Imagination

Studies have shown the important role that imagination has in the development of children’s cognitive abilities.

I am not sure where my cognitive abilities are on the scale these days, but I am part of the generation that was raised before computer games and interactive electronic devices. There were plenty of opportunities for our imaginations to be developed. We had toys that we manipulated with our hands and we did things with them that required some imagination and creativity – Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets. Grandpa kept a big cardboard box filled with wooden blocks in the spare room and we spent hours happily creating all sorts of amazing things with the blocks and not bothering the grown-ups.

And we made regular trips to the library. Books… books… and more books. We had to imagine what the things looked like that we were reading about, there weren’t always pictures. We played role-playing games that required imagination, “Cowboys and Indians,” “Army,” and other fantasy games. I can remember lying on my back in the grass when I was a little kid and looking up and imagining I was a mackerel (my dad went ocean fishing a lot) and the sky was the “top of the water” and what would it be like to be a fish?

What I’m saying is that I’ve got very active imagination. It doesn’t take much to get me going.

Naturally, one of my favorite things to do is watch the amazing shapes form in the big white puffy clouds that sail along before the wind across a bright blue sky. Whales, pigs, elephants, bears, profiles of crones with hooked noses and jutting chins… all sorts of things and creatures that appear and then disappear as the wind shapes the clouds.

I have to be careful though doing this because I tend to fall easily if I don’t watch where my feet are going, so I have to stop walking. Of course, if I don’t keep an eye on the MollyWog, then she can get into trouble too. Usually, she'll just start trying to dig out of its hole some small furry mammal, but the last time we were out walking and I started cloud gazing and stopped paying attention to her, she managed to hop over the bottom strand of the barbed-wire fence and then left part of her hair behind when she hopped back.

So I am beginning to wonder whether I have an overactive imagination. Richard recently came home with a package of stevia sweetener. It sat on the counter for a while with some other stuff he bought. Part of the photograph on the front of the package was blocked on the right by something else, and before it was finally put way, I had plenty of time to look at it…  and pretty soon I started seeing a smiling face – somewhat distorted, but a face with a bow at the top of its head.

I finally asked Richard, “Do you see a smiling face?”“No. I see cookies, a cupcake with frosting, and a cinnamon roll.”

One of my dad’s favorite sayings, was “He (or she) is nuttier than a fruitcake.”

And I’m thinking I just may be getting nuttier by the day.

Exercise and applesauce

Our Dad had lots of little sayings that we heard constantly throughout our growing-up years at home. One of the games we played last year at his big 90th birthday celebration was seeing how many of theses saying his long-time friends could remember.

Well I’ll be a suck-egg mule.
Its colder than a well-digger’s foot.
I’m busier than a one-armed paperhanger

Are just a few that we heard very frequently, but the one that sprang to mind on Christmas morning was one I knew he said all the time but I couldn't remember any of it. finally called my sister, and she talked to our Dad at the facility where he is being cared for, and he remembered it:

Exercise and applesauce helps to get the deal across.

I think is rather amazing because the fog of dementia is starting to cloud his mind and he doesn’t remember things very well now.

I’m not sure what “the deal” was but we heard “Exercise and applesauce….” a lot because when Mom served pork chops or a pork roast, we always had applesauce to go with it.

We had dinner on Christmas day with our friends from Massachusetts. She was planning lamb and she asked us to bring a vegetable and applesauce.

Why I didn’t just go to the store and buy jar of applesauce escapes me, but I did not. I bought 8 large apples (4 Jonagold and 4 Granny Smith) and I made it from scratch (cinnamon stick, lemon zest and lemon juice, brown sugar) and mashed it with a potato masher so it had little chunks of apples instead of being totally smooth. It was very good. Even though the apples cook down quite a bit, I still ended up with quite a bit more applesauce than was needed for the dinner. A lot more.

The food was delicious and even better, the fellowship was wonderful.

We are Meant to Eat Together
Eat with people whom you love and respect, who love and respect you, and who love and respect food.
Eat with people who are learning to cook, with sincerity of heart; children are a great example of this.
Eat with all your senses, masticating textures, smelling sensuous aromas, tasting luscious flavours.
Eat with people who aren’t afraid to make noises like ummm, ahhh, and oohh.
Eat with people who aren’t afraid to make a mess, lick their fingers, clean out the bowl, and eat with their hands.
Eat after the perspiration of a rigorous jog, invigorating walk, in the lusty afterglow from a roll in the hay; it’s much healthier than smoking a cigarette.
Eat with people who laugh and smile a lot, people who tell stories and spin yarns. Eat with people who are generous and share. Full stop.
Eat with all your fondest memories, triumphs through tragedy, and memories of love. Eat with people who love to cook and eat.
Eat with people who are gracious and grateful.
Eat with people who are nonjudgmental and forgiving, who can see both sides of the story and still have an opinion.
Eat with love, passion, compassion in your heart, and while searching your soul. Eat with people who love life and are genuinely interested in you and the world.
And finally, if you eat like this and with people who do and are all these things, pleeease ... invite me for dinner.

From the Return to Food book by Sherry Strong

So. What to do with all of the extra applesauce since my dearly beloved doesn’t particularly care for applesauce (he would rather eat the whole apple, and so would I, actually)? Well, every morning I eat 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed and 2 tablespoons of ground chia seed.

I normally mix the flax and chia in about 6 ounces of lemon-lime soda and drink it down as fast as I can. A delay of more than about 30 seconds means one is left with mucilaginous (gelatinous substance that is sticky and viscous) glop that is almost guaranteed to trigger the gag reflex. So, for the past few days I have instead been mixing it into the applesauce and adding a bit soda to make a little more liquid and down the hatch as fast as possible. Makes a nice change.

And before it is all gone some of it is going into the freezer so I have it on hand the next time we have pork.

Clickety-clack

Days go by like boxcars in the night…
Hobo’s Last Letter by Crazer, Hicks, Watson, and Newberry

The main Burlington Northern-Santa Fe rail line heading south/north and east/west through the state passes by our little town. Sometimes the trains come barreling through town at breakneck speeds, often with two or three engines pulling and two or three engines pushing (especially if the engines are heading west pulling hopper cars full of coal from West Virginia or Kentucky or wherever it has come from). The wheels making a cheerful clickety-clack as they roll along.

Sometimes the train creeps through the town, agonizingly slow, groaning and moaning and clanking and banging as it is shunted off on the siding to wait for a train coming in the opposite direction or a faster moving train coming up behind. This is especially a patience-builder if one has made the mistake of thinking “the train will pass before I get there” and instead of going over the viaduct turns left and right and left again to take the shortcut to the YMCA and then finds herself instead sitting at the north junction crossing gate waiting for that last car to pass (and on one horrible morning the train completely stopped on the siding with two cars left across the road and sat there for about 30 minutes).

And because we are about a mile from the train tracks, one can hear them throughout the day and during the wee hours of the morning (if one happens not to be asleep), and in those quiet early morning hours the sound of the cars moving down the tracks is very plain.

So too do the days pass—sometimes swiftly and sometimes they drag along—and suddenly one realizes certain people have been “sitting at the crossing” for 3 months waiting for something to be written here.

What in the world happened? I dunno exactly.

• A paralyzing case of writer’s block.
• One disaster after another happening to my best friend: her husband of 47 years died of cancer on August 21, almost exactly a month later she fell off a step ladder at her home and badly fractured her leg, spent a couple of weeks with an erector set on her leg to keep it stable and then went through 9 hours of surgery to finally fix it, and has been in the nursing home, unable to walk on it for yet another 4 weeks, although she finally gets to leave the nursing home tomorrow to be cared for by friends in their home. Even though all this happened to her and not me, trying to being a good friend and spend time with her in the nursing home and going to house (5 miles out in the country to water plants etc) has taken a lot of time and emotional energy -- which I was happy to do
• Trying to spend more time reading books, which means I am off the computer earlier in the evening and also means I have less time while I am on the computer to write.
• Maybe a little depressed. Moving into the fall of the year is always going to be hard for me and I expect it always will be.

Give me 5 minutes and I will think up a few more good reasons, but you get the idea.

A friend who I almost never see in person, but who keeps up with me by reading the blog, notices I haven’t written anything for a long time and sends me an e-mail wants to know if I am okay?

Yes Nancy, I think so. I happen to have a very expensive computer keyboard that sounds and feels just like an old-fashioned typewriter, and I am once again feeling the urge to do a bit of clickety-clacking myself here now and again.

Channelling Helen Mirren

Almost every beautician who has cut my hair has been frustrated with me I think because I am not very capable of doing much to style it myself.  So I get a "great hair style" and leave the beauty shop and when I next wash it... well, my hair still looks good but not like the beautician had it fixed. 

Several have told me that I have great hair. It is fairly thick, has lots of body, and if it is cut correctly, it looks pretty good without me having to fuss with it too much, and it continues to look good as it grows out. I almost never return in 2 months or 3 months or 4 months -- like I have been told to do -- to keep it looking like it did when it was first cut.

I often wait way too long between haircuts until I reach the point were it no longer looks good, and so by the time I finally can’t stand it any more, I look pretty ragged.

And last Monday I had reached that point. Now, it happened to be my good fortune that someone cancelled an appointment, so I did not have to wait an additional 2 or 3 weeks for a slot at the beauty shop.

I realize that there is no mandate that women have to have an “age-appropriate” hairstyle – whatever that means – but I do want to have hair that looks like it somewhat fits that age that is showing on my face. At any rate, I printed a picture of the lovely and elegant Helen Mirren

who is 4 years older than I am and who has a wonderful hairstyle, and I showed the picture to my dearly beloved and said...

“I’m going to ask her to turn me into Helen Mirren…”
And when I got to the beauty shop, I thrust it at Amy, the woman who cuts my hair, and said “Turn me into her.”

There have been times when I have returned home from having my hair cut and cried because I didn’t like the way it was cut, but this was not one of them. She didn’t cut my hair to look exactly like Helen Mirren’s but it is close enough, and I am delighted with it.

Richard was too. When I walked in he said,

“My goodness, Helen, you look great!”
He made me feel like a million bucks and he me laugh to boot.

And the giggles continue because he has been teasing me about being Helen for the last couple of days.

I do not pay as much attention to my appearance as I could, but I definitely do feel better when I think I “look good” (or as good as it is possible for me to look) given my nose and my permanently red cheeks and chin, and...

I expect, in my own way, I am as fixated on how I look as the next person.

Anne Bernays wants to know:

“Is this fixation with our appearance wired into the human female? If so, then we don't have to feel guilty about it. If not, then why do we behave as if our appearance trumps kindness, intelligence, imagination, enthusiasm, and humor?

I don't think I behave that way, at least I hope not?

The Sting!

No, I’m not talking about the delightful 1973 movie with the complicated plot in which Robert Redford and Paul Newman set out to con (sting) Robert Shaw (the bad guy). No indeed

In this feature, The Crazy Dog Lady (me) and the Mollywog (the dog)

 go out walking on a Saturday afternoon and blunder into a swarm of yellow jackets (the bad guys).

About halfway through the mile walk, there is an abandoned house. The house has sort of a converted carport at the side, with a ceiling fan and a wooden porch swing on two chains anchored to the beams. The old woman who lived in the house before she died sat out under the fan in the afternoons and watched the world go by while she crocheted – she made afghans and those very handy towels with the crochet tops that you can attach to a stove or refrigerator handle, and all sorts of other things. I exchanged “waves” with her many times as I walked by. As the holidays approached she would have a yard sale and I usually bought some of her crocheted items for presents. I know there is an extended family with adult children, and one of them lived in the house briefly, but it has sat empty for several years now.

Often when I am walking the dog, I will stop and sit on the swing for a few minutes to rest if my back has started to hurt and to catch my breath – there is a very steep hill just before the house. I sit and swing for a bit, and the dog sniffs around the stuff that has been left there. I realize I have no business going onto the property and sitting on the swing, and I was punished for my indiscretion.

This time there was swarm of yellow jackets near the swing, low to the ground, that I did not see. Molly walked right in the middle of them. She got stung at least once on the leg—probably twice—and shot off like a rocket, and I, not able to move quite as fast, got stung 3 times: once on each hand, and then, thrill of thrills, one of them flew down the sleeve of my t-shirt and got me near the armpit.

I tried putting meat tenderizer on the stings when I got back to the house, but I guess my meat tenderizer is too old or is missing ingredient that is supposed to help neutralize the toxin in the sting. It stopped hurting after a while. I felt very sorry for poor Molly. She curled up in her bed and acted very depressed, and didn’t move – not even to eat – until I took her out at 9:30 for her evening squirt.

Within a day or so after that, I discovered we have two nests of a nest of these unpleasant insects on either side of the front door – one nest is in a gap between the old foundation of the house and the concrete blocks of the new addition Richard built, and the other is about 5 feet from our front door, in between the wood border of a flower bed. A steady stream of them go in and out of this small hole all day long.

I understand that yellow jackets here do not survive the winter because it is too cold, but I am not sure I want to wait around for the cold to kill them. We are investigating how to get rid of them safely. Once upon a time we found a nest of them farther away from the house in an abandoned chipmunk burrow, and we poured kerosene down the hole at night and lit it on fire. We can’t do that with either of these nests.

With two nests this close to the house, it seems inevitable that we will get stung again.

And I am not interested in a sequel of this adventure.

Fitting in

I saw a gaggle of 16 girls at the park training for softball the other day. It brought back memories of the women’s softball team in Orange, where we lived in the mid-70s. They were called the Lionettes, and they were very exciting to watch, and they were very good – they were the runner-up team in several world championship games.

But back to here and now, the young women jogged around the baseline. They lined up opposite each other and tossed grapefruit-sized fluorescent green balls back and forth. One girl was pitching to another girl, underhand. She was very fast. The ball zipped along only a few feet from the ground, smacking hard in the glove of the catcher. They were lovely to watch.

They were dressed in different sorts of athletic clothes, but they all had hair long enough to wear in a ponytail. Not one girl had short hair. Brought back memories of how important it was during the years I was high school, in the mid-1960s, to fit in.

There were about 556 graduating seniors in the summer class of 1967, so there was quite a bit more variety in the different types of hairstyles that the girls wore than

there is in the small high school here, which has a total student body of 363 students.

Much has changed and much has stayed exactly the same.

Following the rules

My dearly beloved husband had an outpatient operation yesterday to repair the umbilical hernia that he has had for a very long time. It had always bulged out some and it would go back in when he pushed on it. One morning about a month ago, when it bulged out and he pushed on it, it did not go back in right away. That scared him, and so he decided he had better get the thing repaired.

Finally. Hernias like that can be very dangerous if the intestine gets caught in it. so I was very pleased he was moving ahead with this.

He scheduled an appointment with a woman surgeon who turns out to be a really interesting person (she is also an Episcopal minister), and who told him that if that happened again, he should lay on his back, put ice on it, and think happy thoughts.

The surgery went well. After he woke up, we moved to a room on the patient floor. We were told he had three goals to meet before he could leave the hospital: he had to be able to walk, he had to be able to pee, and he had to be able to drink liquids without vomiting.

After he was settled in the room I went to the cafeteria to get something to eat and when I was finding my way back to the room, I happened to meet a woman in the hall (a friend of a friend), whose husband died about 2 months ago. I told her to come back to the room. She talked and talked and talked about her husband and his death. Having had the experience of not being able to get people to engage when we tried to talk about our son’s death, we were happy to listen to her and encourage her to talk some more. Richard has this knack for continuing to ask questions to keep people talking and that's what he did to her. She tried to leave the room several times but he would ask yet another question and so she kept talking. I think it was good for her to do that.

He managed to walk, pee, and not vomit so we were able to leave the hospital. The doctor’s orders for his discharge were very extensive. He is not supposed to do the dishes, the laundry (or even lift heavy clothes), cook, shop for groceries, take the trash out, lift anything heavier than about 6 pounds, or drive, among other things.

The nurse who took care of him told him a cautionary tale about her husband who did not listen or follow the instructions after his umbilical hernia was repaired and he tore it open and is in terrible pain, and he can’t get it fixed because he can’t afford to be off work for another 6 weeks.

I suspect Richard will mostly behave himself, except this afternoon, I caught him at the counter chopping lettuce for his salad.

??? I said

“It doesn’t say anything about chopping lettuce,” he says. “What that about is they don’t want me lifting heavy pans (like your cast iron skillet).” He may be on a slippery slope here, and I may have to remind him of the rules.

In the meantime, I will have to be the housewife again for a while. He is a much better househusband than I am a housewife, and he is a bit obsessive about the right way to do certain things (like stacking the dishes in the drainer), so I expect he will be a little crazed by the time the restrictions are lifted.

This morning we struggled with the wide elastic binder that they put around him at the hospital. He had to take it off and put on again over his t-shirt because it was irritating his bare skin and he couldn’t seem to get it to back on the way it was. and me trying to help him wasn’t working too well. He has been wearing it all day like he is supposed to, but it is not quite right. I found some instructions on the Internet, so we will have to try again tomorrow to get it on the right way.

No tears were shed

We are gathered here today to celebrate the death of one of the Neotama floridana clan, who was feeling lucky, but instead, it was our lucky day. In the past week, she chewed a hole in an electric blanket that we had stored in plastic tub, most likely to line a nest she was preparing for her most recent litter, shredded some tax records, also stored in a tub, and chewed through our telephone line twice in three days. There was great rejoicing in the camp at her demise.

I suppose it is not fair to blame all of these events on this particular pack rat, because we have killed two others in as many days -- after about 2 weeks of setting traps -- both the old-fashioned spring variety and a live trap. 

We have since spotted a fourth rat in the basement...

and Molly informed us there is a rat lurking in the engine block of my car, which is temporarily disabled due to a transmission problem but will become permanently disabled if the rat is not caught before it destroys the wiring, hoses, connections, etc.

This seems to be a particularly bad year for them. Peacefully coexisting with these animals is not possible. Their predilection for chewing through electrical wiring makes them very dangerous. Trapping them live and then releasing them is not an option. One man who made a study of this discovered they must be moved at least 5 miles away or they will find their way back.

So it is war: us against them. I would like to think that we will ultimately win, but I’m not so sure.

Luxuriating in the dust

In her book A Window Over the Sink Peg Bracken writes of when she first looked through the window she had installed in her kitchen…

I was astonished at the way my mind took off in seven-league boots . . . . I was traveling eastward ho, across the ocean, past the Rockies and the small Idaho town where I was born, to the small Missouri town where I grew up, and to some other places where I may have grown up some more, though I'm not entirely sure about that

I sometimes wool-gather when I look through my kitchen window, but usually there are enough interesting things going on in the front yard to keep my attention firmly in the present...

A chipmunk full of nervous energy searches for sunflower seeds caught in the cracks of the wooden platform I feed birds on.

A turtle makes its way across the driveway, moving surprisingly fast for an animal that has a reputation for moving slowly.

Rabbits have created a dust bath in a sandy spot on the driveway. Two rabbits meet face to face near the public bath and creep cautiously toward each other. 

They touch noses and one sort of leaps away and they chase each other down the driveway.

A Brown Thrasher lands on the driveway and scurries over to the dust wallow and, as its name implies, begins to thrash around in the dusty place.

It behaves exactly like the birds that take a bath in the water I have provided in the birdbath a few feet away on the grass. It flaps its wings and spreads its tail and splashes in the fine dust. It lays down writhing and flinging the sand around with its beak, attempting to get the particles into its feathers.

The bird acts like it is in ecstasy.

It gets up, shakes itself, and runs across the driveway into the brush, and then a half-a-minute later it comes running back and does it again, and then finally flies off.

We’re often shown scenes in movies of beautiful women preparing to luxuriate in the perfect bath. They light candles, pour fragrant oil or bubble bath tub as it fills, and then lay back in the steaming water. I have to say that bird was enjoying its bath every bit as much, without all the extras.

The benefits of careful pruning

The tulip poplar we donated in our son’s memory was planted in the park in March 2012.

It was less than 3 feet tall and was basically a bare stick.

Within a week, another tulip poplar was planted next to our tree. It was the same size and also a bare stick. Both trees soon begin to put out leaves. Our tree had a small setback when the tip got broken shortly after it was planted, but it recovered nicely.

We watered both trees that summer, the next summer, and the summer after that to make sure they would survive through July and August, when is very hot and little rain normally falls.

In 2013, our tree was very healthy and growing well.

So was the tree next to it, and they were about the same size.

And then I began to carefully prune our tree. Richard did not want me to, but I explained that it really was OK, that I wasn’t going to do a hack job on it, and that the tree would benefit from it. As we walked around the park one day before he finally agreed, I pointed out that none of the big trees in the park have limbs below about 5 feet. Eventually, all of the lower limbs on the small trees would be cut off anyway, so there was no point in the tree putting its energy into these lower limbs.

Don’t worry, I said, the tree will be fine.

The family that donated the tree next to ours has not done anything to their tree since it was planted. Both trees are healthy and are growing well, but now, 2 years after I began pruning our tree...

 the difference in the two trees (ours is on the right) is quite obvious.

It’s hard not to miss the object lesson -- sometimes we need to prune things out of our life that can stunt our growth or divert our energy away from things that are more important. Taking secateurs to a thumb-sized tree limb is one thing, and applying them to our own lives is quite another. And not always very easy. Jesus certainly talked about the importance of pruning when He compared the need to prune grape vines so they bear better fruit with the pruning God does in us so that we produce better fruit in our own lives.