Author name: Sayling@@Away

I love forsythia, their delicate yellow flowers with the barely detected scent.   What I didn’t like, when I was a kid, was the fact that a forsythia branch was the means by which punishment was enforced in our home.  While my mother had a Master’s degree in verbal tongue-lashing, my father was in charge of physical discipline.  Thus the switch, a solid forsythia branch, was frequently applied to my or my brother’s posterior by my Dad, with varying degrees of force and frequency depending on the infraction.  “Wait ‘til your father gets home,” was an ominous sign of things to come. My uncle was of like mind with Dad, but he applied a belt to my cousins. The belt was an old black leather strap that hung in the kitchen closet in their home, but which traveled with them to Plymouth each summer, when they came to visit us.  My brother and I swore that what we experienced was the worse than what our cousins endured, and part of each visit involved a lengthy recounting of recent times the belt and switch had been used, the infractions that had called for their use, and the virtues of each form of punishment.  All this ended during one of the cousin invasions when, exasperated to the limit by our behavior, our respective fathers gave us the choice: switch or belt. The cousins all sat down on the kitchen floor and recommenced our discussion of the merits of each of these instruments of torture.  The dads watched on in amusement for a while, then demanded an answer. I remember saying, “I think I’ll take the switch,” to which my cousins replied, “We’re okay with the belt.” Later that evening, our backsides smarting from the latest insult, we collectively decided not to discuss our different forms of punishment again, just in case discussing them might somehow elicit their use. My husband and I planted forsythia along our driveway, but I never once cut a switch when my kids were growing up. Not that I didn’t think about it. 0 0

Although eucalyptus is used in the saunas of many spas, I was first encountered its unique odor when we moved to California in the 1970s.  Eucalyptus trees were first planted in California in the mid-1850s for use in shipbuilding, similar to its use in Australia. However, the California blue gum eucalyptus split and curled when dried, unlike the old growth trees from Down Under.  The eucalyptus was then planted to be used as fuel and windbreaks.  But if you want to see rows and rows of them, find some railroad tracks in that state. They were planted alongside the tracks so that eucalyptus wood could be cut on site for replacement railroad ties.  Alas, the wood proved too soft for ties, which split when spikes were hammered into them. California’s love affair with the eucalyptus continued through the 20th century, with dozens of medicinal uses proposed, most of which were bogus. But eucalyptus oil is still used in conjunction with steam to open up the sinuses. Today the tree is considered an invasive species that kills native vegetation. My introduction to the unique eucalyptus smell came on a hot day in southern California, tracking through the piles of leaves and bark sheddings from the trees, alongside some railroad tracks. The smell of the oil permeated my sinuses and left me with an indelible memory of my time in that the Golden State. 0 0

Okay, this is not pleasant for almost everyone else, but this smell was certainly integral to my life as a teacher of human anatomy.  I taught in a dissection lab for over 40 years and the smell of the embalmed bodies is one that lingers – not in just memory but also on your clothes.  If I were in an elevator after class, there would always be someone who would wrinkle up their nose and say, “What IS that smell?” When the medical students joked about it, I’d remind them that I’d smelled like that for decades, whereas they only had a semester at best to deal with it!  My lab coats are wrapped in plastic in the closet because, even after years of washing, they still have the faint odor of my profession. 0 0

Of all the spices in my spice drawer, cinnamon is the one I use most often. In addition to its wonderful aroma, it also has medicinal properties: studies have shown that it relieves arthritis pain, lowers LDL cholesterol and blood sugar, and boosts cognitive function and memory.  What I like about it is that it can be used in both sweet and savory foods. By far my favorite use of cinnamon is in a recipe brought to this country from Poland by my great-grandmother in 1895: apple kuchen. I thought I’d share the simple recipe: MEMMERE’S APPLE KUCHEN ½ cup sugar 2 cups flour 1 tsp nutmeg 1 tsp cinnamon 3 level tsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 4 tbsp butter or margarine ¾ cup milk, more or less 3-4 Granny Smith apples, pared and sliced into wedges Sugar and cinnamon for topping Mix sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, baking powder, and salt. Work the butter into the dry mix with your fingers until it resembles coarse corn meal. Add the milk, enough to make a stiff batter. Spread batter in greased 10” by 8” glass pan. Press apple slices into the top of the dough, arranged in rows. Sprinkle well with cinnamon and sugar. Dot the top with small bits of butter. Bake at 350o for 45 min or until the cake is slightly brown and pulls away from the edge of the pan. Do not overcook as it will be dry. (It will depend on how hot your oven runs.) You can have this warm for breakfast or for dessert with ice cream. 0 0

I’ll bet not a lot of my readers have ever heard of this product.  It comes in a square green metal tin with a cow udder printed on the side and a cow’s head and flowers on the top.  This is because it was developed – way back in 1899 –  to soothe and heal cow’s teats when they become chapped and cracked from being pumped for milk.  Bag balm smells heavily medicinal, not surprising since it is made from hydroxyquinoline sulfate, lanolin, and petroleum jelly.  I was introduced to it by my Mom when I was pretty young, because I remember telling her that her hands had a yucky smell. Turns out the farmers who used it on their cows discovered it softened and healed their hands. It has lots of other uses too: dry facial skin, cracked fingers, burns, zits, saddle sores, sunburn, pruned trees, bed sores and radiation burns.  Not sure how it works on all that.  It was also used by Allied troops in WWII to protect their weapons from rust and on the paws of cadaver sniffing dogs at Ground Zero after 9/11. I used it on my babies’ diaper rash – they were too young to mind the smell and it worked wonderfully – and on my hands in the winter. Mostly it just reminds me of my mother. In a nice way. 0 0

Anise is a smell (and a taste) that had dire repercussions in my twenties. I love its taste and smell, and there are two liqueurs with that flavor: anisette and absinthe. Absinthe, also called wormwood or the green fairy, was banned in the US until the 21st century because of its supposedly addictive nature. But that didn’t keep me from the anisette! On a trip to Tijuana in the late 1970s with my husband and a couple of good friends, we decided to avail ourselves of the cheap prices for liquor and bought a bottle of anisette and one of Kalua. When we got home that night, while everyone else indulged in Black Russians, I poured myself a glass of anisette and added a ton of ice cubes. Several times. Later that evening my husband poured me into the car and the next thing I remember is being dragged off the floor of the car, where I had slumped.  You know where this is going, right? I spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, either clinging to the toilet or sleeping on the floor, and swore off anisette forever. However, when my children were babies and teething, I was advised to let them gum on zwieback, a dry toast that I remember my mother giving me as a kid.  And it’s flavored with anise. I always bought two packages. 0 0

     We’re having another dreary day of cold rain. We’ve had so many of them that my husband commented, “It’s like winter in Cleveland.”  Not to deprecate Cleveland, but we lived there for five years, and the winters were pretty depressing.    Having to curtail my activities because of another shoulder replacement, except for an occasional trip out for Pain and Torture (PT), has reduced my world to four rooms: bedroom (to sleep), office (to write), kitchen (to grab what’s available to eat; I’m not cooking) and family room (to watch revolting news and yet another death on Downton Abbey). Oh and of course the bathroom, but I don’t spend much time there unless I’m reading a good book.    I check my email twice a day and have been working hard on finishing up my interview notes on applicants I interview for UNC’s School of Medicine. Beyond that I’m waiting on returns from CreateSpace, where my first book is being massaged into something hopefully intriguing for Kindle.  All of which has left me in a singularly uncreative frame of mind.  So I’m now going through the critiques for all of the chapters on the new book (nine so far) that have come from my two critique groups.  This has just added to my mental malaise because I‘ve missed three meetings of one group because I don’t have a way to get there.  Driving is still a couple of weeks away.    So right now I’m channeling Annie and mentally humming The Sun Will Be Out Tomorrow.  Crap, another year until Downton Abbey returns. 0 0

With apologies to Brittany Spears: I just had another shoulder replacement.  This is the consequence of my competitiveness – competitive swimming, tennis, field hockey, basketball – that lasted long after a normal person would have put some of these activities aside,  mainly because I wanted to get better at each sport. But there is a genetic aspect as well. I remember thinking how sad it was that my parents were both crippled with arthritis when they were in their 70s. I never even considered it would be my fate, too.  Double whammy. But modern medicine came along just in time to help me out. I’ll be back in the pool in a couple of months and will pick up a tennis racket for the first time in years this summer. Can’t wait. So how does this relate to my writing? Well, it’s the competitiveness. Not with my fellow writers but with myself this time.  I need to write to get better at it.  Need to submit my writing for critiques to get better at it.  Need to submit pieces for publication to get better at it.  Sitting back and hoping your writing will get noticed won’t do it. You need to compete. The publishing world is a morass: lots of writers, too few agents, too few publishing houses and too few editors who decide what the public wants to read. So I’m going to self-publish.  Can’t wait. I’m too competitive. 0 0