I have miles to go before I sleep.

Spring is here and this is the time of year that I get itchy feet.  I left Hutchison, Kansas in 1977 with my then husband and with everything in a U-haul we moved to Pueblo, Colorado.  Since he had lived here before, it was a returning for him, but for me it was a leap of faith and a complete 180 degrees from my life in Hutchinson.  I gave my mother the keys to my little Lou's Kitchen on 4th Street and fired up the engine on my 1973 Chevy and headed West to seek my fame and fortune.  I was one naive little girl back then.  The husband turned out to be a little less then I hoped.  We did start a business so I had a job to do.  

The husband soon became an ex husband and the job a former place of employment.  At that time I thought about pointing the (now a Cadillac) east and leaving Colorado, but I could not go home a failure, so I stayed.  I went to  College and got a degree in Finance while waiting tables at a small cafe in Bessemer.  I married a local guy and divorced him 2 months later.  Then I met and married Kenneth.  The rest is history.  Through all the years, I made trips to Kansas in the Spring to see the Lilacs.

And, of course, a trip to Hutchinson also called for a stop at Skaets Steak Shop on the corner of 23rd and Main which is the entrance to the State Fairgrounds.  That was the first place I ever worked and a member of my family (sometimes more then one member) has always been on the payroll there.  My sister, Dorothy, had a heart attack and died there.  Luckily they hit the restart button on her and she lived several more years.  

I would meet my friend Joe there for a 2-3 hour coffee.  That was always fun.  I do have a gold elephant I need to send him someday.

But, those days are behind me.  The days of throwing the pistol in the suitcase and driving 8 hours to get anywhere are now behind me.  Water under the bridge.  Lately I have been studying the family tree and I was surprised to find that I am now the top nut on the tree.  I used to ask someone older then me about our lineage, but now I find that the buck stops here.  There is no one to ask.  Damn!  When did that happen?

I think about the trips to Hutch and I get sad that they are no longer.  I have my own Lilac in the back yard.  I feel much like Robert Frost must have felt when he wrote this poem.  Am I really done?  Is this where it ends.  Wait!  I have so much left to do...….

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

So, from someone who knows, life is short.  Love your neighbor, brighten the corner where you are and if perchance you think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, stretch your neck over there and have a bite!  You may be right.

A chamber pot, by any other name is still gross.

Now this morning you are going to learn something you probably could have gone the rest of your life without knowing, and yet here I am.  Since I lived through the chamber pot days, you ought to at least be able to read about them!  So here we go!

Once upon a time, long, long ago,  there was a little girl who lived in a ramshackle house on Strong Street in Nickerson, Kansas.  She lived there with her mother, father, older sister, older brother and 3 younger sisters.  The house had electricity, but they never used it except to run the pump and the washing machine.  They did not want to "wear it out" nor did they want to appear "uppity."  They owned a car, but it was only used on Sundays when the went to Plevna to see great grandma Hatfield and Grandma Haas.  They were simple folks, you see.

The house had 2 bedrooms, a front room, a dining room and a kitchen/laundry/Saturday night bath room and a book case with Nancy Drew mystery's on the shelves.  Oh, and Brenda Starr.  So I guess that was also a library.  The "front" bedroom was Dad's, but he had to share with us big kids, Josephine, Jake, Donna, Mary and me. Dorothy slept with Mother in the middle (other) bedroom.  Mother needed her privacy and the only time we were allowed to sleep with her was when we were sick.

Ah, but back to the chamber pot business.  For those of you who are antique collectors you will recognize a "chamber pot" as a porcelain bucket with a handle for carrying.  Usually it was white with a lid and a line of blue around the top for decoration.  I never quite understood that whole decoration thing, but I guess it is what it is.  The main purpose (Well actually, the ONLY purpose.) of the chamber pot was to hold human excrement during the night and was immediately emptied upon the household arising.  It was called a chamber pot, because most people had a private area when one could go in and close the door and do "their business in private.  Not us!  Nope.  We did not have a chamber anywhere in that house and if we did there would no doubt be a kid in there.  It was probably about 120 feet from the back door of the house to the outhouse.  Now I do not know if you have ever been out in the wilds of Nickerson, Kansas, at night without a flashlight, but let me tell you, that is one damn scary place.

Number one, our house was probably about a block from the cemetery, and there was that business of ghosts for our little minds to deal with on dark, moonless nights.  Nights with a full moon were even worse!  And the river was not far so it was not unusually to hear a wolf, coyote or cougar howling or screaming and scaring the living shit right out of us.  That, coupled with the fact that dad had seen Gypsies camped on the outskirts of town and you know what that meant.  You see Gypsies came into towns and stole the children.  Luckily we never actually missed anyone, but that was because people like my father seen them and made the kids stay inside.

But back to the chamber pot saga!  Ours set right under the window between the kids bed and dad's bed.  After dark we were free to use the chamber pot and by morning it was full.  Now I trust I do not need to tell you what it was full of, do I?  It was usually Jake's chore to take it out to the outhouse and dispose of it, rinse the container and turn it upside down to drip dry and air out.  When Josephine eloped at the tender age of 15 or so and Jake left home, the duty fell to me.  I was smart enough to know that the sooner I got that thing the lighter my chore would be.  If I waited too long those other kids would not go outside and soon it was full to the brim.  Just try carrying one of those things without slopping it on your feet.

We left that house when I was 16 and I never ceased to be amazed that we had an "inside bathroom" in every house we lived in after that.  Not only did the houses have a commode that flushed, but there was a small sink to wash my face and look in the mirror.  And the bathtub!  My God!  That was pure bliss to sink into and soak. (It was also handy for throwing up in when I came home so drunk I could not hit the stool!  But that is another story and we probably are not going to go there!  Sorry, momma.)

Speaking of bathrooms, I probably ought to get off here and go clean mine.  Thinking back on those years always makes me appreciate what I have now.

Have a good day and thank the Lord for the little things he gives you.  You could be growing up on Strong Street in Nickerson, Kansas.

Grocery shopping has sure changed from 1950's.

Back when I was 12 years old Flemings grocery store  and Berridge IGA (?) had contests.  IGA was for a trip to St. Louis and when you bought something you had so many points to vote for the contestant of your choice.  That contest was won by Irene Reinke.  As a general rule, we did not shop at IGA because that was the store the "rich people" shopped at, so mother did not vote for Irene.

Flemings had a contest where you turned in labels from cans of a certain brand of food.  I stood outside the store and pushed for people to buy that brand, then save the label and I would go by their house and pick the labels up and put them in my stash.  Now, the city dump was different than dumps are today!  The powers that be would designate a place as the city dump and if you wanted to dispose of something you took it there and threw it on the pile.  People also went there to paw through the "stuff" and pick out good stuff.  My idea of good stuff was labels from cans, which I tore off and took home to my stash.  My stash grew bigger every day as I waited for the closing day when I would turn them in to be counted.

Now there were 2 prizes in my contest.  One was an English Racing bike which was for a boy which meant it had the bar across the frame.  Girls were open in that area.  The other was a radio.  I had my eye on that bike and nothing was going to deter me.  When the day arrived I took my labels in to be counted and I had almost 3 times as many labels as the boy who came in second place.  In all fairness, he was livid.  He had been beat by a girl and now that girl walked away pushing a boys bicycle while he stood there with a stupid radio.  Yes, I pushed that bike all the way home.  My sisters were so envious.  I pushed it around the block.  I pushed it into town and pushed it home.  I never had ridden a bike before and when I tried to stand with my feet on either side of the bike, it was not happening.  That damn bar was higher than my crotch.  But at no time did I think about trading it for the radio.  I just let that boy eat his heart out as I pushed it past his house.

And then the tires went flat because there are a lot of goat heads on Strong Street.  Mother could see no reason to have the tires fixed because it was apparent by this time that I would never ride that bike.  No one ever rode it until I gave it to a boy named Johnny Isabel who lived in Hutch and I do not remember how I knew him or why, but I  made a deal to sell it for $5.00 which he never paid me, but there you go!

Back to the grocery store, we always shopped at Flemings.  They had a locker plant inside the store where one could rent a small freezer to store extra food that was not canned or dried.  Things, like meat.  Not that we ever had meat, but if we did we could have rented a small cubicle, which we never did because meat was a rarity at our house.  Well, Jake would get a rabbit now and then, but not worth renting freezer space for the short period of time it took to go from dressed meat to the table to digested and forgotten.

There was a barrel for dried beans, onions, potatoes and such item.  You put what you wanted in a brown paper sack and took it up and had it weighed.  We were always careful with the brown paper bags because they were reused over and over.  Milk bottles were refilled.  Pop bottles were returned for a deposit that had been paid when the pop was purchased.  Lots of times we walked the ditch along the highway to find bottles that were discarded by people who were too lazy to return them to the store.  Seems like the deposit was only one or 2 cents, but it was free money and we could buy candy at Engle's store.  The display case there was filled with boxes with tops removed.  We pointed to which ones we wanted and the items were placed in a small brown paper bags.  A nickel was usually over half a bag.  As kids we never worried about "spoiling our appetite"  because evening meals were few and far behind at our house.

Don't get me wrong, poverty sucks.  No food sucks.  Wearing "hand me downs" sucked.  Walking every where was a pain. Easter was the only time we could ever hope to have anything extra and that was Easter Eggs.  We had chickens that were laying hens so eggs were fairly easy to come by.  Sadly eggs were either sold or cooked into something that could be shared among the 8 of us, but at Easter we got a whole egg and sometimes, if times were good, a chocolate something that resembled a rabbit.  I will go on record as saying my mother tried harder than anyone else in the world.  She went to clean houses every day and never asked for anything in return, except that us kids were fed.  She paid the lady up the street 50 cents a week to babysit the little kids.  Dad hung out at the pool hall, but as long as he was there playing dominoes, he was not home screaming at us to shut up.  No television back then, so creeks and haylofts and the cemetery  were our playgrounds.

Damn, I miss that life. .When I can not sleep at night, I run up and down Strong Street.  I spy on Hank Windiate(sp) and Jake Smith.  I listen to Rudolph Reinke singing in German as he did his chores.  I see the chickens scratching in the dirt for some hidden scrap.  I watch Joe Hedrick roping calves over on the corner.  But mostly I just watch for my momma to come home.  I have quit waiting for her and now anticipate the trip I can make to see her again.  I want to see her hazel eyes and hold her thin, long fingers.  But mostly I just want to see her smile when she comes to meet me.  And yes, momma, I am bringing the tomato soup made the way you like it with home canned tomatoes and milk.

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

I woke up this morning with the cat on my head.  Naturally, the first thought in my mind was one of mother's famous sayings:  "There is more than one way to skin a cat!"  Now let me go on record as saying, I have never skinned one; nor do I ever intend to do so but I have been known to flip the sheet so she flies off of me and onto the floor.  Trust me, she does not stay there.  I have had a lot of cats in my life and everyone of them has been devoted to me.  Well, mostly.

All of my cats have been Calico cats and so they were females, because all Calico cats are females, or so I have been told and it has been my experience.  I did at one time, have a male cat named Boots and I do not think he liked me at all.   He was a gray and white striped cat.  He was pretty much Kenny's cat.  I think Kenny always wanted a cat, because at one time he got a white Spitz dog and named it Kitty.  That dog did not stay with us very long and moved on to someone who actually wanted a white dog.  Except for that dog from hell, all animals that find their way into my home are here for the duration.  If you doubt my sincerity, you might want to take a look at the 8 geese residing in my back yard.  I do not even know how old they are.  My guess is about 16 or 17 years old because I got 3 geese when Bret was a wee lad and he now has a wee lad of his own.

Now I have Icarus.  I know Icarus was the little boy in mythology whose parents gave him wax wings and he flew to close to the sun and they melted, but I did not name this cat.  He was named by Sherman who liked the name and did not think anyone else was smart enough to know who Icarus was, but there you go!

But back to this cat skinning business.  Many years ago when I was in grade school and the body still bent, we had a Jungle Gym on the playground and one of the favorite things to do was swing by our arms  on the bars then do a thing called "skin the cat" which entailed pulling our feet up putting them behind your head and sort of turn ourselves wrong side out and then drop to the ground without breaking your neck.and not totally dislocating your shoulders.  As I write this, there are many things flashing through my mind.  One of which is the knowledge that we wore only dresses back in those days so when we were swinging on the bars and when we were turning ourselves wrong side out the perverted little boys were all setting on the ground watching us.  Holy shit!  How damn stupid were we?

Or were we naïve?  I am thinking naïve fits the bill a lot better.  I like to think that the days of sand and shovels were also the days of innocence and freedom. I do not know when the innocence ended for me.  Seems like about the second year of high school.  That was when I became friends with a girl named LaVeta.  Her dad made home brew and I really liked that.  She taught me how to shop lift.  I learned to dance.  I learned to smoke.  Life was good!  I dropped out of school in my senior year.  I ran away.  I broke into a gas station and stole the money out of the cigarette machine.  I had friends and what friends they were!  Sadly none of them showed up for court.  But on a good note, my downward spiral was ended at that point and I became a functioning member of society.  It was not until many years later that I became a respected member of the human race.  Which brings me to the lesson for the day.

"That is water under the bridge."  Been there.  Done that.  Sometimes the water under the bridge is low and just amounts to a stagnant puddle that just breeds mosquitoes and other vermin.  But that a clean rain falls and fills the creek and the puddle is gone.  Water under the bridge.  You can look at it and move on because in due time the cleansing rain will wash it all away.  Or not.

Even the mud puddles are different here in Coloradol

It rained the other night and I have to confess, it scared hell out of me.  Seems like when I was a tot back in Kansas, rain was more frequent and softer.  In Colorado, it seems to be either feast or famine, so to speak.  We lived about a mile from Bull Creek and it always had water in it, but when we got a good rain the little Bull Creek became a raging torrent and overflowed it's banks and came up the highway clear past the sand pit and almost to our corner.  I remember wading up the highway and the crawdads scooting away from me.  The scoot backwards, you know.

Strong Street was dirt.  Well, all the streets were dirt in that area.  Mostly the dirt was soft, but when it rained it would have puddles standing on it.  (Having a little problem here with proper English.  Do the puddles stand IN the road or ON the road?  Since they were on the road that sounds right, but since the actually were a part of the road they could be in the road.)  You choose.

Any way, after a rain the puddles were there and the sun shone brightly on them.  Now I am sure some of the water seeped into the earth, but it took a while and I remember seeing pollywog's swimming in the water, but it could have been mosquito larvae.  Who knows.  There is something so primal about wading in a mud puddle, that it defies description.  To feel the cool mud ooze between my toes was second only to walking on dried mud.

I do know that eventually the water was gone and the sun beating down on the puddle would cause the silty dirt to dry and crack.  The cracks would the curl on the edges and separate.  If I could be really patient, the sun would continue drying and then I was left with a big dried out patch of curled up mud.  The happiest memories are in the remembering, and I can still close my eyes and recall walking very slowly across the dried up mud in my bare feet.  The fragile mud curls made only a tiny crackle and I would walk slowly back and forth to be sure I mashed them all.  I have not had an experience like that since I left Nickerson.

Mud in Nickerson was also good for making mud pies.  The mud held together because parts of the road had clay.  My best friend, Barbara had a brother who nicknamed me "Mud Pie" and that name stuck until we went to high school.  Just happened to remember that.

The reason I am thinking of this is after our rains, there is a place in my driveway that water stands in for a short time.  I was looking at that yesterday, and the quality of the mud is not the same as Nickerson.  And for some reason, I do not see it making the curls like Nickerson mud made.  I suppose there is more gravel in my driveway.  Nickerson was sandy, hence the Sand Hill Plum Jelly that the Amish make and sell.

So as I start my day today, I will put on my shoes and socks and not even look at that puddle over there.  Some things can only continue in our memories and the days of sand and shovels and mud pies are over and are best left in the far recesses of my mind where I can use them as my safe place when life becomes too tedious and I need to escape.

A Brownie pin and a Brownie dress does not a Brownie make.

Aunt Helen Lang was married to a man named Skinny and they had money.  Now this only affected me in a round about way, but 70 years later, I still think about her.  The clearest memory of her is, of course in later life, but still my childhood memories are the fondest.  She and Uncle Skinny would pop into our life on very rare occasions and there was never a heads up, just look up and there was their big shiny car and the trunk was always loaded with wonderful things for us.  I remember when I was in 7th grade and mother had her hysterectomy, Aunt Helen brought me a store bought dress.  I can close my eyes and see it now.  It was ever glaze cotton and the color was exactly the same hazel as my eyes, whatever that color is called.  It had a white collar and strings of the hazel fabric held white daisies.  Two.  One on each string.  It buttoned up the back.  I wore it until it hung in shreds.  Even then it had a use after it was worn out.  Mother cut the good parts off and tore them into strips that were put with other strips, rolled into a ball, and when enough balls were ready, she took them to the rug weaver.  Nothing went to waste at our house.

Back to Aunt Helen.  One afternoon while I was off doing something somewhere else, Aunt Helen and Uncle Skinny came to visit.  I must have been in the third grade at the time.  I missed them completely, but Aunt Helen did not forget me just because I was not there.  She brought me a Brownie dress with a Brownie beanie.  If you do not know, the Brownie group was for the younger kids that preceded going into girl scouts, which was my fondest dream.  She also provided the brown shoes and the money for registration where I received my golden Brownie pin!  I could see vista's opening onto a wonderful life as a Brownie and later as a girl scout.  The world was my oyster!  But alas, a nine year old girls dreams die very easily in the dust of Strong Street in 1950.

Oh, I went to the first meeting and paid my nickle dues.  I got my gold brownie pin, which was worn upside down until I fulfilled a list of things to do.  That list was never finished.  As a matter of fact, it was never started.  Everything on that list required an adult to help and guide me through the process.  Mother was off cleaning houses to put food on the table and Dad was very busy shuffling dominoes at the local pub.  My oldest sister who was 12 or 13 at the time was busy being a slut and "getting herself pregnant" by a 27 year old man.  (In this day and age he would have been thrown so far into prison he would never have seen the light of day, but that was then and what was acceptable then was that he worked and would take care of her.)  And there my resources ended.  So that went by the wayside.  The brown dress stayed in a drawer with the beanie and the gold pin.  I assume at some point it ended up in one of the rugs.

My oldest sister married the man and in due time,  a baby girl arrived.  After a few years she became pregnant again and I was called upon to stay with her while her husband worked since she was in a lot of pain and had a 4 year old daughter that needed care.  So, as the day progressed and she was in more pain I really began to get nervous.  When she came out of the bathroom clutching the door jam to announce, "The baby is coming!"  I learned where babies came from and it was not the stork, like I had been told.  I was ripped into the birds and the bees business very rudely.  I grabbed Mary and ran next door to the preachers house.  His wife (luckily) was a nurse, but (unluckily ) she was not home.  He called somebody to come and I ran home to my little house on Strong Street with Mary in my arms.  Sadly, the baby was born dead and I would carry the guilt of not knowing what to do all my life.  Common sense tells me this is wrong, but we are all humans and we all fail and learn to live with those failures.

I was in an antique store in the Junction a couple years ago and found a Brownie pin.  I looked at the little dancing elf, or whatever it is and bought the pin.  It is up in the cupboard along with other worthless treasures that some how seem to form my life.  They all seem to connect together to pull me back into myself.  I know my life is made up of the good times and the bad times and it sometimes makes me very sad.  The things I have done and the places I have gone are all in my mind some where and last night I lay in my bed and thinking about things I came to the realization, that one day, I will just die. When that happens, all my memories will have been for naught.  When that happens and people learn of my demise, they will say "Oh, I knew her!"  

Which brings me to the point I want to make.  No, you do not know me.  You know OF me.  You know who I let you see.  We are all that way.  I look at you and I see the face you present, but I do not know what you are thinking.  I do not know what you are feeling.  People say I am blunt.  Frank.  I tell it like it is.   Am I?  But do I?  Mother always said, as we get older we begin to face our own mortality and I am sure Mother was right.

But I want to put Aunt Helen to rest here before I leave.  Mother and Aunt Helen remained friends all of their lives.  When I went home to visit, Aunt Helen always came to see me or I went to see her, but mostly she came to mom's house.  When mother lived in the apartment on 15th Circle, Aunt Helen would get confused as to which one to go to and she had a big problem with curbs, in that she had a hard time staying between them!  She would see me standing in the parking lot she was supposed to be in and here she would come in that big Lincoln!  She would park taking up several spots and leap out of the car with her wig askew waving a bag of Werther's Originals that she had brought for mother.  She was 90+ the last time I saw her.

Aunt Helen has been gone for many years, but I still pick up a bag of Werther's every now and then just to take that walk down memory lane.  It works every time.  I can see her in my mind right now as clear as day.  I do not remember Uncle Skinny, but I do remember my precious Aunt Helen and her heart of gold and her hopes for a skinny little girl on Strong Street.  I just want to say, "Hang on Aunt Helen!  I will make it up there yet!"

709 North Strong Street and the midnight dash.

I know I speak of my formative years in Nickerson as mostly happy, but there was something lacking.  While the majority of the homes in town contained running water and indoor "facilities" the sewer system and the running water had not yet reached our little street.  The running water consisted of a pump in the kitchen, a pipe that led from the sink to the wall where there was a hole that let the water run onto the ground out back.  We had Muscovy ducks which were very happy with this method of ridding our selves of waste water.  Ducks like water and they could always be found in the middle of the mess.  That is what ducks do.  Interesting note here; to my knowledge Muscovy is the only domesticated duck that is able to fly.  At least I think that is right.  I had 37 ducks of different breeds here on South Road several years back and only the Muscovy could fly, which they did with amazing regularity right up to roost on my air conditioning unit.  Nasty damn things.

Any way, that was the set up for the running water in our house.  Bathroom facilities were an entirely different matter.  That little job was taken care of out the back door and down the path to the little wooden shack that was perched over a deep hole.  The cool porcelain of city bathrooms was replaced by a wooden bench with a hole cut in it and the white roll of "toilet tissue" gave way to the Sears catalog.  Sometimes it was a Montgomery Ward.  Sears was favored for it's absorption, well all the pages except the ones which were colored because they were slick.   Oh, and sometimes we were real lucky and had a corn harvest that produced soft corn cobs, but that was never.  And there was always the danger of  "picking up a sliver " if one moved the wrong way while on "the throne."  That combined with my fear of dark places and black widow spiders was enough to keep me in a paranoid state most of the time and my bowels in a locked state. Those are just some of the hazards of life in poverty Ville.

Using of the facilities in the daylight was one thing, but at night it was an entirely different matter.  Living in the country brings a whole new set of problems.  First, there were no street lights on Strong Street, or the next street over, or the highway either.  Flashlights were unheard of at our house.  There was a kerosene lantern which we could use if we could find matches.  Now I want you to know that no way in hell was I going out to that God forsaken place alone, and neither would any of the other kids.  The river was not far away and sometimes we could hear a cougar or mountain lion calling.  I think there might have been a panther at one time or maybe a panther was a cougar.  Coyotes yipping in the field behind the outhouse was a regular occurrence.  Mother assured us that coyotes were more afraid of us then we were of them, but I was not sure about that!

So I learned early to not drink a bunch of water before I went to bed and thus maybe avoid that trip in the middle of the night.  I think the sisters found it easier to wet the bed than walk that lonely walk.  It seemed like it was a very long ways to the bathroom, but reflecting back, I do not think it was that far.  I think it might have been 60 feet, but it sure seemed a lot farther to my little body.  If there was a moon then the shadows scared me, and if I had the lantern the shadows scared me.  If an owl hooted then right there was the end of the trip!  If I could stay on the path it was alright, but if I veered to the left just a tad I was in a cactus.  If I strayed to the right I was in the chicken fence.  I do recall how bright the moon used to be out there in the middle of the night.  And the stars!  There were millions of them.  I could pick out the big dipper and the little dipper.  I look at the sky at night now and it is very pale.  I am glad I have those memories.  Kenny and I were in Utah once and lived in a campground.  I could see the stars then.  I wish I could go back there and appreciate it.  The Utah sky is bigger than the Kansas sky.

So, anyway, there you have the drawback to the Strong Street life.  But, I survived.  I know there are some of you that are reading this that think how horrible that was, but it really wasn't that bad.  It was an inconvenience for sure, but it was what it was.  I am very glad that I have indoor plumbing now because I am terrified of the dark.  I have a night light in the bathroom and if I leave something in the car, it will have to keep until morning.  I do not think there is anywhere left in this world where there is not indoor plumbing, but if there is, I do not want to go there.

As I write this, I can see that path in my mind.  I remember the neighbors had a concrete floor in their outhouse.  Hank Windgate did not have a door.  The Ayers family just had a tin tub with a hole in it over a bigger hole.  So all things considered, I guess we had it pretty good.  My daughter, Debbie, has a saying that seems apropos here:  "What doesn't kill you or make you bleed, will make you strong."  So there you go!

A cow named Bossy.

I am not sure her name was Bossy, but I think it was and that is what counts.  She was brown, but back in those days most of the milk cows were.  I want to say she was a Guernsey, but you are not going to catch me lying at this stage of the game.  She was brown.  A soft brown.  We had several cows when we left the Ailmore place, along with the horses dad used for plowing. We also had Star, the Shetland from hell that no one could ride.  You would have thought he was a sweetheart if you just looked at him, but try to get on his back and that was not happening.  He is the one that left the scar on my brothers face.  But back to the cow.

 The reason I am telling you about Bossy is because that cow knew how to give milk.  But the best part of the milk was the cream.  We had a separator which separated the milk from the cream (hence the name separator).  We would toast a piece of bread and then put cream on it and sprinkle it with cinnamon and sugar and put it under the broiler for just a few seconds.  That was heaven!  The cream was so thick it stayed standing on the toast.  I go to the store now and buy "heavy whipping cream" and it pours out of the carton.  I have not even seen cream like we used to eat.

The same cream was churned into butter.  The butter was bright yellow when it was rinsed and put in the refrigerator.  It was also very delicious.  After Bossy died in cowbirth, (the baby also died) we were without a cow and thus without butter.  The neighbor girls lived with their father right next door.  Their mother had passed many years before and he raised the girls  alone.  They also had a cow and made butter.  With no cow we had to resort to eating margarine.  Now in those days margarine was white.  I think it was actually lard, but it came with a little yellow dye button that you could work into the white mass so it looked like butter.  We used to trade margarine for butter because the neighbor girls did not like butter. 

Another thing was they made doughnuts every Saturday morning.  Their father was diabetic, but he sure liked those doughnuts and he thought if he only ate them once a week he would be alright.  Another daughter came from Plevna to visit them every Sunday so they managed to eat all the doughnuts.  None for me!

One time mother had fried up a bunch of small carp that she had seined and Dorothy got a bone caught in her throat.  Mother had picked the meat off, but apparently missed a small bone.  As she was choking one of us ran next door and told Mr. Reinke.  He had experience at such things, you know.  He grabbed a piece of bread from the cupboard (in case we didn't have any and of course we didn't).  He made Dorothy eat the bread, which dislodged the bone and sent it into her stomach where the acids would dissolve it.  He was a hero!

Mostly Mr. Reinke just did handy man work around town and then did his chores when he came home.  We could here him singing songs in German while he did his chores.  Since he sang in German, my dad was sure he was a Nazi, but we never knew that for sure.  I just thought he was a very nice man to save my sisters life. 

I was always envious of their "outhouse" because it had a concrete floor and a lid on the potty part.  Ours had a floor that was pretty well shot and a bench with 2 holes.  I never understood that part, because we never went in there with anyone.  I just could not picture that!  Thiers also had a door and a latch from the inside for privacy.  Ours had a door at one time, but not by the time we inherited it.

The point of this entry when I started it was about cream.  The point I wanted to make was, back in those days we ate thick cream.  We used real butter.  We ate potatoes, and bacon, and gravy and we were all skinny.  When I married my first husband I stood 5'1" and weighed 92 pounds.  I am convinced that all the additives in our food are still in our bodies.  I have given up trying to read the ingredient list on anything I pull off the shelf or out of the freezer.

And I am sure I will never live long enough to ever be able to toast a piece of bread and pile cream on it with cinnamon and sugar.  Sure would like to see old Bossy again, but those days are long gone.  I would not eat a Carp now if I was starving.  I am beginning to look forward to the day when I can once more run barefooted down Strong Street see all my family and friends.  Seems like that list gets
shorter every day.

(After thought) I do need to tell you, that when the separator quit working at one point and mother strained the milk it was not the same.  She would leave it set and the cream would raise to the top.  I could not stand the bits of cream that were floating in the milk  to touch my lips.  I would try to pick them all out with my finger, but it was an exercise in futility.  I could eat straight cream, but not swallow a fleck.  I was so happy when we had to buy milk from town because it was homogenized.

Some things will always be the same.

I lay in bed awhile this morning thinking of something from long ago.  The road in front of the Strong Street house was dirt.  Actually all the roads in Nickerson except Highway 96 and 56th Street (the back road to Hutchinson) were all dirt.  Well, the county road to Sterling and 3 blocks that made up Main Street were paved.  I think they were originally brick, but who knows.  Back to Strong Street.

It was the silty stuff and I can still feel it on my bare feet.  In the summer it was very warm, but the sidewalk was hot, so the sandy dirt was much preferred.  I should explain that the sidewalk of which I speak was a block away over beside the highway.  It was a 2 block long sidewalk that ran from the Fein house, along an empty field and then the block in front of Mr. Kings house, a rental house and then in front of the house where some crazy lady lived that we never saw and she may or may not have actually lived there.  The side walk on that block was pretty cracked and had chunks missing.  So if we were lucky enough to snag a pair of skates we could only skate on the first block.

Three things come to  my mind from the above paragraph.  First, Mr. King (and that may or may not be his actual name, but it works for me this morning.) is the one who slept face down in his garden one day all day long until a black hearse took him away.  Second is the matter of snagging skates.  My friend Barbara had skates and sometimes she would let me borrow a pair to skate home from her house which was in town and where I visited sometimes.  There was always the stipulation that I not skate in the dirt and I not lose the "key".

For those of you who do not know about old time skates, I will update you.  They were made of 2 steel platforms with two steel wheels in front and two wheels in back.  The body was held together with a nut which required a "key" to tighten and loosen.  Loosen the nut and slide the platforms either apart to make them bigger or together to make them smaller.  The front had clamps which were loosened and then adjusted for the tight fit needed to hold the front of the skate on your shoe.  The back had a strap for you ankle.  If everything was not tightly fitted your skate could come off and down you went with your tender flesh skidding along the rough side walk.  Ah, but when everything was perfect the feel of the wind on your face and arms as you sped along at 3 MPH was worth all the risks!  The best way to stop was to steer off into the dirt and that worked every time.

click here to see a pair

The last thing that comes to my mind from that paragraph is that the corner of the sidewalk that was by the Fein house had several steps that brought you up from the highway to the sidewalk.  It was on those steps that my brother brought the news to me that Hank Williams had died in the back seat of his limousine on his way to do a show in Nashville.  He was so young and we could not believe it.  People did not die for no reason, but there it was.  How very sad we were that day.  WSM had announced it.  WSM was the Grand Old Opry station.  I wonder if it still is?  I may turn the radio on some Saturday night and see.  That is if I can find the radio and if I know which button it is.

But what I really started out to tell you this morning, is how clearly I can feel the sandy dirt on my feet from all those years ago.  I used to like to wiggle my toes into a pile of it where it had blown up along side the road.  It felt silky and warm and made me happy.  But when it would rain and there would be puddles, that was fun too.  If the puddles stayed several days there would be little things in the water that looked like tiny dots with a tail.  I soon learned that those were pollywogs, which would turn into toads or frogs in just a couple days if the mud puddle did not try up and we did not step on them.  They were pretty damn fast, so stepping on them was really not an option.

Ah, but the best part was when the puddle dried up if we did not disturb it, there would be a whole new thrill.  If left alone the sun would dry the mud and the top layer would curl up.  When that happened I could step barefooted on the dry mud and feel it crackle under my feet.  That was a whole new feeling and if Jake got to the puddle first he did it and that used to piss me off so bad!  Sometimes he would save it for me and that made my whole childhood worth while.  I do not know the last time I actually stepped on dry mud.

Funny the things we think about in the middle of the night when the world is asleep and we are all alone.  Guess that is why God gave us a memory.  It keeps me grounded.

Rubber Hoses are replaced by time outs!

I have my biggest inspirations at 3:30 AM and if I don't go with them, they are just lost.  So this morning I woke up with a boy named Dwight Kite on my mind.  He was an 8th grader at Nickerson Grade School and I must have been in 4th or 5th grade.

* I must put a disclaimer here to say that while the names are pretty close to accurate from my childhood days, the memories that accompany them are solely my perceptions recalled 65 years later and may or may not be completely accurate.  But the events usually have some merit for some reason.  That having been said, I will continue.

As I recall Dwight was a big boy.  He was referred to around town as "now quite right in the head."  There were several of those in my growing up days and were times different they would have been referred to as "special ed" and later "special needs" and today I think they are just kids.  We have certainly come a long way in how we treat our children, but remember the time frame I am talking here.  Dwight was big.  Dwight was slow.  Dwight was easily led astray.

The incident that is in my mind today was one of those times.  There were also big boys who thought it fun to "rile Dwight up."  I have no idea what had gone on and it is entirely irrelevant.  I do know Dwight was "called into the office."

Mr. Houston was our principal.  As I recall he was tall and skinny, but when you are 3 feet tall everyone looks tall.  He wore suits and his shoes were always polished.  His hair was parted on the side and combed in the manner hair was combed in those days.  Several times a day he would walk slowly down the hall and peer into the class rooms to make sure we were studying.  He could stop a heart with a look so we always kept our heads down.

Dwight was in the office with amazing regularity and we heard things were going to "come to a head" soon.  Now you need to know, that back then a teacher could administer "discipline" in the classroom.  Miss Howe in 4th grade was fond of coming up behind the dawdler with a wooden ruler and cracking it down with the straight edge on top of your head.  Oh, trust me!  You do not know what pain is until suddenly that ruler hits your bony head and the stars fly.  Dawdling days were over then!

But if the teacher could not control someone, they were sent to the Principal for a "talking to" and usually that was all it took.  I never got a "talking to" and I was very sure I did not want one.  Dwight on the other hand received several of them.  Mr. Houston kept a rubber hose in his office and we always thought it was just to scare us straight, but Dwight learned different.  We all watched as he came out of the office with tears streaming down his face and red marks on his arms.  Mr. Houston had won.  We all were sad and of course went home at night to report the action to our parents.

Well, that is called "corporal punishment" and Dwight had been bad and no one seemed to know just what he had done that was so bad, but it must have been bad or Mr. Houston would not have whipped him with the hose.  Dwight was never quite the same after that.  He came to school and was just a big, hulking boy who didn't have much to say.  And then he was gone.  He still lived in the house across the street with his mother and father, but he was rarely seen.  I never saw him, but the other kids said they did.  I don't know.

That was a long time ago, but it still sticks in my mind.  I marvel at how our world has changed, but no matter how much it changes, it still stays the same.  Oh, the days of the rubber hose are gone, pretty much and replaced by more modern methods like "time out" or Lord only knows what.  But there is still the standard there that kids have to measure up  or be labeled different. 

I wonder what Dwight Kite's home was like.  I wonder if our society been back then what it is today what Dwight would have become.  I do not know when they quit beating kids into submission, but I am thinking maybe some of them could still benefit from a little of that.  Just not from the principal of the place you go to learn.

It was a different world back then.  It is sad that all these years later, I still think of Dwight Kite.  Our family went to church with Mr. Houston and his wife and son, and I was as afraid of him in church as I was in school.  Later Miss Barkiss, the music teacher, married the son, David.  That is all I know.  That may be all I want to know.

If I could turn back time....that's a song, you know.

That is a song and if I wasn't so lazy I would go to youtube and then paste the link here, but basically I am pretty lazy in that department.  Pretty lazy in most departments actually.  But I can let my mind drift back in time and I am thinking my life would have been so different if I had do overs.  Course I would have been screwed in the beginning because I picked the wrong family!  Sadly back in the picking days, I did not even know I had a choice, so I just got born into the one fate set me down into that day.  So for the first 15 or 16 years I was happy.  You know the old saying, "Bloom where you are planted."  I bloomed where I was planted and then I found out there were other gardens that actually got watered on a regular basis.  Even got a little fertilizer from time to time.  Those were the kids that turned into jocks, cheerleaders, musicians, brainiacs, and such.

Sadly I wandered through high school without ever actually participating.  I knew my future would be to wed some hardworking man and raise kids.  I flunked cooking and I flunked sewing, so the hard working men were out.  They wanted a woman who could actually do something.  You know, a helpmate of sorts.  I guess the saying "Poor people have poor ways" comes in to play here.  I am not sure my dad ever went to school at all so an education was not very important to him.  Mother had graduated at the top of her class, but it didn't help much on the farm so she married dad who was a farmhand for my grandmother.

My dad's occupation was listed on the census rolls as "farm worker" and mother was "house wife."  And that was a good thing, but sadly father liked to drink.  He also fought the mechanical advancement in the agricultural movement.  He was one of the last to give up is horses and only then because they died.  His productive years were pretty well over at that time.  We became just simple folk and mother cleaned houses for a living.  It was a good honest wage.

A side note here is that I do not ever remember a firearm in our home.  Jake hunted rabbits with a sling shot.  There just never was a gun, nor was there ever a discussion about a gun.  There was corn liquor of some sort in the fridge and dad made hot toddy's when he had a cold.  I think he had a cold for all of his life.  If he was in a good mood he would let us sip a taste of the hot toddy from a teaspoon . I have often thought I would like to have  a hot toddy again just to see if it was as good as I thought it was back then.  Seems like it was a shot of liquor, boiling water and I am sure some sugar.

I digressed there, didn't I?  So if I had it to do all over again, I would.  But this time I would study very hard.  I would not even look at boys and I sure as hell would not have drunk that home-brew LaVeta Bankey gave me in my sophomore year.  I would not have dated that guy named Gene who brought me a satin pillow case home from Germany.  I would not have dropped out of school and ran away to Louisiana with a couple friends in my senior year.  I would have been so good.  So very, very good.  And I would have went to church every Sunday and memorized all my bible verses.  I would have been a missionary like I wanted to be when I was 15.   Hell, I might have changed my name to Teresa and been a Catholic and fed the hungry in Calcutta slums.  But I didn't.

Instead I set here like butter wouldn't melt in my mouth and dispense my wisdom not telling anyone that experience is your best teacher.   As you sow, so shall you reap is a favorite passage of mine from somewhere in the Bible.  Nothing wakes you up like a good dose of "sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.."

Now back to the subject, if I could turn back time.  I can't.  Try getting that toothpaste back in the tube.  Water under the bridge.  Things like that come to mind.  I have had some very good talks with God and while he does not answer loud enough for me to hear, he does answer.  And he has me believing that I really am not such a bad person and I will have another chance.  What did not kill me has made me strong and I hope I can help someone else along the way at some point.  Guess we will see.

The dress code has definitely changed.

Thinking back to when I was a little kid back on Strong Street and I must admit, we definitely dressed a little different than the kids today.  Jake always wore overalls.  So did dad.  Church dress meant clean overalls.  As little girls, my sisters and myself always wore dresses.  As the poor family in town we were given a lot of "hand me downs" and that was good.  Josephine handed hers down to me and I handed mine down to Donna, Donna to Mary, and Mary to Dorothy.  By the time they got down to Dorothy they were pretty tattered.  But when one of the ladies from town showed up with a bag of clothes that her daughters had outgrown it was like a gift from heaven.  These were clothes that were brand new to our system.  Sometimes there were even shoes which was really great.

The way the shoe thing worked was we each got a new pair of shoes for the first day of school and we wore them until we could not get our feet in them any more and then handed them down to the next kid.  Some times we would finish out the last month or so of school barefooted.  I liked that best.  I hated shoes.  We had 2 choices for shoes; black or brown.  I think I was in 7th grade when I found out there was another choice.  That was "saddle oxfords" and they were for the very rich kids.  Those were white with either brown or black through the center part of the shoe  hence the name "saddle oxford".  If you owned a pair of those you had to put white polish on the white part and that was just a waste of money as far as we were concerned.

I know I have told you about how mother used to save feed sacks that were pretty fabric and make us dresses.  I told you how I thought my name was Gooch when I was a kid.  Now I want to tell you something off the cuff here.  I sell on ebay and several years back a lady gave me a big pile of those feed sacks to sell.  I think there were probably 40 or 50 one yard pieces.  They brought some very good bids.  One of them I sold to a lady in Korea for $48.00 plus shipping.  The lowest priced one brought $9.99.  That is for 1 square yard pieces of fabric.  Made some good money on that lot.

Jeans or slacks were NEVER worn.  Girls wore dresses.  That is what we wore.  Even in the summer there were no shorts.  Dresses.  That was it.  We played in the dirt and made mud pies in dresses.  We always kept the dress that was in the best shape for our "Sunday go to meeting dress."  No wearing the everyday dress to church.  That would have been sacrilegious.  We could shinny up the ladder to the hayloft and watch the cat giving birth in a pile of hay in our everyday dress.  We could pick corn and throw it on the wagon in our everyday dress.  But you know something?  I can not remember any dress I ever owned except one my Aunt Helen gave me when I was in 6th grade.  It was store bought and was a grayish green everglaze cotton fabric and it had a tie at the neck which had 2 white daisy's on it.  I wore that damn dress until it almost cut me in half.

When dresses got to the point that they were pretty much thread bare, the went to the rag bag.  Periodically  mother would empty the rag bag and take her scissors and cut out any good fabric.  This was then cut into strips and each strip had a slit cut in each end.  The strips were then laced together through the slits and rolled into a big ball.  When enough big balls were rolled up, they were taken to the weaver lady who would weave them into a rug.  The rug was probably 8-10 feet long and roughly 28-30 inches wide.  They were beautiful and I still like to make them today.  Back then the weaver lady charged $2.00- $3.00 to make and they were very sturdy and wore forever.

Back to the shoe thing.  I am sure we had socks.  I know for sure Josephine did because they came up to her knees and when she got out of sight of the house, she rolled them down so here legs were bare.  She always was a dicey female.  Oh, and we always had to wear a slip!  Our dresses were always cotton, so there was no danger of a boy seeing through and lusting after us, but we were always afraid that if we did not have our slip on that someone would know.  A bra was never anything that I ever needed because I just never had any boobs to speak of.

I must tell you, mother always wore a hat to church.  Well, any time she dressed up she wore a  hat.  Women were expected to cover their head in church.  She could have walked in stark naked and caused less of a stir then what would have happened had she not worn her hat.  Oh, and that damned hat pin was good for getting our attention should our shallow little minds wander!

Funny, looking back, that I remember so little about clothes when I was little.  I guess back then we were more worried about starving to death than about freezing to death.  I want you to know it could get cold back in those days.  But we could make snow ice cream with out fear of radiation fall out.  Course we knew not to eat the yellow snow.  We could snap an icicle off the eaves and suck on that and convince our selves that it was good and filled us up.  I would dry up and blow away now before I would eat an icicle.  God only knows what is in our atmosphere today and he ain't talking.

So, I don't know just what the point of this was when I started writing tonight, but I am pretty sure I am done.  Going to be a long day tomorrow.  Hope I have time to get my naps in before Jeopardy.  In the mean time, just be kind to each other.  You never know what kind of burden the other guy is carrying.

Peace out!

The road is a lot shorter than it used to be.

I think back to Nickerson and Strong Street and as I recall, my future stretched before me and the road was very long.  Days were filled with running up and down the dirt road barefooted and playing "Kick the Can" at night.  That was summer.  The sand pit was up the road behind the house.  We were not allowed to go there.  We knew that.  So where do you think we spent the hot afternoons?  Correct.  The sand pit was cool.  We knew we would get a lickin' sure as shit if Momma knew we were in that water, so we made sure we were dry before she got home.  Seems like the name of that sand pit was Vincents.  Athey's sand pit was over on the highway and Mummy's was outside of town near the Arkansas river, so this one had to be Vincent's.  It was not a working pit, so no one was ever around.  Of course there was a "No Trespassing" sign, but we were too little to read it and if we had been able to read it, we had no idea what trespassing meant.

I could not swim when I was little so I always stayed in the low part with the little kids.  To be honest I did not learn to swim until about 10 years ago.  Kenny did not know how to swim either and we took the boat out every weekend in the summer.  I think we were pretty naïve in that area, but it all worked out.  I had made sure that all my kids knew how to swim, but I never thought it was important for me to know.  About 10 years ago, I decided that I should learn the art of that and off I went to the warm water pool at the "Y".  I learned the art of survival and decided that swimming was not for me and I gave it up for other things.  I just never liked the water up my nose or in my ears.  Sorry.  Just not my bag.

I do not think most of you know just what Kansas weather is and how we survived back then.  It is hot in Kansas.  Hot and humid.  There were no air conditioners in those days.  The best we could hope for was to lay under a tree in the shade and with a little luck, a soft breeze would blow across our bodies and that was how we cooled ourselves.  Churches used to have cardboard fans in the rack where the hymnals were kept.  We were not allowed to steal those either.  It was not unusual for the temperature to soar above the 100 degree mark.  And of course on days when it was that hot and a cloud came up there was a damn good chance that it was bringing a tornado.  Feast or famine.  We knew if  a tornado came we were to run for the cellar, but I have already told you that no way in hell was I going down in that hell hole.

If we thought summers were bad, we knew winters were worse.  We had a wood stove in the front room, but it burned out in the night and had to be rebuilt every morning.  That was Jake's job.  Since we walked to and from every where.  When it snowed we followed in Jake's footprints going to school.  I do not remember having boots when I was little, but I do recall at one point Jake grew out of his and they were handed down to me.  Does anyone remember galoshes?  They were black and had 4 or 5 buckles on the front to hold them on.  I would rather have been caught stark naked in a snowbank then to be caught dead in those things.  Of course mother gave me that lecture on "pride going before the fall and a haughty spirit before destruction" and I wore the damn things to school.  In later years I worked and made enough money to buy my first new pair of boots.  I went to Warringtons Dry Goods and they had two pairs in my size.  One pair was brown rubber and the other was white with fur around the top.  I wanted the white pair so bad I could taste it, but I bought the brown pair so as not to be prideful.  What a friggin' moron I was in those days!

I recall mother making me a new coat.  It was light teal corduroy and had been something else previously, but she carefully took it apart and cut a pattern to fit me.  I was so proud!  I wore it to school as soon as it was finished and some boy said, "So you got a new coat.  It is still old and it is not pretty."  Kids are so mean at that age.  I would like to say it did not bother me, but it did.  Until you live in a world where everything is hand me downs, you can not know the feelings.  I tried to just be happy that I had a coat that no one had worn before me, but somehow the joy was gone.

When I entered high school it was in Plevna, Kansas and I lived with my Grandma Haas and Great Grandma Hatfield.  I stayed there for 5 months until Grandma Haas passed away.  Then I was moved back to Nickerson and enrolled in Nickerson High. 

I would like to say that my life got better and I was happy at school, but that would be a lie.  I do look back on my early childhood in Nickerson as the happiest time of my life, but not at school.  I was happy at home, but I was an outcast at school and I grew to resent the snobby kids.  My best friend all through grade school was a girl named Barbara, but when we left grade school she drifted away.  By the time I reached my Sophmore year I had new friends and weekends usually were spent sneaking into Duke Bankey's home brew.  We moved to Hutchinson the year I was a senior.  I dropped out of school and my formal education was behind me.  I was now an attendee in the school of hard knocks and I graduated at the head of my class although I was never sober enough to know it. 

And then life picked me up and spun me around and landed me here on the Mesa.  So here I set looking down a very short road at what remains of my Golden years.  Sorry, but that is such an asinine statement.  I am once more reminded of one of Mother's jewels of wisdom.  I was beating my chest once and she had told me I was my own worst enemy.  At the time I thought she was nuts, but as I contemplate that next hill I have to climb I hear the echoes of another of her adages and I think this was her best.  It was "Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."  She was right.  I spent many years sowing the wind and now it is time for my harvest.  I gotta' say, it got here a whole lot faster then I thought it would.  Yesterday I was young, but the stop sign is coming up fast!

The hands of time are kind.

Has it really been 15 years?  Thanksgiving is a bad time for me, but then most days are anymore.  It was a couple days before Thanksgiving 15 years ago when my husband was taken to St. Mary Corwin hospital, brought back to life and started the journey to death.  There is no other way to put that and it was what it was.  I could not find his DNR so the rescue squad did what they do.  This has been a lesson well learned.  I have a copy of mine stapled to my head.  This began 3 weeks of ICU and then transfer to Colorado Springs to try to wean him off life support.  Needless to say that did not work and 2 months later I was a widow.  It has been a long 15 years.

I look back  on those years and it is almost like it was yesterday.  We had adopted Bret, so that kept me busy.  He was 10 or so when Kenny passed.  I sent him to public school.  I sent him to charter school.  I sent him to private school.  The little fellow kept me very busy.  I would have no doubt went nuts had I not had him, so for that I am grateful.

Being a 60 year old widow with a 10 year old son was not conducive to dating, so I did not do it.  After 9 years I put my toe in the water and met Sherman.  We know how that turned out and 3 years later he was gone.  I miss having someone to lean on, but I get by with a little help from my friends (I heard that in a song.)  There was one guy that I cared about, but he turned out to be not at all what he presented himself to be, so that fizzled out.

I think about dating some times, but not very often.  It would be nice to have someone that would call a couple times a week and maybe take me out to eat once in a while.  Or a walk along the levee.  I really miss that.  I have lady friends that I go to lunch with on occasion, but I still miss having a man to open a door for me.  I miss having a conversation where I say something and then he says something and then we both laugh.  A sense of humor is so important to me.

Kenny and Sherman were both very intelligent and witty.  They both loved me although not in the same way.  Kenny was fishing, bull riding, family, cooking, gardening, and country music.  Sherman was more high brow, sipping wine and old motorcycles.  We watched a movie once a week and one night we were watching "Cheech and Chong", which was my choice and he told me "Fiddler on the Roof "  would be wasted on you!"  I laughed at him, but I never chose Cheech and Chong again.  I did try to watch Fiddler on the Roof, but it bored me to tears.  He was right about that.

If I could meet someone like either one of those two, but I think God  broke the mold after he made them.

So, Thanksgiving is over for another year.  I had lots of company and they are starting to leave now.  Patty is going to stay a couple days extra so there is that.

I am changing my life and the process is already started.  I am sorting my possessions into 3 piles.  One is to keep and one is to sell and one is trash.  I guess there 3 more piles.  Those piles are "stuff" that belongs to other people.

There are books that belong to the college and are supposed to leave when the book sale is held in the Spring, but I hear the sale is not happening this year. Ever hear of a "book burning".

 Another pile belongs to a guy in Pueblo West and is stuff he wants, but not enough to take it home.  It has been in my garage for about 9 or 10 years.

 And then there are 2 piles that belong to a kid on the west side.  He wants his stuff, too, but not enough to come and get it.  I call it "garage sale shit."

I want to downsize.  Frank and Cliff brought me a roll off this summer and I filled it.  I may need another one of those.  Right now I am sorting and boxing.  I have a pile in the garage that grows every day.  In the spring I am going to have a junk sale and get rid of it.  What does not sell goes to the ARC.   My dogs are old.  If they make it to Spring it will surprise me.  When they are gone, I am gone.  This house will be put up for sale and since it is prime real estate, it will sell quickly "as is, where is, with all faults and weaknesses."

Some where there is a place for me in this world.  Course I come with a cat.  That cat and one suit case is about all that I need.  I suppose I can not completely change everything and I am sure wherever I am and what ever I am doing, I will pause for a run out to Los Pobres to see Sister Nancy and Rosie.  I expect I will still be gathering wax for the candles for the homeless.  I expect I will still have a crochet bag to work on, but who knows.  I guess I will just set back and see where the tides of life blow me.

In the meantime, if you see me on the street, I can sure use a smile and a hug.

Over the river and through the woods.

Nickerson was always cold in the winter and snow was always very deep.  I do not know when winter started exactly.  It was some time after school started and before Thanksgiving.  We lived in a house out at 709 Strong Street.  I would like to say it was a "clap board" house, but I am not sure that was accurate.  I think it was called a "clap board" because somebody took boards and "clapped" together and then hammered in a nail for good riddance.  5 rooms and not a bathroom in any of them.  The front room had a pot belly stove that we built wood fires in for warmth.  The kitchen had a giant wood cook stove.

The front of our house faced east toward town and the back faced west toward the cemetery.  The front of the house was the "front room" and Dad's bedroom was on the south with 2 beds.  One was for him and the other was for all of us kids except the 2 little ones and mother.  The next 2 rooms were the dining room and on the right was Mom's bedroom.  The dining room had a built in cupboard and yellow glass dishes were there.  We had a whole set.  They may have come from the oatmeal and corn meal we bought.  I wish I had a set of those dishes today.  I would sell them and retire on a tropical island some where. 

The kitchen ran the whole length of the house on the back.  Well, that is not quite true.  The back door of the kitchen led to a back porch.  One side of the porch was for stacking wood and on the other side was a door that lay at about a 30 degree angle and covered the steps down to the dreaded cellar.  I am sorry, there is no pretty way to put this, but that cellar was the scariest place in the whole world and we lived about a quarter of a mile from the cemetery.  Mother stored sweet potatoes, apples, white potatoes and canned fruits and vegetables down there.  There were spiders down in that hell hole bigger than I was and deadly as shit.  Black widows loved that place.  One of the first lessons I learned was how to take a stick and poke a spider web.  Usually it just broke loose and floated off, but if it were the web of the deadly black widow, it was shiny and crackled when you pulled.  When that happened we were to get the hell out of wherever we were at.  Being a good daughter, I did just that.  It was called a black widow because after breeding and to provide nourishment  for the babies, mother black widow killed and ate her husband. Praying Mantis's do the same thing.  I guess the kid's dad was lucky, huh?

The kitchen was one step down and could be accessed either through the dining room or mom's bedroom.  The floor was concrete, which was one step above a dirt floor.  The wood cook stove took up the whole corner.  Of course we had a wood box, and an ash bucket there by the stove.  Very little cooking took place through the week.  Mostly we ate cereal, raw potatoes, apples, sweet potatoes or a bread sandwich.  Sundays we cooked.  We had either fried chicken or roast beef.  Supper was stuff like scrapple if mother was lucky enough to score a hogshead.  Fried carp was regular fare and apples in about any method were an everyday occurrence.  I ate raw apples, fried apples, baked apple, boiled apples, sliced apples, dehydrated apples and rehydrated apples.  I made up my mind that when I grew up I would never eat another damn cooked apple and I have managed to keep that vow.  Marriage vows were easily broken, but the vow to never eat a cooked apple has been respected and never broken.  For the record, I do not eat Carp either, but that is just because I never ran across one since mother used to seine for them in Nickerson.

I started this to tell you about how hard the winters were back home.  Our walls had cracks where the boards came together and some times when the wind blew snow came in.  Not very often because mother did paper the walls, but sometimes the paper cracked.  I can remember once when we drove to Hutchinson to have Thanksgiving with my half brother, Earl and his wife and kids.  It took us most of the day to go and come back.  The roads were very snowy, but the cars back in those days were very heavy and pretty much mashed the snow.  If we slid off the road, sooner or later someone would come along and help us out of our dilemma.  We were in turn supposed to do the same for anyone we found in a predicament like that.  That was the good thing about the good old day.  We helped each other.  The "haves and the have nots" were not so far apart as they are today.

The thing about going to Earl's was that he had a house with a furnace.  It was an actual furnace and blew hot air through a grate in the floor.  We were amazed at how hot the grate was and Gertie showed us one of the boys leg where he had been burned by it before he learned.  He had a series of little squares on his leg and we "oohed and aahed" at how lucky he was to be alive.  We then ate whatever we ate and after a little small talk dad "allowed as how we ought to get on the road for the long drive back."  ( I made the drive in later years and it took about 20 minutes and that was driving slow and gawking at everything."  Of course that was not in the old Studebaker now was it?)

Thanksgiving had been great that year.  I do need to tell you that back in those days at the family dinners the order of plates being filled was different than it is today.  First the men filled their plates.  Then the older kids.  Then the mothers fixed plates for the young kids.  At that time it was time for the women to get their food.  When the meal was over, the women folk washed the dishes, dried them and put them away.  Floors were swept and the kitchen "redded up" for the next meal.

I wonder if the kids today know how Thanksgiving came to be a national holiday?  It is this time of year that I pause to think about how the people who were living here in America and surviving for so many years welcomed the newcomers and brought them food.  Guess they kind of thought these people needed help to survive.  I am betting that if they had known then what they know now, there sure as hell would not be any Thanksgiving dinner on the horizon.  But here we are in 2017 in the land of the free because of the brave with racial bias and hate swirling like snowflakes looking for something to be thankful for and coming way short of the goal.

Damn, I wish I could go back to that little shack on Strong Street and get my tongue stuck to the flagpole just one more time.