Happy Fourth of July!

 I bet this is about the last kind of post you expected when you found me this morning.  Last thing I thought I would write about today, but I need a break from reality.  I need to be happy if even for just a few minutes.  It is 9 days until Christmas.  I have no tree.  No presents.  No hope for any happiness on the horizon, so it is off to Nickerson and the 4th of July.

It is back to the ramshackle house at 709 North Strong Street and it is July 4th, 1948 and it is hotter than hell.  No air conditioner in our window.  Electricity is only used for the lights because we do not want to "wear it out".  The war has been over for  almost 3 years.  My brother, Jake, had brought me home a package of fire crackers.  I do not know where he got them, but they were wrapped in cellophane and they were red.  There must have been 10 or twelve in the package and I was fascinated with them.  In truth, I was scared to death of them!

They were (as I recall) about an inch long.  They were a very dark red.  The fuse was a piece of white twisted paper.  If I had something like that today, I would light the twisted fuse and they would all pop and it would be over in 10 seconds.  But that is now and this was 72 years ago.  Times have changed.

We went to the old, dead Cottonwood tree out by the barn.  Jake showed me how to pick the dead wood and select just the right piece to use as "punk".  Punk is dead cottonwood  from the heart of the tree.  It separates easily, is very light , and it is free.  The man selling the fireworks had given him a free punk, but I needed my own.  In order to keep the punk glowing red, it needed to be blown on at regular intervals.  My brother was the smartest person in the world!  He was 4 years older than me and I worshipped the ground he walked on.

I recall untwisting one from the bunch and putting it in an ant hole.  With the wick pointed upward and the punk held downward and my eyes about 4 inches from the firecracker I touched the glowing punk to the wick and nothing happened.  Well, that is not quite true!  Something happened, but it was not a popping firecracker.  It was my mother jerking me off the ground and explaining to me that this was a stupid maneuver.  My brother rounded the corner of the house and quickly exited, stage right!

She then taught me the proper was to do it.  Unwind one firecracker.  Lay it on the ground.  Blow on the punk to make it red and touch the end to the fuse.  As soon as the fuse showed signs of being lit, back up very far away.  And then she was off to find brother Jake.

I do not remember many more 4th of July's until my first husband talked me into holding a Roman Candle in my hand and hurling it back and forth to make the balls go further.  When that exploded in my hand, my firecracker days were over!  Today I enjoy watching the fireworks across the river and I do it from the safety of my bedroom.  

I miss my brother.  I miss my mother.  I miss my sisters.  If this were not true, would I be writing about a 4th of July that happened 72 years ago?  No.  I would be curled up in my bed still sound asleep.  

There is an old saying that goes like this, "When God closes a door, he opens a window."  This means that life changes and life goes on.  Until the day God calls me home, I will have choices.  He has closed a door in my life and I am looking for the window.  I hope there is one, but right now, I am not sure.  I sure hope there is! 

So, until you hear otherwise,  Happy Fourth of July!  

And she never left his side.

This morning at 7:00 AM I was setting in a parking lot at 4th and Abriendo waiting for my son to arrive with my grandson.  53 years ago at the same exact time I was setting in a motel room with my husband, waiting to go to McPherson Hospital, in McPherson, Kansas to see my brother, Jake.  Jake had been in an accident the day before and mom had called to tell us to come.  We left the kids with Duane's sister.  Debbie was 3 years old, Patty was barely  2, Dona was 1 year old the day before, and Sam was 26 days old.  His sister was a brave woman.

We had arrived in McPherson late the night before and gone to the hospital.  My brother was propped against pillows and covered with a sheet across his body.  He did not even look hurt.  He did, however, continually kick his right leg and emit a moan.  Mother said that the doctor told her he was trying to stomp on the brake.  The last thing he would have seen was the side of a loaded gravel truck as Johnny ran the stop sign.  Johnny was down the hall in the same condition as Jake.  There was no hope for either one of them.  There was too much damage; too many broken bones to set, and to many internal injuries to even assess them all.  At the moment Johnny's last name eludes me, but it will come as all the memories of that time visit me from time to time.

This was my brother who had set with me beside a car battery and a radio listening to the Grand Ole' Opry from Nashville, Tennessee.  This was my brother who had written all the letters from Aschaffenburg, Germany when I was 15 years old.  This was my brother who dared to tell my husband, "You hadn't ought to hit her like that."  Of course that just got him some of the same.  This was my brother who had a new baby 6 months old and had been attending church.  This was Uncle Jake to my kids.  This was a broken human being that did not even know I was there.  And my mother set beside him holding his hand.

She talked of emptying the other bedroom at the house and setting it up as a room for Jake, just in case he lived and could come home.  She knew how severe the brain damage was and that he would be a vegetable and would need constant care.  She would quit working and stay home and take care of him.  For the first time in my life, I saw a mother's love in action.  A mother who would give up everything for her child.  My father had died only 8 months earlier.  His passing had made no impact on me, but seeing my brother so small and helpless was about to be my undoing.  So we stayed a little longer and then mother sent us back to Hutchinson to rent a motel room.  We would be back in the morning and she could call if anything changed.

We rented a little rat hole room and called and gave her the number.  In only 4 short hours the phone rang with the news.  "Jake is gone.  I will see you at the house."  I can not go into what went on in that motel room when I hung up the phone.  There are some memories that are so terrible they can not be erased and some hurts so deep that they will never heal.  I will just say that Duane was very upset and took the loss of my brother very personally.

So for 53 years I relive the Halloween of my brothers death.  My husband and I were married on October 30, 196?,  Dona was born October 30, 1964.

Guess what I am trying to say, is today is a bad day in my year.  Probably going to survive once more, but just be patient with me today.  Halloween pretty much sucks for me, but it passes.  Every year it passes.

So, life is mostly good.

I was married to an ostrich and never knew it.

The light of dawn, or in this case, the light of way before dawn is very enlightening.  I woke up at
4 AM this morning to begin the tedious task of sorting through my mind.  It is normally a scary process and today was no different.  Like many times before, I thought about my brother and how he died.  But this morning I also thought of my first husband and how he handled Jake's death.

It had been a few weeks since Jake's passing and I mentioned something about the event to Earl Duane, my first husband.  His response was simple.  "I don't think about it.  I pretend he has gone to another town and I will see him when he comes back or we go there."  Such a simple premise.  I often envied him of the ability to just ignore reality.  I wished often that I had taken lessons from him.  It has been 52 years and it is just as fresh in my mind today as it was back then.  I see him in the hospital bed in McPherson, Kansas, with his head propped up and his sandy hair falling across his forehead.  The scar on his right cheek was vivid.  He had no bandages because he was too injured to bandage.  He passed on October 31, 1965.  My dad had passed in February of the same year. 

I am not good at dates and can not tell you what day most of my family died, but Jake was like an extension of myself.  I do not know why I woke up with this on my mind, I just know it was not the first time and will probably not be the last time.  I do not remember any of my marriage dates except for Kenny.  Let me tell you, when I had to come up with all those dates for the social security I was one busy little girl!  I was on the phone with the Bureau of Vital Statistics for probably an hour while the man researched  the various marriages and divorces and separations and such. 

When it was all over , I thanked him profusely for his time as he had been a lot of help.  He knew more about me then most people and his last question to me was "I just want to know, what happened with old Earl."  For some reason that struck me as funny and we both had a good laugh.  But sadly enough, I have often wondered the same thing.  I did envy him his ability to completely disregard any thing that was not what he wanted it to be.  I am sure he did the same thing with our divorce.  He certainly was adroit at ignoring that little sentence about the child support.

Normally I do not talk about him as he is the father of my children and I respect him for that, but he had a different relationship with them from the one he had with me.  As long as we can all separate the man into two parts, we are good to go.  We did talk on occasion and he remembered me as the skinny little thing he married and nothing I did after that mattered.  In his mind I never left.  I was just gone into town to pick up some groceries.

So in closing, I want to say, my life is good.  My home is good, but way to big and way to much work for me.  I want to do something although I am not sure what.  I do know there are big changes coming in the next year.  It is going to start with a giant rummage sale in the Spring and then I will just see where the future takes me.  I have lived over half my life in Colorado.  For the first half it was Kansas.  Do I think about going back?  Sometimes.

For now, I am going to run through the shower and start a new day.  That is the best part of life to me, knowing that each day brings a fresh page and yesterdays are just that.

Memories are just that.

I have been promising a friend that I would bring him some Choke Cherry Jelly for over a week and once more forgot to deliver the goods.  So I was setting on the deck visiting and the subject of canning and jelly making came up which immediately turned to the good old days when we damn near starved to death.  See, back in those times it was a daily challenge to keep our rib cage seperated from our spine.  It took food to make that happen.  Course when two old people get together their main goal is to prove that thier poverty was worse then the other persons.  I usually win!  And I must confess, I have been known to lie.
We made jelly and preserves out of any kind of fruit that happened to fall from the tree.  Ever eat peach pit jelly?  Peaches were canned and peach preserves were made and then the peach pits were boiled and ended up as jelly.  Did you know peach pits contain a trace of arsenic?  I think that is right.  I am sure it is some sort of poison.  Know what to do with watermelon rinds?  Those were turned into perserves.  Apple sauce was a staple.  Apple cider was a luxury.  Ever eat carp?  Those were nasty, but after they were canned there were ways to stretch even those.  Carp is very strong, coarse and gives a whole new meaning to the word "fishy".

Brother Jake was very adept at bringing home a rabbit on occasion.  Now, I trust you know that we were always happy when it as a bunny rabbit as opposed to a Jack rabbit.  Jack rabbits are the males and are very tough and stringy and have a wild taste.  A nice little bunny is tender and actually pretty good eating.  Or at least they were back when we were growing kids.  Have not eaten one in years and the memory of what season he hunted in has dimmed so  I will bypass that fare on my table.
October 5 was my brother Jake's birthday.  He would have been 77 years old.  The one good thing about losing him is that we will forever live in my memory as a man of 28 years.  That is how I remember him.  He always wore  khaki pants and a tee shirt.  I close my eyes and see  his lopsided grin and the big scar on his cheek.  He had a habit of sucking air through a gap in his teeth.  Sometimes it was irritating, but mostly it was just Jake.
I guess it is only natural  when I think back on the growing up years  that I think of him first.  We were 4 years and 4 days apart.  When he went to the Army we wrote every week.  He introduced me to my first husband.  They were friends and stayed so until the day he died.  He did tell me once that he would understand if I did not stay with my husband, but back in those days when the wedding vows were taken they ended with "till death us do part." and were sacred vows.  But sometimes there are things worse then breaking a vow.
Jake was in a car wreck on October 30, 1965  and passed away on October 31.  October 30 was my wedding anniversary to the kids dad and my middle daughter, Dona, was born on that day in 1964.  Needless to say, this time of year is a little sad around here so I work way harder then I should and try not to put pen to paper.  Seems that when I see it in black and white, it is overwhelming.
So that having been said, I will stick my head back in the sand and head off for church.  Teresa and I are off to the Broadmoor on church business, so that should take my mind off life for a while.

I will be back soon though, to fill pages with my drivel.  Chin up!!