Grandma Annie and Drying Parsley
When I was a child I spend a large chunk of every summer at my grandmother's house across the river in Frenchtown. It was usually toward the end of summer, the dog days of August, when this visit took place. Frenchtown and my grandmother's house seemed quaint to me, as opposed to the noisy kid-filled neighborhood on Main Street. In Frenchtown, everyone had a garden and shed, and produce was readily shared with neighbors. Only the Bergs had a garden in my home neighborhood. One evening after supper, Grandma Annie took down a large basket from a hook in her "back kitchen," a room where her sewing machine kept company with a monstrous cabinet her father had built, in which seldom-used kitchenwares and canned good were stored. "Come with me," she said, and we took a three-block walk to the home of another family with a French Canadian name. There the basket was soon filled with tomatoes, carrots and green beans, the latter Grandma's favorite. A 20
