Adventures in rural living

Chapter 1
Small towns appear about every 10-12 miles along the 4-lane highway that one picks up in Springfield to travel through this area of the state heading to Arkansas. The highway bypasses the towns, but there are plenty of access roads (our town has 3 exits on the highway), so none of these towns have died like what, unfortunately, happened to towns along the old U.S. Highway 66.

Some of larger towns have a Walmart. For us, the nearest Walmart is in any direction is about 25 (give or take a few) miles away, so going to Walmart is not a “quick trip” and is not convenient if we don’t have a lot of shopping to do.

Now the corporation that operates Dollar General Store came up with a brilliant idea: Put a Dollar General Store in each of the small towns along the highway. That way the residents in these small town don’t have to drive so far to go to a variety store.

But then the brilliant idea starts to dim. The corporation has some screwy ideas that can make shopping at the Dollar General incredibly frustrating. The store does not hire people to stock the shelves. The clerks who are supposed to be behind the checkout counter are required to stock the shelves during normal business hours, but they are not allowed to put a bell on the counter so customers waiting to pay for their purchases can alert the clerk. Sometimes you have to stand there at the counter and wait… and wait… and wait… for the clerk (who may be in the back of store) to realize someone is there. Another problem is that is even more frustrating is when something is gone from the shelf, it can be up to 6 weeks before the product is back on the shelf. We have experienced this numerous times.

My husband’s birthday was last Thursday, and on Friday, he asked me to stop by Dollar General on the way home from aerobics class and buy a couple of packages of thank-you notes because he needed to send some. The store has a $5 off coupon on $25 of merchandise purchased on Saturday, but you have to spend $5 at one time to get the coupon. He figured two or three packages of thank-you notes would be enough to get the $5-off coupon.

So I went to the store and looked in the logical places for the thank-you notes. The store has a rather extensive collection of inexpensive greeting cards for most occasions and that is where I buy the greeting cards I send. After wandering up and down aisles and looking on end caps and not finding any packages of thank-you notes, I finally asked the clerk.

“We don’t have any,” she says, “some of the stores have thank-notes notes but not this one. We don’t carry thank-you notes here anymore.”

I stood there a little dumbfounded. “Why?” She shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t know.

Part of the joy of small-town living. A variety store that doesn’t have what one would think is sort of a basic need for polite society. One of the pharmacies in town may have thank-you notes, so I will have to check that out. Otherwise, getting thank-you notes will have to wait until we have a lot of shopping to do at Walmart.

Chapter 2

Our computer guy used to tease Richard that he has more redundancy than NASA. I mean, the man has backups, and then backups for the backups, etc. This obsession of his has gotten us out real messes many times so I am not complaining.

So Saturday arrives and hums along -- thank-yous were tendered by e-mail and he did not shop at Dollar General and spend $25 on merchandise -- until about 5 p.m., when my dearly beloved announces, “I’m going to take my shower now.” He comes back surprisingly quickly. Right in the middle of his shower, the water just stopped. Zip. Zero. Nada. Fortunately, he had not started to wash his hair.

You get that initial panicky feeling. What? No water? You see we are not on city water. Our water comes from well and is pumped into a pressure tank in small well house behind the house.

So he heads out to the well house. He installed lights and a switch to turn them on to keep the interior warm in the winter so the pipes don’t freeze. The lights don't work. So that tells him it is an electrical problem rather than a failure of the well pump or the pressure tank.

He goes to the pole where the electrical meter is and opens the box below the meter and discovers the breaker to the well house is tripped, but the breaker appears to be broken and can't be reset. He very carefully disconnects the wires from the meter to the breaker and from the breaker to the well house, after much struggle (grinding rusted screws etc etc.), is able to get the box apart enough so he can pull the breaker from the box.

In the meantime, I have heated a 2-liter bottle of water (we have numerous bottles of water stored in case of power failures) on the stove and washed my hair.

The True Value hardware in town stays open until 7 p.m., on Saturday so he decides to go to there to see if they have the breaker he needs. He is not hopeful about this. This is a small town True Value, after all. And so he disappears down the stairs to the garage.

My heart goes out to him. He is the man. He is expected to fix these problems. I have calmed down. We were without power for 3 days once after the remnants of a hurricane came through here, so we are prepared. We have 5-gallon buckets of water to flush the toilet with, 2-liter bottles of water for cooking and dishes… we can handle this.

Maybe 10 minutes later he comes back in the house, walks over to the sink, and turns the faucet on. He just happened to remember that he has a bunch of breakers left over from years ago when he did the electrical panel in the house. Guess what? He has the right-sized breaker to go back in the box, and he was able to get that wired up again.

Sunday morning when we were eating breakfast he says, "You know, that had to be God yesterday. He was leading me. I couldn't have figured all of that out by myself..."

Yes indeed.

He leadeth me: O blessed thought!
O words with heavenly comfort fraught!
Whate'er I do, where'er I be,
still 'tis God's hand that leadeth me.

Watershed moments

People who get to know me well will eventually learn that I like spiders. I do not automatically kill every spider that I find in the house. We practice capture and release, unless it is a brown recluse that has is not being reclusive and is out and about (which is very rare). He will kill them, I usually let them scurry back into hiding. I suppose I am being foolish -- I knew someone who had to eventually have plastic surgery to repair the damage from a brown recluse bite.

I like to take pictures of spiders. Rest easy, here are just a few. I won't bore you to tears.

  

 

My birthday is very close to Halloween. One year a friend, who is a good with a sewing machine, was inspired to give me a tote bag and some pot holders made from spider web material.

The local market takes 5 cents off the total when customers bring in their own bags to put the groceries in. I have quite a few bags to use for this, and today I happened to grab the spider web bag as I headed out the door. Tuesday is “banana day” at the market, and the price-per-pound drops to 39 cents.

A young woman behind me at the checkout counter noticed the bag sitting on the conveyor

and commented that it was “cute.” So I had to explain that someone had made it for me because I liked spiders quite a bit.

She said she had severe arachnophobia. Her fear of spiders began when she was 5 years old. She woke up and a spider was on her face. That “did it” for her.

My interest in spiders began when I also was about 5 years old. I was out in our yard one day and I noticed this “fuzzy looking thing” on the wooden fence at eye level. I don’t remember touching it, but I must have, because suddenly hundreds of tiny spiders came pouring out from under, spreading out in all directions. I still remember how amazed and excited I was to see that.

Some researchers believe folks are born with an innate fear of spiders and snakes and that it is a “hangover from a survival instinct that evolved in ancient times.” I dunno.  Maybe.

I know that I was never afraid of spiders or snakes, and my parents (usually it's the mom who does this) did not teach me to be afraid of them. I think it would have been interesting to to visit with this young woman more about the topic but the line was moving. I wonder if she would have gone on to grow up to be afraid of spiders if she had not had that experience. Oh well...

In any event, our very different experiences as young children – hers and mine -- were watershed moments -- they certainly affected us for the rest of our lives.

Just another odd moment in the Ozarks

On the bench there was a jumble of oddments such as are to be found in every workshop, bits of cord, wire, metal tools, some bread and cheese which the mice had been at, a leather bottle…

The Wart was familiar with the nests of Spar-hark and Gos, the crazy conglomerations of sticks and oddments which had been taken over from squirrels or crows…

The Sword in the Stone, T.H. White.

When I decided I was tired of the name I had given this blog when I first started writing it, I knew I wanted to include “Ozarks” to reflect the south central area in Missouri where we live (very close to the Arkansas border), but I wasn’t sure what else to add. My friend Judy suggested the word “Oddments.” She and her husband owned a used book store, and when they went to book fairs, they would set up a table with the sign “Oddments,” indicating “these were unusual things that caught our eye that we thought would also catch somebody’s eye and think ‘well, this looks interesting’ and buy them.”

I was familiar with the word “oddment”, which the author T.H. White seems to find quite useful in the first part of his epic, The Once and Future King,  which I confess I have tried to read several times but can’t seem to get past the first 100 pages, despite colorful characters and delightful writing, but never thought to use it myself.

At any rate, all that to say this… I had one of those “odd moments” the other morning that brought home just how appropriate the word is.

I was walking the church loop when I saw something twinkling green on the barbed wire fence separating the asphalt from the goats. Of course I had to see what that was. And what a surprising thing it was!

I did not think this Japanese beetle (and another one I saw further along the wire) accidentally impaled itself or that it decided to sacrifice itself, as did the kamikaze pilots in WWII, as a way to atone for the damage it had caused in peoples’ gardens.

Nope. This is the work of a bird—the Shrike—which impales the prey it catches on barbed wire or thorns. I have never seen a Shrike on the wing, but I did find a dead one that had crashed into our plate glass window, so I knew a little bit about the bird and its habits.

I was just surprised to learn that they also catch and impale insects.

I don’t think anyone is going to shed a tear for these dead beetles.