The Old Neighborhood

Funny how certain details stick in one's mind. I still remember the phone number and address from my childhood home.

A social media party at The Yarden on the eve of the 2011 Independent Garden Center Show in August provided an opportunity to visit Albany Park, the northside melting-pot immigrant neighborhood where my family lived during my early years. Wanting to avoid Chicago's infamous rush hour traffic, I headed up north early enough to visit the Peterson Garden Project, and to take a walk through the old neighborhood, just a few minutes' drive from the event later that evening.

The neglected front yard would probably mortify our old landlord. He took great pride in his postage-stamp front lawn, mowing it every week with his green rotary mower whether it was needed or not.

Going back to the old neighborhood last summer brought a flood of happy memories. Although the Jewish bakery our delicious challah and onion rolls came from, the ice cream shop Dad took us to every time we lost a baby tooth, the school store where a child's allowance could buy a big bag of penny candies, and the Treasure Island our groceries came from are all gone now, the neighborhood where our family spent our early years looks much the same as it did over forty years ago.

the dining room window

Back then breakfast and lunch were sit-down family meals, usually in the kitchen on weekdays, and in the dining room on the weekends. Sometimes our milkman would be invited to join the family for breakfast. Dinner was always in the dining room. Even with the shade drawn, the dining room window evokes memories of our antique, upright piano piled high with sheet music, and the beautiful dining room table and buffet with thick, hand-turned legs where we found nooks and crannies to hide the peas and lima beans on our plates when Mom wasn't looking. (That is, until we were busted by that funny smell she noticed.)

I remember sleeping in the dining room under that window with my sister so Aunt Natalie could have our room the week she came to help Mom take care of us after our youngest brother was born.

Across the street where Rachel, one of my best friends lived, is a front yard much like the ones I remember - neatly-manicured lawns, and lots of flowers. New windows and siding were added to many of the buildings, and most of the front yards are now fenced. Otherwise, the old block looks much as I remember it.

My first sleepover ever was at Rachel's house. I've always thought "sleepover" was a misnomer - we were up all night.

Rachel's mom made the best tamales in the whole neighborhood. She and Mom were good friends, and, Rachel's mom always shared a big batch of her tamales with us. Some were savory, and some were sweet, and besides Mom's cooking and Dad's chocolate chip cookies, they are among my favorite food memories growing up here. That's saying a lot in a neighborhood where moms from all over the world made their specialties and shared covered dishes with each other so we kids could grow up loving those wholesome and delicious from-scratch ethnic foods. Fast food and sit-down restaurants were rare treats in our world. We grew up loving real food made in our mothers' kitchens, and learning to cook when we all pitched in to help with dinner.

I haven't seen Rachel since we were kids.

I wonder how her life turned out. I still see her as a sweet, carefree, smart, pretty girl with shining dark hair and big brown eyes.

Our neighborhood was religiously and ethnically diverse. We had a synagogue at the end of our block, but my siblings and I went to church and Saturday catechism a few blocks away. Standing atop a gleaming copper dome, Our Lady was a beacon in the distance as we walked to church.

As a child I thought she was beautiful and mysterious. (That was before I had a zoom lens.)

I was never too excited about the outside of our church. It seemed kind of imposing, austere and dreary.

Once inside though, it felt completely different. I thought it was a beautiful, magical, spiritual place where I could feel close to God.

I remember feeling awed by the scale of things, the stained-glass windows, and the ornate altar. Even though I didn't speak Latin and understood little of what the Mass was about, I was never bored since there were so many interesting things to look at.

Nearly everything seems just as I remembered, including the baptismal font. I expected it all to be much smaller than I recalled. Instead I came away surprised at how big it still seemed.

Father Reardon lived here, in the rectory. He was young, handsome, compassionate, and gave the easiest penance. The line outside his confessional was always the longest!

As a little girl, I wanted to grow up to be a nun so I could marry Father Reardon.

I changed my mind about being a nun when I found out they couldn't get married.

Nuns could garden . . .

. . . but I could garden too, and still get married and have kids. That was about the time I fell in love with Mitchy Braun next door. For our first date we went to the soda shop. He bought a hot dog and a malt. We split the hot dog and had two straws for the malt. Allowance only went so far for seven-year-olds, even in the 1960's. Mitchy's and my love life consisted of picking out furniture and baby toys from the Sears catalog for our future family, and hanging out on the front stoop with the other kids until our moms called us in for dinner.

The school at the end of our block, where I spent my early elementary-school years. At least from the outside, the school was every bit as big as I remembered.

In kindergarten, we sat on this little ledge when the bell rang, waiting for Mrs. Meyerbach to shepherd us up the stairs and into our class. She was a stocky, grandmotherly woman who wore bejeweled cat-eye glasses, stockings with seams, and thick orthopedic shoes with black laces. I loved Mrs. Meyerbach, until, at the end of my first year of school, she told Mom it wasn't good for me to be left-handed, and she should teach me how to use my right hand before sending me back to school in the fall. Thankfully, Mom ignored her well-meaning advice. It took a while, but eventually I forgave Mrs. Meyerbach.

All of our teachers played piano, and there was a piano in every classroom. Music wasn't a special class. It was part of the curriculum throughout the day. Since we lived so close to school, we went home for lunch every day.

While the school looks much the same as it did over 40 years ago,

the gardens are new.

It was wonderful seeing prairie blooms and grasses growing where once there was only lawn. After enjoying the school gardens, I took one last walk to the middle of the block to say goodbye to the old house before heading off to party at The Yarden.

Kindergarten class photo. That's me - top row, first on the left, in a dress Mom made me.

My First Gardening Book

Yep, I still have this little gem, a gift from my farming, gardening maternal grandparents when I was eight years old. This little book is surprisingly educational, with all kinds of information on the science, history, and cultivation of flowers. A Whitman 'Learn About' Book, it was published in 1961, and as you can see in the inscription below, Grandma and Grandpa sent it to me for Chanukah in 1965. To this day I still enjoy reading through it now and then.

This time, I was dusting the bookshelves in our den when I came across the book. I took a break, sat down on the sofa, and read its well-loved, careworn pages.

Our family has always been big on giving books as gifts, often following family tradition with a simple note inside the front cover. There are many books on our shelves with similar inscriptions. There are stories and memories in the inscriptions.

I thought about Grandpa's handwriting. As a small child I loved his handwriting and tried my best to imitate it. I thought about all the letters we wrote back and forth to each other throughout my life, until shortly before he passed away. I thought about how lucky I am that I saved so many of those letters, and how Mom saved the ones he wrote before I was old enough to take care of them myself.

I thought about how Grandma had saved the letters we all wrote to them, and how wonderful it was to find them as we were cleaning Grandma's house one day after her passing. Those preserved letters were a final, loving gift from them to all of us. We went through all those letters, all carefully placed by Grandma back into their envelopes with return addresses, old postmarks, and stamps that cost a penny or two, bundled together with strings and old rubber bands - our family history in letter form.

Letter-writing is a dying art. It's such a joy to have a life-long record of communication between my grandparents and me in our own handwriting, of the large and small events of our lives and the feelings we shared with each other. Coming across my first gardening book reminded me how well Grandma and Grandpa and I got to know each other through the letters we wrote, and I'll always be grateful for all they shared with me.

Mrs. Schmidt's Pickled Green Tomatoes

Mom's pickled green tomatoes

For several years during my childhood, Mrs. Schmidt helped feed our family. She was a grandmotherly, widowed German lady who lived one suburb north of us in an old bungalow in an old section of town where her chicken-raising had been grandfathered into a rezoning several years before we met her.

She and my mom were friends. Mom made 1940's-style house dresses for her with her vintage patterns, and often bartered her sewing skills with Mrs. Schmidt for all sorts of goodies. My favorites were fresh, organic chicken and eggs, and Mrs. Schmidt's Pickled Dill Green Tomatoes.

Mrs. Schmidt raised slaughtered, and dressed her own chickens. There was no comparing her chickens and eggs with the inferior stuff that came from the grocery store. I feel lucky that as a child, thanks to my family's farming heritage, our home garden, the milkman who delivered our non-homogenized milk, and Mrs. Schmidt, I learned what real food is supposed to taste like.

Mrs. Schmidt was a thrifty woman, and nothing went to waste - not even the green tomatoes left on the vines in her bountiful, beautiful garden just before the first frost. She'd pick those tomatoes before they got hit by frost, and make jars and jars of pickled tomatoes. Every year she'd share several jars with my mom. I was glad not all my siblings enjoyed them, since that left more for me. Mrs. Schmidt's pickled tomatoes come in right up there with my grandma's chocolate milk and homemade apple butter as my favorite food memories besides the ones made at home by Mom.

I was always excited when Mom would ask me if I wanted to come along to visit Mrs. Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt loved children. She was always interested, sweet, patient, and kind. She made me feel welcome and special at her house. She always had a homemade sweet treat for us when we sat down for tea in her old-fashioned kitchen or in the cool shade of her beautiful garden on sunny summer afternoons.

Since my maternal grandparents lived out-of-state, we only got to visit them occasionally. I missed them alot, and always wished we lived closer to them. I envied my friends whose grandmothers lived down the street or close enough to visit more often. Mrs. Schmidt became a sort-of foster-grandmother that helped fill the gap. She's gone now, but my memories of her will last the rest of my life. If I close my eyes I can still see her plaited silver hair, her kind face, and those sparkling, mischevious, high-spirited eyes.

I never had Mrs. Schmidt's recipe for pickled green tomatoes, though I wish I did. On a mission a couple of years ago, I searched the web and found this one that has all the ingredients I remember in her awesome pickles.

Pickled Green Tomatoes
3-1/2 pounds firm green tomatoes, quartered
1 clove garlic per jar of pickles
1 hot or sweet red pepper - your preference
2 stalks celery thickly sliced
1 quartered, sliced white or large sweet yellow onion
3-5 sprigs fresh dill per jar of pickles
2 quarts water
1 quart vinegar
1/2 cup granulated pickling salt
3 tsp pickling spices

PREPARATION:
Wash about 3-1/2 pounds small, firm, green tomatoes (or larger ones, quartered). Drain and pack into quart jars. To each quart, add garlic, red pepper, onion, celery and dill.

Combine water, vinegar, spices, and pickling salt. This will be the brine.
Bring to a boil, boil five minutes; then immediately fill jars within 1/2 inch of the top. Seal lids. Note: You may want to process in hot water bath for 5 minutes, but not necessary. Makes about 4 quarts. Store for at least two weeks before opening to allow flavors to blend.

Our Garden of Dreams - Part II

This is a shot of the corn, damaged by a bad storm, and is the only picture we have of our huge vegetable garden. Behind the corn, you can see the honeysuckle bushes that made forts, houses, and secret hideaways when it was too hot to work in the garden. We cooked up all sorts of big fun in the cool, dark shade we found when crawling underneath them while exploring the nooks and crannies of our new home.

The photo with Part I of this story is a shot from Mom's garden in a new century. Now a great-grandma, she's still gardening big. She and her husband still grow a humongous vegetable garden every year. In fact they have not one, but two gardens. They grow about everything you can grow in a garden, and preserve the surplus, which lasts them until the next year's garden harvest. If you visit them in garden season, you'll get to enjoy the garden's bounty too, and even bring some wonderful veggies home with you. At Thanksgiving and/or Christmas, you're likely to get a care package of potatoes and life-changing garlic. (Life changing because I promise you've never had such wonderful garlic in your life, the phrase was coined by my dear husband's close friend whom we shared some with.)

I have no doubt a lifetime of healthy eating, including produce grown in her organic garden, and the good exercise she gets tending it all have contributed to her good health. How many 70-somethings do you know who take no prescription medications? Although Mom doesn't have as much energy as she used to and deals with a chronic back problem, she's one strong, healthy woman. I have no doubt her lifelong passion for organic vegetable gardening contributes to her enviable good health. And it all started a long time ago, back at the crooked little ranch with the huge yard where my parents first fulfilled their dream of gardening and home ownership.

We moved in May, and there was no time to waste getting ready for planting. I don't think we were even fully unpacked before work began on the garden. A compost enclosure was built, and the sod removed from the garden became the first contribution to our compost pile. A rototiller was rented, and the cultivation began. Huge piles of compost were spread evenly over the garden and tilled into the soil. After Dad tilled, we five children were charged with walking up and down and back and forth to break up clods of soil and pick up debris to throw into the compost bin. We all took turns with rakes, smoothing and evening the surface of the soil.

Dad built up sections of the garden into hills for certain plants, and raised rows for others. Mom inoculated peas and left them to soak while dozens of seed packages were torn open and planted in the warm, sweet spring soil. It took days to get the soil prepared and our garden planted.

I pretended I was a young pioneer girl living on the prairie, helping my parents plant the crops our family would need to see us through a harsh prairie winter. Our crooked little owner-built ranch was our rustic cabin (during the winter the plumbing worked about as well as a 19th-century log cabin's plumbing might have.)

We planted corn, beans, melons, squash, eggplant, spinach, beets, onions, chives, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes, radishes, turnips, potatoes, strawberries, peppers, carrots, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. I learned about staking tomatoes, blanching cauliflower, and how wonderful a radish tasted; spicy, fresh, and crisp from the garden after brushing off the dirt. I learned about crop rotation and the hazards of pitchforks. (Someday I'll tell you about my encounter with the wrong end of a pitchfork.) And I learned to love vegetables that used to make me gag.

What do I remember of those days? I remember working on that garden alongside my parents and siblings, the smell of freshly-turned soil, and the excitement of sitting with Mom on winter Saturday afternoons, looking at catalogues with names like Burpee and Jung, and reading Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News while the other girls in the neighborhood were reading teen heart throb magazines and shopping at those huge new air-conditioned shopping centers they called "Malls."

I remember the excitement and wonder as tiny seedlings emerged from peat pots and flats on shelves lit with florescent bulbs and sunlight from the living room window. I remember corn stalks that grew taller than me, and watermelons and cantaloupes and fresh corn on the cob, and I remember that one year the corn all got ruined by smut. I think I was the first one to find smut, since I was always checking the corn to see if it was ready yet.

I remember how much we looked forward to the first sweet ears of corn, and how disappointed we were to realize our corn would have to come from a farm stand or a grocer that year. I remember thinking smut was a funny name for a corn fungus. I thought smut was those magazines teenage boys hid between their mattresses.

I remember picking heirloom tomatoes from our organic garden decades before and after either were fashionable. I remember with great fondness those days spent with my family in the garden where my mom and I would sometimes stay and keep working into the cool of the evening after everyone else had long since gone on to some more 'exciting' activity.

Since our house was on a corner lot with one side along the main school bus route for our neighborhood, the kids on the bus could see our garden from their seats. I was one of the new kids on the bus and at school, and found myself subject to curiosity and teasing at first. One of the boys on the bus started calling me "Garden Girl," and not in a complimentary way. I dreaded getting on the bus to hear "EEEOOOWWWW, look, there's the garden girl." Soon other boys joined in the teasing, and that was how they 'greeted' me as I boarded the bus for what felt like a very long ride.

Then one day a girl in my fifth-grade class invited me to play jump rope with her group, and later that afternoon, to take a seat with her on the bus. I'd become very shy at school since our move, and while I was happy at home, school became an exercise in enduring stares, curiosity, teasing, and feeling like I didn't fit in. I wanted to move back to our old city neighborhood where all the moms sat out on the front stoops while all the kids played together, fought together, and knew each other almost as well as we knew our own families. The girl who invited me to play became my best friend into high school. Although we don't see each other often enough, I feel a special bond with her and we've remained friends. We had our second babies within weeks of each other, and soon she'll be a grandma for the first time. (I've been one for almost five years.) I've always been grateful to her for being the first to reach out to me in friendship after our move.

The garden became my sanctuary from the first lonely months as the new kid. I've had a number of gardens since then, and to this day the garden remains my favorite retreat and a sanctuary from the often cold, harsh world. It's a place of peace, beauty, and meditation that's sometimes hard to find in the hectic, crazy world we find ourselves.

I was born to play in the dirt. I'm thankful I was born into a family with a long, rich history of playing in the dirt before me. The moms who shopped would not have known quite what to do with this little garden girl geek who would rather stay home and weed the patio flower beds or trim the hedges. I still don't like to shop, and I'd still rather be in the garden than just about anywhere else.

Our Garden of Dreams

When I was ten years old, my family moved from our north-side 2-flat rental unit to a ranch home in the south suburbs, fulfilling our parents' long-time dream of home ownership and a place to plant a vegetable garden. The huge yard, the reasonable price, a low down-payment, and owner-financing were all factors in the decision, following months of house-hunting.

The yard was divided into sections. The flagstone patio was bordered on two sides by the house and garage, on one side by a raised shrub and flower border, and on the other side by a narrow path with a small, rectangular perennial bed on either side. The beds were bordered by miniature picket fencing to protect them from trampling by children and dogs. They were planted with perennials and spring bulbs. I remember roses, peonies, bleeding hearts, hyacinths, and tulips.

I learned you could divide a perennial and make more plants from my mom as she lifted huge clumps of peonies from the cool, dark soil. The apple tree one of my younger brothers planted from a seed was placed in the bed on the right, the sunnier of the two beds. It was planted inside the little fenced bed for protection from trampling feet or a lethal lawnmower attack. Last time I was at the house, after Mom had sold it to my youngest brother, the apple tree was still there.

Following the short path between the perennial beds, you entered the heavily wooded side of our yard where we played and romped with our dogs. Left of the patio there was a privet hedge that ran almost the length of the yard except for two paths, one in the middle and one on the side closest to the patio. The privet hedge divided the wooded section from the sunny, open, treeless section of lawn. The sunny side of the yard was bordered by a bridal wreath and honeysuckle hedge that provided fruit for the birds, privacy for our yard, and a cool, shady, secret spot for daydreaming and play. The wooded side of our yard was already an over-sized lot. The other side was narrower. It was, an open, sunny field where my parents would plant the garden of their dreams.

It was an excellent setup for a family with five young, active children. The garden was sheltered and protected from stray softballs and clumsy puppy paws by one of several privet hedges in our yard. It wouldn't be long before this ten-year-old garden girl geek was asking her parents to please, please let her use those brand new electric hedge trimmers to cut the privets. Legitimately concerned for my safety, they were reluctant. Finally after much begging and promises to be careful, I was given a chance with careful monitoring. Soon buzzing the hedges became one of my favorite hobbies. I loved the challenge of shaping them as evenly and prettily as possible. No one had to tell or ask me to do that job. I was happy to trim the hedges even if they didn't need any trimming. It was here in my childhood home where my lifelong passion for gardening was born.

to be continued . . .

Serviceberry Blossoms, and a Guest Post From Mom!

I love this shrub. It's beautiful spring, summer, and fall. I love its open, airy habit, the beautiful, delicate blooms, and its gorgeous fall color. This one is as old as our home, and unlike our ungainly 40-year-old Bradford Pear, the serviceberry has grown more graceful and lovely with age.

Mom surprised me yesterday with an email that said she'd been inspired to write a new guest post! I'm very excited! This time she'll be recalling a story from my childhood that I'd completely forgotten. As I was reading, it all came back to me, and reminded me of several other stories about my mischievous dad, who passed away too young, when I was only in my late 20's. I have lots of fond memories of him, including his playfulness and sense of fun. Thank you Mom for reminding me of this story. I'm so glad you were inspired to share it.