Could we post the first few paragraphs of our memoirs here for critique?

This is from my memoir/cookbook, Fry Bacon. Add Onions: The Valentine Family & Friends Cookbook (A memoir in food of growing up Pennsylvania Dutch.)

In my 2006 short story collection, My Last Romance & other passions, there is a story called "Treat Yourself To the Best". It is about a young woman from a north central Pennsylvania rural town who moves to Philadelphia and meets and marries a guy from a well-bred suburban family. She genuinely loves her family but whenever she takes her husband back there to visit she is both a little defensive of her lively, exuberant, boisterous family and astonished that her elegant husband loves being with them so much. In the story, she returns with her husband for a sausage-stuffing party in their barn. The barn itself has always embarrassed her because it is one of the Mail Pouch Tobacco barns that were once so ubiquitous in Pennsylvania. The sign on the barn reads, "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco: Treat Yourself to the Best".

Fifi, the heroine of the story, cannot quite understand why Tim, her husband, is so fascinated by her family and so enthusiastic about participating in their activities --- such as stuffing sausage. I wrote the story because, once I left Pennsylvania, I was always aware of how much people loved it when I would tell about the things that, to me, where normal parts of life --- making huge crocks of sauerkraut, pickling and preserving whatever the garden yielded, spending hours on old logging trails filling buckets with blackberries or in fields picking wild strawberries. To me that was just what people did. I was unaware of the fact that there were people who had never spent warm spring days kneeling in the yard digging up dandelions for that night's dinner.

I'm sure there are other cultural heritages that incorporate whatever bounty the world has to offer but among Pennsylvania Dutch people making good use of nature and finding ways to serve it and preserve it is a long standing tradition.

Most Pennsylvania Dutch families evolved from immigrants who were peasants in "the Old Country". They learned, out of necessity, to use everything they could to feed their families and they devised ways of preserving those things through the long, harsh winters. Pickling, preserving, smoking, canning were necessary to get a large family through the bitterly cold winter months. As I worked on the recipes for this book I was continually aware of how so much of the food that was part of family tradition was also making good use of commonly available food sources that were abundant and cheap. My Gram Werner used to say that the reason pigs were so valuable was because you could use every part of them except the squeak. In the cold hill country of Pennsylvania maple trees grew in such abundance, that maple syrup was a frequently used sweetener. Cows were kept for milk, cream, butter, cheese and sour cream. When I read these recipes now some seem so rich and loaded with calories but back then people needed those rich, calorie-laden foods to see them through long days in the fields or the factories or lumbering in the forests.

Well here it is. Sock it to me and don't worry about it because I have no intention of publishing anything. It's just something that helps me therapeutically. I need to get it out. By the time you finish reading it you may see why it needs to come out and into a latrine where it belongs perhaps. The last time I took an English course was 20 years ago when I was 30 and in nursing school. Good grammar is a distant memory. Just critique it honestly. The only thing I ask is to not be mean spirited.

Graveyard on the 3rd Floor

[i]Showing up for a fill in position as a nurse on another floor, I get off the elevator and into a very different environment. It seems as though I have stepped off into a different century, perhaps the 1800s. Oh my gosh, it couldn't be, but there are individual rooms with bars on them; paint and wood crumbling to the floor; a few patients here and there, unkempt, the smell of urine and feces hitting my nose, I fight off what my stomach yearns to do. I turn around to ask the nurse that brought me here how on Earth there could be such a place in the 21st century, but she was gone. I walk down the corridor and start visiting each patient to try to do what I can, and then I see it. I couldn't believe it, but there it was; a grave yard complete with tombstones, here on the 3rd floor!! Dear God in Heaven!! Have I gone mad!!! How could this be?? I move on. I treat my patients as best I could, all the while thinking that I will report this situation to the proper people when I get off this floor. When it's time to do my nursing notes, I find no charts. I ask a co-worker where the charts are and she said, "Up there," pointing to the cabinets up above. I look inside and find several old fashioned metal bedpans with crumbling paper inside, obviously, the charts.[/i]

I gasp and sit up in my bed, my whole entire body drenched in sweat. Another dream, yet another dream. Every night, almost every single night I have to endure these crazy dreams. They follow me around the next day, and sometimes several days, depending on how strong the next dream is, then the next dream follows me around. They are vivid, long dreams; no, not dreams, they are nightmares that invade my head.

Other than bad dreams, I sleep fairly well. I finish my night's sleep and wake to my 5:30 a.m. alarm. My husband Evan has already gotten up at 5:00 a.m., made coffee, and is doing his a.m. internet searching, most likely Harley-Davidson forums. I get dressed, play with my Lab Anna, feed her and my cat Dagny, make my lunch, which is always something low calorie, low fat, with a big, giant mug of ice water, (I gained 30 pounds over the last 2 years and am trying to lose it, have lost 18 pounds so far), and I'm out the door by 7:30 a.m. I get to work by a little before 8:00 a.m., say hello to my co-worker our coordinator Sandra and I settle down to my desk and look to see what my day holds in store for me. I'm a registered nurse for a company that provides personal care services for people in their homes and I go around supervising nursing assistants and writing that up in the patient's charts. It's the closest thing to not being a nurse and still be a nurse, because I can't stand the stress of being a hospital nurse; and I have proven that to myself.

I get to work and am told that we are having an in-service on some new equipment for nurses at the hospital that will probably last all day. So, I sit down and there's a class full of other nurses. There's a special hat we have to wear, and special shoes that have a type of roller blade on them. In order to move from point A to point B, all you have to do is THINK about going from point A to point B and you would do so. It would be like it was reading your mind. It was suppose to be more efficient and save the nurses steps. It was really neat. We took turns learning this thing and I just can't catch on. Only me and another girl just couldn't get it and she finally did, but I just can't.

Again I wake up drenched in sweat. My husband sleeping soundly by my side. Hmmm……good idea those special shoes. Wonder if I can get a patent?

Driving down the road the next day on my way to see one of my patients, I enjoy the countryside. I often daydream on pleasant things, but more often than not, sometimes my travels take me to a road I may have taken on the way to my hospital job that I left over 2 years ago. Or maybe I'll see one of their billboard signs or maybe I'll just think of it for no reason; what matters is, I think of it.

……and what matters is, I think of it, what matters is, I think of it…….