There was a point a couple of years ago, where I got tired of looking up a recipe in one of my vast collections of cookery books and magazines for something we enjoyed and therefore prepared frequently. I made one large book of the most regularly-used and favorite dishes; printed out pages and xerox copies of various pages in plastic protector sheets, all tidied up in a three ring binder. Some of the recipes were culled from various cooking websites and printed directly from their pages, some were ones that I copied, pasted, adjusted the print size, deleting unnecessary text, and saved them to a file on my own computer.

It all made a pretty thick binder, all told – and at some point, the pages wicked up a large quantity of water from off of the countertop. Because most of the pages were inside plastic protector sheets, they stayed damp and began to get moldy, disgustingly smelly, as well as blurring the lettering on many pages. Anyway, this week I started revamping the binder. Because as it is, the single binder had become so large and unwieldy, I plan breaking it into a pair of slightly more wieldy binders. The chicken, beef and soup recipes are all packed into in one, and the fish, vegetarian, salad and miscellaneous side dishes in the second. The desserts, preserves and sauces are already in a third binder of their own.

This necessitates calling up and reprinting those pages, finding the websites or the issues of various magazines and scanning them afresh: a bit of a chore, but it also gives me an opportunity to consider deleting some recipes entirely; something that we made once, and really didn’t like enough to fix again.  And that’s my housekeeping chore for the week … anything to put off working up the income tax return for 2024…

(This will be the follow on book to West Towards the Sunset, with Sally Kettering’s brother Jon as the main character. He is now eight years old, and he, Henry and Pa Kettering are part of the crew building a sawmill on the American River, over the winter of 1847-48.)

The stretch of valley where the mill was to be built was one of those lightly wooded vales, with gentle hills on either side and the ice-cold river winding in gentle bends down the middle between. There were stands of trees – bare sycamores holding up their branches against the cold blue sky, and oaks just shedding the last of their bronze-colored leaves. When we came to that place and set up camp, we saw that Captain Sutter’s surveyor had marked certain large trees with blazes and bits of red rag tied to canes thrust into the soil, Mr. Marshall, with Pa and Mr. Wimmer went to walk along the riverbank, looking for the best site for the mill. The weather was so mild that even though it was coming on to winter, we could still sleep in the open, although Pa set up a tent for us – the wall tent that he and Ma had slept in at night, coming over the trail. Even so, Mr. Marshall told us that it would get cold at night when winter did set in for real. He and Mr. Wimmer commenced planning to build a double cabin – the kind that they called a dog-trot cabin in the South; two rooms on either side, with an open porch in between. Pa thought that we three could get along for the moment with our tent, thick pallet beds stuffed with grass, and every heavy quilt that Ma could send with us.

“When are you going to explain to me how a saw mill works?” I asked Henry, after we finished setting up our camp. Pa and Mr. Marshall had not yet returned from walking the open meadow where the river made a gentle bend, sorting out the best place to start building. They were also marking the trees which would be felled for their timbers, timbers that would be needed for the mill, and to build a cabin for the Wimmers and the Mormon workers.

“I will show you,” Henry replied. He was already whittling out with his fine steel German pocketknife. It looked to me like he was cutting little notches into a rounded piece of wood. “I have studied much – existing diagrams and plans for such. It is in my mind to make a working model. For my amusement and to teach to you.”

When Henry talked of such things to us, he always sounded more stilted; as if he were still thinking in German and putting his thoughts then into English.

“Will it really saw planks?” I demanded, and Henry sent me a sideways smile, as he whittled away.

“It might,” He replied, seriously. “If there is enough force from the water, to work the saw blade. It might not. There is a complicated reason why…”

And he went on explaining it to me, in every detail. It all went into my mind and then trickled right out again – just as Ma’s lessons always did.  I just wasn’t made for book-lessons, not the way that Henry, or my sister Sally was. I had come to that realization in the last year or so; it seemed that Pa had come to the same conclusion.

Oh, it was a rare time, those first weeks in the Coloma valley, setting up to build Captain Sutter’s mill! None of Ma’s lessons that always made my poor head ache as if someone was pounding on it with a hammer! The constant soft splashing of the river, the last few leaves on the nearly-bare trees rustling in the light breeze, and the way that the morning fog left glistening droplets on the branches, which sparkled like diamonds once the sun burned off the fog … But there were chores in plenty – but outdoors, and variable, which was much more to my liking. Holding the hammers and saws for the carpentering crew, bringing them dippers of cold water when they were thirsty, watching them fell and trim trees. Pa let me handle a small hand saw, so that I could help trim smaller branches. Within the first week, a cabin of unpeeled logs Mr. Wimmer’s family, and the workers had been built and nearly completely roofed,

I liked the passel of young men that Mr. Marshall had hired, and Mr. Wimmer supervised as I came to know and work with them. They were  all militia volunteers for the Mexican War and sent out to California as part of the Army – but seeing that they were all devout Mormon, they were well-mannered and clean-living to an unusual degree, having eschewed strong drink, and even the drinking of tea and coffee!  Pa remarked quietly to Henry and I that this put them farther over the edge of the temperance side of conduct than any hard-shell Baptist that he had ever heard of. They were all bound for their new colony of Deseret, when winter was over, and spring thawed snow in the high mountain passes. Brigham Young, who was the chief apostle of the new Saints, as they called themselves, had decreed that they would establish the perfect new city for themselves, out in the howling desert wilderness near the great inland Salt Lake. We had not passed through that desert, but some that we had met in California had – and they said nothing good about the awful desert country. I reckoned myself that it was several degrees awfuler than the desert between the Humbolt Sink and the Truckee. I couldn’t see how any sane body would want to set up housekeeping there, and I said so to Pa when we talked of this.

“Having failed in attempts to build such a perfect communal establishment for themselves in the settled country, Mr. Young has decided that the howling wilderness would be the better choice for his folk.”

“Why would that be?” Henry wondered. We were sitting at our fire, a little apart from where the others were camped in and around the half-built log house. “Were they not agreeable to their neighbors?”

You must recall that Henry Steitler’s pa and ma were foreigners, only come to America a year or so before we set out on the trail to California – so Henry might not have paid much mind to the ruckus that had been raised about Mormons in Missouri and Iowa and other like places.

“No,” Pa replied. “For whatever reasons, good or bad – or Mormons, good or bad – their neighbors were not agreeable to them. I’d guess that Mr. Young has decided that they can only get long with their neighbors – if they have no neighbors.” Pa looked over to where the Mormon lads were laughing and joshing around their own campfire as the sun slid down over the far hills in a blaze of gold and orange glory, sending shadows reaching out across the narrow valley. He sighed a little. “It’s gonna be a hard row their chief apostle has set them to hoe – I wish them all the luck in the world, but I just don’t see how they can make a garden out of a desert that forbidding.”

“You think they will fail at that – their Deseret city?” Henry was fascinated. He recalled our desert crossing as well as any of us.

Pa shook his head. “I don’t see how they can, even with the best will in the world – not on land so hostile to everyone but poor naked Indians, living off crickets and grubs … no, nothing will come of their Deseret.”

I remembered this exchange most particularly – because it was one of the very few times that Pa was wrong.

So, having completed the YA novel about the emigrant trail, I was thinking over how to make it into a series, along the lines of Little House on the Prairie. The trouble is that with my original protagonist, Sally, in West Towards the Sunset, being twelve years old in that book … she would grow up. I wanted to keep the main character of a series as a tween or teen, but still incorporate their participation in all kinds of interesting events over the following twenty years after 1846. And then I had a thought – each YA novel could feature a subsequent tween or teen in the Kettering family, starting with Sally’s brother Jon as a main character … and then with two more siblings!
And that was inspiring – especially since the milieu of the various precious metal rushes would allow more liberty to a male character … so on with the follow-up, featuring Jon Kettering! Then I am plotting taking the younger sister, presently a baby, to Virginia City in the Silver Rush, and the very youngest Kettering boy, as yet unborn, working in a newspaper office with a very young Samuel L. Clemens. Each book, as in the Texas frontier series will be free-standing, but linked. So behold — the first half chapter of Hills of Gold!

(I promise – I am also working on the final wrap-up of the Luna City Chronicles. Yes, I can multi-task…)

It was a small thing, that bright pebble in the millrace – but what an avalanche that it started! I was there at the very start of it all, because Pa was a carpenter, working at the job he had been hired to work on, and he took along me and our sort of foster brother, Henry Steitler to help, early in the winter of 1847. Henry was sixteen then, and well-grown; he loved to build things, and work out better ways to make things work. He counted as a man, as things went, then. His father had died in an accident on the trail, and well… he had been part of our family ever since. He was tall and fair-haired, like me, so people just naturally took us to be blood-kin.
My name is Jonathan Mathew Kettering, and I had turned seven years old, on the early winter day that our wagon company came down the Yuba River track into that wide valley in the center of California. When I was eight years old, Pa and Henry and I went to work on Mr. Sutter’s new sawmill, in the hills. I wasn’t interested in any kind of school that involved reading books, to Ma’s despair. I escaped Ma’s notion of lessons any ways that I could, preferring to run wild in the woods and hills with my best pals, Will and Jimmy Greenwood. The Greenwood boys were part Indian and came by those ways naturally. Their older brothers were in the trail-guiding trade, their pa was Old Man Greenwood, the famous mountain man.
“Those wild boys are the worst kind of influence on Jon!” Ma exclaimed, the evening that Pa came home from Sutter’s place and told us that he was considering taking me to work on the sawmill in the hills. “Indeed – take Jonny-cakes with you, Elkanah.” (Johnny-cakes was my nickname among the family.)
“Might as well start him off, learning a good trade,” Pa agreed, and so that was what happened. I didn’t mind much. I really didn’t care anything for book learning, as it made my head ache something fierce.
We Ketterings and Henry Steitler had arrived in California as part of a company of ox-train immigrants in the trail season two years previous to the time of the story that I am telling. My Pa, Elkanah Kettering was captain of that company. Pa was a sensible man, and there was an old mountain man with us, Choctaw Joe Bayless, who knew the trail and the conditions in the west. Choctaw Joe had all that, as well as acquaintanceship with many of the tribes that we encountered. He knew their languages and their ways, right well enough, to ease our passage, and our company arrived safely in California, with the addition of a baby girl born on the very day that Pa’s company tackled the last high pass through the mountains.
A wagon company which followed the same trail as us, some weeks later had not such good fortune. They were stranded in deep snow for months. Half of them starved to death before rescue parties could be organized and come to their aid. Their awful suffering has been warning and a cautionary tale, ever since. My sister Sally’s best friend was one of the survivors – Ginny Reed. Sally threatened to scalp me good, if I ever asked Ginny anything about it. Ginny didn’t like to dwell on it, none.
So that was how Pa planned our winter in the hills – helping to build Captain Sutter’s sawmill. Ma and my older sister Sally were taken up with caring for our new baby sister, Emily-Anne. Our womenfolk were all planning to spend the months that we were away in our small cabin, on a patch of land near Sutter’s place, a settlement which was growing right crowded, even then. I had no interest in babies, anyway, no more than I had in Ma’s school lessons. Pa was saving up to purchase a nice tract of land closer to the coast, where he could plant wheat and run cattle, Ma could have her splendid garden, and we all live together in a big new house that he would build for us, rather than the cramped little cabin of unpeeled logs. Well, that was Pa’s intent, anyway. Before things changed.
Captain Sutter was the big impresario of those parts in the earlies. He had ambitious plans, when he hired Pa along with Mr. Marshall and a crew of Mormon boys to build a sawmill, on the south branch of the American River. Those hills that were like knees to that tall mountain range, mountains that were a barrier between California and the desert that we had crossed barely two years before. The river poured down from the foothills, and Captain Sutter hoped that the spring flood would power his mill. Pa needed the money to buy that tract of land that he had his eye on, so he took Captain Sutter’s coin. Captain Sutter needed lumber, lumber to build all those houses for those new settlers coming to California, now that it looked likely for it to become an American territory. The war with Mexico over it all seemed likely to be settled in our favor.
Anyway, we took off, up the rough track to the hills above the American River, just as winter set a white veil over the high mountain peaks beyond. Pa drove a wagon filled with supplies, canvas for tents, and trunks full of carpentering tools. I rode in the wagon with him, and Henry rode his tamed Indian paint pony that his father had bought from some Kanzas Indians, back when we started out on the trail. That pony was getting real-well mannered, finally, although it wasn’t anything for looks.
There were a number of picks and shovels among the gear in the wagon, and some wheel-barrows, as well.
“You see, Johnny-cakes,” Pa explained, “We’ll have to dig a mill-race, to channel the water from the river to turn a wheel that runs the saw. Dig the race, build the mill – all from the bare ground.”
“A lot of work,” Henry added. His pony was picking a careful way along side our jolting wagon. “But it saves a lot of work, in the long run.”
“A proper mill, so I am told, saves the work of thirty men working a pit-saw, day and night, sawing lumber from logs,” Pa explained. I thought about how I’d much rather be with Pa and Henry, working at building that saw-mill no matter how hard it might be, rather than doing home chores for Ma and enduring her efforts to teach me book-learning.

So, my daughter and I are diverting ourselves on a winter evening by watching yet another reality TV series. This one is a real-estate flip-cum-interior decoration series; it can be construed as a kind of professional education for my daughter, the ambitious real estate agent, and amusement for myself. The series is focused on houses in various bedroom communities in the Seattle area, so the prices are somewhat elevated, in comparison to urban South Texas. There are other differences as well, but the houses themselves are an agreeable mix of older cottages and ten- to fifteen-year-old new-builds. They have also been on the market without selling for weeks and months – to the despair of sellers. The hosts of Unsellable Houses are twin sisters and successful real estate agents in their own right, so the focus of each episode is diagnosing what is wrong with the house which is sending potential purchasers away determined to look at something else and remedying those failings. (Conventional wisdom is that there are only two reasons for a house on the market   not selling: either the condition of the house or the asking price.) In the case of these featured unsellable houses, it’s condition. The solution which the twin sister agents offer is an investment deal to the house owners. They will invest a certain amount in renovations, put the house on the market again for a fairly realistic bid – and they appear to be experienced enough in the local market to accomplish this. When it sells, they get back their investment and split the profit evenly. More profit, if the house sells above asking price, which has happened quite frequently. I would guess that the sisters pick the properties to offer this deal very carefully; the location must be attractive, the house itself structurally sound, and the necessary fixes cosmetic. No tear-downs or junk houses in a bad part of town need apply.

From watching the first season of this series (from 2020) and noting the various renovations performed for the various houses I can make a handful of deductions about current market trends and what buyers were and continue to favor:

A kitchen and dining area combination – an almost guaranteed part of renovation is demolishing any wall between the two, often in favor of an island with bar seating instead.

New kitchen cabinets go all the way to the ceiling.

White subway tile for a kitchen backsplash seems to be a constant design element these days. I can favor that, as it’s an element that doesn’t date. Sometimes jazzy floor tile in kitchens.

If not already-existing hardwood floors (and some of the homes are old enough to have them)  – then high-grade vinyl flooring is installed in areas elsewhere than bathrooms and sometimes kitchens. I rather like the best-grade vinyl flooring, myself.

Tile in bathrooms, sometimes rather nicely pattered. Carpet in bathroom areas is an abomination and was the first thing to be ripped out in my own house. For some reason in the 1980s, builders did this, for which they ought to be sentenced to an eternal afterlife of cleaning commodes. With their tongues.

The same for popcorn ceiling texture: an abomination, which I consider to be the Devil’s solidified sperm.

The on-trend for master bathroom vanities is to put in double sinks, where one had been sufficient before, if the bathroom is large enough.

The one aspect of putting the renovated houses on the  market which the sisters employ for good effect is staging – that is, filling them up with furniture, rugs, and decorative elements, even down to elaborate place settings on the dining tables. I had always preferred that a place that I looked at with the intention of renting or purchase be empty, as I could better visualize it with my own possessions in it. I had read that this was what most house-hunters also preferred, or that staging be minimal, more of a hint at possibilities rather than the full-on set dressing. But perhaps this kind of staging is now the preferred strategy and expected fashion, especially for top-dollar properties.

 

04. January 2025 · Comments Off on Another Snippet From Luna City 12 – Secret Life of the Brownies · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book
(Letty, Douglas, and Stephen with their other friends have decided to investigate the mysterious brownies…)
It took the two girls merely fifteen minutes, exploring the first three gaps in the sagging wire and the wandering trails beyond, beaten into the hard summer earth.
“They went this way,” Letty announced with confidence. Yes, there they were – the straight tracks of narrow wheels, and the footprints of someone whose’ shoes were about the same size as Letty’s were marked in the pale dust between patches of low-growing weeds. “Towards the old Sheffield place. I wonder if …” She left that thought unfinished, and Retta finished it for her.
“They’re camped out in the icehouse? It’s got a roof on it, for sure. If I wanted to stay hidden, and had a place to hide out from everyone, I’d sure as certain consider the icehouse … I wonder how they found it, though.”
“How did they find out that Mrs. Allison goes on the bus to Karnesville and spends the whole day at the hospital?” Letty replied. The two girls walked on silent cat-feet along the narrow beaten path through the thicket of oak trees and scrub brush, brush which covered a low rise above a bend in the San Antonio River – a rise hardly sufficient to be termed a hill. They had nearly reached where the old icehouse had been dug into that hill, when they heard a small child giggling, somewhere hidden by the thick undergrowth. A girl’s voice – startlingly close to them, but unseen, called –
“Coral! Time for your nap! Don’t be a naughty girl, now!”
Retta looked over her shoulder at Letty, who nodded and gestured that they should walk away. The mystery brownies clearly had set up housekeeping in the thickets around the Sheffield ruins, likely taking shelter at night in the ice house. Retta and Letty hurried away, not daring a sound until they had reached the road.
“Well, we shall have something definite to report, now,” Retta commented, wholly satisfied with what they had been able to discover; that it was a real person, and not a familiar household spirit, doing chores at the Allison home. She consulted the alarm clock – which she had carried with her in her little bag of First Aid supplies. Retta wanted to be a nurse when she grew up, and the aid kit accompanied her everywhere. As a Scout, she was always prepared.
They were only a short distance from the club-house; the girls had a shorter distance to cover than the boys, who need travel the farther distance from Luna City. It was a few minutes after four, when Douglas, Artie and Stephen finally appeared, sweaty, breathless and only moderately triumphant.
“They’re living in the icehouse?” Douglas sounded skeptical, and Letty reassured him.
“We followed them almost there – the girl and the baby. They can’t be anywhere else. What did you find out in town?’
“We went everywhere!” Artie was in full, enthusiastic flow. “Looking for strangers who might be kids like us! Even to Abernathy Hardware – every shop along the Square. I think we talked to everyone … Sgt. Drury even asked what we were doing. I told him we were doing a scavenger hunt, and had to get a copy of a newspaper from someplace else. Pretty clever, huh?”
“Yes, but what did you find out?” Letty could hardly contain her impatience. “How did the girl find out about the Allisons … and the old icehouse…”
“There are two boys,” Douglas explained. “They weren’t from around here, everyone is certain about that. Also – the talk different. Almost like city folk, but not quite. One is about my age, maybe a bit older. The other looks to be seven or eight. Everyone we talked to, who noticed the boys says that they’ve seen the older boy running errands and making deliveries for the grocery store. For tips, mostly. And Mr. Mason – that’s the guy who runs it now – he says he don’t bother with asking for a name, since he’s not paying wages. But he lets that boy and his brother pick through the trash and spoiled things that he’s throwing away at the end of the day, ‘cause it’s unfit to sell.”
“Yuck,” Retta made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
“You get hungry enough, you’ll eat what you can that won’t bite back,” Artie pointed out, with feeling. The Vaughns were hard up, everyone in Luna City knew that. Mr. Vaughn, whose little ranch property near Beeville had been foreclosed on at the very start of the crash, made only a pittance as a policeman for the Luna City Police Department – hardly enough to support a wife, Artie and his younger brother Harry. If it weren’t for them keeping hens and a garden out in back of the Vaughn place, and their father regularly going hunting … they’d also be scavenging what they could from the grocery store, like those unnamed boys.
“So, where did they come from?” Letty asked. “Did anyone know that?”
“I went and talked to Manny Gonzalez, at the garage,” Stephen answered. “I thought that he might have seen something, since so many travelers go past his father’s place.”
Manny – or Manolo, was an older teenage boy, who was interested in nothing but engines and mechanical things, to the exclusion of practically everything else. Manny quit school as soon as it was allowed, to work in the Gonzalez family enterprise. This was an auto repair shop on the very edge of town, situated – like the Tip-Top Ice House Gas & Grocery – to take best advantage of travel on the main road between San Antonio, Beeville and Rockport.
“Did he?” Retta demanded, impatiently. “Stop keeping us all in suspense, Douglas – it’s not fair. What did Manny tell you? Did he see the boys? Did he know anything about them.”
“He did, indeed,” Douglas replied, with something of the air of Sherlock Holmes explaining something to Dr. Watson. “He told me that a trucker with a busted brake line and a load he had to get to Brownsville stopped at the shop about six weeks ago … and there were four kids with him. Four kids with an old wagon and a couple of bags and an ‘ol suitcase strapped onto it. The two boys, a girl about eleven or twelve, and another little girl – just about able to walk, Manny says. The littlest had curly blond hair and looked sort of like that cute little girl with the ringlets in the movie shorts – that’s how come Manny took notice. He also noticed that the four kids didn’t stick around, until the trucker got his brakes fixed. When he moved on, the kids weren’t with him. Manny thinks the oldest boy is the one doing errands for the grocery store.”
“If he was hanging around there, looking for work,” Stephen had already made the logical deduction, “Then he might have overheard Mrs. Allison talking to the others, waiting for the Karnesville bus. What are we going to do now, Captain?”
Douglas sounded as if he were thinking out loud. “I really think that we should talk to them. These kids. Find out what’s going on. Why they’re on the road, without any family to look after them. I’ve never heard of kids going on the bum, all alone, ‘cept in the movies. Maybe a boy by himself, looking for work and hitting the road. But with his little sisters? There is something odd and curious about this situation. I think we ought to get to the bottom of it, before we tell anyone else. Tomorrow is Sunday … the bus doesn’t run on Sunday, and the grocery store is closed. I think we ought to go out to the icehouse tomorrow afternoon … after church and talk to these kids. Find out what the story is. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Stephen nodded. “Meet here first, then go all together. And not a word about this to the grownups … until we find out what the story is.”
They all agreed, although Letty saw that Retta hesitated.
Finally, Retta mumbled, “Well … with a baby, who still needs milk… we really ought to tell someone. Someone who really cares. And can do something.”
“We will tell someone, as soon as we know that their story is,” Douglas assured her. It was nearly suppertime – and their mothers would all be irate, if they were late to the table. There was no more time to talk about the matter of the family of children living surreptitiously in the ice house: they headed for home, as speedily as their various means could take them – Douglas and Letty on their bicycles, and Stephen on a spry ranch cowpony. Retta and Artie on foot.