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.