Blogging backwards- Youngest and Zac: Dressage Wizards

Blogging backwards: When a beautiful pile of experiences accumulates and starting at the beginning seems too intimidating.

I shall blog backwards in an attempt to reduce the pile to manageable size.

This past weekend was the TriState Region Pony Club Show Jumping and Dressage Rallies. For my Pony Club pals of the past 40 years, this will signify. For the rest= really cool horse stuff.
Youngest was unable to compete in the Show Jump Rally, as we were still on our way home from France when he and his pony would have needed to arrive in northern Ohio.
But, for Youngest, the important competition was the Dressage Rally, as he is attempting to qualify for the team to compete in Pony Club National Championships at Kentucky Horse Park. And we had a day between France and the Dressage Rally!
He has been working on the required Musical Freestyle portion of qualifying for the competition for 7 months, with dedication and creativity. (Along with #momadvice and his dressage instructor!)

In true Youngest fashion, 7 months of dedicated work in one portion does not bleed over into other bits of the whole. So, on our 4 1/2 hour drive he worked on memorizing the other two required dressage tests and repeatedly listening to his chosen music for his freestyle. This was crucial to his success or failure in that portion, as we do not have at our fingertips a regulation full size dressage arena in which to practice. They are exactly 20 meters by 60 meters, quite sizable, and flat. He had been practicing in indoor arenas over the winter and spring, not 20x60, and our field at Cowfeathers- big enough, certainly, but NOT flat. So, when you go to "dance" to the music, you have to match it to certain places in the arena, on a horse that is moving, sometimes swiftly. It's a lot to do, which is why practice and knowing your music is critical.
As he found out, knowing your other two complicated tests is also vital, and he slacked a bit there, having an error in his second test, which loses two points and could've knocked him out contention for Championships. The pair still managed to score a 62.5, still above the required score of 60 in the second dressage test. Phew.

Just an example of what his test looked like, this is someone else's test from Google Images, but it gives you the idea. This stuff is complicated! Maybe a bit more time to learn the test next time?

Now, at Pony Club Rallies, no parents are allowed in the barn. No adults at all, except for the Horse Management staff of judges that are there to make sure the kids are being safe and thoughtful, and offering help where safety is in jeopardy. So, as a designated "Coach", I am to hang out in the warm up area, help the kids warm up purposefully, help fix issues and give them high-fives. I watch them do their test(the forms they ride in the judged arena-as above), and help assess the test and make improvements for the next test which is ridden fairly rapidly after the first.
The Musical Freestyles are ridden a bit later, so my riders returned to the barns, took care of the ponies and had water, bites to eat, recoup (clean stalls, clean tack, refill water buckets, help teammates that still haven't ridden).
We had 7 riders from our own Pony Club riding freestyles, so there were clusters of our riders getting ready to perform.
But where is Youngest? Hmmmm. Wherewherewherewherewhere...with 21 minutes to go until his Freestyle, he is still not out of the barn. I am trying to coach my first rider, but anxiety grows every minute that he doesn't show, until I go find another teammate who is having a snack and send her to the barn to move him along. Can you work on something, a bunch, for seven months, and not show up? Maybe if you're this kid!
He shows, with a brief time of warm up before riding. Kaylee, Youngest's mentor and owner of perfect pony, Zac, is also at the rally, and her anxiety has joined mine. She is now given the task of getting him focused, as I, Coach Mom, have blinded myself in both eyes from rolling them too hard. Plus, I have another kid that is ready to ride (and didn't cause me anxiety) about to perform!
That rider, KZ and Dreamy perform an elegant freestyle, and I am so proud of them! They, too, are trying to qualify to compete at National Championships, and they've put themselves in a good position to make it on the team.
Now for Youngest and Zac's turn.  Fortunately, Zac is an all business performer. He likes the applause and the crowd, and he enjoys strutting his stuff, so even without much warm up, the boys are ready to go. And, we are about to see if the seven months of work will pay off.
His music is from The Jungle Book.
And, they dance.
Beautifully.
To say it "went well" seems inadequate. There were some things they could have done a bit better. But, they were great!

They zoomed down the diagonal in a lengthened trot!

They seamlessly crossed over in their leg yields.

There were extended canters, and counter canter serpentines. There was a walk to canter depart, square halts and ten meter circles. They were stars. 

If you want to watch it- (I want to over and over, I'm so proud!) here is a link to my video of their ride:

https://youtu.be/qJulaStC0Ck

Awards time eventually arrives. Youngest's team were excellent all day, not just on horseback, but in their work in the barn. In Pony Club, we emphasize care of the horse and your equipment, and our teams are well schooled in this. So, when awards are given, first we award the places in Horse Management. Hard work, paying off. The girl on the far left is the Stable Manager for the team. She's the "in charge" of the team while in the barns, keeping everything going- and evidently did a great job! A blue ribbon is a first place award!

Next, they give out the team awards for the riding scores of the day. So proud of this group of riders!

But, although this is Youngest's team, and of prime interest to most of my readers, (Hi Mom!), his was not the only team fielded by our growing and top-notch Pony Club.

 We had three full teams! Actually, 16 kids; three teams of five, and one upper level member who was Stable Manager for another Pony Club's team of new competitors. This makes me very happy.

After all the Horse Management Awards, and the Riding Awards, the last ribbons to be awarded were for the Musical Freestyles. These are open to anyone, but required for those attempting to qualify for United States Pony Club National Championships in Lexington, KY. Since they are difficult to choreograph, and take extra time and effort to create, most competitors don't ride a Freestyle. But our Pony Club had 5 Freestyles and a Pas de deux! (That is a Musical Freestyle with two competitors riding together. It is french, for "not of two", as in, they ride as one.)
Our Pas de deux team won the category with an adorable ride. I cried.
And, our Pony Club had the top 4 overall single Musical Freestyle rides!

The Blue? This guy here.

 I don't know if I've seen him happier. Ever. And he's a happy kid. 

Whoa. Well DONE TEAM!!!!

And, Zac, you're the best. Just the best. Thank you for sharing him with us, Kaylee! 

Addendum: Youngest got the official email that he and Zac qualified for National Championships! Really proud of this pair!

Nighttime in the Garden of Chicken Destruction

Or, night time in one of the gardens where chickens have spent the day deconstructing. I have given them half-hearted chase. Since the kitchen garden has yet to be planted, I did not fuss at them much, but they do absolutely ADORE anything new I do in a garden. If you mulch, they are right there to "distribute" the mulch, if you had plantings which the mulch had surrounded, they are quick to "trim" the plants. They will un-plant any new plantings in a trice. And, today, I put the straw down in the paths of the kitchen garden, and did not close the gate= invitation to destruction!

All that fluffy straw had been in neat and tidy flakes, packed down to suppress weeds.  Sigh. And, as you may note, only three of the four paths are straw packed. I did only two bales, and they went so far. The effort to go fetch another was too great. I am still in the invisible mud of grief that comes with loss.  April, you left a hole in my life greater than the ones the chickens persist in creating in my gardens.
So, I am in the garden, at my little cafe table near the Tuinhuis ( our garden house).  It is an attempt at a bit of (further) nature therapy. And, it is good.
I got on my horse for an hour this afternoon, equine therapy is wonderful. Balancing. Nelle, who had that horrible, near death experience and surgery at the end of 2016 is back under saddle, albeit lightly. She and I are getting on nicely, although I did ask the Lord to spare me from skittish Thoroughbreds today when she was clearly terrified of unseen monsters as we crossed the bridge she crosses everyday. And, after a nice ride remembered it as a potential hazardous threat on the way back to the barn as well.  Do you remember the scene in Bambi, when his legs go out in all directions on the ice? That is what Thoroughbreds do, intentionally, for no reason other than their brain screams "DANGER!" My best combat tools are "soft eyes", singing to her and being completely relaxed, which can be a challenge when 1100 lbs of horse is feeling fragile.
The Lord did not spare me the companionship of the Thoroughbred brain. But in his wisdom he threw me a biscuit and allowed Nelle to give me- for the first time- a really nice forward (and sideways-on purpose!) leg yield.
The mosquitos have arrived to shoo me back inside. And, remind me it is time to re-create the screened porch!
More nature therapy?

April, for you.

It's a warm, windy spring day at Cowfeathers, feeling like summer, but without the number of bugs that summer cultivates. My peonies and iris are blooming, but will suffer greatly today in the heat and drying winds. I know that, so I took a picture of the peonies this morning while it was still cool. They wanted to be cut and brought in to the house, but I just didn't feel like it.
I'm slogging through invisible mud.
So are many of my friends, as this Monday April's body was found.
I won't be cryptic about what happened. I always want to know how someone died, as if that knowledge could somehow save someone else I love. Maybe it can.
April was murdered by the man she loved, with a gun, in their home. He then drove to a nearby park and killed himself.
I haven't wanted to say anything about it. I haven't put anything on Facebook, or really responded much to the huge amount of grief pouring out from all of us, her friends and colleagues. I have not felt like I have the ownership of the grief like so many others. Her son, her family, her best friends. I am too peripheral to have a voice in this.
But, as I continue to move through the bare necessities of the day, changing sheets, dishes, stall cleaning, photo of peonies to remember them by, I realize that I was not her best friend, but that doesn't mean I did not love her, and I am not deeply sad. And angry.
April read this blog. She would've loved the last entry with the before pictures of the ruin that is now Cowfeathers. She followed the sagas of our horse dramas, and kid achievements and laughed at my ridiculous illustrations, both in this blog, and the ones I regularly scribble on paper towels in exam rooms to explain anatomy, or seizure thresholds or surgical repairs to my clients.
April was smart. She was a devoted young mother. For 15 years she drove me absolutely batty by telling me how much her stomach hurt, then sitting down to a lunch of Taco Bell, or chicken fingers. For the first few years, I sympathized with her about her angry digestive tract. For the next decade, I just sympathized with her angry digestive tract.
And she would have laughed at this token humor.
She laughed a lot.
No, I didn't see this coming. I don't know if anyone did. Unlike so many other women who tried to save themselves with useless restraining orders, if April had known this was about to happen to her, I think she would have saved herself, not with paper. She was that kind of woman.
When we started working together, she was a kid. I remember her painting the staff bathroom a soft blue and not enjoying the task. I expected her to find other employment after that, but she stayed and continued to work. Year after year, for the last few years often times as my assistant. She said that I had a keen sense of when she stepped away to do something else, that is when I would need her help!

I miss you, kid. Your dark brown eyes and dust of freckles, your swimsuit model body that belies your terrible food choices, your tenacity with your job, your love of your boy, your silliness, your devotion to that lemon of a Cane Corso- sweet, very sweet, but so defective! I love that you bought my expensive pasture-fed, fresh-from -the-chicken eggs for your dog, but ate icky store-bought white ones for yourself. Your laugh I will miss terribly. And, I can't believe that the time I creeped us both out on purpose, cracking us up, somehow became a treasured memory instead of just a funny joke.

How I wish it could have stayed a lark.

The Big Daddy of Before and Afters- Cowfeathers Farm from cow byre to feathered nest.

Interesting that my last posted blog was a re-do of a room. I like those entries, because I enjoy the process and the new life breathed into a room, home or space by effort and creativity.  Shortly after that blog I re-injured my back and spent some weeks coping with that mess, but I am mending, and returning to doing most of the things I enjoy in my life.
So, I wanted to share another re-do. A grand-daddy of a re-do. So much more than that, it was a restoration. 
A rebirth of an important place in my world, Cowfeathers Farm. When folks come to our home, many say "you did an amazing job with this place." For the people who knew it 30+ years ago, they are truly impressed with where we live because Cowfeathers had been left for dead. But it wasn't Huz and I who gave it resuscitation. We took a lovely home and made it our own, we have added on, redecorated and maintained, but we did not restore.
That leap was taken by a young couple in the mid 1980's. We had heard their names from the people we purchased from, and I had marked "Meet Tom and Leslie" on the bucket list of my life. I had contacted them once years ago, but all being busy, we never connected. Then, in late winter, they drove down the driveway on their way to The Big City. I was at work, but Youngest greeted them, and got their address. And I was thrilled! I couldn't wait to get them here and hear the stories of the resurrection of our little homeplace.
We found an evening, and they drove up from the town farther south where they now live, and brought themselves ( big gift!) and their stories and even photos.
One of the highlights of my spring to meet these lovely people and connect a little more history on our home.

This is Cowfeathers this spring, the view from the front gates.

And this is what that intrepid, optimistic couple saw from the road 30+ years ago.

The bones are all there, they just have some flesh on them now. But it took some real strength to get there!

 The barn today...

 And the barn in the mid 1980s.

Behind the main barn you can see another building that blew over in a storm more than 20 years ago.


The house today....

 And the house when it was saved from its neglected and abandoned state. The couple purchased it, and the day they closed arrived and sat in the drive, in their car and cried. There was not a thing about this place that said "move in". The depth of the project was, undoubtedly, terrifying. And they had never attacked a project of this magnitude before. They say the optimism born of naivety was soon blown away by reality. I loved the photos of where they started, and the wonderful photos of the true friends that showed up weekend after weekend to work. Hard. Cowfeathers was restored by blood, sweat, tears, hope and friendship.
The house had raccoons, cows, plenty of bats, legions of spiders, a really, really big snake and generations of mystery stirred in with 20 years of abandonment. It came with broken doors and windows, the ubiquitous plywood paneling and lots of possibility.

I would have been excited, and terrified too!

Inside was room after room of work. Painstaking work, as they were embarking on a restoration, not a renovation. So they worked hard to make the home liveable without losing the original character.
This photo of the front stairs is a good example.
The walls are damaged, peeling, cracking and very dirty. the floors are there, but there is dirt, cowpoop, and who knows what on and under the glued on treads.

The same views of the front stairs, taken today.

Every inch of the house needed care, and thought and restoration!

Check out the "kitchen" upon purchase in the 80s. the fire place has been bricked up, and there is a metal shelf on the wall. Otherwise, it is the same today. The fireplace has been restored, and the window on the right of the photo now opens up into our sunroom.

We love our home. And, I have always appreciated the people who didn't let it fall down. I am so grateful to now know them! I look forward to having them back, as often as they can come, to enjoy this place they put themselves into, allowing us to do the same years later. What a joy to have them see their work is well loved. Tom and his friend opened up the fireplace. Tom created the gorgeous mantle that is there now, with this soft curve along the top. I am glad to know that!  And thankful to be the current steward of Cowfeathers Farm. I hope it is loved and lived in for many generations to come.

Salem House basement finally loses it's black eye! From blech to beautiful.

Well, it took a while, but we finally carved out the time to finish the last room at Salem House. This last remaining bastion of ugliness was in the basement, at the base of the stairs on the right. It was a room of pink shag carpeting and pressed wood paneling, dark and depressing. With the rest of the house re-dressed in decidedly cheerful tones, this room was the one you avoided looking into at all costs.
So, with a lot of things on the schedule, we took a few morning hours last Saturday to rip up pink shag, red indoor/outdoor carpet and scrape up disintegrated rug pad. We ripped down the ceiling drywall that was beyond damaged and then cleaned up!

I left the girls with "homework". Finishing the clean up, and priming the walls and ceiling. After tearing down the ceiling dry wall, we opted for painting the ceiling boards above and the floor joists that make up the ceiling. This added some head room and visually made the room less cramped. There was very little in the way of electric and hvac left in the ceiling. And paint makes things disappear like magic! 

The droopy wires are to be rerouted and moved up safely by an electrician this week. Meanwhile, they stand as an eyesore. 

The ceiling was a laborious task that required four coats of paint, but it is so much brighter! In between floor joists, the ceiling is painted a pretty blue, making it feel even higher. By day three the place was brightening up!

The window had already been replaced with the rest of the basement windows, so it was just cut out properly and trimmed with 1x3". We added base board in 1x4 and ceiling trim in 1x3, but other than that, paint and elbow grease!

The jewel box color on the floor is the same throughout the basement. With the addition of soft lighting, we were ready to make it into the study. All college kids need a great place to study!

Jute rug, desks, chairs, a place for guests to lay out their study materials, and both soothing light and task light make it a welcome space. 

I love that I was able to do this with my children. That the girls decided to spend their spring break on the project with me was a treasure. I hope they learned some skills and gained some confidence in their ability to perk up a room. Total price tag was less than $200, but final effect is worth so much more! 

Dirty Job, Saving a life.

This morning's plan got started a bit late. I was cranky because there was a mouse in our crawlspace that woke me up at three am, and then continued to do so, until sunup. Mostly with the question "Do I get up and kill it by setting the trap? Then hear the trap snap, ew, and have to empty it of the dead mouse." It was less existential "do I have the right to take a life", (I was pretty cranky) and more the ick factor of dead mouse in the night.
So, after morning barn chores I treated myself to two cups of tea and a bunch of googling about moles and grubs. We have abundance of both and trying to decide what course of action to take. Currently favoring the idea that if we have a lot of both, eventually the one will polish off the other and tunnel elsewhere. Unfortunately, this could mean several years of walking around on ground that is much like a giant sponge, and too treacherous to ride the horses.
By mid-morning, I'd stalled enough, and headed to the main task of the day. I had purchased a new leaf blower and wanted to give it a go. At Cowfeathers we do not need a leaf blower for leaves. We have a mighty wind that does all our raking for us. I bought the leaf blower for cleaning.
Indeed, I do clean my house with a shop vac, but the leaf blower is handy for cleaning the barn. The last one went motor-up some years back, so the cobwebbing  has been done mostly by broom- inadequately for sure. In fact, the last leaf blower was used really only in the loft and mow area prior to our big barn parties, and never down below in the animal areas. So today was it's maiden attempt. I began by getting on coveralls, hat, gloves, respirator and full mask- the kind that is tight as a drum, hurts your face and leaves marks for hours.
I began in the chicken house. Ushered all the birds outside, opened the big door and fired 'er up! Whew! Cobwebs, dirt, straw, poop blown away.
I moved on to the barn, thru the cat area and the goat pens, by this time I can't see much, too much condensation inside my goggles and dust coating the outside. But with all the dirt and cobweb blobs raining down on my head, shoulders and down my back it has to be getting cleaner.

After photo. Covered in yuck, mask marks for sure!

Most of the worst bits are on the beautiful beams above, so even though I specifically purchased the lightest of the powerful machines, I can feel the strain in my shoulders from holding the machine above my head.
When I make it into the main part of the barn, I have an ambitious moment and head to the old sheep stall. This is a large concrete area where we used to house some of our sheep, and was previously the milking barn, with old stanchions. When I milked our sheep these old wooden stanchions came in handy. The sheep left in 2015. The area has been unused since then, still harboring an old steel gate to contain the ram, dried marbles of sheep poop and stacks of buckets that my wonderful father in law washed out when he was here last year.
I was blowing all this detritus out of the stall in a most lazy fashion, leaving everything mostly where it lay, except for the dirt. But laziness sometimes make things more difficult. So, I turned off the blower for a second to try and stack the buckets in the same region, a bit out of the way.
I turned over a blue one and let out a yelp as something jumped out from under the bucket!
A chicken. NO fooling. A chicken. Under a bucket. In the sheep stall I haven't walked into in about a year.
She recovered a split second before me and stalked off, me in pursuit. She looked mysteriously wet, but not dead, which is a miracle. She is one of our Speckled Sussex and has never been one for being handled. Chicken breeds, like dog breeds or horse breeds, have tendency. And the Sussex girls have always been independent adventurers. Willing to walk off, alone, to the creek or back to the apple trees. Hawk bait.  I had decided to not get attached, even though they are most pretty birds.
I got her fresh water (having dumped all the buckets when I was blowing dirt around at 160 mph) and poured her corn and layer ration. She enthusiastically went to work on the food.

I eventually headed back to my dirty task marveling at the God moments that led me to try out the new leaf blower, decide to tackle the sheep stall, and move that bucket. Poor kid would've never made it, as they are silent in the dark, and she hadn't made a peep.
Still a mystery as to how she got under there. I had another chicken get under a bucket years ago, and she, too was found alive and kicking. But that was in the chicken house, in a high traffic area. I still think she was there for more than a day.
A few years ago I stopped counting the chickens every night before finishing chores. For one, not sure I can still count that high, and for two, if I was short a bird, I went on a hunt for an animal that hunkers down when it's dark and doesn't come when it is called (mostly).  I'd be stressed out and wondering which bird was missing. We rarely lose a bird to anything but old age, so I gave up that stress of counting and occasional searching. The bird was nearly always back in the morning, no worse for wear.  Would not have been so with this little chicken.

Thanks for this save, God!

Clementine Paddleford - a spoonful of the past.

When I was in third grade, I found out we were moving. Leaving the tidy lawns, sidewalks and child-packed suburbs of New Jersey and headed out to the Connecticut wildness, of tall, mysterious trees and aggressive old rocks.
I was the youngest child, and "helped" choose the house. At least I was taken along on the house hunt adventure.  I really liked a red house that was dollhouse-tiny, with dozens of other red, dollhouse-tiny outbuildings. It had a rope swing. I still remember that house, from a short visit in 1976, although I don't think I ever saw it again, and have no certainty of where it was located.
The weight of my favor rested lightly on my mother's shoulders, so we instead purchased a house on a hillside that featured mysterious tall pines that had their own wheezy conversations, and lichen splotched rocks that pushed out of the earth like crashed spaceships. Best of all, it had a river, so I had a friend. Although I'm sure these features also appealed to her, she liked the location and the potential of the place. We moved in and called it "Puckihuddle".
I don't have an actual definition for the word, Puckihuddle. A somewhat thorough search of the oracle of Google shows a preschool by the name, and a reference in the Great Bend Tribune newspaper of Kansas,  March 25, 1975 of "Puckihuddle" being chosen for a unit name in a Lutheran Holy Week program. Also, there was a store by the name that placed an advertisement in the Ulster County Catskill Mountain News on November 9, 1972 in the great build up to Christmas that asserted that "Santa comes to Puckihuddle for"....such intriguing items as patchwork elephants, feathered vests and the enthralling enigma; "Plumnutty".  If I could just go back to Christmas 1972. Did I get a Plumnutty and just don't recall? I think I certainly would remember a feathered vest.  It appears both Plumnutty and Puckihuddle went out of vogue in the 1970s, as there were no more modern references.
My mother said "Puckihuddle" was an Native American word (I'm sure she said "Indian", as it was 1976) that meant "A happy place to live and work". I've long been suspicious that she picked the meaning and then the word. Because live and work there, we did.  A search of a database of dozens of Native American languages is missing the word.
So, we moved into Puckihuddle, it was our homeplace.
Puckihuddle possessed layers of life.
According to a stranger that came down the drive one day, the mysterious whispering tall pines were a beacon to the child he was during WWII- where their family planned to meet if they were ever separated by war.
One year, best pal Tommy and I, stumbled- literally, over stones in the myrtle that turned out to be stairs from the house down to the Little River. We showed mother and dad, and they were revived for delightful use and mom planted daffodils all down the hill through the wood so that using the steps in early spring was covered by a canopy of trees spurting yellow-green buds and carpeted by purple myrtle and yellow daffs.
There was a foundation of stone that used to hold up ____ice house? barn? root cellar? that now grew a small sample of Marsh Marigold whose bloom my mother treasured, and would call us to come look, expecting our equal awe.
On the property was a little garage that, first priority upon purchase, was turned into a barn to house my sister's horse, Frosty. In that garage was a small treasure trove of things. Kitchen-y things that were grand, and crude and special and exotic. In the landscape of 70's cuisine, Pyrex and Tupperware, these were things I'd never before seen. My mother said they had belonged to Clementine Paddleford. That Clementine Paddleford had lived in the house a long time ago, and she was the first female food editor for the New York Times. (Or so my 8 year old brain retained.)
Clementine Paddleford always hung around the edges of my imagination. She was eternally the full, rich, lovely name of "Clementine Paddleford", never another version. The steps we discovered to the Little River were probably made by Clementine Paddleford and her servants to fetch water. The beams of the small study with the soaring ceiling surely once had a loft where Clementine Paddleford slept. And, undoubtedly, she cooked over the stone fireplace in the dining room with a large cast iron pot.
I have no idea why in my imagination, she lived in a loft but had water-fetching servants and cooked on a open fire. My Clementine Paddleford wore a long calico dress with high collar trimmed in lace, and a bun. She was rich, but cooked on open fire. And, she was a newspaper woman. Revered, but long forgotten, having tragically left behind her kitchen accoutrements. Clementine Paddleford was a cross between Ma Ingalls and Susan B. Anthony.
Sometimes, I would try to figure out the purpose of the more unusual kitchen-y things left behind by the esteemed Clementine Paddleford. Mostly I  was wrong. But sometimes I would be let in on the true identity of an item by an older, wiser cuisinier. I guessed for eons what a little iron press with intricate design and two sides hinged together could create. I was eventually informed it was an ice cream cone press with a wooden mold to wrap the warm cooked cone around so it could cool in the proper shape. Hmmm. Hadn't thought of that. Cones came from the store in a box, right? There were mixers, mashers, strainers, mallets, beaters, all of odd shapes and sizes that made the art of cooking seem difficult and potentially violent.

The 80's came, I grew up, Puckihuddle became someone else's homeplace. And another layer added to it's history. Clementine Paddleford took a step back in the mists of time, but her collection lived on, at least in the wooden spoons I took with me to college and in each move since.

The wooden spoons- with a regular spoon to compare.  

So, imagine my neck snapping around as I ran my bathtub water on Sunday and spotted out of the corner of my eye, nearly buried in the spine of my favorite magazine, Country Living, the words "Clementine Paddleford".
It was as if after 40 years, bubbling forth, there was proof of her existence outside of the kitchen treasures and the stone steps to the river. I greedily read the small blurb that included this name from my past.

It read;
" In the case of fire, after safeguarding my family, I'd run back for my vintage copy of How America Eats by Clementine Paddleford. My husband picked it up, almost as an afterthought, from a used bookstore while on a business trip in 2000. When I cracked its spine, I discovered a kindred spirit- a woman who, as food editor of the New York Herald Tribune for 30 years, had traveled thousands of miles to answer the book's titular question. It was the first time I'd read a food writer who paid as much attention to the stories behind the recipes as to the recipes themselves. I set my mind to learning everything I could about the author, and went on to write her biography, helping to reinstate her name into the annals of American food history. (She, in turn, helped shape my career as a food writer.) And all of this came from a husband's hurried $14 purchase. (Good thing it wasn't jewelry.)"

Well. I was like a beagle who caught wind of a rabbit. A beagle who was in the bathtub. But had access to Google.  Good thing my cell phone has a water proof cover!
My main question was "Did Clementine Paddleford really live at Puckihuddle?"

My research belied my childhood persona of Clementine Paddleford, and replaced her with someone even more excellent. She was an adventurer and a pioneer, but of the 1940's and 50's, instead of my imagined 1800 model. I guess that tells you what my childhood brain thought of the timeline of when the first female food editor would have been hired. She wrote her seminal book in 1960. She flew her own little Piper Cub plane, spent time on a submarine cataloging the food made under the water, travelled the country learning about tacos and oysters, sticky buns and rum pie. At age 33, she had surgery for cancer that left her with a permanent laryngostomy, but didn't stop working, learning and writing. Also, evidently, not only did she not cook over an open fire in a cast iron kettle, she didn't cook much at all. She had two maids that did that for her (and, therefore, potentially used those stone steps to fetch water from the river? Okay, wrong century again.) I read and read and read, and learned a whole lot about Clementine Paddleford. And then, buried in a bio on cooksinfo.com  was the following sentence; "In 1938, she purchased a summer home on 17 acres in Redding, Fairfield County, Connecticut. "
Good enough for me.
 I believe.

Clementine Paddleford was real! She lived at Puckihuddle before it was ours and probably truly left behind her wooden spoons and ice cream cone creating capacity. When I stir my chili, she stirs with me.

And, as another truth becomes evident,  I would guess that the Native Language data base is missing a word. My mother knows it.