Aunt Beck

 That was her name.  Just Aunt Beck.  If you walked past my house at 709 Strong Street and turned right at the dead end, went across the highway that ran to Sterling and followed the driveway up to a little white house, you would end up at Aunt Beck's house.  I do not remember her at all, other than she was a short woman with her hair in a bun.  Course all women looked alike to me in my memory.  Occasionally momma would make something and dispatch me to "Take this to Aunt Beck and come straight back.  Don't bother her."  

And that was what I would do.  Aunt Beck would open the door, take whatever I had, thank me and close the door.  It was not until many years later that I actually knew who Aunt Beck was and what her function was in the Haas Family migration to Kansas.  I knew I had a cousin named Ronnie Beck who lived in town and was in the same grade I was in while attending Nickerson Grade School.  A side note here is that he had very red cheeks.  Now those of you who know me know that I also have very red cheeks at times.  That makes me think that it is a Haas family trait.

Years later I was to learn that when a member of the Haas Family in Germany migrated to the United States that Aunt Beck was the contact person in Kansas.  The members the the Haas family would get in touch with Aunt Beck and she would put them in touch with whoever they needed to contact here in Kansas.  Mostly my ancestors settled around the Hunstville and Abbyville area.  But back to Aunt Beck.

Sometimes I would walk from my house to the highway to Sterling and go up to Cow Creek and wade around looking for seashells.  Oddly enough I found a lot of them.  Jake and I used to fish Cow Creek and he and his friends would go down a dirt road to a swimming hole.  I never swam and I knew they were down there naked (or so I assumed.) and I wanted no part of that!

Now a note here about the creeks and rivers in Nickerson.  It is bounded on one side by the Arkansas River, another by the Cow Creek and another by the Bull Creek.  Normally, the only one that carries any significant flow of water was the Arkansas River.  But in the Springtime when the snow melted in the mountains of Colorado, the runoff flooded the rivers and Nickerson became isolated.  At least I think it was what happened.  I know when I used to travel to Hutchinson in the Spring, I had to go 50 Highway because all the little creeks long 96 highway would be over the road.  Now what any of this has to do with with Aunt Beck is beyond me!  Back to the subject.

Now, I could bore you with stories of my lineage, but I will not.  The gist of this is mostly to satisfy my own curiosity.  There was a time, I would ask one of the grandma's or mother, but not anymore.  I have lost track of all the cousins and of course, all the aunts and uncles have long since passed to their reward, so I have to rely on genealogy and I am pretty lazy when it comes to looking thing up.

So, having consulted my book that has all the answers, apparently Aunt Beck was my great grandfathers first wife.  Or, she could have been a sister to his first wife.  Sure do not know who to ask at this point!  But anyway that is all water under the bridge and I could say about anything and there is no one around to dispute my memory.  That is the best part of being old!

So anyway, it snowed last night.  According to the old way of thinking, we have 7 more snows until we are done for the year.  Guess we will see.  

You all have a good day today and I wish you Peace and Prosperity for the coming year!

And remember, you cannot sprinkle showers of happiness on someone else without getting a few drops on yourself!

Me, covid, and liver and onions!

 That sentence right there breaks every rule in the English language!  That having been said, let me forge ahead with my tale.

Over the last 2 years I have become pretty much a recluse.  I venture out to the store and church and that is about it.  I am fully vaccinated, but I did contract Covid about a year ago.  I did not like it.  I was incapacitated for 2 full days and nights.  I would not call it "sick" because sick entails a lot of throwing up and I rarely get sick.  I did take to my bed for two days with respiratory symptoms that caused me to once more renew my lifelong commitment to God, Mother and the flag.  That was over a year ago!  I had a small gathering for Thanksgiving and a granddaughter tested positive for Covid, so she gathered her brood and left.  Her mother remained with me and she immediately tested positive, so we quarantined for about a week.  So...

I test weekly and wear my mask when I go to the store.  Now I have always been a fairly "out and about person", but Covid has changed that.  So I have decided to make a greater effort to be social again.

Last night I had my dear friends, Rebecca and Ron over for liver and onions.  I like to cook and I like to have people in for meals.  I think most people are gregarious and that old saying "No man is an island unto himself." comes to mind.  Now on to the jest of the conversation that led to this blog post.

The subject came up of the blog that I have, that you are now reading.  I used to write regularly, but now it seems my main thing in life is to doze in front of the television while Ken Jenning regales me with the afternoon version of Jeopardy! 

Well, to make a long story short, I invited them for supper last night and the fare was Liver and Onions.  A good time was had by all and I sent the leftovers home with them.  It was nice to have someone to talk to beside myself!  Conversation is defined as an exchange of ideas between two or more people.  Now granted, I do occasionally talk to myself, or sing out loud, but this is different.  I say something, then they say something and it goes on like that!  

So, thank you, Rebecca and Ron, for coming to my house and talking to me!  We will have to do this more often!  Next time I will cook something besides Liver and we will include Ross in the dinner party! That should be fun!

Peace!

December 23, 1983

 That was a very long time ago!  A lot has changed since then, but a lot has remained the same.  It is 0 degrees right now, then it was -8.  Kenny and Gene Baugh had been working on a drive line for the tandem dump truck.  They went to Pueblo Brake to pick up the repaired one and they were closed.  Gene went home and Kenny and I went to Canon City, picked up a marriage license and proceeded to the Senior Citizens housing where we found a retired minister to "do the deed".  

And here I set 40 years later.  Temperature is hovering around the zero mark with no hope of warming in the near future.  I am alone now in this house where I have lived for 40 years.  There are a lot of memories here.  Some are sad but they are mostly happy.  I used to have 2 dogs and a couple cats, but now I just have one cat.  I have driven the same car for 6 years and have no need to buy a new one.  I have one calico cat.  I don't want any other color.  Her name is Icarus and for those of you who know who that is, yes, I do know that Icarus was a male and yes, I do know my cat is a female.  Sherman named her.

It was so cold yesterday that the geese never left their house.  I opened their door, but they stayed inside the wire part.  I will not be surprised to find a dead goose out there today.  I have had those things since Bret was 7 years old and he is 31 now.  I do not know how long they live, but I am strongly thinking they may outlive me!

I started this yesterday and lost interest.  Today is actually the day before Christmas, or Christmas Eve as it is known.  I will not be going to church tonight as I have become pretty much a hermit because of Covid.  I had a friend stop by yesterday afternoon to tell me he would pick me up and take me.  He had a little trouble understanding that I am afraid of crowds.  Covid has pretty much left me crippled socially.  A lot of people do not understand what a panic I go into when I think of going into a crowd of people.  But it is what it is.

So today, December 24, 2022, I want to tell all my friends, Merry Christmas.  Sorry my phobia is getting in the way, but there you have it.  I love Christmas and I like to watch it from the safety of my home.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Peace.

Santa Claus is coming to town!!

 Momma said it so it is true!  It is funny how so many years later the things momma said, come back to haunt me!  Especially things like, "You can't judge a book by its cover."  "You reap what you sow." "Never look a gift horse in the mouth."

I am not sure a lot of them made any sense at all, but nonetheless they seem to pop up fairly regularly in my everyday life and they seem to be most apropos to a situation I find myself in at the moment.  Now do not leap to conclusions that I have gotten myself in a pickle again, because I have not.  My life seems to be spinning along beautifully and I hope that will continue and not go spiraling out of control as life sometimes does!

It is the Christmas season and while the birth of the Christ child never ceases to fill my heart with joy, there is all the fa de la that goes along with bringing out the best or worst in some people.  I do not buy into the trappings of the season.  I do not fight the crowds to buy a gift for friends just for the sake of buying a gift for someone.  I do that all year long and Christmas is reserved for the birth of the Christ child.  I go to church.  I come home.  I do not drive slowly by the houses that are ablaze with lights and the meter on the side of the house is spinning at top speed.  I do not fight the crowds at the parade or at the mall.  Covid is always in my mind.  I do not want that stuff!

I do spend time remembering when the kids were young.  As a single working mother with five kids, Christmas was not always as nice as I would have liked and the table was rarely loaded with the bounty of the harvest!  One Christmas we had corn dogs, because that was what the kids wanted and it was cheap!  Daddy usually took them over Christmas break and Santa was a little more giving at Daddy's house.  That was fine with me and has absolutely nothing to do with my memories at this point.

The saying "It is what it is", comes to mind at this time.  Not sure if it is relevant at all, but there is a lot of truth to that statement and it has helped me over more than one rough patch!  Gibby said that and he was a very wise man and one of my most trusted friends in the days gone by.  He was one of the first to die from AIDS.  His was the first panel I made for my Memorial Quilt which hangs in the Library on Abriendo.  

The saddest part of getting old is the dimming of my memories!  At least I think that is it, but then again I am blessed with selective memory!  I remember things very vividly, and while that may not be exactly how it happened, it is how I remember it.  Momma used to say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,"  and that is how I remember things.  My journaling may not be exactly how things happened, but they are what I remember.

"Never let your right hand know what your left hand is doing."  "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." But, the best of all is "It is what it is."  And there you have it in a nutshell.  

Christmas is coming and this will be 81 of them that I have lived through.  Will this one be different?  Of course!  They all are.  But 6 days after Christmas, I get another shot at doing it right.  New Years with the resolutions to "do better this year."  I used to quit smoking every January 1, but it never worked out because I had no willpower.  I finally quit, but I do not even remember the date, nor the year.  It has been a very long time though!

So, just in case I do not make it back to this site for Christmas, I want to wish you all a very happy Christmas!  Remember the baby Jesus.  I know different religions do things differently, but just know that all roads lead to the manger and then to the cross.

As Tiny Tim would say, "Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!"

Peace!

Hindsight is 20/20 looking back!

 My momma, the wisest woman in the world told me that years ago. I sometimes wonder if my kids will ever look back and remember anything I said.  I sure hope they do.

Growing up in a house that was home to six kids we all had our place in the hierarchy.  When my father married my mother, he had 3 sons from his first wife who had died.  They had been placed in an orphanage because he could not care for them.  The younger two were adopted into homes but kept in touch over the years.  The oldest left the orphanage at age 18 and mostly wandered the world.  

Of my family growing up, Josephine was oldest because she was the first born to my mother.  She had a different father than my dad.  Her father was supposedly a gangster in Chicago.  Who knows!  Then came Jake, who was the only son, simply because he was the only son.  Then came me, a bright and shining star on the roster of children!  Not really.  That put me in the middle child position which is not a place anyone wants to be.  But there I was, nonetheless.  Then the others who mostly tended to favor my father in coloring and mannerisms.  Donna and Mary were next followed by Dorothy who was the youngest.  Her sole claim to fame is that she was the last one born to my mother. 

Mary was always my dad's favorite.  There was never a question about it: It just was.  When Mary went to Junior High School and they had a dance, my dad went to town and bought her a beautiful white prom dress.  It was so soft.  Mary met and married her future husband when she was 13 or 14 years old.  He was 15 or 16 at the time.  I think.  I am a little foggy on the ages, but they were both very young. I do know I borrowed her prom dress when I married Earl Duane Seeger in 1960.

I look back down the road that I have traveled, and it makes me very sad.  My mother tried to give us kids everything we wanted and needed when she herself had been through trauma that I would never know about.  There are only two of us left, me and Donna.  I wonder if Donna ever thinks about our childhood.  I wonder if she remembers it the same way that I do?  I do know she squeezed a baby rabbit so hard once that it bled out its mouth and she put it in a drawer and covered it up with a washcloth, but it died anyway!

For the record, Lavender is still my favorite color, and my mother is still the angel that I remember.  The only difference is that instead of living on Strong Street in Nickerson, or on Avenue A in Hutchinson, she is walking on the streets of gold.  She is not in any pain, and she gets to look down on me and see that she raised a very strong woman after it is all said and done.  She is waiting for me to take that leap from here to where she waits for me.  I just hope she knows how happy I am that I was raised at her knee.

We all different mannerisms as is common in big families.  Josephine was the oldest, so she was bossy.  Jake was the only boy, so he was expected to do boy things, like chop wood, take the old tomcat that ate the baby chicken to the forest and chop off its head with the same axe, and mostly just do boy things.  He did let me tag along sometimes.  Of course, we all had to cater to Mary and Dorothy, because Dorothy was the baby, and Mary was the pretty one.  Mary was also Dad's favorite.    I do not think he liked me at all, but that taught me how to raise my own kids later in life.  

I bent over backwards to make sure that I did not favor one over the other.  If I spent $20 on one for Christmas, I spent $20 on each of the others.  Later my son pointed out to me that this was wrong.  I should have bought each one a gift especially chosen for them regardless of price.  He also pointed out that he was the only boy and should therefore be granted special status!  Little turd!

But this blog is actually about my high school prom.  Mom had somehow managed to get her hands on enough shiny polyester fabric in a beautiful lavender color.  She then scraped together enough to buy several yards of lavender net to pair with it.  She sewed me a beautiful prom dress all my hand with a pattern in her head!  It was beautiful!

It is at this point that the adage, "You cannot make a silk purse out of a cow's ear." comes to mind.  The softest net is very soft and lays differently than the cheap net that momma could afford.  When the skirt was stitched together with the bodice, it left the stiff net to completely encompass my waist.  What started out to be a fairy tale night, ended up being a torture.  By the time I got home to take the dress off I had a very raw waistline that was actually bleeding. It was packed away in a box under the bed and I do not know what ever happened to it. 

Lavendar is still my favorite color.  Always will be.  Lavender is still my favorite scent, and the beautiful fields of Lavender in Grand Junction is my favorite place in the spring.   

Momma told me long ago that my childhood would be what defined me in my later years.  She sure hit that nail on the head!  My experiences of those long-ago years guide me in everything I do in my old age.  When I think of momma it is always the house on Strong Street and the old wood stove and the ducks and chickens out back.  It is the Peach Tree by the chicken house and the treadle sewing machine and the Catalpa tree by the road.

Wonder it that is what heaven is like?  I sure hope so!

Peace!

Bamboo toilet paper at my house.

 For many years I used recycled toilet paper at my house.  I thought that was the complete answer to doing my part in saving the planet.  One day it came up in the conversation with a man friend and his son.  The son was most interested to know just how they went about recycling toilet paper.  I explained that it is made from recycled paper into toilet paper.  I buy this stuff online so it is purchased by the case.  Lasts a very long time since I live alone basically.

Now, recycled toilet paper is made from recycled newsprint and things like that, so the name is rather misleading.  Granted, if you are used to the thick, soft stuff like Charmin and other high dollar products, you are not going to like my recycled stuff, nor the bamboo that I am currently stocking my holder with, however, I am definitely on the environmentally friendly side of the ecosystem.

And, as for price I pay roughly $1.46 a roll for this. That is a bit more than what I paid for recycled.  Actually, I pay $1.29 for the recycled from Who Gives a Crap.  It is never easy trying to save the planet, but I try in little ways.

I actually prefer the bamboo because it seems to be a little stronger than the recycled stuff, but honey, my old butt is not real picky!

So, the point of this is, I guess my assessment of recycle versus bamboo is what I am trying to convey.  Bamboo is a very fast growing grass that is used in lots of ways, toilet paper just being the one I am familiar with in everyday use.  Not sure if any of these can be purchased at the local grocery store, but since I just got my shipment, I am good for a while!

I do think there is a product out there called Seventh Generation which is readily available on the grocery store shelf.  Or Walmart.  Or wherever you shop;

Oh, and either one is septic tank friendly which makes both myself and the man who pumps my septic tank happy.  So go forth today and think about what you are using in your kitchen and bathroom, and have a blessed day!

Peace! 

Getting ready for new beginnings!

 Tomorrow when I wake up November will be behind me.  The bad memories can rest until next year.  It is not like shutting a door and moving on, it is just closing a door and living my life.  It all sounds good, doesn't it?  And I really wish it worked that way, but it doesn't.

I sometimes long for the days gone by when the only thing I had to worry about was whether I would be scared when my brother hid and jumped out at me in the darkened path on the way to the outhouse in the middle of the night!  Or whether one of us would drown in Vincents sandpit where we were cooling off on a hot summer day.  Or whether one of us would choke to death on a bone lodged in our throat from the big old Carp that momma caught in the Arkansas River when she seined for our supper.  Or whether that green Peach I stole off the tree by the chicken house was going to kill me for sure this time.

I remember the rabbit hutches and the babies that grew to be our supper.  I remember the nasty old Muscovy Ducks foraging for a scrap of something in the bottom of the mudholes behind the house where the kitchen sink drained out a pipe from the house.  I remember how the big red rooster used to seek me out and chase me out of the barnyard.  I remember my brother putting the baby kittens in a sack and throwing them in the river.  He wasn't being mean, he was doing as he was told.  Momma could hardly feed us, let alone a bunch of kittens.

Momma always said that people are like the seasons.  Babies are born like the Spring and are fresh and new and flourish, but when we get old we are like the Autumn.  We lose our leaves and and become skeletal like the barren tree against a cold dark sky.  

I have always accepted life in that manner.  I look around at my friend pool, and it is about dried up!  That young girl that used to race out the door and down the street to dance all night has ceased to exist.  The auburn hair is white now and the barefeet that used to fly across the floor are encased in a pair of orthopedic shoes.  The catfish that used to be fun to catch, dipped in corn meal and fried has been replaced by some sort of white, flaky stuff raised on a farm somewhere in a spring fed lake.  Most meals are steamed and fried is a thing of the past.

Fall is here and Winter is on the way!  That means I have to be careful not to slip and fall and wind up with a broken hip.  I have no desire whatsoever to jump in a snow drift or even throw a snowball at the mailman, or mailwoman as the case may be!  A trip out back with a bucket of water for the geese is about all the excitement this old broad can handle!

But I remember!  The kids today will never know the joy of walking home from school in knee deep snow.  They will never know the joy of a pair of galoshes with fur around the top that Santa Claus brought to replace the black ones that Jake grew out of and passed down to me.  They will never know the closeness of sleeping in a bed with 3 other kids.  They will never know what joy a Saturday night bath in a big aluminum tub was!  

The older I get, the fonder the memories become!  Momma always told me that someday my childhood would be something I would look back on and smile.  Something that would bring me joy.  And momma was right!

Momma was always right!