To See Owls

Apr22

I stepped out of the garage and looked across the driveway at the house. It was dark and silent. My husband and children were in their beds and fast asleep. Earlier in the evening when Mom had called to tell me Daddy had just died, my husband Arnie and I decided that he’d stay home with our daughters so I could go to the hospital to spend time with family.

The balmy spring night breeze felt pleasant as I stood in the driveway thinking about my dear, sweet father. How strange it felt to have him gone. There wasn’t a sound, but I felt something approaching. I looked up and saw a huge horned owl swoop low over my head and then fly up to the chimney of the house. Having landed, it gave three, deep hoots and stared down at me.

My heart pounded as my mind flooded with memories of my childhood. It felt like the essence of Daddy was right there with me in the yard. Looking up at the magnificent bird, I questioned, “Daddy?”  The owl continued to perch on the house’s chimney and hoot. I knew the owl was just an owl, but it felt like Daddy’s spirit had accompanied the owl’s unexpected and unusual arrival.

More than thirty years later, my two bachelor brothers made me remember the spiritual feeling I had when I saw the owl on the night of Daddy’s death by going on a midnight quest to the woods to see owls. Both of my brothers suffered from Parkinson’s, and despite my calling to check on them frequently, coming to the farm to fill their pill boxes and doing many other things for them, they were not doing well. Pills were either not taken or too many taken. Hallucinations clouded reality at times. There were falls, burned meals and clutter everywhere.

At Billy and Casper’s visit to the doctor in March 2016, I was told it was time for me to have them move into an assisted living home. The night before the move, my brothers decided to walk in the dark to the farm’s wood lot about a mile behind the barn. Fortunately, they made it back home, but there were certainly falls, and one of them lost their glasses. The reason for their trip? “We wanted to see the owls.”

Continue reading →

Inventing Words

Apr15

Listening to the radio while getting ready for the day, I heard a man asking a radio talk show host if using A I (artificial intelligence) was a form of plagiarism. This piqued my interest. As a writer, I don’t want anyone to attempt to pass off my writing as their own or have anyone to think my work is generated by AI.

I could understand why the caller asked this question since I know that AI content is generated by patterns in existing data and established thoughts by original authors. AI’s electronic brain can quickly and easily imitate any writing, artwork or video faster than any human.

Is using AI a form of plagiarism? AI in my computer said that if A I content is used in anything, to avoid any suspicion of plagiarism it needs to be edited, cited, or clearly labeled as a standing book point for original work.

Can AI be as clever and inventive as people? For some souls, it might be a neck-to-neck race. But if we put AI up against a writer like William Shakespeare, there is no doubt that AI electronic synapsis will come up with work that sounds like Shakespeare, but without Shakespeare’s skill at feeding the English language new words.

Many articles that I’ve read about William Shakespeare point out that he used more than 20,000 words in his plays and poems. As many as 1,700 of those words were never used in the English language up to that time. The English people in the 1600’s mentally chewed on the new words Shakespeare used in his plays and poems, working out whether to continue using them…or not.

Like a mad scientist, Shakespeare threw together words, many already existing but never before paired up, like bed and room, or eye and ball. The word pictures he produced with the combinations increased audience enjoyment.

To some words, Shakespeare attached prefixes or suffixes. Fashion became fashionable, changing a generalized description of apparel to describe clothing that is attractive and popular. He added the word ‘in’ to ‘audible’ and the world learned what to call voices we hear but can’t make out.

Continue reading →

Spring Came Anyway

Apr8

The snow had melted, but the early April days remained overcast and dreary. In my brightly lit second-grade classroom Sister Michaeleen worked hard to prepare her large class of children to make their first confession and receive First Communion. There were prayers to remember, devout actions to memorize for a lifetime and a schedule to complete our preparations.

            For the Sunday on which we attended our First Communion, many of my classmates would wear an all-white dress and veil an older sibling had worn a year or two before for their own First Communion. A few classmates were getting a new white dress and veil. Every girl in class was atwitter with excitement. The boys just shrugged when they were told to attend First Communion Mass wearing dark pants, a white shirt and tie. Their mothers would take care of those details.

            “Now girls,” Sister Michaeleen reminded, “Be sure to wear your whitest stockings with your Communion dresses.” I looked down at the baggy, wrinkled tan stocking on my legs, and then across the aisle at Violet, a pretty girl who lived in town. She always wore white stockings.

            I hated how the tan stockings looked. It seemed to me that only girls who lived on farms wore tan ones. Tan or white, these stockings were held up with garter clips just above the knees. I had once told my mother that Sister Michaeleen wanted all the girls in class to wear white stockings every day. There was no fooling Mom with my ‘white’ lie. I was her seventh child.

            When recess bell rang, Sister sent us out into the parking lot playground next to the school with the instruction, “Practice your prayers!” My classmates and I paired off in groups and walked back and forth on the dirty blacktop under a glowering gray sky. Arm in arm we practiced saying our First Confession prayers, “Bless me Father for I have sinned.” Our First Communion would be soon, but I was a little hazy about when exactly.

That afternoon it started to snow shortly before Daddy picked us up from school. Snow and a sharp blast of wind entered the car before I could slam the door shut. Mom had come into town with him to buy a few groceries. She pulled her coat up closer to her neck saying with a shudder, “The forecast says this storm is going to be a blizzard.”

From my snug spot between Mom and Daddy in the front seat of the car, I asked, “But it’s April, aren’t we going to have spring? Sister said, ’April showers bring May flowers’!”

Heavy snow and wind made it hard to see the barn from the house by evening when  the milking chores needed to be done. In the morning, Daddy didn’t drive us kids into school because it had been called off due to the inclement weather. I overheard Mom and Daddy talking about not being able to go into town for something the following day.

Continue reading →

OCD Me

Apr1

Lifting a gallon of milk off the grocery store’s refrigerator shelf, I turned to put it in my cart when I came face-to-face with a nurse that I had worked with a few days before. Rosie had a toddler with her and a baby sitting in her shopping cart. Delighted to see her, and for a chance to introduce her to my daughter, Tammie, I glanced at my grade school daughter and said, “Tammie, this is the nurse I told you about. Rosie, this is my daughter, Tammie.”

They shook hands. We had a lovely visit, but soon went our separate ways as Rosie’s baby began to fuss. Rosie and Tammie were both born with TAR syndrome, causing them both to have elbow-length arms. Tammie’s hands sharply angled in, while Rosie’s did not.

On our way home from the grocery store, Tammie had many questions. The first, “Why are her hands so different than mine?” I explained that some people with TAR syndrome have surgery on their hands to ‘centralize’ them, which I suspect gives them a farther reach.

I began to tell Tammie that Rosie had seven siblings and that she had one sister who also had TAR. She and her sister never needed blood transfusions, nor surgeries to correct lower extremity deformities. My daughter wondered, “How can that be for someone with TAR?”

My explanation that evening became an often-repeated maxim, “All illnesses, syndromes and tendencies are experienced by people on a one to ten scale.” I tried to explain that what one person experiences with an illness or disability isn’t what everyone experiences.

In my mind, Rosie and her sister had TAR on the scale of maybe three or four. Tammie with all her blood transfusions and leg surgeries, had TAR on the scale of about six or seven. We also knew a boy with TAR who had hands coming out of his shoulders and was never able to walk independently. For those extra challenges I felt his experience of TAR had to be at least a nine on the scale of ten.

Continue reading →

Goats Go To Hell

Mar25
Kathy holding one of the baby goats.

The bright sun blinded me when I stepped out the back door of the farmhouse to go to the goat pen. My big brother who was keeping me company said, “Spring is here to stay. From now on it’ll get warmer, and then it will be summer.” I could hardly remember what a warm summer day felt like. I was so young that I was not allowed to wander around outside without an older sibling with me. Recently, the weather had been either cold and rainy, or mild and windy. The piles of winter snow in our yard had melted away. Our driveway looked brown, with gooey, muddy ruts.

As my brother led me toward the orchard, I noticed that the brown lawn behind our house was turning green and dotted with small yellow flowers. I wanted to go see the goats because Daddy told me that two of our nanny goats had babies last week when it was so cold that it rained slush.

The goat pen surrounded several of the apple trees in the orchard. As we approached, I could hear the deeper bleating of the big goats and the tiny, high-pitched calls of the kids. The babies were clambering around their mothers, stopping occasionally to suckle for a few moments. My brother opened the gate to let me in. I immediately scooped one of the inquisitive kids into my arms. It didn’t struggle as I hugged and kissed it.

Daddy kept goats on our farm for many years while I was growing up. When he wanted to breed the nannies, he hooked a small trailer to the car, and we visited a man who lived beyond the bridge which crossed the Big Eau Pleine River. I loved riding along with him to this interesting, magical place. The farmyard was near a cliff overlooking the river and was surrounded by lush trees and bushes. After loading the man’s billy goat in the trailer, Daddy and the man talked while I sat in our car. From under shady trees, behind banks of flowering bushes, I heard the spooky calls of peacocks and other exotic birds that the farmer raised.

The white billy goat we borrowed from the man smelled terrible. When he was at our place, Mom was reluctant to hang our laundry on the clothesline near the orchard, for fear that our clothing would take on the billy goat smell. My brother told me the male goat peed on his beard. I believed him because the animal’s beard was a dirty yellow.

I loved the goats because they were so affectionate when I played with them. Their strange, slit-shaped pupils made them look intelligent. These beautiful animals were curious and loved to climb and nibble on everything. Daddy provided a wooden ladder and stacked wooden boxes for them to jump on. The borrowed billy goat was so feisty that when Daddy went in the pen to milk the nanny goats, he would rear up onto his hind legs in a threatening way.

Continue reading →

Obligatory Meals

Mar18

Niki arrived just as I finished vacuuming. She walked into the house holding a pan and asked, “Do you have room in your refrigerator for this? It needs to be baked, but not until an hour before we eat.”

Joining my daughter in the kitchen, I explained, “My refrigerator is pretty crowded, but maybe I can move things around, so it will fit.” We spent the next five minutes moving things around on the shelves. Dozens of half empty jars of condiments crowded together on the top shelf with a box of milk, a large bowl of Jello and a bottle of wine.

On the next shelf down were three or four mysterious, long- forgotten boxes of leftovers. I couldn’t remember what was in one of the boxes, so I threw it out. The other boxes looked more recent. It felt wrong to throw them out because they weren’t moldy yet, so I put them back. Closer to the front of that shelf were boxes of newer, still somewhat appealing leftovers. To the far left was another cluster of half-empty jars of relishes, pickles, jars of dried vegetables, fruit, and nuts, as well as chia and flax seeds.

The next shelf down contained two dozen eggs, a rack of ribs waiting to be roasted, a box of fresh vegetables, and a precariously balanced pan of apple crumble. It didn’t look like Niki’s pan would fit. My refrigerator is a cluttered mess even when I’m not hosting a family potluck gathering.

Taking a step back, I shrugged and suggested, “It’s cold enough today that we can use my unheated front porch as a refrigerator for a few hours.”

Managing the contents of a refrigerator is hard to do. Sometimes leftovers get forgotten on the backside of a shelf, in a true case of, out of sight, out of mind. It doesn’t help when the leftovers weren’t enjoyed very much when they were fresh. Another problem is that every family member seems to like different condiments. Every member of the family has an aversion to being the one to not eat the last pickle, olive, or forkful of kimchi.

Continue reading →

Droplets of Blood

Mar11

I had one thing on my mind that morning: to write my article early in the day for a change. Spending the evening in my office writing when I should have written much earlier wasn’t the way I wanted this day to end. I expected to have a calm morning and afternoon working at the computer. Murder and mayhem were the last things on my mind.

Sitting down at the desk, I checked a note pad on my desk for writing topics. The two white and black feline siblings with whom I share my home jumped onto my lap. Sadie licked my hand and almost touched her nose to mine. Jerry decided that he didn’t want to share my lap, so he pushed Sadie aside. His unspoken message was clear. Sadie jumped down and Jerry quickly positioned himself on my left arm and shoulder. I looked down at the cat and informed him, “Jerry, you know I won’t be able to type with you there.”

I noticed two small dark-colored splatters on the screen when I opened my computer’s Word program. Although small, the spots looked like splashes. I took a Kleenex and wet it with glass cleaner and what I wiped off turned the Kleenex red. Startled; I suddenly leaned forward. Jerry slid off my shoulder and landed on the floor. “That looks like blood! Where in the world did it come from?”

Finding random splashes of blood in my office was unnerving. I frantically pondered, “Whose blood was it? How did it happen to be shed?” Only one thing was certain, the blood wasn’t mine! I would have noticed if I had sprung a leak and unexpectedly began spurting blood! I didn’t see any more drops of blood, so I got down to work on my next article.

Continue reading →

The Call of a Dead Chicken

Mar4
SQUAWK!

Snow no longer thrilled me, especially the kind we had now that it was March. No longer soft and fluffy, snow from December and January lay in hateful patches of slick spots in the driveway where it had been packed down by car and tractor tires. On the back lawn old snow lay in dirt-stained, sodden drifts of grainy ice-pellets. The melting weather last week had reduced a snowman I’d made earlier in the winter near the backdoor of the farmhouse, to something that resembled a tree-stump made of ice.

I loved Saturdays because I didn’t have to go to school, but this morning I had a case of the late-winter blahs. We hadn’t had fresh snow for a couple weeks. Snow we had earlier in the winter was half-melted away. When I went out to play in the yard, not only did I get cold, but I got muddy, which I hated! The sticky mud was horrible. I stared mournfully out of my bedroom window at the farmyard below.

My apathy disappeared instantly as I noticed ice-ferns had grown in the corners of the windowpanes during the night. I reached out to touch the tip of one feathery fern. My warm fingertip melted a small round spot. I admired the beautiful, frosty designs. Then I realized that if we had a cold night, the mud in the farmyard would be frozen. I decided to bundle up and go outside.

Walking across the frozen mud-rutted yard made me wobble and almost fall the way I did when I tried to walk over a rockpile. My first stop was the barn. Daddy would be doing his morning chores. I loved to follow him as he worked. He was using a hay fork to put hay from the mow in front of the cows. The cows were conversationally mooing, snorting and flipping small tufts of hay with sassy tosses of their heads. The barn felt comfortable, but I knew there was no furnace. My brothers told me that all the warm animals in the barn made the air warm.

When Daddy left the barn to feed and water the chickens, I followed him. The chickens were funny to watch, but they didn’t fascinate me like the cows did. It was also my opinion that chicken manure smelled worse than cow manure. Sometimes the birds picked on each other. That morning Daddy found a dead chicken. He wasn’t sure why it had died.

Continue reading →

Snuggling Madison

Feb25

Awake, but reluctant to leave my warm, cozy bed, I rolled over and hugged my teddy bear. Betty and Mary, two of my big sisters who shared the bedroom were up and getting dressed for the day. I stared up at a window-shaped patch of sunlight on the wall above my bed. The wall had been painted a pretty color, but the bright sun and the dancing shade of a tree branch made it look even prettier. I smiled at my bear’s funny little face and kissed it.  I heard my sisters walking down the stairs and Mom asking, “Didn’t Kathy get up, too?”

I wasn’t stubborn. I just didn’t want to get up because I was comfortable. Last night when it was bedtime, I fought going to bed as usual. It was hard for me to say why I didn’t like bedtime, other than I disliked not being awake.

 “I’m not stubborn about bath-time, either,” I assured my teddy bear. Mom always had a hard time getting me to take a bath. But once she got me to sit in the warm soapy water, I loved it and never wanted to get out. I hated how cold my freshly bathed, damp body felt after a bath. That sort of cold was dreadful.

A surge of love made me hug the teddy bear and say, “I love you, Madison!”

One year ago, one of my big sisters on the verge of leaving for college became very sick. I was frightened and didn’t understand what was happening, or if she would ever get well again. I heard the grown-ups whispering things like, “brain bleed” and “…needs to go to the big University hospital in Madison.”

Weeks later, Mom announced that a miracle had happened. She prayed for my sister to be healed, and my sister ended up not needing surgery. She could now go home, but the University Hospital was far away from our farm, and Daddy was busy. My sister’s boyfriend said he’d take my mom and me to Madison to bring my sister home.

I liked my sister’s boyfriend because he was always funny and when I was around, he would pay attention to me. Despite the excitement of traveling and having Jim joking around with me, the trip to the University Hospital in Madison felt like it took forever. The hospital was so huge that while we waited for my sister’s paperwork to be done, we visited the hospital gift shop. Not only was I surprised that there was a store inside the hospital, but I discovered that it was better than my favorite stores in Marshfield: Woolworth’s and Ben Franklin’s Five and Dime.

Continue reading →

Triple-A

Feb18

I planned to do three errands after my weekly three o’clock appointment. By the time I finished my first errand, night had already settled over the parking lot. I shivered as I walked to my car. For the last several days the temperature in Wisconsin was often below zero in double digits. Today a brisk wind made this Siberian weather unbearable and very dangerous.

Once inside the vehicle, I decided to forget about the other two stops I had planned to make. I was cold and tired. All I wanted to do was go straight home. Cars are dependable these days, even during cold winter weather, so I confidently pressed the starter. Instead of hearing the familiar purr of the car engine, all I heard was an unfamiliar clicking sound! The car didn’t start. I had hoped the heater would make me feel warm as I drove home, but now I didn’t even know how I was going to get home. I felt betrayed. My trustworthy car had let me down!

It didn’t take me long to assess the situation. My preferred car repair shop was nearby but already shut for the day. Who could I call for help? My immediate family is extremely light on adult men who could come to my aid. At this point, I realized that I was losing feeling in my fingers and toes from the cold. I have a sister who lives in Marshfield, so I called her to see if one of her sons could come to my aid.

I was ready to abandon ship and hitch a ride home, leaving my car where it was. But if I got a ride home, then how would I get back into town tomorrow? I had no faith that my car could be easily resurrected. As far as I knew, it was dead and hopeless. My sister said she and one of her sons would be with me in a few minutes. She had more confidence in my car than I did, telling me that her son would be able to get it started. My face was now feeling stiff with the cold, which made it hard for me to talk, so I walked back to the store where I hoped to warm up. Frostbite was a real danger in as little as ten minutes because of the extreme cold and wind.

Continue reading →