Kate Youngs Baker
Grandma Baker (Kate Youngs Baker) was our fortune
teller! I have no idea how many cups of green tea or black, always made with
loose tea and boiled ‘too hell and back’ as Adin used to say, in an old upright
enamel teapot, we drank with her. She’d pour the boiling drink into cups,
usually after our meal, settle herself into her rocking chair with us all
squatting around her, and when it was safe to drink, we’d sip with her.
Always, when there was about a teaspoon of liquid
left, the ritual began. We’d carefully swirl the tea around to distribute the
grounds, then, in one swallow, drink it up and carefully, so as not to disturb
the pattern, hand the cup to Grandma.
She’d turn it gently around in her gnarled hands,
trying to get the best perspective and then she’d begin.
A Young Aunt CB Waiting to Have Her Tea Leaves Read?
A long dark piece of tea grounds? There’s a tall,
dark, man in your future (shivers up the girls’ spines).
Several leaves clumped together? A reunion or a
celebration is coming your way.
Tea leaves pointing to the cup’s edge meant a
trip—sooner or later was determined by where in the sphere the leaves were.
Meet a stranger? The leaves foretold that too as
well as the arrival of a letter soon. Now, as adults, receiving a letter may
not be such a big deal but for a kid—I’d wait for days for the promised
epistle.
I believe Grandma’s tea fortunes implicitly. I can
still remember the impatience with which I waited for my ‘turn’!
Aunt Ruth Maney holding Richard Maney, Michael Maney in
front, Ethel Baker Taylor next to Aunt Ruth, Her mother Kate next to her,
Lucille Kinsella, then Barb Taylor, Harold Taylor and Adin Baker.
As I drink my green tea today, Grandma is always
with me and I always check my ‘fortune’.
2 comments:
We used to go down to Center Lisle and stay for several days with Uncle Adin and Grandma Baker. While my parents carried on long conversations with them (well, long to me as a kid), I amused myself with picking the grass that grew several feet long outside the back door of the kitchen. Then I braided it into long ropes that I strung around the windows and along the ceiling all over the living room. The braided ropes competed, of course, with all the yellow sticky fly tapes hanging from the ceiling (well-used, too!). So many things I remember about being at Adin's - not least of which were the tall porcelain "vessels" in the upstairs hallway and that the walls upstairs were unfinished - brown wallboard with big white dots on them in orderly lines.
And I remember dinner with Grandma Baker when I was very young. Especially one when, beforehand, she sent me out to the front yard to pick greens from all the dandelions that grew all over (most likely extra prolific from all the fertilizer distributed by Adin's lawn mowers, the cows he let into the yard when he need it "mowed"). She made a salad from the greens and, as I remember it, their taste was too sharp for me. Then after dinner we drank tea and she asked me to give my cup to her. She considered it very carefully and then told me, "I see that you'll be taking a trip soon." I was so excited about this! I hoped that she had seen it accurately, since I knew she was mostly blind. But you know what? Her prediction DID come true - we drove home!
Thanks, Mom, for such sweet memories. I love that you made sure we visited Adin and Grandma Baker - was it every summer? It's so special to me that I knew them and got to experience life on the farm. And thank you for this blog story - I had not realized how much reading the tea leaves was a ritual both for Grandma Baker and for everyone else who went to visit her, as well. Center Lisle definitely was a trip well worth taking!
Looking at the picture,that is exactly how I remember Great Grandma Baker and Uncle Adin in my memories. And how I remember the yellow fly strips out on the back porch -- it brought back memories when I had my place in Lake Helen and I bought the fly strips and hung them out my back door and around the back wall of the house. I vaguely remember Uncle Adin as having a deep gruff voice, but I enjoyed being around him--found him interesting from a child's point of view. Grandma, I remember her sitting in a rocker I think at the bottom of the stairs someplace. How interesting that she enjoyed entertaining everyone with her tea leaves, although I never had it done myself.
I always enjoying going down to Center Lisle to visit that little house with all the cows around, and all the cow patties in the pasture...but I also loved that we stopped at Aunt Lil's General Store to get a soda pop out of the chest cooler, and always had to go home with part of the cheese wheels -- a cheddar I think, but also Dad and Jim always shared in the Limburger cheese. Then if it was the right season, we would stop along the ditches on the way home and pick elderberries for those luscious pies.
Many wonderful memories on those glorious trips to Center Lisle.
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