I don’t really believe I am excessively OCD, but I do have a fondness for tidiness and organization. Sometimes on Monday mornings my house looks as if the Jolly Green Giant picked it up in a huff and shook it so hard things fell off the wall. Especially if our little princess has been here because all I do is play with her, no housework. I begin my projects before I ever drop my feet to the floor on a Monday morning. All the time I am having my second cup of coffee I am looking at that big piece of dried mud or maybe it’s “cow mud”, laying on my kitchen floor. I know my husband sees this glob of cow dropping that has come loose from his big mud “clod hoppers” but he pretends not to see, so I must clean this before I swallow another drop. He used to smoke years ago, which shows that I have been this way a long time, and as soon as he placed a smoked butt into the ashtray, I was grabbing it, going to the sink to wash and clean it up, every time.
It makes me think about my little grandmother. She was somewhat this way in as she would sweep her floors many times a day. She always had a broom sage broom or two or three standing in each corner of her house. These are made from the broom sage, also known as broom sedge, growing on the sides of the road and in the overflowing fields at this time. My grandaddy would gather several sticks of this straw and bind it together with strong twine at four-to-six-inch intervals and leave the loose ends free to sweep the dirt off the floors. We have so much of this plant here on our ranch and our cows don’t eat this grass, so my farmer tries to douse his fields with chemicals to kill off the offender. The bigger grocery and plant nurseries even sell this stuff as a novelty. I could probably enhance my bank account if I decided to gather and sell broom sage.
I gathered some of the straw not too long ago and made me a broom to sweep my back porch and just to really add to the character of my back porch. Every time I sweep, I have to get a real straw broom and resweep as this little broom leaves pieces of the fluffy part of the broom all over the floor. I never noticed that on my grandmothers’ floors. I guess this could be because I now so many years later, visualize just how things were nearly perfect when I was a child growing up in her house.
We love pimento and cheese and homemade is always so much better
1-pound shredded sharp cheddar cheese, 4 ounces softened cream cheese, ½ cup of Blue Plate Mayonnaise, 1 (4 oz jar of drained chopped pimento), ¼ t. black pepper, 1 t. garlic powder, salt to taste. Combine all ingredients and allow ingredients to combine in the refrigerator for several hours.
