What I Learned From Canned Beans

“Here’s the deal,” as my friend Joyce says. “Here’s the deal.” It pays to say yes to a party. It pays to have a few cans of beans on your pantry shelves. It pays to have well trained help.

Anny asked me on Monday to make dinner for us —Roger Anny and I—and a couple friends of hers coming in from Pittsburgh on Friday, and another local friend home from college. I said, “Sure thing, bring them over,” then forgot about the whole thing. So on Friday when she called to say it would be an hour or so before they arrived, I panicked—for a moment.

            Then I went to the pantry and took inventory. Anny is a vegetarian. I had cans of kidney beans, black beans, pinto beans, tomatoes. I had peppers, onions, garlic, in my fridge. I began to put together a pretty respectable vegetarian chili.

I used an old tried and true recipe for coffee cake and made one of those too. The chili wasn’t quite done when the company came in the door so I pretended I intended it that way and made them talk to me in my cozy kitchen while I finished the chili.

The coffee cake took forever to bake, but it smelled good as its cinnamon topping browned and it was an event of its own when we took it out of the oven piping hot.

            Dinner was delightful because Anny and Roger are well- trained assistants. We’ve thrown together enough parties that they know the drill. Roger comes in the kitchen and says, “What do you need?” does the required job and then comes back for more.

            Anny knows how I want the table set in the dining room; she puts on the water and the napkins and the salt and pepper. Roger cleans up the kitchen right behind me as I make a mess creating dinner. Then after dinner, the cooperation reverses as we clear the table and fill the dishwasher.

I thoroughly enjoyed the party I’d forgotten about. I also never stressed except for that one moment. When I saw my cans of beans, and heard Roger and Anny offer to help, I just relaxed and enjoyed my company.

Maybe I’ll make all my parties last minute deals. As long as I have good help and canned beans.  

What I Learned Stawberry Picking With My Grandpa

“Oh, it’s nice to get up in the morning when the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”

I’ll never know if my Grandfather John J Jaquish made that up or remembered it from somewhere. I’ll never forget him shuffling into my bedroom at his house in Tunkhannock singing with the first birds of the morning. I groaned and pulled the blanket over my head, but I knew it was time to pick strawberries.  

 I must have been the only grandchild living at Putnam Street right then because it was Grandpa and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Space from down the street, picking ripe berries like machines. 

 I was born the year he retired from the Cooperative Extension Service out of Penn State, so if I was twenty, he was eighty-five. He’d been the first county agent in Wyoming County, PA.

He knew how to get things done. He motivated his granddaughter to pick berries by making it a competition. I picked like mad but I never gathered as many quarts as he did. If I picked sixteen, he picked eighteen. Come to think of it, he always counted them at the end too.

We picked our berries early in the morning, before it got hot. His silly song got a college student out of bed on summer morning. I don't think he learned that in the extension service, though. He did raise eight kids. I was one of 27 grandchildren. All of us have Grandpa stories.

Our berries picked we’d go home. He was tired, and the Phillies were on TV. So guess who, washed, cut, sugared, pectained, boiled, and stirred all the berries into jam? Who made sure the jars were clean and the paraffin was just right?

At the end of the day, there were pints and pints of beautiful strawberry jam under paraffin seals stored out on the back porch.

It took me as long to clean all the syrupy, strawberry, sugary, goo off the stove and counters as it had to pick the berries in the first place. One night in bed, as I shut my eyes, I vividly saw a mountain of strawberries falling on me.

When the family visited on summer weekends, Grandpa bragged about his jam and me, as he made sure my aunts and uncles had a pint or two to take home.

I was proud of all that work, glad to present my family with jam. However, I really don’t eat many strawberries, and I never “get up in the morning as the sun begins to shine, at four or five or six o’clock in the good old summer time.”  

What I Learned From My Sis

My sister is the one to learn hospitality from this week. Up here in the North East where the flood waters have made people homeless, my sister is traveling with that most welcome of sights, The American Red Cross.

Over the years, she’s traveled from her home in Lewisburg, to Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and now New York. Her career as a Red Cross Volunteer began after hurricane Katrina. She was nervous, a little scared, and not sure she had anything to offer. But she’s there and has been used by Our Father to ease the loss, shock and misery of people who have lost everything. 

This time she’s been away from home for two weeks, and has traveled all over New York state. She drove into Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, quite a feat for a country girl, and then got to sleep in a fancy hotel. On that same trip, another assignment had her sleeping on a cot in a gym and sharing one bathroom with fifty other women. 

My sister does all that pretty cheerfully. She knows how to turn the other cheek and listens compassionately to frazzled flood victims. She makes new friends as she meets co-workers from across the country. She deals with cots, and little sleep, and detours, and even tarantulas when she was in Oklahoma. She just keeps working side-by-side with other volunteers to make life better for the ones who come to her shelters.   

My sister does not have a halo, just ask me, I’m her sister and I know. But she does have a determination to help. She does have years of nursing behind her, and wisdom from following God for a long time now.

She has some good stories to tell too, about the people she has prayed with, and people she has counseled and helped. Just ask her.

This week I just have to say I’m proud of her. I have to ask you to be proud of her too, even though she’ll yell at me when I see her again.  

When the Red Cross calls her, she goes and that’s a pretty good lesson in how to be hospitable.  

What I Learned From Ant Cinny and Her Candy Dishes

What I Learned From Ant Cinny and Her Candy Dishes.

My cousin Sue Gillespie stood up at my aunt’s funeral and said, “I’m married into this family, so believe me, you people don’t even know that you practice radical hospitality. “

 I thought about that, and it seems in our family they say it this way, “Come on by, the door is always open. Eat what we have, sleep where there’s room. Make sure you come early and leave late and bring your dog too.”

My Aunt Cinny, or Ant Cinny, as I always referred to her, had a lot of covered casserole dishes that she called candy dishes and kept full in her dining room hutch. The candy was usually from the last holiday, so you might be eating Christmas candy near Easter, but the candy was always there.

My children knew it was there because I taught them how to raid her candy dishes, just as I did when I was a kid. Ant Cinny and Uncle Hank, always made you feel like they weren’t doing anything until you arrived. They asked questions and listened to your answers, no matter if you were a kid, an elder like them, or the in-between like me. 

I sometimes felt hassled by kid rising, but Ant Cinny was always was delighted by my children. She could be counted on to walk around the Oakdale Mall with us. She was there when each of them came home from the hospital. She helped my mother babysit when Roger and I took the youth group to the Creation Festival every year. She never forgot their birthdays or a holiday, and most of her presents were wonderful silly things form the dollar store.

At her funeral we all told stories about her kindness and I suddenly saw that example by example she taught us to say, “Come on by, the door is always open. Eat what we have, sleep where there’s room. Make sure you come early and leave late and bring your dog too.”

Sometimes my family is a little too much, but I have candy in my dishes and I always know they have some for me in theirs.

What I Learned From One Who Didn't Have Much To Offer

 I just watched a special about Walt Disney, the man who convinced us that dogs, elephants, bears, teacups and chairs, all sing, dance, and tell us stories.

I’m conditioned; I wouldn’t be too shocked if the books in my office started singing. The white pine tree in my parent’s yard never sang, “Be Our Guest,” but it did teach me something about hospitality. 

 It shaded a good third of the backyard at 207 S. 7^th Ave in Clarion, Pennsylvania. White pines have always been beautiful to me, with their iridescent green needles against blackish trunks and the blue sky. They smell like home and endless July afternoons and sound like whispering water, or far off singing, as the wind strums through them.

The tree in the backyard was so big it touched the sky. It took three or four kids to reach around it, but you couldn’t find anybody to do that and get pine pitch on their clothes or in their hair. Pine pitch smelled wonderful and gave you these dark patches on your hands as if you were a hard worker with calluses like my father got from changing tires.

Okay, I know the tree didn’t touch the sky but you could see it from out front if you were across the street in the Denio’s front yard looking back at our house. In addition, the tree was big enough to have a tire swing on one branch, a porch swing on another branch, and a tractor tire sandbox around behind them.

It kept the swings and sandbox in cool dappled shade with only a few sunrays making it the whole way to the pinecone- littered ground.

The tire swing was best when you went around and around tightening the rope until your feet didn’t touch the ground anymore. Then you let go, shut you're eyes and rode the whirling rope as it untwisted itself once more.

The sandbox was fun when you borrowed some of your brother’s matchbox cars and drove them up the tire treads and into the sand box city you constructed. The sandbox smelled like Dad’s tire shop, and offered endless possibilities after you scouted for ants and removed an occasional cat pooh.

The porch swing hung over a root—white pines have roots sometimes show above ground. This root was the push off place to get and keep the swing traveling. If you wanted to read, the swing was a great place too. You could lie still on your back and kick the swing chain to drift gently. Or you could just be still and daydream as you gazed up into filigree and wrought iron of needles and branches.

When the snow fell, the tree became a tent keeping the ground bare underneath as the braches bent down. Carefully my father, Judy, Jack, and I shook the braches. As the snow released the braches would bob up gracefully. We squealed with laughter to be suddenly standing inside a snow globe.

That tree was downed by lightning my senior year of high school.

It didn’t have much to offer really, just its beauty and its shade. It made a good playmate, and sang a lovely lullaby as you drifted off to sleep on a breezy summer evening.