The Estate Sale Diaries- November 25th Nashville -Part 2

There was a line even at 8:30 Friday morning, waiting for the moving sale on Grayson. The house was a brick ranch, and its driveway was a heart killer. The front lawn rose from the road at a 60 degree angle, and mowing it on a riding mower must have given someone some nervous moments. I recuperated from the walk up in back of the house, where I could wheeze in peace, out of the public eye.

What pain the owner must have felt at leaving, for her back yard was a three tiered terraced garden. Red Knockout roses still bloomed, and though cold had killed the cannas to the ground, a few Shasta daisies were still in flower.

I was in line ahead of a dealer, a man who could , and did, talk for thirty minutes straight. To me. All I needed to do was smile and nod. The dealer and his wife planned to be out all day, and he went over their itinerary. He urged me to drive down to Murfreesboro, where one of his friends was having a sale. He told me most of the people behind us and in front of us in line were dealers. Neither he, nor his wife, seemed fond of these other members of their fraternity, and no one greeted anyone else.

"Watch out for them", the wife warned me, pointing to the young couple who were first at the door. "She'll come up and snatch things right out of your hand".

I learned that the older dealers had shops or booths, but the new generation sold on line, on Ebay. "I wouldn't fool with that", the man said, "Who wants to fool with sales tax and shipping?" Perhaps people who did not have to pay rent for a shop or share their profits with the consignment store, I thought, though I did not get an opening to say so.

Talk ceased. The front door opened. In we went. We swarmed the kitchen, and in the first five minutes piles marked "sold" rose around the checkout table. I was looking for the pale green enamel cookware set, but I did not see it until a man carried it out the door. The mixing bowls-dozens- went fast as well. I found two sets of Hall Pottery bowls with their lovely, but impractical gold rims-

Later at checkout, the ladies behind me gave me unsolicited advice. "Those gold rims- You know they can't go in the microwave. You can't put them in the dishwasher-". I told them I did not cook in a microwave, and I did not mind hand washing.

There was more Hall china. A souffle dish and a covered bowl that looked as though it would be used for compotes.

Glassware covered table after table. Glasses, mugs, pitchers. Wedgewood plates. A hall closet hid dozens of ring binder church and Junior League cookbooks.

At one hour in, I kept circling the kitchen, looking for the overlooked. What dealers were left, were in line. Mr Talkative was disassembling the dining room table. His wife had bought a nest of large plastic storage boxes, and they were full of what she thought would sell. The house was emptying out, though people ignored the 20 quart stockpot, the canner, the cappuccino maker- all still in their boxes, forgotten on the garage shelves. What survived Friday would go for half price on Saturday, when there would be no more dealers around.

My arms ache today from holding boxes as I waited to pay. Kind ladies in line held some of my dishes for me, and I trusted them. No one ran off with anything. I never thought they would. There may be no honor between dealers, but there is among the ladies of Nashville who have driven out of a morning, perhaps to look for something for their granddaughter's first kitchen-

And the woman whose house this once was, the woman who collected Hall Pottery and who gardened on a hillside- Who was she? Were there clues?

If we look close enough we might find them. Perhaps inside a cookbook from the Franklin, Tennessee Ladies Auxiliary. It looks like a retirement gift , and a card and a note left inside thank her for her years of teaching- "In remembrance of the fun and good times we "cooked up" at Fairview High School", it reads. And continues-"You were a true example of class and style-always to be counted on to do the right thing-".

The Estate Sale Diaries- November 25th Nashville

I do not camp at stores to get in line early, and the prospect of being in a store with a crowd gives me what Mark Twain called the "fantods". I will be going early today to a moving sale over on Grayson in West Meade. The pictures of the kitchen and the kitchenware are at the Patterson Estate Sales web site, Pattersonestatesales.com. I have tried in vain to set up a link, but if you want to see more pictures you will have to depend on Google to guide you. I think the mixing bowls alone justify the gas, though Grayson is but 2 miles from my apartment. These three photos are from the web site-

Holiday Red Cabbage and Turnips

A while back I posted a shredded cabbage recipe from "Four Great Southern Cooks". The recipe came from Beatrice Mize, who cooked at the Dew Drop Inn in Georgia and later in private Atlanta homes. Mrs Mize was half black and half Cherokee Indian, and she had a way with vegetables. I had never cooked shredded cabbage before Mrs Mize showed me how.

Now , I have created my own recipe by combining cabbage with shredded turnip. This is a creamy and tasty side dish, and it is the second time I have added orange juice to a recipe . (Last week I added it to creamed chicken livers, with happy results).


Here are the ingredients :


1/2 head of red cabbage, shredded by the julienne disc of a food processor.

3 small turnips shredded by the processor.

1 tbs red vinegar or cider vinegar

All the juice squeezed out from a large orange

1/2 stick of butter

1 cup of chicken broth or chicken bouillon

Sea salt, 1 teaspoon, or add more to taste

1/2 to 3/4 cup of heavy cream.

1 to 2 tbs olive oil



Melt 1/4 stick of butter in a twelve inch saute pan. Add the olive oil, then the vegetables and toss them with the oil-butter mixture to coat them. Season generously with the sea salt. Heat over medium for five minutes , stirring the mixture. Now add the rest of the butter, the broth, the vinegar, and the orange juice. Taste, and add more sea salt as desired. Reduce heat, cover the pan and cook for 15 to 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Then add the heavy cream. Sir in and heat through, and it is ready to serve.

I paired this with corned beef and hot buttered egg noodles. It would go well with any holiday roast. I think this recipe would serve four to six.

"Give money me, take friendship whoso list".

So said the old poet Barnabe Googe, whose Dickensian name would have been worthy of a clerk in a counting house.

In 'Provide, Provide", a greater poet tells his readers-


"Make the whole stock exchange your own!

If need be, occupy a throne,

Where nobody can call you crone".


Money is much on all our minds for the next four weeks, for merchants rely on our money to put air in their retail soft tires. Our children want us to prove we love them by asking us to line up outside the electronics store at midnight, only hours after eating our Thanksgiving dinner.
The poets advise putting cash away to buffer us in old age when our health and friends are gone. But we-we prefer to spend. If not our own money, well- then the bank's.

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." So said Thoreau. This thought never occurs to a young professional woman with a ten thousand dollar limit on her credit card. Over to the Green Hills Mall she will go ,to buy a handbag at Louis Vuitton.

Why not? It helps the economy. She can afford $175 a month for her Mastercard, and 15% interest.
But let her be late by twenty-four hours in paying that bill, and her interest and her payment double. She would have been better off paying the thousands she spent on the handbag in cash.

But she could not afford that. She has no cash. She has only her labor. If she is a nurse, she might get overtime or a second job. Extra checks that could help her pay down the debt. Reclaim her life. Instead, she feels rich again. What is a luxe pocketbook without shoes to match? Back to the mall, using a different credit card. She has five or six.

Then Bear Stearns fails, interest rates rise, overtime is no more. She has to pawn the handbag to make a car payment.

I know people who live like this. I have had brushes with this myself, though I, who always buy second hand, have never worshiped pricey leather in whatever form it comes. I once owned a Coach pocketbook that I bought at a thrift shop. A nurse I worked with offered me $30 for it one night as we talked at the nurses' station. I sold it to her, and carried my keys and wallet home in a ziplock bag. That nurse thought she had gotten a bargain, but I had the cash.

I do not have credit cards anymore. My Chanel boutique is the Goodwill store. If I have no cash, I cannot buy, and if I deplete what cash I do have at an estate sale, I must do without till the next payday.

Thus I am spared paying for a pontoon boat I might use once a year, or for a car bought only to impress. This is a perk of being over sixty, when one has little desire left for jewelry and clothes and makeup.

The currency I want now- free time, good health, and peace.

Not one of these is for sale on "Black Friday".

On the Stove Top Now

This is a simple vegetable and bean soup I will leave on the stove top to simmer. I had some beet greens I needed to use, and two carrots a day or two away from terminal softness and the garbage pail. I can afford to waste nothing, so into a soup they went, along with two fifteen ounce cans of cannelloni beans, 3 cups of water, one 15 ounce can of chicken broth, 15 ounces of Muir Glen Fire roasted diced tomatoes, five cloves of garlic, sea salt to taste, and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar. I sprinkled in some Herbs de Provence as well, and a tablespoon of olive oil. This kind of soup is good with warm bread, even if it is the 2 day old butt end of a loaf of Cuban bread revived by 30 seconds in the microwave.

The carrots I diced. The garlic I crushed up in a press. The beet greens were from three beets. I cut off the purple stalk-y part and tore the leaves with my hands. Cooked through, the colors of this soup will not be as bright as they are in the photo, but the soup will still be good.

And here is last night's dinner- Creamed Chicken Livers in Puff Pastry Shells( Pepperidge Farm, out of the freezer case.) and beets and carrots roasted with a glaze of olive oil, sea salt, pomegranate molasses, and a dusting of cinnamon.


The roast vegetables are easy. Peel and cut up 3 beets and 2 or 3 carrots. In a bowl mix 4 or 5 tablespoons of olive oil with a tablespoon of pomegranate molasses. Grate a stick of cinnamon over the glaze and blend. Taste and adjust. Be generous with the sea salt. Then toss the vegetables into the bowl and coat well with the glaze. Line a Pyrex dish with enough aluminum foil to wrap the vegetables in a packet. Dust on a little more cinnamon before you seal it. Bake at 350 for an hour. This should serve three or four.


Creamed Chicken Livers-


1 pound of chicken livers

1/3 stick butter

2 Shallots, peeled and diced.

1 tablespoon of capers

4 or 5 tablespoons of heavy cream,more if you want the livers creamier.

1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar

Sea salt- a sprinkling on the shallots to sweat them as they saute.

2 sage leaves, chopped up.

Juice from one orange.


Put half the butter in a saute pan, and saute the chopped shallots (sprinkled with sea salt )until they are translucent. Add the capers then add the chicken livers. As they cook over medium heat stir them and break them up with a wooden spoon. Add the chopped sage leaves and the vinegar and mix well. You want the chicken livers to achieve the consistency of ground beef. Add the rest of the butter, the cream, and the orange juice, and mix well. Keep the livers warm while baking your puff pastry shells according to package directions. When the shells are baked, spoon in the warm chicken livers. If each person eats one shell this should feed four to six.


Had I done the usual with this recipe I would have added sherry or marsala to the livers. A fortified wine would have made this good, and it would have tasted like the tried and true and familiar. The orange juice takes it in another direction- away from the conventional.


These are my own recipes. I hope you try them. And if there are any livers left over, add them to an omelet or make a condiment for pasta.

"Diagnostic Drift"

AOL gets my email, and when I go to it to see what's new , there is always some  headline to scare or amuse. On four hours of sleep, one is easily amused, or easily peeved, and AOL is always reliable.
.


"Cursing Baby Doll Outrages Parents" is one of today's stories. This might be funny, but I will never read it so I will never know. Instead I see another headline asking "Is it Borderline Personality Disorder?"

Well, is it? Big M.D., Big Psych, and Big Pharma hope so. People with BPD must be treated, declares the article. With mood-stabilizers, anti-psychotics,  and anti-depressants.

And who might these sick people be? "People with borderline personality disorder can quickly swing from having intense love for someone to suddenly becoming very angry and hating that loved one".

This sounds like marriage to me, so let us include all the wedded. It sounds like the mother of a defiant 14 year old girl, and the football fan who throws his shoe at the dog when it blocks his view of the last play of  the Tennessee- Florida game.

A round of anti-psychotics for each and every one.

Big Psych says there are other symptoms. "Spending money carelessly". Here go the Men in White Coats- out to fill their vans with Black Friday shoppers fighting each other to get into Target.

"Eating Binges". Now we have diagnosed anyone who sits down to Thanksgiving dinner, or orders a second burrito .

"Over drinking" There go all the Winter Carnival revelers stumbling back to Fraternity Row across the Hanover Green.

"Being afraid of being alone". Now we have to figure out the anti-depressant dose for infants and toddlers-

"Feeling empty inside."  Existential pain that has plagued man and woman since Eden. That means the whole doubting, suffering, wondering human race. We are all going to the Bad Mood Gulag together.

And who else will be joining us there?. Jesus felt forsaken on the cross. Job confronted silence and emptiness until God spoke to him out of the whirlwind.

Job must have been hallucinating. Big Psych says so.

The Dressing Down of Nursing

After a stay in the hospital , my mother complained that she could not tell who was a nurse and who wasn't because everyone she saw had on scrubs. Gone were the white uniforms, the white nurses' caps unique to each school-

I was thinking about this the other day after seeing a young nurse who from a distance looked like a real belle, a Scarlett O'Hara re-born.  Until I saw her left arm, which was tattooed from wrist to elbow. Our dress code forbids "visible" tattooes, but scrubs do not have long sleeves.  I know I sound like a curmudgeon complaining about the customs of the young, but appearance was once one of the most important qualities of a nurse. Neatness, cleanliness, poise implied competence and caring and discipline. There was no place for talon nails, tight scrub pants, cleavage, hoop earrings. There is no place for them now, which is why hospitals fight back with two page dress codes.

Scrubs, which look slovenly even when new, are the universal nurse garb today. Some are all one color, some are busy, with little dancing hippopotami or flowers all over. Even white shoes are optional, but running shoes are the norm.

This past summer I wore white scrub dresses for a while until ink and other stains disfigured them. Not a shift went by without someone remarking that I looked " old school" or like a "real nurse". Now I wear green scrubs again and hope that my patients know I am a nurse because I act like one.

I am not nostalgic for nurses' caps. They were cumbersome and frequently out of place. In today's hospitals they would be just another place for MRSA and VRE or any of the other viral horrors to hatch.  And white uniforms are not practical since they are not white for long.

I am nostalgic for a time when nurses did not have their fingers glued to I-Pods. I miss the old style head nurses who knew everything that was going on in their units.  The days when a nurse was allowed to call her patient's doctor without asking a supervisor for permission and without using a script like the SBAR.

Nurses once had time to give their patients back rubs. It was an evening expectation  at my first job. Now the only back rubs being given are by nurses to each other, in between bar coding every medicine and filling in the endless blanks on paper or computer.  Now every nurse has two patients in every bed- the real flesh and blood patient and his doppelganger, the "documentation". I will let you guess which one demands the most attention.