Well, some things are just weird. Period. And here's an example- long story probably made longer.
My husband Jeff is from a small town called Waterville about 60 miles east of Syracuse, New York. I just love small towns, love love love! Everyone knows everyone, a real sense of community! I would like to live there someday when Caiden is off to college.
Anyhoo, I receive emails from Ebay when anything from Waterville comes up for sale. Last year I bought a 1905 Relief Society Cook Book- Revised by the King's Daughters of M. E. Church Waterville, NY.
Something old and from Waterville-
had.to.have.it.
Hand written on the inside cover of the book was-
Miss Mae Hayden Waterville, New York Dec. 20, 1910.
Unfortunately for Jeff I'm not a great cook, but I do like to try recipes now and then.
A couple of weekends ago I brought the cookbook up to camp with me and let my mother in law Rosemary look through it. It was a rainy cold day so we were all huddled inside with literally nothing else to do! All of the recipes were written in by women of Waterville long ago and some of the last names are now street names in town. Having lived there all her life Rosemary loved it! We decided to call her mother's sister, 82yr old Aunt Irene, better known as Chuchi (polish for aunt). We put her on speaker phone and Rosemary began to read off some of the names in the cookbook to see if Chuchi knew any of the ladies, seeing as she used to work in the Waterville nursing home way back when. She did know some of them and then preceded to explain where they lived in town and who they where married to. That phone call took about 20 minutes. Then a little bit later we decided to call her again when there were some terms we had never heard of used in some of the recipes, like an iron spider (iron skillet) sweet milk (regular milk) etc. During the course of a day we called her a total of 5 times, all because of this cookbook!
After dinner we had exhausted all our efforts on the cookbook and were going to leave Chuchi alone for the rest of the evening. Or so I thought. I was just thumbing through it again when I came across a Cranberry Nut Bread recipe cut from a newspaper. It was about 7" long by 2.5" wide. It looked to be from the Waterville Times Newspaper, probably 1920s or so. Included in the cut out just below the recipe was an advertisement for a Dry cleaning business which read- "Dry cleaning- quality work on all kinds of garments at lowest prices for first class work. Satisfaction guaranteed. J. L Feuiner. 174 Sanger Avenue Waterville."
Rosemary was looking over my shoulder and said "does that say 174 Sanger Ave??" "Yes, why?" "That's Chuchi's house!" Yup, you read that right, Chuchi's house. Sooooo, we called Chuchi again and let her know that in some random 105 year old cookbook, which by the way we bothered Chuchi about all day long, happened to have a newspaper cut out with her address on it!! Now THAT my friends is WEIRD!!!!!
nice one lori!
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