Christmas walks

I have started dealing with too much noise/people at Christmas by going for walks down to the creek midafternoon.  This is also a useful way to walk off some of lunch.  My gramma's place is on one end of an 80-acre plot; the woods you see in the first picture are the other end.

Big Creek was a glacial run-off tributary to the Wabash; it does not have a Wikipedia entry of its own, but it was probably related to the Illinoian glaciation. (There's a book from 1899 if you really want to deep-dive on glacial deposits.)

Anyway, this plot of land (the field to the right and the homestead and woods bookending it) has been in the family probably since the middle of the 1800s - one day I'll poke around to see if it goes back to the 1840s or just the next generation.

The field isn't much to look at, especially in the winter, but it's there and it does field stuff.  The road we're walking on is actually a county road, but the bridge has been gone for more than thirty years now, so they don't really do much with it.

View from the end of the lane

See, bridge gone.  I have the vaguest memories of it existing but I don't know if that's just from seeing pictures of it.  Grampa walked down here with us once when I was a kid to shoot at garbage on the far bank.

Big Creek, where the bridge fell in

Here's the woods from the other side.  The field in the foreground doesn't belong to my family.

View from the creek

It was much less muddy this year than on previous walks, but there were lots of tracks!  I did some Googling for an easy tracks identification guide and found one on... a hiking goods website?  But it seems legit when compared with similar guides.

Here's what we saw evidence of:

Probably turkey (these are big - I thought maybe heron but no back claw)

Deer

Maybe skunk?

Dog or coyote

Probably raccoon

Probably raccoon

Catwalks

So I was thinking about the Evansville stockyards on my drive into work this morning.

When I was a kid, sometimes Grampa would take us with him when he took hogs into town to the stockyards.  These trips are among my earliest memories; we were still living in the trailer, and we moved out of the trailer when I was three.  I'm realizing that most of my earliest memories are tied to one geographic location, which is more or less where the trailer stood.

Anyway, the stockyards.  I don't remember the stockyards themselves, rather than just Grampa's old red truck with the high-sided back that he used for hauling hogs into town, until I'm maybe six or so.  The stockyards had loading docks for trucks to back up to, then a series of interconnected holding pens to move the hogs up to the scales as they became available, as well as some walkways.  Over the pens, up in the rafters, there were catwalks.

We (us kids) didn't always go up in the catwalks.  I think it depended how long Grampa had to wait for the hogs to get to the scales and get paid.  I don't even remember how us going up in the catwalks got started, but we weren't sneaking around, just keeping busy.  You could wander over most of the stockyards via the catwalks, which I think were accessed by stairs from the scales office.  It was a bit of a maze, and we got kind of lost over the cattle half of the stockyards once, prior to which it hadn't occurred to me that the stockyards were for more than hogs.  Sometimes to keep going you had to jump a gap of a few feet, which seemed quite far when you're six or eight.

A lot of random memories are tied into the stockyard trips.  The vending machine at one of the feed stores that had grape soda of a brand no one else carried.  Stopping at a gas station (now closed) for candy based partly on how much Grampa had gotten for the hogs.  Spilling a whole package of Sixlets in the truck.

The stockyards closed sometime in the 1990s, a victim of the city having grown up around it, the declining local livestock economy, and probably other factors that I wasn't aware of at the time.  Grampa died in 1998, about five months before I met my now-husband and graduated from high school.  Experiences like this probably fed into various parts of my personality, but at this point in time what I'm wondering most is, who's going to take my niece exploring, and where?

Senses

Particular sensory inputs stick with me, and similar stimuli will evoke memory of the place or experience they're associated with.  Sometimes these make it into a work of fiction, but usually they just come flooding back when triggered.  Here's some of them:

• The sodium lights on I-271 in Cleveland:  You probably don't notice these during the day, but usually by the time we get to Cleveland, it's past 11 p.m.  Cleveland has lights at all its interstate exits and interchanges, at least on 71/271, and they're the super-tall, two- to six-light clusters of sodium lights - or at least they used to be; I don't know if they've started switching to LEDs yet.  It's a yellower light, and my husband is usually asleep at that point in the trip, so it's just me and a mostly empty highway and the sodium lights.  I haven't actually used this in a story yet, but they're a large part of the inspiration for a setting I've been working on. 
• The barn (now gone) at my parents':  This is one of the stronger smell triggers - I've only run into it a couple times outside the barn itself, but it's a mix of musty and hay or straw and a hint of mud.  It is perhaps one of the most recognizable of smells for me.
• The machinery barn at my grandparents':  This is the location evoked for me by the smell of engine grease.  I not infrequently have dreams set in this building.
• Keemun tea:  I think the first time I bought keemun was because of the color of the container it came in from Twinings, but the flavor, my God.  It has layers.  Twinings eventually stopped carrying it, and I had to find somewhere else.  I picked up a new tin at Jungle Jim's on the way to my folks' for Christmas. 
• The pineapple fried rice from Jasmine Thai:  This is probably in my top five flavor experiences; I got it kind of randomly because I've been trying to try different things from the Thai restaurant.  It's kind of savory bliss, curry without the heat, with occasional pops of sweet/sour from the pineapple chunks and cashews for a bit of crunch.
• A ceiling fan under skylights:  The location for this is at a kind of run-down Burger King, but the pattern of light and shadow is particularly evocative.  I used this at the beginning of the first draft of Murena.

Most of these seem to be taste and smell, and a couple of light color/patterns thrown in. There are probably others, but these are the ones that get triggered enough for me to have noticed them.

Nostalgia in a Soup

I grew up going to the same church my dad's family has been going to forever.  I don't know if they still do it (I've moved away and whatnot), but when I was a kid, they had an annual sausage supper in the fall.  The menu was set: sausage, sauerkraut, applesauce, and navy beans are what I remember; coinciding was a bazaar, a quilt raffle (quilt made by the quilting group), and (I think) a silent auction.  My great-grandmother made chocolate peanut butter balls (also known as buckeyes or peanut butter bon-bons, depending where you live) for them every year, sold for a quarter or fifty cents for a bag of three at the bazaar.  Since my siblings and I generally got to, you know, hang out at the church while my parents were working the kitchen or serving at the supper, we blew a lot of our accumulated money on the peanut butter balls.

Anywho.  The soup is actually the other flavors of the sausage supper, because although chocolate-peanut butter soup would probably be tasty (thinking something like a cream-based soup), it wouldn't really be supper, per se.

The change I made?  I don't like sauerkraut, so I went with straight shredded cabbage.  It's not the prettiest of soups, but it packs a pretty good flavor punch.

The soup:

• About a pound of link sausage, preferably a bratwurst type, cooked & sliced
• 1 small cabbage, shredded
• 2 huge or 4 medium potatoes, peeled & cubed
• 2 apples, peeled & cubed (I used McIntosh, but I think I might go with Granny Smith next time for the sturdiness and strength of flavor)
• 1 pound of navy beans, rinsed
• 8 cups of chicken stock or broth
• Onion to taste - I'd have added half an onion sliced, but my onions were... unpretty, so I threw in about an eighth cup of dried diced onion
• Salt & pepper to taste
• About half a teaspoon of garlic powder
• About a teaspoon of powdered mustard
• About a quarter cup of white vinegar

Throw everything in a slow cooker and cook on low for eight to ten hours.  I layered it, bottom to top, beans-potatoes-apples-cabbage-sausage, but only because that was the order I prepped them in.  Once it's done, stir through it to distribute the ingredients.

The chocolate peanut butter balls that I didn't think about making until just before I headed home tonight:

• 2 cups creamy peanut butter
• 1/2 cup butter
• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 3 cups crisp rice cereal
• 2 cups semisweet chocolate chips 2 bags of chocolate chips

Melt the peanut butter & butter together over low heat.  Mix the cereal and the powdered sugar together, then pour the peanut butter mix over it and blend it together.  Form this into balls (recommended about 1"), put them on cookie sheets, and chill them until they're firm.  The firm part is important, because next they're going into chocolate chips that you've melted in a double boiler.  The recipe calls for about one bag, but I've never gotten away with fewer than two bags.  So thoroughly coat them and drop them back onto cookie sheets lined with wax paper.  Once the cookie sheet is filled, they go back in the fridge to re-firm up.

State Parks

When I was a kid, a lot of our trips were to state park in the region.  We stayed in the lodges a lot; I've always thought they were more fun than regular hotels in hindsight, because the lounges often had games and other people hanging out, and the food was generally good.  Plus you didn't have to drive anywhere from the lodge to get to what you came to see.

One of the constant themes in most of our trips was hiking; we walked a lot of trails, some of them dry, some of them in creeks.  If the trip wasn't to somewhere with hiking, it was probably a historical site.  We rarely went anywhere that was more than an eight-hour drive, but within that radius we did quite a few trips.

Some of locations:

• Cave-in-Rock - one of our occasional day-trips in the summer, the cave at Cave-in-Rock isn't as cave-y as some of the others; you can generally always see the way back out.  The cave has been used in movies a couple times; one of the more interesting non-natural features there is the historical graffiti.
• Wyandotte - located near Corydon (Indiana's first state capitol), the Wyandotte caves are more serious caves - underground, windy passages, stalagmites and stalactites, the whole works.  We also went to Corydon during that trip.
• The Hermitage - Andrew Jackson's residence in Tennessee; we went there at least twice.
• Clifty Falls - located in Indiana near Louisville; I believe this was also the trip when we went to the Churchill Downs museum.  Normally Clifty Falls is a trip to see amazing waterfalls along a creek; we happened to go while there was a pretty serious drought in effect.  So while we didn't get to see much in the way of waterfalls, we did at least get to see the neat rock formations that are normally underwater.
• Turkey Run - I think we went to Turkey Run a couple times.  They had an arcade in the basement of the lodge with nickel pinball machines.  The trails there ran concurrent to the creek.
• Spring Mill - the only place I've ever seen a muskrat, Spring Mill is near Bloomington.  In addition to the mill, we also went to the Gus Grissom memorial in the area.
• Brown County - Brown County is famous for its foliage and covered bridges.  I'm pretty sure we probably saw a covered bridge?  Most of what I remember about the trip was finding the reprint of a German-English primer in one of the gift shops.
• The Dunes - the Dunes are a national park, up by Chicago.  The water was cold when we went, and I think it was the only time I ever wore the sundress I made for 4H.
• Garden of the Gods - this ends up in the news fairly often because people fall off the cliffs there surprisingly often.  We never got that close to the edge.  Since most of northern Illinois and Indiana are glacier-smooshed flat, the views there are quite different from what you get in a lot of the rest of either state.
• Harmonie - being the state park we went to most often (to go swimming), I've been there quite a lot.  (The day after we got married, we went to our cousins' high school graduation party there.)  My deer spotting skills were honed there.  The concession stand at the pool had butter pecan ice cream and Goldrush bars.
• Angel Mounds - the site of a Native American settlement hundreds of years ago, Angel Mounds was farmed by relatives of my cousins' family during the 19th century before the significance of the mounds was known, and the state purchased the land for preservation.  It was a bit of a drive, and I associate butter cookies with the trip.  (The shortbread cookies shaped like flowers with holes in the middle... those ones.)

We've hit a few parks in New York since I moved up here, but they don't have the same kind of convenient accommodations (lodges) that most of the ones in Indiana had, and we're not really into camping.  I miss Indiana's lodges!

Argh

Ok, so I live in New York, right? Not "The City," the rest of the state. And I should be used to it, since southern Indiana's weather is crazy, and I lived there almost twenty years, and I've been in New York almost ten, but...

71 today, 45 tomorrow? What is October thinking, dammit? Space heater or fan, make up your mind already.