For your reading enjoyment, we continue to publish Rambling Vines by the late Marylea Vines as she recalls events and names of Corning folks from many years ago. We are currently in the year 1990

I spent a large portion of last weekend “putting up” sweet corn. Friend Wid Rice called early one morning to see if I needed any sweet corn and before I hardly knew what was happening, I had corn all over the kitchen. The Rices gathered and shucked the corn and all I had to do was remove the silks and put it in plastic bags for freezing. I have found out that I can take an ear of corn right out of the freezer, spread a little butter on it, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roll in waxed paper, and place it in the microwave for a few minutes. Tastes just like fresh corn. However, it doesn’t make me too much difference how it tastes because I like corn, even field corn, in any way that it is fixed, except for corn relish. I even like hominy and have a recipe that I will share with other people who like hominy. It is called Hominy Salad and easy to make.

Hominy Salad: One can hominy, white or yellow, two hard-cooked eggs, one medium-sized onion, chopped, one-half cup chopped sweet pickles, one-half cup chopped celery.

Mix the above ingredients with salad dressing. The mixture for the salad dressing is: Two tablespoons prepared mustard, two teaspoons sugar, one teaspoon vinegar, one tablespoon canned milk or heavy cream.

Friends have favored me with plenty of nice cucumbers and fresh tomatoes during the last couple of weeks. First, Arvel Phillips came along with some large red tomatoes that really tasted like tomatoes and Hollis the barber is busy these days distributing the cucumber surplus from the garden at his home in Knob community. I shared with my neighbors, the Kellets, because I got onions from Gene’s garden more than once for cooking up a mess of onion and eggs.

I tell you Putter and his fleas are almost as bad an experience as me and my head lice years and years ago… can’t get rid of the things!

We have a bumper crop of fleas this year and even I have carried in a few from just walking across the yard.

I have tried every remedy offered and we still have some miserable days. If I am not doing something to him, I am spraying some new remedy about the inside of the house, trying to keep them from the carpets. He is too short legged to get on any of the furniture, so I am fairly safe there.

Some of the suggestions offered by friends include: Put vinegar in the rinse water after bathing him.

Feed him a clove of garlic every day.

Sprinkle him with Sevin dust.

Boil the peel from different kinds of citrus fruits and use the liquid to sponge him.

Treat the yard with some stuff that looks like grass seeds.

Use diesel oil along the edges of the yard.

Poor little thing has gone through so much, that I can just start bath water and he runs to hide until he is sure who it is for.

He likes to lay underneath my bed and the other day when I went home from work, he failed to greet me at the door. I began looking around for him and walking from room to room saying things like, “Poor mama, her little Putter is gone,” and pretty soon I spotted him underneath the bed. He thought he was well hidden, but his tail was sticking out in the open and just wagging away. He stayed hidden until I started rattling pots and pans in the kitchen and here he came in a long lope ready to kiss and make up.

I don’t know about anyone else, but to me it seems that Summer is about over when we’ve had the 4th of July. Won’t be long until there will be talk about such things as Back to School, shorter days, home heating bills… and no more yard work!

I get real ambitious each Spring and run around setting out flowers all over the place and without fail, soon as it gets up in the 90’s and 100’s, I get so onery about watering that soon my plants look like that I have moved away and left them… all except that old rose bush at the corner of the front porch that I have been trying to get rid of for years… neither snow, nor drought has any effect on it.

Last year I bought a couple of hibiscus bushes and shared with friend Beverly. Their bush has grown like a weed, is waist high and literally loaded with beautiful red, plate-size blooms. Mine? If you want a good laugh, take a look at theirs, then mine. In the first place, I got the runt plant and the blooms, if there ever are any, are going to be white, not red!

A few years ago, my brother thought I needed an outside thermometer, so he bought this big round thing and attached it to the walnut tree out by the back door. The hand spun around to 80-something and stayed there night and day, through Summer and Winter.

A year or so later a niece came along, discussed it with her husband and decided that Aunt Mary had to have a working thermometer. They sneaked off to the store, bought an exact duplicate of the one my brother had installed, and proudly attached it to the walnut tree. To say it was a duplicate of the first one is an understatement… almost immediately the needle went to almost the same eighty-something and there it has been for a couple of years.

On the 4th of July about mid-afternoon when it was crowding 100, my company Mary Jane, started off down the street to visit her cousin, Tommie, when the thermometer caught her eye… Shucks if it was only 80 something she would just walk! We had to laugh at her that night because she said that just believing it was cooler, actually made it seem cooler.