Sorghum

In my family, the last weekend of September means only one thing:
sorghum.

What's sorghum, you ask? Okay, you didn't ask, BUT...this is sorghum:

In my family, sorghum also means that we all pile into the car and go down to the family farm in Iowa, where we celebrate the sorghum harvest. For 20 years--rain or shine--our relatives and Iowa friends have been coming to harvest, eat a good potluck, and visit all day. It's not very glamorous, but it's fun. I've been going almost every year since I was two years old, and I love seeing all my people who I don't usually see enough of.

So when we get there in the morning, what we do first is cut down the sorghum out in the field.

Any kid or adult can help with the preparations. I remember being eight or nine years old when somebody handed me a machete (which gets the job done), and before I knew it I was cutting down sorghum that was five feet taller than I was.

Meanwhile, someone starts a fire.

A contained fire, that is.

Then we take the truckload of sorghum over to the press.

It's powered by a tractor, and there's a belt that turns the press. Then you just feed the press some yummy sorghum, and the juice comes out the side in bright green trickles into the designated plastic ice cream bucket, which is then poured into the designated metal milk pail to be strained.

I remember one year where instead of using the tractor, they had this wooden contraption where historically you hitched up the draft horses and they would walk around in circles to power the press. But nobody there had a horse, or bothered to bring one, so they enlisted all of us kids to grab hold of it and carry it in circles. It was heavy. Eventually a few grown ups took pity on us and helped, and we managed to get some juice that way.

After you have the juice, you pour it into the vat, which sits atop the aforementioned fire, and you let it boil, but not too much! And stay clear of the smoke and steam. After the juice thickens up a bit, you have yourself a fine jarful of sweet greenish sorghum goo. It's basically like molasses, and tastes very good in cookies and other things.

In between all that, we break for a potluck lunch in the dairy barn. It's all cleaned out and hasn't housed cows for a long time, but you can still see the stations where they stood.

The neighbor's dog likes to come and beg for food, and we always wave the Norwegian flag from the barn. I just loved the color of the soybeans that were all around us.



Ahhh yes, sorghum weekend was good.

Awaiting the return

My mom's coming back from Tanzania tomorrow!

After going there seven times, all of us at home have the While-Mom's-Away routine down. We still have a bit of cleaning to do, but otherwise we survived, just as she expected us to do. She will come home tired, in need of a shower, maybe a bit hungry, and oveflowing with stories to tell. I'll be listening and thinking about when I can make it back to TZ again...

*Cough* Ahem. Daydreaming a bit. Anyways.

These last couple of trips, all she's asked of us upon her return is to stand at the gate with her Grande Chai Latte with No Water from Starbucks.

My mom's only vice, or the main source of her boundless energy?

This year we'll be just as happy to oblige. We can't wait until she gets home!

Milwaukee

So, on the top of the screen it says that we mostly blog about music, our travels and wonderings.
I've talked about music and wonderings, but I don't really have too much traveling planned--no Africa this year.
Mom goes off to Tanzania for three weeks in August with a group from our church, and I will be keeping things together at home with my family. College hunting, of course, is my main priority right now, but at the same time I'm trying to manage those decisions in a way so that I won't go crazy.
I tell you, Dear Reader, it is impossible.

But I am getting excited for one brand new experience: Building a house in Milwaukee for Habitat for Humanity. On Sunday morning me and a bunch of other kids and adults from my church will wake up bright and early (well, more just early) and be on the road to Milwaukee at 5:30 AM. We're leaving at that insanely early hour to make it to a Brewers game at 1PM, so they better win.
We'll be framing a house in the city, with help from local volunteers, young AmeriCorps volunteers, and the future owners of the house. That's one of the cool things about this organization, that the family is expected to work a certain amount of hours to build their own house. Imagine the sense of accomplishment and pride they have to be living in a permanent home that they built with their own two hands.
None of us going have extensive construction skills; we can hammer, drill, measure, sand, paint and lift things, simple things, but that doesn't matter. We'll be learning a lot on the job, working hard, having fun, coming back tired in the evening, then doing it all over again. I'm excited to get to know my fellow travelers and also the people we'll work with in Milwaukee, excited to see this city, and to make myself useful, being one piece of the puzzle in helping a community.

We hope to be witnesses to amazing things during this next week, and I can't wait to find out what they'll be.

Em: Christmas Music

I love Christmas music--to a point. I love singing it by myself and in church choir, I love listening to the good old classics sung by Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bing Crosby (especially his duet with David Bowie!). I love it all, but I could never spend my days listening to the radio station that only plays Christmas music. There's enough that people stress out over during the holiday season already, and I would not want to be stressed out even more by something that I usually enjoy. Every store you go into to by gifts, it seems like, is always tuned to that radio station. Most of the Christmas music I like the best though is the church stuff. I mean, that's what Christmas is, a church holiday. I've always found it so interesting how it's supposed to be about celebrating Jesus' birth, but the way we celebrate it has so many pagan influences. Christmas trees did not grow in Israel, I'm pretty sure. Santa Claus, although showing goodwill towards all people in a way that I think Jesus would be proud of, he's...well, I don't know where he came from or why.

One Christmas album I could listen to forever is "Keepers Christmas," a collection put out by Minnesota Public Radio that has simply beautiful renditions of tunes I thought I would hate--but don't-- and some very nice original ones as well. Lots of the musicians are from the Twin Cities, and if you listened to MPR's morning show, you'd recognize lots of voices, like the Steeles, the Roches, Neal and Leandra, and Butch Thompson. I think you can still buy it online and in the Minnesota Store in Mall of America. My parents have played it every year since I was little, and without even trying I could sing along with every track, it's so ingrained in my mind.

On December 13, we'll be having a big Christmas hooha/concert at our church. It's lots of fun, but being in the choir and the bell choir makes it a busy night for me and my family. It lasts about two hours or so, and my feet always hurt afterwards. The price we pay. We always sing the "Hallelujah Chorus" at the end, and the audience stands up and is given music to sing with us. It's so funny to see them try really hard to sing the parts in the beginning, then eventually fold their arms in resignation and just watch us. I don't blame 'em though, it's a hard song to sightread.

Now, Hannukah is coming up on December 11th, sundown, but I only know one song for this: "The Hannukah Song" by Adam Sandler. In this song, you basically learn the name of every famous Jewish person in showbusiness, and many creative ways to make the word "Hannukah" rhyme with everything. I'm sure it doesn't really show the true meaning of the holiday, but if you like Sandler's humor, then you'll laugh through the whole thing. But I'd rather find a Hannukah song that doesn't include the words "smoke some marijuanikah, it's time to celebrate Hannukah." Any ideas?