A time for new beginnings?

 A Happy Birthday to me!!  These keep right on coming and the only way to stop them is to die, apparently.  Since I am showing no signs of that, I will just open my cards, answer my phone and say thank you.  I realize birthday is a good time to look back down the cluttered road of my life and remember birthdays before.  Now here is the really sad part, I don't remember them.  There is only one birthday that I can actually focus in on and remember it clearly.  That was my seventh.  

First I want to tell you that over the years I have had husbands, kids, friends, acquaintances, teachers, co- workers, lovers, family and my birthday has never been forgotten.  And every card, letter, phone call or personal visit has meant a lot to me.  I have been covered in flowers delivered by FTD and the aroma still fills my senses.  I love flowers!  I hate it when they have stayed past their prime and I have to throw them out and put the vase some where.  All of these touched me deeply, but the one 73 years ago will travel with me to the streets of gold!

Mother cleaned houses as a side job and one of her clients was a lady named Paralee who was also a cousin to mom.  Paralee was also the neice of Aunt Helen and Uncle Skinny Lang.  Not real sure how all the blood lines worked in here, but I do know that side of the family had money.  That and the fact that Paralee and her husband worked and only had one kid.  On this particular birthday, Paralee wanted to see that I had a birthday party.

I am not sure how many kids from school showed up, but I do know somebody gave me a gift of a cookie cutter.  It was red plastic and the design was Cinderella.  I was ecstatic!  It immediately became my favorite possession.  Now you need to understand that growing up in Nickerson without benefit of running water in a house heated with a wood stove was not exactly the lap of luxury.  Gifts were few and far between and the cookie cutter joined the Chiquita Banana cloth doll that mom had gotten with coupons saved and then stitched  the pieces together by the light of a coal oil lantern.  I slept with the cookie cutter and the cloth doll.  I dreamed of the day when I could make cookies and cut them with my own cookie cutter.  

The dream of the cookies I would make was much like building castles in the air.  Sugar was rationed.  Since the cow had died, butter was non existent.  Store bought "butter" was a one pound block of white grease with an orange pellet that you poked a hole in and then worked it into the white grease so it looked like butter.  World War II left an indelible mark on most of us kids back then.  Our sole source of information was what we picked up listening to the adults.  I know I was too young to understand, but I can remember the jubilation when the war was over and our troops came home.  

Some how all the horror of Auschwitz and the pictures of the emaciated bodies of the Jews still lives in the recesses of my mind.  The stories that came out of that period must never be forgotten.  We must never again turn a blind eye on man inhumanity to man.   

And once more, my mind has turned a corner.  How did I go from a happy 7 year old at her first birthday to Auschwitz?  Could it be that perhaps this is where my passion for lifting the downtrodden  comes from?  I can clearly remember things that I should not remember.  I can hear Roosevelt announcing on the radio "The war is over."  I do not think it was actually him since the war officially ended after his death, but memory is a funny thing.

Momma always said that our mind will remember what our mind wants to remember and momma was right.  I want to remember a red Cinderella cookie cutter and a birthday party that may or may not have actually happened.  So, on my happy birthday to me day, that is what I will remember.  And I will see friends that love and care for me.  By the very act of clinging to life for 80 years, I have earned my stripes!

So Happy Birthday to me!  And rest assured, I am not done yet!  I may be the matriarch, but I am still 7 years old in my mind; an innocent little girl aching to grab the world by it's horns and make it her oyster!

Peace and love!

A Louisiana sweet roll

 I rarely think about husband #3 who also has the honor of being the only one to be #4 and the only one I had to divorce twice.  He is also the one who moved me to Colorado where I would thrive for the next 47 years and he is the one on my mind this morning.  Oh, not because of an undying love but because I woke up thinking about an old orange cabover that Kenny owned and taught me to drive.  We owned several of the big rigs when we were trucking early on in our marriage.  It only made sense that I should have some sort of an idea of what driving one entailed, so up in the cab I crawled with Kenny in the passenger seat.  

Now, I chose the cabover because I wanted to be able to see the road and the ditches and all that stuff.  A conventional has a big long hood and I am only a little over 5 feet tall so seeing the road was a challenge.  If you have never driven a stick shift, you will be lost in a truck that has 13 forward gears.  My Honda has 5 forward gears and I get along very well, but it is only about a foot off the ground and if I stretch my arms I can reach clear across it.  But I digress.

Charlie was an operator by trade.  Now an "operator" in this context is someone who operates heavy equipment like front end loaders, backhoes and stuff like that.  The big yellow ones you see on construction sights.  At the time of our marriage I owned a small cafe.  To get back on track, shortly after we married he took a job with Krause Plow and Implement as a truck driver.  His first assignment was to deliver a load some where in Louisiana.  Krause let the drivers take their wives if they wanted to, so off we went.  My first adventure!

The trip to Louisiana was only 300+ miles "as the crow flies", so we arrived at our destination late at night.  He found a place to park the tractor/trailer with "facilities" nearby and we crawled into the sleeper.  I was tired and slept like a log.  When I awoke the next morning I was alone.  Very soon I heard a rapping on the door.  Charlie had returned with a bag in his hand.  Inside  was coffee and a roll.  He was very excited about the roll!

"It is a sweet roll!  They are authentic Louisiana sweet rolls!  Here eat one!"  I took what looked like a biscuit that someone had forgotten to add the baking powder ingredient.  It tasted the same.

"This is not a sweet roll.  This is not sweet at all."  His eyes lit up.  

"I know!  Here!  You have to put honey on it!  That is what makes it sweet!"

And that was the highlight of the trip.  We did have that memory and every time I made biscuits after that, we had to have honey.  That made them sweet rolls.

Since coming to Colorado life has changed.  I am now widowed from husband # 6, but when I see a biscuit, I still think of old Charlie and how excited he was to introduce me to authentic southern cuisine in the form of a "sweet roll" that was really nothing more than a dry biscuit, but then isn't that what makes life interesting?

Momma always said, "If life hands you a lemon, make Lemonade.  Charlie taught me if life hands me a biscuit, make a sweet roll!

Our journey here on this planet is up hill and down hill, but when it is all said and done, it is the good times that we remember and it is our journey that shaped us into who we are.  And when the trumpet sounds I plan on having my little jar of honey just in case someone brings biscuits!

Peace!

Would you like something to drink?

 Sure.  An innocent question I ask or am asked quite frequently.  It is a social thing and accepted as harmless fodder in our day to day interactions with people.  Sure.  My drink of choice is water with ice.  An occasional soft drink on a hot day or a  big glass full of ice with tea goes good.  It has not always been that way.  Sadly I am one of those people for whom "a drink" means stay the hell away from anything that contains alcohol.  One drink is too many and a thousand not enough.

I learned very early on that if there was booze at the party it was not going to end well!  The boys in the crowd quickly learned that the best they would get out of me full of liquor was barfed on.  Dancing went out the window.  I became belligerent.  My first date with my first husband was spent with him holding my head while I wretched out the door of the car.  This was followed by me passing out and brother Jake taking me home, putting me fully clothed in the bathtub and throwing a blanket over me.  

I hated hangovers more than fried apples, which I loathe with every fiber of my being.  Every time I picked up a beer or mixed drink I told myself, "This time it will be different.  This time I will just have this one.  One.  Well, maybe one more."  And down the rabbit hole I went.  "90 miles an hour down a dead end street," so to speak.

I managed to function in my job because I limited my drinking to my days off from work.  I drank at home after the kids were safely in bed.  Since I was a single working mother with no child support I could not afford my habit.  Had anyone suggested AA I would have been offended.  Life has a funny way of putting us where we need to be at the time we need to be there and I am a prime example of that.

  My third husband brought me to Colorado and after about a year we divorced.  At that time I learned my first husband's brother was living in Pueblo with his wife.  Delvin and Nedra and I got together.  They were big on "AA" which is the acronym for Alcoholics Anonymous.  They attended meetings probably every day of the week and would swing by and share the "Big Book" lessons with me.  I explained to them that I was not an alcoholic because I did not drink.  He explained to me that being dry did not mean I was not an alcoholic.  I was one drink away.  And you know what?  He was right.

I would love to have a big red tomato beer.  Or a Pina Colada.  Or a Rum and coke. Or a fifth of rot gut whiskey and chase it with red Kool-Aid, but that is not going to happen.  I know myself enough to know that one drink is too many and a thousand are not enough.  I have overcome the nicotine addiction and put the cork in the bottle, so it is all down hill from here.  I just gotta' keep breathing, putting one foot in front of the other and some day the trumpet will sound and I will be out of here.  Keep my hand on the rudder and my eye on the prize.

Maintain.

Into each life a little rain must fall.

I remember back when I was a kid that life was so simple.  One of the highlights in my memory is crouching in the dirt and watching through the chicken fence as an old brown hen laid an egg.  I recall her looking at me a time or two and wondering if she was ever going to get done.  I do not recall it being any kind of "bonding moment" with the chicken, but in that few moments we were alone in the universe.  After she laid her egg and left the nest, I picked it up and took it into the house to momma.  While she was pleased that I brought her the egg she was upset that I had bothered the chicken it her egg laying business.

So, now to the crux of the matter.  Looking back I can see the folly of my experience.  First, laying face down in the dirt I was subject to all kinds of bugs and spiders.  Not to mention the fact that snakes also slither around chicken houses looking for prey.  And had the chicken not been engrossed in the act of laying an egg, she could have pecked my eye out!

Living on the farm was a constant learning experience.  The chicken experience was mild compared to the life and death struggle that went on constantly.  I recall the "dead animal wagon" coming to pick up our old Shetland Pony, Star.  Dad had gotten Star back when we lived on the Stroh place.  As I recall that was one of Dad's biggest follies.  He had gone into Hutch to join some of his old cronies for "a drink" and returned many days later with Star in a horse trailer.  That was the meanest damned horse that ever crossed the pike!  As Dad was unloading him he was kicking at the sides of the trailer and when he was finally on the ground, he made it clear that no one was going to set on his back! Or pet him! Or brush him! Or do anything but feed him and stay the hell out of his space!

We moved to the Strong Street house about the time I started second grade and Star died about a year later.  I recall the "dead animal wagon" coming to the house and the man taking a wench line out of the back of the wagon and into the barn.  Mother made us go into the house at that time and let us out as the truck left the yard with a horse leg sticking straight up in the air.  The demise of Star was complete.  He would be made into dog food.  I learned that from my school chums.  "Yes!  Dog food.  And his hooves will be made into glue."  Now how in the hell 7 year old kids knew that was beyond me, but it sounded true enough to me that I spent several nights crying myself to sleep, mourning a horse that was meaner than hell and no one could get near. 

There was a big Mulberry tree in the back yard there and under it I started a cemetery.  Donna squeezed a baby rabbit to death and  I buried it under the tree and put a stick to mark the place.  Dead birds were eulogized as well baby chickens that did not survive.  A mouse made it in also. And then I lost interest.  

Jake went off to the Army and I entered high school.  The days of sand and shovels were behind me.  Time to grow up and plan my future.  I would be a missionary.  I read about Africa and how the natives needed saved and brought into the grace of God.  Reverend Barnett gave me books to read.  I  learned that a lot of them were cannibals!  That kind of scared me, but at 15 years of age the world was my oyster!

And then I went to live with Grandma Haas, who was crippled by a stroke, and Great Grandma Hatfield, who was caring for her.  And the rest is history.

What a difference a day makes.

"Twenty four little hours.  Now there is sun and floweres, where there used to be you."  Those are words to a song.  Seems like that was a song that fit a lot of  situations back in days gone by.  It also fits a lot of situations today.  We are all given our lives and we set out on paths to either spend them wisely or fritter them away by doing nothing.

Sometimes we set off in one direction and then do a complete turn around and head some where  totally opposite of what we wanted to do.  Sometimes we end up doing things we never dreamed we wanted to do and it is a good thing.  Sometimes it is not.  

There is also the "random factor" that comes into play from time to time.  A train can pass harmlessly through a crossing every day at the same time for years and no one notices, but on the one day that  Mr.  Brown leaves his house 10 minutes late he arrives at the crossing at exactly the same time as the train and if he is slow to apply his brakes, it may very well be the end of Mr. Brown.  Some might call it "fate".  But is it?

Some speak of a thing called "pre-destination".   Do we come into this world at a predetermined time and exit at a predetermined time or is it all completely random?  Or is it a combination of both?  Have you ever experienced de javu? This may or may not be the proper spelling, but de javue is that moment in time where something is happening (or has happened) and you are thinking, "I have been here before!  I know what will happen next."  Maybe you can change the outcome and maybe it just plays out to a predetermined ending.

I like to think that I was placed here by a God who watches over me and keeps me pretty much in line.  You know, a God who loves me and wants only the best for me and I will live happily until one day when he gently reaches down, smiles at me and takes me by the hand to live in glory forever.  That is a very pretty picture and while I believe this to be mostly true, I do know he made one mistake with mankind.  He gave us free will.  And there, my friend, is my downfall!  Not only my downfall, but the undoing of every man, woman, and child on this earth!

I started out well with dreams of becoming a missionary and saving the lives and souls of the wretched natives in the wilds of Africa.  Had I clung to that goal, would I have succeeded or would I have ended up in a pot over a fire and become a meal for a bunch of naked natives in the outback?  What this all boils down to is this: CHOICES. Some of my choices have been made with no thought at all as to the eventual outcome.

Momma always said, "Hindsight is 20/20 looking back."  What this means is simply that I can now see what I should have done and the choice I should have made when Mr. Earl Duane Seeger asked me to dance that night at the Crow Bar.  But then, had I declined I would not have my little family of Debbie, Patty, Dona, Sam and Susie, would I?  I would not have my grandchildren nor my great grandchildren.  

While I do not see my kids very often during this Covid business, it does not mean I love them any less.  My choices now cover children in 3 states; Kansas, Colorado and Texas.  This past week my middle daughter lost a son.  This means I lost my first grandchild.  He made the choice to jump in the car and "run into town."  He had probably done this a hundred times before, but this time he did not come back.

While we will miss him we will remember the free spirit that was our little Joey.  With a heart full of love we will bid farewell to the life of a young man will never reach his full potential and will always be remembered as just Joe.  But then again, maybe he did fulfill his mission in life!  He taught us that love knows no bounds and that the mold was not built for everyone to fit inside.  

I will always remember the last time I saw him.  I was ready to leave and return to Colorado.  He was fiddling with his phone, but we have the understanding that when parting there has to be a hug, and an "I love you " said.  Even if we are in a hurry, or upset, or whatever.  Amicable partings are a part of life and always accompanied by a hug and an "I love you."  And I had that with Joey that day.

So RIP Joey.  Go fly free knowing that you were loved while here on this earth and will be remembered always in a special corner of my heart.

Grandma.

https://youtu.be/OQxRiv0jqmM

Facebook asked me and I said...

 Question on facebook this morning was "What is the one smell you can not stand to smell cooking?"  My answer was immediate, "Apples."  That is always my answer.  I can still smell the apples cooking in my mind.  My poor little Kenny never quite understood my aversion to the smell, but he learned to live with it.  When his mom was still alive and his sister Martha lived with her they would bake apple pies and invite us over.  Kenny usually went alone on those visits.

While he accepted that this would never be an apple pie house, I do not think he ever understood my reasoning.  It is not that I chose to hate cooked apples.  In fact I am alive today because of the apples that were gathered, stored in the root cellar, and cooked through the cold winter months to keep us fed.  I shall try to explain this to you so I can understand it myself.

When I smell apples cooking I smell poverty.  I smell a 2 bedroom house that was home for 8 people.  I relive itchy wool blankets that kept us from freezing.  I remember trips to the outhouse in the middle of the night and fearing I would be eaten by wolves or kidnapped by Gypsy's.  I remember heating water on a wood stove so we could wash dishes or take a bath in a tin tub.  Apples and Carp.  Foods that kept us alive.

But I do have good memories.  Those memories are triggered by crisp, cool air and a moon high above on Saturday nights listening to "The Grand Ole' Opry" with my brother on a car radio in the front yard of 709 Strong Street.  I love the twang of a flat top guitar and the mournful sounds of Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and all the old singers.  My world almost ended when Hank Williams died in the back of a car on the way to the Grand Ole Opry.  

The feel of sand between my toes takes me back to running along the road to the Vincent Sand Pit to watch my brother fish or swim in the murky water.  I never learned to swim, but I could bait a hook and catch a big old catfish!  Mostly it was Carp, but it was food for our bodies and nourishment for our souls.  The smell of the Lilac bush takes me to my Grandma Haas and Great Grandma Hatfield.

There were 8 of us back then.  Now there are 2.  I think back to the bygone days and while they make me nostalgic, they are also my salvation.  It was the ramshackle house and the poverty that shaped me into the woman I am today.  I like the think I am compassionate and caring.  When I see the poverty and homelessness of today  it makes me appreciate how much my mother sacrificed for us kids.  Not just me; all of us.  We got an education and learned humility and responsibility.  Mother gave us our basics and then pushed us off the branch like the momma bird does with her fledglings.  We all flew!

I like to think that my kids learned something from me.  They all seem to be responsible.  They are hard working.  I have never known them to take anything that was not theirs.  They give an honest days work for a days pay.  And the one thing I know and hope they learned also is that if God brings you to it, he will bring you through it.

Amen!

If I had known then what I know now.....

 

I met Earl Duane Seeger shortly after my birthday in October of 1960.  My brother Jake introduced us in a bar up the street from the house. I think it was the Crow Bar.  They used to have a thriving business and I remember once they had a Calypso band and I fell madly in lust with the little guy who played the Bongo drum.  Sadly, I could not hold my liquor very well and a bad case of "Four Roses Flu" hit me suddenly and I retreated up the street to the safety of the of my home where I worshipped at the feet of the porcelain throne.

Oh, but the night I met his friend, I managed to sip demurely on a coke laced with absolutely nothing but a couple ice cubes.  That man was drop dead gorgeous with a full head of blonde hair and the most beautiful blue eyes I had ever had the pleasure to gaze into.  And gaze I did!  He was freshly home from the Army and I was freshly out of high school.  His name was Earl Duane Seeger.

(Short note here: I was out of high school because I dropped out the beginning of my Senior year to devote more time to drinking and partying.  That was one endeavor in my life that I succeeded very well at.)  The match made in heaven ended in marriage 3 weeks later and we set up housekeeping in a one bedroom 3rd floor walkup.  

Needless to say, my party days were over.  Earl ,who I called Duane because that was his middle name  worked as a tree trimmer for a guy whose last name was Bean.  He had 2 brothers who also worked for Mr. Bean.  ( They called him "Navy Bean" but I am pretty sure that was not his name.)  They would go to his house every morning, go do their job for the day, and then come home.  Life was good.

The only thing that would have made it better was if I could have had a baby.  (Eventually that happened 5 times.)  Duane and his brothers left Mr. Bean and branched out on their own.  Life went on and 10 years later I returned to Hutchinson with my babies in tow.  Duane ended up buying land in Lakin, Kansas and making that his "base of operations."  We shared custody of the kids without benefit of lawyers and such, but it worked for us.

At one point he had a cafe in Deerfield where he lived upstairs and I had taken the kids to see him.  We had a relationship that while not cordial worked for us.  I remarried a couple times and he had girlfriends.  It was during his Deerfield days that I found that plaque above and thought how appropriate that was for him.  He hung it where he spent time in the  kitchen of his cafe.  It was not a working cafe, but it had lots of rooms upstairs for the kids and the stove and grill worked down stairs.  It worked for him.

After Deerfield he bought land in Lakin and moved onto it.  He moved a trailer house in for him, and then his mother who was a widow by that time.  A couple of the kids also moved trailers in and life went on.  It worked for him and that was the important part.  When he passed in 1994 at the tender age of 53 we were all devastated.  The kids brought this to me explaining that "Daddy read this every day and always kept it in the kitchen where he set." 

Now it sets behind the faucet on the kitchen sink.  It has been in my kitchen since his death.  The kids gave it to me and explained that "Daddy never stopped loving you."  I see it every day.  Earl Duane Seeger was my first real love.  He was the father of my children.   We could not live with each other, but we could also not live without each other.

Funny how that works.