What you may not have known.

In women's circles we talked about this. In the book (The Push by Ashley Audrain) which I'm reading currently, she opens with this:

"It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother's heartbeat.. Actually the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother's blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part in our mother's ovary. All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old-foetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother's womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her own grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born......

Layne Redmond: When the Drummers were Women.

A Letter from my Grandmother

I was reminded of a letter I received from my grandmother when I wrote the previous post. I went through my treasure box of my mother's and father's and aunts' letters (I wish they were all there, my mother wrote to me weekly, long newsy letters before she died just over 4 years after I emigrated to Canada). I am missing hundreds of them. But around 50 are saved.

Anyway I found this lovely letter from my grandmother, sent in the early part of 1970, she left it undated. she refers to my father visiting my mother every day when she had extended hospital stays. My mother was to die just over a year after this letter was written. Granny was never the same after her death. It was a terrible time for all of us.

Granny didn't like letter writing, she always felt embarrassed by her lack of education, she was very young (around 10-11) when she left school to work in service to help support her family. I have corrected her spelling where necessary but I have left her punctuation (or lack of) and grammar stand due to the charm of it and the way I can hear her voice in her words. My mother had that gift too.
I adored my Granny and had the great good fortune to live with her and my grandda for a while in 1946.

My dear Mary

Thank you ever so much for your lovely letter and present you never forget me Mary and thank God to hear you are over your trouble and that God sent you a lovely little baby girl a sister for O*** please God time won't be long slipping Mumma told me that she is very tiny but don't you mind that Mary they run up better than the big babies

Mumma (my mother) was the same too I could only bath her evening second day she was very hardy and Mary Mumma is getting stronger every day thank God for that I suppose you heard she was down to see us and she is coming down on Sunday so I will have this letter ready for her

I was thinking Mary that you will have the summer before you now and you will never miss her getting big what a lovely name you gave her Mary you are great I suppose T** had a say in that I don't think I hope the little darling will enjoy her name what do O**** think I suppose she is great looking at her and her little smile

O must be getting very big please God we will be seeing ye all in the summer and dad and all the boys are very good tis great that G***** (brother) got the bank and that he is very happy. J*** (brother) was down after Christmas he is getting to be a lovely boy he is after getting fine and fat thank God for that

I often felt very sorry for your daddy and the way he used looked after Mumma he never missed going up and down to her he was great to cheer her up thank God for that they are both very good and we have her to go to here for our little chats she is one of the best in the whole world

I am here at 51 Main street and am very happy which is a great thing Mary the flu was very bad thank God I did not get it so far all the families are going on great.

J--- (my cousin) is doing a line with a very nice boy he gives her a very nice time and she likes him

Mary dear I will ring off now and will give this to Mumma when she will be down on Sunday

I hope you make this out.

Good bye and love to Mary, T** O*** and J******* from Grannie xxxx

(PS) Tell T** I was asking for him it won't be long slipping when I will see all the family love Grannie

Dementia and Alzheimer's and Nuns

I remember that Time article about nuns and Alzheimer's published in 2001. Clearly. Unfortunately, it is behind a paywall now so I can't access but if you're interested and a subscriber you can go ahead and do so. Nuns had not only generously co-operated with studies on these brain diseases but also donated their bodies, postmortem, to science in selfless efforts to assist further research. I remember the autopsies showed that even though advanced degradation of brain cells due to Alzheimer's had occurred in these nuns, other segments of their brains had taken over complex functions like needlework and crossword puzzles thus keeping the Alzheimer's unnoticed by those around them. The personalities of the nuns had much to do with their abilities in later years (90+). Many of them had kept journals from their teenage years exhibiting a positivism about life and a thirst for learning.

I did find a similar article in the New York Times but it's not as detailed as the Time essay - and I am relying on - ahem! - my memory about the original article.

Excerpt:

At 93, Sister Nicolette Welter still reads avidly, recently finishing a biography of Bishop James Patrick Shannon. She knits, crochets, plays rousing card games and, until a recent fall, was walking several miles a day with no cane or walker.

I was driven to write this by a visit to an old friend yesterday who is in a third level care home. She is 93 and until the last year or so was taking care of herself in her own home. Reading and playing complex card games and knitting sweaters for her pensioner sons. Then one of her sons died. And the family hadn't told her he was dying. And this shoved her over the edge into mental disarray which has remained.

My grandmother, then in her seventies, was similarly afflicted when my mother died. Within a short period she retreated to an alternative world where Mum was still with us and Granny, our darling granny, never surfaced again.

My aunt, a bridge playing, golfing entrepreneur in her nineties, vanished into her own bottomless dark hole when her youngest child died at 49.

As to my friend, she is like a skeleton in a wheelchair, her caustic P&V with which we were all familiar has vanished, replaced by this gaunt shell with haunted eyes and no memory of us, her former familiars, but a clear memory of her dead son visiting her yesterday.

An unknown percentage of these "long goodbye" diseases is down to circumstances surely? None of those nuns lost a child and I wonder if this has a huge bearing on our emotional and mental abilities in our later years. As I have witnessed, heartbreakingly, first hand.

Oh Death, We Know Thy Sting

Many blogs are topicking on death. Alan Rickman, David Bowie, Brian Bedford. It brings it all home, I suppose.

I remember my father when his mother died. He came down for breakfast. He'd had a long night with his mother. He was her favourite, the youngest of six and the only boy.

"My mother died last night," he told us at the table in this dispassionate voice and carried on eating his toast and drinking his tea.

"What are we going to do?" I remember asking him. I felt nothing. She was an odd woman, my paternal granny, though very good to me materially. My mother couldn't stand her, with reason, but that's another story.

"Nothing," he said coldly, "Just go on about your normal business."

I was 14. This was completely at odds with how my mother reacted to her father's death. We children didn't go to the funeral or attend any memorial masses.

It was only years later, when Dad and I would travel together that he would allude to his mother's birthday as it coincided with the times of our vacations.

"My mother would be 110 today," he'd say, offhandedly over the coffee, but I'd catch the tremor in his voice.

And later, if we were walking along or playing our nightly Scrabble game, or he off in the shower I'd hear him singing this song from beginning to end, note perfect, word perfect:



We never talked about it.

Light, Tunnel

There comes a day when one wakes up and bingo, no pain in the back. Today was such a day for me.

Interestingly enough, nearly 3 weeks later, the whole back of my hand is a rancid shading of purple and yellow from where the IV was inserted.

And yesterday, I catch these two brothers I know sneaking in their truck and trailer down my driveway and I wave at them to stop and sheepishly they admit they'd filled the rest of my barn with a truckload of wood and wanted it to be a surprise as I'd "been kind" to them last year. And when I questioned that, they said "think about it". I've never been one to keep a ledger. although I know of a few that do. Imagine that if you will. Tallying up your own favours and good deeds like money in the bank.

One of the loveliest letters I ever received was from my grandmother about a year after my mother died. In the letter she listed all the ways and kindnesses and gifts I'd given my mother in the last few years of her life. And I didn't remember much of anything I'd done or sent or given or written. I felt I hadn't done enough. But my mother had shared all these instances with her own mother and I was then re-gifted everything so magnificently in that precious letter that when I read it now I burst into tears.

It's best not to tally anything. Give and forget is my motto. Unless I am given. And that I don't forget.

Daughter handed me a huge bag of goodies yesterday.

Bits and bobs including her wonderful baking and cooking.

Among them is this magnificent oil lamp which thrills me to pieces. In so many ways.

How very dear she is.

Every time I light it I will think of her.

Clementine Bread

One of the great bonuses of a sort of semi-retired life (at least retired from the stuff that never quite fulfilled me) is baking and cooking. There never was time for it before. I've always cooked and baked of course, but never got time to experiment, take the time to create. I dig into the memory box and mentally go back to my granny's kitchen and watch her gather her bits and pieces about and throw it all into the bastable oven and hang it over the turf fire. This is how I remembered her bastable cake/bread recipe.

I infinitely adapt it as the mood and supplies take me. Just like her. Today I had an overload of clementines. Those luscious little balls of sunshine. So I made a zest of 3 of the skins to the music of Frankie Gavin and kinda pulped their insides. Added 3 more clementines for good measure, these I sectioned and halved. For more colour I threw in cranberries. And bingo!

I bet you never saw the marriage of those two words, clementines and bread, before now did you?

And you were asking about Frankie? I just love the fresh twists he puts on Beatles, Mozart, etc. Here's a sample, try not to dance.

The Annual Trek to Granny's

At Christmas time each year, the layer of unhappiness lying over our childhood home in Ireland was more tangible with each year that passed.

After they got married, my mother went to live with my father and his widowed mother. My father was the only son in a family of six - all the girls were older than him and all these women he grew up with literally adored him. He never had to lift a finger. After about six months, when my mother was pregnant with me, she and her mother-in-law had a huge fight and my mother left, towing the beloved and forever worshipped son behind her.

From then on, she refused to have anything to do with her mother-in-law but parcels would arrive occasionally for me in the post, containing dolls or games.

On Christmas Day, the unspoken hovered around the turkey and the tree. Because my mother refused to have her mother-in-law in her home, her own mother was banned as well, thus absenting both grannies from our table.

On St. Stephen's Day (Boxing Day), pre-car ownership, my father would pack up a few of the older children and take us by way of train but when that service was cancelled on a bus all the way down to his mother's house which was in a small town in east Cork. I remember it as always raining, with steaming windows and smelly wool coats on everyone.

My grandmother would be overjoyed to see us. I was always a little afraid of her, she was thin as a rail and wore her hair in a tight silver bun and called my father by his diminutive "Jimmy" which I found very amusing. Her table groaned with goodies, endless tins of biscuits, another turkey, fruit cakes, sweets in boxes, and extravagant presents for the children. We were on our best behaviour because we knew what was coming.

Her beloved Jimmy and herself would get caught up on all the news. Even then, I noticed a tightness to her lips when my mother's name was mentioned. I would study the odd British type pictures on her walls and she had the only chaise lounge I had ever seen in a house prior to then. It lay in glory by the front window, upholstered in red damask with a shawl draped carefully across the back of it. And I remember wondering if Granny ever fainted on it when we left and did she have smelling salts to revive herself.

She asked me about my "books". Books in those days were an old-fashioned term for the class (grade) you were in.

"What book are you in?"

"Two, Granny".

"Ah," she'd say,nodding, "You'll be writing them soon enough. Now who does she look like Jimmy? Not like our side at all."

I never could take a conversation with her anywhere. I never could respond beyond her first question as with her next one she'd always involve my father who would always turn the question back on her.

"Mother," he'd say, "Sure I think she's got a great look of you, myself."

Which I knew to be a great white lie, as everyone said I looked like my other granny.

When we left, stuffed to the point where we all should have been mounted on her parlour wall, she'd catch the wrist of each child in a strong grip and lay on the coin. Huge amounts for those days. I would get a whole half-crown and the boys would get a shilling each. In farewell, she would never kiss us or hug us and she'd shake my father's hand and watch us all as we traipsed slowly down the hill from her house.

Daddy was always irritable on the endless, steamy bus-ride back to the city. We'd be complaining we'd missed the Wren Boys, we always missed the Wren Boys every year because of the trek to Granny's.

But fondling the magical possibilities of the coins in our pockets made up for a lot.

Generation Gap

~~~~~~~~Grandgirl and Ansa playing on the beach.~~~~~~~~

The grandgirl has landed for her two weeks with me. I cherish these times more as the years go by, for the end of her high school years is fast approaching and I think summer jobs and everything that goes with that scenario will end these annual precious days together.

But she surprises me. She always has. She asked me about summer jobs here for next year when she will be sixteen. Maybe at the local golf club. If I were younger I would turn handstands at the idea of her spending the WHOLE SUMMER here. As it is, I look at her soberly, trying to suppress my delight, and tell her, yes I'll check out the contacts I have at the golf course and see what the possibilities are between the proshop, the restaurant and the caddying.

We talk of many things. The books we both enjoy, her new interest in cooking, her recent writing stint - she has written some very interesting stories that she shares with me. And poetry.

We share fresh I-pod additions and she listens with delight to a song my mother sang as a teenager: Little Sir Echo and by the time the last verse rolls around she has it off by heart.

In turn I listen to her rap collection and the new R&B - more like hip-hop to my uneducated ears - and we plan our next day of adventure. This time to Brigus, a marvellous old village, then to a merino farm where I can buy exquisite hand wrought wool and she can play with the animals, and a drop in on Cupids and their 400 year anniversary.

And the generation 'gap' is in our heights, she has now surpassed me by a good two inches. And I was considered tall in my time.

I Breed, Therefore I am

No matter what a woman has accomplished in her life, it seems that when she hits the status of grandmother, that then becomes her only definition.

Gawd, how irritated I get by these reports from various newspapers/media outlets:

Grandmother in car accident!
Grandma gets convicted of burglary!

A prefix always pops into my head when I read such drivel:

Grossly enfeebled by her biological status,
Grandmother placed fifth in the weekend's 10K Hamburg, Ont. road race.

But my favourite of all time has to be:

Grandmother of Eight Makes A Hole in One

This startled me until I realized she didn't puncture one of her grandchildren.

And it seems like it's only the female of the species who gets thus categorized. Ever seen the word grandfather in the headline of these kinds of news reports?

Perhaps grandfathers are models of propriety and virtue - and also non-golfers.

Bastable

There’s something about this picture that’s very important.

It’s about continuity.
It’s about tradition.
It’s about laughter.

It’s about engaging all the senses:
See (me do this)
Touch (the ingredients)
Feel (the light dough between your fingers)
Listen (to the timer on the stove)
Smell (fresh baking).
Taste (fresh from the oven)

It’s about love.

Last night I showed my granddaughter (who's fourteen) what my grandmother showed me:

How to make a Bastable (sometimes spelled Bastible) Cake.

So my grandmother made it in a black lidded pot and hung it on the hook over the open fire.

So I made it in a fancy square pan and baked it in a state of the art modern oven.

But the aroma was the same. The taste was the same.

And the love? What do you think?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


And here's the recipe as I can find no reference on the web, not a Wiki nor a dictionary entry. The name of the cake is taken from the bastable oven, a cast iron covered pot, used in Co. Cork where I was born and raised.

Bastable Cake
2 cups cake flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
4 ounces butter
½ cup sugar (generous measure)
1 egg, beaten
¼ to ½ cup milk raw or sour.
2 – 3 cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped
Raisins and nuts and/or dried fruit
1 teaspoon cinnamon or cloves(optional)
1 egg beaten with a pinch of salt, to glaze

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Sieve the flour and baking powder into a bowl. Rub in the butter with your hands. Add about 1/3 cup of the sugar, the egg and enough milk to form a soft dough. Divide the dough into two pieces. Put one piece onto a greased ovenproof plate or pan (or use greased 8 inch cake tin), and pat out with floured fingers to cover the plate or pan.

Arrange the chopped sweetmeats and cinnamon on top of the dough and sprinkle with the rest of the sugar. Add more sugar if the apples are very tart. Roll out the remaining dough and cover the top. (This is easier said than done, as the dough is like a scone dough and is very soft). Press the sides together, cut a slit through the lid, and brush with the egg wash. Bake for about 40 minutes until golden brown.

Remove from the oven. If using a cake tin, carefully slip the cake out. Cool on a wire rack for 5 – 10 minutes. Dredge with more sugar and serve with soft brown sugar and good heavy cream.