It used to be a more user friendly world.

Back in Nickerson in the late 1940's life was so simple.  We did not lock our doors.  Oh, we could lock them, we just did not.  We had a key called a skeleton key.  Our key fit every other lock on every other door in town.  The lock was not so much to keep anyone out as it was to keep the door from blowing open while we were gone.  Do not think we were gone very often, because we were not.  Nor was anyone else, so the "key to the front door" was more a symbol of status then actually meaning anything.  If, perchance , the key was misplaced one could simply go to the local hardware store and purchase another one for just a few cents.  I do not know at what point in time someone came up with the idea to have a lock with a special key, but it was some time after life on Strong Street.

Another thing that was in every yard was a pump for water.  Ours was a "pitcher pump" which held its prime which meant we did not have to pour water in it to get it started.  There were 2 things that were always located on the nearest fence post and those were a can of water just in case the pump did lose it's prime and  a tin cup.  The tin cup was for drinking the water that came from the pump.  If we were playing and got thirsty, we simply went to the nearest pump and got a drink from the pump.  It was the neighborly thing to do and back in the day the house that did not let you drink from their pump was avoided at any cost.  Water was free and everyone was a neighbor.  Oh, there were a few houses that had dogs and sometimes the dogs were not so friendly, but usually the lady of the house would holler at the dog and then you could get a drink and be on your way.  I do know that the water that was pumped up from deep in the earth was so sweet and cool that it must have been the elixir of the Gods. 

I did not know about hoboes growing up, but I had heard of such things from my brother, Jake.  He was friends with a man who lived down on the Arkansas River when we were on the Stroh place.  Seems his name was Blackie Joe or something like that.  He worked with silver and turquoise and sold his wares around town.  Mother did not like Jake hanging out with anyone who lived on the river, but Jake was always one to sneak off and not tell her where he went.  I saw Blackie on the bridge once and he was scary.  His clothes were black and his face was very weathered.  I did not get close!  He was not on the river in the winter and Jake said he "went south" and that he had family down south.

When I started high school I had to walk down main street to school and then back up main street to go home.  The railroad tracks ran right through the middle of town and sometimes the trains would block the way.  This was back in the early 1950's and the box car doors were open and we could see  the men "riding the rails."  Mother always cautioned  us about these men and I was scared to death of them, but secretly I sometimes thought how much fun that might be to just go where ever the train took me.

Another thing that mother was always adamant about was the eating business.  We had a big round oak table.  Of course I think that is all that anyone had back then.  If we were eating, we were eating at the table.  Homework was done at the table.  Sometimes she would make us hot chocolate and that was drunk at the table.  On Sundays we sometimes went to Plevna to Great Grandma's house and had fried chicken dinner at her big round table.  She lived with my grandma Haas who had a stroke and could not walk without a walker.  I lived with them my freshman year of high school until grandma died and great grandma moved to Coldwater.  That was the best year of my whole life.

Well, I am rambling.  The cat is rolling a marble around my feet.  It is 4:00 AM and the rest of the world is asleep.  And yet here I set, thinking of how my mother would come to my house and set at my big round oak table and reminisce of the time all decisions were made at the table and how the table symbolizes the center of the home.  She was right. 

Course, my momma was always right!  RIP my sweet mother. 

The miracles of modern medicine!

It used to be a cataract was a big deal, but thanks to modern medicine, that is no longer the case.  I recall when I was in grade school a cataract was spoken of in hushed tones as if the person who had developed a cataract suddenly had enhanced hearing and would know we were discussing "it".  And when a cataract was removed it meant days in the hospital and then added care at home.  No bending, no lifting, special diet and on and on.  Last Wednesday, I had my second cataract removed.  The hardest part was the Coronavirus limiting access and the 6 foot social distancing rule.

So, my friend picked me up, delivered me to the Rocky Mountain Eye Hospital for eye surgery.  He dropped me at the door and in due time I was taken to the back, prepped and given an IV to relax me.  The first time I had an operation of this sort I slept through it, but this time was different.  I visited with Dr. Schlomer as told me every move he was making.  I saw all the debris he was removing and it was very bright colors.  Actually, there were funny shapes and bright colors.  I felt absolutely nothing.  I think the actual removal took about 2 minutes.  He then taped a shield over my eye and it was done.  I was home well before noon.

My ride was waiting at the front door and had been considerate enough to bring me a banana since he knew I had not eaten today.  He drove me straight home, and I went inside so my son could go to work.  He was at work before noon.

My first afternoon was spent dabbing at my eye which was running much like a leaky faucet.  The only things I needed to actually do, was use my eye drops, do not bend or lift for 24 hours and wear my dark glasses outside.  Today begins the third day after surgery and I am good as new!  My new eye is clear and I can actually see better with it then the other eye.  So....

Forget all the horror stories you hear about cataract surgery and if you are contemplating it I advise you to go for it.  Now, I am sure that any doctor who is an ophthalmologist is well versed on the fine art of cataract removal, but I am just partial to Dr. Schlomer.

So, I am going to take my leave of this and see if little Jiraiya is about ready to crawl out of bed.  Going to be a long day!

A whistling pig? What is that!

I shall tell you!  Yesterday I stopped to pick up my mail (which was actually mail from the day before) and I found this:

Inside was a very nice hand written note from Fred Keller apologizing for not sending these 3  CD's that Sam wanted me to have.  Now, Sam had not told me anything about any CD's nor had he mentioned The Whistlepigs String Band in any conversation.  I was pretty sure had he been to Minnesota to attend a concert by any Whistlepigs, he would have at least mentioned it in passing.  And a jug band with a banjo, mandolin, guitar and a bass was not in his music preference.  Hell, it was not in mine either!  A mystery!

Since Sam was at work and I did not want to bother him and I had a custom order patchwork bird seed catcher to make I decided to pop it in the player.  I am an avid fan of old country, but I do love a mandolin and guitars and a banjo.  What a pleasant surprise!  I have got to say, my sewing time flew by and I was thoroughly entertained.  It seems my son knows me better than I know myself!

This is a picture of the band, which I now love!  So now to solve the mystery of how this came to be in my mailbox.  My son lives in Dallas and works at Southwest University Medical Center as an IT.  In this capacity he consults with people all over the country, most of which is done remotely.   Fred Keller, who is the leader of the band is married to a lady (I forgot her name) who he met through his work.  I am very glad that he talked to her and found out about this band.

The point is he knew I would like this and he was right!  I had never heard this kind of music since "HeeHaw" left the television many years ago.  I am going to keep these 3 CD's in my car because there is too much distracting me here in the house to give my full attention to this and it deserves my full attention!

So a big thank you to Fred Keller, Joel Olson, Chris Jones and Ross Willits, way up there in Sandstone, Minnesota, for brightening an old lady's day and days to come.  You have brought back memories that have been long forgotten in my old gray head.  Days in Garden City listening to the guys picking at Lee and Iris Day's house when Julia Day Torres was a tiny little squirt with bright red hair.  That is one of my fondest memories back then.  Of course Lee and Iris are long gone along with Duane and the rest.  Sad how a tune, or a smell, can take you back, isn't it?

Right now my mind is back in Garden City, Kansas in that 2 story house on the corner of "something and something else."  Better wind this up or it is going to be a very long day!

Peace to you all and thank you to The Whistlepigs String Band and my son for knowing me so very well.  I love you all!

Calling all arm chair phycologists!

Do you analyze dreams in your spare time?  I just woke up terrified.  Here are the facts of the dream I just had:  I was young, probably in my 30's.  I had a small child and a husband that was very hard working and devoted to me and my child. We lived in a small house near a prison facility.  I do not know where he worked.  My brother (who has been deceased for 55 years) was there visiting.  We came back from a car ride to find barrels of guns and ammunition in the front room.  There was one barrel filled with grain.  Since we were all law abiding citizens we were freaked out.  Suddenly there was a knock on the door and the police were there.  They had a tip that I was running guns.

One of the police was a heavy set, very friendly cop that seemed to believe me and one was bound and determined that I was pure evil.  These two played good cop/bad cop while the other 5 ransacked my house.  They found nothing else; just the guns and ammo in the front room.  I do not know how the dream ended because I woke up.

Now, the facts leading up to bed last night.  Jiraiya and I had a visitor who actually came in my house and drank a cup of tea and we set at the table with our masks off.  Later Ross came by and picked up noodles, but he stayed on the porch and wore his mask.  Jiriaya and I walked down and looked in the ditch to see if the water was running (If it was we would try to catch a crawdad, which he calls dagcrawlers or crabs.)  We also watched a bird setting on a nest up in the tree right outside the window.  None of those activities seem to me a portend of a nightmare!  But, for some reason I woke up scared to death.

So, give me your take on this.  Leave it in the comments below this post, or go back and leave it on facebook, (which would be the quickest way for me to see it.)

So, for now I am going to make Bret his breakfast sandwich to take to work, have another cup of coffee and try to shake this feeling of dread that has me in it's grip.

Have a good one and may the peace that passes all understanding be with us today!

The sound of silence is killing me.

https://youtu.be/bGLHadex0B0

I wake up most nights just after midnight.  It is then that I do my best thinking.  Last night was no different.  I have nothing in particular to worry about, so I just lay there and think and inevitably end up back in Nickerson and I can hear a lonesome train whistle coming from the track that ran about 3 blocks from the house.  Mostly what I hear is silence, but the silence is broken occasionally by a coyote.  Rarely it is a wolf, but rarer still is a panther, or mountain lion drifting up from the river.  I love the river and I especially love walking the banks of a river or creek.

There is so much to see, or at least there was back when I was a pubescent girl with a vivid imagination.  Maybe it was just that back then the river and the cemetery were the 2 places I could go to escape the tedium of every day life.  Mom let me go to the cemetery with no qualms, but she worried when I walked along the creek.  Now granted Cow Creek ran past Nickerson on one side and Bull Creek on the other.  Access was restricted when those 2 flooded which they did every Spring.  The fact that the third and final escape was the Arkansas and it was always running high.  I went back to Nickerson a few years back and was surprised that nothing had been done about flood control, so they were pretty much busy building little dirt dams here and there to keep the water out of their houses.

There is just something about a quiet stream far from the city.  Little spiders skate across the surface where the water is still.  Tiny minnows gather in still places.  Baby frogs find their first water legs in pondlike places.  The abundance of flowers and mosses gives hope to a world that is still living away from the crowded city.  I am terrified of snakes, but in the wilderness they do not bother me at all.  I just back up and go a different way.  I am in their territory and that makes a world of difference.  When I find one in the goose house, it becomes my duty as superior human to kill it.  In the wilderness, I am the intruder.

Do you know what a crawdad house looks like?  If you come upon a small hole with balls of mud piled around it, that is a crawdad house.  I used to think a crawdad was a tiny lobster, but late in life I learned they were the cockroach of the creek.  I still like them.  When they are in the water they mostly travel backwards.  When Bret was 4 years old I took him fishing at the park and he caught a crawdad.  Actually the crawdad caught him because it had a grip on his hook and when he let go, he fell to the ground.  Bret was terrified of the "crab".  Jiraiya and I found one by the ditch a week or so age.  He and his daddy went back and found it and it was nearly dead, so Bret put it in the duck water.  The next morning we found its lifeless body near the duck water.  We had a funeral complete with rivers of tears for the poor little crab.

If I live to be 100 years old, I will never forget my life in Nickerson, Kansas.  I go back there sometimes.  I do not know any of the people there, but I haunt the places I used to walk.  Bull Creek was a dry creek bed last time I was there, but I still recall how it could fill the banks and overflow across the fields when the Spring rains came.  I  remember my brother catching a bull frog and putting it in my skirt with instuctions to take it to the house and find something to put it in.  I was mortified that it would bite me.  As luck had it, I opened my skirt to show it to Josephine and it leapt into the house.  She almost beat me to death before I recaptured it.  I think I told you she was mean.

I want to go back home next Spring.  I will drive 96  Highway and the State Patrol will have a man at every bridge, because the creeks all flood in the Spring.  It is just something that we can count on.  Since Kansas is flat it floods easily.  I love Colorado, and my life is here, but I think when I die, my soul will live in Kansas.

At least I hope so!

Farewell to Uncle Manley and Aunt DoLores.

Back in 1960 when I married Earl Seeger I picked up 11 sisters and brothers in law.  Most of them I never met, but some I did.  Manley was one I did, but not his wife, Doloras.  I knew Manley lived in Denver.  Let me see if I can name all of them: Harold Manley Seeger, Cleo Seeger, Virgil Seeger, Raymond Seeger, Jesse Seeger,  Dorothy, Betty, Dona, Alma,  Delvin, Earl, Larry.  I have a call in to one of the girls, because I think there was one more. ( I had forgotten Jesse.)

The point of this is that we found out recently that Harold Manly Seeger and his wife DoLoras passed away in an Aurora assisted living facility in Aurora.  They died 9 days apart from the Covid 19.  This is a very trying time in our history.  This not anything I want to contract that is for sure.  When people start demonstrating and telling me they are tired of being held back from living their lives I find it very troubling.  There is no vaccine and without a vaccine or a cure we are pretty much at the mercy of a pandemic that will kill a lot of people.  I am not really anxious to die with something like this.  Pretty sure I still have a few good years left in me.

Now I know pretty soon they are going to lift the restrictions, but let me tell you, I am still going to wear my mask, wipe everything down with the Clorox wipes I have because I do not want to become a statistic.  I do have to say that not being able to go to church I have completely lost track of what day it is.  Bret is supposed to write the day on the chalk board on the back door.  That way I know what day it is, but some times he forgets.  I had 4 Wednesdays last week and that is not good.

I have a niece who voluntarily went to New York to work there.  Her name is Lisa and she is a very good girl.  When Desert Storm came she was one of the first there.  And Desert Shield found her still in Iraq.  She is one of my heroes.  I host a Mothers Day Tea at our church every May and she attended last year since she is now living up North in the Denver area.  We had planned a big "Lou's family attendance " this year, but up jumped the devil and my high tea has been cancelled.  Many disappointments in life and this is just another one.  Next year will surely be better.

But back to Manley and DoLoras.  Manley was the oldest and at one point he came to stay with Duane for a few weeks.  Of course by that time we were divorced, but I always remained friends with his family.  His sister, Dona, lives in Colorado and his younger brother, Larry lives in Kansas.  I saw Larry last summer, but have not seen Dona for several years.

So now I am rambling and reminiscing.  I will be glad when this mess is over.  It is not the idea of having to stay home, it is the fear of going out.  So, you all be safe out there.  I will be downstairs doing "stuff".  I am trying to consolidate my fabric and sort it into some sort of useful form.  It rained last night and that is good.  I just need to remember that today is the day that the Lord has made!

Peace to all.

I glimpsed my future and that shit ain't gonna happen here!

Remember a while back when I was flirting with the idea of dating because I thought it might be nice to have a gentleman friend to hang out with?  Plead the blood of Jesus over that thought!  I saw myself at the grocery store yesterday and Lou Mercer is not ready for that!  We are in week number something or other ( I have actually lost track of time) of this social distancing and not getting closer than 6 feet to any other human.  I am a rather gregarious soul and do enjoy people so this has been very trying for me and probably a lot of other people.  But, back to the subject.

I went to Lagrees yesterday to pick up a couple items that I needed.  I always start on the produce aisle.  I picked up a bag of lettuce, a tomato, and 3 bananas.  Next stop was the mark down shelf.  There was already a gentleman there, so I waited.  He picked up each bag and ran his fingers over the plastic covering of each item in every bag.  He deemed three of them as good enough to go home with him and I watched as he took them over and put them in a grocery cart that was attended by a lovely lady that I figured must be his wife.  I saw he already had several of the bags in the cart.  A cursory look at the rack told me he had taken anything that was worth paying for.

I caught sight of him several more times in my journey through the store.  The lady never let go of the cart and when he would venture off to check something out, she remained with the cart.  Very soon I formed a vision in my mind of what life with this guy would be like.  I would be in charge of the cart and he, as the bread winner, would be in charge of what went in the cart, and also what I would eat.  I pictured the home with him collecting the mail and sorting through it and letting me look at the advertisements that arrived.  He would pay the bills while I stood quietly by.  I wondered if the woman had any wants or desires of her own.  I know I have plenty!

The jest here is that he was the man of the house.  He decided what they would eat.  My job would be lord only knows what.  I made up my mind from that 15  minute peek into some one else's life that no way in hell do I need a man.  Been there, done that, and like it like it is. I want to push my own cart and put in it what I want to eat.  I really do not mind picking up a bag on the discount shelf and finding day old produce in it.  I usually always buy my bananas when they are ready to turn because they make better banana bread.  When I buy eating bananas they are usually pretty green.

I did not see them leave the store, but I am betting money, he was driving.  Now, I am pretty sure that  they have a tidy house, they eat good and no doubt watch the same shows every week night that they watched for the last 40 years.  Maybe I am just getting old and set in my ways, but I would like to steer the boat, so to speak, every once in a while.

Granted it would be nice to have a man around to talk to and share my day with, but I have baggage and I am pretty sure any man I find in this day and age is going to have his own baggage and I just am not ready for that.  I sometimes eat breakfast for supper and sometimes my noon day meal is something I just ran through the blender.  Or more often than not, a nap instead of eating.

I am a packrat, by nature.  I buy my own car when I need one.  I love my company and I am pretty sure it is going to stay that way.  The square dancing lessons are over.  Fishing out the back of the boat is over.  Classic Country music still plays on my stereo and always will.  Last man friend I had gave me a jazz cd.  Wonder where that went?

So, stay home.  Stay safe.  And stay single!  That will be my mantra!