A spare roof for the Lustron

I don't know if I've mentioned this on the blog, but Darling Christopher and I own a Lustron porcelain steel home, which my niece Kellee rents from us. If you don't know what a Lustron is, you can google Lustron or visit a site such as http://www.lustronconnection.org/ Lustrons are fun houses, and there's a lot to say about Lustrons. (My niece recently asked me if she could go on living in ours forever.)

Unfortunately the Lustron company went bust, and they don't make parts for the Lustron homes any more, so when I heard that a guy up north near Grayling, Michigan had a spare Lustron roof for sale, it was sort of irresistible, given that we have a giant truck capable of carrying the roof. The seller, Mark, had removed this roof from a Lustron home in St. Ignace, but it had looked too good to scrap out, so he was sitting on it.

We've never driven our 1984 Ford 350 with the twelve-foot wooden stake bed and racks and dual back wheels more than twenty miles, but it seemed to be in good shape after Christopher replaced all sorts of heavy front end pieces and wired up a second battery for more reliable cold starts. Grayling was two hundred miles away.

The truck made a lot of strange noises in the first thirty miles, rubbing and squeaking and groaning and tick-ticking, but one by one the noises subsided; it was as though we were taking an old neglected man out of the nursing home for his first long walk in a long while. There were stressful moments, such as the moment realizing we had left the thermos of coffee on the kitchen counter, and later realizing that we'd left the toolbox in the garage.

We made it to Grayling at a gas consumption rate of 9 mpg (better than the 6 mpg we get around town). The guy Mark who sold us the roof helped us load the a ton of steel roof panels onto the Monkey Truck, and we found on the way back that our gas mileage was still 9 mpg.

We stopped at the Whitehouse restaurant in Clare for a late lunch; I had a patty melt and Christopher had an omlet. There are only six tables in the place, and so we talked to the guys at the other tables and they told us about a big piece of bright shiny copper they saw a guy buy, half inch thick two foot by four foot. Nobody could imagine how much the guy paid for that. Another guy told us there were no more deer left for hunting. I told him come down to where I live; plenty of deer down here, running out in front of your car about every day.

So we get the roof back home, including gutters and one downspout and a chimney, and the truck was fine (though at one point we were suddenly, mysteriously low on brake fluid). Chris did all the driving, and I thought it was good to have an adventure, even if I had to unload the truck myself, since Chris had to go to work. Then my brother Mike came and helped me, so everything really was fine.

Oh, and the guy who sold us the roof said he was really interested in these Lustron homes, and so I told him there was a Lustron home being offered for free to a good owner, down in Illinois. The new owner would have to disassemble it and then truck it to the new destination, but then there it would be a free house. And he was very interested. It would be funny, I thought, if the guy just got rid of a Lustron roof and he ended up buying a whole Lustron house.

Thanksgiving fluids

Okay, so I volunteered to thaw and stuff the bird, since it was in my freezer. I turned on the outdoor refrigerator in the pole barn and put the turkey in there to thaw three days in advance. Who knew the vintage 1932 fridge worked so well, so well that the bird was entirely still frozen the evening before. No problem, there was the thaw-in-water method. Fine. I wanted to brine the turkey anyway, so I made a brine and thawed the turkey in that. One should brine a turkey for about six hours. I forgot and brined mine all night. Shoot. So Thursday morning at nine I remember it's still in the brine and I run cold water over it and soak it in the cold water. I want to know how much salt is being extracted from my over-brined turkey so I taste the water in which my raw bird is floating. Then I read that over one third of turkeys brought into American homes have salmonella in them. And I can't remember what made me think it was such a good idea to taste the water the raw turkey was floating in. So I took a shot of tequilla, and then another half shot for good measure, hoping to kill any bacteria in my gut. Then I ate some plain yogurt with good bacteria in it. The tequilla sort of put me in an easy mood so Chris and I opened a bottle of wine at about noon, and the making of the sausage stuffing never seemed easier. At one thirty my brother Mike showed up, whisked the stuffed bird in the pan away to Mom's to cook in her oven. I made some pie crust using the new recipe we found that called for a quarter cup of vodka in place of some of the water, and Chris' custard and pecan pies were the best ever. All was well. Nobody got salmonella and nobody complained that the turkey was too salty. Even the leftovers were readily consumed. That's something to drink to.

Leaves Fall, Fall Leaves

There are two sounds coming from my neighbor’s house. There are the barking dogs, Jack Russell terriers they usually keep tied in the yard, and then there’s the leaf blower. They started blowing leaves out of the yard in July, and they are still blowing. I like to imagine there’s one single leaf that gets blown into the pile along the road, then creeps back into the grass to be near the dogs on a daily or weekly basis. The leaf blower they use is gasoline powered and is worn like a backpack. Christopher and I wait for all the leaves to fall, then I sweep them off the roof and he runs over them with the lawn mower. We do have to rake a little, but we use those stray leaves as mulch on our flower beds and around our bushes as mulch. This year I decided to cover my vegetable garden leaves a foot deep. My brother Mikey brought over nine huge bags of leaves from his neighbor, and I’ve asked the girls from the prison to dump their leaves onto it as well. It’ll be interesting to see how this works in spring when I plant without rototilling or turning over the soil at all.

In our nine acres of wood, we don’t have enough leaves. They fall in autumn, and then by late next spring, there are bare patches in the woods when there should still be inches of leaf litter. The problem is non-native earthworms, and it’s too complicated to get into here, but if you want to hear something creepy, come to my house in spring, when they are mating. As soon as the sun sets, you will hear the rustling of leaves and the slithering of glistening earthworm bodies moving over one another, and it goes on all night long.


Note there's a new entry posted at the literary-ish blog: http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/

The Food Swap

My neighbor Lynne just gave me a frozen turkey. She said her family was getting too many turkeys this year, more than they could use, because both her sons got turkeys and her husband too, and her own employer at the laundromat is giving her a holiday ham. I accepted graciously; who am I to turn down a turkey? I should mention here that Lynne and her husband have as little money to spare as anybody I know, partly because they’ve got one of those sub-prime mortgages on which the interest rate keeps going up. My mom (Susanna) has chickens and supplies eggs to a few people, and I get mine from her or from my niece Kellee, who also has a few chickens. When Susanna has a surplus, I give eggs to Lynne, who saves all her cartons and drops them on my porch so I can give them to Susanna. I did a little gleaning at the Kirklin farm recently, sweet-talked Pat into letting me pick some squashes out of the field after she was done picking for the farmer’s market, and I gave Lynne a few of those acorn squashes. (I’ll make Pat a batch of my famous chocolate candy that she liked so much last year and some candied orange peels to say thank you.) Lynne loves summer squashes as well as winter squashes, but her garden didn’t amount to much this year, so I gave her some of my wealth of zuccinis and yellow squashes. Last week she gave me six packages of preserved meats (summer sausage and pepperoni) she’d gotten by some means, and a while back, in the middle of winter, showed up with a whole case of asparagus bundles that had fallen of a truck. So I think I’ll use the turkey for the Thanksgiving meal at Susanna’s, and Susanna’s still got too many eggplants—the rest of her garden was ho-hum but her eggplants were magnificient, especially the lavender colored ones. Oh, and she’s still got green peppers too. Kellee’s garden was incredible this year, and many of the brandywine tomatoes I canned (8 quarts and 30 pints) were from her garden, and she said she’s still got some beets for me and she’ll provide a stalk of Brussels Sprouts for the Thanksgiving meal. I’ll have to give her some of my elderberry wine and hard cider when it’s ready in a few months. While I was at the Kirklin Farm, talking to Pat, she was scrubbing vegetables in an outdoor sink, and she held up a big phallic turnip and we both cracked up; she had sold all her eggplants, she said. "At the farmer's market," she said, "I am renowned for the beauty of my eggplants."