70 years (x) 365 days = 25,550 main meals

Mary stretched a dollar with frugal shopping and a liberal garden. Yet her main meals were abundant and varied. She cycled through a two week schedule, putting dinner on the table when husband Clint came home from work at 5:15. Saturday evening was more casual but supper was still early. Sunday dinner was served at 1:00 p.m., after church.

Weekday meals Tuesday through Thursday: Spaghetti and meat balls, chicken pot pie, beef stew, meat loaf, hamburgers (no buns) with gravy, chile con carne, roast chicken, fried chicken, stuffed peppers, cabbage rolls, vegetable soup, chicken soup, broiled steak, breaded veal cutlet, fried calf liver, creamed chipped beef, macaroni and cheese, navy bean soup, green pea soup.

Friday: breaded fish, fried tomatoes and white gravy, breaded zucchini, potato soup swimming in butter and dusted with paprika served with fried doughnuts rolled in granulated sugar, New England clam chowder, fried breaded oysters, crab cakes.

Saturday: pancakes, waffles, scrapple, bacon, hot dogs, sausage links, rarely--creamed kidneys or shrimp, scrapple.

Sunday: roast beef, roast pork, baked chicken. (Son Clint called the roasts “boiled” when cooked in a pressure cooker.) Sunday evening--no cooking, a self-serve slice of pie or cake.

Monday: “leftovers” from Sunday.

Vegetables and fruit: nearly every meal had mashed potatoes with gravy for husband Clint. (He claimed repeatedly he could eat a mashed potato sandwich.) In season--from the garden—peas, carrots, beets, radishes, corn, green and yellow string bean, cabbage, zucchini, and leaf lettuce, apple sauce. Out of season, from the big chest freezer in the basement—yellow corn, green and yellow string beans, lima beans, succotash (lima beans and corn); or from the cupboard under the cellar stairs—canned tomatoes, bread and butter pickles, beets, and strawberry, cherry, and grape jams beneath crowns of white wax.

Constants at the dinner table included mashed potatoes (of course), iced tea with wedges of lemon, coleslaw, bread and butter (never margarine because of husband Clint’s aversion to it). Homemade butter rolls appeared on many Sundays.

Desserts peaked on Sunday. Cakes included lemon with lemon zest icing, white cake with boiled coconut icing, brown sugar with burnt sugar icing. Pie with flaky, tender crust ran a broad range of berries and fruit—strawberry, pumpkin, rhubarb, blueberry, cherry, peach, apple, lemon meringue. Coconut cream and pineapple cream were custard rich. Passing trends were shoo fly pie, pineapple upside down cake, Boston cream pie (from a box mix), jelly roll (thin sponge cake spread with home jam), lemon chiffon/buttermilk pie (a puffy concoction with a sweet-sour, melt in your mouth texture), cream puffs and éclairs, strawberry shortcake made from sweet biscuits and homegrown strawberries--in more frugal days topped with whipped evaporated milk.

Mary made butter cookies in various shapes extruded from an aluminum Wearever cookie press and garnished with multi-colored sprinkles, Toll House cookies, (Br’er Rabbit) molasses cookies, and at Christmas walnut balls dusted with confectioner’s sugar

Mary’s signature confection , of course, learned from Eva her German mother, was “torn britches:” an eggy dough rolled paper thin, cut in rectangles and slit two or three times, deep fried to a golden brown, and when cool sprinkled with confectioner’s sugar. Making torn britches took at least two hours.

Around 90, after planning, preparing, and cleaning up more than 20,000 meals, Mary decided she needed a few "cookless" days a week. Since then, on Tuesday and Thursdays she's allowed a frozen dinner for her and Clint.

Simple Days, Simple Pleasures

When young, Mary would sit on the front stoop of the farm house. She'd smooth the sandy soil and with a stick she'd write in dirt. At 92 she can still see herself doing that.

Mary also liked to sit on the steps and look for out-of-state license plates on passing cars.

"We didn't need fancy toys to make us happy. They were simpler times. And, oh, how much things have changed. You should see the farm now! You wouldn't recognize it." By this she means the old homestead isn't well taken care of.

[Ed Searl]

Typical Mary Meal

Green beans, corn, cole slaw, stewed tomatos, buttered noodles, and chicken tenders plus a glass of iced tea with lemon: a typical Mary meal.

The Rosemary Bush

Mary's mother Eva grew a rosemary bush in an oversized terra cotta pot. During the winter it was kept in the warm and dry cellar. Each spring, after the threat of frost passed, two sons carried the pot across the pea gravel driveway to the garden alongside the chicken house.

Each Sunday morning before church, Mary's father Joe broke off a big sprig of rosemary and placed it in the buttonhole of his suitcoat lapel.

"He thought he was a big deal!" Mary declared.

[Ed Searl]

One Line Drawing

Mary learned to draw this "one line" bird in elementary school.

Johnny Cut My Finger

Mary was a tomboy. She was always shadowing her older brothers Seppe (Joe) and John.

In the spring of 1921, when Mary was five, brother John had the task of chopping turnips that had become shriveled and hard over winter. (The turnips were cow food.) John wielded the hatchet and told his younger sister that she could hold the turnip while he chopped. Mary complied.

John swung and in one stroke cut through the turnip and the middle finger of Mary’s right hand.The finger dangled by a flap of skin. Blood spurted. Mary wailed, alarming her mother Eva, who’d been washing windows on the first floor of the farmhouse. Mary held bloody finger in hand and ran to the ladder where her mother was perched. “Johnny cut my finger,” holding it up to show. Eva exclaimed in German, “Great God in Heaven!” She immediately knew there was nothing she could do.

Good fortune followed disaster. Across the street the Blomers were having a grocery delivery. Eva raced across the crushed oyster shell road for help. In quick order Mrs. Blomer, with Mary in her lap, and the delivery driver were speeding in the grocery’s panel truck to Dr. Sinexon ‘s office in Paulsboro. Mary squeezed her hand as hard as she could to quell the blood.

Mary, who always called herself a crybaby, without any painkiller, stood bravely while the doctor sewed the two parts of the finger back together. She did her best not to cry, but sobs spilled. The doctor paused to ask, “Does that hurt you?”

Mary said, “No.”

“Shut up then,” the doctor admonished.

Mary returned home with her stitched finger in a splint and arm in a sling.

In a day before anesthesia, antibiotics, and micro-surgery, that her finger knit back together is astonishing. There was always a visible scar. It didn’t bend much. But it healed without infection.

Mary remembers a subsequent trip to the doctor’s so the finger could be examined and stitches removed. She rode on the handle bar of a bike while her father Joe pedaled to Paulsboro and back.

[Ed Searl]

Joy: Mary's World

Mary, among her many domestic chores, takes pride in her Monday laundry. Into her 80s she hung all her laundry outdoors to dry. (At 92 a dryer still doesn't stop her from hanging items beneath the covered back porch.)

For many years the clothesline in the backyard was framed by four iron poles embedded in concrete, the four corners describing a great rectangle. The clothesline reached around the perimeter and also ran in two diagonals to make a central X. Mary hung the sheets in an outer row and propped up the sagging lines with long wooded poles. On inner lines she pinned white shirts with outstretched sleeves, khaki pants that billowed to the wind, along with underwear ordered by respective wearer: Mary's, Clint's, son Clint's, and Ed's--all in a row, upward of 28 pairs, immaculately white from hand rubbing on a ribbed-glass washboard and a Clorox dipping. No hash mark survived her scrupulous scrubbing.

Mary declared time and again, that when the wash was done and the laundry hung on the line by wooden clothespins spaced in tidy order, it was beyond words to express what she felt. She was utterly joyful.

Eventually, when only Mary and Clint were left at home, she continued to experience a Monday morning ecstasy at the sight of Clint's laundry drying on the clothesline.

One February day, when fresh snow glistened and laundry was a-drying, Mary was compelled by an even richer joy. The beauty of the moment swept through her. With a long clothesline pole she drew a huge heart in the snow and inscribed it, "I love you, Clint." For Mary this was a rare display of emotion.

Later that day, she and a friend shopped for meat at a country butcher near Chadds Ford, PA. While waiting for their order, Betsy Wyeth, wife of famed artist Andrew Wyeth, breezed in, protesting the cold and snow, though she wore a luxurious fur coat. Betsy declared her intention to make beef vegetable soup for Andy. "Tell me girls," she said to Mary and her friend, "tell me how you make your beef vegetable soup."

Mary used the occasion to relate to Betsy Wyeth, how earlier that day the beauty of the snow and the joy of Clint's underwear on the clothesline had stirred her to declare her love with a snowy valentine. "That's so sweet. I'll have to tell Andy," Betsy Wyeth responded. She took away Mary's recipe for hearty vegetable beef soup, too.

Whenever I see a reproduction of Andrew Wyeth's iconic and melancholic "Christina's World,"--in the foreground a paraplegic woman sprawled on an overgrown hillside with a decrepit house on the crest,--I envision "Mary's World."

In "Mary's World" a midlife woman in babushka and car coat inscribes a heart into a winter's cover of snow with a long wooden clothes pole. In the background white boxer shorts billow in the wind.

[Ed Searl]