Ozark Oddments

Taking a very deep breath

2012-01-30T11:58:00.001-05:00

I have not been gifted with the gift of hospitality. Mymother had it. My sister has it. I do not. If I had family in the area then it probablywould have happened more frequently because of family birthdays and holidays.But I don’t. And I haven’t.

I am guessing that I can probably count on one hand the numberof times we have invited another couple to a meal at our house, and maybe ontwo hands the number of times I have other women at the house for lunch.

However, I recognize the need to show hospitality, and Irecognize the need to step out of my comfort zone. And I have made a New Years’resolution to try to do this at least once a month.

So, I am just not very comfortable doing this. But I am doingit today.

Part of the problem is that I embarrassed for tworeasons: (1) the way my house looks because of structural defects and (2) the way my house looks because I am a lousy (wondering now what the difference is between "lousy" as in "very bad" and "lousy" as in "covered with lice") housekeeper. I can’t do anything about the structural defects of my house that are embarrassing-- ceiling that sags in parts, chunks missing from the old, tired, and veryworn-out linoleum, hideous paneling. But I can do something about being a lousyhousekeeper. Over the weekend, I did manage to sweep down the drapingcobwebs, and wipe up the thick layer of dust covering everything, and actuallymop the floor and vacuum. I have spruced it up as best I can.

In about 40 minutes, a woman from church is coming forlunch. I can do this, I am telling myself. I can do this.

And 10 minutes ago, I let the cat in, who proceeded to throwup in about 5 different places in the kitchen and under the table.

Oy vey.

So, now the kitchen floor is even cleaner.

Poop 101

2012-01-20T16:09:00.000-05:00

We have had the contents of our septic tank sucked out 4times since we moved here in 1981. Without fail, the men who show up with theirtank trunk to cart off the contents have been very pleasant and cheerful.Perhaps part of it has to do with the amount they charge for this service, buteven so, they seem genuinely to enjoy their job – or at least not to mind it.

It invariably seems that the tank needs to be pumped out inthe winter, and poor Richard has usually spent several hours in the freezingcold trying to figure out if the reason the toilet is not flushing correctly isthat the tank full or if it because the line leading out of the tank is frozen.He has some handy dandy gadgets to achieve this, including a snake thingy thatattaches to his drill and a device that fits on the hose to shoot water at high-pressuredown the pipe, but today, he couldn’t get it flowing again.

As I got in my car at 8 am to drive to town, he said, “I’veused up all my tricks. This is beyond me,” and by the time I returned home 1hour later, the poopologist with the truck and a tank on the back had arrivedand was backing up the driveway.

He was a delightful man. He gave us a very humorous lecture –Poop 101 he called it – on how the process works and how to keep the bacteriahappy that are vital to the tank functioning properly. I listened for a bit with agrin on my face and then went inside to commence work. I have a feeling he keptup a steady stream of humorous conversation the entire time he was here.Richard came in with a smile on his face just having paid him almost $200.

It is possible that this guy who spends his livinghauling… uhhh… stuff may have had other dreams for his life when he was younger.His dad owned the business – in fact, the first time we needed the services ofthe “septic system sucker" he came with his dad, but I know he doesn’t takehis work home with him in a brief case, I doubt that he has a stress-inducedulcer, and I imagine he sleeps pretty good at night.

Gettin’ the heck out of Dodge

2012-01-12T21:04:00.000-05:00

To balance what will be sad memories tomorrow, we havedecided to go to Springfield to play a bit. It seemed like a good idea earlierin the week when the temperatures were hovering near 50.

I got up thismorning before "dawn had cracked" and let the cat out at about 5:30.As soon as I opened the back door and felt the blast of frigid air and saw thedusting of snow on the ground, I thought to myself, “you are not going to beout there very long.…” She hesitated a moment on the porch, and I suggested shemight want to come back in the house, but as a cat will do, she bolted.

I was right ofcourse. It takes me 19 steps to go from the back door to the computer in myoffice, and within 10 seconds or so of sitting down and starting to work, shewas up on the bird feeder outside the window meowing at me to let her in. Icouldn't see her, because it was still very dark, but I could hear the pitifulwail.

I am very glad we no longer have to take care of animals. Shortly after wemoved here, we had a lot of chickens and ducks and raised rabbits for a while,and I can remember having to go out on bitter cold mornings and dump the iceout of their frozen bowls. On mornings like this I am also glad I don’t workout of the home. In later years, when I was the janitor at the post office,part of my job was to shovel snow, so both of us would have to go in very earlyto clear the walks in front of the building and put salt down.

Trying not toremember the details of last January 13 just seems to intensify them. When wegot the call at 11:45 that our son had “taken a turn for the worse,” I left thehouse immediately and drove back to the nursing home. I was there in about 3minutes. His room was at the end of the hall, right by an entrance with twosets of double doors. They made quite a racket when they were opened. I wentthrough the first set and through the glass of the second set I could see aclot of people standing at the nurses station at the end of the hall. As Iopened the second set of doors, they all turned and looked at me.

I knew right thenthat he had died. The nursing home social worker was with them, and she startedmoving toward me, surprisingly fast for a large woman. I hesitated for a secondoutside his door, which was shut, and started to go in and she shook her headat me. I guess she thought they were still trying to revive him. She reached meand put her arms around me, and then at that moment the door opened and the nursepractitioner and the RN and some others came out of room.

I looked at him lyingthere in the bed. His eyes were half open and his mouth was slightly open. Hehadn’t just taken a turn for the worse. He was dead.

I closed his eyesand shut his mouth. I kissed him on the forehead. He was still warm and hisskin was pliable, and his hand felt soft when I picked up, but very heavy. Hisface was very peaceful, and rightly so: newly dead people look so peaceful becauseall the muscles in their faces have relaxed.

I sat down by thebed and started to make phone calls. A minute or two later, Richard walked inthe room. He looked at Nathaniel, and just for a second, he thought Nathaniel wasasleep.

Looking back on January13, 2011, I see details in slow motion and then they speed up almost liketime-lapse photography. I continued to make phone calls. The CNAs came in to washhis body. People from hospice came in. The funeral home arrived to take hisbody. They wheeled him out. Judy and Charlie came.

We don’t know forsure what caused him to die when he did. It happened very quickly: He wasworking on the laptop and stopped to go to the bathroom. He got pale and clammy,and they helped him get to the bed. He was worried about his cellphone getting knocked on the floor so they put it on the table. As they helped him lay down, his eyes rolled back andhis pupils became fixed and dilated and he died. My friend, who is a nurse practitioner,guessed that the massive tumor in his gut compressed the vagus nerve and shut hisbody down.

And tomorrow we will have Italian food at a goodrestaurant. We will see a movie that got good reviews, and we will take sometime to reflect on our son. One thing that I am most thankful for is that wehad almost a year to mend fences with him and bandage over some old wounds, sothat we were on good terms when he left his body behind.

Catching up

2012-01-11T07:50:00.001-05:00

I've missed you. It's been more than a year.
You don't love me, don't call me, don't need me, don't pay me…
You've a heart of stone. You look terrible.

I love this line that Faye Dunaway delivers as “Vicky” inthe original Thomas Crown Affair, as she gets off the plane and greets theinvestigators, having been summoned to catch the oh-so-clever mastermind behindthe bank robbery. The remake of the movie was not bad, but why mess with aclassic? The original is right up there near the top of the list of my favoriteall-time movies.

I think if my blog could talk it probably would be sayingsomething similar.

I have been neglecting it lately. I admire people who canmange to write something interesting every day or nearly every day.

Except I don’t think I look all that terrible. Last week Iactually went in to see my new beautician to have my hair trimmed before it gotout of control after the last amazing haircut she gave me. I think I used tofrustrate my old beautician (who retired) because I would wait sometimes a yearbetween appointments, and in the meantime, I would hack at my bangs and thefront part of my hair with scissors to keep it out of my eyes, while the restof it kept on growing, and thus destroying her careful layering around my face.

I tend to write marvelous things when I wake up at 4 a.m.and lay there waiting a while before I disturb my husband’s sleep by startingwork, but by the time I do fire up the computer, I have switched gears and amthinking about organizing my day and which manuscripts I am going to work onfirst.

I don't want to write about the grieving process all of the time, but it is unavoidable at the moment.

January 13 is looming in our minds.

Friday the 13th.

Not all anniversaries are cause for celebration.

Last week we ate at one of the sub-sandwich shops that arespringing up in our towns. Coming in right behind us was a young mother with herlittle boy – maybe 3 years old. He knew the routine. As she told them what she wanted on her sandwich, he went over to the high chairs and began trying to drag one over to the table where they would eat. Shesat across from him. The little guy was loud and laughing andplaying an eating game with her. We smiled and laughed at him, remembering ourown son when he was that age. We were not able to take him into a restaurantuntil he was about 4 years old – he was just too loud and disruptive as a “toddler.”

There was a memorable trip with my parents when he was about 18 months. We moved from Los Angeles to Oregon and my mom and dad came along to help us with him. When we stopped to eat, one of us inevitably ended up gobbling down his or her food and taking him out to the car so the other diners in the restaurant could have their meal in peace.

And then after we stopped laughing and talking about it, I sat there crying quietly and eating my Southwestern wrap –fortunately there was only one other person in the restaurant who could see me, I am not sureshe noticed.

There was so much I wanted to say to that young woman.

What was lost is found...

2012-01-06T20:47:00.002-05:00

Last September (can it really be that long ago!) I was in ablue funk and feeling a bit frantic as well because I had misplaced three journals. I know that keeping the journals served a very useful purpose: theyallowed me a safe way to express anger and frustration about things my husband and our son were doing without harming them in the process.

But did I really want to keep them?

Should something happen to me, did I want to leave them behind for Richard to find and read (assuming he could read my handwriting)?

I didn't think so.

After several intensive searches of the various bookshelves throughoutthe house and under the clothes in the drawers of my dresser, I was not able tofind them anywhere. I never totally stopped looking for them, but I decided notto invest any more time in the search.

Richard said not to worry about it. As soon as I stopped looking, they would turn up. Things have a way of doing that, he said.

It has been rather warm here, and last night I was lookingfor an extra large t-shirt to wear instead of my flannel pajama top, and so Istarted rooting around in the bottom drawer of my dresser where I keep the t-shirtsthat are too large for me to wear in public.

There they were.

I stared at them in disbelief. On the one hand I am relieved that I found them, but onthe other hand, I am bewildered at how I could have searched the drawers of mydresser a bunch of times and not searched that drawer. I know I searched the top andmiddle drawers, but why didn’t I search the bottom drawers? It doesn’t make anysense at all. None.

Maybe it was act of God

Now that I have them, I am reluctant to toss them out.I suspect that tucked away in the pages will be memories of our son that I donot want to throw away. I may have to use the snap-off razor knife tosurgically remove the bad and keep the good.

Home, sweet home…

2011-12-31T16:02:00.000-05:00

He suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said “Bother!”and “O Blow!” and also “hang spring-cleaning!” and bolted out of the housewithout even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling himimperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel…and scraped and scratchedand scrabbled and scrooged… until at last, pop! His snout came out into thesunlight and he found himself rolling around in the warm grass of a greatmeadow….”

And so Mole temporarily abandons his burrow and gets involved in anamazing adventure with Badger and Rat and Toad…

And so it was on the last day of 2011 with that I popped outof my cave of an office and into the sunlight and took a walk with the cat. Ofcourse it is not Spring--that is most definitely some months away, and I amnot doing cleaning -- but it is unusually warm today, almost 60 degrees (even if a it is a bitbreezy), and I too could feel the call…

Squeaker and I tooka walk out to the pond. I fret a bit about the pond surviving fromyear-to-year, especially when we have had drought, and indeed, it was very low asSummer segued into Fall. But, the recent rains have filled it up, almost tothe brim. That means it will likely survive the summer.

Our land slopes from the house up toward the wood, and formssort of a ridge, creating a beautiful south-facing slope where the wet weatherspring flows along the the edge of the flat pasture.

I have often daydreamed about clearing some of the trees andbuilding a house into the side of the slope.

Instead of heading straight back the way we came to thepond, the cat and I took a left turn and headed toward the spring. It has a bitof water in it from rain earlier in the week, and so we hopped across and headed up the slope toward theupper pasture.

And look-it here..

Someone else also had the idea of building a home into thesouth slope.

Yes, the cat has to look too.

Hard to say whether this house is occupied or abandoned. Inany event, if someone does live here now, they have has not swept the porchrecently.

And feeling much refreshed and invigorated, we head backtoward the house. The cat is feeling so invigorated she does a typical catthing and goes nuts (which is why I suppose our ancestors in the Middle Agesthought cats were possessed), charging around tailed bristled out like a bottle brush, and clawing her way up a tree fora few feet.

Happy New Year to everyone.

See y’all next year.

Kindred spirits…

2011-12-26T21:13:00.001-05:00

Judy and I are standing in her kitchen preparing fresh fruit I brought with me that will be for a fruit salad. She is slicing red seedless grapes. I havesliced two bananas, and sectioned two tangerines and teased the seeds out them,and have carefully peeled the fuzzy skin from some kiwi fruit, and they havebeen sliced and added to the bowl. A lovely ripe pear is waiting. A can ofpineapple has been opened and added with its juice. When I was buying thisfruit, I thought cherries would be a nice, colorful touch, but when the cashierput the small package on the scale and I saw the price was $6.89, I decided wedid not need cherries in the salad.

Charlie (Judy’s husband), his sister (yes Dot, you haveended up on the blog), their mother, and his niece Karen, are all working on ahard jigsaw puzzle of a very fancy snowman that has been laid on a large pieceof green felt.

Earlier, I was trying to help them with it, but not succeedingvery well. I am somewhat spatially challenged. Even so, I can see that laying out this jigsawpuzzle and getting people involved in it is an excellent way for people who donot know each other to become better acquainted.

Dot is waiting for us to finish because she needs to puttogether a Waldorf salad and fix broccoli.

My husband and the other two husbands, Jimmie (who belongsto Dot) and Rick (who belongs to Karen), have moved into the living room andare occupied with a new Kindle Fire that was Rick was given for a present. Richardhas hollered at me a couple of times for the names of the reference books I usefor editing. I can imagine wheels turning: he will be wanting to buy one ofthese and load it with the dictionaries and the style guides I routinely use.

As Judy and I work a way chatting about this and that, Ihear my husband’s voice and his laughter coming from the living room. My heartlifts. It can be a bit frightening to walk into a room of strangers who allknow each other, and I know Richard was nervous about how this was going toturn out. My husband is a rather shy guy. It appears that they have hit it offand that they have things in common to talk about, and that he has foundkindred spirits in these two very nice men. He tells me later he really enjoyedtalking with Rick, and that Jimmie was very witty and funny.

I was worried about Christmas, worried thatnegotiating this holiday that is loaded with memories and stress was going tobe akin to dancing in a minefield. Judy and Charlie and his family were thereto hold our hands and it became a stroll in the park. We are so blessed.

Santa Claus done been here already

2011-12-21T14:26:00.000-05:00

These days, the jolly fat man in the red suit and the whitebeard who gets around in a sleigh pulled by reindeer has morphed into a cleanshaven, slim and trim, younger fellow wearing a brown uniform and driving a bigbrown truck with gold lettering on the side.

He showed up here on Monday with Christmas from Los Angeles,and he showed up in Lakewood yesterday with Christmas from the Ozarks. And therespective families breathed sighs of relief that nothing happened to theseboxes along the way.

Such is the situation when just about all the people onebuys gifts for are 1500 miles away and there is little likelihood that any ofthem will come East for the holiday or that we will travel West. My sisterwould love for me to experience the Italian Christmas Eve seafood meal (squidis usually involved) that is traditional in her husband’s family. If it werepossible to hop on an airplane in Springfield and fly directly to Los Angelesor Long Beach or Orange County, we might actually think about it, but having tochange flights in Denver or Dallas-Ft Worth is an adventure neither of us wantsto participate in at this time of the year.

I remember a Christmas season a very long time ago when myfather took his little kids to downtown Gardena to see Santa Claus in the earlyafternoon. We found him, sure enough, staggering down the street drunk as askunk. My dad was very angry --and he could get rather loud when he was mad -- and I can remember him complaining to somebody about it, but now Idon’t remember if it was in person or on the telephone after we got back home.

I suppose we took our boy to see Santa when he was little,but I don’t remember doing so, and I don’t have any pictures of him sitting onSanta’s lap. I do remember going down to the train tracks several Christmases in a rowto see a special Christmas Train that Burlington-Northern had put together, litup and decorated, with Santa Claus on a flat car. It was quite beautiful.

At any rate, Christmas is coming and we are gettingfat, even if the goose isn’t.

Pressing buttons...

2011-12-19T19:56:00.001-05:00

The last time I was at the thrift store, I picked up a bookfor 25-cents called Three Junes by Julia Glass.

The gold seal on the frontsays “National Book Award Winner.” And indeed, it is a winner. Fenno, one ofthe characters in this finely crafted first novel, muses on the death of hismother…

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch outand compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may passblindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart, and then asingle melancholy week may seem like a year’s pining, one long unfolding note.

I like the accordion analogy almost as well as the “time islike a river…” Time does indeed seem to stretch out and compress itself. Timeindeed does inexorably march forward, and we are coming up now on the first theanniversary of our son’s death. At times, this past year has indeed seemed topass with blinding speed. And then again, it seemed that some on days we were slogging through molasses and the day would neverend.

It often seems like that, even when one is not in the midstof some stressful event. Perhaps it has something to do with the right balanceof “being busy” and having “nothing to do.”

But, the bit about the accordion caused one of those “ohyes” moments too in another way. Funny, sometimes, how memories can betriggered.

My father’s 3 sisters and their families lived within a“long-day’s drive.” We frequently (but not always) spent holidays with theseaunts and uncles and cousins. Sometimes they came down from central andnorthern California to see us and Grandpa, who lived nearby, or sometimes wepiled in the car at the “crack of dawn,” usually the day after Christmas, andheaded north, toward Carmel Valley or Sacramento, depending on which aunt wewere going to see.

When we went to Yuba City, we usually stayed with Aunt Vera,probably because their daughter was just a little older than me. Cousin Markwas just a little younger than me.

I have many comforting of memories of Christmas and Thanksgivingholidays spent with these wonderful people who were our extended family. Theysort of all mush together.

When I read that passage about the accordion I suddenlyremembered that my cousin Mark had an accordion when he was “a kid.” I thoughtit was quite an amazing instrument. Half of the instrument was like the pianokeyboard that I was familiar with because I was taking lessons, but I wasfascinated by those smooth, little black buttons on the otherside that were pressed to make the chords. The instrument was much to heavy for me to strap on and work, but I can remember him playing it and letting me push the buttons. And then I wondered how his fingers knew how tofind the right button to press..

The one that got away

2011-12-15T10:18:00.000-05:00

One of the lessons I have learned in the past year is howimportant it is to tell people who are suffering that you care about them. Youmay not understand what they are feeling, you may not know what to say, you mayhave no words of comfort easily at hand to offer them. You may have no wordsat all; in fact, sometimes it is better not to even try because sometimespeople say the worst possible thing when they are only trying to be kind -- butlet them know you care.

So, when I learned that a friend’s husband’s mother waskilled in an accident, I had Richard fix me a sympathy card. I have a terrible time picking out cards, and the program on his computer allows one to adjust the wording on the card if it isn't quite right.

This will be an especiallyhard thing for this dear man, our former pastor, who drove 90 minutes to spend 5minutes with us at the hospital when Nathaniel had his second operation. Hisfather died last December. I am sure he is not over grieving for the loss ofhis father, and now his mother is gone too.

I grabbed my camera in one hand (one never knows when therewill be something interesting to see) and clutched the envelope in the other, andthe cat and I walked it out to the mailbox for the rural letter carrier to pickup.

Near the head of the road, I was noticing some aluminum canshad collected down below in the thicket -- sometimes teenagers park at the headof our driveway and drink and throw the cans out -- when suddenly I noticed a verylarge deer.

She looked up at me, ears up and twitching, I looked at her,camera still clutched uselessly, and I said, rather stupidly, “Oh, hi there.”

She responded by leaping around, white flag of a tail waving,and took off. And then I saw there was another smaller deer, probably this year’sbaby, and it too raised its white flag and took off. All I could think at thatmoment was “please do not bolt across the highway and get killed.” Fortunatelyfor them, they ran parallel with the highway and disappeared into the brush.

Scared the cat half to death. The camera remained clutched uselessly in my right hand. So this post is not only not illustrated with awonderful shot of this beautiful deer, it is also not illustrated with a hilarious picture ofthe cat with her tail bristled out.

I am a thief…

2011-12-10T19:49:00.001-05:00

The light has come on again, for a while at least, and I amfeeling better than I have for quite some time, well... I was until I opened mypurse this morning to clean it out.

We went to St Louis on Thursday to have a bit of fun. We didsome shopping for things that could only be had at St Louis. We actually hadourselves a Starbucks coffee, thanks to a gift card Richard had received.

We had White Castle Hamburgers in honor of our son’s memory.

His favorite thing to do when he worked the graveyard shift at the ambulancewas to get 10 of them at a time.

He loved going to Forest Park. We went there, to the StLouis Art Museum, and saw beautiful paintings...

including a special exhibit ofMonet’s Water Lilies. Why is walking through an art museum so exhausting?

But the main reason we went was to attend the annualmemorial service hosted by the medical students at St Louis University Schoolof Medicine for families and friends of those who donated their bodies to themedical school during 2011.

Perhaps it seems like a paradox that going to a memorialservice would make me feel better and much less depressed, but that is exactlywhat happened.

Perhaps the moving experience I had at seeing the glorious thechurch with the beautiful stained glass windows…

Photo by Szeke

Perhaps it was feeling the bond with the probably 1,000 other people whowere there – people who were friends or families of the 435 other individuals who had also donatedtheir bodies – who had also come to honor the memories of their loved ones.

Perhaps the overwhelming welling up of emotion when thepianist and the violinist began playing Satie’s Gymnppedia No. 1, Lent etdouloureaux

And the students began coming up the long aisle in pairs and laid flowers onthe basket that contained the names of those who had donated their bodies…

I don’t know, but it was beautiful and wonderful and moving.

I will never know which of those lovely young men and womenwho participated in the program might have studied the body of our son in theiranatomy laboratory, but seeing them and hearing their words about how gratefulthey were for the donation and how it would help them be better physicians…well, it gave me great comfort.

Just before we left for the cathedral in which the servicewas held, we had lunch at a small Vietnamese restaurant. At every Asianrestaurant where we have a meal and chopsticks are brought along with silverware to the table, they are almostalways the cheap bamboo kind that are meant to be thrown away. I usually alwaystake them because there are many useful things that can be done with chopsticksthat have nothing to do with eating (or attempting to eat).

At any rate, at the end of the meal, I grabbed both sets andput them in my purse and thought nothing else about it until this morning. When I tookthem out, I noticed that these were not at all like the throw-away chop stickswe usually get. These looked very much like chop sticks the restaurant wouldhave collected and washed along with the silverware and reused.

I am almost sure I stole the chopsticks.

I didn’t do it on purpose. Honest.

My shadow...

2011-12-05T15:55:00.001-05:00

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me…

A line from a beloved poem by Robert Lewis Stevenson that mymother read to me when I was little girl, probably over and over and over, assuming I was like most other young children who seem not to get tired of hearing things they like over and over and over. Idiscovered this when our boy was little and I would attempt to skip pages ofbooks I had read to him over and over and over – books that he hadmemorized. Every time I tried to turn 2 pages at a time to get through it faster, he always caughtme.

At any rate, I sometimes view the Depression that began stalkingme last December at about this time, when our son’s physical condition took sucha nosedive, as a Shadow that occasionally grasps me around the ankle and tries to trip me up and slow me down andwants to get up close and personal. I would rather not go back on the happypills that the doctor gave me last December. They either worked very well or itwas a placebo effect, but I would just as soon not take the drugs if I can avoidit.

And most of the time I seem to do fairly well. We are only a few days into December, but already I have been feeling Shadow’s arms trying to embrace me in hisdull, gray hug. I am determined to shrug him off. It would be easy to blame thetime of year for this – the deciduous trees are now naked, standing with their skeletonsexposed. Barren. Dull. A cold, gray day today. There is a feeling of wanting toretreat and withdraw and hibernate.

It began to drizzle sleet and some freezing rain as I drove homefrom town this morning, but within a half or so after I had picked up where Ileft off working, a light snow began to sift down, reminding me of how my mother dustedpowdered sugar on a chocolate cake through a wire-mesh strainer.

We watched The Adjustment Bureau Saturday night. The movie intrigued me. Now that I have seen the ending, I must watch it again to pick upthings that I missed the first time through because I was nervous about how it wasgoing to end.

Today I am wondering was it chance, or the devil, or part of a Master Plan, that resultedin my unfortunate fall several years ago in which I fractured my pelvis andspent at least 2 months camped out on the couch and needing a wheelchair to move? I suppose I willnever know, except that I know God worked that event into a marvelous good.

Yesterday,we working together in the kitchen preparing food, with the roles switched. He didthe actual cooking, making cabbage sauteed with green and yellow peppers, dressed with a sweet, Asian style sauce; and a green beandish cooked with hot chili-tomatoes and mushrooms, a bit of sugar. I did thechopping and the assembling of ingredients.

Even as I write, this I can smell the wonderfulpungent odor of boiling vinegar and ginger as he prepares marinated carrots,and he has sprinkled yellow squash split lengthwise with cheese powder and spices. which will be roasted, and fish baked with a thin coating of marinara sauce.Would any of this had happened if that day in June had gone according to plan?

Hard to say, but I am enjoying this new interest of his very much.

Talkin’ turkey

2011-11-24T09:51:00.000-05:00

Having lived in an area where hunting is integral to theculture, I was already aware that the wild turkey is a very clever bird, and “gettinga turkey,” as the hunters here say, is not all that easy. I used to clean housefor a man who was the national champion at turkey calling contest for yearsrunning and he used to tell tales about his adventures hunting them.

Most of us tend to think about turkeys as the dim-witted birdswith the gigantic breasts that are raised in mass quantities for consumption.When I looked into raising a few turkeys for us when we were in our “back tothe land” phase, I was warned that extra care was needed with them because theywere not bright. And indeed, being called “a turkey” is not much of acompliment.

After watching the wonderful PBS Nature program last week “MyLife as a Turkey,” and I may just watch it again on-line, it is so beautifullydone), I have even more respect for the wild birds. The program is based on thejournal kept by Joe Hutto, who hatched16 wild turkey eggs in an incubator and then spent close to 2 years raising themfrom poults to adulthood.

The turkeys taught him a lot. Turkeys live in the now. Theydon’t think about what happened yesterday or the day before or the day beforethat. They don’t think about what is going to happen tomorrow or the day afteror the day after that. They are just concerned about what is happening right….this….minute….

Hutto pointed out that because we are able to think aboutthe past and think about the future that we often times miss the “now” – we arecheated out of truly living because our minds are often elsewhere and we miss now.

At the moment I am definitely in the “moment” because I am somewhatconcerned that something is going to go wrong with the two pies that are bakingin the oven. The timer that is supposed to mean the pies are done has gone offtwice and the pies were definitely not done either time.

One looks like a pumpkin pie but is actually made with butternutsquash. This pie will be taken later this morning to the community-wide Thanksgivingmeal that is being offered free to those who have no place to go (our churchvolunteered to provide dessert). The other also looks like a pumpkin pie but isa sweet potato pie that will go with us at noon to our friends’ house fordinner. They had brought a store-bought sweet potato pie to a recent churchmeal and concluded that it was “nasty,” so I offered to make one.

This is the day that we set aside to give thanks. Thereare somethings about this day that are going to be hard, and I am very thankfulthat these dear people have invited us to their home so that we do not spendthe day by ourselves… and I am indeed most thankful that I have wonderfulmemories of “Thanksgiving past”…. (and excuse me while I see if buzzer goingoff this time – third time’s the charm? -- means the pies are really done)

And I am also thankful that pies appear to be OK…

Quick as a wink...

2011-11-19T20:28:00.001-05:00

My friend Judy graciously volunteered the services of herhusband, Charlie, to help Richard finish the washing machine projected that endedunexpectedly last Thursday when he and the platform yielded to the forces ofgravity, and it landed on his hand.

I am pleased to say that after icing and wrapping with anelastic bandage that it no longer resembles a boxing glove. His knuckles have reappeared and the skin onthe back of his hand once again looks like the skin of a man who is on the farside of 60…

I helped Richard move the platform in front of the basement doorusing an old cart Richard had made for our generator. Why he did not use thecart to move the platform in the first place is one of those small mysteries. Hegot things squared away so that it would be convenient for Charlie to swing byon Friday morning on their way home after the aerobics class – he comes withJudy and walks on the treadmill while we flail around on the other side of thecurtain that divides the large room. Richard was sorely tempted to move the washingmachine himself, but because he had arranged for Charlie to come, he wisely, didnot attempt it. He surely would have hurt himself again.

I prepared for the event by watching a few excerpts from theRed Green show and making sure the roll of duct tape was handy.

Judy and Charlie arrived, and Richard and Charlie disappeared almost immediately out the back door. Judy and I visited for a minute or two discussing wintering-overcare of the impatiens plant that I grew from some starts she gave me...

and doingquite well in front of the window in Richard’s office, and then I grabbed thecamera and we went down to the basement to document the event.

The door to the basement was shut. We stood there for a fewseconds, wondering if we should open it and go in, when suddenly it opened, andthey walked out. We did not get a chance to supervise. The job was done.

Now he has to attach the hoses and we must read theinstructions on how to operate the thing. Both of have a habit of not readinginstructions first, but I think it might be a good idea this time.

It’s not brain surgery…

2011-11-12T18:54:00.000-05:00

I had intended to visit the laundromat on Wednesday to wash our clothes, given that…

our old washing machine was not agitating properly or spinning the cloths because it needed a new belt…
there was no washing machine belt to be had at the local hardware store, it would have to be ordered and we didn’t want to spend any money on it…
and a few months ago we had purchased a new front-loading high-efficiency machine but were waiting to install it until we used up the 5-gallon pail of old soap…

So Richard began working on a new platform to sit the new machine on.

He removed the old platform and cleaned up the area behind the dryer and we found this tiny baby...

the second baby salamander we have found, and one wonders what is going on in our basement behind the closed door!!

The clothes began piling up. Then, I was able to get an appointment on Wednesday to get my hair cut, so we calculated we could wait until Friday until I would have to go to the laundromat to wash the clothes.

There was also a glimmer of hope by late Wednesday afternoon that the new platform Richard is building to keep our new front-loading high-efficiency machine off the floor of the basement would be ready by Thursday and that the new machine would be up and running on Friday.

Thursday morning, however, Richard lost control of the newly completed and much heavier platform as he was trying to move it into the basement and it threw him off balance… he fell, it fell, and it smashed his hand.

None of the bones in his hand or wrist appear to be broken, nothing is numb, and his fingers are warm, so aside from his hand being swollen and significantly bruised, he will likely be OK.

In the meantime, I knew there was no hope that I would escape having to go to THE LAUNDROMAT.

The laundromat has a front-loading high-efficiency machine and I began dithering about trying to operate it (Stephen King wrote a short story about demon-possessed laundry equipment running amok). By Friday morning Richard was somewhat annoyed with me.

We’re not talking about brain surgery here….

It’s just a washing machine.

There will be instructions.

And he was right. It was just a washing machine, there were instructions, and I was able to do four loads of clothes at one time. I returned home euphoric at how easy it was and schlepped the clothes from the back seat of the car to the basement and started the dryer….

And forgot to close the back door of the car. The dome light burned all day and probably into the night, until the battery was dead.

Brain surgery, indeed.

Stackin' up....

2011-11-05T19:07:00.000-04:00

In 2009 I had a running sidebar on this blog where I kept a list of the books I had read and added to the list as I completed one. I intended to keep the list going for the entire year.

When I had reached 68 books and the year was not nearly over with, it occurred to me that this was becoming a source of pride, as though I was saying

Look how many books I have read! Aren't I special!!!

and so I deleted that portion of the sidebar and I stopped counting books.

I began 2010 reading at the same fast pace, but as Spring turned into Summer and we got caught up in all that was going on, about the only reading I did was when I read out loud to Richard and Nathaniel while we were on trips in the car, and by the end of year, while Nathaniel was in the nursing home.

And in 2011… well… grief and the depression that goes with it dropped like shroud. The antidepressant drugs I took helped to keep me going, but even with them smoothing things out, I lost interest in doing many of the things that used to give me pleasure. I quit watching the few TV program I enjoyed. I pretty much lost interest in reading -- I couldn't concentrate on what I was reading even if I was in the mood -- except when Richard was driving us some place in the car.

I still went to the thrift store and the used-book store and I bought books that looked interesting, but I didn’t actually read them. People who care about me and know I love to read loaned me books to read. And I added them to the shelf and there they sat -- about 3 feet worth – collecting dust.

I am pleased that in the past couple of months the gray shroud has begun to lift, and I am once again enjoying a few TV programs and I have started reading again.

I finished the John Grisham book, an amazing collection of short stories … and the Alexander McCall Smith book, another installment in the delightful life of Isabel Dalhousie, and I started the Jennifer Finney Boylan book – a truly fascinating book -- and on a car trip earlier in the week, I started reading the first in Jim Lehrer’s One-Eyed Mack series to Richard.

Then on Thursday, I received this e-mail from Judy

I just finished reading the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. You will love it!!! That's an order. Truly you will love it. You will cry and laugh out loud and not want it to end.

And true to her word, the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society did in fact find its way into my hand yesterday at aerobics class….

I started reading it last night, and I believe her assessment will be correct. I have already laughed out loud, enough so that Richard appeared in the door between the bedroom and the living room and wanted to know “what’s so funny?”

From biscuits to...

2011-10-29T19:18:00.000-04:00

We got a welcome break yesterday from the routine when some friends at church took us for a long drive in the country to see the fall colors -- mostly in Ozark County, a rugged area, where she grew up.

As we passed one place, she pointed and said, “The man who lives there is a banker…”

Richard, sitting next to me in the back seat, thought she had said “…baker,” and piped up

“I love bread. I could eat my way through a bakery.”

I am not sure what she thought about this non sequitur. She didn't say anything, but from what I could see of her face, she was little puzzled and was thinking about how she was going to respond. I quickly told Richard that she had said “banker” instead of “baker” and we had a bit of a laugh, and the conversation veered off into our respective abilities at "hearing" what we thought other people were saying.

But the fact is, he does love bread, and I make a lot of the bread we eat. I occasionally try to create some of the fancy-shaped artisan bread he likes but it seldom works.

I use the same basic recipe and try to put some variety into the shape of the bread – I have a French loaf pan, or I make flat bread in the cast iron skillet, or I use the pizza stone to make pita bread, or I make small round loaves.

Earlier in the week I decided to make Pilgrim’s Bread, which comes from my Mennonite cookbook (but which appears on a number of cooking Web sites) and is not something I ordinarily make for him because it has more oil (I leave the oil out of his bread) and sweetener (I use just enough to keep the yeast happy) which raises the calorie count. It has an interesting texture and flavor, being made with rye flour, corn meal, and wheat flour. I alter the recipe by using sorghum for the sweetener and use all whole wheat flour instead of part white flour.

I had just emptied a large can of peaches into a container and it seemed like it might be a nice size for a small round bread loaf, so I cut out three small loaves, which I thought might turn out sort of like a like giant biscuit. The rest of the dough I made into small “long” loaves.

Richard observed this with some amusement. Offering opinions.

The bread rose nicely but it did not turn out like giant biscuits. It did not hold it shape, but sort of slumped to the side.

Given that the dough was a little dark to begin with, and then I cooked it a little bit too long so it got just a little bit too brown…

When I pulled it out of the oven, well, he began to laugh and for good reason I think…

Not my best moment in the kitchen (although the bread tasted great).

Counting blessings, name them one-by-one

2011-10-24T16:44:00.001-04:00

The aerobics class for geezers starts at 8:00, and as I headed out the door at 7:50 this morning, down the porch steps and around to the driver’s side of my car, I congratulated myself that I would actually arrive on time.

I saw immediately that the tire that looked sort of low yesterday when I got back from church was well and truly flat, so back into the house I went, and just as I asked hubby which of the other two cars I should take, the phone rings, and it is my father.

Happy birthday to you…” he begins to sing…

My dad has a baritone voice, and so naturally, he begins to sing the familiar melody in a funny, high falsetto. Which makes me laugh. I love this man so much.

We talk briefly, and I head down the stairs again, and manage to arrive at aerobics only a few minutes late. At the conclusion of the class, I see as wasp crawling groggily on the floor. The insect has managed not to be stepped on by any of us as we lurch around doing the grapevine and side-step kicks, and so I rescue it using a Styrofoam cup and a piece of paper towel and let it go out the back door.

When I arrive back at the house, I grab my wallet in my left hand, and the keys, the cup, and the paper towel in my right hand, and as I pass the trash can, I throw in everything in that hand. Then, just before I reach the steps up to the second story, I realize that I am no longer carrying the car keys, so I go back to the trash can and find them. It occurs to me that if I had not immediately remembered--remembered right then--that I had thrown them in the trash, how long would we have had to search for them before I would have remembered? I shudder to think about it.

I am now officially 62 years old. Yes indeed. Welcome to the new normal.

Richard tells me my brother called while I was gone, and he will call back later. We leave the house for about 20 minutes to get our flu shots and pick up the mail at the post office.

Not too long after we return home, the phone rings again. It is my sister. She has arrived at work, and once again I hear Happy Birthday, this time in a lovely alto voice.As we chat on the phone, I open the package from her that we have just picked up from the post office and the birthday cards that have arrived. We chat briefly and go about our respective jobs.

About a half-hour later, my brother calls. I hear Happy Birthday for the third time. I used to think my brother was tone deaf, but as I listen to him sing the song, I realize that he is not tone deaf after all. He has written a funny message in the birthday card he sent me, and we laugh together about it.

The day for me is now winding down, but it is two hours earlier in California and a few minutes ago, the phone rings and it is my other brother. He is taking a walk on his lunch break, and is climbing a rather steep hill. He does not sing to me, but I have a pleasant conversation with him and he hangs up.

And before the day draws to a close, I receive yet another phone call.. This one from my brother's wife. She too sings "Happy Birthday", but a different version. This time its the "Put another candle on my birthday cake" version that we both watched Sheriff John sing on TV when we were kids..

I appreciate so much the gifts I have been given. I am grateful of course, for the material things I have received – Victoria's Secret Amber Romance bath products; some clothes, some money. I remember with joy how much fun our mother had at birthdays, preparing a favorite food and making the day fun; I remember with joy the wonderful birthday present our son gave me a few years ago. The chief of the volunteer fire department he belonged to had his own plane, and Nathaniel bought me a 30-minute ride over the Ozarks countryside, and while this area is not exactly a tourist destination for viewing fall foliage, the patchwork of browns, bronze, gold, and an occasional blaze of red and orange, was quite lovely…

But I think what I am most grateful and thankful for are the intangible blessings that come from being part of a good family -- blessings that one can't put a price tag on. Blessings that are indeed priceless.

My family. I am truly blessed.

Up a tree...

2011-10-22T15:43:00.001-04:00

When I was a child growing up Gardena, a suburb of Los Angeles, our neighborhood had fairly large lots, and although downtown Los Angeles was perhaps 10-minute drive on the Harbor Freeway, the atmosphere was still a very semi-rural. The woman who lived in the corner house across the street kept chickens, and so did the woman next to her. The family down the street had a couple of horses on their place.

Our house sat the very back of the lot facing “sideways”, and outside the front door grew a huge California pepper tree, very similar to the ones in this photograph

Photo courtesy of Forest & Kim Starr

I do have a few pictures where a glimpse of the tree is visible.

This picture was taken in 1954, probably on my birthday, when I was 5 years old. In the other picture, which I am guessing was taken a year later, probably at Christmas...

I am holding a stuffed animal that I called “Cooney” (short for raccoon), but a closer look at it leads me to think it was actually a panda bear. No matter.

The California pepper tree, which is native of Peru, has lots of horizontal branches that are often very close to the ground (or would be if they haven’t been pruned so the homeowner can mow underneath them without bashing his or her head). Our tree did have big branches close to the ground, and I spent a lot of time climbing the tree. I also ventured up into the acacia tree that was next to the house. I loved its small yellow flowers. It was much more spindly, and one time I climbed too high and got stuck up in that tree. Well, not stuck, just afraid to come down. I remember my mother at the foot of the tree trying to coax me down, and eventually I worked my way down. I remember she suggested that it might be better not to try to climb that tree any more.

The neighborhood was already in transition in the early 1950s, many of the single-family homes had been torn down and replaced with small apartment buildings. When I was about 11 years old, my parents succumbed to the lure of making extra money by renting to tenants and had duplex apartments built on our land. The pepper tree and the acacia tree were bulldozed along with almost all of the other trees on the place, and the duplexes were built. The venture turned out to be a disaster; fortunately, they were able to find a buyer and we moved a few years later into the home where my father still lives.

Now fast forwarding a few (!) decades and 1500 miles away/ Our place seems to be a destination for every feral cat for miles around. The first cat we had was a big female--“Big Kitty” we called her -- who was as big as or bigger than the average tomcat and did not take crap from any of them. It was a common site to see her tear off down the driveway after an interloper, and they ran.

Our current, Squeaker, being a little pipsqueak, is constantly being bullied by the other cats that show up here, and although she puts up a good bluff, if we are not here to rescue her when the caterwauling starts, she ends up climbing a tree to escape.

Her favorite choices are...

The sugar maple in the front yard...

the silver maple at the side of the house...

or the pine tree on the back side of the house. And on more than one occasion I have found myself at the foot of one of these trees trying to coax her down.

I will soon be 62 years old, and so even though I am somewhat mathematically challenged, I can deduce that it has been at least 50 years since I have climbed a tree. I can hardly get my mind around that. Whew.

Rising to heaven...

2011-10-17T11:31:00.000-04:00

Fourteen of us have trailed behind the hospice bereavement coordinator and the chaplain, each holding blue and white helium balloons on ribbons that are tied together in a knot. We gather around them in the parking lot of the senior citizens center. It is warm, the sky is bright blue, and a breeze suddenly springs up to tug at the balloons.

The manager of hospice medical services comes with scissors and cuts a balloon free from the knot and hands one to each one of us. Our son had lovely blue eyes. I ask for a blue balloon. I will later realize that this was a mistake. I should have gotten white.

The chaplain and the bereavement coordinator speak a few words. The symbolism of releasing the balloons in connection with the death of our loved ones is obvious. We let our balloons go. The woman next to me says “The souls of our loved ones rising to heaven.”

They race up into sky climbing higher and higher. I am able to watch my balloon for quite a while, until the blue of the balloon blends with the blue sky and I can no longer see it. The white balloons remain visible.

The last time I cried was several weeks ago when I unexpectedly found the birthday card he gave me last year. The last birthday card I got from him. I will never get another birthday card from him.

I start to cry, again, as the balloon symbolizing our son fades into invisibility and I can no longer see it. I feel alone and isolated. And then the moment passes.

We return to the dining room. I visit a bit with the woman who was sitting next to me, whose son died of AIDS, and another woman whose son died of cancer, and another woman whose daughter died. I no longer feel so alone.

Eventually the balloons will pop and the shreds of rubber with the attached ribbon will fall back to earth as litter someplace. The bodies of our loved ones will eventually become dust or ashes, but least their souls will not end up as litter.

Serenity and cacophony

2011-10-14T21:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we decided to take a break and celebrate the tax return being done and so we headed off to Springfield for some R and R (and then wondered if it wasn’t something of an oxymoron to link “Springfield” with R and R in the same breath).

At any rate, our first stop was at the Mizumoto Japanese Stroll Garden (there are lovely pictures of it here and here in the Spring).

This park is part of a huge park complex outside of Springfield. This is a lovely area, with winding paved paths through pine trees and Japanese arrangements of plants and rocks, and a huge koi pond with lots of interesting little bridges and stone pathways, and trickling waterfalls and a replica of a Japanese tea house, and one of those meditation gardens with the combed gravel. Just lovely.

We fed $1 into the machine and bought a few handfuls of food to feed the koi...

And then all of a sudden here comes a turtle – a much larger version of the sort of turtle little kids used to be given as pets.

It came right up to me...

and I tried to give it some of the koi food, but the fish were too aggressive.

Now, to set the stage for what happened next, the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners is in Springfield, and as the name implies, it houses Federal prisoners who require medical treatment or who have mental health issues. Occasionally the prison makes the news -- John Gotti died there, the man who shot the Congresswoman in Arizona is being sent there.

The lovely Japanese stroll garden borders the back of the prison -- there is a large open area outside the main prison fence where there are various outbuildings and then a chain link fence separates this from the garden. We were enjoying our mosey on the path that meanders around this lovely pond and its artistic plant arrangements, we start hearing this funny-sounding amplified woman’s voice echoing. A tram tour of the parks is offered on certain days of the week and I thought perhaps was one of the trams with someone giving a guided tour.

Richard listened a bit longer and said, "No, that is a gun range." A gun range? Sure enough. As we continued to move forward the voice became clearer, and she was giving instructions to people who were about to shoot guns. Everything was quiet for a few seconds.

And then it sounded like we were in a war zone.

Ka-bam, blam, blooey, bang bang bang.
We could smell the gunpowder wafting in the morning breeze.

We made our way through the row of trees blocking the view of the back of the prison from the park,

and there was a line of people shooting at targets. Probably prison guards or perhaps Springfield policemen.

We had to laugh -- this is exactly the sort of thing that happens to us regularly -- nothing like a little gunfire to add to the ambience.

Dancin' the night away

2011-10-12T12:51:00.001-04:00

When I was in high school, my mother enrolled me in a charmschool sponsored by Sears at the local mall, and for good reason. I did notmove with very much grace. The way my knees and hip joints are constructed hasgiven me sort of an odd walk. My brothers teased me about it. They said I “plonked”and they would chant “Ling plop, long plop, lugga lugga blug blug.”

So, I have been somewhat uncomfortable in situations where gracefulmoment is required. Hence, my precious mother’s attempts to help me.

Last year I went shopping and found the perfect gown to wearto the cyber ball at Willow Manor,

but I did not actually have the nerve to putit on and attend the event. I was not planning to go this year either.

Theanniversary of my mother’s death 2 years ago is tomorrow and I was not exactlyin the mood.

However, when I read that Nigella Lawson is attending, Iimmediately decided that I would love to spend some time chatting with thiswonderful witty woman, whose reports on NPR I have loved to listen to, and so Iasked Danny (my lovely husband does not enjoy crowds) if he would escort me – he is a good dancer and he will make melaugh – and he agreed.

I suddenly find I have instant recall of all of the charm school lessons Ilearned on how to walk and hold myself gracefully and so I have refreshed the gownand am waiting for Danny to arrive.

After a dance or two, I am sure he will be lured away,and then I will go in search of Nigella (wherever Willow has stashed her).

Laughin' and cryin'...

2011-10-11T07:10:00.000-04:00

There is an advantage for self-employed people to get the extension to October 15 to file the tax return that is due in April. Self-employed people are required to make quarterly payments of estimated taxes based on earnings from the previous year, so this is not about paying the tax--unless not enough money has been paid in each quarter--we’re just talking about the tax return.

I take care of entering the income and expenses into an accounting program, which prints out all sorts of handy dandy reports, and we have a computer program that does the calculations and prints the return, but getting to that point is very, very stressful for him because operating a business out of your home complicates things and he still has to come up with the raw figures to plug into the computer.

The death of Steve Jobs last week certainly did give pause for thought. Our first computer was an Apple IIE...

and it took almost 8 hours to run the reports that I can do now in 3 minutes.

Every year I hope that Richard will set aside a certain time each week to work on the taxes so that when the deadline looms he will basically have it done. So far, this has not happened. He has been in panic mode for about a month now, and he finally finished it over the weekend.

We always celebrate filing the tax return. Yesterday morning after I came back from aerobics, he was in and out of my office several times over the course of an hour – right when I was in the middle of finishing two manuscripts for the hardest journal I have to work on – coming up with ideas for what we should do. We would tentatively decide something and then he would come back with another idea; or, to be fair, I would come up with an idea and go tell him. In any event, by about 10 a.m., I was ready to bop him in the head.

By 11 a.m., I had just about finished the last of the manuscripts (“it was all over but the shouting”) I had started working on hours earlier, and went into the kitchen to get my lunch. Richard was in there bustling around getting food on his plate, and I started talking to him about this journal and how hard it is, and then I sort of laughed and said, “It’s just a journal for cryin’ out loud” and then I really did start to cry at the same time that he started to laugh, and then I was in his arms and he was laughing and I was crying and laughing at the same time and yes, one really can laugh and cry at the same time. The crying helped, actually and the day improved dramatically.

Shortly after lunch Richard walks in and hands me a list of things he wants me to print from the check record for 2011. “I am not going to go through this again next year,” he says.

Then about 2 pm Richard says “I’ll be outside for a while…”

Can I come? I was in my "afternoon slump" and ready for a break.

No.

No? How come?

But he was out the door and I was stewing. I walked out on the porch but I didn't see him anywhere in the yard. In a little while he came in with vase of flowers, scooted things around next to my monitor, and set them down.

“Happy Fall,” he says.

Indeed!!

Beauty from bits and pieces

2011-10-08T13:09:00.000-04:00

It has always fascinated me how one can sometimes take bits and pieces from plants, stick them in water or sand or some other medium, and get a brand new plant out of the deal.

I have had some success in collecting new plants in this way from bits and pieces of other peoples’ plants, but plenty of failures as well.

Two years ago when I visited my family home in Gardena and saw my mother for the last time, I carried way pieces of some of the plants growing in their backyard, including pieces of the “orchid cactus” that she loved so much and which was continuing to thrive in the backyard under the apricot tree, and blooming so beautifully when we were there in June for my niece's wedding...

and which had bloomed some 50 years ago in my grandfather’s yard when he lived in the same neighborhood. All these went into moist sand... and they lived.

Some day I hope that it will bloom. The tangled waxy-leafed hoyas vine next to it, which on occasion has produced clusters of pink flowers, also came from a piece from my parents’ yard, years ago.

Earlier in the Spring, my friend Judy gave me starts of an impatiens plant that were starts from the starts from the starts from the starts (and perhaps a few more starts of starts) of a impatiens that grew in her mother’s yard years ago.

And so I found a big pot that had been used to grow tomatoes in last year and dutifully planted them.

I do not actually have a green thumb—nor a black thumb either, for that matter. Sometimes I can figure out what a plant needs—and provide it—and the plant does well; sometimes I make an effort and the plant decides it would prefer to have a new home in Heaven.

In this case, I guess I did the right thing, because the impatiens grew and grew – very much taller than the nursery-grown impatiens I have planted in the past in shady spots in our yard, and finally, just as the last day of summer turned into the first day of fall, they began to bloom...

There is still some time left before the first hard frost is likely to occur, maybe a couple of weeks, so they will continue to live on the porch for a while longer.

Mental fruit loops

2011-10-03T18:16:00.001-04:00

One of the writers/photographers whose blog I will read regularly (when she posts), and who is a Facebook friend, writes humorously and lovingly about her Jack Russel terriers,

(a photo of one of her crazy little dogs from her Web site)

indicating in a most recent FB comment that… “physically they are great specimens.... but mentally.... well.... mentally they are fruit loops.”

Not just dogs are afflicted with mental fruit loops, we are finding out.

Richard learned on Friday that the macular part of his eye has “bump” in it rather than a “dip.” Today we went to back to Town to see the ophthalmologist about the problem, and he is very confident that this will resolve on its own and has prescribed some eyedrops. If it does not resolve by the end of the month then some sort of procedure will be necessary.

Richard is very relieved that he will not have to undergo a procedure on his eye – at least not immediately. And the ophthalmologist assures us that should the “worst” happen and they cannot fix it, he may have some trouble with up-close reading but he will not go blind in the eye.

We will turn around and make another trip to Town tomorrow to see the grief counselor. And eating out will figure prominently in the days' events.

One of Nathaniel’s coworkers at the sawmill gave him a gift card for a steakhouse that has several locations scattered around this part of the state. He and Richard had gone out to dinner once, and when it became obvious that he would not be leaving the nursing home again, he gave us the card to use.

I took two friends out to lunch, and there was still some money left on the card – enough for at least one more lunch.

So, Plan A was for us to go to the steakhouse tomorrow and use up the rest of the money on the card. When we got back from Town this afternoon, I looked in my wallet for the gift card and it was not there. I looked everywhere I could think of that I might have stuck the card to keep it safe until we used it again.

I cannot find the gift card.

But in the throes of tearing “high and low” through all of this stuff, I did find an anniversary card from my sister from June 2010 with money in it that we were supposed to have used to take ourselves out to dinner.

As each month passes, I find more and more evidence of bizarre behavior from 2010 and in the 10 months since January 2011. It seemed to me we coped beautifully with the "macro events" involved with our son's illness -- making appointments and keeping track of appointments and getting him to the appointments, negotiating the crooked and obstacle-filled paths of Medicaid and Social Security Disability and SSI, and all of that, but when it comes down to the "micro events" we did all sorts of weird stuff.

Richard does not particularly like the steakhouse, so now we are discussing… and discussing…. and discussing… plan B.

And wondering if our own mental fruit loops will resolve…

I am a bit stuck…

2011-09-29T19:56:00.001-04:00

One can always tempt fate about when the first frost will come here in the southern Midwest, but I usually bring the indoor plants that have spent the summer outdoors on the porch or under the shade trees on stands in shortly after the first day of fall. Even though the days are often very warm, the temperature can get rather brisk at night, and some of the plants I have are semi-tropical and sulk if the temperature drops too low.

The migration indoors is a fairly uneventful and painless procedure for most of my plants. I pick them up – even the big boy here...

who is just delighted to be on the porch for the summer -- bring them in, and set them down in their spots in front of windows or under skylights.

However, there is inevitably some pain involved when it comes to moving these guys--

and there was a funny piece about “guys” on NPR the other day that is worth listening to or reading…

And of course it doesn’t occur to me to wear gardening gloves when I pick them up (duuuh)…

and so this is me a short time later...

wearing the handy dandy hands-free magnifiers and using a pair of tweezers…

to pick out the bits the cactus have left behind.

Where the wild things are…

2011-09-23T16:34:00.000-04:00

Resisting the temptation to start another blog called the Basement Chronicles, or something along those lines, I guess what goes on in our basement does qualify as “odd moments” in our daily comings and goings.

Watching the Pixar film Monsters Inc does tend to give one a different perspective of creatures that resemble a salamander.

Fortunately, this baby that I found in the basement a few days ago, and which Richard agreed to hold for me so I could get a picture of it...

was a bit squirmy but totally benign.

And then there was this fellow who showed up on the towel that we keep draped over our dryer to help protect it from the inevitable dings.

I did not hand it to Richard to hold.

But on to more serious matters. As I have mentioned before, I often listen to the police scanner during the day when I am working. Yesterday a call came in that Mr W was shouting at Mrs W when she drove to senior housing to pick up her mother. They are separated and she has a restraining order. The unit where her mother lives is across the street from the house where Mr W lives. Although he was obviously creating a public disturbance, apparently, the restraining order does not stop him from screaming at her from his front yard and I guess he was not arrested for that.

I listened to the police chattering back and forth for a bit about Mr and Mrs W, and then that call went away and it was mostly license checks, reports of C and I driving, and livestock on the road from the Highway Patrol for the rest of the day.

Mrs W owns a shop on Main Street, and this morning shortly after I came became back from aerobics, a call came in that Mr W had showed up at her shop and had assaulted her, that he had left in his truck and that he had a weapon. So I listened to a police officer in a plain car as he followed Mr W around the town until another officer with “lights” showed up. They got him pulled over, but he decided to run for it, and then there was a foot pursuit with Mr W running down the street…. and eventually they got him. And a tow truck was called to impound the truck and an ambulance to attend to Mrs W’s injuries, and the day moved on.

It was sort of an exciting deal sitting hear listening to all this unfold over the radio. But I am sure it was not very exciting for Mrs W. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live with an abusive person, and I am so very thankful I don’t have to find out. Our son got taste of it – he lived with a woman who hit and punched him on occasion when she got mad. I was so thankful when he was able to get out of that toxic relationship forever.

What happened today pretty much proves the point that victims of abuse have been complaining about all along: restraining orders are very little help in actually protecting the person who is feeling threatened. Having a restraining order against Mr W certainly didn’t help Mrs W today. My heart goes out to her.

Sweet and salty...

2011-09-21T14:09:00.001-04:00

Having the need to periodically defrost the freezer means that there is less chance of things ending up at the bottom and not being discovered until they are so badly freezer burned they are hardly edible. And over the weekend Richard did just that -- defrost the freezer -- and presented me with a nice chunk of deer meat that someone had given us and that I had no idea we had. I took it out of the refrigerator when I went to bed Monday night and left it sit out overnight and it was nearly thawed in the morning when I got up, and into the salt and vinegar it went for a few hours.

And was it just a happy coincidence that the talented Tess recently just happened to post what sounded like an amazing and unusual recipe at Willow Manor for pot roast? A pot roast cooked in foil with some rather unusual ingredients: cocktail olives and raisins and balsamic vinegar.

I couldn't resist.

Not having any cocktail olives on hand, I went to the store yesterday to fetch some and seeing that the jar of cocktail onions was $5.49, I instead bought some "salad olives," which looked exactly the same but were much smaller and not quite so pricey. But other than that I actually did follow the receipt exactly, well, almost..

Even though the weather has changed such that one might consider turning on the oven, I decided to use the crockpot instead so I wouldn't have to pay as much attention to the cooking process. At the end, the pot roast was outstanding.

I have concluded I cannot take decent pictures of food so you will just have to imagine the slices of meat covered with this amazing sweet and salty sauce.

World Famous Pot Roast indeed! If you happen to be in the mood for a pot roast, this is excellent.

Soap fit for a… giant

2011-09-19T20:45:00.000-04:00

I went to an indoor yard sale on Saturday and I bought a nice bar of olive oil moisturizing soap.

I paid 50-cents for it, which I know is a good deal because I found it on the Internet for a variety of prices, usually between $12 and $14.95.

The soap is indeed lovely, creamy with a wonderful fragrance.

It weighs 12 ounces.

I find it a bit hard to hold, especially when I have it with me in the shower and am attempting to use it.

It might be comfortable in the hand of Madame Olympe Maxime the giant woman played by Frances de la Tour in the Harry Potter movie.

But I can barely keep a grip on it.

I am thinking about getting out the hacksaw and cutting it smaller pieces.

Losing the past..

2011-09-17T15:47:00.000-04:00

I have concluded that should I die without warning, I do not want to leave behind things that would hurt the person most likely to be left with the task of dealing with them – my husband.

I have sporadically over the years of my marriage kept journals, which were quite useful as a way to keep secret from others (mostly him) the things that were on my mind and yet “get it out” at the same time. A cursory search of the places where I usually kept the journals shows they are not there, so I have obviously moved them. I have no idea at the moment where they are. This is a bit disturbing. I have not yet gone on a “tearing things apart” search to find, but I am confident they will turn up.

In the mean time, I did find one journal, the oldest one, under the clothes in the bottom drawer of my dresser. I began writing in this “1-year diary” as early as 1966 and continued off and on through 1970, and there is one entry in 1975.

We went through a hard time in our marriage in 2004, and once we had moved safely away from the brink of the chasm, I picked up the diary, for some reason, and began thumbing through it. I have never quite forgotten who I was in that era, but the specific details of my behavior had faded. As I scanned the pages I obviously became more and more depressed about the person I was in the last half of the 60s. On the first page of the journal, January 3, I had dated it 1970 and had written “Here I am at 20 years old….”

And on the next blank page after that, dated Sept 7, 2004, I had written…

Here I am now at 55, still holding on to this diary that has entries dating back to 1967, 36 years ago. I wonder why I kept it all these years. What does it say about the person who scribbled in here? Much, I think. Mostly about a confused and foolish young woman who stood at the brink of the cliff and deliberately stepped off. Which launched her into a free-fall…

I watch the broadcast of a service at my sister’s church on Wednesday night, and the preacher, Bayless Conley, said – well I don’t remember exactly how he worded it – but that we shouldn’t get too far from our salvation experience – we shouldn’t forget what we were and what we have become – because it is too easy to be judgmental toward people who are struggling with things that we perhaps struggled with ourselves. Something like that.

He certainly is right. There is a phrase that goes something like "the church is the only place that shoots it wounded..." Those of us who have reformed from some destructive behavior can certainly be harsh and not very compassionate toward others who are still struggling.

But, in the days that have passed since then, and as I have gotten deeper and deeper into the diary, I have decided I do not need to have it around any more to remind me of what I was. No indeed. So, page-by-page, it is going into the shredder. I think I prefer to “leave the past behind and press on…”

Birdie num num

2011-09-13T15:32:00.000-04:00

You just never know when something you’ve seen… or heard… or read... will pop into your mind unexpectedly. Yesterday evening when we were in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner, I cast a sideways glance at my beloved, who was up to his elbows in hot sudsy water doing the dishes (I was rinsing), and the phrase “birdie num num” sprang unbidden into my mind.

Hollywood and romance novels and advice columns present all sorts of ideas about what is romantic, but a guy who will lovingly do the dishes for me is right up there at the top of the list.

In 1968 Peter Sellers made a rather silly movie “The Party. He plays an inept Indian actor, who instead of being fired from a movie set where he has totally screwed up everything, gets invited to a big Hollywood party. Where he totally screws things up. Some parts of the movie are very funny – well, at least they were in the early 1970s. At the time we found this scene especially humorous.

The words “birdie num num” just popped out of my mouth before I realized it. We laughed. Probably because it brought back memories of more than just the movie: back in the day, “birdie num num” became a code phrase for well... you know....

But about a half-hour later, the phrase took on a bit of another meaning when about 4 feet away from my window, a medium-sized hawk suddenly appeared on one of the limbs of the tree trunk I have rigged up to hang the hummingbird feeder on. It sat there for maybe 20 seconds, and then flew onto a nearby branch, and then off it went.

The birds did not come back to the feeder for quite a while, and for good reason: these hawks eat birds. This is only the third time since 1981 that have actually seen one of these hawks at my bird feeder, so I am not too concerned that it will start hanging around what it must see as a “buffet table.”

This morning, Richard pointed this out to me underneath some trees around the corner from the feeding platform.

It obviously had dove for dinner. We will have to see if it comes back for seconds.

Missing pieces…

2011-09-07T19:57:00.000-04:00

A few years ago Richard threw up a wooden scaffold attached to the porch and running along the side of the house so he could tear into the wall, repair some termite damage, replace a window, and put up new siding, and he extended it around the corner and across the front of the house part way so he could work on some siding on that side of the house that is falling apart.

The scaffold was supposed to be temporary, but it has yet to be taken down (and, alas, the second part of the project has yet to be done), and for several summers it has served as a handy place to sit large pots of tomatoes and some of my cactus.

It has also become a playground for a small army of lizards that patrol it regularly for insects.

One day some years ago, just before I was going to open the screen door to go outside, I watched a little lizard race across the porch and gobble up a cockroach that was headed in a determined way toward the house. So I think of them as our first line of defense during the Spring and Summer.

After I inherited Richard’s old camera, I began to have a lot of fun trying to take pictures of them. They are nervous, very fast, and usually don’t sit still too long for their portraits, but once in a while…

They will sit still long enough so that I can get a few shots.

The cat also hangs out on the porch and the scaffold – she likes to stretch out in patch of sun and sleep, or perch on a board that forms a shelf at the corner, as is true with most cats, she is very alert to anything that moves.

In the last few days, I have noticed at least one lizard with a missing tail.

Isn’t too hard to guess who was responsible. The lizard’s tail will grow back, assuming she doesn’t kill it. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we also could grow replacement parts?

Memories of Labor Days gone by

2011-09-05T15:57:00.000-04:00

Many of the federal holidays are more or less like ordinarydays for us, the only difference being the post office will be closed, and theY will be closed, so there is no need to go to town. Being self-employed, wecan take off anytime we feel like it and do something. So the Labor Days ofyears gone by tend to run together as being rather unmemorable. Exceptrecently.

In 2009, Nathaniel had the day off— as an unpaid holiday(which annoyed me a lot; where are you Mother Jones!!!)— and he and I decidedto take a drive out to Noblett Lake, maybe 10 miles away early, before peoplestarted to arrive for picnics.

The lake was created back in the Depression era by a groupof workers from the Civilian Conservation Corp. They threw up a small concretedam across a creek and made a pavilion and a picnic area, and it has been a favoritespot for local people to picnic, camp, and fish, and have a good time.

We spent a nice morning there, walked the trail around thelake, enjoyed the peace and quiet of the place and its beauty.

We had no cluethat the cancer that would eventually kill him had probably already started spreadingits seeds of death throughout his body.

Last year, he had a “divine appointment” on Labor Day tovisit Jason, a childhood friend who had moved to Arkansas to go to college shortlyafter high school and who he had not seen for maybe 15 years. My friend Naomi, Jason’smom, invited Nathaniel to go with them on a trip down to Arkansas to a nicepark where they got to hang out and visit. Although they visited frequentlyduring the last months of Nathaniel’s life on the telephone, it was the lasttime they saw each other face-to-face.

So, when this Labor Day morning dawned -- a beautiful, crisp clear almost fall-likeday, it occurred to me that we could drive out to Noblett Lake and walk on the trailand enjoy the quiet serenity there… and remember… and then I realized thatnope, that isn’t going to work.

Noblett Lake is…well… gone too. A few weeks agovandals, opened the gate in the dam and drained the water. The creek that feedsthe lake is still flowing, but the lake is empty.

For a while, there was somedoubt whether the Forest Service was going to rehabilitate it and close thegate and let it fill up again. Local outrage has, perhaps, changed its mind. I havefirm faith in the resurrection of the body; perhaps the lake will beresurrected as well.

And then there was one…

2011-09-03T18:12:00.001-04:00

It was one of those September mornings when the temperature difference between day and night has resulted in a fine white mist that hugs the ground in low spots along the road and flows like water down and out across asphalt.

As I walk down the driveway and come up out of the hollow to the paved frontage road, I see the sun is barely peeking over the trees on the horizon, glowing like an orange-red ball in the early morning haze. It reminds me of times we had cookouts at the beach when I was a kid, watching the setting sun, glowing orange, sink lower and lower in the sky, its powerful light diffused by the fog bank rolling in off the ocean.

I head off down the road. An occasional car or truck whizzes by on the highway to my left, but it is still rather early, and there are fairly long moments of silence. I imagine what it would be like if there were no cars at all, how quiet it would be. The insects have not yet started to sing, and the birds are still.

I pass Big Tony’s house, and it is quiet as well. Sometimes his yappy rat terriers are in the yard barking wildly, but this morning they are still inside.

And then up ahead, I see them walking toward me through a finger of mist that has poured down across the road: two old women, enjoying an early morning walk. Visiting with each other as they amble along.

These two widow women have lived near each other for years. There used to be three of them who walked together, and now there are just two.

Their faces are relaxed. One says something to the other, and they both smile, I hear a laugh. We draw closer and smile at each other and exchange greetings, and they pass by and make the turn at Big Tony’s house to go to their respective homes.

The Simon and Garfunkle song “Old Friends” begins to play in my head.

No, they aren’t old men sitting on a park bench, but they are old friends.

If stages of life are indeed as the seasons, then they are Winter companions. I am entering the Fall of my life, and I wonder as I continue walking down the road, if I will have someone to walk with, a companion, when it becomes Winter for me and I am old.

The days slip by and summer moves further into fall, and if they are still walking together, they aren’t doing it when we are taking our walk or when I am driving down the road heading for town.

And the seasons, they go round and round and another summer comes. I go to a garage sale at the house of one of the women and learn that she was seriously injured in a fall and now living in the nursing home in the Alzheimer’s unit. I go to visit her, but I am not sure she knows who I am.

A few weeks ago her obituary was in the newspaper.

Yesterday when I went for a walk, the remaining little old lady, and a woman who was probably her daughter, turned the corner at Big Tony’s house as I was passing by on my way home. We smiled at each other and commented on the lovely morning.

Stepping carefully

2011-09-01T17:45:00.001-04:00

The hot water heater, the washing machine, and the dryer live in our walk-in basement – on a platform to keep them out of the water that invariably seeps in when a hard rain falls -- along with other stuff, like the barrel full of sunflower seeds that I feed to the birds. There is a room attached to that, which we call the fruit cellar, where our freezer lives.

In my dreams, I imagine the room where our son used to sleep before he moved away has been remodeled into a new home for the washing machine, drier, and freezer, so that multiple times a day we do not have to walk down the porch steps, around the house, and into the basement.

And even if we don’t have to go down there for something out of the freezer, or to do laundry, or to get seeds for the birds, invariably, Richard will have moved something I am not using routinely “down to the fruit cellar,” and invariably, within a day or two I will need it.

It is cool and damp in the basement, and a lovely place to be on hot summer days. There are lots of crickets in there and other insects, and snakes… who knows what else. A huge spider lived in the basement for a few weeks last summer, and this summer a small toadlet has taken up residence.

The little toad is very hard to see against the concrete and the thin film of rust-colored dust in certain spots left by water seeping in when it rains. Richard warns me to “be careful” so you don’t step on it.

I do not have a picture of the toadlet, but I do have a picture of a lovely sign.

It would be fun to change the wording slightly and put it on the door of the basement. I borrowed this, with permission, from Non-Working Monkey who took this photograph when she went on a holiday to England.

An unhappy ending to an otherwise great day

2011-08-25T21:00:00.001-04:00

When one begins dragging 60 behind them and doesn’t need a magnifying glass to see 70 looming, the options for funny birthday cards increase dramatically.

And leave it to my sweet sister to find one to honor my sweetie on his birthday earlier this week.

When we were kids growing up in Los Angeles, there was a local television program for children hosted by Sheriff John, and he did a “birthday cake” song...

which I found myself singing when the day arrived. We did not, however, have a birthday cake this year for him. We had Klondike bars instead.

The aches and pains of growing older are not what makes the “golden years” very golden. Richard has an occasional minor problem in his back, which requires him to walk around hunched over a bit for a day until it works itself out. At this point it is still something we can still make jokes about, but it may not be so funny as time goes by.

Today would have been a very nearly perfect day. I have finally clawed my way out of the huge volume of work I was handed and feel like I can take a breath once again. I even had time to look at a blog or two. Yea!!!

We have been accumulating brush since last winter due to ice storms and throughout the spring and summer due to high winds. The pile began to breed and suddenly there were two piles, and both of them looked pregnant.

And as it often goes with us, they might have remained for quite a bit longer, perhaps even throughout the winter, except an armadillo picked one of them to crawl under and die, and the stench of rotting flesh has been wafting in the window I sit in front of for the past week – it takes the process quite a while longer in an armadillo because of the hard shell. So Richard decided to burn the piles today. Yea!!!

The last time brush piles were burned – in September of last year -- Nathaniel did the job

so it was a bit poignant for both of us when Richard went out to light it off.

And then just as the job was finished, a very bad thing happened. A turtle that had crawled under the brush pile for shelter did not get out in time and was killed.

How to explain how horrible Richard felt? Horrible. We both felt sick inside. I love turtles.

I probably have as many photographs of turtles (and judging by the red eyes, this is a boy turtle) on this computer as I do of lizards and flowers and…

At any rate, I am so grateful I am married to a kind man who does not take pleasure in killing things.

Strange food associations…

2011-08-20T20:00:00.000-04:00

When Richard was young, his mother drank buttermilk. A lot of buttermilk. He couldn’t stand the way it looked. Eventually he might have come around to liking it, except somewhere along the way he took a big swallow of truly spoiled milk, and that did it.

He has never tasted buttermilk. He also won’t eat cottage cheese. And he won’t even try my homemade yogurt, although why he turns his nose up at it is beyond me. It is smooth and does not have “chunks” of stuff in it.

One of the most memorable of a string of otherwise wonderful Thanksgiving meals throughout my childhood occurred one year at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. I am not sure how many of the cousins were there, but we had a fine time sticking black olives on our fingers and wiggling them around and then eating them off our fingers.

At some point, I suspect one of the adults became annoyed by this behavior and said something like

“Cut that out, if you keep eating all of those olives,

you will make yourself sick.”

And sure enough, not too long after eating the meal, I got violently sick and spent some time bent over the porcelain throne.

Up to then, I loved black olives, but it was quite a while before I started eating them again.

Our son was not a picky eater -- not in the least -- and we usually did not have trouble getting him to eat. He was, however, very visually oriented, and there were a couple of foods he got “fixated” on because of the way they looked – not because of how they tasted – and he would not eat them any more.

We kept chickens for a long time and had fresh farm eggs several times a week. He loved eggs and gobbled them down.

One morning I set his plate of eggs in front of him and he took one look and started gagging. That was the last time he ate eggs (unless it was part of an ingredient in something else) until he was well into adulthood. He could give me no reason for what it was about the eggs that caused such a violent reaction.

Later, the same thing happened with long spaghetti. He quit eating it because it reminded him of worms.

He stopped eating elbow macaroni because… well, I am not sure why… something about the “bend” in the pasta, but he would eat “penne,” which is the fatter straight tube.

Now he really liked corkscrew pasta, because it reminded him of the auger that used to operate at the feed mill in town. He had started stockpiling pasta in preparation to move out, which I am now slowly eating my way through: six 1-pound packages of augers.

The other day I cooked some augers to make a small pasta salad for lunch—lentils and whatever vegetables I could scrounge with salsa on top…

And as I put the augers on the plate...

I suddenly got my own association with something.

Along with the chickens, we raised Muscovy ducks for meat. The drakes are big and are very meaty.

(Our main drake was pure white. But I don't have a picture of him. This one is from Wikipedia)

We had lots of Muscovy ducks. They are the “rabbits” of duck-dom. They are prolific breeders, and the ducks raise large batches of ducklings.

I couldn’t help but notice that the augurs look very much like a certain organ that the male duck has that is vitally important for procreating.

I had a very clever title picked out for this post and when I mentioned it to Richard he said.

You aren’t going to use that, are you?

I sort of hemmed and hawed and he said...

Don’t

I have a new name for the augurs, which I will not share. My little pasta salad was very tasty. And we will be eating augurs tomorrow in macaroni and cheese.

Get'er done

2011-08-13T12:53:00.000-04:00

There have been a few moments during this week where I have just wanted to shut the computer off…

walk out the door…

and never come back.

Not really.

But during this week occurred one of those periodic events that I call the “conjunction of the journals,” when all of the issue managers of the journals I copyedit have manuscripts that need to be worked on, and they need me to work on them.

Last Friday I received an e-mail from the woman who handles the dermatology journal: She has 21 manuscripts she needs done right way--by the 16th in fact--which would only be possible if I were a machine and not a flesh and blood person who needs to eat and sleep, get some exercise, watch a bit of television and have lunch with my friend at Subway, which I did on Thursday.

Who offers the suggestion that perhaps what I really do need to do is "walk away for 10 minutes..."

Yes.

That is something I could do. I could take the camera and see if I can get a picture of the toadlet that lives in our basement;

I could take a short walk with Richard...

down to Big Tony’s house (who lives at the "T" up ahead there in the picture).

On Monday, the woman who handles the transplant journal sent 6 files for me to work on, and then on the Wednesday, she sent 4 "rush items" that she needs back right away, and that I was to set aside the other 6 she sent me earlier in the week. I told her that I could not get them back to her "rush" because I had too much other work piled up and that she might want to send them to someone else.

No, she writes back. You are my favorite.

I am her favorite.

I thought I was done with the orthopedic journal for the month, and on Tuesday, here came 6 more.

Also on Tuesday the journal covering diabetes sent me a manuscript. These manuscripts are incredibly difficult. It is due back Monday.

I log-on to the Web site where I retrieve the manuscripts for the vascular surgery journal, and I see there are 14 of them waiting. Fortunately, the deadline for the last of them stretches into September.

As the week progressed, I was hoping that the only journal I had yet to get anything from – the thoracic surgery journal – would not send me anything. And he did not. Thank goodness.

Richard helps to keep me grounded. He gives me a hug and a pat on the back and says...

Do the best you can and ask for more time. They will give it to you.

Of course, he is right. Having a mental meltdown will not help. All I can do is plug along, doing the best I can.

So I have plugged away:

I will send the last of the rush manuscripts back on Monday.
I will have the manuscript for the diabetes journal ready on Monday.
I have finished 1 of the orthopedic manuscripts.
I have finished 2 of the vascular surgery manuscripts.
I will have 14 of the dermatology manuscripts ready by the 16th and will ask for more time on the 16th.

I wonder what would happen if Richard were not here. I hope that if that time should come, that I will be retired; but then I think, because of the sort of job I have – which I really do love – I could continue to do this for a very, very long time…

As long as I don't become demented.

A chorus line of naked ladies…

2011-08-12T18:06:00.000-04:00

Beginning at about 8 pm Sunday evening, we were without power for about 10 hours because of a strong thunderstorm that moved through the area with very powerful straight-line winds that broke a lot of trees. The dead tree alongside our driveway, which Richard has been eyeballing for some time and talking about “having someone come in and take it out before it falls and hits one of the cars,” did indeed come down. It fell behind the cars parked at the garage, at an angle, and did not hit anything.

Our TV-watching plans were set aside. We got in my car, which could still be backed up and turned around despite the dead tree, and took a tour of the neighborhood to see who did and did not have power. We didn’t get very far. There was a tree blocking the road just past Tony’s house -- he did not have power -- so Richard executed a perfect 5-point turn on the one-lane road to get us back headed the other direction.

We took a left at the “T” with gravel road right in front of Tony’s house and immediately saw that this road was also blocked by a tree. We could see that some people further down the road did have power.

We came back, and by the light of the Coleman lantern, I started reading him the John Grisham novel, “The Confession,” and after a couple of chapters, he decided he better fire up the generator to try to keep the refrigerator cool because the power probably was not going to come on right away. He fired it up and saw that it needed gasoline so at about 10 pm we made a trip to the convenience store and ran the generator for another hour before we went to bed.

We got up to a quiet house Monday morning, and fired up the generator again. And at 7 AM, just about the time my laptop computer battery was running out of juice, the power surged back on. Hallelujah! And the day commenced.

The good thing about the storm is that it broke the heat wave and the drought for our area and we got some lovely rain over the next few days that we needed badly. Everything that was looking so sad and tired suddenly sprang to life again, and up popped the naked ladies.

Amaryllis or “surprise lilies” are a more polite name for them. We were bewildered during the first spring we were here to see the thick, lush vegetation at about the same time the daffodils and tulips came up, but no flowers.

And then, surprise!

Put a cork in it…

2011-08-06T16:11:00.001-04:00

Many years ago, a friend’s husband made me a concrete birdbath that sits on the ground where I can see it from the kitchen window. It has a round hole in one end into which a cork will fit to keep the water in and to let the water out to clean it and to keep the mosquitoes from breeding.

Corks tend to deteriorate over time when they are left submerged, so occasionally I replace the cork with a new one. The type that come in the occasional bottle of sherry Richard buys work well.

The birdbath is extremely heavy and difficult to move, so permanently blocking the hole would mean tipping it on its side to drain water out, and that is not an option.

This birdbath is a popular gathering place for birds…

And little warty toads….

The cat drinks out of it.

I have no idea who comes to visit it at night, but for sure the raccoons are interested in it.

Earlier in the spring, I got up in the morning and noted the water had been drained out, and I discovered the cork had been pulled out.

This happened a few more times, but it didn’t bother me too much because the water needs to be drained frequently. And then I decided to put a "sort of a brick" on the cork.

And then the cork disintegrated.

So I found a new cork in the junk drawer (how could one survive without junk drawer?), but it was slightly bigger than the hole in the birdbath and it took several tries throughout the day before I could get it wedged in there firmly enough to stop the water trickling out. After about the third trip out with my small pail of water, I finally resorted to whacking on it with a hammer. Round cork. Round hole. Should fit.

Satisfied, I replaced the sort-of-a brick on top of the cork, but the cork stuck up too much which left the brick at just enough of an angle that it did not thwart the raccoons. When I got up the next morning, the sort-of-a brick had been pushed off and the new cork pulled out, and the birdbath was empty.

As I stormed back into the house fuming at this clever, clever animal, I recalled that one of the writers of a blog I used to look at fairly frequently (and I am slowly, slowly, starting to be interested again in all the blogs these lovely people have written) has Lucy, which appears to be a pet raccoon or else a very tame wild one, and I wondered – how does one live with a raccoon? How would one go about keeping them OUT of stuff?

At any rate, after several false starts, I got the cork back in and doubled up on the “heavy things that are sort of like bricks” and so far that seems to have done the trick.

I have been thinking in the past few days how it is that the minutia of day-of-day life, the innumerable little problems that crop up that need to be solved, the small decisions that need to be made that help to keep me focused on the right here and now instead of what has happened.

Which manuscript will I work on next?

What shirt will I wear to the Y this morning?

The things that constantly demand my attention and help to keep me going – to keep me from floundering.
To keep me from thinking too much about the gaping hole that suddenly opened in the fabric of our life.

And then, inevitably, every once in a while, I find myself looking over my shoulder as I sit at my computer, feeling at any minute he is going to walk into the living room, and I’ll hear his voice “Hi Mom!” in that funny way he had of saying it.

I miss him so much.

And then the lyric of a song will float through my mind….

“And as I stumble through the darkness
I will call Your name by night…”

And then the moment passes and I ...'

until the next one…

Caught in the act…

2011-07-30T14:42:00.000-04:00

A week or so before we left on our trip in early June, Iplanted the last of the tomato plants that Richard bought from the feed store.We did not get around to staking them or putting them in cages before we left,and when we came back it might not been too late to do it, but we werepreoccupied with getting ourselves reorganized from the vacation, and when wewoke up and saw what was happening, they were a tangled mess on the ground and itwas too late to do anything about it.

Richard comes in and announces “I found the culprit who is munchingon our tomatoes.”

Yes indeed.

Who can resist a vine-ripened tomato (aside from someone whodoesn’t like tomatoes)?

Not me. Not him (or her) either.

End of an era

2011-07-29T07:21:00.000-04:00

The cicadas that live in the trees that surround the house begin very early in morning to stitch their sewing machine songs. These are not the smaller periodic cicadas that we had in the late spring, these are the big ones that are with us throughout the summer every year. Even if there were no traffic whizzing by 24/7, there is nothing quiet about country living in the summer. The cicadas go to sleep in the early evening, and then the katydids wake up and sing to each other throughout the night. I love the sound of the katydids. Puts me right to sleep

The Bandido Brothers show up fairly regularly here after dark. Each year there are a different group -- the Momma raccoon brings the latest batch of infants to the house to introduce them to all the goodies that might be had here. They scavenge the leftover bird seed at the bird feeder, they invariably tip over the large saucer of water I put out for the birds, and if I forget to bring the hummingbird feeder in, then they are all over that. They squabble and make noise and are just adorable. Until they grow up. They apparently did not come by last night, because this morning I see that the water is still there.

The heat continues. I suppose it is hotter in some areas than it is in others -- I think we get a bit of a break because our house is well shaded by trees and surrounded by tall trees and there is no asphalt or cement around the house to serve as a heat sink. It gets this hot in Los Angeles for sure, but there is no late afternoon marine layer coming off the ocean to moderate the heat. The "low" the other night was about 80 degrees. I find that even though we have lived here since 1981, Los Angeles is still home. I still think of myself as a "California girl".... urr... well, make that "geezer."

I sort of "engineered" it so that someone came on Wednesday and installed two window air conditioners, one in Richard's office and one in our bedroom (my office is in the bedroom) so we will have "zone cooling". He was annoyed with me because he "wasn't ready" to do what needs to be done so the A/Cs can be installed (had to move a bunch of stuff away from the window so the A/C could be put in), but one of the A/Cs has been sitting in its carton for at least a year and the other one even longer, and it was time. Installing a window A/C is not a major deal, but Richard can't lift anything very heavy because he has an umbilical hernia that he must be careful with.

So an era is coming to an end -- an era of suffering through the Midwestern summer with no relief except for box fans a few hours of cool air being drawn through the house in the early morning and early evening by the whole-house attic fan. The heat never seemed to bother us much -- or if it did we have forgotten how miserable we were -- but at least now we can be a bit more comfortable.

Not a slave to fashion...

2011-07-25T20:11:00.000-04:00

Richard listens to the NPR radio program Car Talk every week, and by default I hear snatches of it as I meander within the sound of the radio in his office. I enjoy the program, the banter between the hosts and the people who call in with problems, the weekly puzzle, and the closing credits.

The credits begin with “colorfully nicknamed actual staffers, notably producer Doug the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion bongo boy Berman…

I have not been a slave to fashion since we moved here in 1981. I try to be neat and clean and look presentable, but I have nothing currently fashionable hanging in my closet.

I was reflecting on fashion yesterday when I rose from the pew to make my way to the front of the church at the end of the service to play the closing song and happened to look down. If I had stuck to the white pumps with the 1-inch heels that I had briefly tried on and then discarded because my feet immediately started hurt (even though they are my size) I would not have found myself suddenly realizing that that I was wearing a different shoe on each foot. I wondered why I had not bothered to look down when I was putting them on or at any time before I left the house, when there still would have been time to change my shoes.

It was an easy mistake to make, actually, because they are, after all, very much alike, and I doubt that anybody noticed the difference, especially since I was wearing an ankle-length dress.

In some places footwear like this on a Sunday morning would not pass muster, so I am very thankful that I live in a place where I don’t have to torture my feet to fit in.

The writer of one of the blogs I read sort of went on a rant about why do we need “perfection.” And he makes some good points. Many very nice looking, and pleasantly average, and even strikingly beautiful women are filled with insecurity about how they look and thus gobs of money are spent on facial products and surgical procedures and clothes, and hair to so they can feel better about themselves, and sometimes in order to succeed in a world that values external beauty.

He tends to want to blame our culture for this, but I think the root of it is basic human nature: I suspect that every culture on the planet has some sort of standard of beauty that the people must strive to achieve – from the tribal people in the Amazon River rainforest where they often have skewers in various parts of their faces, to the Inuit in the far north whose women were expected to tattoo their faces to appear beautiful.

I am just thankful that my career path did not take me in a direction where I had to “dress for success” and appear a certain way to advance my career.

Dressing for success today in our hot little house with no A/C meant slipping on silk boxers to wear as shorts (25-cents at the thrift store) and a sports bra that was in a bag of clothes I was given years ago by a woman whose house I cleaned. I just have to make sure no one arrives unexpectedly at the back door.

Feeding the donkey…

2011-07-20T18:22:00.000-04:00

Several Saturdays ago, maybe the second Saturday after we got back from California, the phone rang in the afternoon, and I picked up.

“Hello?”

Immediately, I heard voice of my sister’s husband, rattling along in Italian at breakneck speed.

Of course I did not understanding a single thing he was saying, and likely never to do so, especially since the variety of Italian that his family speaks is a dialect that developed on one of the small islands off the coast of Italy where they all came from.

I began to laugh. It perked the day right up.

Yesterday, we took most of the day off and journeyed to Springfield to commemorate our 40th wedding anniversary. It ended up being sort of boring because it was so hot outside we did not go to any of the fun outdoor places we had thought about going to, and the theater that offers such a nice price break on the matinee on Tuesday was not showing anything we want to see.

We were able to find a few things we wanted in a couple of used-book stores, and we looked at the beautiful things at the Waverly House, a art gallery and gift shop, and then we had lunch at the Macaroni Grill.

We both had the opportunity to learn a little Italian. Richard came back from the men’s restroom and said it was playing a lesson in Italian that said, “When was the last time, Gina, that I told you I loved you.” We had a good laugh about that. What if the woman’s name was not Gina?

So, more out of curiosity than real need, I visited the women’s facility to see what I would be taught.This is what I was asked to repeat: “I have to go to the bank to get money so I can buy food to feed the donkey.”

We had an even bigger laugh. The day, which had the potential to slide into boredom, suddenly perked up a bit. Laughter will do that...

Nursery fare

2011-07-14T20:55:00.000-04:00

The essay for July 9 in Simple Abundance

is titled “Nursery Fare for Children of All Ages”

She writes:

When you’re cranky and cry easily, when you are so tired that your eyes burn from keeping them open, when you need hugs and someone to pat the top of your head and whisper, “Shh… there, there…” and no one is around, you need nursery fare.

Nursery foods are the well-loved recipes from childhood that conjure up the happy, innocent moments when all was right with the world…”

She started me thinking about the foods that bring back such pleasant memories of childhood.

My mother did not make dessert very often, but things that spring to mind are…

warm tapioca pudding…

warm rice sprinkled with sugar, a dollop of margarine (butter was a treat for only very rare occasions), and a bit of milk….

a few marshmallows on top of a graham cracker and put under the broiler (years before “S’mores” became popular)…

hot chocolate made with canned milk…

It surprises me not at all that my favorite thing to eat off the dessert bar at the mega buffet is bread pudding (not that we will be going there anytime soon given how much weight we have gained…)

And then I suddenly remembered some things I loved to eat when I went to stay overnight with Mungie, my mom's mother, who was twice widowed and lived with her son, Ellis, whose wife had died many years earlier.

I loved Mungie, but I tended to prefer hanging around with men when I was a little girl, and I especially liked hanging around with Uncle Ellis. He had a couple of hobbies – indoors he raised canaries, and in the back yard he raised and raced pigeons.

Every time I see the small flock of feral pigeons flying about near the bridge over the highway, where they roost on the ledges of the “I” beam girders, I think of him and remember going outside with him and helping him mess about with the pigeons. When I was a little older, he gave me some pigeons of my own and built a coop for them at my house, but a neighborhood boy that I went to school with stole them one summer when we went on vacation. It was not until we were at our 10th high school reunion that he confessed that he had been the one to take them.

Uncle Ellis made money by making brooms, and he kept me supplied with stick horses – I was going to be a cowgirl when I grew up. Really, I was.

I loved the smell of the broomcorn, and watching the machine that he used to stitch the broomcorn, and the other machine that wound the wire around the stick. And when I spent the night, they fixed me up a bed in the room with the big machines that made interesting shadows when the lights were off, surrounded by the smell of the broomcorn.

And part of the ritual of staying with them was the bedtime snack: pieces of white bread torn in chunks with milk poured over and eaten; or it might be graham crackers crumbled into milk and eaten.

I have already learned in the past 6 months that food does not help. Eating to assuage our grief has just made us gain a lot of weight. So, I think I had better just reminisce about the nursery fare of childhood… except if memory serves, I believe I do have some tapioca in the cupboard…

Excuse me for just a minute….

Perilous times

2011-07-12T09:23:00.000-04:00

The bluebirds have worked very hard this year and have managed to raise a second batch of babies.

I have no idea how many left the nest box, but at least one survived and ended up on our porch on Saturday.

It sat there quite a while, with Mom chattering away from the branches above.

We were pleased to see it, but very much wished that the parents would lure it away from the house and take it out back toward the woods, where it might be a bit safer from the marauding cat.

I have not heard the parents’ plaintive calls since Saturday, so I hope that they succeeded.

Baby birds often do not survive. Lots of things are out to get them, and their clumsy abilities at flying often send them crashing into things, which can be fatal.

One would like to intervene: rush out and grab it and keep it safe from harm for a little while longer. But Nature has to take its course, and sometimes it isn’t pretty.

One could make a metaphor about baby birds leaving the nest and children, but I think perhaps I won’t go there….

That creepy-crawly feeling

2011-07-11T17:42:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time, I taught fairly young kids – kindergarten, first grade—on Wednesday nights at church while their parents were attending the Bible study. I enjoyed the kids and most of the kids seemed to like me, and at the end of the hour, I would get hugs and off they went.

And then once, a few days after such a Wednesday night session, I got an itchy sore that began to spread… and then another... and then Richard got the itchy sores… and then Nathaniel got the itchy sores.

We could see that something was Going On.

I made an appointment with the doctor.

In the meantime, the child in question had been taken to the doctor, so by the time I saw the doctor to find out what it was, there was no “mystery diagnosis.”

I had been given scabies by the child and had thoughtfully given it to my family.

We were given a bottle of prescription medicine that we had to wash ourselves with, and I had to wash a lot of laundry in very hot water.

On Saturday while I was sitting at the computer, I kept getting this feeling that something was crawling up my right leg over the shin.

Flea? Chigger? Tick? Scabies mite?

Please, not that again!!! Although chigger bites are just about as bad.

I’d look down and I could see nothing. I’d rub the area, and creepy-crawly feeling would go away. For a while.

And then it would happen again.... and again... and again...

I got a magnifying glass and had Richard look at my leg to see if he could see any minute beastie crawling up my leg.

Nope. Nothing there.

We have concluded that a nerve in my skin was confused. Today, fortunately, it seems to have gotten a grip on its proper place in the network and is behaving itself.

So I can stop worrying about ticks, chiggers, and scabies mites. Now, if I could just do something about the two mosquito bites on my stomach.

Any port in a storm

2011-07-08T12:48:00.000-04:00

It is imperative that people who live in these here parts regularly check the engine compartments of any cars that they do not drive every day, because pack rats will move into the space and set up housekeeping. If that was all they did, it would not be much of a problem to simply sweep the debris out of the engine compartment and carry on.

But as I said, they don’t just make themselves a cozy nest. They compulsively chew the electric wiring and hoses in the engine compartment and they can do a horrific amount of damage. We had to junk a perfectly good but very old car when we determined it would cost far more for a mechanic to track down the electrical problems caused by pack rat damage and repair it then the car was worth.

Our yard has taken on the appearance of a used-car lot. We have 3 cars sitting idle – a long story that makes us seem as though we are flirting with mental illness – involving the “beater” back-up vehicle to make sure our son would have a car to get to work, the purchase of a good-quality vehicle for us to drive on the frequent trips to the hospital 90 miles away (sometimes two or more trips a week) while he was being treated and recovering from operations and when we still had hope he would recover, and then of course the “beater” car that he was driving when he was able.

OK. So Richard lifts the hood on the “good” extra car and sees this...

which is the beginning of a pack rat nest. The car is parked near some straw that I was using to cover my hostas at night earlier this spring when winter had not quite given up... otherwise it would be a collection of twigs, leaves, and grass

And then he lifts the hood on Nathaniel’s old car and sees something totally unexpected in addition to an accumulation of twigs, leaves and grass…

This tiny little possum had apparently decided the engine block was a safe place to stay to get in out of the rain (which we have had quite a bit of recently).

We wrestled with what to do about it – we didn’t want to kill it outright...

but Richard needed to put out poison and set traps to catch the pack rat that was also thinking about setting up housekeeping in Nathaniel’s and what if the little guy ate the rat poison... or got caught in the trap?

Richard left the hood cracked and when we checked yesterday afternoon the little guy moved on to someplace else. I'd hate for it to be collateral damage in the war with the rats.

Laughing.... and crying

2011-07-07T16:30:00.001-04:00

I try to keep in mind that the telemarketers who call me on the phone are probably decent, hard-working people who are just trying to make a living. It is rather unfortunate that the job they have irritates the snot out of people and leaves them open to all sorts of rudeness and bad manners.

Carl Hiaasen wrote a great "consumer-gets-revenge-on-the telemarketer" novel, Nature Girl, where the woman of the house lures the offending telemarketer to Florida and bad things happen...

Of course I wouldn't attempt to get revenge like the outraged woman in Hiaasen's novel, but I find I have suddenly started responding out of character to these phone calls.

While we were at my Dad's house, a telemarketer called and wanted to know if I was the homeowner. Instead of the usual, "Thank you, but I am not interested..." I responded:

"No. I am not the homeowner and we are not taking any calls now."

Everybody in the room who heard this began laughing hysterically -- although I suppose it does not actually seem that funny now, it was good for a bit of merriment when it happened.

Today I got one from a woman with an accent so thick that I could not understand what she was saying. I had to get her to repeat the lead-in and her voice was so annoying that I finally just said said, "I am sorry but I do not want to talk to you" and I hung up.

It helps to find things to laugh about a bit after having a hard day yesterday.

My boy is never far from my thoughts, yet I was a bit surprised at myself when I walked into Y yesterday morning, saw a couple of the women in my aerobics class sitting there waiting, sat down and burst into tears. I think the clerk behind the counter was a bit surprised too. After some hand holding and hugs, things were better and I had a good rest of the day...

Until about 4 p.m. Ann had invited me to attend a graveside service to bury the ashes of her son and his wife. The wife, who had had suffered with severe depression, killed herself in September. And then Ann's son, who had became increasingly despondent over his wife's death, shot himself in January, a week after our son died. Our son and this young man had been school friends for several years, and we were at their house often.

Sometimes shared experiences forges a bond. I just wish the bond I have with Ann wasn't so horrible.

Who Gets What

2011-07-04T11:43:00.001-04:00

Sorting out the disposition of family heirlooms and other treasures can be a minefield for adult children after their parents die. I began cleaning house for an old guy shortly after his wife died, and I worked for him a few years before he also died, and there was so much infighting among his 5 children about who would get the family treasures – and there were a large number of antiques and other beautiful things – that they finally decided the only way to settle the arguments was to have a public auction and everybody had to buy what ever it was they wanted; of course with the worry that some of the items would pass out of the family if his kids could not cough up the money to outbid strangers for particularly nice things.

Some years ago, after my mother heard about a particularly nasty battle that went on among the family members of one our relative's in-laws over a toy tricycle, she decided that, “we aren’t having that in our family,” and so she distributed some of the nonessential treasures. I got the small ornate sewing scissors that she used and some figurines, my sister got the piano, and so on…

When I was there in June I decided to appropriate for myself – after getting the OK from my father – that had great meaning to me from “way back” but that I had a good idea meant little to my brothers or my sister.

My father’s oldest sister, Aunt Betty, had given The Jar to him when I was young, and one of my earliest memories was being mesmerized by what was in The Jar. Unlike The Jar so creepily written about by Ray Bradbury and dramatized so well by Alfred Hitchcock, this did not hold any terrors for me. I loved this collection of reptiles and amphibians. It had been sitting in the garage on a shelf since the early 1960s.

Over the years the formaldehyde had evaporated to the point that some of the specimens were close to being ruined, and I could not stand it. So, it made the trip home with me and I rehabilitated it.

And even though some of the once brightly colored specimens have become bleached out because of the sun shining on them, I still enjoy looking at it, I suppose because of the memories it brings of my Aunt and Uncle .

And just so y’all don’t think I am totally weird, I also have a teapot that belonged to one of the grandmothers (not sure if it was my mom's mom or my dad’s mom) that I love too...

and periodically fill with dried flowers.

And I just want my family to know that I will not fight with anybody over the disposition of the butcher knife. This was a present that Aunt Betty gave to my folks when they got married in 1945. It is still being used and is as thin as a razor and just as sharp, and sparks could fly when it comes time to decide who gets it. You three can work it out. Richard, however, says he would like the potato peeler, if nobody minds.

In which Little Huney gets hitched…

2011-07-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

My sister (looking very beautiful as the MOB)

began calling her baby girl “Little Huney” rather early on because she really was a “Little Huney” – and very different in personality from her big sister....

but not perfect, of course--they have had some interesting times with her, just like most other parents who have raised daughters. She got up one morning before anybody else was awake, decided she wanted a piercing in her ear cartilage, and just.... did it herself. Then she came home one day with a stud in the side of her nose, again without asking anyone what they thought about it.

And then she met a young man at Starbucks, and fell in love...

and they had a glorious wedding back on June 18 (time flies!).

I have sat through a few weddings that seemed to me like train wrecks waiting to happen, and unfortunately, my assessment was sometimes right. Of course one never knows how things are going to work out for a young couple as they begin life together, and most couples do go through bad patches no matter how perfect they are for each other.

This wedding was not a train wreck. Indeed not.

We were right up front, in the second row, so I don’t know how many elbows bent to press Kleenex to extra moist eyes, but I suspect there was a lot of damp Kleenex by the time the ceremony was done, especially when the groom got choked up saying his vows and could hardly finish them, and the minister who married them got choked up himself.

Having come unprepared, I had to borrow my brother’s handkerchief before the ceremony even started.

So, how does one go about putting into words the sights, sounds, and memories of a lovely wedding and lovely visit with family and friends?

Ships passing in the night

I have not seen my Aunt Vera (my father's sister) and her husband, Uncle Bud

or their children—cousins Teri, Mark, and Nadine—since their father turned 80 years old in June 2003.

Our family happened to be on a “long weekend” trip to Yosemite that year, which is not that far from Sacramento, where they live, and so we took a detour home and crashed the party.

Uncle Bud Murphy and Little Huney share a birthday. She decided to get married three days before her birthday, and the Murphy relatives decided to come to the wedding, and then head on down the road to Phoenix, where Mark lives, to have big party for Uncle Bud.

Teri came from Hawaii so she could drive her dad and mom in their RV...

and Nadine (on the left there) came too so they could take turns with the driving. And then surprise surprise, Mark showed up for the wedding...

He is a pilot, so he hopped on a plane Saturday morning in Phoenix, rode in the “jump seat” to the Orange County airport, rented a car, attended the wedding, drove back to the airport, and caught another ride back to Phoenix.

And then there was cousin Jeanie and her husband Ryojin..
.

She is a “half first cousin” -- we had the same Grandpa (a longish story better saved for another time) -- who lives in Pennsylvania. I last saw her in 2004 when my father turned 80 and she came to the party.

The wedding coincided with a trip she was planning to Papua New Guinea and she had to be in Los Angeles in connection with that, so I was able to spend a little time visiting with her before we went our separate ways -- her husband back to Pennsylvania and for her, a long plane ride over thousands of miles of ocean.

We were like ships passing on the sea, flashing smiles at each other, exchanging brief messages, and then heading off on our own particular journeys.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig

2011-06-27T21:30:00.000-04:00

Having driven just about half of the 3600 or so miles it took to go from here to there and back again in a car with a stick shift (5 forward gears), and having driven the last 90 miles of the journey, I found myself slamming my foot down on the nonexistent clutch pedal as I left a couple of hours later to go to the kennel to pick up our cat.

I could see a storm brewing as I headed back to the house, with her meowing miserably in the cat carrier in the back seat, and within an hour or so comes

Blatt… Blatt… Blatt… The National Weather Service announces a severe thunderstorm warning….”

And the sky turns black and the wind kicks up and the rain pours for a while, and then it is over…

We spent Saturday night in a motel in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and I had totally forgotten when I woke up yesterday morning that it was our anniversary. Richard remembered later in the day, but I did not remember until I got a phone call from my sister later in the day singing a “Happy Anniversary” song.

This morning when I stood at the bathroom sink to brush my teeth and wash my hands, I felt a tickling sensation at my ankle and looked down to see a cricket crawling up my leg. And then a little later in the day, I saw a lizard scuttle across the “porch room” floor to vanish under a pantry cabinet.

Things are just about back to normal.

How the "haves" roll

2011-06-16T13:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a day of contrasts.

We left the madhouse of the Las Vegas strip area and ventured to Henderson to the Clark County Heritage Museum, a beautiful facility on the outskirts of Henderson. We arrived just after the museum opened and the curator – the lovely man who appears frequently on Pawn Stars to authenticate items of historical interest – was talking to the museum receptionist as we walked in. He was carrying a satchel under his arm full of papers and overflowing with books, and as he turned around to look at us when we walked in, several of them dropped on the ground, which I picked up for him.

The price of fame. Instead of trundling along through life as an unknown and unrecognized museum curator, he can barely go out in public without being recognized and bothered.

It was peaceful and quiet at the museum, with interesting artifacts and items showing the life of the Native Americans who lived in the area, and the early days of Las Vegas. And outside, various historic houses and buildings have been moved onto the grounds and restored and are open for people to walk-through.

A batch of very young rabbits had apparently just left the nest and several of them were playing on the lawns of these houses, and funny little ground squirrels were scampering everywhere. A Gambel’s quail scurried away from us -- top knot bobbing - as we came out of one of the houses and vanished into the scrub.

We were not prepared for strolling in the heat and sunlight, so we did not go on the nature trail. In any event, it was a lovely, relaxing couple of hours and the price of admission: $1.00 each.

We stopped at a Vietnamese restaurant in a strip mall for lunch. The dining area was filled with several large groups of Vietnamese, and we were the only white folk. We suspect that some of the people were kin to the owner or the chef because people sort of got up and wandered back into the kitchen and out again. There were a number of children running around and laughing (and also going in and out of the kitchen) and playing some sort of table game.

One little old man appeared to be the waiter and he hustled around trying to take care of everyone. It was loud and noisy and fun and the food was very good. One of the ingredients in the soup we had resembled cubes of reddish colored tofu. I happily ate it, and I ate Richard’s too, before Richard told he thought it was congealed pork blood.

The bill for lunch was $22.

Richard attended the afternoon session of the convention and when he returned, he said the editor of the trade magazine he writes for had invited us out to dinner and we would meet her at the Bellagio. So we got ready and drove to the Bellagio, assuming I think that we would pile into her car and go somewhere else.

But no, she had made reservations for us at Circo, an upscale restaurant in the hotel serving Tuscan-style cuisine.

The dining area was very quiet. There was army of men dressed in black suits waiting on the tables, as many as two or three at a time bringing food. There was a “wine guy” who did nothing but present bottles of wine to diners.

Both of us were trying to figure out if there was something “light” on the menu, and while I was mentally gasping at the prices of the food, she announced that we should have the “tasting menu.”

So we did. And they brought small courses of food – amazing food -- with fairly long gaps between each course. We were there at least 3 hours.

Richard has this habit of snatching the check when other people have invited us out to dinner and paying for it. This time, however, when the waiter appeared at our table and handed the check to Richard, he passed it to our host. Fortunately. The price of the meal was $450.

We walked out of there stuffed and stunned and more than a bit overwhelmed.

And now I am happily pounding away on the keyboard in our $30-a-night hotel room, which has served our middle-class needs very well, and very shortly Richard will arrive back from the morning session, and we will load the car and drive off across the desert to Los Angeles.

Easily confused and easily amused

2011-06-14T14:04:00.000-04:00

Somehow in the rush to get ready for our trip, I got very mixed up about when Father's Day occurs. It wasn't until late last night, after we finally managed to arrive at the Bellagio to see the fountain show (the pedestrian bridge to cross the street in front of the Bellagio was broken, which resulted in a rather circuitous route to get there) and then walked back to the motel to get something to drink that I realized I had made a mistake.

I thought Father's Day was June 12. So I wrote a Father's Day card to my dad and put that with the weekly letter I write him, and then added one more stop on my morning trip to town on Friday to buy a card for Richard. Richard was amazing -- truly amazing -- in all of the things he did for Nathaniel when our terrible journey began this time last year, and I intend to honor him for that for as long as we both shall live...

And I was so proud of myself when I got the card mailed off to my Dad (feeling not too bad that it would be a day late) and had the card for Richard ready to go to give to him on Sunday.

I had called my dad on Sunday when we were having dinner in Flagstaff, asking how he was and hoping he had had a nice day, and although he is always happy to hear from me, I imagine he was a bit confused about why I had called....

As we were meandering through the casino last night headed for the cafe, I noted a placard announcing "FREE for Fathers on Fathers Day, June 19...."

I will have to call him today and explain that I have lost my mind.

And then this morning, around 9 a.m. we suddenly heard quite rapid banging. Richard went to the door and looked out in the hall but all was quiet. There is some refurbishing going on in the motel--when we read a review of the motel, someone had complained that there was a lot of noise--and then I thought it might be kids running down the hall or something. But then Richard realized it was the bed in the next room banging against the wall. It didn't last very long, and we sort of giggled about that for a minute or two...

The Woman of TomTom

2011-06-13T22:07:00.000-04:00

The day before we left on our road trip -- from rural Missouri to the bustling metropolis of Los Angeles -- I received an e-mail notice that the writer of a favorite blog, The Reluctant Memsahib, was embarking with her husband on their own road trip.

I think perhaps she has the potential to see much more exciting things than we saw on the first leg of our trip. So far, the only really interesting thing we have seen from the windows of the car as we motored at a sedate 65 mph down I-40 (which follows the old Route 66) was a small herd of pronghorn antelope grazing in a field in northern New Mexico.

This trip requires a few days' stay in Lost Wages so Richard can attend a convention. We arrived here this morning in a rather more leisurely fashion than we have done in previous trips. We decided to take an extra traveling day -- our grief counselor urged us to do this when she spotted us early last week on our morning walk as she pulled off the highway at the Willow Springs exit just as we were crossing the overpass.

"You two are exhausted," she said. "You just don't know it. Take your time."

I could relate to Memsahib's post of today, where she describes them being stopped by a policeman and being fined for speeding and other infractions. I remember quite vividly about 7 years ago when Richard was driving and blew right past the sign that said

Construction Zone

Reduced Speed

Fines Doubled in Construction Area

and there was a Arizona highway patrol car sitting there to see us do it, and she stopped us. We spent a hour or so in Winslow, Arizona, and I actually got to "stand on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" while he was paying the $220 fine. We were somewhat poorer and much wiser after that episode.

A new companion with us on this trip has been our handy TomTom device with the pleasant female voice advising us how to get where we want to go. We don't actually need her while we are on the road, but she was very helpful today directing us from the Interstate to our motel, and from there to the location of the pawn shop that is featured on the "Pawn Stars" program. As we drove by the pawnshop and saw the line of people standing outside in the hot sun waiting to get in, I concluded that I did not really want to stand in line for the chance to see the interior of the shop, and so we drove on by and made a couple of right hand turns and then headed back to the motel.

We are somewhat nostalgic for the "old Las Vegas" that we remember from the 1970s. The "new and improved" Las Vegas is overwhelming. In the old days, one could walk down the strip and enjoy the lights and the sights -- now everything has gotten so huge and so grand that it is no longer very walkable -- the casinos are simply too far apart.

But except for a stroll last night and early this morning down the quaint streets of Williams, Arizona, we have mostly been sitting on our behinds since Saturday morning and so we will put our shoes on, head on out for some Indian food, and perhaps walk as far as the fountains at the Bellagio...

Amaretto sauce-covered ants…

2011-06-09T18:44:00.000-04:00

We heard an interesting thing on a nature program recently: In parts of Africa where humans coexist with army ants, when word comes that the ants--which are known to eat anything and everything in their path--are headed for the village, everybody grabs their babies and the chickens and they vacate the village. The invading ants thoroughly clean the huts of any organic matter, and then the people come back. Works out well for both.

Ants are described in admirable terms in the Bible…

Take a lesson from the ants… learn from their ways and become wise! Though they have no prince or governor or ruler to make them work, they labor hard all summer, gathering food for the winter.

And indeed, they do labor hard.

The ants that live with us are consummate scavengers, and I can relate.

I got a strong dose of the “scavenger” gene from my dad – I can hardly resist looking into a dumpster or a trash can; within recent memory, for example, I found a really nice bucket and some other good stuff in a trash can in the park. I don’t go as far as a friend of mine, who regularly ate produce she found in the dumpster in back of the supermarket, but I have found some cool stuff on occasion.

At any rate, this is about ants. Within 15 minutes or so of a cockroach being smashed (and unfortunately for us, there are quite a few cockroaches who seem to want to be in the house with us...)

they have found it...

and are busy recycling it.

I think it is interesting that nowhere does Franz Kafka say that poor Gregor Samsa woke up one morning to discover he was a cockroach, but I think just about everybody who has read The Metamorphosis assumes that is the insect he was. I mean, he could have been a June bug -- which can be annoying, but most people don't hate them and don’t think them “vermin.”

Unfortunately for them, the ants don’t know the difference between a smashed cockroach and $4.99-per-pound rainbow trout that has been set out to thaw on a rack. I guess they must have thought they hit the Mother Load -- quite a group of them ended up getting washed down the drain the other night.

Richard decided a few weeks ago that I deserved a special treat. The trout were on sale and so he bought four of them. And then he splurged even more and bought me a small bottle of medium-expensive amaretto so I could make amaretto sauce to go on them.

To make a wonderful sauce for trout or other mild-flavored fish (and this is OK for nondrinkers because all the alcohol evaporates off), and I think it would be wonderful on warm rice…

Take about 2 ounces of slivered almonds or whole almonds that have been chopped up a bit, and toast them in a 1 tbsp of melted butter, but don’t burn them (like I did the first time) ….

Then add 1/4 cup of amaretto…

Then add 1/2 cup of heavy cream. I don’t have heavy cream, so I put twice as much powdered milk as needed in 1/2 cup of water and added that, and then let it simmer a bit and reduce down….

Then, you can add some chopped grapes, or diced peaches, or other sweet fruit.

Very tasty. Unlike ants which live with us, which don’t taste good at all (has anyone ever actually eaten chocolate-covered ants?)

Gettin’ gussied up…

2011-06-06T17:47:00.000-04:00

A big event in the family is coming up in a couple of weeks – my sister’s youngest daughter is getting married, and we will be leaving soon to drive on out there to the Left Coast and have us a party.

Which means we have to organize ourselves and figure out what we are going to wear. We have been living a long time in an area where Ozark Casual is the rule – people have a tendency to show up at weddings and funerals too, wearing their everyday clothes, which for quite a few is bib overalls or their work clothes. At the last wedding I attended, the grandfather of the bride did indeed show up in Dickie pants and a work shirt.

I have had a lot of fun teasing my sister about what we may or may not be wearing. I sent her an e-mail in which I said “Richard wants to know if he can wear his bib overalls” to the wedding…”

I have reassured her several times that I am just kidding. But when I talked to her on Saturday Richard reminded to tell her that he would be add a flower in the buttonhole to give his Ozark tuxedo a bit of class.

I really am just kidding.

We discovered that Richard has two suits in the closet. They have been kept secure in a garment bag and there are no holes in them from the moths. We don’t remember buying two suits, but there they are.

A rose by any other name…

2011-06-04T15:53:00.000-04:00

I think one of the signs that recovery is moving forward, even if there are a few backward steps along the way, is a renewed interest in reading the blogs that have given me so much pleasure in the past.

I read two blogs written by Australians, including the one by Cathy. I enjoyed so much seeing the beautiful pictures of her roses in a recent post.

My mother loved roses, but I do not remember seeing rosebushes in the yard until we moved to the second house we lived in – and where my father still lives – in the early 1960s. Then many rosebushes began appearing in the flowerbeds as the years passed. One of the few presents that I actually remember giving my mother was a rosebush with lavender-colored blooms for her birthday or maybe Mother's Day.

When we moved here, I did not attempt to plant a rosebush at our house, but I didn’t need to.

A previous owner had planted a climbing rose – an old fashioned “heirloom” type, on the wooden fence that used to separate the “yard” from the “pasture.”

It has come back year after year after year, even though the fence, and the trellis we later put up, disintegrated years ago. Now it climbs up into the sumac bushes.

I had totally forgotten about this old faithful friend until I happened to read Cathy’s blog, and so I thought I would check to see if it was blooming this year.

And indeed it is.

It is not big and bold and brassy, it has a very small,

unassuming flower...

but it is sweet and I love it.

We are spared the cacophony

2011-06-01T20:39:00.000-04:00

I started to title this post Do you hear what I hear?” but the fact is, we are not hearing it, and I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the song lyric work.

What is the it?

The deafening calls of these bulgy orange-eyed insects –

the periodical cicadas -- that merge once every 13 or 17 years (I think this year it is supposed to be the 13-year eruption) in these here parts to engage in a frenzied mating orgy for a short period and then disappear again for another 13 (or 17) years.

I first time I heard these creatures was well… 13 years ago (or maybe 17) when I cleaned a house out in the country that was surrounded by woods. I came home very relieved that we did not have any of them at our house – or at least not enough of them to just about drown out the sound of a lawnmower busy in the next yard.

I have been two places in the past few days where there were so many of them that they made enough noise that one had to “speak up” if one wanted to talk outside and be heard. And even though it may not sound that loud on the You-Tube link there -- they really are quite loud.

Again, I came home to blissful silence – well, not quite blissful because the trucks are still roaring past -- but at least not any noisier than usual. Which is why I was very surprised to see this one on the back porch.

I am wondering why no one has thought to make one of those campy “B” horror movies with giant insects featuring this guy (or gal).

I mean, it looks like it could be an alien from outer space.

A day of memories

2011-05-28T10:27:00.000-04:00

When I was kid growing up, Memorial Day was one of great excitement. Our church had a tradition of “breakfast in the mountains” and my father was the cook. The night before, he would pack the car with all the essentials for cooking pancakes at a campsite in the mountains, and the next morning we rose up at the crack of dawn and drove up into the mountains. We found the campsite, and he and my mother set up the equipment and made preparations to cook pancakes and fry bacon and us kids – well, we played and explored and ran around, and had a ball.

And soon other people from the church showed up with their kids and we all played and explored and ran around had a ball together. And as the morning advanced, soon portable radios came out and the men listened to the Indianapolis 500. We were not particularly interested in listening to cars roar around a race track and so my dad would begin to clean up and pack the gear and we came home.

And the years passed, but for me the Memorial Day tradition came to a screeching halt when I reached college. Instead of going to the mountains, I found myself holed up on Memorial Day weekends frantically studying for final exams and finishing term papers. We did not have computers back then – we did it the old fashioned way: we looked up things in books at the library, wrote notes down on index cards, and typed it on old Royal standard manual typewriter.

And then Memorial Day sort of became “just another day” in the year. Our family never visited the cemetery or decorated family graves, and certainly after we moved here, there were no family graves to decorate or visit even if we had a mind to do that.

Last year, however, Memorial Day suddenly became memorable once again. It sucked. Big time. Without a doubt, it was the worst day in my life -- up to that point, at least. A worse day was to come, of course.

We have been advised to “find distractions” this Memorial Day weekend, and so we are.

A friend turns 60 tomorrow, and there will be a birthday party at her church after the morning service, which we will attend for a while, then we must high-tail it back to our church in the afternoon because it our turn to host the “5th Sunday Singing” for the area churches. Today I will be occupied making food for that: Asian cabbage pear salad, macaroni and cheese, and a chicken pie.

On Monday, another friend is having us over for a meal.

So, we will take deep breaths, no doubt shed a few tears, and get through it.

Crying "wolf?"

2011-05-25T06:38:00.000-04:00

Sometime after the construction on the highway in front of our house was finished, and the McDonald’s restaurant and convenience store were put in on land where the package liquor store and the Rawlings sporting equipment factory used to be, and Lee moved his tire shop to the corner of Willow Road and Highway 76, was the installation of a tornado siren.

We are able to hear the siren in town if it goes off – but just barely. The new siren is about 1/2 mile from the house and we can hear it quite clearly.

At about 4:20 a.m. it goes off. Richard is a "night owl", and I am not. I needed to go to bed early last night, so I am sleeping in the “little room” off the porch. I was already mostly awake, but dozing. Not any more.

I lay there for a few seconds, wondering, "is this for real or not?" After the terrible storm that hit Joplin on Sunday, one tends to think twice about these things. Joplin is about 135 miles away, but if it could happen there, it could happen here.

Unfortunately with this siren, one can never be sure if it is the real deal. Several times this spring it has gotten a "short circuit" and has begun to wail for no reason at all. One can ignore a tornado siren in the middle of the afternoon when the sun is shining and there is not a cloud in the bright blue sky.

But not when it is pitch black outside, and through the small window at the foot of the bed, I can see flashes of lightening and hear the rumble of thunder in the distance.

I dare not ignore it.

I get up, get dressed, and step out onto the back porch. The moon is shining brightly. The siren continues to wail.

The NOAA weather radio is not on its hook in the living room. Richard had it in the bedroom last night -- another series of bad storms were moving through the area -- and did not put it back. So I tiptoe in to get it. The regular radio by the bed is on. The NRP station does “BBC World News” over night, and I hear lovely British accents discussing the volcanic eruption in Iceland. The siren has stopped, but Richard did not hear it or news, he is sound asleep.

Back in the kitchen, while I wait for coffee, I learn that there is a tornado on the ground 8 miles north of a small town that is about 30 miles from us, moving away. So I guess the siren was not for real... at least not this time. The computer voice tells me that the tornado warning has been lifted for our county.

I fire up the computer. Another day begins...

Would you like that hockey puck with molasses or jelly?

2011-05-23T20:49:00.000-04:00

I’ll take molasses, sorghum if you have any…

Richard on occasion has been rather underwhelmed at my prowess at combining flour, milk, fat, baking powder, and salt and turning out a delectable biscuit (I have also had some trouble with cinnamon roles, but that is another story.)

The problem was that I refused to use white flour or solid fat. I would insist on using whole-wheat flour and canola oil (I do have a recipe for oil biscuits).

They have always tasted OK, but light and fluffy they ain’t, and he could not resist referring to them as hockey pucks. I myself on occasion also referred to them as hockey pucks.

When we started our diet – whoops – I meant to say “permanent change in the way we eat” about 5 years ago, I quit making biscuits all together, but Richard has grown very, very, very, tired of not being able to eat things he enjoys, so once a week on Sunday, we eat stuff that we are not supposed to eat. And a few weeks ago he decided he wanted biscuits, and I caved bought white flour and used butter. And I made us some biscuits.

Our son took a shine to ice hockey when he lived in St Louis, and when we went to California in November, my brother was gracious enough to take him to a L.A. Kings’ hockey match. Now my brother has a friend who has connections with the Kings, and so they arrived several hours before he game and went “back stage” hung out and met the players and watched them practice, and Nathaniel recovered a hockey puck that had been flipped out of the rink.

So….

I just thought I’d do a comparison test of my latest batch of biscuits with the proverbial hockey puck.

I think I came out on top.

Solved: The stinkin' mystery

2011-05-22T08:37:00.001-04:00

I am always up for a good mystery. In fact, my friend Judy has loaned me the Elizabeth George With No One as Witness paperback which I will begin as soon as I finish House at Riverton. The fact that I have begun reading again, and am slowly taking up doing things in the "new normal" that I enjoyed so much during the "old normal" is a good sign, I think.

For almost a week now, I have been smelling on "my side of the house" a decomposing animal, which I assumed had been killed on the highway nearby. As days passed and the smell grew worse, I even took a stroll up the highway right-of-way looking for it, but found nothing except pieces of shredded tires.

Yesterday, however, when I went out to put more seed out for the birds, I noticed the smell was particularly strong right near deck at the back door and it occurred to me that I had been looking in all the wrong places for the dead animal. I bent down and stuck my head under the deck and at the far end of the wheelchair ramp and sure enough, I saw a lump.

I figured it was a dead opossum -- they seem to have a habit of dropping dead -- so I told Richard about it and he said he would take care of it.

And indeed he did. And it was not an opossum, it was a dead cat. For months and months a big black and white "Sylvester" type tom cat has shown up at our house to terrorize our kitty -- usually putting her up a tree.

He won't be terrorizing Squeaker any more. On more than one occasion I had asked Richard to please shoot it -- and he had investigated getting a CO2 pellet gun but couldn't find what he wanted at the Big Store That Shall Remain Nameless (which is happening more and more -- not finding what we want there).

Of course we have no clue what the cat died of or why he chose to crawl under our porch to do it, but the natural process of decay after death -- complete with bizarre carrion beetles -- will proceed out of sight and out of smell at the back of the property.

I am just very happy to once again smell sweet Missouri air wafting through the window and will spare you all any further description about this -- it was my job to carry the corpse in a garbage bag to the back of the property and dump it out (Richard was worried that the beetles would not be able to get out of the bag -- we're crazy, I think), and it was all I could do to keep from throwing up, which is not something I want to dwell on any more because in a few minutes I will commence cooking breakfast..

Richard saw a 30-minute documentary on biscuits the other night. He wants them for breakfast, so we'll see how it goes.

The imp in my computer

2011-05-21T06:48:00.000-04:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times for Sam Vimes, Commander of the Watch of Ankh-Morpork.

On the one hand, tensions between the dwarfs and the trolls in Ankh-Morpork, which are always at a simmer, are threatening to boil over. He has to keep a close eye on the trolls and dwarfs who are Constables in the Watch who must put aside their differences and work together.

Now he has been pressured into hiring a new Constable who is a vampire. Vimes does not like vampires; well, it is not that he doesn’t like them, he just doesn’t trust them.

There has been a murder that the Watch must investigate – a troll has apparently murdered a dwarf in a tunnel complex under the city. He is under pressure to solve it quickly because it could launch a full-scale riot in the city. The new vampire on the Watch, who is very beautiful and looks about 16-years-old, needs to be partnered with a Constable who is a werewolf. Each one has senses that make her especially adapted to working in dark tunnels where the murder occurred. Everyone knows that vampires and werewolves do not get along very well….

Complicating matters further is that Lord Vetinari, the not-so-benevolent despot who runs Ankh-Morpork with a not-so-velvet gloved hand, is upset with the amount of money the Watch is costing the government and has assigned an “efficiency expert” to go over the books and the activities of the Watch.

(Be patient. This post really is about my computer, and I will get to it in a minute.)

On the other hand, Sam is head-over-heels in love with his wife and they have a young son, who he adores. He has taken his duties as a father very seriously.

And to help him remember his husbandly and fatherly duties, Sam’s wife, who is somewhat bossy, insists that he carry a Gooseberry.

“Duddle-dum-duddle-dum-duddle-dum!”
Ah yes. No matter how bad things were, there was always room for them to get just that little bit worse…

Vimes pulled the smart brown box out of his pocket and flipped it open. The pointy-eared face of a small green imp stared up at him with that wistful, hopeless smile, which, in its various incarnations, he’d come to know and dread.

“Good morning, Insert Name Here! I am the Dis-Organiser Mark Five, the Gooseberry. How may I…” it began speaking fast in order to get as much said as possible before the inevitable interruption….

I don’t carry around the Terry Pratchett equivalent of a Blackberry, or a PDA, or one of those incredible new mobile phones that can do just about everything except wash the dishes, and I have never sent a text message on my little TrakPhone that is for emergencies only….

But I am convinced I have a “little green imp” living in my computer.

I have very particular ideas about how I want my desktop to look. I am a big fan of the uncluttered look – I like it plain and simple. In particular, I like the “old Windows” version of the desktop. Like this:

Which is what it looked like this morning when I turned my computer on. (By the way, Oklahoma Granny, if you enlarge the picture and look at the time signature at the bottom right and subtract about 10 minutes you will get an idea of what time I get up).

However, yesterday morning when I turned my computer on, this is what I saw:

Mind you, I have done nothing whatsoever to the desktop settings on the control panel.

Nothing at all.

It just changes itself.

This is not one of those weird computer problems that makes one want to heave the thing against the nearest wall, it is just bewildering.

Do I have an imp in my computer?

Deeee daaaa, da deee da deeeee

2011-05-19T21:10:00.000-04:00

In the early years when we lived here, the volunteer fire department was summoned by a loud, shrill siren mounted on top of the old 3-story building on Main Street that housed the police department and the dispatcher for police, fire, and the ambulance (that was before 911 took over dispatching).

One warm summer afternoon I was driving down Main Street, with the dog hanging out the window, and just as we passed the police department, the siren went off. So, there I was driving down the street with a howling dog. It was hilarious.

By the time our son was old enough to join the fire department and also become a first responder to accidents and medical emergencies, the siren had been replaced with radios and scanners, and we had several scanners that were on at all times, with the volume up if he was home, so if the volunteers were “toned out,” he would hear it and respond.

The scanner that we had in the living room lost all of it signals 5 years ago when the battery backup went dead after we went on vacation and turned off the electricity to the house for 2 weeks and forgot to take it to a friend’s house so it could be plugged in to keep the memory intact. I never got around to reprogramming it, and think the only traffic we pick up now is the NOAA weather radio report, which is hard-wired into the scanner, and traffic for the electric cooperative, which comes in handy when there is a power failure and we want to know where the crews are in their efforts to get us electrified again.

Our son’s scanner was still plugged in when he left the house for the last time in on Dec 13, and a month or so ago I decided to move it into my office, and I have taken to listening to it during the day. I normally work best without any accompanying noise, but the occasional traffic on the scanner is rather fun to listen to, and also informative.

Throughout the day there will be a variety of calls -- medical emergencies, an occasional fire, or accident. Most of the announcements are from the Highway Patrol headquarters to alert officers to C & I driving and information on license and vehicle registration checks for officers who have stopped people for traffic violations.

What I have learned from these calls is that a significant number of people whose licenses have been suspended or revoked for DUI or “points” or whatever keep right on driving. If the goal is to keep highways safe from irresponsible drivers, it isn’t working.

Calls among the local police officers often involve barking dogs, disturbances at the low-income housing complex, and children playing unattended, shoplifters at the local stores, that sort of thing.

The other morning, however, when I turned the scanner volume up at about 6 am, traffic was flying fast and furious between a number of departments – there had been a multiple shooting just outside of town. A 34-year-old woman had been shot in the back, and two men at the residence had also been shot, but not as seriously as she had. Quite a bit of drama, including the Air Evac helicopter, and to date only sparse details have been printed in the paper about what happened.

This afternoon, things are back to normal.

Attention Troop G Officers: There is a report of goats on the highway…

Sights…sounds…and smells…

2011-05-16T07:49:00.000-04:00

At about 5:45 every morning I get up from in front of the computer, fetch the hummingbird feeder, and step outside on the deck to hang it. We have two feeders: the one on the other side of the house hangs from the second-story eve in front of Richard’s window. I raise and lower that one by a rope and pulley to change the sugar water, but I don’t have to bring it in because it is too high for anything to bother. The one on my side of the house must be brought in at night because is easily reached by any marauding raccoon that happens to pay us a visit.

The sky is beginning to lighten, but it is still very dark outside, and the trees surrounding the back of the house loom as black shadows.

The cardinals have already started to sing—they are usually the first ones to greet the coming dawn—but suddenly I hear the ethereal sound of a wood thrush, very, very close by. He is in a tree on my left, probably one of the pine trees or perhaps the birch tree that have grown up very tall since we planted them as seedlings shortly after we moved here. This is one of those birds that is heard but is seldom seen. I remember years ago the Charles Kuralt Sunday Morning program we used to watch on CBS did a feature on songbirds that were vanishing because of loss of habitat. The closing moments of that piece singled out the wood thrush, with the voice over wondering if in the future the song would be silenced.

I have heard this bird on occasion over the years since then as he passed through going someplace else. But this Spring he seems to be staying. I have been pleased to hear his song when walking to the pond or to the edge of the woods at the back of our land, but I have never heard it this close to the house. I am almost afraid to move as it continues to sing, and then it is silent, probably having flitted away.

The air is still and is beginning to warm a bit, and the sky looks clear, so I return to my computer and heave open the window that will provide some visual diversion from the work of the day. It gets lighter and lighter, and a little breeze has started up, and immediately, a puff of air wafts in. I expect to smell the faint sweetness coming from several clumps of multiflora rose that have begun blooming near the back of the house (I remind myself to put “chop down multiflora rose” on the growing list of things to do in the yard that I can tackle, if it will stop raining on the weekends when I have time to do it).

But instead of smelling flowers, there is the pungent odor of rotting flesh. Some animal has died nearby. It probably was struck on the highway and was thrown off the road into the brush, or mortally wounded, it crawled off out of sight of the state’s pick-up-dead animals-on-the-highway crew to suffer a wretched death. Or maybe it just "dropped dead", like that poor opossum we found earlier in the Spring. I guess I will be smelling it for a few more days.

The alarm on my computer goes off reminding me to take my blood pressure medicine.

Another day begins...

One man’s trash….

2011-05-14T09:06:00.000-04:00

I grew up with a father who was a mechanic by trade, and he always did most of the repairs on our family cars himself. I sort of assumed almost all men worked on cars, so it was quite a shock to me when I married my dearly beloved to find out that he did not work on cars and had no interest in learning how. He in turn got a shock because I did not do things like his mother – so we both were in shock for about a year.

At any rate, when we first moved here it was vital to find a mechanic to work on our cars. And we began taking our vehicles to Sidney, who lived very close by and worked on cars out of his garage. Sidney was a good mechanic and he was trustworthy, but he had no concept of time management. Once we left a car at his shop to be fixed and got it back 2 years later.

Sidney eventually retired and moved down the road a-piece, and one of our friends recommended Randy, who has a thriving business in town. Randy is also a very good mechanic and is trustworthy. He also has a concept of time management and has seldom kept one of our vehicles for more than a couple of days, and only then because he had to order a part.

So, the other morning when our pick-em-up truck needed to be inspected for registration and needed a bit of a going over – the antilock brake light won’t go off, air conditioner is leaking coolant, gas can be smelled when the tank is full -- instead of taking two vehicles into town, dropping off the truck, and driving back in my car, we decided we would both go and then walk back, which would give us a 2-mile walk.

It continues to annoy us that people are such slobs, and so we continue to pick up trash when we walk, and we decided to take our trash grabbers and bags and clean up the town a bit on the way home. (I am not slowing down to pick up trash, he says. If I can reach out and grab it without stopping, then fine; if not, then it can stay there…” )

Most of the trash we pick up is from the fast food restaurants (cups for various drinks, lids for the cups, straw wrappers, straws, bags) cigarette packages and the strip of cellophane, lottery tickets, and empty aluminum cans and beer bottles.

Occasionally though we find good stuff. I usually don’t investigate the paper trash that I find along the road, but when I saw this strip of orange on the ground I was a bit curious. Good thing I looked.

When we got back home, Randy had already called and left a message that the truck did not need anything done to the brakes, it would pass inspection; we could recharge the air conditioner many-many-many times for what it would cost to repair the small leak, and “the leak in the gas tank is not dangerous -- just don’t fill up the gas tank all the way…”

And within the next couple of days, we will be heading to the ice cream parlor for a treat (Richard thought I should obliterate the address for some reason).

Why I am not a waitress

2011-05-10T12:39:00.000-04:00

Many of the young women I went to college with got part-time jobs waiting on tables. I did not. I knew my limitations. When I was offered a job as a student assistant in the campus Admissions Office, I readily accepted.

Twice now our church has joined the Lutheran Church to cook and serve breakfast on Saturday morning at the Senior Citizen Center. Various organizations in the town do this once a month as a fundraiser to help support the Center, which provides meals and other social activities for elderly people in town.

On both occasions I have explained that it would be much better if I were to work in the kitchen and put scrambled eggs on the plate rather than deliver the food to the tables and walk around with the coffee pot “topping off” the cups of coffee.

I sometimes have a bit of a problem transferring liquid from one container into another.

Is a picture worth a 1000 words? Yes, I think so. I didn’t speak 1000 words this morning as this was happening, just a few choice ones…

My mother's mother on Mother's Day

2011-05-08T06:00:00.003-04:00

Women of a certain age (like in their early 60s) most likely were raised by women who in turn were raised by women who learned how to “make do” when times were hard.

I will pause a moment so you can get that worked out.

To make it easier, I am talking about our grandmothers, women who were young women in the early 1900s. And for younger women, that would be great-grandmothers.

On this Mother’s Day, I am thinking about my mother’s mother. Her name was Elsie. I called her “Mongie” because that’s what came out when I was learning to talk and tried to say “Grandmother.”

She died in March 1957, when she was 71 years old, and I was 8 (or maybe I was 7 and would have been 8 in October – I can’t figure it out).

I do remember her, but most of my memories of her are of stories that my mother has told me about her.

My mother had no explanation for why her mother was dressed this way, in her husband’s clothes, standing by the house on their ranch in Colorado.

I love this photograph of her. I have it on the wall.

Elsie married Walter in 1906, and I suspect she had not been married very long when this picture was taken. I suspect the great sorrows that followed this woman around had not yet come into her life.

In 1907 she gave birth to a boy, who died at 3 months.
In 1909 she gave birth to a girl, who died at 1 month.
In 1912 she gave birth to a boy, Ellis. He survived childhood and died in 1976.
In 1918 she gave birth to a boy, who lived 3 weeks.
In 1926 she gave birth to my mother. This will be my second Mother’s Day without my mom. I miss her so much.

Then, in 1936, when my mother was 9 years old, Walter was killed in an accident on the ranch. He took his gun and went off on the horse to do something – possibly to shoot coyotes or perhaps get a rabbit for dinner. They surmise that the horse stumbled and he dropped the gun. It went off and he was shot and he died.

So Elsie buried three children and her husband.

They ended up in Los Angeles when my mom began high school, and I think my favorite Grandmother story stems from that time. They did not have much food in the house, possibly not much more than a sack of potatoes and some tea bags and sugar. Elsie told my mother to invite a friend over. Elsie sliced the potatoes and fried them, and made hot tea, and they had a party with tea and potatoes and played games and had a great time.

I cherish the legacy this country woman instilled in my mother – the attitude of frugality and “making do” and learning to have a good time despite the circumstances.

What were we thinking?

2011-05-05T07:45:00.000-04:00

Well, we obviously were not thinking. At least not clearly.

Our simple solution to the cat bothering me all day came to an inglorious end.

We should have remembered that the main reason why we removed the our home-made doggy door contraption out of the bottom pane of the storm door at the back of the house about 5 years ago was that Squeaker would periodically bring in live animals that she had caught and then let them go.

Once we had to unhook our propane heater and cart it outside for a few days because a rat she brought in had climbed up inside of it.

And then there was the chipmunk who happily lived with us for about a week, gorging itself on sunflowers seeds that I kept in a bucket, before we figured out a way to catch it unharmed and release it outside.

So, why were we so surprised when the cat trotted in the back door a couple of days ago and dropped a very live vole behind my chair? I had it momentarily cornered in a corner, but before I could grab it, it bolted and disappeared. We had visions of it dying and stinking up the house – that has also happened before.

We laid out glue traps and it got stuck on one late last night. So the vole-in-the-house problem is solved.

And the storm door is now firmly shut, and I am getting more exercise.

Courtin’ clothes, and the one that got away

2011-05-03T17:59:00.001-04:00

Once upon a time I played the dulcimer, and one of the first songs I learned was “Froggie went a-Courtin.” For some reason, I was reminded of that song when I noticed the American goldfinch who has been here all winter, has suddenly--overnight it seems--put on his bright courtin', all set and ready to impress the rather dowdy-looking female.

I have been pleased in the past week or so to see the arrivals of the birds that spend winters south of here and then return for the summer – among them the indigo bunting – and on a number of occasions I have been treated to the primary colors at the bird feeder – the yellow goldfinch, the bright red cardinal, and the shimmering blue indigo bunting.

I had a perfect shot with the camera lined up – all three of these birds were at the front-hard bird feeder at the same time—and then this is what I ended up with.

You’ll just have to imagine it.

The staff goes on strike

2011-04-23T15:20:00.000-04:00

Most cat owners have heard the phrase

“Dogs have….. Cats have staff.”

Yeah. Well, our cat has a certain staff woman very well trained, but with the help of her union rep, she is now on strike.

Our cat is an “indoor-outdoor” cat, and we have allowed her to drive us nuts. When she wants in, she crosses the bridge from the porch to the bird-feeding platform in front of the window where I sit at my computer and meows at me to let her in.

And what do I do?

I get up and let her in.

She eats a bite of food, uses the cat box (it seems not to matter that she has 8 acres of land on which she could poop or pee), perhaps plays with one of her toys for a minute or two, and then, within about 10 minutes or so, she wants out again. If the back door is not ajar, she nags at us to let her out by meowing obnoxiously. And we get up and let her out.

We cannot just leave food out for her and make her a totally outside cat because there are several big tom cats who have decided our property is part of their territory. They torment her enough as it is, and if we left food out, they would simply eat it and the problem would get even worse. Plus she has no sense (one morning very early, I watched her following a fox that was trotting down the driveway).

In the winter, it is not quite as bad because it is COLD outside and she is happier to stay indoors, but as Spring arrives, the problem escalates.

Having already established here in earlier installments that parts of our house are rather crooked, I don’t need to go into a detailed explanation of why the screen door at the other end of the house requires forceful persuasion to shut all the way, and even then, there is a half-inch gap at the top. If left to its own devices, it stays open about an inch. On more than one occasion, I have gotten up to let the cat in the door at my end of house (which does shut all the way) and she has run straight through the house and out the back door at the other end.

After listening to me complain for the umpteenth time about the cat, today Richard finally said.

Look, the back door is open. Just ignore her. She will go around and come in on her own.

So earlier today, I took his advice. She crossed the from the porch to the platform and meowed at me. I got up to make sure the back door was open. She thought I was getting up to let her in, but I did not. I sat back down. She returned to the platform and meowed at me again. I ignored her. She left and came in the back door herself, curled up on the bed, and went to sleep.

Yea!!!

And yes, other visitors have occasionally come in the back door as well: lizards, frogs, chipmunks, wrens….

Chaplin revisited

2011-04-15T13:38:00.004-04:00

After looking at the Google logo today, which is a clever short film in honor of the anniversary of Charles Chaplin's birthday, I was reminded of a post I wrote about Charles Chaplin in 2006. No point in rewriting the whole thing or reposting the picture, but one never knows what one might come across when going through things after people have died. In this case, it was things that had belonged to my father's mother, who died of a stroke in 1958 when she was 65 years old and I was 9 years old.

After my grandfather died, one of my aunts had taken a box of things home and later we were sent this copy of a picture of my grandmother...

which was taken when she was about 18 years old. Our entire family was certainly surprised to see this picture, because most of the pictures we had of her were when she was much older. And we were even more surprised when the picture of Chaplin was found.

We have just about finished going through our son's clothes. Taking it bit by bit. We were so surprised to find that he a lot of really nice clothes that he had collected in anticipation of -- what we don't know -- but most of them he never wore because he never went anywhere that required him to dress nice -- except for church, and he did have suit for that. Certainly anything he wrote to work at the sawmill was ruined in short order. At any rate, so far, and we are so thankful for this -- there have been no unpleasant surprises in his drawers, amongst his things, or under the bed.

“Lucy” puts ‘em on and takes ‘em off

2011-04-13T20:48:00.000-04:00

I know that as an adult I am not a very enthusiastic wearer of shoes. Living in the country as we do and on the sort of land that we do have here in the Ozarks, means that going outside barefoot is not a very much fun unless one treads very, very carefully; I mean, mostly rocks here with a little dirt mixed in, dochna’ know.

I definitely prefer going barefoot in the house during the summer and in the winter getting by with thick socks or very soft-soled slippers. In any event, when ever I sit down in front of the computer my shoes end up on the floor under the desk. At the moment I have 3 pairs of shoes and slippers under the desk and another pair of shoes off to the side.

I suspect I was also not a very enthusiastic wearer of shoes when I was a little girl. I think my parents sang the first few lines of the popular tune of the time “Put your shoes on Lucy, don’t you know you’re in the city” to me frequently as away to jolly me into putting my shoes on.

At any rate, that tune has plays in my mind frequently in recent months, the main irony being that it is in the city, where nature has been bullied into submission by concrete and asphalt and lawns are carefully manicured and thick with various types of grass, that it actually is possible to run around quite freely outdoors without worrying about stepping on a rock.

However, sometime during 2010, and as vivid as some memories of 2010 are, I only have a vague recollection about other things, and thus I have no idea when this happened— possibly as late as in November when Nathaniel and I did a lot of schlepping through airports and then additional walking on top of that (mostly with shoes on, I might add)—plantar fasciitis developed in my right foot. What? Huh? What this means is that the bottom of the heel hurts — really hurts — and you must wear shoes all the time. Dr Zorba, who I listen to on public radio on Sunday afternoons, says people with plantar fasciitis should even wear rubber flip-flops in the shower. I did not have it bad enough that I required flip-flops for the shower, but I did find it necessary to wear my slippers to negotiate even the 10 steps from the bed to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

And then all of a sudden the plantar fasciitis went away. And I have no idea when it stopped hurting like crazy if I did not have something on my feet.

I only know I am very thankful that now that we are temporarily having summer in April that I can charge around the house barefoot without discomfort.

It is just very nice not to deal with that any more. Weaver of Grass wrote in one of her posts about getting old is not for "wimps.” How right she is. And her advice, mostly to "get on with it" and stop complaining is good as well, I think. All sorts of parts of my body seem to be falling apart – here a twinge, there a twinge, everywhere a twinge – but at least the heel of my right foot is one less thing I have to worry about. Now, if I can just figure out what is going on with my left knee….

We have some excitement in the kitchen

2011-04-04T20:37:00.000-04:00

Richard was busy multitasking in the kitchen. He had fish baking in the convection oven, and then he decided to whip up a package of the chocolate-raspberry mousse dessert that we had found at the salvage store. (Sunday is eat-whatever-we-want day)

So he dumps the package in a bowl, pours in the milk, and begins beating it with the hand mixer at high speed, which he supposed to do for about 3 minutes. About halfway through the timer goes off for the fish, so he stops beating the dessert, sits the mixer up with the beaters over the bowl, and tends to the fish. About this time I pass through the kitchen and offer to help with finishing the dessert.

He agrees that would be a good idea, because he has to flip the fish and put it back in the oven.

So I plug in the mixer, and immediately the beaters begin to whir around at top speed, spraying chocolate mousse everywhere – on the refrigerator, all over the window, all over Richard who has just arrived at my shout of dismay.

It seems instead of turning the mixer off, he pulled the plug.

So we stood there, laughing and each blaming the other for the mess, and offering well-chosen opinions about our respective intelligence levels.

The fact that this man I married in 1971 was and still is good looking (well, I think he is) was a plus, but the thing I have come to appreciate and treasure the most over the years has been his amazing sense of humor and his ability to make me laugh. Oh my, what a blessing that is!

Something else to think about

2011-04-02T08:41:00.001-04:00

I suddenly have something else -- and someone else -- to think about.

Sue, who I have known since high school...

(she is the one there on the right in this picture, who is behaving herself)

and who I saw in November when I went to Los Angeles…

has sent an e-mail announcing that early in March she found out that she has breast cancer. Her mother died of breast cancer 20 years ago at age 73.

Sue is a very smart woman and has been faithful about having her yearly mammogram, and they have caught this cancer very early. So early in fact, that they had to do the equivalent of an “E-ticket ride” (if you did not go to Disneyland during its early years of operation you can read an explanation here) to get a biopsy specimen because the spot was so small.

Naturally this is a roller coaster for her – and no doubt there is a battle on-going in her heart not to cave into fear. I understand a little of that fear – I had a breast lump removed in 1990, that I knew they knew wasn’t cancer, but they wouldn’t come right out and tell me for sure it wasn’t cancer until they got it out. I spent some time on pins and needles until we learned it was a fibrocystic lump.

This is the real deal for her though, not fibrocystic breast disease, and I don’t even want to hint that I know how she feels.

A lot has changed in breast cancer treatment since her mother died, and her prognosis is very good. I am so sorry this is happening to her, but I think she is going to be fine. Praying about someone else’s crises often is just the thing to help divert self-absorption.

When Sue got married, I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. She chose purple and orange for her colors, and at the time I thought, “You have got to be kidding! Purple and orange?” Of course, it was gorgeous.

In the winter of 1981, I received a box at Christmas from friend in Oregon. The two years we spent there changed our lives in ways I can’t even go into, and I have cherished in my heart the relationships I made there. There was a king-sized “friendship quilt” in the box – which we have used every winter since then – and there was also grapevine Christmas wreath. It has hung on various walls in the house, gathering dust, and occasionally getting knocked off, since 1981. It became sadder and more tired looking as each year passed, and finally, a few weeks ago, as Spring began to peak around the corner, I decided I would give the wreath a face lift.

My friend Judy thoughtfully cut out a florist’s advertisement from the local daily paper announcing that she refurbished wreaths and arrangements, so at our last appointment with the grief counselor, I dropped the wreath off at a florist shop. I told her to “fix it up.” I gave her a dollar limit on how much I wanted to spend, and told her I wanted it to be bright and pretty, and then I blurted out that I liked “purple and orange.”

Judy was kind enough to pick it up for me. I think the florist did a great job.

It is now hanging in safe spot on Richard’s office wall,

and every time I look at it, and I can see it easily where I sit at the table to eat, I think about Sue and I say a little prayer that….

she will get the best care possible from the medical team treating her…
she will be strong…
the treatment will work…
she will have peace…
that she will be surrounded by strong and supportive people who will encourage her not to give up… and
her faith will not waver...

Crivens!

2011-03-23T18:48:00.000-04:00

I have heard writer’s block described as many things over the years, but if I had to add my own description of what it feels like, the most appropriate would be a predicament I was in a few years ago. I drove home from where ever I'd been, got out, and popped the hood on my car so I could disconnect the battery (no fancy hood release in this old car). There was slow leak on the battery that we could not pinpoint the source of and so my clever husband had installed a disconnect switch with a lever that had to be opened when the engine was turned off and shut when one wanted to start the car.

Somehow, my fingers got pinned between the hood and the hood release latch, and I was well and truly stuck. I started hollering for help—the pain was excruciating—and fortunately, Richard had seen me drive in and was wondering where I’d got too so he eventually came to see what was going on and figured out how to get me loose. It scared both of us very badly, and it changed forever how we approach the hood of a car. I have since heard of people self-amputating body parts to free themselves... well, it doesn't bear thinking about.

So that is sort of what it has felt like during the past couple of weeks, struggling to write something but not really being able too…

It became part of our habit while Nathaniel’s physical life was coming to an end for me to read a book to him and Richard in the evenings in the nursing home because we found ourselves running out of things to talk about, strange as that may seem. We all wanted something light and funny, so I read “Going Postal” by Terry Pratchett, and then I started a second one...

But time ran out for Nathaniel before I could finish it. We brought the book home and set it aside, because we were not emotionally ready for me to resume reading that one.

So we started Thud, yet another Terry Pratchett book, mainly because we still really did need something silly that we could laugh at. We finished that one. And then Richard decided maybe we should finish the Wee Free Men.
Every one of Pratchett’s novels has at least one really deep and profound thing buried in there amongst the silliness that can cause one to stop and reflect, and Wee Free Men is no exception.

Last week we went to Springfield for the first time since mid-December, the last time either of us was there because Nathaniel was in the hospital. As we passed the oh-so-familiar landmarks, we had some time to reflect on those many, many, many hours we spent driving him back and forth beginning in June, to various doctors or to the hospital for imaging studies and operations, and what not. Richard observed how resentful he sometimes felt that he had to give up so much time driving him back and forth, and now of course he is grateful for every minute he got to spend with Nathaniel.

And the thought has occurred to me more than once that it really is too bad that we can’t more easily develop an “attitude of gratitude” for things as they are happening instead of having to wait for some tragedy to wake us up. As Joni Mitchell points out “Don't it always seem to go.... you don’t know what you got ‘til its gone…”

When we were about half-way to Springfield, I came to the end of the Wee Free Men. Not to spoil it too badly for anyone who might want to read it, the heroine, 9-year-old Tiffany Aching, with the help of the Nac Mac Feegle (the fierce little blue men on the cover), has been successful on her perilous quest and is wanting some special schooling. She is met by Mistress Weatherwax, the person who would be in charge of all that, who tells her

“First, you get the test, and then you spend years findin’ out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.”

So I find myself thinking back on our lives since May 31, when I drove Nathaniel to the emergency department and heard the ER doc say “brain tumor or abscess” and then a week later, when I had to drive to Springfield by myself for the first time in years and years to take him to the hospital for his first operation, and Nathaniel was laying all the way back in the seat next to me, deathly ill because of the brain tumor…

And I wonder now how in the world Richard and I managed to pass all of those tests -- and Nathaniel too, for that matter. He is now free of all these worldly cares; but we, of course, are in the midst of the worst test ever. We are assured by friends who passed through this dark tunnel themselves 10 years ago and who know about these things, that we will pass this test as well. And then we will wonder how we managed it….

“Crivens!”— a word used frequently by the Nac Mac Feegle, and which we suspect is probably a swear word— has become our new favorite word to bellow when we have dropped something for the umpteenth time… or the cat has thrown up all over the carpet… or….

Weekend movie viewing

2011-03-07T08:18:00.001-05:00

Today's Quote for the Day
Not every story has explosions and car chases. That's why they have nudity and espionage.
- Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum

I enjoy a good car chase or explosion as much as anybody else (anybody who saw the classic Steve McQueen movie Bullitt, won't soon forget that car chase!) but it seems like a lot of movies are nothing more than excuses for car chases and explosions and there is little else going on to recommend them.

Which prompts a few comments about The King's Speech, which did not have explosions or car chases or nudity or espionage. It played in the local theaters during at time when we had no interest in going to the movies and we missed it. When it won the some Academy Awards, as everyone suggested it would, then it was back in the local theaters and we were able to see it over the weekend.

I actually don't care very much about who does or does not win an Academy Award, and I certainly have not seen every film Colin Firth has made, and I suppose he has made some stinkers, but who can forget him as Mr Darcy? Or the character he played in the movie Love Actually.

Well, at any rate, he was truly wonderful, and The King's Speech had everything I like in movie. Drama. Laughs. A good plot. And it was true (or mostly true). It was a bit of feel-good entertainment that we sorely needed.

Signs are everywhere

2011-03-05T19:18:00.001-05:00

Winter’s icy grip seems to be loosening a bit now that March is underway. Subtle – and not so subtle -- signs are appearing here and there. A ferocious thunderstorm moved over our area last night – lots of thunder and lightening and torrents of rain, instead of snow. The wet weather spring was flowing this morning for the first time in quite a while.

Several varieties of crocus grow in my garden; some came up a bit too early and succumbed after about a week to a sudden hard freeze; but another variety is now starting to bloom and doing well. Yellows buds are forming on the daffodils, and the forsythia are starting to show a bit of yellow as well.

A few birds are singing.And a pair of blue birds has been house hunting.

He is trying to entice her to come join him, but she seems disinterested.

After about a week of very cold temperatures, small animals that do not hibernate were suddenly out and about in the daytime, no doubt very hungry after being kept “in” (wherever “in” is for them) during the bitter cold. Our cat went nose-to-nose with an armadillo that was rooting around in the front yard one afternoon. Of course, I had no camera at hand to take a picture of this hilarious scene.

The yellow-rumped warblers are mobbing the suet feeders I have hanging on two sides of the house.

They will leave soon for parts north, and perhaps they are building up reserves for the flight.

For several days running, this little fellow was also out and about in the daylight.

Then we did not see him for several days.

A few days ago as we left for our walk, I spotted him on the ground.

Dead.

We wondered what happened to him. It was like he was just walking along and collapsed and died.

I have been taking care of our pastor’s little dog for a couple of days while she recovers from having had some tests on her heart. She is stuck in Springfield for reasons I won’t go into, but this is a classic case of health care managed by insurance companies: The doctor always keeps his patients at least 24 hours after an angiogram – if for no other reason than to make sure there is no problem with the femoral artery access site -- but the insurance company says this is an outpatient procedure so he had to discharge her.

This little guy is smaller than the cat, and she is tolerating him surprisingly well. I am not sure what he is – maybe a Poodle crossed with a Bichon Frise. Our pastor found him running down the middle of the street while she was at a yard sale so she doesn’t know what he is either. He is mostly fluff. I have missed having a dog so much, and I am enjoying him, even though being around such a small dog makes me a little nervous. I put a collar on him that has a bell (it belongs to the cat) so I can hear him and not accidently step on him by accident.

I cooked two turkeys today, and he quickly discovered that amazingly good little bits appear magically (accidently and on purpose) on the floor.

The care and feeding of a blog

2011-02-21T16:37:00.001-05:00

Yesterday we discussed in Sunday School portions of the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the idea of “nursing” as it applies to nursing anger or nursing a grudge, or nursing bitterness, and what that can lead to. The aspect of “nursing” that I directed the class to think about was the idea of “care and feeding”, asking the women to remember what it was like “nursing” their infant, and what that involved. Reminding them that we have a choice about the sorts of emotions we choose to “nurse.”

Even if we never literally nursed an infant, we all know about the care and feeding of our bodies – indeed, many of us spend much too much time “nurturing” ourselves in this way and are made aware of it every time we get on the scale or attempt to button that pair of jeans that seemed to fit just fine last week.

I am particularly pleased with the “care and feeding” of my own body today. Last night before I went to bed, I put white beans and boiling water in our thermos, and sliced a lovely red bell pepper and an onion, and put them in the refrigerator. This morning when I got up at 5 am, I dumped the beans, which were still steaming hot and 90% cooked, the peppers, onions, leftover cooked red lentils, tomato paste, some wine, and some spices in the crock pot and turned it on so I would have something delectable to eat for lunch. Richard does his own lunch -- I had already tried Bulgarian Red Pepper Stew on him some time back and I have marked in the margin of cookbook “Richard hates this.”

And it occurred to me that I have not “cared and fed” this blog for a while. One of the songs I hear occasionally on the Christian radio station has something to do with “let’s go dance in the minefield.” The past 2 weeks have been something of an emotional minefield for us. I have been sort of reluctant to write about it, but there is another reason also, which I will get to eventually

We spent the week leading up to Feb 12 preparing for our son’s Celebration of Life, and because our church does not have equipment to project presentations or play DVDs, we created picture displays to honor the various stages of his life. Our son would have turned 34 on Feb 12, so there was the added remembrance of significance of that day for us… and then, also on Feb 12, some years back, our Little Dog died.

A minefield.

I mentioned to our bereavement counselor when we saw her on Thursday that I was feeling so guilty for still grieving about the dog in light of my mother having died a little over a year ago, and our son’s death a month earlier, how can I possibly be still thinking about the stupid dog, for crying out loud. And she stopped me and said… “You are grieving the loss of the relationship – a relationship that is gone forever – and that is a valid sorrow and you should not feel guilty about it.”

I have decided she is worth her weight in gold.

And backtracking a bit, there is Valentines Day. Richard is the sort of guy who simply goes out and buys what he wants when he gets the idea that he wants it. So when you ask him, is there anything particular you would like for Valentine’s Day, he can honestly say, “No, there isn’t.” What the heck do I do now? Get him nothing? A box of candy which neither of us needs because we have both gained back quite a bit of weight in the last couple of months?

A minefield.

Well, it happened that just before I left to go to town for the aerobics class, there was an interview on National Public Radio with this lovely British cooking person, Nigella Lawson, who I have heard several times, and she suggested making a really wonderful steak at home instead of going out to eat.

And an almost unbelievable thing happened. I stopped at the store and there, marked down tremendously in price, were two beautiful packages of $6.99/lb steak that I was able to get for about $3.00 for both of them. It was one our better Valentine Day experiences. I did not actually prepare the steak like Nigella suggested because I didn’t want to mess with the sauce, but we each put on a bit of “Claude’s Western Style Barbeque Sauce,” which has almost no calories, and it was wonderful.

But at any rate, I have had a difficult time drumming up the energy to write for this blog, and I have worried about it just sort of withering away and dying for lack of attention (which happens to some infants who are not nurtured), and those few followers that I do have wandering off to greener pastures. A weird sort of God-thing happened. During the last 6 weeks of our son’s life, almost all of my work dried up. I had just enough to keep me busy, but not once during this time did I have to make a decision about whether I needed to stay home and get the work done or miss a deadline, or leave and stay with our son at the nursing home. Thus, I was able to spend about 4 hours a day with him. In the last 2 weeks, however, the flood gates have opened, and the work has poured in. I have been a bit preoccupied. That’s it folks. I am not fallen off into the “Slough of Despond” like John Bunyon’s Pilgrim. Just busy…

Sittin' tight...

2011-02-11T08:14:00.001-05:00

Nothing warms the cockles of my heart quite as much aswaking up to 6 inches of fresh snow on the ground with the knowledge that I donot have to immediately leap into my car and race to the post office so I canshovel the sidewalks in front of the building so someone doesn’t slip and fall andsue the post office.

I worked for that venerable institution for about 15 years. Istarted out as the contract cleaner. In addition to keeping the inside of the buildingclean, in the summer I had to mow thelawns and also wash windows – and there are a lot of huge windows on thebuilding – and in the winter, I had to make sure the sidewalks in front and onthe side of the building were clear of ice and snow.

They loved me so much that they offered me a job as a temporaryworker, and so for almost 1 year, around 1990, I was a substitute mail deliveryperson.

Indeed I did deliver the mail – through rain and sleet and snow – just likethe motto says. And I got to drive a jeep with the steering on the right side, just like in England.

I have not fond memories of one particular morning when I hadto struggle through about 1 foot of snow with a thin crust of ice on top, and negotiateicy porches to put mail in people’s boxes.

I did actually make an attempt to become full-time employee whena position opened up, but I got beat out on the test by a woman who scoredlower than I did but got 10-points added because she was a disabled veteran.

So, I went back to being the contract cleaner. And on 6 daysa week I showed up there faithfully, year after year after year. And then Idecided to do something different in my life – mainly we both felt were justgetting too old to do the job. We? Yes, Richard is very happy too. Because Iended up getting him involved in several projects there because I could notmanage them myself— and the last time we had to strip and refinish the floorsit about killed us. So, the time had come…

And so now on a snowing morning, I can sit and watchthe flakes come down and feel very happy inside that I can stay inside and I don’t have to go anywhere,if I don’t want too.

A frozen alternative...

2011-02-03T08:23:00.000-05:00

Several days ago Richard hauled out a 10-pound bag of chicken leg quarters from the freezer because said we were out of room and I needed to cook it so it would take up less space.

So after it had thawed sufficiently in the refrigerator, I put about 5 pounds of it in the crockpot and started cooking "Two Meals for Four People", a recipe from my Mennonite cookbook that results in chicken stew for one meal and then a very hearty soup for another meal.

The other 5 pounds got liberally sprinkled with a Jamaican-style jerk spice and went into the oven to bake.

So after all of this chicken was cooked, I took everything off the bones, and packaged it up, and all of the the went into a pot on the stove and boiled some more, and so by early evening I had a nice kettle of very hot and very flavorful chicken broth.

I decided to set the whole deal outside on the porch to cool off a bit so the fat would rise and it would be cold before I put it in the refrigerator. As the evening progressed, I totally forgot it was out there (naturally) and so it sat outside all night and until midafteroon yesterday when I couldn't find the pot I was looking for and suddenly remembered I had forgotten to bring it in.

I guess the only reason why the whole mess wasn't spilled all over the porch was that it was too cold for the raccoons to venture out and help themselves. At any rate, it was 5 degrees outside yesterday when I looked at the thermometer and it didn't rise much over about 15 degrees for the entire day, and so when I brought the broth in, it was frozen solid.

The porch just might make a handy-dandy freezer on the odd occasion when we are plunged into the deep freeze. Which somehow reminds me of the wonderful story I read a few years ago about the woman doctor in Antarctica who ended up operating on herself for breast cancer because there was no way they could get her out. Seems to me they slept in portable freezers to help keep warm...

Are you ready for it...?

2011-01-31T11:37:00.000-05:00

That was the prime topic of conversation in town this morning as I made the rounds from the aerobics class at the YMCA to the post office and finally to the feed store to pick up sunflower seeds for the birds.

The forecast this morning for the weather this week is rather grim. Unlike other places in the north and east, where once winter sets in, it is pretty much there to stay, winter in this lower part of Missouri behaves in a rather manic-depressive sort of way. It was nearly 70 degrees on Saturday, we were running around in our shirt sleeves, sitting on the porch basking in the sun drinking coffee. Now the temperature is plunging and near-blizzard conditions are being forecast for some areas of the state, particularly north of the I-44 corridor that sort of divides the state in half. There is some strange atmospherics that go on in this state and often the weather north of I-44 is much worse than what happens down in this part of the state,

But then "much worse" is something of a relative term, isn't it? One wonders what is "much worse:" 2 feet of snow or 2 inches of solid ice? The ice, obviously.

At any rate, we may or may not get a bunch of snow, we may or may not get a lot of freezing rain and ice first -- which is purely horrible -- underneath a bunch of snow, but people this morning were sort of scurrying, realizing that if the bad stuff does hit, they are not prepared. I realized I was almost out of sunflower seed so I did a bit of scurrying myself.

Richard has been scurrying, charging up the laptop batteries, making sure we have water to flush the toilet in case an ice storm wipes out the power, putting concrete blocks in the back of truck to help with traction, making sure the generators have gas...

Just can't ever tell with the weather -- sometimes it happens exactly as it says and sometimes nothing happens at all. Just never know....

Unintended humor... and it could be worse

2011-01-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

One of the traits I admired most about our son was his compulsion to make sure he paid off his bills. Over the course of his sometimes-troubled life, he got himself in several major financial messes thanks to bad decisions about trying to help people who were taking advantage of him and the help of predatory lenders, but he managed to get all of those debts paid off before he got sick. Indeed, about a month before he was diagnosed with cancer, he made the last payment to the last predatory lender and was excited about the prospect of saving that money so he could move out on his own. Yes, he did have some help -- we were a safety net for him and let him live with us -- but he did not freeload. No need. Even though the “room and board” we charged him was a lot less than he would have paid on rent, food, and utilities had he been living on his own, he did pay us as well.

By the time he died, he owed nothing. He paid the cost of transporting his body to the research facility by selling his guns, and he paid off his credit card bill with January check he got from Social Security. But it now seems there may be some additional bills that neither he nor we were anticipating because of confusion with Medicaid, hospice, and the nursing home.

My mother often remarked that she thought she had an odd sense of humor, and I sometimes wonder if I have not also inherited a strange way of looking at the world. At any rate, gales of laughter rang out at our house this morning after I read the letter our son received yesterday from the Missouri Department of Social Services informing him, that “you are no longer eligible for…. the vendor nursing home program” due to the reason listed below, which is (cutting through government gobbledygook) “you are dead.”
And it goes on to inform him that, “if you disagree with this decision, you have the right to request a hearing…”

Obviously, of course, we would be the ones to fill out the form and request the hearing, but I had this sudden vision of our boy showing up at a hearing--as ghost--to protest the fact that they had cut him off on Jan 13, the day that he died.

The timing is sort of tricky. He was admitted to the nursing home on Dec 17, and he died on Jan 13, so he was a resident there a few days short of 1 month.

The nursing home arranged for an ultrasound examination that ended about 30 minutes before he died, and there is the possibility that the images from this were read by a radiologist later that day--after he died--or possibly the next day. So one wonders who is paying that bill? Medicaid?

Also, we may end up having to pay for part of his stay in the nursing home. We were told that hospice would bill Medicaid for the nursing home bill, and then pay the nursing home. And in December Nathaniel, had done the “pay down” for January that Medicaid required when his full Social Security benefit kicked in November. Yet another letter we received about a week ago indicates that because of a change in vendor status, he will owe about $1,000 for the time he stayed in the nursing home.

It is all very confusing, and we have decided to do nothing about any of this because we figure the parties involved (hospice, Medicaid, and the nursing home) will get it all sorted out. We think that perhaps he will actually owe about $500, which we will recoup when we sell his car. So, we are not stressing about this. It is sort of like standing back and watching a “Chinese fire drill,” a term my dad used to use, which was a gag I remembering seeing done in the silent movies, and “figuratively refers to a large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise—by a group of individuals that accomplishes nothing.”

And then on to less humorous matters…

Thursdays are going to be a minefield for us during lunchtime for a while, I think, and so we left the house at 10:45 on Thursday to eat out and shop at the discount grocery. Shortly after we got back, I received a phone call from a woman whose boys were friends with our son when they all attended a small one-room schoolhouse out in the country for about 4 years. She had three boys, and our son used to go to her house fairly regularly to play with her sons. She called to tell me that she had just found out that Nathaniel had died, and to express her condolences, and then she began sobbing as she told me that her middle son, who was about Nathaniel’s age, had killed himself within the last few days.

In the midst of one of my “pity parties,” I had thought that it couldn’t get much worse than losing a child (unless it might be that several of one’s children died at once), but then I realized, that yes, it certainly could get worse…

We do something entirely unexpected

2011-01-22T06:36:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon we left for Town (and as I have explained in the past, Town is about 25 miles down the road) to run errands:

We had to pick up a generator that we had dropped off at a small engine repair place because it wasn’t working right. Turns out that “cheap off-brand” generators such as this one, which we bought from Big Name Tool Place That Shall Not Be Named cannot really be repaired because there are no parts available – not even a spark plug – says the repairman.
Then we had to stop by the funeral home to pick up our son’s death certificate and talk with them about options for printing the handout for the memorial service, if we decided to have a hand out.
Then we had to stop by the newspaper office to pick up copies of the newspaper that has his obituary in it.
Then we had to stop by Sears to buy a high-efficiency front-loading washing machine that was on sale, which is supposed to save us money on our electric bill and do a better job of washing our clothes. Every time in the past we have bought an energy-efficient replacement for an older model our electricity bill has increased. We will not abate our breath to see what happens when we start using the new machine.
Then we had to stop by Aldi to stock up on butter, bacon, and eggs, which as you all know, are the building blocks of a good, heart-healthy diet.
And then we arrived home at about 3:45.

The day before, on Thursday, I had spoken to my friend Judy about whether she was going to attempt aerobics class yesterday morning because of the snowfall. They live about 5 miles out of town on a hilly, windy, gravel road and often get snowed in by not very much snow. She and Charlie are leaving early next week for a 2-week vacation at a resort in Mexico. For the past two weeks or so she has been my go-to woman for hugs and shoulder crying, so I am going to miss her. I told her if they were able to get out to see Charlie’s mom, who lives in the assisted-living wing of the nursing home, which is about 1 mile from our house, they should call and come by the house for a visit.

We normally eat dinner at 4 p.m. on the dot – I know that is very early for some people, but we both work at home so we can eat dinner whenever we want and that is when we want to eat. We got back at 3:45 and there was a message from Judy that they were at Charlie’s moms and we should call them there. I dialed the number and heard my stomach gurgling because it was expecting to be fed shortly – indeed, Richard was setting out the plates – and after a bit of conversation with Judy, I heard myself say, “Why don’t you and Charlie come over for dinner?”

So they did.

You have to understand I can probably count on one hand the number of times we have invited people for dinner at our house in the last 30 years. We are not antisocial people, but our house is not conducive for entertaining, I am very nervous about cooking for other people– I have no confidence at all in my skill as a cook–and entertaining in that way is just is something we have avoided doing.

Last night was “left over night.” Richard had only eaten half his dinner from Thursday night because Thursday was a very hard day for us and we didn’t have much of an appetite – his problem was compounded because earlier in the afternoon he spilled a bag of cherry-flavored licorice all over the floor, washed it off, and then felt compelled to eat it all because it was wet.

Richard refuses to even taste the tongue I cooked a few weeks ago, so I was going to eat a tongue sandwich made on the last onion roll in the package. Richard grabbed a bag of frozen pork loin, we threw some Yukon gold potatoes into the microwave, he hauled out several containers of various vegetables, put together a salad, and within about 15 minutes we had a rather tasty meal for our friends without any fretting or attacks of nerves or a anything else. It happened too fast for any of that.

We sat around the table trading funny stories – especially Judy’s funny story of chasing after her miniature dachshund, who was chasing a chicken, and they all ended up in the lake. Charlie, who was a chemist by profession, enlightened us on how certain proteins, which are composed of long building blocks of…. uhhh…stuff…fold in on themselves. Well, we laughed and enjoyed each other’s company and then they went home.

I am still reeling from the spontaneity of the situation yesterday. We just don’t do “spontaneity” very well, but I think we are going to try to make a habit of it.

In the presence of Greatness

2011-01-18T07:04:00.000-05:00

Jackie and Todd were especially good to us over the holiday season. Jackie was the paramedic who Nathaniel worked with when he was training to be an EMT. Todd is the genius who fixes our computers. They have morphed into more than just business associates – they have become friends.

We spent time with them on Thanksgiving while Nathaniel went to a friend’s house. At Christmas, while he was in the nursing home, and we hadn’t even thought about Christmas dinner, they had us over for a lovely meal.

Jackie raises Great Pyrenees. Definitely not one of those infamous puppy mills. They live on a small farm, and their dogs live in a large fenced area with goats and chickens and shelter in bad weather with the goats in the pole barn. When they came by the day our son died, they brought this one with them.

His name is Beren, and for quite some time now, he has been traveling the dog show circuit with his handler.

He is a good dog. How good is he? So good that he will compete in the upcoming Wesminster Kennel Club dog show.

In the meantime, he is home for a visit, slumming with the other dogs in Jackie’s kennel and living with the goats she has to help remind them that their main job on earth is not to parade around a ring in front of a judge but to guard animals.

I have heard stories about dogs--and sometimes cats as well--having almost a “6th sense” when it comes to awareness of emotional suffering in the people they are with.

I was sitting on the floor trying to get an eye-level picture of this beautiful dog. Todd was on the couch next to me and took the camera and took the picture.

Then Beren looked at me sitting there, and within a few seconds of this picture, had walked over to me, laid his massive forehead on my shoulder, and just stood there.

I did what any normal human would do. I buried my nose against his neck (he smelled very much like dog and goat), and wrapped my arms around him and stroked his fur. I just sort of leaned into him and felt this amazing release of tension and a sense of peace. And he just stood there and stood there while the conversation around us ebbed and flowed, and Todd picked up my old guitar and began making it do amazing things, and finally Beren raised his head and backed up and wandered into the kitchen to see if there was anything edible on the counter.

We have noticed in the last few days that the cat is acting odd too. She wanders around the house meowing loudly. We called her Squeaker to begin with because she has such tiny, whimpy meow. She has always allowed us to scratch her head, but she does not like to be petted and is the sort of cat that when you reach to pet her, she slinks down to avoid being touched. Suddenly, she has become very demanding about getting her head scratched and allowing us to pet her too. I think she knows.

Remembering MLK

2011-01-17T10:56:00.001-05:00

Today is the day we set aside to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. One needs to keep in mind that this great man was still just a man, he had feet of clay, and he was not perfect.

But he did have a dream, a vision about how things could be different in this country, and he did something about it. But he was not just a social activist, and despite occasional slips along the way, he loved God and had a personal relationship with Him, and he encouraged others to do the same. It was not just about social change and righting wrongs.

I have a little volume, The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Selected by Coretta Scott King, and every year on this day I get it out and thumb through it to remind myself that here was a man who was willing to put his life on the line for what he believed.

So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all of our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights, Without Him, life is a meaningless drama with the decisive scenes missing. But with Him we are able to rise from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope. With Him we are able to rise from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy. St Augustine was right – we were made for God and we will be restless until we find rest in Him….

The quote continues with MLK reminding us to

...never forget that there is a first and even greater commandment. “Love the Lord thy God with all the heart and all they soul and all thy mind.” This is the height of life, and when you do this, you live the complete life.

At the moment, of course, we are living through the process of grieving for the death of our son last Thursday, so we still feel very much surrounded by ashes, the sun doesn’t seem to be shining, and we do indeed seem to be going through the routine of daily life as though in a drama with “decisive scenes missing.” But there is also deep within my heart the knowledge that Christ has come to give us life, and give us live abundantly, and that as soon as this season of weeping ends, we will once again experience a daybreak of joy. Right now the presence of Christ within is weeping with us -- He was indeed a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief -- but soon it will become “joy unspeakable and full of glory."

And once again I am overwhelmed by the kind remarks and thoughts and prayers offered by those who have read this blog and have chosen to leave a remark, and also for those who are holding us up but have chosen not to leave a remark. Bless you all.

Fly away in the morning

2011-01-14T04:00:00.003-05:00

One of the songs we sang at the church we used to attend was “I’ll Fly Away” an old-timey song about the soul leaving the body and flying away to heaven….

Some bright morning when this life is over,
I’ll fly away
To a land where joy will never end
I’ll fly away
I’ll fly away oh glory,
I’ll fly away, in the morning…
When I die, hallelujah by and by,
I’ll fly away…

Our boy left his body behind yesterday morning and his soul flew away to heaven.

We left him at about 11:00 am, after the ultrasound technician finished her examination, alert and playing on the laptop computer. We were called about 45 minutes later that he had taken a turn for the worse and we needed to come back. I arrived at the nursing home within 5 minutes of getting the call, and he had just died.

We had bad news from the ultrasound examination. The preliminary result showed there was no free fluid in his abdomen. There was nothing the doctors could do to reduce the size of his belly and make him more comfortable. Had he lived longer he would likely have had a very miserable death.

So, the Lord was merciful. We began our walk through the valley of the shadow of death in June, and it has come to an end. And now we will go on with our lives without him.

“The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away
Blessed be the name of the Lord”

Farewell my boy....

until we meet again in glory.

Failure to communicate

2011-01-13T07:24:00.000-05:00

Our frustration and anger at the local doctors who are supposed to be supervising our son’s care at the local nursing home (except I am not sure exactly who is in charge -- hospice or the doctors?) has been increasing daily during the past week, complicated by the fact that our son is somewhat friggled in the head, as my father would say.

Being his parent has always been a very challenging and frustrating experience for us (that was a topic of many of the early posts on this blog) because he is just “different” – not mentally retarded, not mentally ill, but probably a very high-functioning person with Asperger syndrome. The fact that he is dying has not changed him in that respect. He is still a challenge and he is still frustrating.

Early on when he was discharged to hospice, with one of the doctors at the local medical clinic as the admitting physician to the nursing home, hospice arranged for us to sign a power of attorney that allows us to make medical decisions for him only in the event he becomes mentally incapacitated to make decisions for himself.

But he is not yet mentally incapacitated. He is still mentally competent and independent and capable of making decisions, and unless we are also present in the room when any of the medical people taking care of him are there, none of these people are under any obligation to inform us of what has been said or what decisions have been made – indeed, they were prohibited by the HIPPA rules from disclosing anything at all.

So. Last Thursday, because of the alarming size his belly has grown too, the nurse practitioner from the clinic and the hospice nurse agreed that the doctor should do a belly tap and drain fluid out of his abdominal cavity. We happened to be in the room when this discussion took place. We were left with the impression that once the equipment needed for this was collected, the doctor would come in on Monday morning and drain the fluid. Over the weekend, the hospice nurse collected all of the equipment needed for this procedure and brought it to the nursing home. We assumed everything was good to go.

On Friday, one of the doctors at the clinic who comes to the nursing home to see patients – but not the primary care doctor of record – came into our son’s room and said “Hold on a minute… we can’t just go sticking needles in your belly without first finding out what is going on in there… we think your colon might be distended, we are not sure where your intestines are and how big the tumors are, and we need to get an ultrasound so we don’t kill you….”

Which is a prudent thing to do. The only problem is that we were not in the room when this conversation took place and during the many conversations we had with our son on Friday and Saturday and Sunday, he never bothered to mention this conversation to us. Later on when Richard confronted him about it, he said, “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

He didn’t think it was relevant.
So, we waited on Monday for a telephone call from our son telling us that the doctor was there to do the procedure. And it never came…

We were very upset and Richard had a long discussion with the nursing staff at the nursing home and had them add our names to the HIPPA form, and had our son sign the form, so that we could be informed directly of medical decisions.

And then things got really wanky. We assumed he would be transported to the nearest hospital or to the imaging clinic for the ultrasound, but only later did we find out that the nursing home has a contract with a company that comes with a portable ultrasound unit.

Nobody arranged for the ultrasound.

The nurse practitioner who coordinates patient care at the nursing home for the clinic had jury duty on Monday and Tuesday so he was not even there to get the ball rolling -- and the clinic has no back up nurse practitioner to see patients -- and, so nothing was done. Finally, yesterday, arrangements were made for the ultrasound to be done this morning at the nursing home.

A week has gone by. Our son’s belly swells by several more centimeters each day. He is now back on oxygen because the pressure from this fluid build up against his diaphragm is making it hard for him to breathe and his oxygen saturation levels are dropping. Any sudden movement at all puts so much pressure on his stomach that he vomits – not because of nausea but because whatever is in there is forced out.

Hospice is doing a wonderful job. There have been a few hiccups at the nursing home but it too has done a wonderful job at caring for our boy. The doctors: not so much.

So, here we are…. wondering how long of a delay there will be before the radiologist evaluates the ultrasound images and reports back to the doctor…. and then how long it will take the doctor to show up to do the tap… and… trying to take a deep breath and calm down and move through the day with some semblance of calmness.

On another note, I feel so blessed to have had the wonderful comments from people who have read the blog and have added us to their prayers and have sent such kind and caring remarks. I appreciate you all so much.

What’s the Evil Squeaker-do doing?

2011-01-07T07:38:00.001-05:00

That is usually among the first of the questions our son asks me as I walk into his room for our morning visit.

What she is usually doing is annoying the heck out of us – either wanting out because she is tired of being cooped up in the house – or wanting in after she is outside for a few minutes and realizes it is simply just too cold for those precious little kitty paws.

But then she does what all cats seem to have knack for doing – melting your heart when you would like to strangle them. Under the sewing machine is a large basket full of balls of yarn and she has found one, hooked it out with her needle claws, and is demonstrating to an appreciative audience...

all of her skills as the great kitty hunter.

She will kill it dead, no doubt about it.

It escapes several times, and she chases it down.

After having sufficiently subdued it,

she wanders off to take a nap, leaving me to pick up the aftermath.

He misses his kitty, and we have loaded her up in the cat carrier and taken her to the nursing home several times. He gets to pet her a little and scratch her head, which she loves, but she is too frightened to do much more than cower at the back of the carrier or hide under the bed.

Good from bad: a temporary reprieve

2010-12-31T06:18:00.000-05:00

Given that the early evening hours in a nursing home is the time when the staff is most hard pressed because all of the elderly patients must be collected and put to bed, it is no wonder that our son’s repeated calls to have someone attend to his nasogastric tube went unanswered. The thing had plugged up and was causing him to gag. It became unbearable, and he grew tired of waiting for them to come, so he just pulled it out himself. That was almost 4 days ago.

And he has been able to eat small meals, including a grilled cheese sandwich, but he is being very careful not to overload his stomach, and he hasn’t vomited.

Had the nursing home staff not screwed up, he would still be sitting there with the tube sucking nourishment out of his stomach as fast as it got put in because no one had a clue that he would be able to tolerate being without it.

He also no longer needs the oxygen -- his O-Sat is running in the 90s on room air. So for the time being, he is no longer tethered to plastic tubing. It may be that this is just a temporary reprieve, but we are thankful nonetheless, and so is he.

The morphine pump gives him a small dose every 20 minutes, and the amount has gradually been increased, so he has a tendency to “nod off” frequently, where he says he has funny little dreams.

I love sitting there watching the expressions pass across his face.

Mother gets a little helper

2010-12-29T16:38:00.004-05:00

With the ominous words of Jagger and company’s late 1960s song lurking, I pay an early afternoon visit to the rural clinic where “I am not a doctor, just call me Bob” takes care of me, to see if he can offer anything to help me calm down and sleep at night. I feel so guilty that God is not enough to get me through, but I am so wound up emotionally and I looked so awful from lack of sleep in the last pictures we took at the nursing home on Christmas that I decided...

Steps Needed to be Taken

This man is not like Dr Kutz, the neurosurgeon who removed our son’s brain tumor and who arranged for $90,000 of radiation treatment that our son was never charged for.

Not a doctor Bob is not tall, and he does not, as our son noted so accurately about Dr Kutz, “light up the room” when he comes in.

He is not so handsome, like Dr Cavagnol, the surgeon who removed the axillary mass but could not complete the operation on Dec. 13, that I must look at his shoes in order to hear what he saying.

No indeed. One can look full into Not a Doctor Bob’s homely face, which is round and fat and looks a little like a toads, and be reminded of a comfortable couch or chair that you can nestle down in and relax with. He took my hand when he sat down and held it. He hugged me with both arms, when we stood up to leave. He gave me a 6-week sample of one drug and prescribed two others, as needed, to get me through the day and night. And he did not charge me for the visit.

I am aghast at the idea of taking these drugs – I feel guilty that I even need these drugs (after all, I have God, why do I need pharmaceuticals?), but even so, I definitely need something to help me sleep. Just take it as you need, he reassures me. It will get you over the hump.

Okey dokey, Just Call Me Bob, I’ll trust you…. As long as these keep me calm and together and I don’t start hallucinating and run into Alice...

I’ll be OK.

Sitting up and taking nourishment

2010-12-27T06:23:00.001-05:00

I used to clean house for this delightful old man and there was a certain routine we fell into when I arrived at his house. I would say:

“And how are you today?”

And he would respond:

“As long as I can sit up and take nourishment, I guess I can’t complain too much.”

We are very grateful that N can still sit up and take nourishment, even though it isn’t very much and even though it gets sucked out of his stomach fairly quickly. He has a great deal that he could complain about.

Occasionally, the suction for the NG tube can be turned off for about a half hour or so while he is eating to give his stomach a chance to absorb a bit more of the nutrients, but inevitably the suction must be turned back on and then it all comes back out. Or not.

They are trying all sorts of things to see if he can chew it fine enough, and sometimes he can, and sometimes he can’t, and then the tube becomes clogged.

We have become quite adept at unclogging the tube if it clogs at the connector, but if it gets clogged in his stomach, or starts to pull out, then we have to get help, which is the main reason why we are not able to bring him home. It would take the hospice nurse about 45 minutes to get here.

On Saturday, we had a rather nicer Christmas dinner with friends – which was a blessing because we had totally forgotten about trying to make a Christmas dinner for ourselves – than he did, but it did us good to see him enjoy the taste of the food he was given...

and wearing a new hat his Uncle Andy got him. Unfortunately he is not able to wear a new shirt he he was given given because (1) the heat is cranked up very high in the nursing home and he overheats easily, and (2) even though his flesh is beginning to melt away, his belly has swollen so much because of the effects of the tumor that the t-shirt it is too tight and uncomfortable against his skin.

Nate developed a very special relationship with the crew that mans the local train that delivers empty cars and picks up full ones on Sundays at one of the local manufacturers, and I was going to make an effort yesterday to today to disconnect him from the suction pump, bundle him up, and take him for a ride to where they do the switching, but unfortunately, it was very cold and N said he was too weak to walk to where the train would be. If it warms up enough toward the end of the week, I will try again to wheel him out to the car and at least bring him home for a little while.

In the meantime, while he is still alert and oriented and not requiring so much morphine that he is out of it, we are trying to make the best of what time we have left.

Fudge

2010-12-24T09:20:00.001-05:00

Last Christmas, Jim Beam and I got together and made some truly awesome chocolate-walnut fudge that I sent off to members of my family as part of the Christmas box and gave to various people here, including our friends Judy and Charlie, and we ate quite a bit of it ourselves.

This year I did not get around to making the fudge because other things forced their way to the top of the list of things to do. So, R went to the local tourist stop a mile or so down the highway and bought fudge from them. They sell a lot of it, and it is OK fudge, but definitely not as good as the homemade variety. Last Friday, he was at the hospital with our son trying to get everything coordinated with hospice and getting him discharged to the local nursing home, so I packed up the Christmas box, put a box of fudge in each family’s bag, called Judy and asked if they could P-U-L-E-E-Z-E help me by taking the package to UPS.

And bless them, they did. Charlie arrived and I gave him $50 and told him I thought it would be about $25. Silly me. It cost $35 to send two boxes to California. We are going to do something different next year, but that is another story.

I had several boxes of fudge left over. Apparently I was supposed to have given each family two boxes of fudge.

We had coffee with Judy and her husband earlier in the week and exchanged small gifts – she gave us a plate of homemade cookies and fudge she had made, and we gave them two doohickeys to keep ants out of hummingbird feeders and a box of the fudge.

When we got back home, we sampled some of her fudge and I sort of cringed with embarrassment because her fudge looked so much better than what we had bought and it certainly tasted a great deal better than the fudge we had given them. I had visions of her offering the box of fudge to someone else, who takes one look at it and passes it on again…. and again…. the perpetual gift of fudge…

Breath of Heaven...

2010-12-21T08:05:00.000-05:00

Back on December 20, 2005 I posted some of the lyrics to the Amy Grant song, Breath of Heaven, because I was stressed out about something and was trying to rest in God's presence to get me through.

I suspect the problem had something to do with our son. He has had a very difficult time negotiating life.

The song is playing in my head a lot now, too. Since June we have been flirting with the edges of the Valley of the Shadow but now we are headed deep down down into it...

Breath of Heaven
Hold me together
Be forever near me
Breath of Heaven

Breath of Heaven
Lighten my darkness...

I feel a certain affinity for Mary these days. She was not expecting to get pregnant, and neither was I. We both brought forth sons into the world; her's of course had a somewhat more important role to fill on this earth than mine did, but I am just now finding out that he touched peoples' lives in ways I never suspected. She watched her son die at age 33. So are we.

I am just so thankful I have God's presence to walk with us through it.