You…Pig Snort!

Oct21

Supper would be later than usual for my family on that hectic fall afternoon. Unexpected afterwork delays and equipment breakdowns had strained my nerves and made my children irritable with hunger. Deciding to make a quick and easy supper of sloppy joes on sliced bread, I put a pound of hamburger into the fry pan on the stove. The phone rang and I answered it. While talking to my husband on the phone about our respective negative experiences we’d had that day, the frying hamburger started to burn. I howled with frustration. A greasy smoke haze filled the kitchen air.

From the living room next to the kitchen, I could hear my five- and nine-year-old children playing. Short-tempered because of their hunger, and perhaps as a reflection of their mother’s palpable aggravation, they seemed to be quarreling more than playing. Finally, the fight escalated to the point of total outrage and the angry child stuttered as she shouted the ultimate insult, “You, you, you PIG SNORT!” The insulted child stomped out of the room.

The absurd insult made me chuckle. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with being a pig snort, but being called one in that tone of voice left no doubt about your lowliness and despicable existence. Laughing seemed to reset my temper for the evening. Frustrations weren’t the end of the world. I clearly recognized that my children’s irritableness was a reflection off me. I reminded myself, “The saying is true…’If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy!’”

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I Have…VoIP!

Oct14
It sounded like an illness!

My sixteen-year-old brother took me for a walk when a man came to our farmhouse to install our family’s first telephone. I didn’t know what a phone was but knew how to get in the way and annoy people with floods of questions. That fall, I entered first grade.

I quickly learned that our phone was connected to something called a ‘party line’. That meant there were several families in our neighborhood who shared the use of one line.  

When someone on our ‘party line’ received a call, all the phones on the ‘party line’ rang. Each household knew who the call was for, because each household was assigned a different series of long and short rings. We were not supposed to pick up our phone receiver unless the phone rang our assigned rings. Some people liked to pick up to see who was calling the neighbor. They usually stayed silent, but sometimes there were background sounds. Mom called the people who listened in on other people’s calls, “Rubberneckers”.

If a phone conversation lasted a long time, no one else on the party line was able to use the phone until that call ended. When there was an emergency, like a farmer needing to call the veterinarian for a calving cow or his barn was on fire, the farmer would break into the conversation by saying, “Please get off the phone. I have an emergency!” 

Telephones evolved quickly. By the time I graduated from high school, all telephone lines were private. The new phones at that time came in many colors other than black. Instead of cranking the phone, we just used one finger to spin a dial to enter seven digits. Our calls were clear as a bell. Everyone had landline phones back then, so there were phone books in every home. These books gave the name, address and telephone number of everyone living in your community and were so handy!

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Perfectly Fine

Oct7

I slid out from behind the steering wheel and slammed the car door shut. The fall afternoon sunshine was so beautiful, I should have been out enjoying a walk on my country road. But a day off from my job at the hospital was often spent running errands. Once I completed my job list, I swung by the hospital to attend a meeting at the 7 North Unit where I worked. While on duty when unit meetings are being held, I was often too busy to attend.

I walked into the lounge where the meeting was being held, followed by two nurses who also had the day off. Our Unit Manager nurse slowly worked her way through the meeting agenda; a new doctor’s standing orders, changes in how to send certain lab samples, patient safety issues, and an update on computer-based training requirements. Her last topic: the results of recent patient-care surveys. Our patients were saying the care they received from us was good. According to administration, that meant we were falling down on the job! Afterall, why weren’t our patients saying we gave ‘very good’, or ‘excellent’ care on the hospital survey?

As an employee at the hospital, I was always aware that if a patient had a nurse or nursing assistant who was rude or gave poor care, that patient would see the entire hospital as being a bad place. Each employee represents the place where they work. A bad employee is like a weak link: a breaking point. The patients surveyed regarding their stay at my hospital didn’t say they thought our care was subpar. But according to the survey managers, our patients damned us with faint praise. Administration reacted to the survey report as if they had been given a mouthful of unsweetened, lukewarm oatmeal. 

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The ill Begotten Tree (Part Two)

Sep30

Half of the deck behind my house was covered in cool shade. A pleasant breeze passed by, temporarily teasing away the summer heat for the moment. Some friends dropped by for a visit. One visitor said, “It feels nice out here.” Everyone agreed, so we all sat down around the deck table. While admiring the yard, another commented, “I see that you have an apple tree in the flowerbed along the driveway.”

I glanced over at the tree and chuckled, “That poor tree has a funny story about how I got it and it has a sad story about what its life has been like in my yard.”

My friends were curious and wanted to know more. So, I told them the funny story first, about how one year I won a gift certificate to a local plant nursery in a “Largest Weed Contest” at the Central Wisconsin Fair. When I was declared the winner, one of the other contestants said I had cheated. My 25-foot wild grapevine aced his gigantic burdock bush. The judge of the contest promised Big Burdock Man that next year the contest rules would outlaw vines. I accepted the certificate as the winner, said “Thank-you” and escaped my fellow contestant’s burning disapproval by quickly disappearing into the surrounding crowd.

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The ill Begotten Tree

Sep23

Humidity made the air look hazy and my lungs feel airless. Early afternoon sunshine burned into my skin like a laser beam. Sweat poured out of my pores so fast, I felt the sensation of salty sweat tickling my skin as it gushed out. Glancing around my garden, I tried to remember all the garden products I had signed up to show at the Central Wisconsin Fair in Marshfield, Wisconsin.

Green beans were on my list. My goal was to find ten beans that were straight and identical in size. I stopped to think, “Did the entry form say ten, or twelve?” I was certain that I only needed one eggplant and for the tomatoes: three green ones, three ripe ones, and three heirlooms. Thankfully, I’d dug the potatoes for my entry, and harvested the onions yesterday. Finding identical sets of everything isn’t an easy job. Sometimes it is even impossible. Under my breath I mumbled, “I hate fair entry day!”

Eventually, I moved on to working my way around the yard to cut the flowers I planned to enter. The easiest to gather were three hydrangea blossoms, so I started there. When I eventually returned to my house, I placed my armful of cut flowers into the many vases required and began to gather up certain potted house plants. My variegated-leaf hoya plant was in bloom. That was something not every plant lover gets to see very often.

Jars of canned goods and crafts I’d worked on through the year covered the dining table. I had gathered them and fastened entry tags to each one last night. With everything assembled, it was now time to pack everything into my car.

By the time I arrived at the fairgrounds, I was a frazzled, sweaty mess, and I still had to unload the car and deliver the right entries to right department for them to be displayed. As I went to work, it occurred to me that every year, fair entry day was always hot and humid. And every year I hated the miserable day and the rush to bring everything, conforming to all the rules. The irony was that by the last day of the fair, the nights were often very cool.

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A Grace Seldom Mentioned

Sep16

I stood looking out of the window over my daughter’s kitchen sink. Watery, late April morning sunshine gave such pale light that it not only gave little warmth but seemed to leach the color from the backyard pine trees and the mud-rutted driveway. Three cars were parked near the house. One belonged to me, and the other two belonged to friends of my daughter. They were busy cleaning the house and doing her laundry so she could take care of her newborn baby. Three of my grandchildren sat at the kitchen table playing cards. Three others sat in the living room and the two-year-old stood next to her mother watching her nurse the baby.

Only just last week, the spring air felt more friendly. Warm, happy afternoon sunshine flooded into my dining room as my daughter gathered her children in preparation for leaving. At the door she stopped and said, “Is it okay if we drop off the kids on our way to the hospital to have the baby? They want to come with us because they said it was tradition.” I laughingly gave my consent. After all, it was my tradition, too!

The following week, our whole world turned upside down. My daughter’s husband died in a freak accident and their baby was born. Suddenly, people we usually only saw at church, weddings, and at birthday parties brought casseroles, salads, and desserts. They were coming to clean her house, help with the many other chores a mother has in raising a big family, and to keep her company.

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Waking up with a Kick

Sep9

After my tonsillectomy surgery was over, but before I was fully awake, two nurses put me on a cart and returned me to my room in the pediatric unit. I drowsily noticed that Mom and Daddy and my brother Billy were in the room waiting for me. Mom brushed the bangs off my forehead. Daddy stood quietly watching me with love in his eyes. At the foot of the bed, Billy discovered that the blanket covering me covered everything but one foot. Doing what was instinctive as a brother, he reached down and tickled my foot. My instinctive reaction was to pull back my knee like a piston and transfered all my energy into a well-placed kick.

More than a year earlier, I came down with a sore throat. This sore throat was different than any other sore throat I’d ever had. Besides being very painful, it seemed as though I couldn’t swallow anything. When Mom told me to open my mouth so she could take a look, she gasped, “Your tonsils are so swollen, they are nearly touching! I’m going to take you to see Doctor Kroeplin in Stratford.”

Mom’s reaction scared me; I cried. Then I got the mirror from the bathroom to look at my own throat. I saw two huge, red, shiny lumps of inflamed flesh covered with white streaks. They didn’t look like they belonged where they were. When Doctor Kroeplin looked in my throat, he said, “Kathy has strep throat. If it isn’t treated with penicillin, she could get rheumatic fever.” The large, bitter pills he prescribed needed to be taken daily.

I gagged easily and found swallowing pills impossible to do. To complicate things, penicillin pills taste terrible. Mom was desperate to get them into me because of what the doctor said. She tried to hide them in spoonfuls of apple sauce. The apple sauce went down, but I gagged out the bitter pill. Orange juice was a rare treat in our house, so she got some, thinking it would help me swallow the pills. I spit up the juice along with the pill onto the kitchen linoleum. I ended up having to go back to see the doctor to be given a penicillin shot in my rump. As much as I didn’t like that, it was better than swallowing pills.

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Eating Bonnie and Clyde

Sep2
Billy asked, “What do you want to name them?” I looked at their small eyes and listened to them snuffle before answering, “They look like they’re up to no good. We should call them Bonnie and Clyde.”

A section of wooden fence placed at an angle allowed people to be one step inside the pen to feed and check on the animals but not get their feet dirty in the muck that would quickly develop after a few days. I stared at the two lumpy looking, rather furless animals. My brother Billy asked, “What names should we give them?”

The animals made snuffling noises with their rubbery snouts. Unlike large-eyed Disney princesses, they had ridiculously small eyes fringed with blond lashes. I didn’t see them as endearing and felt no remorse at all knowing that when fall arrived, we would butcher them so we could have pork and sauerkraut meals, bacon for breakfast and breaded pork chops. I suggested, “They look like they’re up to no good. We should call them Bonnie and Clyde.”

The small building beside the machine shed where Bonnie and Clyde lived that summer frequently changed its purpose. Before reaching my teen years, I knew it as a chicken pen, goat hut, heifer lounge, and a pigsty. A row of windows on the south wall let in light. A door on the west wall allowed a person to enter to feed the animals. A door on the east wall allowed the animals to go outside to enjoy fresh air in a sheltered, fenced-in area behind the machine shed.

The pigs loved to eat, and it seemed like they ate everything, not only the pig feed that Daddy provided, but all the kitchen scraps that Mom put in a bowl for me to carry across the yard to them each evening. It took Bonnie and Clyde only a few minutes to chow down half-eaten hotdogs, broccoli stems, apple cores, potato peels, and fat cut off a beef roast.

Outside, beneath the south-facing windows, grew huge clumps of rhubarb, no doubt liberally fertilized through the years by a large variety of animal dung. In the spring, before returning the empty bowl to the kitchen, I’d yank out a stalk. Some of the stalks were as large as my wrists, and I loved dipping them into sugar and eating them!

As the days passed and the summer slowly blossomed, the nearby strawberry patch yielded huge, red, sweet berries. A row of cherry trees along the strawberries provided cherries for pies and the garden kept Mom busy canning. Meanwhile, Bonnie and Clyde grew fat. I sometimes watched them rooting in the soil behind their shed. Some days they were covered with dust, on rainy days they wallowed in muddy puddles. They seemed so happy, snuffling, grunting, oinking and making horrible squealing sounds when they fought over a tasty find in the mud.

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A Cole Cover and the Dam-port

Aug26
Imagine material covered with small blocks that look like this, but in the colors of blue and brown instead of red and black. That is how the material on my “cole cover” quilt looked.


Before being old enough to attend school, I slept in a crib suitable for newborns through their sixth year; one side rail down, pushed in a corner of Mary and Betty’s bedroom. My sisters mostly ignored me except when it was bedtime and I wouldn’t stop talking. At those times, I was told, “Shut up!” Sometimes I felt in the way. Sometimes they’d stop talking when I came into the room. Then one of them would say, “Little pitchers have big ears.” I wanted to know what they had been talking about. I was also confused, because I knew pitchers didn’t have ears. Then there were other times when they made me feel like their personal comedian. I loved that!

The new school year had recently started, so my siblings were gone all day, either at school or at a job. Each day, I spent hours following Daddy all over the farm as he did his work. He called me his little shadow. I chattered to him non-stop in my childish lisp.

One morning, Mom sat at her sewing machine. I didn’t know what she was making, but knew that whatever it was, everyone would get to see it when it was finished. That evening Mom held up the material I’d seen her working on. She said to me, “I made a quilt for you.” She’d taken an old, thread-bare blanket, folded it in half, and covered it by sewing new material on both sides.  To secure the quilt, Mom had used white yarn to make ties through all the layers every several inches.

 I wrapped the quilt around me. The material felt cool, but warm and comforting at the same time. The pattern on the material reminded me of the spade, club and hearts I’d seen on playing cards, but these were the colors of blue, brown, and white. It wasn’t big like other quilts we had in the house. It was just the size of my crib. I loved the immediate feeling of coolness when I wrapped myself in it, so I began to call it my, “cole cover”. What I really meant to call it was my cold cover. I became very attached to that small quilt.

I had a childish habit of pronouncing some words wrong. I said “cole” instead of cold. Instead of learning to pronounce these words correctly, I continued to say them wrong, mostly because two of my siblings, who were six and seven years older than me, thought I was hilarious. I loved the attention.

One weekend, three cousins came to spend the afternoon with us. They were all close to the same age as Mary and Betty. When I wanted to join the group, one of my sisters exclaimed to the cousins, “You have to hear how Kathy says some words!”

My sister ordered, “Kathy, say, davenport!” In 1955 the sofa in our living room was called a davenport because that was the name of a popular East coast furniture company who made sofas.

Like a little trained monkey, I grinned and said, “Dam-port!” My cousins howled with laughter.

My sister demanded, “Say aluminum.”

I proudly pronounced, “Alumin-num-num.” The cousins laughed again.

My sister instructed, “Now say, hamburger.”

I obediently responded, “Hamburg-ger-ger.” I honestly didn’t know to stop the repetitive num-nums and ger-gers.” These were alliterations born of compulsion. Everyone thought I was funny, but my moment in the spotlight was over.

Just as I was about to follow my sisters and cousins outside, Mom decided it was time for my Saturday night bath. I protested to no avail. Once in the tub, I lathered the bar of soap until I was sitting in a bubble bath. When Mom wanted me to come out of the bath, I strenuously objected. She eventually got me to exit the water, but not before my fingers and toes developed wrinkled skin.
Donned in a floor length cotton nightgown, I escaped the house. The older girls were playing a game of Seven Steps Around the House. I didn’t know the rules of the game and wasn’t convinced that anyone else did, either. There was a lot of shouting and laughter. The sun slowly slid down the sky and the grass under my bare feet began to feel cool and damp. We all trooped into the farmhouse.

I asked for my “cole cover” and someone handed it to me. I still felt clean, but I checked my toes to make sure. There was a blade of fresh grass between a big toe and the next. Brushing it aside, I pulled the beloved quilt around me and savored the cool hug from my friendly old quilt.
 
           
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I Took Off My Shoes

Aug19

As soon as the work crew left my house, I sank into my favorite living room chair and kicked off my shoes. The work I’d hired them to do in the dining room was finally finished. Leaning back, I planned, “Tomorrow morning, I’ll wipe away the construction dust on my kitchen counters and living room furniture. Then I’ll return things I had to remove from the room so the work could be done.”

Hours passed and dusk began to settle over the countryside. There was still dayglow in the sky, although the sun had set nearly an hour earlier. I got up from the chair to return a cup to the kitchen. Not wanting the cup to be stained by the last few drops of tea in it, I turned on the sink to rinse it out. Not a single drop of water came out of the faucet.

I suddenly remembered that I had turned on the water hose while the workers were still here, and I had forgotten to turn it off!  The realization made me shout, “Oh no!” Although I had a new well dug several years ago, and the drill rig went very deep, I have a low output well. It can run dry if I turn on a tap and leave it running constantly for over two hours. I’d started watering the garden at least four hours earlier.

Usually all I had to do when this happened was wait an hour or two and then go to the basement to turn the pressure pump back on. But running my well dry has happened so seldom that I forget in between times how to turn it back on. What I don’t understand is whether the switch moves to the off position when the pump kicks off, or if stays in the on position. I’ve been told the words “on” and “off” are printed by the switch, but there isn’t a light by the pump so I’ve never seen them. None of this wouldn’t be a problem if the pressure gage would go up when it is turned on. Unfortunately, there is no immediate way for me to know if I made the right decision or not! This has me not knowing what I’m doing.

My garden is inside of a plastic-covered hoop building, so I need to irrigate the plants each day. When I set up my irrigation in spring, I have to attach the drip tape to a headline, then attach the headline to a pressure regulator, then attach that to a 50-foot hose that has an easy on/off connection (for lawn mowing) to the last 25-feet of hose which is then attached to a water timer that is then screwed onto the outdoor water spigot.  The water timer is important. When I turn it on to water the garden, it stops the flow after a set time, thus preventing me from forgetting and running my well dry.

Every year I have problems with my irrigation system. No matter what I do, one connection or another leaks. I’ve tried many different things to prevent this. This year, whenever I tried screwing the water timer to the spigot, it leaked badly and soaked directly into the foundation of my house. My solution was to just leave the water timer off. I would have to trust my memory to turn off the hose.

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