Every year I think about Montgomery’s wonderful character, Anne Shirley. With the exception of glorious December, other months are ho-hum by comparison. October represents far more than a twelfth of each of my years, regardless of what the calendar says. Even though one should seek out new experiences to savor, there is something comforting about the repetition of familiar things that you know you can count on.
I have read the comments of several authors who say that their characters become so alive in their minds that they actually dictate their writing. The rich Octobers in the deep pool of my inner being of my life have been chockablock with layers of experience and great beauty that in turn pull up snatches of poetry and writings by fine authors.
I cannot have too much poetry in my life. Poets see both the reality of the external world and the inner emotionality of t human soul with a keen eye that they express with an economy of the best words assembled in a memorable style.
Is there anything better than an Indiana October? Below are some lines extracted from a poem that the Hoosier poet, James Whitcomb Riley, wrote. His lines are interspersed with some of my own musings. His memories predate my own, but his reactions are universal, and our spirits touch across the years.
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock . . .
O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best
With the risin’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest
As he leaves the house, bareheaded, and goes out to feed the stock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock
October is a month of glorious sunrises that I watch from the window above the desk where I write. The rising of the sun is very important to the Japanese and to me. No two sunrises are alike. I shall never again see in my lifetime — or, indeed, in all eternity — what the sun, that master colorist, has provided on this day. Riley continues:
They’s something kindo’ harty-like about the atmusfere
When the heat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here . . .
the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a pictur’ that no painter has the colorin’ to mock
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn . . .
O, it sets my hart a-clickin’ like the tickin’ of a clock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock!
The vibrant colors of October comprise many of the threads woven on my loom of life: gold, pale yellow, tan, orange, brown, red, ochre, rust, the cobalt of the sky . . . Even the great Monet and other Impressionists could not surpass the palette of an October autumn.
Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
And your cider-makin’ ’s over, and your wimmern-folks is through
With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and saussage, too!
I delighted in listening to old Granny spinning tales of how people lived. She described how they dug a trench and lined it with straw. Then they laid apples, cabbages and such on the straw, covered them with another layer of straw and dirt. Her brother, Bert, made homemade cider that Mother and her cousins were allowed to drink through a long wheat straw stuck through the foam. One time it had turned hard. Mother said, “We little girls had the bestest time!” wclarke@comcast.net

I woke up with a case of the literary doldrums. I even got out my file of quips and insightful sayings by people that I’ve saved for an emergency. I reread last week’s column before e-mailing it and thought, “I hope that people aren’t bored with this recitation of various games.”
Well, I never! — as old Granny used to say. I can’t predict what will ring people’s chimes. I received e-mails from people who piggybacked on my reminiscences. As I say so often, “I am you, and you are me.” Serendipity is when one unexpectedly comes across something happy. I’m certainly smart enough to take advantage of these serendipitous e-mails and let others do my writing today!
Mary Jo, the wife of one of Bill’s nephews, wrote:
Loved this column today.  I was such a game person from a very young age. So many happy memories come from those times gathered around a card table.  My sister, Ang, and I started playing Monopoly before we understood how the game ended.  Some games went on for three days and we kept our money in our billfolds at night!
I have always carried a deck of cards and we even played under our desks during 8th grade Spanish which is why I know about ten words! I remember my grandmother and her siblings playing Euchre on holidays and that was the only time I heard her swear.  They got so loud and would bang on the table and let out a string of curse words that sounded so happy and celebratory even though they lost that hand.  You could tell they had spent decades enjoying the competition with those they loved.  I could almost see your family playing canasta because although we are all different we can relate in so many ways.
What a hoot about Mary Jo and Angela keeping their Monopoly money in their wallets! Friend Jean wrote about a happy memory of how she, her Mom, daughter and father-in-law played a gambling game, Left-Right-Center, betting nickels rather than dollars. They laughed and shouted so much that her husband who was working in his office went downstairs to see what was going on. She still goes to a nursing home to play euchre with her deceased mother’s buddies.
My insightful nephew, John Jones, summed up the importance of games in people’s lives.
The games are all different but they have a common thread that binds them together, the players. Other than chess, which demands all your concentration, all of these games can be played while chatting and visiting with the other players. It is this sense of community while playing that brings everyone to the table. You can swap gossip, news, thoughts and humor while snacking or enjoying a beverage. In our fast paced and hectic lives we have need of these game times to recharge our souls and reaffirm our place with family and friends. You talked about the penny-ante poker, which I remember. It wasn’t the pennies that mattered…they were just to keep score. It was the people holding the cards, laughing, carrying on and having a grand time. It was the bonding of people over a game table.
John’s mother, Christine, and I played vicious games of Scrabble. “Rose Mary, I don’t think that’s a word.” “It is too!” “Get out the dictionary.” The Internet has added a new dimension to games. Friend Jana plays Scrabble on her pad with her sister who lives in Minnesota. Her husband plays bridge with various people from all over the world. He never knows who will turn up. Niece Lynn used to play Mafia Wars with an international group.
The new technology is wonderful. However, it is a second-hand, virtual reality where one cannot hear shouts of glee, cussing or moans of disappointment. One is essentially alone. I cannot imagine that it builds deep memories where one hears the voices of beloved people in the mind’s ear. wclarke@comcast.net

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear . . .
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
To hate all the people your relatives hate . . .
— “South Pacific” by Rodgers and Hammerstein appeared on Broadway in 1949. It was harshly criticized by some.

Wanda Frazier Smith passed away on August 23. I was six years old, and she was four when my family moved three doors away. Thus began a friendship that endured through all the years that we were together and apart. Retrospection shows me that Wanda and her family enriched and helped form the person that I became.
The last time I saw her was a couple of months ago when she and I went to Knightstown to attend the visitation for Judge Lynch after which she stopped at our house for dinner. Judge was the son-in-law of Gertrude Scovell who lived with her mother, Rosie, across the street from the house where I grew up. We spent many hours of our childhood, sitting on the glider with Rosie, and Wanda kept in close touch with the Lynches all of her life.
Bill and I attended her memorial service at the mortuary from which so many of my relatives were buried. Predictably, it was packed. Betty Lynch and her daughter, Karen, sat with Bill and me, along with my friend Darlene Keesling Petry. Wanda’s and my friend, Gigi, with whom we’d lost touch for many years was also there. These two events coming so close together set me to musing.
People spoke about how much Wanda loved Knightstown. Looking back to our childhood during the 1940’s and early 1950’s, Wanda and I said we were lucky to grow up in a small town where everyone knew each other. We were like the cartoon character, Mr. Magoo. We blindly wandered through our childhood without being concerned about our being of different races. Of course, prejudice and discrimination existed in Knightstown, but we weren’t touched by them. Children know what’s truly important. Left to themselves, they seek out friends, and Wanda and I were forever-friends.
We were together almost every day in every season, building snowmen, sledding, going to basketball games. . . donning our steel sidewalk skates in spring . . . playing kick-the-can and bicycle slips in summer, starting a Nancy Drew Mystery Club. When Wanda turned six I proudly escorted her to school. In autumn we built bonfires and roasted hot dogs.
We ate and slept at each other’s houses. We knew each other’s relatives. Wanda visited old Granny with me, and I met her mother’s parents. We thought that we broke her cousin’s arm when we knocked her out of the Fraziers’ plum tree. (Priscilla admitted before the memorial service that it was only sprained.) Mrs. Frazier drove two of my sisters to Henry Co. Hospital to have babies as all of their husbands were in service, and my parents had no car.
Our paths diverged: I went to college and became a teacher. Wanda married and had children before I did and rose to a very responsible job with U.S. Customs. My sister, Christine Jones, her husband and their eight children moved into my old house. Wanda’s sister, Barbara, and my niece, Dee, were best friends. The youngest Jones children, Ruth and James, played with Wanda’s older daughter Lisa.
Thus, did four families of neighbors come together and hold each other in deep and enduring affection. A great pleasure of my old age was that after losing track of each other, Wanda and I became reconnected and also later reconnected with Gigi.
And now? And now my forever-friend is gone, and I am left bereft for her and my lost childhood . . . wclarke@comcast.net

John Board wrote that his mother canned six hundred quarts every summer. I suspect that both she and my mother felt an intense satisfaction and pride when they surveyed those gleaming jars of goodness and love. Linda Forst Linke wrote that her mother, my beloved Vivian, and her father canned vegetables. Linda’s job was to dip tomatoes in boiling water and remove the skins. She wrote, “I felt so important! It was a real job, and I felt a real sense of being part of helping the family get ready for winter and loved going down in the basement to bring up jars for dinner.”
When we lived at 312 N. Ritter in Irvington I used a hot water bath in which the jars are boiled to can the surplus from Bill’s garden until Margaret Burris, our next door neighbor, and we went in together and bought a pressure canner to share.
When I complained to a real estate colleague about the cost of Nonesuch Mincemeat, she said, “It’s just as good and far cheaper to can your own mincemeat, using green tomatoes.” It took so long to peel the peck of green tomatoes that I bought that I asked Bill to help. I figured that each quart was worth about $50, considering what I earned as a Realtor.
Tomato season is in! Bill says, “People sometimes put down Indiana, but no tomato can compare with an Indiana tomato!” Gardeners love to brag about their tomatoes. Hothouse tomatoes bought at the supermarket aren’t as tasty as those grown outside. Now we have fancy “heirloom” tomatoes, grape tomatoes and cherry tomatoes, but my father favored Burpees’ Big Boys.
People are passionate about tomatoes. About this time of year, I’d ask my mother, “How are you?” “Oh,” she’d moan. “I’m awful sick. My stomach’s all upset.” Eventually she realized that she was eating too many tomatoes. She’d make a meal of sliced tomatoes with a tiny bit of sugar sprinkled on them and bread and butter. During lunch a dear friend, said, “I love tomatoes! Sometimes I just wash a tomato and stand over the kitchen sink to eat it.”
I’m not willing to undertake the work and dedication of gardening. However, I understand the satisfaction that gardeners get from planting seeds that come to life and become something nutritious and delicious. Henry David Thoreau was an excellent gardener. His rows of green beans that he sold to supplement his meager income added up to seven miles in length. He wrote, “I came to love my rows, my beans . . . They attached me to the earth . . .”
Home gardening knows no national boundaries. When Bill and I travelled in Italy we saw many vegetable gardens, even in tiny city yards. Bill called his garden on Ritter “my back 40 feet.” After we moved to Edmondson Ave., he wondered why we got only one mess out of the green beans that he planted. Our neighbors enlightened him: “We’ve had the best fun, watching the rabbits eat your beans!” Another summer he planted zucchini. There were so many blossoms that we even fried some. However, he got few zucchini. He discovered why when he cleared the garden in the fall. There was a rabbit nest right in the middle of his zucchini patch. So convenient!
I know what many Hoosiers are having for dinner tonight: roasting ears slathered with butter, sliced homegrown tomatoes, cucumbers in vinegar and fresh green beans. Oh yum of yums!
“One must cultivate one’s garden!”    Voltaire
wclarke@comcast.net

During the hot August days of seventy years ago, Wanda Frazier and I might have been splashing in Mother’s laundry tubs that we’d filled with water early in the morning for the sun to warm. If an afternoon shower came, we’d run out in our bathing suits.
One Sunday afternoon after the biggest downpour that anyone in Knightstown remembered, the streets were so flooded that Uncle Nolan Kelly paddled down Carey St. in his homemade kayak while Wanda and I frolicked in knee-deep water in the street, shrieking with pleasure. Mother watched from our porch while Wanda’s mother watched from Gertrude Scovell’s porch across the street. Then Mother noticed that we had black splotches on our skin. “Get out of the water!” she yelled. “The sewer’s backed up.” She dragged me to the shower and scrubbed me with a brush and Fels Naptha soap.
Another thing that we would have been doing this time of year was to wash dozens of Mother’s Ball Mason canning jars in washtubs of sun warmed water. We were paid a few cents for each jar which we promptly blew on Cream Soda or other pop at Conway’s neighborhood grocery store behind their home at the corner of Lincoln and Jefferson.
Mother and Daddy grew a big garden in a lot on the north side of the greenhouse that stood at the top of a hill on N. McCullum St. on the north edge of town. They were both wonderful gardeners and grew food not only for delectable summer eating, but to provide canned food throughout the winter.
Canning was necessary. We didn’t even have a refrigerator until I was around twelve years old, and our modern chest freezer didn’t exist. Instead, we had an ice box. Mother fastened a sign to a porch pillar that indicated whether she wanted a block of ice weighing 50 or 75 pounds. The Ice Man came in the unlocked house if we were gone and deposited it in the ice compartment. During cold weather, she also stored perishables in an orange crate that she nailed to the outside of a sliding kitchen window.
Her canner that sat on top of the stove was made of tin with two shelves and doors with a place in the bottom for water to provide steam. I wish I had it now as it’s probably an antique. She worked for weeks, putting up many quarts of green beans, corn, tomatoes, pickles, vegetable soup, corn relish, pickle lily, grape juice and jelly from the grapes on our grape vine, and catsup.
Memory is often rose tinted. However I believe that none of today’s “boughten” canned goods could compare with Mother’s jars of homegrown, fresh-picked vegetables and fruits that had no additives, too much salt or preservatives. In my mind’s ear I still hear Mother singing popular songs to herself as she worked and the hiss of steam and canner’s whistle when it needed water. wclarke@comcast.net

My great-aunt Laura, one of Grandpa Kelly’s sisters, lived well into her nineties as did Grandpa. Still vigorous in her eighties, she wallpapered her living room by herself, including the nine-foot-high ceiling. My great-grandmother Christina lived with her. Bedfast, she lived to be a hundred.
Every summer Uncle Nolan Kelly, Aunt June, Grandpa, Mother, my cousin Carole and I made a pilgrimage to Michigantown for Sunday dinner at her home. We called it “dinner,” and the evening meal was “supper.”
There was no calorie counting or Weight Watchers, Atkins, or South Beach diets, yet few people were fat, compared with today. Women used wringer washers, hung the laundry out on clotheslines and ironed it, there being no such thing as dryers and polyester and permanent press. There were no riding mowers, and many tended gardens and canned the results.
People didn’t eat out as often. There were no calorie-loaded “fast” food restaurants, boxed foods or frozen entrees. Everything was made from scratch. Aunt Laura started cooking Sunday dinner on Saturday and got up early on Sunday to finish — as did my mother. When we arrived around eleven o’clock the table was set, and the food was keeping warm in the oven.
Some people eat to live, but I live to eat, and my middle shows it! I enjoy French and Italian cuisine, but nothing tastes better than made-from-scratch Hoosier cooking. There was no concern about the calorie count. Indeed, Aunt Laura probably never heard of a calorie! Her menu for this special meal never varied: both ham loaf and chicken and noodles, home-canned corn, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes, green beans fresh picked from her garden and slow-simmered with ham, “relishes” such as homemade pickles and cucumbers in vinegar, slaw, hot rolls, strawberry preserves made with her homegrown berries, cake and a couple of kinds of pie. My cousin, Carole Kelly Pittman who makes excellent pie herself, remembers that she had rhubarb pie for the first time at Aunt Laura’s.
After dinner, we sat in the parlor while the adults chatted. Aunt Laura’s children, Mother’s first cousins who lived in Frankfort, arrived with their children. I remember Dorsey Pittman who was Superintendent of the Clinton Co. Schools and his sisters, Charity and Dana. After they left, Uncle Nolan would say, “Well, Dad, shall we go out to the Old Home Place?”
Grandpa, Uncle Nolan and my mother always spoke in a reverent tone about the Old Home Place that my Kelly ancestors pioneered about three miles from Michigantown which is a few miles from Frankfort. It was the true North of their family compass. Knowing that it existed gives me a sense of the deep roots of my Hoosier heritage.
Riley came to the end of his story:
. . . Memory now is on her knees
Out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
For, O my brother so far away,
This is to tell you . . .
Aunt Mary fell asleep this morning, whispering,
“Tell the boys to come.”
And all is well out to Old Aunt Mary’s.
And now? And now all that remains of the Old Home Place with its famous round barn that people came from miles away to see is an old cemetery with tilting, crumbling stones on a woodsy knoll above a modern farmer’s soybean field. My great-grandmother was the last to be buried there. Other ancestors lie in the cemetery on the highway south of Michigantown.
Following Mother’s death, we lost touch with the Clinton Co. branch, and I don’t know the whereabouts of Aunt Laura’s descendents. My cousin, Carole Kelly Pittman and I are the only ones left who remember Sunday dinner at Aunt Laura’s . . . wclarke@comcast.net