Grocery shopping has sure changed from 1950's.

Back when I was 12 years old Flemings grocery store  and Berridge IGA (?) had contests.  IGA was for a trip to St. Louis and when you bought something you had so many points to vote for the contestant of your choice.  That contest was won by Irene Reinke.  As a general rule, we did not shop at IGA because that was the store the "rich people" shopped at, so mother did not vote for Irene.

Flemings had a contest where you turned in labels from cans of a certain brand of food.  I stood outside the store and pushed for people to buy that brand, then save the label and I would go by their house and pick the labels up and put them in my stash.  Now, the city dump was different than dumps are today!  The powers that be would designate a place as the city dump and if you wanted to dispose of something you took it there and threw it on the pile.  People also went there to paw through the "stuff" and pick out good stuff.  My idea of good stuff was labels from cans, which I tore off and took home to my stash.  My stash grew bigger every day as I waited for the closing day when I would turn them in to be counted.

Now there were 2 prizes in my contest.  One was an English Racing bike which was for a boy which meant it had the bar across the frame.  Girls were open in that area.  The other was a radio.  I had my eye on that bike and nothing was going to deter me.  When the day arrived I took my labels in to be counted and I had almost 3 times as many labels as the boy who came in second place.  In all fairness, he was livid.  He had been beat by a girl and now that girl walked away pushing a boys bicycle while he stood there with a stupid radio.  Yes, I pushed that bike all the way home.  My sisters were so envious.  I pushed it around the block.  I pushed it into town and pushed it home.  I never had ridden a bike before and when I tried to stand with my feet on either side of the bike, it was not happening.  That damn bar was higher than my crotch.  But at no time did I think about trading it for the radio.  I just let that boy eat his heart out as I pushed it past his house.

And then the tires went flat because there are a lot of goat heads on Strong Street.  Mother could see no reason to have the tires fixed because it was apparent by this time that I would never ride that bike.  No one ever rode it until I gave it to a boy named Johnny Isabel who lived in Hutch and I do not remember how I knew him or why, but I  made a deal to sell it for $5.00 which he never paid me, but there you go!

Back to the grocery store, we always shopped at Flemings.  They had a locker plant inside the store where one could rent a small freezer to store extra food that was not canned or dried.  Things, like meat.  Not that we ever had meat, but if we did we could have rented a small cubicle, which we never did because meat was a rarity at our house.  Well, Jake would get a rabbit now and then, but not worth renting freezer space for the short period of time it took to go from dressed meat to the table to digested and forgotten.

There was a barrel for dried beans, onions, potatoes and such item.  You put what you wanted in a brown paper sack and took it up and had it weighed.  We were always careful with the brown paper bags because they were reused over and over.  Milk bottles were refilled.  Pop bottles were returned for a deposit that had been paid when the pop was purchased.  Lots of times we walked the ditch along the highway to find bottles that were discarded by people who were too lazy to return them to the store.  Seems like the deposit was only one or 2 cents, but it was free money and we could buy candy at Engle's store.  The display case there was filled with boxes with tops removed.  We pointed to which ones we wanted and the items were placed in a small brown paper bags.  A nickel was usually over half a bag.  As kids we never worried about "spoiling our appetite"  because evening meals were few and far behind at our house.

Don't get me wrong, poverty sucks.  No food sucks.  Wearing "hand me downs" sucked.  Walking every where was a pain. Easter was the only time we could ever hope to have anything extra and that was Easter Eggs.  We had chickens that were laying hens so eggs were fairly easy to come by.  Sadly eggs were either sold or cooked into something that could be shared among the 8 of us, but at Easter we got a whole egg and sometimes, if times were good, a chocolate something that resembled a rabbit.  I will go on record as saying my mother tried harder than anyone else in the world.  She went to clean houses every day and never asked for anything in return, except that us kids were fed.  She paid the lady up the street 50 cents a week to babysit the little kids.  Dad hung out at the pool hall, but as long as he was there playing dominoes, he was not home screaming at us to shut up.  No television back then, so creeks and haylofts and the cemetery  were our playgrounds.

Damn, I miss that life. .When I can not sleep at night, I run up and down Strong Street.  I spy on Hank Windiate(sp) and Jake Smith.  I listen to Rudolph Reinke singing in German as he did his chores.  I see the chickens scratching in the dirt for some hidden scrap.  I watch Joe Hedrick roping calves over on the corner.  But mostly I just watch for my momma to come home.  I have quit waiting for her and now anticipate the trip I can make to see her again.  I want to see her hazel eyes and hold her thin, long fingers.  But mostly I just want to see her smile when she comes to meet me.  And yes, momma, I am bringing the tomato soup made the way you like it with home canned tomatoes and milk.

This post should be titled "Inside the mind of a madwoman."  I woke up this morning thinking about today being Jiriaya's first day in daycare/preschool.  Then my mind moved to a grandson who is estranged from his kids and they are being raised by my daughter, his mother and how sad that was.  And then I flashed back to my teens when my brother and I got drunk on rot gut whiskey and red Kool-Aid and how I can not drink red Kool-Aid to this day.  Then I flashed to the next time I got drunk on wine.  I was divorced and living in Hutchinson, Kansas and working at the Red Carpet Restaurant as a cook.  That hangover lasted 5 days.  Now, the point of this post is for those of you who think I do not drink and that butter would not melt in my mouth.  You are wrong.  What I want you to take away from this is several things.

Liquor by itself is not bad.  Liquor in small does is probably alright, but liquor in some peoples hands is like a stick of dynamite in a gunpowder warehouse.  It is not good.  Both of these hangovers are burned into the deep recesses of my mind.  Let's face it, when you can remember a hangover that happened 40 or 50 years ago like it was yesterday, that is a hangover from hell!

I have been married several times, as most of you know.  And the majority of those men were alcoholics.  (Mother always said that the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic was that the alcoholic had to go to those damn meetings.  So with that definition in mind I must rephrase that to read that most of those men were drunks.)  Henry was not, he was just a jerk.  Kenny was not and we were together 20 years when he passed.  He must have made an impression because I have only dated one man since than and that relationship was strictly platonic until he passed.  He did kiss me a couple times, but I am not sure why. Then I hung out with a younger man who took me hiking and things like that, but that one petered out without even a handshake.   And I am not sure where I am going with this, but bear with me.

Oh, I know.  I have now been wide awake for one hour and 49 minutes, drank half a pot of coffee, gone from preschool to hangovers to death and am now thinking about the 2 half sheet cakes that are down in the freezer waiting for me to finish frosting them, but I had a thought when I got up of something I wanted to impart to you, so let me think what it could be.

Oh, this is to my daughter who is raising 3 grandkids and to the father who is letting her.  And to anyone else out there who thinks walking away from responsibility is a good thing.  Thinking drugs are the answer.  Thinking other peoples feelings do not matter.  There are several things I have learned in life and one of them is that God will never give you more than you can carry.

So when I walked away from a 10 year marriage with my kids in the back seat of a 1959 Chevy and all my belongings in the trunk, I was scared to death.  I knew my mother would not let me live with her very long so the first item on the agenda was to get a job.  Easier said then done, but I walked into Skaets Steak Shop where I had washed dishes before I married and told them I was an experienced waitress.  If you lie with a straight face and do not waver, people tend to believe you.  And thus began my career in the restaurant business.  I held my little family together that way.  And now years later I see history repeating itself.  You all know that my youngest son is an adopted grandson.

My hat is off to my daughter who is now the security of 3 kids that belong to her son.  For whatever reason, sometimes people take a wrong turn and sex and drugs seem to be more important then the kids at your knee.  Selfish wants replace love and family.  Temporary feel good moments replace the fulfillment of the children we sired.  And someone has to step in and pick up the pieces.  My daughter and her husband are doing that.  Not because they want to, but because they do not want to see her grandkids separated and placed in foster homes.  I did one kid, but she is doing 3.  So that makes her 3 times the woman I am.  Daddy pops in long enough to make noises that sound like he might actually step up to the plate, but then he doesn't.  The kids do not understand that.  But my daughter does and so does her husband.  So they are the security  for the kids and some day it will all work out.  In a perfect world the Daddy would get a job and set up a home for the kids.  And maybe the mother would do that.  Right now it looks like that is not happening.

So while I may know how things should work, they don't and there is nothing going to change anyone's mind so I guess I will just call it a day and go tend to my own knitting, as mother used to say.  It will all come out in the wash, or not.

There is more than one way to skin a cat.

I woke up this morning with the cat on my head.  Naturally, the first thought in my mind was one of mother's famous sayings:  "There is more than one way to skin a cat!"  Now let me go on record as saying, I have never skinned one; nor do I ever intend to do so but I have been known to flip the sheet so she flies off of me and onto the floor.  Trust me, she does not stay there.  I have had a lot of cats in my life and everyone of them has been devoted to me.  Well, mostly.

All of my cats have been Calico cats and so they were females, because all Calico cats are females, or so I have been told and it has been my experience.  I did at one time, have a male cat named Boots and I do not think he liked me at all.   He was a gray and white striped cat.  He was pretty much Kenny's cat.  I think Kenny always wanted a cat, because at one time he got a white Spitz dog and named it Kitty.  That dog did not stay with us very long and moved on to someone who actually wanted a white dog.  Except for that dog from hell, all animals that find their way into my home are here for the duration.  If you doubt my sincerity, you might want to take a look at the 8 geese residing in my back yard.  I do not even know how old they are.  My guess is about 16 or 17 years old because I got 3 geese when Bret was a wee lad and he now has a wee lad of his own.

Now I have Icarus.  I know Icarus was the little boy in mythology whose parents gave him wax wings and he flew to close to the sun and they melted, but I did not name this cat.  He was named by Sherman who liked the name and did not think anyone else was smart enough to know who Icarus was, but there you go!

But back to this cat skinning business.  Many years ago when I was in grade school and the body still bent, we had a Jungle Gym on the playground and one of the favorite things to do was swing by our arms  on the bars then do a thing called "skin the cat" which entailed pulling our feet up putting them behind your head and sort of turn ourselves wrong side out and then drop to the ground without breaking your neck.and not totally dislocating your shoulders.  As I write this, there are many things flashing through my mind.  One of which is the knowledge that we wore only dresses back in those days so when we were swinging on the bars and when we were turning ourselves wrong side out the perverted little boys were all setting on the ground watching us.  Holy shit!  How damn stupid were we?

Or were we naïve?  I am thinking naïve fits the bill a lot better.  I like to think that the days of sand and shovels were also the days of innocence and freedom. I do not know when the innocence ended for me.  Seems like about the second year of high school.  That was when I became friends with a girl named LaVeta.  Her dad made home brew and I really liked that.  She taught me how to shop lift.  I learned to dance.  I learned to smoke.  Life was good!  I dropped out of school in my senior year.  I ran away.  I broke into a gas station and stole the money out of the cigarette machine.  I had friends and what friends they were!  Sadly none of them showed up for court.  But on a good note, my downward spiral was ended at that point and I became a functioning member of society.  It was not until many years later that I became a respected member of the human race.  Which brings me to the lesson for the day.

"That is water under the bridge."  Been there.  Done that.  Sometimes the water under the bridge is low and just amounts to a stagnant puddle that just breeds mosquitoes and other vermin.  But that a clean rain falls and fills the creek and the puddle is gone.  Water under the bridge.  You can look at it and move on because in due time the cleansing rain will wash it all away.  Or not.

Even the mud puddles are different here in Coloradol

It rained the other night and I have to confess, it scared hell out of me.  Seems like when I was a tot back in Kansas, rain was more frequent and softer.  In Colorado, it seems to be either feast or famine, so to speak.  We lived about a mile from Bull Creek and it always had water in it, but when we got a good rain the little Bull Creek became a raging torrent and overflowed it's banks and came up the highway clear past the sand pit and almost to our corner.  I remember wading up the highway and the crawdads scooting away from me.  The scoot backwards, you know.

Strong Street was dirt.  Well, all the streets were dirt in that area.  Mostly the dirt was soft, but when it rained it would have puddles standing on it.  (Having a little problem here with proper English.  Do the puddles stand IN the road or ON the road?  Since they were on the road that sounds right, but since the actually were a part of the road they could be in the road.)  You choose.

Any way, after a rain the puddles were there and the sun shone brightly on them.  Now I am sure some of the water seeped into the earth, but it took a while and I remember seeing pollywog's swimming in the water, but it could have been mosquito larvae.  Who knows.  There is something so primal about wading in a mud puddle, that it defies description.  To feel the cool mud ooze between my toes was second only to walking on dried mud.

I do know that eventually the water was gone and the sun beating down on the puddle would cause the silty dirt to dry and crack.  The cracks would the curl on the edges and separate.  If I could be really patient, the sun would continue drying and then I was left with a big dried out patch of curled up mud.  The happiest memories are in the remembering, and I can still close my eyes and recall walking very slowly across the dried up mud in my bare feet.  The fragile mud curls made only a tiny crackle and I would walk slowly back and forth to be sure I mashed them all.  I have not had an experience like that since I left Nickerson.

Mud in Nickerson was also good for making mud pies.  The mud held together because parts of the road had clay.  My best friend, Barbara had a brother who nicknamed me "Mud Pie" and that name stuck until we went to high school.  Just happened to remember that.

The reason I am thinking of this is after our rains, there is a place in my driveway that water stands in for a short time.  I was looking at that yesterday, and the quality of the mud is not the same as Nickerson.  And for some reason, I do not see it making the curls like Nickerson mud made.  I suppose there is more gravel in my driveway.  Nickerson was sandy, hence the Sand Hill Plum Jelly that the Amish make and sell.

So as I start my day today, I will put on my shoes and socks and not even look at that puddle over there.  Some things can only continue in our memories and the days of sand and shovels and mud pies are over and are best left in the far recesses of my mind where I can use them as my safe place when life becomes too tedious and I need to escape.

B & D Carryout helped raise my kids.

Debbie and I were talking today about how parents do not always raise their own kids and it turned to my early years of being a single parent.   I know I was working at the Red Carpet and I was off on Sundays.  Through the week I worked the morning shift, came back and helped through the supper rush and then went down on South Main to sack bread at the bakery.  When you maintain a schedule like that, days off are a definite luxury so it was important that they be savored.  Now I have to say I was not very good at attending church, but I made sure the kids got on the bus every Sunday morning for their religious training.  But Sunday afternoons were special.

The fishing poles were always in the trunk of the old black Ford.  There were no such things back then as car seats so the kids just piled in wherever they fit.  They climbed back and forth across the seats, hung out the windows and generally just made a nuisance of themselves.  Of course they were hungry.  They were always hungry.  They were always hungry, always thirsty and always needed to pee.  It was all just part of the living thing back then.  They were kids and that was all they knew.  But any time we had a little time to kill and a little gas in the car we were good.  Gas was like 20 cents and the Ford could go 20 miles or more on a gallon of gas, so life was golden.  The only thing the old car lacked was an actual floor board on the drivers side.  It had a lot of floor, but it was mostly holes.  Well, no radio and no heater or windshield wipers, but it ran and that was what mattered.  Well, stopping mattered and the brakes worked most of the time.  I guess it was a way to get to the B & D Carryout out on fifth street where dinner awaited us.

Now keep in mind that coffee was 20 cents a cup and a hamburger at McDonalds was 19 cents.  At B & D Carryout I would purchase 8 hamburgers and French fries.  The bottom of the box was covered with French fries and then 8 hamburgers were placed on top of the French fries.  Each hamburger had a pickle slice and a squirt of ketchup.  That was it.  For this I paid $1.00.  Try and feed a family of 6 for a dollar today.  Not happening.  You are probably thinking that those were some damn little hamburgers, but you would be wrong.  When a rag tag carload of people are off for an afternoon of fishing and playing in the sand, there is no better meal to be had and the memory of those afternoons will some times pop into my mind at night and make me so homesick I cry.

How I would love to turn back the hands of time and be given another chance at raising my kids.  There would have only been one husband and father and there would have been college funds.  No home made clothes and no hand me downs.  There would have been a bedroom for each kid with a bed and sheets and blankets.  There would have been a puppy and kittens.  I would have read them stories and taken them for walks in the park.  We would have filled the pew at the Presbyterian church on Fourth Street.  And there would not have been a B & D Carryout.  Of course there would not have been fishing trips either.  So would the trade off have made that much difference?  Do my kids enjoy life because we went fishing  or would they have been better off going to college?  It is all irrelevant now.  There is no going back, so I guess I will just try to remember it as good times.  I am old enough now that I can get my fishing license for $1.00 at Walmarts.  I bought a new rod and reel and a new tackle box, but for some reason, they have not been taken out of the shed.

Mother said it best.

When we were kids on Strong Street, life was so simple.  In the winter we filled the water buckest and set them close to the wood cook stove in the kitchen so they would not freeze.  When it snowed it snowed and if the snow was deep Mother sent Jim Davis to the school to walk home in front of us so he could break a path for us.  Dad couldn't do it because he was busy playing Dominoes at the "Recreation Hall ( which was another word for "Beer Joint") in town.  Back in those days cars only had rear wheel drive which was the precursor to front wheel drive or all wheel drive.  Let's think about that concept a moment.

Rear wheel drive meant that all the power was in the back axle and the steering was in the front axle.  So basically, a car was propelled from the back and steered by the front.  Only time you actually had control of where you went, was when you went backwards.  OMG!  Isn't that how life is lived?  It sure is!  How many time have I looked back and thought " I should have done that differently!"

Which calls to mind several things my momma used to say and I could not understand them back then, but as I gain in age and wisdom, I am actually getting pretty damn smart.  There are 2 that spring to mind today for some reason.  The first one is  "As you sow, so shall you reap."  And the second is  "Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind."  I was naïve back when she would tell me this.  She explained it to a nine year old girl in simple terms, "If you want to eat a tomato, you have to plant a tomato.  You can not plant a turnip seed and get a tomato."  That was simple enough back then when eating was the most important thing in my young life.  And later when I was married to the "love of my life" I could not make the correlation.  That saying had no meaning in my life through the next 4 husbands either, but now that I am on the down hill slide, I can see it all very clearly.  Whether it has been the roughly 45 years of learning that has been drilled into my head or just the culmination of life that woke me up, I do not know, but here I am dispensing wisdom to anyone who will listen!

So let me explain the "sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind" as I understand it today.  During the Vietnam War years, I waved my flag and demanded they "bring the boys home".  You see how that worked out for me.  When the powers that be decided to end it, it ended.  Gay rights came and I waved my flag.  AIDS hit the scene and I demanded care.  Martin Luther King, Trayvon Martin, Civil Rights; it was always something.  Now it is immigration and ripping babies away from mothers that has me stirred up.  Always demanding.  Always thinking my voice matters.  But does it?  Probably not.  I am on facebook, but I do not appear too often, because when I do I piss somebody off.  Mostly I defend as a "Libitard", but occasionally I get personal.

My last marriage taught me all I need to know about living a peaceful existence.  He respected and trusted me, and I returned the faith and trust.  He was my friend.  Sometimes he would need to remind me that I could not save the world and that Don Quixote tilted at a lot of windmills in vain.  I no longer have Kenneth as my rudder, but I do have my faith.  Social Justice is my thing and I pretty well stay away from people and their personal problems.  I adhere to that "Do not judge me until you have walked a mile in my shoes."

Trouble with the husband?  That is between the 2 of you and as long as it remains only the 2 of you, you have a chance.  I guess you could put it on facebook and let people vote on it, but when it is all said and done, it is between 2 people.  I equate facebook to the whirlwind and the poster as the sower and reaper.  I guess life could be simple if both parties were to post the saga as they perceive it in their mind.

"Geraldine does not fix meals I like.  She is always on the phone.  She is lazy.  I have to clean house.  She loves the dog more than she loves me."

"George   doesn't like the same food I do.  He is always wanting to talk when I am on the phone.  He is lazy and does not clean up after himself."

These are little things in themselves, but they become bigger than the whole.  George and Geraldine have planted little seeds.  Each one is harmless in itself, but as they lay in the ground festering, they become all consuming.  They do not discuss them, just water them with words and watch them grow.  And then comes the day of harvest.  The gentle breeze of yesterday is now the whirlwind of today.

Mother said other things also.

"Clean up your own house before finding fault with the neighbors house."  (Am I blameless in this or did I do something selfish?}

"The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence."  (Ever watch a cow standing in knee high grass and straining at the fence that separates the 2 fields?)

"Try to get that toothpaste back in the tube."  (When hateful words are hurled there is no getting them unsaid.")

And of course there is the Golden Rule!  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  and let me end this with what my oldest daughter says:  "What doesn't kill you, will make you strong."

Death is final.  There is not compromise after that.  The dead one inevitably wins because they got in the last word.

Just some things I am throwing out there today.  Take it or leave it.

Where are the Kleenex?

I know you will not believe this, but there was a time when there were not Kleenex!  Worse then that, there was a time when there was an ironing board in every home and an iron in every plug in.  Before that there were pieces of iron which were shaped in a rather triangular manner and placed on the wood stove to be heated to use in the chore of getting wrinkles out of clothes and other household items.  The clothes and other household items were first washed in a washing machine (God I love the way we used to name stuff for what it was used for in the home!)  The clothes were then hung on the  (get this!) clothes line to dry.  When they were dry the ones we did not want to have wrinkles in, were sprinkled.  It was called sprinkling because we put water in a "sprinkling bottle"  which had a top on it with tiny holes to let out tiny sprinkles of water.  See, when the clothes dried with wrinkles in them, they had to be dampened and ironed on the special board  (hence the term "ironing board).

A little aside here, back in the days that this went on a woman was judged by how white her whites were and the uniformity of how her clothes were hung on the line to dry.  There were 2 kinds of clothes pins which held the clothes on the line.  They were both wooden.  One type had a spring and it pinched open, was placed over the item on the line, and then released to hold the item in place.  The other was also wooden but just slid down over the item.  It was best if you had only one kind, because that is just how it was.  A drop of "bluing" was put in the second rinse water to make the whites appear a brighter white.  We even had sets of tea towels which were used for drying of the dishes back then.  (These also required being ironed.)  That was way before automatic dish washers.  The tea towels were embroidered in one corner to denote what should be done that day.  As I recall, the litany was:
 "Monday, wash day,"
 "Tuesday Iron day",
"Wednesday Mending Day",
 "Thursday Shopping Day",
"Friday Cleaning Day",
"Saturday Baking Day,"
 "Sunday Worship Day".
And the world pretty well turned on that unless there was a death or something else equally catastrophic.  Iron day was always special.

Mother would sprinkle the clothes the night before, usually.  Then when she got home in the evening the ironing would commence.  First was baby clothes, then little girl clothes, then boy clothes, men clothes and household things that needed ironed.  But what was really special was the little ball in the corner of the sprinkled clothes.  That was for which ever one of us that had been the best and begged the hardest.  It was the handkerchiefs!  Since there was no such thing as Kleenex, when we needed our nose "blown" mother would whip the handkerchief out of her pocket and pinch it over our nose and tell us to "blow."  ( A little aside here.  I was always hoping I was the first to use that particular handkerchief  as I did not want to have my nose any where near where someone else had undergone the ritual of nose blowing".

But there seemed to be magic in the ironing of the handkerchief.  They had to be square and have no wrinkles.  Most of them were women's  "hankies" because men mostly blew their nose into the air and pinched it off.  Gross, grosser, grossest comes to mind.  Women's hankies usually had a hand crocheted edge.  They were also of thinner fabric.  Each one of us girls took pride in the handkerchief ironing, because we were preparing for the day when we would be the lady of our own home and have our very own iron and ironing board.  Back in those days everything was preparatory to the day we would marry a wonderful man and spend our day making him happy and keeping his home.  So it was always  with great pride that I presented my freshly ironed handkerchiefs to mother and waited until she inspected each one and told me to put them in the "handkerchief drawer."  My life at that point had meaning!  Ah, but time marches on now doesn't it?

Today we have a washer and special liquid soap designed to remove stains, followed by fabric softener to remove wrinkles in the dryer along with removing static cling.  The iron is downstairs, or in a cupboard some where and it really is not needed if you get the clothes out of the dryer in a timely manner.  This did not happen overnight.  As I recall, I tried to get my girls interested in the fine art of ironing and they thought I was nuts.  As for handkerchiefs, those are replaced by Kleenex that are disposable.  And why on earth would we want to reuse a hanky when Kleenex goes in the trash and is added to one of the 697,000,000,000 + piles of trash floating around in our sweet earth today?

I long for the good old days when we actually used stuff that made sense and called it by the name it was used for at the time of use.  So many things in my kitchen are now obsolete, ironing board just being one.  My mangle is a collectors item.  Where are all the rolling pins?  Potato peelers? Lemon juicer?  Sausage stuffer?

Maybe I am the one that has outlived my usefulness?  Ya' thnk?