Fourth of July

Saturday the Fourth of July, a lovely morning dawning for us, the picture doesn't near do it justice. Clear, 72° 95% Wind E 5 mph Visibility 10 mi. For the first time in ages I sat outside the Beck front door to sip my first cup, again for the first time in ages, splash of cream, sweetened with dark maple syrup, one of the best flavors under the Sun. This morning, under Venus.

Yes, I'm a Southerner, and I like cane syrup, and, when we stopped on a country dirt road to buy sugarcane to chew, have watched a mule harnessed at the end of a long pole plodding a circle as men and boys fed long sugarcane stalks into the grinder over a huge black kettle with a fire under it.

But I have a history with maple syrup as well,

from the summer of 1943 when Mama and I stopped in Washington, DC for several days on our train trip to New London, Connecticut to see my father, who was in U S Maritime Service officer candidate school during World War II. My father's sister, my aunt EG and her housemate Phyllis Hill owned a house in Cabin John on the Maryland side of the Potomac River. Phyllis was a Vermonter and for breakfast our first morning there, Phyllis made small, saucer-size Yankee pancakes, incredibly slathered with real butter, and flooded with Vermont maple syrup.

Real butter was an impossible treat: butter was rationed so our troops overseas could have butter, and we were used to a wartime product called oleomargarine. It was white like lard: you bought it in one pound blocks with a little capsule of red-orange coloring that, mixed with softened white oleo, rendered a bowl of yellow butter substitute. I would say ersatz butter, but ersatz was a German word and we were at war with Germany, which to this day is an ugly word for me. Some people called it margarine, but that was too uppity for us here in the South, where it was plain oleo.

Don't kid yourself; only much later was it offered in squeeze packs. In my day, you mashed and mixed it with a fork, and mixing it was my chore. A fact of being First was that every household chore was assigned to the oldest child, and your siblings never seemed to grow into it.

That 1943 summer morning at EG's we had real butter and maple syrup. Light amber, real syrup that was even better than the deliciousness that Log Cabin poured into their little cans.

But this blogpost is about the Fourth of July. The first one I remember, called to mind here before, was about 1939 or 1940. We were at Mom and Pop's house when they lived on Baker Court, and I watched Pop set a Roman candle in the dirt of the front yard, bend over to light the fuze, then run away as it sizzled and fired into the sky. I was standing on the ground a few yards back, my mother beside me, her arms around me, holding me close. If that was 1940, Pop would have been 68, a very old man to me then. As I look from the 4th of July 2020, he was just a boy!

My other earliest memory of the Fourth of July was the summer of 1947, also called to mind here in years past. In Washington, DC again. The summer after Mom died, our aunt Ruth took my first cousin Ann and me on the train from Pensacola to Washington for a couple of weeks. That evening, EG and Ruth took us to The Mall for a fireworks extravaganza that featured Five Star Admirals, heroes of World War II, giving speeches. Who were they? I think Nimitz and Halsey, but what I remember is that they arrived and departed in separate Packard limousines, to standing ovations,

and that as the speeches were over and the fireworks display ended, it started raining. For the trip, my parents had bought me a new blue wool tweed sport coat, and my mother had told me don't dare get it wet, and I was in a panic to get back to EG's car, a 1939 Chevrolet Master DeLuxe town sedan:

Memories are easy and fun for one who can associate them with the make, model and year of an automobile, as I often do.