Mama loved cucumbers

Mama loved cucumbers and so do I. I always thought it was funny that she was so good at growing them and I've never been able to get more than one or two a plant.

Dad made a sort of box, like a mini-hothouse for Mother that was just for

cucumbers. They put soil inside and windows on top so the soil inside warmed up sooner than the regular garden soil. Mother used to take some cucumber seeds and put them between damp blotting paper and put it all in a warm place to start the seeds.

But wait -- oh, you don't know what blotting paper is? Well, paper towel hadn't been invented yet and neither were ballpoint pens. When you wrote with an ink pen, you had to have spare absorbent paper to soak up any spots of extra ink. It happened that two pieces of this absorbent blotting paper worked just fine for starting seeds. Then when they were started, Mama would put them into the little hothouse.

During nice days, the windows would be taken off the top, but they went back on at night until frost danger was over. Then the windows would be taken off together and the cucumber vines climbed and grew all over

the box. We had lots of cucumbers. Mama used to put them in salt water. It's sort of like a pickle but there's no vinegar involved. They would pick leaves from black currant bushes and dill branches, especially dill crowns and put a layer of that in the bottom of a keg and then a layer of cucumber and then another layer of leaves and dill and then more cucumbers until the keg was full. Then they poured over this salt brine, or salt water.

Beginning when the cucumbers had been in this for a couple of weeks,

Mama would pick out a cucumber or two at a time and slice them. Oh I thought that was good on sandwiches. When Mama put these on the sandwiches I took to school, I'd never trade them, no matter what the other kids had.