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Doing one of these diaries is a good way to get your feet wet if you have been hesitant about writing a diary. You can write as much or as little as you want. The audience here is always supportive.
Last weekend I travelled to central Florida to visit my parents and to celebrate my father's 89th birthday. For those who do not know, my father has Alzheimer's disease and my 89 year old mother is his primary care giver.
For the last two years, these trips to visit my parents are mainly for my mother's benefit. My father no longer knows who I am, nor my sister, and not even my mother. So I make these trips for my mother's sake.
When we visit, we try to keep everything light and positive as much as possible. Only when my father is asleep or napping, do my mother and I discuss weightier issues such as politics and the like. She misses that intellectual stimulation and enjoys it when I come to visit.
My mother is an avid cook, even at her age. She is constantly trying out new recipes and subscribes to two cooking magazines. Several years ago, she told me that one of the things on her bucket list was to make every recipe that she found interesting. I laughed and told her that would be impossible since she was always finding new recipes to try.
But this diary is not about new recipes that my mother tries. It is about her family history of food that I never knew before. On Sunday morning before I left, Mom had fixed hot oat bran cereal for her and Daddy for breakfast. She asked me if I wanted some and I declined saying that hot cereal was something they grew up with, but I never liked.
My mother then promptly corrected me and gave me a history lesson of food in her family. My parents grew up in the Depression. My father's family was well off, not rich, but did not have to worry. My mother's family was less well off, but not destitute. As with many lower middle class families of that era, my mother's family raised chickens in the back yard and had a garden. I remember my grandfather's basement having a cellar dug into the side of the lot. In there, the temperatures were always cool and that was where they kept fruits and vegetables that they canned.
What I did not know was another facet of the basement. My mother said that when she was a child, they had two crocks and a crate down the basement. One crock had sauerkraut in it and the second contained starter for buckwheat cakes. The crate contained salted cod. Every morning, my grandmother would send my mother (who was the youngest in her family) down to the basement to get starter for buckwheat cakes and a couple of salted cod fish for breakfast. Breakfast was a huge meal of buckwheat cakes, cod, and eggs every day. Even though they lived in town, they ate like farmers. And after all these years, I never knew that.
For me, one of the great joys in life is learning new things, even the mundane such as what my mother ate for breakfast as a child.
So what is on your mind this morning?