Mom and I canned quarts and quarts of tomatoes in tomato season each year, but we never got too much of the fresh, sliced tomatoes that accompanied our meals.

As I ate my sandwich and tomato juice dripped on my hand, I remembered my grandfather saying, “Another name for tomatoes is Seeds and Water.” I understand why.

I only plant several tomato plants and haven’t had a surplus of tomatoes for many years. Not canning any more. No usual plate of sliced tomatoes accompanying the food on the table for dinner and supper. I hadn’t even thought about that for a long time now. That was good eating.

The sandwich was delicious, made more so by the memory of our summers with sliced tomatoes years ago that accompanied it.

Tomato Season

A challenging jigsaw puzzle

It’s fun in a box. “We” are four friends who spend time together working the puzzles. We have interesting, relaxed conversations as we put the puzzle together. We often work on “subsets” in the puzzle and we help each other find the colors that go in those subsets. It’s teamwork!

We usually end our puzzle session with cocoa and cookies. The puzzle itself affects us the same way as potato chips affect people, –we want to fit in one more puzzle piece before we quit for the session.

When we’re done with one, we’ll choose another interesting puzzle to work on.

We aren’t sure what this device in the picture is but we think it is one of the oil pumps, –from many years ago.
We didn’t stay long but it was interesting to look around.

My friend stands beside an ancient oil pump.

I love to watch the sea gulls. I learned a song about them when I was teaching third grade. The song says they are “bold as can be.” They are! That’s part of the fun. It ends, “They scold and they chatter and make mournful cries.” That rings true, too.

It’s fun to watch the other people at the beach. Some of them go to relax in the sun and get a deeper tan. That’s hard to understand in this time when there is so much awareness about the harm that is done by lengthy exposure to the sun’s rays. Others read or hang out with friends, but most people spend a lot of time cooling off in the water.

Before we came home, we had dinner at a restaurant in Erie. Then we were fed and relaxed and ready to call it a day.

An afternoon at a beach at Presque Isle is great summer fun.

Cooling off at the beach

Here in PA, the plant doesn’t bloom often, –just a few times during the summer months.

Recently it surprised me with two blooms in one night. If I pick them and put them in the refrigerator, I can show them to others the next day, before they wilt into compost material.

Recently the plant surprised me with two blooms one night. The blooms look like orchids but the plant is a member of the cactus family.

These beautiful blooms last only one night.

Tyme has pretty eyes.

When I was a girl, we had fans like those in church in the summer. A light cardboard rectangle stapled to an over size tongue depressor kind of stick made a sturdy little fan. The local funeral homes would give out these fans to churches. They were printed with serene garden pictures and, of course, also imprinted with the name of the funeral establishment. The fans were lodged in the hymnal rack, along with the hymn books, —several to each pew. They provided a way for us to move the air around us and feel a little cooler as we sat in the over warm building in the heat of summer.

I haven’t thought about those fans for years. They were a common fixture every summer. Some women carried pretty, folding fans in their purses and they would really intrigue me. Made of many long straight spines, they would stack to make one long, narrow strip, then snap open into a semicircle to make a decorative yet functional fan.

Today we have the overhead fans going and we bring in standing, electric fans to keep the air moving. And if we live in an area where summer heat is a constant, there is air conditioning. What a wonderful invention that has been!

But today, I’m remembering the paper fans, stapled to a strip of wood, which helped us feel a little cooler during church services in the heat of summers long ago.

A walk through the tall grass

We went into Crawford County to find a geocache. I have enjoyed the hunt for a geocache and I like to go when I am invited. These searches take me to unusual and interesting places.

This hunt took us through this trail that wound through grasses that were almost as tall as I am, –past my shoulders and almost to my eyes.

We found several more geocaches that day and I got some good exercise while we walked to the sites.

I confess that for me a highlight of the day was the noon meal when we discovered a little store named Ice Cream Cottage. It had such an enticing name. We decided to stop and try their wares.

We got a kielbasa sub and a taco salad (with two forks, because it was so big that it was enough for two people and then some!). We had their ice cream for dessert and it was very satisfying. We ordered their version of a chocolate covered cherry blizzaard. It was more like an ice cream sundae but that was okay. It was really good.

I wish the Ice Cream Cottage was closer to where I live. I really liked eating there.

When I was toting my grocery bags into the house, I started to remember when I was a checkout clerk at the Grand Union when I was in college. Today my purchases were placed in a lot of nearly empty plastic bags. When I was a clerk, we had to neatly pack the groceries into large brown paper bags. A grocery clerk back then had to learn how to pack things neatly and efficiently with heavy things on the bottom and perishable things on top. Today a person can grab the handles of the plastic bags and carry many of them into the house at once. Back then, a person with four or five bags of groceries made more than one trip to unload the car.

But that wasn’t all that is different. Another thing, we had to have the groceries unloaded from the store cart, and lined up neatly on the counter. Then we would start at one end and touching each item with one hand, we would punch in the price on the cash register with the other hand. A really good clerk was aware of the price of each item and any changes that would be made daily.

In New York, where I worked, we were not allowed to give savings stamps for the price of milk or beer. Remember Green Stamps? Haven’t seen them for years. This policy sometimes made it possible for wily customers to get away without paying for their heavy packs of beer. They would put it on the bottom of the grocery cart, since it was so heavy and we would deal with the other purchases, saving the beer to last. And then once in a while, the check out clerk would forget the beer and the customer didn’t pay for it.

Being a check out clerk was a demanding job. It probably still is, but scanning prices and plastic bags must make it easier for clerks today.