Hunting the Elusive Gingersnap

I have had a bit of a problem with writer’s block, so this is an attempt to move past it.

One of the disadvantages to living in a small town is the limited availability of places to shop and difficulty sometimes finding what you want. We needed gingersnaps to make sauerbraten sauce, a favorite meal that I had not made in a long time. Richard remembered that we used to have this quite often and put it on the menu for this week.

There are two grocery stores in town. He went to one of them on Sunday to get gingersnaps. There were no gingersnaps. Really?

I went to the other market on Tuesday to look for gingersnaps, thinking I would find some. Silly me. That market also had no gingersnaps.

Today I went to the Dollar General Store, which is not my favorite place to shop because of the weird way its aisles are laid out and some other strange policies. 

Yes, they had gingersnaps! If DG can stock gingersnaps, why can’t either of the two grocery stores?

I was very happy to find the gingersnaps, but the best thing about that experience was when I thanked the clerk for helping me find the cookies, she said, “Of course.”

Of course.

A pet peeve these days is service people—bank tellers, clerks, etc—who respond “Not a problem” when I thank them for helping me.

Not a problem? Helping people is their job, why should it “be a problem.”

Okay. I get it that “not a problem” is a perfectly acceptable response in some situations when someone is being thanked for going “above and beyond” and that language is fluid and new words, phrases, and expressions are added all the time.

I suppose people my grandparent’s age reacted the same way when a whole new vocabulary came along with the “hippies” in the late 60s. I guess I am just showing my age.

Terms of Endearment

I imagine most couples, at least at the beginning of their relationship, refer to each other with terms of affection: Honey Bunch, Snookums, Poopsie, Angel Face, Sweetie Pie and the like.

I don’t remember Mom calling Dad anything but his name, but Dad frequently called her “Mus.” This was short for “Muscles.” Mom was rather frail and not a robust woman. I think this was a result of scarlet fever, which she contracted when she was 9 and was seriously ill. She, her mother, and grandmother (who lived with them) were quarantined in the house. She couldn’t leave her room. She writes

 I was really sick with scarlet fever, had big nodules up and down my neck and swollen lymph glands. My ribs looked like a washboard and scared mother and grandma when I was finally well and stood up because I was so thin. The doctor came to the house but all he could offer was bed rest and a very strict diet…

Antibiotics were not available in the early 1930s, so the disease had to run its course. I don’t have any real proof of this, but think the disease probably damaged her heart.

I think dad started calling her “Muscles” when he was teaching her to drive and then shortened it to “Mus.” She probably had a struggle turning the steering wheel and shifting and pressing the clutch pedal to the floor and all that business.

We used to own a big, old pickup truck that did not have power steering, so I can appreciate how much strength it takes. So “Mus” made sense to us.

This brings me to Jack and Ruth, who are both in their 90s. When she is able, Ruth comes to the monthly Bible study at church. She requires a walker, is tethered to an oxygen tank, and does not drive, so Jack ushers her in and gets her settled and then returns and picks her up. Jack is a “character,” which is a story for another time.

Ruth publishes a newsletter that includes stories, anecdotes, historical facts, poems, and jokes, that sort of thing. Some she writes and other items are things people have sent her. On occasion she has printed (with my permission) things from this blog in her newsletter.

In the most recent newsletter, she writes, “I used to call Jack “Dear Heart.” He evidently didn’t like the endearment because he started calling me “Elk’s Liver.”

Birthday Surprise

 My sister has a remarkable gift for giving us presents. 

We look forward with great anticipation to the boxes she sends for birthdays and other important days in our life. Sometimes it is clothes—every shirt Richard wears to church is one she sent him, and likewise, most of the nice clothes I wear to church were gifts from her. Almost always there is something interesting to eat she has bought from Trader Joe’s (the nearest one is 300 miles away in St. Louis) or World Market, which does not have a location in Missouri. 

About 3 weeks before Richard’s birthday, which was earlier in the week, I received an e-mail from her wanting to know if there was anything Richard would like for his birthday.

At first he said, “A card would be fine, she doesn’t have to send anything.” He is of an age now where if he needs something he just buys and it is hard trying to think up things that someone else can buy him. 

But then he thought about it: “Tell her she could send me a 63 Corvette if she happens to have a spare one lying around.”

Richard has had a love affair with the Corvette Stingray. The first one he owned was a 1963 with a removable hard top. At the time he was a student at Chapman College. The Homecoming Queen rode in it during a parade.

He tells me he took it on the freeway once and got it up to 110 mph, but then realized that if something went wrong, he was going to die.

The car had a special racing carburetor, and he could not find anyone to work on it, so he let it go.

But after we got married, we drove at least two different Corvettes. One of them was a miserable car. It had exhaust pipes running on both sides, which made getting out of the car without getting burned very tricky. The last time I remember riding in that car I was about 8 months pregnant, and Richard had to help me get out.

We replaced that one with a 1978 model that was a lot of fun to drive. By then we had a baby. The car did have a back seat, but trying to get the baby in and out of the car seat was too hard.

That car made way for a regular family-type station wagon, and there have been no more Corvettes. 

Until now.

As it happened, my sister did have a 1963 Corvette lying around.

It was hilarious, but I guess you had to be here.

What We Leave Behind

Corinthians 2:14 But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him.

When livestock trucks carrying cattle or pigs barrel down the highway past our house...

the smell lingers for quite a while.

Likewise, yesterday morning, while I was walking at about 6:00 a.m., a trash truck drove past me on its route, and I could still smell it after it was gone from sight. It wasn’t pleasant.

It occurred to me that we too produce an “odor” as we go about our activities of daily living. I suspect we have all on occasion been near someone whose odor is offensive because they haven't t bathed in a while or washed their clothes.

But I am not referring to body odor. I mean the effect we have on others when we interact with them. What impression do we leave with them? Sweet? Sour? Stinky?

I hope that my relationship with God produces a fragrance that is pleasant to those I interact with and that they aren’t left wrinkling their noses in distaste after I have passed them by.

An Unexpected Harvest

We have a few vegetables planted in 5-gallon buckets: jalapeño peppers, bell peppers, squash, and tomatoes. The peppers and the tomatoes have done well, the squash, not so much.

But something else has been busy planting in our buckets, and so we are getting an unexpected harvest.

I have had to position my hanging bird feeders to make it more difficult for squirrels to leap on them, and so the chipmunks are no longer able to get on the feeders and help themselves.  

Not too long after this picture was taken...

a squirrel leaped on the feeder and knocked it to the ground and it broke in pieces.

This feeder (obviously a feeder I made myself out of a plastic gallon jar and the lid from a 5-gallon pail) is now hanging from the eve of the second story of our house.

But the furry monsters can stuff their faces with the sunflower seeds that are in the wild bird seed we put on the ground platform for the birds that prefer to feed on the ground (doves, indigo buntings, towhees, etc) and the rabbits.

And then they plant the seeds in our buckets...

and clumps of sprouts appear after a while.

I am enjoying the sprouts in my salad. 

And if you have a few minutes, head on over to YouTube and listen to this wonderful song by Nancy Griffith, who died a few days ago.

 

 

The Choices We Make

Last fall, my brother’s daughter and her husband decided they did not want to raise their 2 children in the Los Angeles metro area. They sold their house and moved to Idaho, and my brother and his wife also sold up and moved to Idaho.

I understand the motivation. We did the same thing. When our son was about 2, we sold the house, packed up, and moved to Oregon. My parents, however, did not follow us because they had other children living there. Good thing too, because we only stayed in Oregon 2 years before moving here.

Thursday morning, my brother was sitting in his back yard having a “cuppa caawfee” (he says this like John Wayne might say it – and of course I can’t write it like he would say it -- and it is hilarious) and decided to call me.

We had a nice visit. At one point he wanted to know “how are your teeth?” (How are my teeth? Why in the world does he want to know about my teeth?). “Oh, I just spent $900 on a crown – cracked filling that’s probably 40 years old – but other than that they are fine. My gums are healthy and I haven’t had a cavity in long time…” I guess he wanted to talk about his teeth, which he did.

And then I was dismayed to learn that he and his wife, Debbie, have not been vaccinated against COVID and that they don’t intend to. Debbie says: “What’s the worst that can happen? We go to see Jesus.” Well, yeah, that’s true but…

I am concerned about my brother, especially as the COVID variants sweep the country and only 37% of the people in Idaho have received both vaccinations. Not much chance of “herd immunity” with that low rate.

Closer to home, our next door neighbor (young man, late 40s) died of COVID earlier in the week. A friend’s son-in-law (also a young man) died of COVID Thursday evening.

The vaccination rate in our county is 20%, and this area of Missouri has made the national news several times in the last weeks because of spikes in COVID, with 97% of patients filling the hospitals not vaccinated.  

I understand that people have researched COVID and the vaccine—whether the information they have looked at is from reliable sources or misinformation from anti-vaxers—and have made their own personal choice. I understand that vaccination is not a guarantee that the vaccinated person will escape getting COVID. I also understand that on issues where people are set in their ways, it's futile to try to change their minds.

So, all I can do is pray for God’s protection for my precious brother and his wife and hope that their choice doesn’t have disastrous consequences.

Appropriate Attire

It is not often that a person can do more than just glance at the sun without risking damage to their eyesight. But this morning, I could.

When I left the house at 6 a.m. to walk and pick up trash, the sun was rising up through haze on the horizon, it was huge (as the moon also is as it rises) and was a brilliant orange, but damped so I could look right at it. It was glorious.

It reminded me so much of home. The city in Southern California where I was raised is about 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and often in the early evening fog would come in off the ocean, and as the sun set, it would become damped and easily viewed.

Well, the beautiful vision this morning only lasted a few minutes, because the sun rises quickly and moved through the haze and then gradually got too bright to look at.

Now, on these hot summer days, I knock around the house in a pair of Richard’s old boxer shorts, with the fly sewn shut, on top of my regular underwear. Cool and comfortable and eminently practical. We have some zone air conditioning in the part of the house where I work, and Richard has a unit in his office, but the central part of the house is not air conditioned and it gets hot as the day wears on.

So I’m galumphing along and spotted some trash. And as I looked down to grab it with the picker-upper, I happened to look down and realized I forgot to put my regular walking shorts on top of Richard’s old boxer shorts.

How embarrassing. Fortunately, there is not a whole lot of traffic on the highway at 6 a.m. Yeah, people are heading to work, but I figure people on the highway who saw me walking were going too fast to register that I was wearing men's underwear.

And even more fortunately I did not meet the two women who I regularly see walking on our frontage road on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. I don’t always walk on our frontage road or cross the highway and walk on that frontage road, but if I do and they are also walking, then we pass each other coming and going. There is plenty of time to check each other out. One of the women always wears tight yoga pants and the other one always wears knee-length shorts and a blouse or t-shirt (see?).

Fortunately, this morning they had not started their walk, so I got away with it.

Wanted: Females

One of the first things we did when we move here was to try to grow our own vegetables. It was a hard row to hoe. The soil here is terrible, mostly heavy clay and rocks. So we spent a lot of time and effort trying to build it up by hauling in manure, sand, and compost and making raised beds.

I can remember one summer when we had worked so hard putting in an asparagus bed, and no sooner did we get it planted than a torrential rain caused the wet weather creek to leap its banks and everything was washed way.

Unfortunately for the garden, my husband never met a tree he didn’t love, and when one would sprout up in the wonderful soil I had worked so hard to prepare, he wouldn’t let me pull it up. So the cleared areas where I was trying to plant vegetables soon became very shaded and filled with tree roots, We gave up trying to grow in the ground.

We bought whiskey barrel halves and planted in them for a while, but that project came to an end when the crew hired by the electric company came and cleared the right of  way under the lines, which is where we had the whiskey barrels, and they bulldozed them all to smithereens.

The last time I attempted to grow squash, which was probably 15 years ago, the plants were invaded by these awful beetles, and then the few squash that started to develop rotted when they were about 2 inches long.

Now we have a few vegetables planted in 5-gallon pails. Jalapeno and bell peppers, tomatoes, and this year, we thought we would try again with squash.

We now have several really healthy looking plants in 5-gallon pails on our deck. 

Unfortunately, only 1 squash has developed. 

Richard did some searching and thought perhaps it was because we didn’t have enough insects around to pollinate the flowers. So he found a YouTube video on how to pollinate by hand.

When he went out to try it, he discovered that all of the flowers are male blossoms. There aren’t any female blossoms to pollinate with. Some flowers have both male and female parts, but not squash. We hope that some female blossoms will eventually appear.

Guess it takes two to tango, even for squash.

The Breakfast Club

They are waiting for me every morning.  Richard calls them “the breakfast club”. 

I like to think of these as Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter, one of whom is a baby born this year who has joined the grownups. In the front yard, another group waits for Richard, who usually feeds the birds on that side of the house.

They have become very tame. The other day one who was sitting near the front porch saw Richard going down steps and followed him around the side the house to where the feeding platform is in the front yard.

The rabbits here have a wide assortment of natural food to eat and are in no danger of starving. I think it is more like if you had to choose between a plate of carrot sticks and celery on the left and a bag of Doritos (or Cheetos, or Chex Mix, or… you get the idea) on the right.

In the meantime, it seems the cost of “everything” is going up and up. Last summer we stocked up on black oil sunflower seeds, at about $18 a sack, and wild bird seed. We still have plenty of wild bird seed but were coming to the bottom of the barrel of sunflower seeds and so I stopped by the feed store to pick up another 50-lb sack.

How much was the sunflower seeds? He wants to know.

$30 with tax.

$(#@%*!. Are you kidding me?

Nope.

We had a discussion about whether we are going to continue to feed birds (and rabbits) because of the increase in the cost and have decided we will. I guess we will buy 1 sack at a time and hope the price comes down. If what is happening with sunflower seeds follows the pattern of other commodities, I have a feeling that the price is not going to come down very much. The woman at the feed store says it's because people who stayed home during the pandemic started feeding birds and so sunflower seeds are in short supply.

Repurposing a Squirrel

I suppose there is a secret to skinning a squirrel. I have watched some YouTube videos on how to do it, and of course, these manly men get the skin off in short order. I did prepare squirrel stew once—and it was very good—but getting that skin off was so difficult I decided struggling with it wasn’t worth the effort, so nuisance squirrels that Richard shoots are offered to raccoons and opossums (whoever gets to it first).

But this time shortly after I put the squirrel in the basket, I was very surprised to see a tufted titmouse land on the squirrel and begin plucking fur for its nest. It collected quite a beak-full...

flew off...

and came back several times.

You’ll notice the duct tape on the feeder. That was to repair a crack in the plastic caused by a squirrel.

Richard can’t shoot them easily when they are on my side of the house (my side being where my office is), so I do have a live animal trap that I set and sometimes am successful at trapping them. Last week I trapped 4 squirrels in 3 days. The two squirrels that were here today stayed well clear of the trap, but I think that is probably because a chipmunk came and cleaned out the sunflower seeds I left as bait without activating the the trap.

At church yesterday morning, this book was on the pew where we sit. 

If I can figure out how to outwit the squirrels, then I will be happy to not have Richard shoot them. Having looked through the book yesterday after church -- and it is very entertaining -- but it appears that outwitting squirrels is just about doomed to failure.

Fifty Years and Counting...

Rumor has it that something always goes wrong at a wedding. It’s probably not true, but something did go wrong at our wedding, which was 50 years ago today.

The church where we got married had very strict rules about the songs that could be sung during the ceremony. No secular music allowed, and I had to choose from a list. My dad was very disappointed, because he wanted the song "Sweet Leilani" sung. I had some ideas about songs too, and none of them were on the list. I chose a song that was okay, and I don’t remember now what it was.

At the rehearsal, the minister was kidding around with the soloist and said, “See you at 8:00.” Well, the wedding was at 7:00.

When it came time for the soloist, he wasn’t there. The minister waited a beat and then carried right on, and so we began married life together. 

The past 50 years have seen some “ups and downs,” but I am very glad I said “yes” when he asked.

Mother's Day

I saw my mom last in the summer of 2009. She had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and chose not to receive treatment. She had a deep abiding faith in God and knew where she was headed. She died in October 2009. I called her two days before she died, and according to my sister-in-law who was there, I was the last person she talked to before she slipped into a coma.

She was a wonderful mother and I miss her.

But in addition to honoring my Mom’s memory, I am thinking about two other mothers who had a profound effect on my life because of the way they raised their children, one of whom grew up to become my mom and the other my father. Unfortunately, I did not have a long relationship with either of them.

 My mom’s mother, Elsie, died when she was 70, and I was 7-1/2 years old. 

My memories of her are fuzzy. I particularly love the picture of Grandma Elsie dressed up in man’s clothes on their ranch in Colorado. 

 I have always wondered what the occasion was.What was she up to?

 My dad’s mother, Theresa, died when she was 65 years old and I was 9. 

My memories of her are a bit sharper. 

I am stunned at how beautiful she was.

I am so incredibly thankful for these wonderful women and their legacy.

How to celebrate Mother's Day? Several days late, but that's okay. We have not gone out to eat in a restaurant in more than year, but will take a chance on Tuesday -- several days late, but that's okay. I was given a gift certificate at a local steak house for filling in on the piano at church for 3 months when the organist broke her leg and couldn’t come to church, much less play the organ. So, we’ll take advantage of that.

Things will be rather simple around our house today. I’ll make turkey tetrazzini from the standard recipe in my cookbook.  

I found a jar of molasses in the cupboard, and I believe gingerbread cake with whipped cream (or perhaps lemon sauce – I haven’t decided) (also from that cookbook) will be on the menu today.

Getting Back in the Groove

Yesterday started off fine. I woke up at 6:15 instead of 4:00 a.m. Two extra hours of sleep is a big deal.

I ate Cheerios for breakfast and was feeling groovy. 

 

 Then things started going downhill, and I stopped feeling groovy.

The day before I had pulled my car, a 1994-year-old Buick just-get-me-there-and-back-please-God-sedan, farther up the driveway than I normally do so Richard could park behind me to unload groceries.

I got a little too close to a tree as I was backing down the driveway and ripped off the cover to the driver’s side parking light. I also discovered the body of my car is not made of metal. It is some sort of “plastic” material” because it did not dent. It cracked. I remember when cars were made of metal and if you got a dent you took it to the body shop and they put some sort of filler in the dent and then sanded it and painted it. It looks like this crack could be repaired with some sort of adhesive and a strip of duct tape.

Richard was not happy.

When we sat down to lunch, he asked whether I had made the Szechwan Carrot soup I said I would make two days ago. As I mentioned, we had gone to the store the day before and got the carrots. Well no. I forgot.

I got out the recipe and saw that I needed fresh ginger. When we buy fresh ginger, we peel it and freeze it so we have it on hand.  I used the last of the frozen fresh ginger several weeks ago, but I had failed to tell Richard to put it on the list. We could have gotten some at a very good price at the store (which is about 12 miles away) when we got the carrots. The price at the local store is $4.90/lb.

Again, he was not happy.

I made the soup using ground ginger. You can find the recipe for the soup here  (it is very good!)

Later in the day, he got over being unhappy, I quit mentally beating myself up, we started laughing about something, and to borrow from the movie Cannery Row (I am not sure if the quote is in the book):

“Things were finally back to normal…once more, the world was spinning in greased grooves.”

Dressing Up Pancakes

Why some of our childhood memories blaze like they are lit up in neon and others fade to gray like a sign that has been left out in the elements and untouched for 60 years remains a mystery.

And frequently what is remembered is not something that is very important.

This morning as I was spreading peanut butter and lilikoi jelly on my pancakes...

I remembered sitting down to eat pancakes with my cousins Teri, Mark, and Nadine at Uncle Bud and Aunt Vera’s house. I don’t remember if I was by myself (they invited me to go to the Seattle World’s Fair with them) or if this was a family vacation and everyone was there.  

Lilikoi jelly? Lilikoi is the Hawaiian word for the variety of passion fruit that grows there. Cousin Teri lives in Hawaii and she turns it into jelly. She made some last year and sent me a care package in January.

Passion flower vines do grow here grow here in the wild...

and I suppose I could make jelly, but the fruit is very small and I have never felt like it was worth messing with.

Where was I? I was so surprised when cousin Mark spread soft butter on his pancakes and then sprinkled sugar on top. Butter and sugar on pancakes? That was not how we ate pancakes at home!! I did try it and it was delicious, of course.

So are peanut butter and lilikoi jelly.

Icky-ness

Some years ago I was invited to be a judge at a Speech and Debate event for area schools held at the local high school. The session that I chose to judge was Dramatic Readings, and student I voted for to win did a dramatic reading of part of Robert Fulghum’s essay “Dinner Dandruff, a chapter from his book It Was on Fire when I Lay Down on It. This essay apparently has become a favorite of English teachers and can be found as part of examinations on the internet.

After the dishes are washed and the sink rinsed out, there remains in the strainer at the bottom of the sink what I will call, momentarily, some “stuff.” A rational, intelligent, objective person would say that this is simply a mixture of food particles too big to go down the drain, composed of bits of protein, carbohydrates, fat, and fiber. Dinner dandruff.

Furthermore, the person might add that not only was the material first sterilized by the high heat of cooking, but further sanitized by going through the detergent and hot water of the dishpan, and rinsed. No problem.

But any teenager who has been dragooned into washing dishes knows this explanation is a lie. That stuff in the bottom of the strainer is toxic waste—deadly poison—a danger to health. In other words, about as icky as icky gets.

One of the very few reasons I had any respect for my mother when I was thirteen was because she would reach into the sink with her bare hands—BARE HANDS—and pick up that lethal gunk and drop it into the garbage…

The entire chapter is available here:

http://englishiva1011.pbworks.com/f/DINNDAND.PDF

I was reminded of this essay last night as I finished washing the dishes. The kitchen sick is divided. On one side I wash dishes in a dish pan because the stopper that is supposed to go in that drain does not hold water. Attached to the drain on the other side is the garbage disposal. A mesh screen fits in that drain to stop utensils and catch dinner dandruff so it can be dumped into the compost bucket.

Because I was not “thinking” about what  I was doing, I removed the screen -- it was really gunked up and needed to be cleaned --and then I dumped the dishwater and watched a measuring spoon go into the open maw of the garbage disposal. Not wishing to damage the measuring spoon and/or the garbage disposal, there was nothing else for it but to stick my hand down there and retrieve the spoon (note to self: always, always, always dump the water first and then clean the screen)

Quite icky indeed.

Giving Up

Two Sundays ago my car was covered in ice, and the doors were frozen shut. We had just had a discussion about my tendency to ask himself to do things for me that I could do myself. So instead of asking him to solve the problem, I got the brilliant idea of getting a pitcher of hot water and pouring it over the door handle and around the rim.

It worked and I was able to open both doors. Yay! I went back in the house very proud of myself and told himself, and he laughed and said “Well, they will just freeze up again…” So I went racing out there, and the passenger door opened (barely) and I was able to get my driver’s license out of the glove box (it locks), which is where I keep because I do not normally carry a purse. The driver’s side had indeed already froze shut again. I drove one of the cars that lives in the garage to church.
 

More weather came, and the car hasn’t moved since. I haven’t left the house except to feed the birds since last Sunday (church was cancelled). Richard has managed to get out to the highway and go to town, and we will leave a little later to get the second COVID shot and make a pass at the library to return books, which would have been overdue yesterday except she renewed them for me over the phone.
 

I have had no exercise at all since last Friday. I have not been to the aerobics class (although I do plan to go back Monday), I  have not  taken a walk (when we had the dog, I would bundle up and take her for a walk when it was single digits, but not now), and I have not gotten on the recumbent cycling machine. I feel like a blob.
 

The church I grew up in did not “do Lent” and I don’t recall any of the Baptist churches we attended mentioning Lent either. However, the Presbyterians do “do Lent” and so this has been a new experience for me. Lent is a time for personal reflection that prepares people's hearts and minds for Good Friday and Easter and often involves “giving up” something to help remind folks to focus on their relationship with God. However, in past seasons of Lent I have not given up anything with that purpose in mind.
 

This year is different though. I can see that I do need to deepen my relationship with God, and I have figured out what I am giving up to help me do that. Or at least will try to do. And that is uncontrollable snacking after dinner. About 2.5 hours after dinner (we eat very early), we usually have a salad, which is mainly vegetables and usually no lettuce (not at $1.99 a head). And we eat that while we watch television. Then I sit in my recliner and read for another hour or so. But I don’t just read. I graze – peanuts…crackers and cheese… and then yogurt with fruit.

I have decided to stick with the salad and yogurt and give up the “grazing.” Perhaps I can lose a little of the weight I have put on by exercising my elbow.

Giddy-up

Once upon a time, if I mailed a letter on Monday to my parents in Gardena, CA (a suburb of Los Angeles), it often arrived there by Thursday.

But times have changed.

My little brother’s birthday was on Jan 21 and I remembered to send him a birthday card with some money.

Here he is on Super Bowl Sunday. 

I imagine he was disappointed at the outcome of the game.

Last year when I mailed his card, I left one number off the address on the envelope, and even though I had included the extra digits on the ZIP code that should have sorted the letter to his house, it did not arrive. I got it back in the mail several weeks later.

This year I was very careful to write the correct address but was little late getting it in the mail. I forgot the post office would be closed on the Jan 18th for MLK’s birthday, so the letter was not postmarked until the 19th.

I knew it probably would be a little late.

A little late?

My brother called me 2 days ago (on the 9th) to let me know the card had arrived. It took 20 days.

Now when the Pony Express was delivering mail in the 1860s, they managed to get a letter from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, in 10 days. That’s about 1800 miles. It is 1500 miles from here to my brother’s house in Lakewood. 

We obviously can’t reactive the Pony Express, but my goodness. Something definitely needs to be done about the U.S. Postal Service. And I don’t think we can blame it on COVID.

Silence is Golden

Thursday is our meatless meal day. I fix things that have a complete protein but don’t use meat. Frequently what I end up making is vegan, but we are not vegans. We like meat. A lot. 

I usually end up making enough for 6 people, so I eat the leftovers for lunch for the next several days. 

Tonight we had dal (Indian recipe for rice and lentils), which I got from a great vegetarian cookbook that I have used so much that it is starting to fall apart...

last week we had black bean and quinoa salad, which I got off from the Allrecipes website.. and the week before we had vegetarian chili and cornbread. 

I used two different recipes when I made the chili and got the spices fouled up. I’m not sure what I did exactly, but it was probably the worst-tasting chili I have ever made. 

After we finished, I asked Himself what he thought of the chili. “Oh,” he says, “it was great.” All I said was “Good, I am glad you liked it.” 

As my sweet sissy says “I have found if I don't point out flaws, he won't notice either.” 

I was able rehabilitate the chili by adding some more canned tomatoes and some more chili powder and that did the trick.

A Bite of This...A Bite of That

Along with the instant Idaho potatoes, my brother also sent a bar of 90% dark chocolate. It was rather bitter and not that pleasant to eat – almost like eating baking chocolate. I tried to give Richard half but he declined. It did come at a good time. Part of the instructions the NP sent home with me when I was treated for the “itis’s,” which would be laryngitis, bronchitis, conjuctivitis, and cheilitis (an inflamed upper lip) was “coffee and dark chocolate.”

In the Christmas box my sister sent, was a small bag of caramels. I started eating my half of the caramels along with the chocolate bar. A bite of chocolate… a bite of caramel. Tasted pretty good together.

My sister sent me an e-mail yesterday in which she told me she has found a home nearby for the family piano that we both learned to play on when we were children. My brother also took lessons for about a month but then he decided he would rather go out and play with the boys and so she did not force him. He says now it was one of the biggest regrets of his life.

After we grew up and left home, my mom decided she wanted to do something different with the living room, and so she gave the piano to my sister and bought a small spinet piano that fit perfectly in another spot. Dad could play if he wanted or the granddaughters (one of the granddaughters is very gifted musically) could entertain if they came to visit.

She will be passing it to a family that has two children and lives right down the street from them. The piano is big...

and takes up a lot of room and she wants to do something else with her living room. 

I don’t blame her, but I am a little sad. It is hard though to mentally let go of things that you have had an attachment to.

In her memoir Becoming, Michele Obama writes about being given music lessons by her great aunt on an old piano when she was a child. Her family lived in an upstairs apartment that had been created in an old house that her great aunt owned. 

She learned to recognize middle C because there was a chip in the ivory. When it came time for her first recital, she had no idea where middle C was and was frozen. She was lucky: her aunt came on the stage and showed her middle C and she was able to carry on.

Reading about that brought back a very painful memory. Dad and mom both played, and she began teaching me to play when I was 4. I had an aptitude for it, so they arranged for a teacher and I took lessons. The keyboard was not in good shape. Middle C was chipped, as were the ivories on other keys.

My first – and last – piano recital was a disaster. I was perhaps 11 or 12 years old. When I sat frozen at the piano, which did not have any chipped ivories, I had no idea where to place my hands. My teacher did not come up and show me where middle C was. I floundered. I guess I got through the program I had practiced but not very well. I can’t remember when I was ever more embarrassed. I cried a lot.  

My parents immediately had the keyboard repaired, so when my sister began taking lessons, she didn’t have that problem. Her teacher got me involved in her lessons and gave us duets to play. And she still has the sheet music all these years later. 

We had so much fun. Lots of laughter and joy.

I hope the piano brings the new family them as much joy as it did our family.