Ever hear of sorla keporla? Probably not. It's mostly likely Yiddish, doubtless means a mixed up mess. I’ve never heard anyone else but my own family use the term.

It's a farmer's salad - sliced cucumber and tomatoes right out of the garden. My mother used to make it on hot summer nights like the ones we've been having recently.  

It had onion too, grated into unrecognizable mush by my mother’s strong right arm (and almost certainly a little knuckle juice to add to the flavor) so my father wouldn't complain - he didn't know he ever ate onions but he did all the time - but beware if a piece was large enough to be identifiable. He DIDN’T EAT ONIONS!!

Green beans if they were available, green and red peppers sliced small, a container of cottage cheese and one of sour cream, all tossed together. Crusty Italian bread and butter and ice cream for dessert to give us brain freeze.

All we needed on muggy humid summer nights in Peoria in the late 40's when I was growing up. We would eat on the front porch seated on the swing or the steps, balancing our bowls on our laps, our iced tea set down beside our feet in glasses dripping with sweat, trying to catch whatever breeze came along no matter how stinking it might be. We could smell the mash from Hiram Walkers on nights like that. And the iron smelters from Keystone. And maybe the fetid slow moving Illinois River if the wind was right. Even though we lived up on the bluff.

We would bring the  round black iron bladed fan out to the porch, with its two or three extensions attached to the fraying cord – careful not to get our fingers too close to the narrow inadequate grating protecting the blades or they could be cut off! but you could get mesmerized by the rhythmic turning of the old fan. You had to sit close to the fan to get any benefit from it, it was too small to do much good. My little sister and I fought to maintain our territory right in front of the tiny breeze until one of the other of our parents would get roused from their torpor and smack us or threaten to send us to bed early.

On the lawn a million fireflies – lightening bugs or glow worms we called them. We’d catch some and pull off their neon luminescence and arrange it like a glowing halo on our ring finger.  Crickets and locusts buzzing all around. And mosquitoes, big and fat and when we squashed them, they’d  leave disgusting blood splatter on our arms and legs.

Maybe there’d be some sparklers mom would produce from a hidden cache.

And the families across the street and our next door neighbors would be doing the same. But they didn’t have sorla keporla for supper – I know that for sure.

Another world. Another life.