Old Fashioned Customs

When I was growing up, my mother and grandmother always sent home grown vegetables with my dad to work or bouquets of flowers with us to bring to the teacher or up to church during the week. Home baked pies or cookies often accompanied someone to a meeting at school, work or church. Sharing was expected and many afternoons the doorbell would ring around 4 p.m. and Mrs. Allen, a dear friend of my parents and a former home economics teacher at the local high school, would be beaming at me from the porch, a piping hot apple pie in hand. This was what I grew up with and what I carried with me into adulthood.

Sometime in the last 10 years, however, the tenor changed whenever I’d bring something homemade or home grown into work. The first time I noticed this was at a certain job in Manhattan. I remember one of the editors poking at the tray of home made sugar cookies I’d put out in the break room and making a joke about me being a Martha Stewart wanna be. A few years later, I brought home made banana bread to another company. People made more than a little fun of it and I heard some snickers.  Someone actually told me to my face that I was weird. (Well, I am, but for bringing in snacks?)  That didn’t stop them from devouring it, by the way. And it did come out pretty good.

What’s changed? I’m not sure, but here in the countryside, people remain as generous with homemade, home grown and home baked things as always.

I walked into a local shop and the clerk had a big watermelon on the counter behind her.  That’s not at all what her shop sold so I commented on the gigantic behemoth.

“Oh that,” she smiled, “One of my customers brought it in for me. Isn’t it a doozy?”

Can you imagine bringing a home grown watermelon into the local dry cleaners on Long Island, Manhattan or another major city? They’d probably call the police and assume you’d spiked it with poison or something.

Here, they were planning to dig into it and invited me back later to partake of it!