A Slate Walk and a Brook

September 4, 1999

A Slate Walk and a Brook

This morning before it got hot, I cleaned off the big slate block that leads to the porch steps. Even in drought, as in this long summer, grass leans over and makes a mat for more grass to grow on. Purslane likes to sprawl over the slates too, making patterns with its red leaves and stems against the slate. I leave it for awhile. It's easy to pull and you clear a big space with each plant that comes out. It is always satisfying to find the edge of the slate and for a few days have a neat sharp line. I never get the whole walk done at once. I don't know what's so great about a big old slab of slate, but I guess it's exactly that. It's big and it's old and has probably been there for 150 years and will stay there longer than I'll be here to know.

When I decided we had to move out of grandfather's house, after eight years, even if we set up a tent, any house would have done, but here was literally the house of my dreams, the first and the only one I looked at. Sometime in my childhood I was taken to visit an old white rectangular farmhouse. I remember admiring it as mother and I walked down the slate walk toward the low steps and the wide porch. It stayed in my mind as the ideal house. A few others almost matched it - one set in a valley where we climbed a hill to pick wild strawberries, and Uncle Wild's house in Wisconsin, where I rode on a wagon full of tobacco leaves on the way to the drying shed, and saw the picture book cellar shelves full of jams and vegetables.

But here was the exact same long white house, the slate walk, the low steps, the big porch. Mother and I went inside to make an objective, sensible tour of inspection. I looked out an upstairs window on the back of the house and saw the four year old and her big brother squatting on a rock in a brook, watching a small green and white water wheel turning in the water. End of tour. Never mind that the rooms were small, there are no closets in old farmhouses, and no kitchen cabinets and the dirt lane was a mile long. I was home.

We moved in April, 1944. For years we celebrated moving day as a major holiday. I always made a gingerbread house mold cake. However we never repeated our moving day dinner. It was late when the movers left us. We sat on boxes around a makeshift table. I turned on my electric stove which had been in storage for those eight years, until I had a repair man install new burners just before the move. Loud bang. The new burners were 110 and the current was 220. And so we dined on cold canned spaghetti, happy as it's possible to be.

The house mold cost one of our scarce dollars, an offer from Woman's Day, December 1955, cover price 5 ¢. The mold has just 4 pieces. 2 for front and back of house, with slanted roof attached, and two for ends. Windows and doors are stamped in. The finished house is 3 ½ x 6 inches. It has to bake upside down, as the house has no basement or floor. You set a cookie sheet on the rack below it to catch drips. The recipe to fill it is 1 package of gingerbread mix, ½ cup flour, 2/3 c water, The cake bakes 1 ½ to 2 hours at 325°. " A crust forms on the top of the cake long before center is done. When done, wire cake tester or broom straw, inserted in center, will come out clean." To decorate, follow directions in Woman's Day for 12/55, or your imagination. There are no clues as to how to balance it while you pour the batter in. A cake rack seems to be indicated. Or sand bags. Or bags of rice or beans. In the oven the ridge of the roof would fit down between two wires. I have no dismal memories of wrecked houses, so it must have worked. I must have made an auxiliary pan of gingerbread to eat while we admired the little house, and reminisced about the wonderful cold spaghetti supper.

Gingerbread has other good memories. My brother and I walked a mile home from school for lunch. He was four years older and always about four paces ahead, pretending he didn't know me, unless somebody bothered me. We usually had proper nutritious lunches, of which I have no memory, but some days we would open the door on the wonderful smell of gingerbread just ready to eat. It was decorated with granulated sugar but didn't need whipped cream. We were allowed to make the whole meal of this, with cold, cold milk, no vegetables, no liver, just wonderful warm gingerbread. I have tried one recipe after another and the conclusion is that to get that taste, you need to be nine years old and walk a fast mile before you eat it.

Mother was a DomEcon ( Domestic Economy) student at Cornell in 1914 when Miss Farmer had just started convincing people to measure ingredients. Mother's copy of Miss Farmer's book is tattered. The front endpaper says Cornell University 1914 Prudence Risly Hall 237. I'm pretty sure this is THE gingerbread recipe because the page is half outof the binding and there are spatter spots around, while the next ingerbread page is spotless. Gingerbread days must have been when some milk had soured. Pasteurization was just coming.