Apple Cobbler and morning coffee
As it is in a small town, the welcome mat is always rolled out for anyone, anytime. I decided to join Don and go have coffee with them last week. And, if you know me, I am baking something to take along.
With a deep freezer full of apples from last summer’s bountiful crop, what to bake was an easy decision. An apple cobbler was put together and baked fresh before 8:00 am, leaving plenty of time to cool before 10 o’clock coffee.
I picked Don up from the church and then drove the two town-length blocks to where we would join the group for coffee. As we are discovering, a common way is for the men to gather around one table and the women to gather around another. From our time living in Niverville, MB, where most of the people were from a Mennonite heritage, the same phenomena occurred. We were told that this was typical of Mennonite and Hutterite gatherings. Ever since then, we just call it “Mennonite-style”.
I did not break with convention to go and sit with the men therefore I cannot comment on their conversation. But coffee talk around the women’s table covered such titillating topics as the delicious cranberry coffee cake made by Myrtle and served as Ken’s birthday cake; to speculation as to the possible identity of a critter spotted in our yard last evening; to ceramics and lastly, broken teeth and or false teeth plates. Now let me expand on a couple of these topics.
About the critter. It was barely darker than dusk the evening before. Just light enough to see a small dog or large cat-like shape beneath one of the apple trees. It was digging in the snow for the ground apples and while doing so I could make out a bushy tail. Meanwhile inside the house was a symphony of whining, barking, yelping and a choreography of near-acrobatic jumps and twists whilst the girls (Thistle and Jade) were trying to tell us something was out there and they wanted to bolt out of the house madly barking and running. Our dogs no nothing of hunting skills, so acting stealth to stalk their prey was out of the question! After describing this creature to the ladies and adding that this animal can run very fast, they all agreed that it was most likely a raccoon. After coffee and sharing this information with Don, he said a very similar conversation happened at the men’s table. They too believe the animal was likely a raccoon. This was good to know.
Broken teeth and or false teeth plates. Anne, one of the women that I knew, asked how I was. I replied with good, but I broke a piece from a molar, doing something that I would rather not confess to. A woman sitting to my right chimed in and said that she broke her bottom plate once. She went on to explain that she and her husband were wrestling and she had bitten his arm, evoking a good holler from him. But at the same time, he flung his arm and her bottom plate flew across the room and broke. She concluded the tale with a confession that it was a very expensive wrestling match. The story garnered quite a few chuckles. But it wasn’t until another gal said that the only thing that could have made that story any better was if she would have told us that the wrestling match occurred last week. That’s when the side-splitting laughter began!
Yes, you never know what to expect when you go out for coffee!
