Western NY Meets The Archers*

  It was Cattaraugus County Fair and I was volunteering at the Ag Discovery Stand

Not that I know much about American agriculture but I can hand out stickers and arrange pink plastic pigs in the bran tub (in America, it's a corn tub), with the best of them.  Friday was Miniature Horse Day at our stall.

And here's Cal, with his star, Easter Lilly.

She can play dead, do the steal-the-blanket trick and hop over a few jumps.

But whatever you do, don't call her a pony.

Her friend, Impression, gets a pedi.

There were larger equines too. Watching some of the classes, you'd almost think yourself back in England, if it wasn't for the leather straps they wear just below their knees. Does that date from a time before lycra?

    There were some other differences.. Like the saddle-seat class. I just love that get-up....

Likewise the show-horse class and the ladies' sidesaddle..........

Someone lost a shoe but luckily the ferrier was on hand. Not farrier but ferrier, which perhaps, like many American expressions, is truer to the original word...

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the showground,  there was a use for that extra-large T-shirt.

 And someone else got a last-minute trim...

Mwah mwah

 Wait a minute, am I at the right show?

 Much more to come - including racing piglets and the remains of a demolition derby. Watch this space.

* American readers might not know this but The Archers is a popular radio soap about life in an English village.

Now What's Going on Here?

Much more on the high spot of the Cattaraugus County year after the weekend.........

A Sad Farewell

  Some British readers might sympathise with this. Our village shop has closed. Not that it was any great shakes. It always had a musty smell that lingered on the plastic bags in the car and in the house after you got  the stuff home. I rarely bought anything there, apart from milk and the local paper which you could usually guarantee would be fresh. Though one time I needed some of those small frozen onions to make one of my few American signature dishes, creamed onions, for Thanksgiving (I like them because they were the favourite dish of Errol Flynn as General Custer in They Died With Their Boots On).  I noticed the sell-by date was some time last year, so I pointed it out to the checkout girl. "Oh Darn", she said, or something stronger, "That's always happening. I cleared out some shelves and found some yoghurt which had, like, mould growing on it (except she said mold) yeeeaaaw."  But it was somewhere you could park right outside - it was actually called "Park and Shop" - and rush in to get your milk without the palaver of a long queue. There was very rarely a queue of any sort. And at one time they sold maple syrup made by some people up our lane, so it actually had our lane's name on it, which was great for presents.But now it's gone and there's going to be a Dollar General instead, which will lower the neighbourhood's tone a few notches. (Think Woollies in the last sad years before it went bust and the sort of places you used to find it.) And we'll have to resort to getting milk from the garage.

Flowers and Flowers and More Flowers

Update: The clematis, one of my few gardening successes, currently adorning the sunny side of the garden shed, has insisted on being included. I waged a one-person war to save it from caterpillar speculators that couldn't find any more room on the oak leaves. When summer finally gets here, it's worth it.

The mountain laurel (above - a few weeks ago) was something I never saw before I came to WNY. It has  the most exquisite flowers. They live wild up in the wooded hills but our two stunted specimens have been regularly eaten by deer most winters, especially when I forget to put a net round them. But they struggle on.

Meanwhile multiflora roses (aka those !@#$$**! prickers) seem to have absolutely no natural enemies. They're beautiful for a couple of weeks in June and a pain in the neck the rest of the time, turning any untended parts of the garden into a Sleeping Beauty-style inpenetrable jungle. I swear they actually reach out and grab you as you try to fight your way past. It takes all sorts around here.

Thatched Cottage Western NY Style

Am I hallucinating? Suffering from separation anxiety or clinical nostalgia? Did I just doze off and wake up in Hampshire? No, this really is in our local town, Olean, New York, though I suppose the picket fence gives it away. It makes a change from the usual clapboard but it really should have roses growing over the door, Hollywood-style.

Seriously, our neighbourhood is not one for experimental housing - most people don't have the wherewithall for that.  So it was a pleasant surprise, tucked away on an ordinary sort of residential street. What's next? A Fish and Chip Shoppe?  I doubt it. It's not that sort of America around here.

Western NY Treasures: Buffalo's Italian Memories

The small, scuffed sandals,  worn by a long-ago little girl, balance on top of an old travelling trunk. Next to them, a crochet hat and a lacy white dress.  Nearby,  a  glass case displays a Bishop’s red socks and his gold-embroidered gloves.

  The new museum at the Italian church in Buffalo is exactly the sort of museum I love;  no high-tech stuff,  just a glorious cornucopia of objects, a goldmine of memories.  And it tells a tale of hardship and homesickness, tears and laughter,  that  speaks to anyone who’s left their home for somewhere else, including me.   

  The inner-city church, St. Anthony of Padua has been a focus for the Italian community in our nearest metropolis   since 1891. Then, Buffalo,  on the eastern shore of Lake Erie,  was one  of America’s richest cities,  a rising commercial and industrial force and immigrants, including thousands from impoverished southern Italy, poured in, many lured by dodgy recruiting agents.

  

These days,some 80 people still attend the Sunday Italian Mass,  more on special feast days.  But most descendants of the Italian settlers have left the neighbourhood for more affluent areas  No longer mostly dockers,  labourers, organ-grinders,  the butt of cruel jokes,  but policemen,  business leaders,  doctors, lawyers and politicians -  assimilated Americans.  Italians have contributed rather more to America than macaroni and the Mafia.

   Is it still worth preserving their ethnic heritage?  St Anthony’s new parish priest thinks so. Monsignor Fred  Voorhes  (the name’s Dutch;   the Italian bit comes from his mother), inherited a church which already oozed history, resplendent with murals and statues:  St Martha,  St Rosalia, St Anthony of course, cradling Baby Jesus, St Lucy holding her eyes on a plate.  

But rooting around in cellars and attics, he found a lot more.  “Why hide these wonderful things that people would enjoy seeing?”  If nothing else, the courageous efforts of the  migrants,  travelling to the New World, was worth commemorating.

   Monsignor Voorhes found room for the museum in the church basement. An appeal to Italian-Americans in, as he put it, the “fashionable suburbs” raised 8,000 dollars.  More interesting were the objects donated.   A woman had just called to offer her grandfather’s  “railroad watch” (he’d worked on the railways) and her grandmother’s christening robe, from her baptism in St Anthony’s in 1902.

    The diocesan archives turned up probably the most valuable exhibits,  a rich set of fiddleback vestments, the kind used in the days when the Latin Mass was still the norm.  

    There are reliquaries and tabernacles,  zampogna - Italian bagpipes - and a mandolin,  elaborate silk banners, painstakingly worked and inscribed with the name of a women’s group,  “Societa Femminile S.Raffaele Arcangelo”, a faded Boy Scout flag.

 Msgr Voorhes’ predecessor,  Father Secondo Casarotto, himself born in an Italian village, was an avid historian and had already collected piles of photographs.  Now they’re on the museum walls:  tenement-dwellers, vegetable vendors, children playing in a gutter near a dead horse. Some small boys visiting the museum couldn’t get enough of that one.  

   There are processions winding through streets of houses now mowed-down in the name of urban renewal,  faded sepia basketball teams,  brass bands,  legions of altar boys and  First Communicants,  graduating classes from the now defunct church school.   

  The red socks belonged to Msgr Voorhes’ uncle, Bishop Pius Benincasa, Buffalo's only bishop of Italian blood. He was also distantly related to Saint Catherine of Siena, as is the Monsignor,  “I’ve looked at a portrait of her and we seem to have the same dimple. Now is that purely  coincidence, or was it passed down through the centuries?”

    Buffalo has fallen on harder times, the old industries disappearing,  the population declining,  several of the city’s great churches closed, including some built by other ethnic groups, Polish, Irish, German.   The museum has come at the right time,  before people truly forget – or stop caring.  It depicts not just a vanished Italian community but a vanished Catholic one - and a vanished America.  

“Tell your British readers we’re only 20 miles from Niagara Falls,” said Msgr Voorhes, “Come and see us!”

You Know Who You Are, Ma'am

   Hubby has related a sorry story. On the way home from a business meeting today, he drove through lots of Western New York villages. Near one of them, Java, (another of those local international names) he spied a farm stall with some likely-looking peaches and stopped to buy some. And very juicy they were too - my first decent ones of the season. I'm always amazed that peaches grow in Western New York, considering the hard winters.
  It was one of those stalls with an "honesty box" for putting your money in and mostly that works well around here. While he was there, the lady owner came out and told him that a woman had just stopped and made off with several bottles of maple syrup and other produce without having the decency to pay.  Apparently the security camera missed the car's number plate, but, said the lady, "It got a good look at her face".  I hope she sent the photo to the local paper. Farmers in these parts have enough trouble making ends meet without vile people like that to contend with. Well, if she, or whoever benefited from the maple syrup, happens to be reading this blog....