Posts Tagged ‘Memories’
Pizzas Gina
It was with heavy hearts that Cyndie and I recently learned one of our most revered pizza restaurants back in Eden Prairie, Gina Maria’s Pizza, had abruptly gone out of business, closing all four of its locations. It felt like another indicator of our aging was being manifest before our eyes.
“Remember the good old days when we were able to buy pizzas from Gina’s?”
Back when I was working in Plymouth, MN, I would order a half-baked version of our favorites and bring them home whenever it was my turn to cook dinner.
When Cyndie would come home to visit the year she worked in Boston, MA, she would order a pizza while still at the airport and pick it up on the way, carrying a fresh deep dish in the door when she arrived.
Well, to our great relief, news got out that a manager from two of the locations had acquired the recipes with the blessing of the former owners and arranged to reopen the Eden Prairie location under the new name “Pizzas Gina,” which I think is brilliant.
I happened to be in EP yesterday to attend the funeral of the mother of one of my high school classmates, and the church was just down the road from our cherished pizza place. From the parking lot of the church, I ordered a rendition that, back in the day, Cyndie would have been able to speed dial her phone and ask for “the usual.”
With 30 minutes to kill, I took a slow drive to the cul-de-sac location of the house I lived in during my middle school and high school years. I almost remembered the family names for each of the houses along Cedar Ridge Road. It’s been over 45 years since I lived there, but plenty of the same trees I used to mow around were still in the yard of our old house.
Dinner last night was as delicious as ever. Maybe even more so, after a period of thinking we would never be able to taste our old favorite again. We are so grateful that the previous owners supported the new family’s efforts to keep the recipe alive and reopen the restaurant under a slightly different name.
If you ever find yourself in Eden Prairie and are a fan of pizza with an incredibly rich tomato sauce, make a point of ordering from the new Pizzas Gina on Mitchell Road.
As our typical (early) bedtime approached last night, Cyndie’s phone received multiple alerts from an app monitoring the intensity of the aurora in our location, so we took Asher out for a late walk to check it out. At the high point of our driveway, we lay down to ease the strain on our necks while staring at the sky.
We expected to see the radiating colors to the north, but we found that the display was happening straight up over our heads and stretched across the sky from west to east.
Some lingering clouds infringed on our viewing a little bit, yet they also occasionally added some interesting drama to the spectacle. We experienced an impressive combination of reds and greens. The show we enjoyed rivaled some of the nights when we were in Iceland last year.
I also spotted a shooting star/meteor streak, adding to my wonder and awe.
It all seemed a fitting compliment to our special treat of a favorite pizza dinner. Pretty much out of this world!
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Fourteenth November
We are in our fourteenth November on these twenty acres and marveling over the thought that we have been tending these fields and forests for that long. Thinking back to when we first arrived, one particular vivid memory stays fresh in my mind. The very first time I ventured off-trail in our woods, I came upon the fresh, blood-red skeleton of an 8-point buck in a circle of hair and paw prints.
We had heard the excited yips of a pack of coyotes during the night a week before that, but didn’t realize how close to our house they were or what the ruckus actually meant. We’ve heard similar howling packs over the years since, sometimes triggered by an emergency vehicle siren, but haven’t come upon any similarly obvious evidence on our land like that carcass.
A stray bone is not uncommon, though.
Cyndie recently trained me in recognizing the invasive garlic mustard plant she has worked for years to disrupt, and we spent some time during an afternoon last week pulling sprouts in the areas off-trail that are less obvious. I found it a little overwhelming because it seems to be everywhere. We did what we could until my ability to cope was exhausted.
I can see why she just makes it a habit to pull whatever catches her eye when on our walks. She stuffs her pockets with plastic shopping bags to always have a way to bag and dispose of what she pulls up, an essential step in eradicating the highly destructive invasive.
There was a tiny oak sprout that caught my attention, barely tall enough to stand above the dead leaf blanket covering the ground in November. The leaves were so perfect. Apparently, too young to keep up with all the bigger trees that have the fall routine figured out.
It looks like today’s precipitation is sliding to our south, which is both good and bad. It’s nice that the horses will get a break from needing to deal with wetness in these cold temperatures. Their natural winter coats are coming in nicely, but their shaggy look quickly flattens out in the rain or wet snow.
The bad part of missing out on some rain or snow is that Paddock Lake is dry and will make for lousy skating this year. The residual growth was almost fluorescent green in the low spots.
My footprint was a result of retrieving the horses’ Jolly Ball that had rolled into the middle of the muddy remains of the “lake.” It’s always interesting to find the ball has been relocated from the spots where I place it, handle up, in hopes of enticing them to play.
We rarely have the privilege of catching them in the act. Occasionally, the ball disappears from the paddock. When it happened one time when the hay field grass was tall, we didn’t find it until the hay mower had sliced into it.
Fourteen Novembers of wonder and joy.
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House Fires
There are two times when the topic of house fires gets a lot of attention in most people’s lives. One is during fire prevention events, and the other is when someone’s house burns. It’s not a comfortable topic for conversation. To those who have lost a home to fire, I suspect their lives get divided into “before” and “after” the fire.
In the early morning hours yesterday, one of Cyndie’s brothers woke to a smoke alarm going off, and he and his son were able to get out of the back door unharmed. They stood with neighbors and watched the conflagration for twenty minutes before the firefighters arrived.
One day, everything is fine, and then a day later, lives are in ashes. I’ve pondered this calamity many times in all the homes I have owned. What would I do if a fire were to break out?
Thankfully, I haven’t needed to find out.
This event has triggered a rash of fire memories for me. The most distant being a story my mother told of her mother’s night clothes erupting in flames from a space heater, I believe it was.
When my mom was in the WAVES during WWII and stationed in Miami, FL, there was a fire in her family home in Minneapolis that took the life of her father.
When I was a kid, a family that my parents knew lost everything to a house fire. I remember selecting some of my toy cars to contribute to a care package that my mom and dad were putting together in response. The thought of that family losing everything made a big impression on me.
In the Eden Prairie neighborhood where Cyndie and I raised our kids, there were four house fires on our street over the 25 years we were there. One across the street from ours burned two different times with different owners. The first incident occurred from a candle in an upstairs bedroom, and the second involved an electrical issue in a basement office filled with reams of paper.
Another house got hit by lightning, which caused a smoldering fire in the rafters.
The last fire in that neighborhood happened on a Saturday afternoon. Cyndie spotted the telltale smoke in the air and yelled to call 911 because there was a house on fire. The owner was standing in the driveway, dumbfounded. He told her there were propane tanks in the garage. Somehow, she moved his car out of the driveway. I stayed up on the street corner to wave emergency responders in the right direction.
I vividly remember the loud cracking and popping sound of a ferocious fire gaining energy by the second as I waited anxiously for too many minutes before the sound of the first fire engine siren came into range. It felt like an eternity, and it was excruciating.
Since this topic has arisen because another house has gone up in flames, why not use the occasion to review your home fire preparedness?
Today, we are extremely grateful that Cyndie’s brother and nephew are alright, and we are sending them love and well wishes for a speedy recovery from the devastating loss of their home and the dramatic disruption of their life routines.
Life, after the fire.
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Interesting Day
I recognized his face right away, but it took a second to figure out from where. When he turned to me and instantly recognized me, we both quickly knew it was PHI.
It was John Newman from the Lab at Physical Electronics. Finding him in the kitchen of a Catholic Church in Ely, Minnesota where the Knights of Columbus were serving us breakfast was a wonderful surprise.
We shared the classic life comparison that follows “What are you doing here!?”
We biked mostly roads to Babbit and back before packing our gear to drive down to Chisholm.
After dinner, some stretching was needed before the walk back to our tents.
My bike was back with the mechanics again to continue their efforts at silencing the ratchety creaking.
Efforts were suspended after a screw sheared that will require more work than they are able to provide from their mobile repair trailer.
I’m going to try gently riding it as is today and see how it does. I will have the phone number for the sag driver handy, if things don’t go well.
It was an interesting day.
Happy Juneteenth today!
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New Steps
With visions of bucking tree trunks still in my head, we left the chores of home behind and drove up to the lake yesterday afternoon.
The highlight of the drive was our traditional stop for an ice cream treat in Cumberland. That triggers the feeling that our summer trips to Hayward have officially kicked off.
We topped that off with a dinner at Coop’s Pizza. If that doesn’t scream Northland, then it would have to be West’s Dairy that would. We didn’t double up on ice cream, so a visit to West’s was postponed until later today.
This spring, professionals were hired to repair the front steps, and yesterday was our first in-person viewing of the finished work.
It looks really nice.
Upon arrival, one of the first things we did was check on the gas oven. Cyndie’s brother had reported it wasn’t working, and we wanted to know whether we would be able to order our Coop’s pizza and bring it back to the house for reheating. Soon, I found myself crouched behind the range that probably hadn’t been pulled out for some 40 years, with all of the accumulated grease and decades of accidentally spilled messes gunking up the sides.
I wasn’t able to deduce the cause of the failing oven after checking the troubleshooting guide online and running through the test codes, so a visit to appliance dealers in town is on our schedule for today. That convinced us to choose dining in at Coop’s, where we did some preliminary research on what replacement free-standing 30” gas ranges might cost in the current market.
It’s possible that oven technology has changed since the early 1980s when this place was built. Maybe we could get one that heats more evenly than this one ever did.
Not that I spend much time using kitchen appliances to prepare meals, but this oven holds a particularly fond memory for me. It was a guys’ weekend in a series that became an annual sports competition we titled, “Boborama.” Someone put a frozen pizza in to bake when there were too many cooks in the kitchen. My brain noticed the multiple chefs supervising the progress and failed to hold my tongue from commenting about opening the door to check.
I’d read that you could lose 50°F each time you open the oven door to check on what is baking, and I announced it to the room. My precious friend, Paul, seized the moment and opened and closed the oven door while looking at me and said, “3oo.”
He opened it again, “250.” Again, “200.” He did it enough times, the theoretical temperature passed zero and went to -50, I think. Maybe that was just in my mind.
It was hilarious, but humbling. I’m not sure I learned to refrain from trying to police the activity of others after that, but it did help me hear what I sounded like on such an occasion. Touché.
A replacement oven might work better, but it will lack the character of the original that has been in this kitchen from the start and has been part of many memorable stories over the years.
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Food Choices
As I was eating my fancy breakfast of yogurt with cereal and a side of peanut butter toast all by myself yesterday morning, it occurred to me that there is a pretty well-defined difference of choices I make when it comes to eating for nutrition vs. eating for pleasure. The most obvious influence is directly related to how much sugar has been added. It’s a fact of our human nature that sweetness is very high on the pleasure scale. There are people who can claim to be exceptions to the norm of appreciating sweetness, but I believe the number is a minority.
If a well-balanced diet didn’t matter, I’d choose ice cream at every meal. For uncooked breakfasts, I tend to select yogurt with my cereal. That is not a choice I would make from the side of pleasure. I select a yogurt with little to no added sugar because it’s good for me. Instead of hardly being able to wait for the next bite, yesterday, I found myself noticing that I wasn’t all that excited to put the next spoonful in my mouth.
But it’s good for me, so I eat it anyway.
If healthy nutrition didn’t matter, I would eat even more pizza than we already do. I’m okay eating fruit and vegetables, but I would choose a lot less fruit if I didn’t know it was good for me.
I’m not always hungry, but that rarely stops me from eating food when I see it. When I am on my own, like I have been the last few days, my laziness keeps me from eating all the food Cyndie sends along. For lunch, I could heat and eat the beef stew she provided, but it is quicker and easier to grab some cheese curds and crackers, mixed nuts, and beef jerky. Since they were convenient, I also grabbed a bag of pea pods and carrots to munch.
Of course, all I really wanted to eat was ice cream.
Rural Development
While out on a walk yesterday to get some exercise in the high heat of early March, I spotted new additions to the landscape in the forest across the highway from the Wildwood lakefront properties.
An electric company has wired power to the edge of the wooded land across the road. I passed two of these boxes that make it look like a new subdivision is going in. Maybe they are putting in the infrastructure to support a massive influx of climate refugees who will want to move to the Midwest after fleeing rising seas, intensifying hurricanes, and inhospitably hot high temperatures.
This area is probably not immune to drought and wildfires, but we are close to the Great Lakes, which might ameliorate those risks some.
We used to bushwhack our way through those woods to explore, at one time bouncing over downed logs on mountain bikes. We found several routes that reached all the way to the Birkie trail for skiing or cycling. More recently, I’ve noticed “No Trespassing” signs going up in those woods, so I’ve greatly curtailed explorations other than very close to the road.
Those new utility installations gave me a real sense of how much time is marching on.
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Almost Healthy
The splitting headache is no longer splitting, and her vital signs have returned to normal. Cyndie seems back to reasonably functional. She helped with horse chores and has taken Asher for a couple of walks in addition to a trip to the Post Office as Santa’s little helper. Goodies are in the mail, and the neighbors will find a bag of holiday cheer has been dropped at their doors.
At this stage of holiday preparations, it’s hard to tell that Cyndie was off her game at all.
In support of all her Elf-ish energy, I have been mining the far reaches of our Apple Music offerings to find appropriate holiday sounds. The first few notes of an Andy Williams Christmas album instantly transported me to a big old farmhouse on the border of Edina and Eden Prairie, MN, and the 5-year-old me arose from within my depths with visions of leaded tinsel being draped across branches from outstretched arms of a person standing on a folding ladder above me.
The result of that surge of nostalgia left me feeling lonesome for the clamor and banter of my siblings buzzing around me.
The branches of that family tree have sixty years of growth that have spread us out beyond the conveniences of frequent contact.
That 5-year-old me would only have his father around for 17 more years. I will always remember the time he almost convinced me that he had heard something on the roof in the minutes just before I showed my face one Christmas morning. I was old enough to know better, but I’d never experienced my dad putting on such a believable act before and was gobsmacked by it.
I like to think he was rewarded by the innocent astonishment that must have shown on my face.
Much less astonishment came over me when I stumbled upon news of a school shooting recently in Wisconsin. That innocence is long gone.
Looking at our trees, I was grateful they don’t need to know such things happen. Same with the horses. Then, I realized how attuned trees and horses are to the universe, which means they probably sense each and every atrocity through the connectedness of all things.
They keep calm and carry on their existence, and so should we. I’ll pretend we are almost healthy.
And now I miss the innocence of my 5-year-old self more than ever.
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Clever Disguise
It took Cyndie’s curiosity to draw proper attention to a volunteer tree growing by the driveway a couple of days ago. I had noticed it recently and wondered what it might be but didn’t give it any more thought than that. Cyndie handed me Asher’s leash and pulled out her phone with an app for identifying plants.
To my surprise, it showed Common Buckthorn as a result.
I went back for a closer look. Sure enough. It even had berries on it, the curse that attracts birds to help spread its seeds. How did I let this grow all summer long?
One reason is the absence of the classic dark green coloring of the leaves. This time of year, it gets much easier to spot the new appearance of buckthorn by the deep green that lasts much longer into the fall season when surrounding growth is fading.
Just a short distance away, I came upon these shoots that had sprouted from a spot where I had cut out growth a year before.
Much easier to notice and positively identify.
That tree by the driveway was cleverly disguised by leaf coloring that had it looking like any other innocuous growth present in the surrounding area. If Cyndie hadn’t taken notice, I probably would have ignored that bunch of sprouts for a least another season.
Speaking of seasons, as in years, we are now into our thirteenth year living on this property in western Wisconsin. Last week, Cyndie and I looked back at the posts I wrote in October 2012 when the moving truck came to our old home in Eden Prairie, MN, and relived some of the drama around the failed attempts to easily close on each property.
A LOT of things happened in the ensuing years. Our first spring here, we received 18” of snow in the first days of May. There was a lot of activity to change the fencing and build the paddocks in preparation for getting horses. We put a few years into starting a little business with the horses.
When that dream faded, it was replaced by a focus on providing a retirement home to four rescued thoroughbred broodmares. We’ve annually hosted a peace walk on World Labyrinth Day every May and improved or maintained various trails through our woods.
Every fall, I put my focus on eradicating every hint of Common Buckthorn that I can find within the borders of our twenty acres. This year, it is warmer and dryer than most Octobers here, which seems to be aiding some of the buckthorn in hiding from my view.
That doesn’t worry me. I’ll find it next year if that’s what it takes.
Our clever disguise is that we are starting to look like we’ve always lived here. We are happily forging ahead into our thirteenth winter at Wintervale. Despite 80°F temperatures yesterday, logic tells us winter will show up eventually.
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None Taken
“No offense,” she said. “I was just trying to make a point.”
It didn’t make any difference to me. I wasn’t listening. It was her eyes. I was lost in the mysterious feeling I was experiencing from the way they commanded my attention. It didn’t matter that she occasionally over-formed her mouth when she spoke certain words.
There was a person in there and I didn’t know who that person was. Something about her eyes seemed familiar.
For most of my life, I had no reason to consider the idea of reincarnation. I had no reason to consider New York, either, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. For all I know, reincarnation has been happening since the beginning of time. How is it that there are infants who demonstrate abilities beyond their years?
Sometimes I wonder if I am remembering someone from one of my previous lives. What if I went to grade school with this person? Could they have lived across the road when I was a kid? What about those three months when I lived in Detroit Lakes? Who was that woman in tech school? How many people have I interacted with during my working life?
“Are you even listening to me?”
“Oh, sorry –no offense– I was just distracted for a moment there. If you were 45 years older, I’d ask if we’d met somewhere before.”
“None taken.”
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Confusing Days
Don’t be confused. Today is Sunday. The solar eclipse will happen tomorrow. The championship game of the Women’s NCAA Basketball Tournament tips off today.
I don’t know why I’ve been so disoriented this morning, but I mixed these up at least twice before finally realizing where I was in time and space. Maybe it started yesterday. Cyndie and I huffed and puffed to drag the tangles of vines we’d collected up to a temporary staging area.
Before I attempt to craft an entryway arbor out of them, I will need to spread them out to see the individual twists and turns.
When I went in for lunch, Cyndie stayed outside to putter on other projects weighing on her mind. I got a text from her that she came upon a pile of vines we had missed.
Absentmindedness? I thought we had gotten them all.
It’s the kind of thing that leaves me thinking, “What else have I forgotten?”
My past is getting mixed up with the present recently because we have decided to “declutter” the remaining 100 record albums from our life-long combined collection. Long ago, I sold a majority of our library in the transition from vinyl to digital music, but I couldn’t part with the works of our most adored artists and a few one-of-a-kind records that would never be re-released.
After 45-50 years of holding most of these albums, we are ready to send them back into the world. Since our collection wouldn’t bring an impressive amount of money from buyers, Cyndie sought (and found!) an interested party who would appreciate them in a spirit commensurate with how we feel.
I’m not agreeing to this step cold turkey. For one particularly rare Eric Clapton album, I checked online for the availability of every song and then created a personal playlist in the exact order for my digital library. Attaching the artwork to the file gave me the comfort of a memory that will serve as a special link between albums of my youth and the digital library I’ve switched to as I age.
We’ve successfully saved our children from any guilt they might feel if they had to throw these away after Cyndie and I die.
Now, what else am I forgetting?
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Relative Something 