I originally had this on my webpage "Cocoon's Place" and one year all my friends and family wrote poems or notes to their Mother and we had them on the page. Cocoon's Place, unfortunately, suffered a devastating loss when the host server crashed and lost all it's content.
We lost her to heart disease on May 2, 2002. She is gone from this Earth but will forever live in our hearts. I love you Mom !
In June 1960 Mom had some health problems that required her to be in the hospital for a couple of weeks and I had to stay at my Grandfather's house. I was a precocious 3 year old at the time and the youngest of 4 girls.
Grandpap's prize of the garden were his rose bushes. If any of my Sisters got anywhere near them he'd holler and threaten them with the hickory switch. For some reason he took pity on me, the sniveling baby who didn't understand why Mommy wasn't home, and every morning would walk me out to the bushes to pick a rose for Mom. My older sisters helped make homemade get well cards and we sent the roses with Dad every night when he visited her.
Mom really loved homemade things and pressed the roses in a book to dry them. Those roses traveled with her to Michigan in 1970 when she married my step father and are still somewhere in her files today, although they are probably just dust at this point.
Mom was 5 feet tall and Dad was over 6 feet. They were quite a pair. We always used to say we got all our stubborness from my Dad because Mom still had all of hers...LOL.
Anyway, whenever Mom would disagree with Dad she would jump up on the bed so she could look him in the eye, and stand with her hands on her hips and say "Now Charles, You just listen to me !" Poor Dad never had a chance of winning an argument because he'd be laughing so hard at the spectacle in front of him.
Mom loved to bake. She made homemade bread, cookies, cakes and pies from scratch as well as canning tomatoes and making pickles. Mom was famous (in our family at least) for her Schnecken, a German cookie which has been a Holiday tradition in our family for over 40 years.
Dough:
Cream together using pastry blender or dough hooks of electric mixer:
4 cups flour 1 1/2 cups margarine or butter
Stir in by hand:
3 egg yolks, beaten (save whites for later)
1 cup milk with 1 teaspoon vinegar stirred into it
1 teaspoon vanilla
Chill overnight in refrigerator.
Filling:
3 egg whites
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Beat until it forms peaks, like merinque on highest speed of mixer, about 3 minutes.
Topping:
Stir 4 tablespoons cinnamon into 1 cup sugar
Time to get Messy :)
Sprinkle confections sugar on tabletop. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Divide dough into 4 sections and work with one at a time while keeping the others chilled.
Roll out in a circle like a pie crust.
Use a pastry brush to brush meringue on rolled dough. Sprinkle sugar/cinnamon mixture on top.
Cut in wedges like crescent rolls. Roll each section from wide edge to tip and place on a baking sheet sprayed with pam.
Brush meringue on top of each rolled wedge and sprinkle with more sugar/cinnamon.
Bake 10 -12 minutes until lightly browned.
Yield = 4 dozen cookies at 3 WW points each.
Making these as a labor of love as the cleanup is the pits. They are however, well worth the effort.
"I'm not jet propelled, ya know."
"If you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything !"
"You can do anything in life you want if you have the money and the time. You will always have one or the other, but seldom have both at the same time."
"God helps those who help themselves."
"Beggars can't be choosers."
and her don't have sex talk when I was a teenager "Five minutes of pleasure isn't worth 9 months of pain" (guess raising the kid wasn't part of the pain)
and a Dadism:
Dad's favorite "sort of" curse word phrase
"Bullshit, molasses, turpentine, benzine and alcohol !"
How I wish he had lived long enough to tell us what that really meant.
