Do geese eat grasshoppers?

   There are grasshoppers in my yard bigger than my cat!  They try to jump on my leg for a free ride around the yard, but I do not let that happen. I do not like their sticky legs.  I do not like their little tight lips, nor their bugged out eyes.  They are tricky little varmints.  They can land on a light bulb and not fall off before  propelling themselves off in any direction, except to the direction I thought they were going to jump.

They are not afraid of humans.  Insect spray does not harm them.  They eat everything in sight except weeds.   They do not eat weeds. They travel in packs!  They go from a tiny thing the size of a gnat into a 3 inch long giant grasshopper in seven minutes! 

If it were not for the fact that they are the most destructive things on planet Earth, they would be fascinating creatures.  They can fly.  They can take off from a dead standstill and become airborne in a blur.  They can jump further than a kangaroo.  I think they fly.  They are both aerodynamic and waterproof.  I think they chew tobacco, although I do not know where they get it!

I do not know where they sleep, or if they sleep.  I know I go out early in the morning and there is no sign of them, and suddenly the air is full of them.  Insecticide does not phase them.  I did buy something once that the man told me makes them sterile.  Birth control for grasshoppers??  That did not work either. I think it actually increased the horde!

I have seen my mother goose try to catch and eat one, but she failed in that endeavor, so I am guessing the geese prefer grain.

So, I am praying for frost.  It will not kill them, but it slows them down.  Back in the days of the pioneers, they talked of "herds of locusts, that blocked out the sun!"  They don't fool me.  It was those damn grasshoppers!  

They can put a man on the moon, but they cannot find a spray to eliminate the grasshoppers.  So what can we do to get rid of them?

 My answer to this is , "who knows?"  Just pull up my big girl pants and move on!  Winter will come someday!

Talk about a flashback!!

The fourth of July is fast approaching and holiday traffic is expected to set a new record, again.  Some little chickadee was telling me this during a segment on the morning news, so I know it is true.  Her segment  was on traffic and how it will set new records.  New records also means more accidents due to distracted driving.  She gave me a few pointers on how to make sure I am safe when riding as a passenger.  I am still in wonder at her nativity!

When I am riding as a passenger and I notice the driver fumbling with his/her phone I should simply take it from his/her hand and say, "Here, let me make that call for you."  Anything that is distracting the driver should be taken care of by me.  Alrighty then!  Now I know.

My mind flashed back to my younger years as a young bride and later as a young mother, married to a man whose sole purpose in live was to remain in a degree of "plastered' in one degree or another.  Had I shown the audacity to question either his sobriety or ability to operate a vehicle in any shape was sure to meet with resistance of one form or another.  He was the man of the house and it was his responsibility to get the vehicle and the passengers in that vehicle from point A to point B.  Far beit  my right to question his ability.  

Getting there was only half the battle as the reason for trips on the 4th of July was to blow up a weeks salary in a 15 minute frenzy.  That and drinking several cases of beer and then playing poker with his brothers and brother in law.  That was guaranteed to end in a fist fight.  It was my job to take care of the kids.  Since I did not drink, the 4th of July, like many other holidays was always something I looked forward to with a sense of dread, but so be it.

Looking back, in retrospect, those were the good old days.  At least the kids remembered them as such and later in life, after the divorce, the kids always went to Daddy's for the holiday.  He built a club house on 20 acres of land in Western Kansas and every holiday was cause for a party!  The kids grew up knowing Daddy always had a party going on and that was good.

So there you have it.  I hate the fireworks on the 4th, but it is what it is.  I am rather a prude about most things like that, but that is just me.  You all have a happy and safe 4th of July and keep the powder dry!

Peace!

What the hell?

I had a dream two nights ago that was so horrible I am just now able to write about it and analyze what it means in my simple life;  Here goes;;;;

I dreamed I was setting in a lawn chair beside a green meadow.  Beyond the meadow was a forest.  To my other side was a parking lot with no cars and beyond that a super highway with parked cars.

As I gazed into the clear blue sky, I saw a round object pass from right to left.  It was about 75 feet in the air.  It was silver with blue trim.  It had a door and one window.  A banner over the door read DONALD TRUMP.  It disappeared, but very soon reappeared again on my right and once more slowly passed out of my line of vision on my left.  This happened several times.  I do not know how it managed to disappear and then reappear unless it was orbiting the earth very fast.

After several times of passing from right to left, it stopped and hovered in front of me.  The banner disappeared revealing a door.  The door opened  and what appeared to be Donald Trump stepped out onto  the landing in front of the door.  He was dressed in a peach colored tuxedo made of satin.  His name was on a cream colored banner across his chest.  His shoes were white and he wore white gloves.  He waved at me and asked if I had a ladder.

I woke up.  Now, it is the job of anyone reading this to explain to me what in the hell that dream was all about and where it came from.  In my day to day life, politicians rarely even enter my mind.  I like to bake cookies and watch soap operas.  That is the extent of my existence;

So there you have it. Any thoughts?  

The Ailmore Place in Nickerson

 Until I reached second grade we lived to the best of my knowledge, on the Stroh place.  That is where my memories of life began.  I do not know where Donna and Mary came into being, but I remember momma laying in bed with baby Dorothy beside her.  I hated her!  She made momma stay in bed and I could not be held by momma because of her.  She cried and momma cuddled her.  My cuddling days were over at that point.  When harvest came momma even took her in the truck with her to haul the grain to the elevator.  She left us home with Josephine who must have been about 10 or 11 at the time.  I am sure someone older actually ran herd over all of us, but I do not remember because the seventy some years of life that followed fairly well erased my memories of that time!

I do recall the move to the Ailmore place.  It was on the hayrack, straight down the road, across the highway pulled by the two big horses that were my dad's pride and joy.  " A matched pair, Chris!  Look at that!  Gotta have a matched pair.  Won't work any other way."  Of course, all a matched pair meant to me was that I was going to wear the same coat to school that I wore last year and the first 2 months of school there would be no shoes on my feet, or on Jakes either.  Josephine was big so she had to have shoes.

The house was 2 bedrooms, a front room and dining room combined.  The front bedroom was big enough for all of us.  Josephine, Donna, Mary and myself slept in one bed and Jake made a pallet on the floor.  Dorothy was still nursing so she slept  with mom and dad.  There was a light that hung in the front room and one in the kitchen.  Since electric lights were still a novelty to my dad we used kerosene lamps and did not mess with that new fangled stuff.

I am sure I have writtten about the bullfrog incident somewhere and also about Jake blowing on the gas tank and spraying gas in Donna's eyes.  Across the road lived the Barthold sisters.  They were old maid schoolteachers.  We used to hide in their forest and spy on them drinking tea in the flower garden.  While we were sure that we were well hidden, momma did give us a licking because they told on us.  We swore they were lying, but we got a licking anyway!

It was during this time that Nickerson had a cyclone. Dad had gone to Hutchinson for one of his drinking trips. John Britan knew this and knew we were in for bad weather and came by to check on us. While he was there the storm hit. I remember the lights went out and we only had one lamp burning. I think that a cyclone rotates one direction, and a tornado goes in the other. Not sure what happened, but I do recall it being very scary. Maybe a cyclone is a straight wind.  One thing is for sure, when you are a little kid and the wind is blowing so hard the all the buildings in sight are destroyed and lumber is flying past the window, you get a quick lesson in how to pray and mean it!  In due time the storm "blew itself out" and we went outside.  

The haystack was gone.  The pump house was gone.  The tree that stood in the corner of the yard and served as  cemetary marker for the small animals that passed in our care was still there, standing sentinel over the tiny bodies.  The old milk cow stood beside the water tank and looked very forlorn.  Chickens and ducks wandered around where the chicken house used to be.  About the only thing that survived with little or no damage was the house.

And then dad drove into the yard in his rattle trap old car. Even in his inebreated state he was amazed at the damage.  He thanked Mr. Britan for being there in his absence.  My dad worked as a hired hand for Mr. Britan for many years, so he knew dad pretty well and accepted that dad had a drink occasionally.  Mostly he drank "hot toddies" for his colds.  Not a social drinker, just medicine.  Of course, in hind sight it appears that my dad had a drinking problem.  The upshot was that one day he quit drinking completely and with that he quit having colds necessitating his need for the toddies.  As a little kid we learned to adjust.

We left the Ailmore place a couple years later and moved to 709 Strong Street which would be our home for the rest of my grade school and into high school.  I drove past the Ailmore place several years ago.  It is gone, of course.  Roy Keatings farm is still there and the Rumble house was starting to fall into Bull Creek.  The Barthold house still stands, but the Schultz property is bare.  

Ah, but in my mind I still wade in Bull Creek and seine for crawdads.  I still sing "Buttons and Bows"  for Mr. Rumble.    Mrs. Rumble still gives me a cookie.

Who says you can't go home again?

Peace!

Aunt Beck

 That was her name.  Just Aunt Beck.  If you walked past my house at 709 Strong Street and turned right at the dead end, went across the highway that ran to Sterling and followed the driveway up to a little white house, you would end up at Aunt Beck's house.  I do not remember her at all, other than she was a short woman with her hair in a bun.  Course all women looked alike to me in my memory.  Occasionally momma would make something and dispatch me to "Take this to Aunt Beck and come straight back.  Don't bother her."  

And that was what I would do.  Aunt Beck would open the door, take whatever I had, thank me and close the door.  It was not until many years later that I actually knew who Aunt Beck was and what her function was in the Haas Family migration to Kansas.  I knew I had a cousin named Ronnie Beck who lived in town and was in the same grade I was in while attending Nickerson Grade School.  A side note here is that he had very red cheeks.  Now those of you who know me know that I also have very red cheeks at times.  That makes me think that it is a Haas family trait.

Years later I was to learn that when a member of the Haas Family in Germany migrated to the United States that Aunt Beck was the contact person in Kansas.  The members the the Haas family would get in touch with Aunt Beck and she would put them in touch with whoever they needed to contact here in Kansas.  Mostly my ancestors settled around the Hunstville and Abbyville area.  But back to Aunt Beck.

Sometimes I would walk from my house to the highway to Sterling and go up to Cow Creek and wade around looking for seashells.  Oddly enough I found a lot of them.  Jake and I used to fish Cow Creek and he and his friends would go down a dirt road to a swimming hole.  I never swam and I knew they were down there naked (or so I assumed.) and I wanted no part of that!

Now a note here about the creeks and rivers in Nickerson.  It is bounded on one side by the Arkansas River, another by the Cow Creek and another by the Bull Creek.  Normally, the only one that carries any significant flow of water was the Arkansas River.  But in the Springtime when the snow melted in the mountains of Colorado, the runoff flooded the rivers and Nickerson became isolated.  At least I think it was what happened.  I know when I used to travel to Hutchinson in the Spring, I had to go 50 Highway because all the little creeks long 96 highway would be over the road.  Now what any of this has to do with with Aunt Beck is beyond me!  Back to the subject.

Now, I could bore you with stories of my lineage, but I will not.  The gist of this is mostly to satisfy my own curiosity.  There was a time, I would ask one of the grandma's or mother, but not anymore.  I have lost track of all the cousins and of course, all the aunts and uncles have long since passed to their reward, so I have to rely on genealogy and I am pretty lazy when it comes to looking thing up.

So, having consulted my book that has all the answers, apparently Aunt Beck was my great grandfathers first wife.  Or, she could have been a sister to his first wife.  Sure do not know who to ask at this point!  But anyway that is all water under the bridge and I could say about anything and there is no one around to dispute my memory.  That is the best part of being old!

So anyway, it snowed last night.  According to the old way of thinking, we have 7 more snows until we are done for the year.  Guess we will see.  

You all have a good day today and I wish you Peace and Prosperity for the coming year!

And remember, you cannot sprinkle showers of happiness on someone else without getting a few drops on yourself!

Me, covid, and liver and onions!

 That sentence right there breaks every rule in the English language!  That having been said, let me forge ahead with my tale.

Over the last 2 years I have become pretty much a recluse.  I venture out to the store and church and that is about it.  I am fully vaccinated, but I did contract Covid about a year ago.  I did not like it.  I was incapacitated for 2 full days and nights.  I would not call it "sick" because sick entails a lot of throwing up and I rarely get sick.  I did take to my bed for two days with respiratory symptoms that caused me to once more renew my lifelong commitment to God, Mother and the flag.  That was over a year ago!  I had a small gathering for Thanksgiving and a granddaughter tested positive for Covid, so she gathered her brood and left.  Her mother remained with me and she immediately tested positive, so we quarantined for about a week.  So...

I test weekly and wear my mask when I go to the store.  Now I have always been a fairly "out and about person", but Covid has changed that.  So I have decided to make a greater effort to be social again.

Last night I had my dear friends, Rebecca and Ron over for liver and onions.  I like to cook and I like to have people in for meals.  I think most people are gregarious and that old saying "No man is an island unto himself." comes to mind.  Now on to the jest of the conversation that led to this blog post.

The subject came up of the blog that I have, that you are now reading.  I used to write regularly, but now it seems my main thing in life is to doze in front of the television while Ken Jenning regales me with the afternoon version of Jeopardy! 

Well, to make a long story short, I invited them for supper last night and the fare was Liver and Onions.  A good time was had by all and I sent the leftovers home with them.  It was nice to have someone to talk to beside myself!  Conversation is defined as an exchange of ideas between two or more people.  Now granted, I do occasionally talk to myself, or sing out loud, but this is different.  I say something, then they say something and it goes on like that!  

So, thank you, Rebecca and Ron, for coming to my house and talking to me!  We will have to do this more often!  Next time I will cook something besides Liver and we will include Ross in the dinner party! That should be fun!

Peace!

December 23, 1983

 That was a very long time ago!  A lot has changed since then, but a lot has remained the same.  It is 0 degrees right now, then it was -8.  Kenny and Gene Baugh had been working on a drive line for the tandem dump truck.  They went to Pueblo Brake to pick up the repaired one and they were closed.  Gene went home and Kenny and I went to Canon City, picked up a marriage license and proceeded to the Senior Citizens housing where we found a retired minister to "do the deed".  

And here I set 40 years later.  Temperature is hovering around the zero mark with no hope of warming in the near future.  I am alone now in this house where I have lived for 40 years.  There are a lot of memories here.  Some are sad but they are mostly happy.  I used to have 2 dogs and a couple cats, but now I just have one cat.  I have driven the same car for 6 years and have no need to buy a new one.  I have one calico cat.  I don't want any other color.  Her name is Icarus and for those of you who know who that is, yes, I do know that Icarus was a male and yes, I do know my cat is a female.  Sherman named her.

It was so cold yesterday that the geese never left their house.  I opened their door, but they stayed inside the wire part.  I will not be surprised to find a dead goose out there today.  I have had those things since Bret was 7 years old and he is 31 now.  I do not know how long they live, but I am strongly thinking they may outlive me!

I started this yesterday and lost interest.  Today is actually the day before Christmas, or Christmas Eve as it is known.  I will not be going to church tonight as I have become pretty much a hermit because of Covid.  I had a friend stop by yesterday afternoon to tell me he would pick me up and take me.  He had a little trouble understanding that I am afraid of crowds.  Covid has pretty much left me crippled socially.  A lot of people do not understand what a panic I go into when I think of going into a crowd of people.  But it is what it is.

So today, December 24, 2022, I want to tell all my friends, Merry Christmas.  Sorry my phobia is getting in the way, but there you have it.  I love Christmas and I like to watch it from the safety of my home.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Peace.

Santa Claus is coming to town!!

 Momma said it so it is true!  It is funny how so many years later the things momma said, come back to haunt me!  Especially things like, "You can't judge a book by its cover."  "You reap what you sow." "Never look a gift horse in the mouth."

I am not sure a lot of them made any sense at all, but nonetheless they seem to pop up fairly regularly in my everyday life and they seem to be most apropos to a situation I find myself in at the moment.  Now do not leap to conclusions that I have gotten myself in a pickle again, because I have not.  My life seems to be spinning along beautifully and I hope that will continue and not go spiraling out of control as life sometimes does!

It is the Christmas season and while the birth of the Christ child never ceases to fill my heart with joy, there is all the fa de la that goes along with bringing out the best or worst in some people.  I do not buy into the trappings of the season.  I do not fight the crowds to buy a gift for friends just for the sake of buying a gift for someone.  I do that all year long and Christmas is reserved for the birth of the Christ child.  I go to church.  I come home.  I do not drive slowly by the houses that are ablaze with lights and the meter on the side of the house is spinning at top speed.  I do not fight the crowds at the parade or at the mall.  Covid is always in my mind.  I do not want that stuff!

I do spend time remembering when the kids were young.  As a single working mother with five kids, Christmas was not always as nice as I would have liked and the table was rarely loaded with the bounty of the harvest!  One Christmas we had corn dogs, because that was what the kids wanted and it was cheap!  Daddy usually took them over Christmas break and Santa was a little more giving at Daddy's house.  That was fine with me and has absolutely nothing to do with my memories at this point.

The saying "It is what it is", comes to mind at this time.  Not sure if it is relevant at all, but there is a lot of truth to that statement and it has helped me over more than one rough patch!  Gibby said that and he was a very wise man and one of my most trusted friends in the days gone by.  He was one of the first to die from AIDS.  His was the first panel I made for my Memorial Quilt which hangs in the Library on Abriendo.  

The saddest part of getting old is the dimming of my memories!  At least I think that is it, but then again I am blessed with selective memory!  I remember things very vividly, and while that may not be exactly how it happened, it is how I remember it.  Momma used to say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,"  and that is how I remember things.  My journaling may not be exactly how things happened, but they are what I remember.

"Never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing."  "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." But, the best of all is "It is what it is."  And there you have it in a nutshell.  

Christmas is coming and this will be 81 of them that I have lived through.  Will this one be different?  Of course!  They all are.  But 6 days after Christmas, I get another shot at doing it right.  New Years with the resolutions to "do better this year."  I used to quit smoking every January 1, but it never worked out because I had no willpower.  I finally quit, but I do not even remember the date, nor the year.  It has been a very long time though!

So, just in case I do not make it back to this site for Christmas, I want to wish you all a very happy Christmas!  Remember the baby Jesus.  I know different religions do things differently, but just know that all roads lead to the manger and then to the cross.

As Tiny Tim would say, "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"

Peace!

Getting ready for new beginnings!

 Tomorrow when I wake up November will be behind me.  The bad memories can rest until next year.  It is not like shutting a door and moving on, it is just closing a door and living my life.  It all sounds good, doesn't it?  And I really wish it worked that way, but it doesn't.

I sometimes long for the days gone by when the only thing I had to worry about was whether I would be scared when my brother hid and jumped out at me in the darkened path on the way to the outhouse in the middle of the night!  Or whether one of us would drown in Vincents sandpit where we were cooling off on a hot summer day.  Or whether one of us would choke to death on a bone lodged in our throat from the big old Carp that momma caught in the Arkansas River when she seined for our supper.  Or whether that green Peach I stole off the tree by the chicken house was going to kill me for sure this time.

I remember the rabbit hutches and the babies that grew to be our supper.  I remember the nasty old Muscovy Ducks foraging for a scrap of something in the bottom of the mudholes behind the house where the kitchen sink drained out a pipe from the house.  I remember how the big red rooster used to seek me out and chase me out of the barnyard.  I remember my brother putting the baby kittens in a sack and throwing them in the river.  He wasn't being mean, he was doing as he was told.  Momma could hardly feed us, let alone a bunch of kittens.

Momma always said that people are like the seasons.  Babies are born like the Spring and are fresh and new and flourish, but when we get old we are like the Autumn.  We lose our leaves and and become skeletal like the barren tree against a cold dark sky.  

I have always accepted life in that manner.  I look around at my friend pool, and it is about dried up!  That young girl that used to race out the door and down the street to dance all night has ceased to exist.  The auburn hair is white now and the barefeet that used to fly across the floor are encased in a pair of orthopedic shoes.  The catfish that used to be fun to catch, dipped in corn meal and fried has been replaced by some sort of white, flaky stuff raised on a farm somewhere in a spring fed lake.  Most meals are steamed and fried is a thing of the past.

Fall is here and Winter is on the way!  That means I have to be careful not to slip and fall and wind up with a broken hip.  I have no desire whatsoever to jump in a snow drift or even throw a snowball at the mailman, or mailwoman as the case may be!  A trip out back with a bucket of water for the geese is about all the excitement this old broad can handle!

But I remember!  The kids today will never know the joy of walking home from school in knee deep snow.  They will never know the joy of a pair of galoshes with fur around the top that Santa Claus brought to replace the black ones that Jake grew out of and passed down to me.  They will never know the closeness of sleeping in a bed with 3 other kids.  They will never know what joy a Saturday night bath in a big aluminum tub was!  

The older I get, the fonder the memories become!  Momma always told me that someday my childhood would be something I would look back on and smile.  Something that would bring me joy.  And momma was right!

Momma was always right!

Yesterday is gone, tomorrow is far away.

 That just leaves today to get through.  Today is all we actually have, isn't it?  Yesterday was a hard one, but tomorrow will surely be better.  I had a nightmare that woke me up from a sound sleep and is not leaving me.  I was in a cemetary.  Someone or something was chasing me.  I hid behind a tombstone and then climbed a tree.  Still it pursued me.  By this time I was awake and very afraid so I just got up.  The cat was happy about that, because she is now ensconced on my lap.  She spent most of the night drapped across my head.

Even now, I can feel the terror that the dream brought to me.  I remember the palpable terror that gripped me in my dream.  It is not going to go away easily, but I shall write and bit which always seems to exorcise my demons.  It was on this day in 2002 that Kenneth began his journey to the other side of the bar.  January 30, 2003 he made it.  It was on November 21, 2021 that Anthony crossed over.  Both of these men held a place in my heart that will never be filled.

I know in the recesses of my mind where logic dwells, that death is a vital part of life.  I also believe that there is a higher power that waits for us all to take us to a place where there is no more sorrow and no more pain.  And I know as well as I am setting here feeling the computer keys under my fingers that I will see both of these men, along with Sherman, in a much better place.

But for today, I think I will just remember them as they were.  All of them.   Momma and Jake, Dorothy, Josephine, Mary, Dad and Grandma and Great Grandma.  The aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews.  All of them.  Ex husbands.  School mates.  Teachers.  Casual friends.  Lovers.  Pets.

So once again the terror of the night has subsided.  The sun has not yet begun it's daily chore of peeking at me from the horizon, but I trust that it will soon.  So I shall get another cup of coffee and prepare to  push the demons back down and do something constructive.  After all, Thanksgiving is only 2 days away and I have company coming.  Between Covid and deaths, I have not celebrated a holiday in the past two years.  I guess it is time to do that!

Peace!

Depression rules this month!

 October and November are the two hard months for me.  Of course, when you get to my age there are anniversary deaths and birthdays every month.  And they occur in every month, but it just seems like fall and winter are the most prolific.  And then I have momma whispering in my ear to remind me that I am getting older.  I almost said I am getting old, but older works better in this context!  My mind is still fairly clear and for that I am grateful, but when I look back at the people who have left me, I get very sad.

Earl, Richard, Gene, Josephine, Jake, Mary, Dorothy, and of course, mom and dad are all gone, along with a myriad of aunts, uncles and cousins.  Just Donna and I are left to carry on the heritage.  I have lost track of all the cousins and their lineage.  I figure I am doing good to remember my kids and their  kids and those kids's kids!  I had a great granddaughter graduate high school last year!  I think I have 8 grandkids and 11 great grandkids.

Longevity seems to be a given in our family.  Either you pass to your great reward in your sixties, or you are doomed to a long and fruitful life.  Since I am now 81 years old, I am assuming I will be a centurion in the future.  Kenneth passed 20 years ago, and I have dated a few times, but I cannot bring myself to think I want to have another husband at this stage of the game!

I tend my geese and raise a garden.  I can my produce and bake and cook.  I drive myself to church and shopping and change my furnace filters when they get dusty.  I need to paint, but that is not happening.  I got the smoke detector down from the top of the wall, changed the battery, but cannot seem to twist it just right to put it back up there.  I am assuming it will beep if it needs to!  It will be much easier to turn off laying on the sewing table by my bedroom door!

Well, the day has begun and the geese want out of their house.  They need to forage through the weeds on the back acre looking for a stray grasshopper or a treasure trove of seeds.  I need to brew up a cup of coffee in my little french coffee press and get ready to face the day.

Momma always said that the old people are like the seasons when it comes to dying.  They either die in the fall like the leaves on the trees dropping to the ground, or they die in the spring, like the new leaves opening.

Momma knows!

Life here on South Road goes on as time flys by me.

 The January 6 hearings are over for now.  The tomatoes are in full bloom and the watermelons seem to be reluctant to grow, but life goes on here at my house.  I am once more in isolation because someone I was around has Covid.  Patty Lynn is here for a visit and she was with me, so at least I have company!

The tomatoes are in full bloom and I see tiny little green ones setting on the vines.  I think I have about 40 plants, so I should be good.  Of course the well is acting up and the pump man has been here once already. The 2 pepper plants I planted have refused to grow, but the zucchini looks like it will be feeding me pretty soon.  The Broccoli  refuses to head.  The geese are still alive and well, and I can not remember how old those things are!  Bret was 8 or 9 when I got the first 3 and he is about to push 30 over the edge, so you tell me!  I thought the damn things only lived 10 years or so with proper care.  According to my calculations I have bought and dumped into the barrel 72 bags of feed.  That means I have lifted 3600 pounds of grain.  Not to mention the cost of about $1000.  And that does not count the expense I incurred when my flock consisted of 37 ducks and 17 geese, which were all eaten by the neighborhood foxes.

But all that is irrelevant at this point.  My flock now consists of 5 ganders and 2 hens that show signs of perhaps living forever!  The grass in the back yard is non-existent!  What I now have for vegetation is something called Purslane.  This is an edible weed that the good Lord has blessed me with to keep me healthy.  

What is purslane good for?

• The health benefits of purslane may include its ability to possibly aid in weight loss, improve heart health, and ensure the healthy growth and development of children. It may also protect the skin, build strong bones, and increase circulation.  
• You can google it yourself.
• So I have been busy harvesting,  cleaning, and freezing this stuff.  It is every where in my yard so the good Lord must want me to do that!  Now there is a plant that kind of looks like Purslane which is poison and will kill me if I eat it, so I tend to stay away from that one, or at least I hope I stay away from that one.
• So, anyway, life goes on here at my house.  Hopefully I will be getting a new door on the back of the house soon.  I have been paying taxes on 2 bathrooms for 40 years and this past year I actually had the second bathroom added.  I had called the property tax people to tell them that I was paying taxes on a bathroom I did not have and she explained to me that I did have 2 bathrooms.  That was one of those conversations that left me shaking my head.  So, now I do have 2 bathrooms and I match the description on my tax bill.  At least I feel better now that I actually have the second bathroom.  Hopefully I am going to put a new door on the back of the house sometime soon.  The door I have now has a doggie door and a tiny burglar could creep in if I were to forget to put the cover on at night.
• So that is how things are in my world at the present time.  I have to go let the geese out for the day.  I put seven to bed last night and hopefully (?) 7 will come out this morning.  Patty will be making plans to head back home on Friday unless one of us tests positive for Covid tomorrow.  Keeping my fingers crossed that this crap goes away some day.
• Peace!

The other shoe just dropped!

 Whether our friends know it or not, Roe vs. Wade was the glue that held it all together.  It actually made it possible for women to have a say over there own reproductive organs.  It made us "equal" in more ways then just one.  For years I have watched and listened to the debate over right and wrong as to the use of my reproductive organs and finally became comfortable with my body and choices I made for it.  Roe vs. Wade saved a lot of lives in the years it was law.

Abortion is not an easy choice, as some people might think.  I can still remember back to when I was still in high school and the gossip was rampant about a woman who did "back alley abortions."  I forget her name, but I still remember snippets of gossip about "Mrs. Somebody" who, for a price would perform an abortion supposedly on her kitchen table.  Some one pointed her out to me and she just looked like a normal everyday woman.  No appearances of a "baby murderer" to me.

Time passed and abortions became more common.  I cannot spout dates and laws, but I do know that at some point the "procedure" became legal.  Of course, there were steps that had to be taken and it seems to me that maybe the father even had to give consent.  I did know a girl who had one and when it leaked out she was shunned and eventually moved away.  But of course, my memory of that is not clear.  Time has passed and a lot of things have changed, but apparently, the need to put limitations on what a woman can and cannot do with her body has not.

What you do in the sanctity of your home, with your body is none of my business.  Apparently, it is the business of the Supreme Court and the judges that set on the high bench and decide what some law that was passed many years ago.  What lofty goals they must have!  How they can set on the highest court in the land and pass judgement on a lonely, scared little girl in a back alley abortion clinic is more than I can understand.  I am sure there is a story that brought her there.  

The sad part of the whole thing is there is no right or wrong to this ordeal.  My God knows the paths I have walked and the places I have been.  He knows the decisions I have made and why they were made.  I have been divorced 5 times.  Divorce is wrong.  Hope they do not decide to set my divorces aside because that could get damn messy!

The fact of the matter in this is that women have now taken a back seat to the functions of their own bodies.  It is not a man over woman victory here,  it is a statement that basically says, "Do as we say.  We are better than you at deciding what you do."  Many years ago when I campaigned for gay rights, which will probably be the next right to fall, there was a speech that went like this:

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• By David W. Virtue

www.virtueonline.org3/26/2007

When the Nazis came for the communists,

I remained silent; I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,

I remained silent;I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,

I did not speak out;

I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,

I did not speak out;

I was not a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

Cleanliness is next to Godliness!

 At least that is what momma always told us.  Now back in the day that she preached that, we did not have running hot and cold water.  We never actually had any running water in the house.  We had an electric pump out by the horse tank.  Horses need a lot of water.  Since their water needed to be clean, we were not allowed to play in the horse tank no matter how hot it was.  Of course, I was terrified of those big horses with their big, yellow teeth.   There was no way in the world that I would let them come near me.  Of course, my dad was not the best fence builder, so it was not unusual to find they had escaped.  That meant we had to go find them and lead them home.  "We" was usually Jake and I.  I digress.

Summers in Kansas are very hot!   Very hot and usually very dry, but occasionally we did get a rain.  When that happened, Strong Street was usually flooded.  Since we had an old car that was only used to go to Grandma's house, we walked everywhere.  Now you should know that barefeet in the mud is one of the small pleasures we had.  A mud puddle was meant to be walked through barefooted!  I think that might have been a law back then.

Now, you should know that bare feet and cool water in a mud puddle is not the only joy of my childhood!  When the mudpuddle began to dry up, we did not walk in it.  We waited patiently for it to dry up and when it did there was a whole new joy!  When it was completely dry, it formed a crust.  The crust then turned into a curled- up crust and we could step on the curls and feel them crumble beneath our feet.  Oh, my vision of heaven contains a lot of mudpuddles!  Of course, this was the bane of my mother's existence!  Before we came in the house we had to go to the pump and wash our feet.  "You are not getting in that bed with those filthy feet!"

So, Jake and I would take turns pumping for the smaller kids and each other.  Bonding was different back there on Strong Street than it was on Avenue A in Hutchinson.  When we moved to the big city with running water, we were afraid to use it.  We did not want to "wear it out" or "use it all up".  We did like to set in the bathtub with no water on hot days and watch the little red haired boy who worked at the film developing place across the alley.  Forgot the name of it, but the boy's name was Tommy and my little sister, Mary ending up marrying him!  Sadly, they are both gone now.  There is  nobody left but Donna and I.  

Funny how that works, isn't it?

You cannot get the toothpaste back in the tube!

 There are 2 phrases that my psyche is shaped by and that I also fight with most of my adult life.  The first is "Hind sight is 20/20 looking back." and the second is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."  There are many little things momma threw in along this line and for the life of me I do not know where she got them.  I strongly suspect that she got them from her mother since they lived a fairly cloistered life there in south central Kansas.  The sad fact remains, that all these years later, those are burned into the depths of my being.

In my younger days I was surrounded by Aunts, cousins, grandmothers and a few uncles.  Males in my lineage tended to either die young or live forever.  Uncle Coon lived to be over 100.  (Now I am not sure that this was his given name.  Seems like it might have been Conrad, but it is irrelevant to this article!)  The point is that while the rule at the time was that children should be seen and not heard, the other was that men were the strong silent type and it was best to remember that.  As kids it was our past time at family gatherings to hide under the table and watch the men enjoying an after dinner cigar or pipe.  As I recall there was a lot of coughing and choking while this "pleasure" was being indulged.  

This pastime was second only to spying on the chickens in the coop and hoping one would poop out an egg and we could see where it came from. (To this day I do not actually know how the plumbing of a chicken works, nor do I care!)

I only recall one male cousin in my youth and that was cousin Carl. The girl cousins were named Rosetta, Alvina and Marilyn.  I had another cousin named Donna, but she lived in St. Louis and we rarely seen her.  She never married.  

Carl and I were close at the time.  We used to weed the garden for grandma after family dinners.  Carl grew up and married someone and they had one child.  I am not sure it grew to adulthood.  Seems momma was the only one out of the whole family that was a good "breeder."

Momma had eloped immediately after graduation.  She married a man named Jack Walden and ran away to Chicago.  They lived near the "Loop" whatever that was.  They had a baby girl and for some reason mother found herself hitchhiking back to Kansas with the baby in her arms and fearing for her life.  (Or so I hear. Little bit of "toothpaste" for you there.)  When the baby was but a year old she married what would be my father and they lived not so happily ever after.  While the marriage may have been a bit rocky it lasted until his death in 1965.  I ended up with 3 half brothers, 1 full brother and 3 sisters.  Guess Josephine was my half sister.

All that is irrelevant!  It was at my mothers knee that I learned the art of being seen and not heard.  I also learned that when the words "Little pitchers have big ears!" were used I was about to be banished to another room and I better not listen to what was being said.  "Ixnay" meant no.  Anyone who died went directly to heaven!  No doubt about it!  The meanest SOB that ever walked went to Heaven.  Man beats his horse; straight to Heaven!  Seems like the only thing that would actually keep you out of heaven was lying to your mother and disrespecting your elders.  Stealing and pulling the legs off grasshoppers were minor infractions.  

So, here I set lo! these many years later, still a child!  Could it be that as we age, we become our mothers?  I need to ask my kids how their minds work.  Did they actually learn anything from me and if so, what was it?  Did they walk away with my good qualities or the bad ones?  Do they look back on their childhood as a learning experience?  Was I a good mother?  I know I was rarely there, but do they know I tried?

I guess only time will tell.  I do know they are all independent, compassionate human beings and I love them and they appear to love me.  I hope that I imparted just a bit of my wisdom and honesty to them by my actions.  It may be something I never really know, but when I look at the lives they live, I am proud of each and every one of them.  And I am proud of their offspring.  

Kinda hope that the fruit does not fall too far from the tree in my family tree!

Peace and love!

Closing of the season.

October is a sad month.  It does not start out as sad, but it ends on a very low note.  1965.  October 30.  Dona Marie turned 1 year old.  Sam was 26 days old.  Duane and I had been married 5 years.  My brother was in a bad car wreck in McPherson, Kansas.  We left the kids with Duane's sister in Jetmore and drove to McPherson hospital arriving about 1:00 AM.  

My mother was alone in the room.  My brother lay swaddled in bandages on a hospital bed that held him in a semi raised postition.  His right leg kicked  constantly.  Mother said they had gone though a stop sign and broadsided a loaded gravel truck.  She thought he was trying to hit the brake, although he was not the driver.  He was incoherent.  Mother was already planning in her mind how she would bring him home and she knew he would be an invalid, but that was her son and she would take care of him.  Jake was her only son.

His name was not Jake, it was Delbert Leroy Bartholomew.  He was born October 5, 1935.  He carried a scar on his right cheek that he got when he was about 9 years old because he snuck up behind a Shetland Pony and "goosed it".  Of course it reacted and kicked him.  What did the silly little shit think would happen?

 

He introduced me to my first husband.  After that we sort of drifted apart.  Distance had a lot to do with that as well as guilt that my husband was not the knight in shining armour that Jake had anticipated for me.  The fact that he fell in love a couple times and now had a son he needed to help raise and another on the way made the distance even greater.

 

I missed Dona's first birthday that year and my sister in law cared for my only son that was 26 days old.  To say I was devastated by his death would be an understatement.  He was so young and vibrant.  He had his whole life ahead of him and I needed him in mine.  But, God had other plans.  

And, that my friends, is what this is all about.  God has a plan for our lives.  I do not know what his plan for me was, and I may never figure it out.  I do know that the little girl above being held up by her sister and brother could have aspired to soaring heights, but fell short of the goal!  I look back and try to see just where I went wrong and it is a mystery to me.  I wanted to be a missionary and when that fell through I just pretty much drifted along with the tide.  So, in all fairness, I think maybe God just put me here in Colorado to kind of shake up the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. 

I have worked to get AIDS awareness to the forefront and what was a killer disease is now a manageable health condition.  

Gays are now accepted as a segment of the population.

I worked the Eleventh Hour in the Hospice program and helped many people smile as they crossed the bar and looked back before leaving this earth in a cloud of fairy dust to meet their saviour.

My children all seem to be successful in one way or another and are responsible citizens.

The important part of all of this is that as I mark this anniversary every year.  I will spend October 30 crying most of the day, but I will do it where no one sees.  I have a shoulder to lean on that even I can not see.  They say "seeing is beleiving," but that is not always true.  I have never seen God, but I do know that without him, I would not be here today. When I am happy he smiles with me.  We have even been known to laugh out loud.  When I cry he holds me.

So rest in peace, my dear brother.  Jake, Josephine, Dorothy, Mary, Mother, Dad, Grandma, Aunts, Uncles, friends, lovers, in-laws and outlaws.   click here