Road Trip

Too hot to do much of anything yesterday except try to keep everything watered.  I went out several times to throw water on the ground in all the chicken pens, hoping to give the little girls some relief.  It's eighty degrees outside at five-thirty this morning, and eighty-four in the house. 

Since it's going to be another scorcher and I'm not going to get anything accomplished today, might as well continue on the road trip down memory lane that began yesterday.  I commented to Judy and Joel recently that I'd been watching a 1947 movie and it was so strange to realize that every adult in the film was smoking.  Hardly anyone except bad guys and shady women smokes in movies now.  Stranger still was that, in the evenings, people at home were sitting and talking or reading, listening to radio or records (78s).  There was no television in 1947!  Probably because of the heat, I've been thinking about the soda fountain at the one and only drugstore in the little town where I grew up.  We didn't have sidewalks out where we lived, so my dad would drive me into town so I could roller skate.  The skates were clamp-ons that required a key to tighten, the key on a string around my neck.  They clamped onto my clunky, but serviceable, Buster Brown (and his dog, Tigh) oxford shoes that I hated with a passion.  I always had skinned knees because the skates would inevitably loosen.  After waiting patiently for me to get tired, Dad would take me to the soda fountain for a lime rickey or a pineapple soda made with strawberry ice cream.  Red, the soda jerk, was also the cook, and we'd sometimes go there for dinner...open-face roast beef sandwiches on white bread with mashed potatoes and brown gravy, or a chili size.  That was "fast food" in those days.  Red usually had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth while he cooked and no one thought a thing about it.  One of my earliest memories is of being held in my dad's arms as we waited in the early morning for the drugstore to open, in a queue that went all the way around the corner.  Cigarettes were going to be available!  This was during World War II and so many things...gasoline, meat, shoes, cigarettes, sugar...were rationed, if you could get them at all.  Recycling isn't a new concept...families saved bacon grease and turned it in for the war effort (what do you suppose it was used for?), and collected newspapers and squashed tin cans.  I grew up in an era when you fixed it, wore it out, made do, or did without. 

The sun's nearly up and I need to get to the barn before it becomes a sauna. 

A Rosy Outlook

In between rain showers yesterday, I noticed that the Cecile Brunner rose had burst into bloom.  It sits out in the south yard near the clothesline, protected from the deer by its own chicken wire fence.  Deb and Craig gave me this plant some years back.  It has survived snow and real drought, and has more flowers this year than ever, an example of fortitude in the face of adversity.  The Cecile Brunner is an old, old rose; pale pink, with tiny little buds and mini-flowers grown on long canes.  Once in fashion, the buds were used for corsages for young girls.  Given time, the plant will throw up its canes and form a pink frothy fountain or bouquet.  I had such a plant when I lived in West Sacramento, but what I really remember is the Cecile Brunner from my girlhood in Arcadia.  Vincent Spenser lived in a house behind ours, and would just climb over the fence when he wanted to visit.  There was a huge Cecile Brunner plant against that fence, so big that the canes drooped over and made a rose-covered bower that he and I could sit under, hidden and private...a perfect place to share secrets and plans.  Spense and I were buddies, pals...this was in the early fifties, still an age of innocence, and we were young and innocent, too.  The romance of the setting was enough.