Rest in Peace, Aunt Maudie

In 1960 I met my first husband in Hutchinson, Kansas.  He and 3 of his brothers lived over on 2nd street in a small house beside the foundry.  Virgil was the oldest and he had a wife and 2 sons in Germany, or so I heard.  Delvin was not involved.  The same with Duane and Larry.  Larry was the youngest.  Duane, I married in 1960 and Larry and Maudie married a year later.  At the time the men were working for a man named Bean who owned a tree trimming business.   At some point the men decided that it would be better to move from city to city and trim trees and move on.  So that is what we did.

The next few years are a tad bit hazy in my mind, but I do know Maudie and Larry had a daughter.  When I became pregnant with Debbie we decided that we should settle down and be more stable, so we decided on Hutchinson.  Soon after I had Debbie, the men decided they wanted to move to Garden City.  Maudie's family was there and her daughter was now 1 one year old.  So the Seeger families moved west.  And then came the fruitful years where we had our babies and filled our families.

Maudie and I remained friends and sister-in-laws through the years.  Sometimes we were not in touch, but sometimes we were.  Our kids spent their youngest years as cousins and remain cousins to this day.  I am still Aunt Louella.  This makes a long story short.

Having given  you a bit of a background, I now want to say to the family, I am so sorry for your loss.  Your mother was a unique individual and I regret that I never stayed in closer touch with her, but know I will always remember our younger days together.  Your mother was a unique individual!  I will never think of "Aunt Maudie" wearing her hair in anything but a "bee hive" and know that her bee hive was always the highest and fullest bee hive that could be achieved.  I do not know when she changed her hair style, but I am sure she did.

Maudie was a very strong willed woman and I am sure that never changed.  I admired most the marriage she had with your father, "Uncle Larry."  They remained together through thick and thin and back in the early days, there were a lot of "thin" days.  Family was very important to her and I am sure that she was important to her family.

The Maudie I knew surely mellowed over the years.  There are stories I could tell that would curl your hair, but I shall keep those and only take them out and look at them from time to time.

So mourn your loss and then get back to the business of living, because that is what we all must do.  I shall mourn the young woman with the high, high beehive and the red fingernails.

God be with you at this time.

Aunt Lou

A quick look at my new design.

Lord only knows what I have done here.  I found a lot of buttons to click on and may have gone a bit over board.

Love, Lou

I been thinking about dating.

It gets a little lonely here in this big house all alone.  To counteract that, I was thinking about dating.  You know, some guy picks me up, takes me out to eat (and I do love to eat!) and then go some where like a movie, or a play or drive around and look at "stuff".  We could even take a walk along the River Walk downtown.  There are all kinds of things to do.  Then he could bring me home and walk me up to the door.  We could look at the moon and say goodnight.

With this in mind, I have begun to look at the crop of men out there.  As most of you know, I am well past the age of consent.  This having been said, so are any of the men I would consider dating.  Moving along, I am pretty sure that were I decide to actually date one of the creatures, I need to update my wardrobe.  I do not recall the last time I actually purchased an item of clothing other then underwear (full cut cotton white) or socks (cotton ankle high white).  I wear mostly tee shirts which are slowly becoming threadbare and grease spotted.  I own 2 button up blouses.  I have worn the checkered one twice and looked at the other one once.  Mostly I wear jeans, but I do have several pairs of slacks for church.  So a ward robe update is necessary if I want to impress anyone.  Seems like a lot of work just to be socially acceptable.

So, to get to the crux of the matter, I flipped on the television the other day and happened onto a channel that I did not even know existed.  Perhaps God poked my remote, but I was treated to several episodes of "Forensic Files".  First one was an affluent family, husband a dentist, wife beaten to death in her bed.  Spoiler alert, the husband did it because he was trying to save on child support and had 2 mistresses who needed attention.  Another man killed his girlfriend, dismembered her, cut her bones in half and scattered them in a forest.  Her head he tossed in the lake.  But DNA did them both in at the end of the investigation.  One of them was so stupid that setting up the crime scene, he had the ladder to the upstairs bedroom window backwards! I do not know just how many of you have tried to climb a ladder backwards to an upstairs window, but I am pretty sure it can not be done!

Any way, that afternoon of binge watching people killing other people, made me rethink this whole dating thing.  Other than serial killers who would kill me just for the fun of it, most of the murders are committed by some one who loves you!  These people have kissed and held their victims in a scenario where intimacy is involved.  Several of them had children! Did you read about the guy here in town who killed his mother, cut her up, put part of her in a suit case and threw it in the dumpster?  Or the guy in the Springs who beat his fiancée to death with a ball bat?  So, back to this dating thing...

It is kind of nice to set here with my comfortable wardrobe, in my little house that needs a good cleaning and not have to worry about going out in the dark with someone who just might be the last trip out I take.  It would be nice to have some one actually care enough to call and say goodnight, but it is really not necessary.  I have kids that check on me.  I have friends  who drop by occasionally.  I have a cat and a dog.

I used to walk around Runyon Lake, but then I noticed there were a lot of druggies hanging out there and I stopped that.  Now I just walk around out here.  No one knows when I leave and no one knows when I come back, but I am pretty sure if something happens to me, it will be a random act and not some guy that I decided to "date".  

Yep.  It is going to be another long day!

What kind of kids are we raising/

I was raised to respect my elders.  Did not matter how elder they were, what they were doing, or why. By the very virtue of my thinking they were older, they were to be respected.  If they were crossing the street, I was to offer my elbow.  If they did not take it, that was their business, but by God and all that is holy, I was to make it available.  And if I saw some one carrying something, I better off to take part of the load.  It did not matter if I knew them or not.  I was to offer and be respectful, and Lord knows I try.

I guess this is why I was so upset tonight when a lady friend of mine who lives in Colorado Springs called me to share a story that happened to her today.  Over the weekend, she and her daughter had cleaned the yard and had many bags of debris in big trash bags.  This woman is 84 or 85 years old.  A retired minister who has spent her life helping people.  She lives on San Miguel Street which is a quiet residential area.  She knew the trash man was coming tomorrow so she had to get the bags and the trash cart out to the street this evening.  She has a bad knee so she has trouble walking any way and moving bags of debris is not a light job.  She got the cart out alright and began dragging the bags.  They were heavy and cumbersome, but she persevered.  Halfway through her endeavor, several young men came out of the house across the street.  They stood on the curb visiting and looking her way occasionally.  Never once did any one of them offer to help.  One of them got in his truck and drove away.  The two remaining continued to talk and glance her way.  Then they parted company and the one who lived there went into the house and closed the door.

She called me to tell me about this.  I was amazed that anyone could watch an old woman struggle and not offer assistance.  The one man is a neighbor of hers!  Have we become so complacent that other peoples burdens mean nothing to us?  What has our world come to that this is happening?  I assured her that had I been there, I would have helped her.  I have raised 6 kids and not a one of them would ever not come to the aid of someone in need.

God teaches us to love our neighbor and it that context it means love everybody, but when you see an older person struggling and that person lives across the street from you, it really is your neighbor.  I think God wants us to help every body.  I just wonder who raised those men?  I wonder if their mother needed help if anyone would help her?

As you have done this to the least of these my brethren, you have done it to me.

Or not.

Box Car Willie

I love youtube and usually have it playing in my background.  The other day I lucked onto the life story of Box Car Willie.  I do not remember dates, but he was one of the old singers and very successful in that endeavor.  He grew up in a shack with his mom and dad just a few feet from the railroad track where his dad worked.  The man could make the train whistle sound and it was so authentic that it was like the train was right in front of you.  And guess where that man took me?  Right back to Nickerson.

The railroad ran right across Main Street from East to West.  It came from somewhere and went to Hutchinson.  Kind of ran parallel to Highway 50 as I recall.  I have found in later years that it runs to La Junta, Colorado and turns south there and goes some where.  I used to ride from Garden City, Kansas to Hutchinson with my kids when I lived in Western Kansas.  But back to Nickerson.

In grade school I had a friend named Eveline.  She had very black hair and eyes.  Mother always said she was an Indian.  I did not know.  She had one sister and her name was Georgia.  They lived in a boxcar that set where the water tank for the train was located.  In Kansas, and I suppose all the places the train ran, there was a water tank every 7 miles.  The first trains had to take on water as they were steam engines.  Water had to be kept ready for whatever time the train came through.  That is why all the towns are 7 miles apart.  Some of them survived; some did not. Nickerson was one that did.

A lot has changed.  I know many years ago there had to be a man who shoveled the coal and kept the engine running.  I am sure now that if there are coal fired engines they are fed through some sort of mechanical means.  Now how I got off on this tangent is more that I can figure out!  What I want to tell you is how I would lay in bed at night and sometimes here the train whistle far off in the distance.  It was always the loneliest sound in the world.  The whistle would also bring on the howls of the wolves.  Train whistles and wolves have been ingrained in my mind as long as I can remember.  There is not a train track near my house now, but sometimes on a clear summer night with my windows open I can hear a faint whistle and it takes me back.

I recall when I started high school that I had to cross the tracks to get back to the road that led to my house.  That road was actually a county road that ran North to Sterling.  I lived one block off the highway.  Sometimes the train would be lumbering through and I could stand and watch it pass.  There were times that I could see men through the open door of the box car.  One time there was a man setting in the open door and he waved at me.  He wore overalls and he looked very sad.  After that I talked to Jake Smith who lived on Strong Street and he told me about how the hobos and tramps "rode the rails."  He said sometimes the "bulls" would pull them off the train and beat them to death.  Not sure if that was true or not, but in my impressionable little mind, anything was possible.

Then my brother, Jake, took me around to show me some of the signs that hobos left on peoples fences or trash cans to either denote a friendly person, a mean dog, or a hot meal for the asking.  They would make a mark to communicate and the other hobos knew to ask or pass that house by.  I do not know  if there are still hobos or not and I do not know how to find out.  I do know in later years the railroad owners hired people to keep the hobo's off the trains.

Life is so sad, isn't it?  Who knows what stories these men (there may have been women too) could tell.  I wish I could go back in time and talk to one of them.  I am pretty sure had I tried my mother would have beat me to death, but what a rich history that time was, and I was not smart enough to know it!  But back to Box Car Willie.  He brought the railroad to life.  He brought poverty to our door and he took the history of the box car  to England.  He was a scruffy little man, but he could pack a house.  They do not make them like that any more.

That era is gone and soon there will not be anyone to remember.  Sometimes my heart is very sad that I do not have knowledge of what I was living at the time.  My grand kids will never know what the outhouse was or that water had to be pumped from a well in the ground, or that the homeless people of today are the ancestors of the men who rode the rails.

Peace! and prosperity to all.

This about says it for me.

I have spent my whole life searching for something.  Always looking for the outfit that would make me beautiful, the meal that would satisfy me, the car I would love to drive, and clear down to searching for the man that would make me complete.  Some of those things I actually found, but no longer have them.  I do the looking back and regretting a lot, but it does not seem to do any good.  Then I found this picture on facebook and it pretty well sums it up.

I have the big house.  I have the car.  I have more clothes then I will ever wear, eat what I want when I want.  I had the man who made me feel complete for 20 years.  Now I am alone and I have the perfect opportunity to find myself.  It is time to deal with that little girl on Strong Street, the battered wife, the neglectful mother, the absent sister, and the wayward daughter.

Many years ago I put all my emotions in a closet and now I find that I would like to take them out, examine them, forgive myself and move on.  I suppose life itself is built on a learning curve and I am just grateful to have stayed on this spinning ball long enough to understand this.

I can not save the world.  I can not even save one person, but I can save myself.  Maybe some day there will be room in my life for another man, but it is not now.  I am going to look at myself in the mirror and not see wrinkles and scars.  I am going to see a kind, loving woman who wants to save the world, but I am going to start with myself.  This pretty much sums it up! (click blue)

Wish me luck!

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