Living and Cooking Solo

A select group of family members began spending Thanksgiving at the farm of my Aunt Roberta and Uncle Bob sometime in the early 1980s.   In the beginning, the number of attendees filled the chairs around a large oak dinning room table.   The group included my aunt and uncle and their three sons, my mother, my brother Steve and wife Sandy plus children and grandchildren, and me. The table’s top featured numerous crocheted doilies covered by a piece of clear plastic.   Roberta spent much of her time cooking, crocheting, quilting and doing farm chores.   These doilies represented some of her finest work.   A quilting frame, holding Roberta’s latest quilt, sat nearby showing minute, precise hand stitching. Roberta’s legend as seamstress dissipated when compared to her fame as a cook.   My mother, whose cooking depended on her mood, loved to “drop in” at her sister’s farm around dinnertime.   Roberta, unfazed by the increased number of people aro...

Cretia and I grew up in neighboring states, she in Nebraska, me in Kansas.  We met in Wyoming where we both made stops on our way to where life took us, Cretia to California, me to Colorado.  We now sat in a patio café eating lunch while watching ice skaters glide over a man made rink a few yards away. The patio café is part of the Hotel del Coronado located on a peninsula just off San Diego Harbor in California in the beach community of Coronado.  Cretia worked at the Hotel for eight years giving her an insight into the history of the place, which she shared with me on a tour after lunch.  According to Building The Dream , Elisha Babcock, Jr. and Hampton Story created the Coronado Beach Company in April 1886 and followed with the establishment of a number of other enterprises, including the Hotel del Coronado, built in 1888.  The hotel’s architecture offers a castle-like appearance in the Victorian era Queen Anne style with a roofline outlined in tu...