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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Groundhog Day At the Airport

Aug12
Parlez-vous Fracais?

A lilting tune violently tore me away from deep slumber. I resentfully opened my eyes to total darkness. The crisp white bed linen wrapped around me and the huge bed that surrounded my body didn’t feel familiar. In the darkness nearby, I heard my daughter, Tammie, say, “Mamma? Wake up. It’s time to get going.” She turned on the bedside light next to her bed and the brightness blinded me. The last twenty-four hours instantly came back to mind. It had been late when we entered this room and now, while it was still the middle of the night, we had to get up and leave.

Despite the two huge, five-acre sized beds in the room, there was only one bathroom. I told Tammie to use it first. While waiting for my turn to use the bathroom, my thoughts drifted back to yesterday morning. I was up before seven A.M. The alarm clock hadn’t even gone off. Instead of feeling relaxed and looking forward to a day spent on the cruise ship, I mentally listed all the things my daughters, granddaughter and I had to do before disembarking in Quebec City, Canada. Our lovely week spent on a cruise ship had come to an end.

I felt uneasy because I didn’t know how the day would work out. Since our flight at the Quebec airport didn’t leave until the afternoon, Tammie said there was time to use a Hop-On-Hop-Off bus to tour the city, but there would not be enough time to get off at any of the stops. I wondered what we would do with our luggage while on the tour bus. I didn’t know where we had to go to get picked up by the bus. I worried about getting to the airport on time.

The cruise terminal agreed to hold our luggage for a small fee while we went sightseeing. A parking lot bus took us to a spot near one of the tour bus stops. Surprised that everything was falling into place, I relaxed and looked forward to seeing a bit of Quebec City. We didn’t know where the tour bus pick-up was, and all the signs in Quebec are in French. None of us could read them, so we walked several blocks before realizing we had walked a long way past the pick-up spot.

Finally, the bus came. I didn’t want to sit in the sun, so I stayed on the lower level, but Niki, Tammie and Claire sat on the top deck where the view was better. The name, Quebec, is an Algonquian word. These were the indigenous people who lived there when Europeans arrived. In their language it meant, “Where the river narrows.” Quebec is also the name of the province where the city is located. When speaking about Quebec, it is necessary to differentiate which one is being mentioned, Quebec City or the province.

The bus followed a highway that had me swiveling my head to see everything. Below and to the left was the Saint Lawrence River; to the right was a steep cliff that towered over the bus. I saw something on the cliff sparkling in the sunshine. The earbud guide said that in 1540 when French explorer Jacques Cartier saw this sparkling cliff, he was convinced he was seeing diamonds. He gathered some of the stones. But when he was back in France, he was told they were just quartz crystals. Despite that disappointment, the place is still called Cape Diamond.

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It’s All Fun!

Aug5
Our tour of Quebec was on a sunny day. Tammie sat on the top deck. The view from there was excellent, but unfortunately she was painfully sunburned!

Tammie pulled out her phone to take notes, and I had a tablet when we sat down across from each other in the living room. My daughter stated, “Let’s get this all figured out tonight, because shore excursions filled up really fast before our last cruise.” I did remember. There had been some excursions that were fully booked by the time we looked at what we wanted to do!

I also remembered that we had managed to schedule shore excursions at each port of call. The things we saw and did were fun, but when our ship pulled out of dock, I wished that Tammie and I would have had time to visit the town built around the port. Also, the cost of all those shore excursions had doubled the cost of my cruise.

That night, Tammie and I agreed that the only excursion we really wanted to go on was the one that would show us where the story about Anne of Green Gables took place.

Three months before taking this cruise, I had had my right hip replaced. Walking suddenly felt good again. While aboard ship, I surprised myself by walking a few laps around the promenade deck with my daughter, Niki. Although walking was painless, I was out of shape. Our first port of call on Sunday morning was Portland, Maine. Tammie said, “The church where we will attend Mass is just a few blocks from the dock.” What I failed to remember or maybe didn’t realize was that the distance was all uphill! I wasn’t used to that type of energetic walking.

We stopped often and rested along the way. When we arrived at the church, we were told, “Because today is Corpus Christi, Mass will take place at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception.” He pointed uphill and said, “It’s just a block or two up that street.”

In Halifax, we bought tickets for a Hop-On, Hop-Off bus. This line of ancient, double-decker buses had a set route through the city, stopping at several places of interest. By the time we finished going through the Halifax maritime museum, we only waited five minutes for another bus to roll up.

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Anne of Green Gables

Jul29

Blindingly bright afternoon sunshine streamed through the large western window into my living room. I pulled the drapes shut. The afternoon was warm, and my old brick farmhouse could retain coolness for most of the day if Istopped the sunshine from coming in and toasting the living room carpet. The sweet aroma of baked chocolate chip bars filled the air.

While transferring laundry from the washer to the dryer, I heard the back door of the house slam. My daughters were home. My husband, Arnie, would soon be home, too. I congratulated myself on good timing. The dessert bars were cooling on the counter, and the family supper would be ready in about an hour.

I walked into the living room with a basket of laundry that needed to be folded and found my twelve-year-old and sixteen-year-old daughters lying on the living room floor watching ‘Anne of Green Gables’ on television. Sitting down on the sofa, I pulled the laundry basket closer to me. Tammie popped up at my knee and asked, “When will we be having supper? We want a chocolate chip bar!”

Shaking the wrinkles out of a pair of jeans, I admitted, “I couldn’t resist eating a small wedge of it when it was fresh from the oven. We won’t eat for another hour. Cut a small serving for yourselves. I doubt it’ll ruin your appetites.”  Pausing the VHS tape, Niki and Tammie jumped to their feet and ran into the kitchen.

Buying the ‘Anne of Green Gables’ VHS set with Meghan Follows as Anne, had been a wise decision. My daughters watched the series repeatedly. I loved watching it with them. Both daughters swooned over good-looking Gilbert Blythe. They became frustrated with how Anne Shirley treated him. We all laughed when red-haired Anne smashed her school slate over Gilbert’s head when he called her ‘Carrots’. Anne did many foolish things like confusing a jar of raspberry juice with raspberry cordial. As a result, her greedy ‘bosom friend’, Diana Barry, got very drunk. We cried over sweet, gentle, Matthew’s death and Marilla regretting her decision as a young woman that ended her relationship with John Blythe.

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Mid-West Gourmet

Jul22
Escargot, a.k.a. snails

The hostess led me, my daughters, and granddaughter though the busy dining room to an empty table. Outside the many dining room windows that lined the huge room, we could see choppy, blue-gray water rushing past our ship, the MS Zuiderdam. We had left port hours ago, and were now traveling through the open, northern Atlantic Ocean.

Once seated, and with cloth napkins spread open on our laps, our waiter handed us menus. The starters listed that evening were jumbo shrimp cocktail, tomato and red bell pepper bisque, escargot Bourguignon and lentil Tabbouleh salad with feta. I ordered, “The escargot, please.”

I knew what I was ordering. My appetizer that evening would be snails floating in garlic butter, accompanied by a four-inch-long bun that looked like a small loaf of French bread. Many people refuse to eat escargot because they think they would be slimy and disgusting. I discovered that the little snails are delicious, and not slimy at all! I ordered escargot twice on my most recent cruise.

Having grown up on a dairy farm, I know where milk, cheese, butter and ice cream comes from and how it is made, but when I got home from my trip, I started to wonder if there was such a thing as a snail farm. I knew I had to do some research after a person asked me, “Was the escargot slimy? Because, after all, a snail is just a garden slug that wears a shell.”

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Know Your Neighbor

Jul15

Rain splattered against the kitchen window. I peered through rivulets streaming down the screen. Water-logged trees and bushes in my backyard were whipping back and forth in strong gusts of wind. Feeling chilled despite the warmth of a summer afternoon, I picked up my sweater from the kitchen chair and pulled it on. I felt bored and restless. There were plenty of household chores that I could do, but I didn’t feel like doing them. 

My daughter, Tammie, was sitting on the sofa in the living room busily doing a Japanese thread craft called kumihimo. I glanced around at the dim lighting and turned on a lamp. Chuckling, I said, “I’m turning into Grammie Altmann. Do you remember how she’d always tell us to turn on the lamps because doing close-up work in poor lighting would ruin our eyes?” 

Holding up the braid she was working on for me to admire, she admitted, “Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, but I’m starting to understand where she was coming from. My eyes feel a little less strained when the light is on.” 

Pulling the drapes shut and turning on another lamp, I complained, “I feel bored. There are plenty of things I could do, even fun things like working on my latest jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t feel like doing any of it.” Sinking down onto my favorite chair, I pointed the remote at the television and turned it on. Flipping from one channel to the next, I quickly concluded that there wasn’t much that was interesting to watch.  

One channel featured a reporter standing on a busy, big city, street corner, asking people passing him to answer some basic questions. Curious, I paused my channel flipping. The reporter asked a young woman which country was north of the United States.  She frowned, scratched her head and after a long pause uncertainly questioned, “Ummm. Alaska?” My daughter and I exclaimed in disbelief. 

Other questions the reporter asked were just as simple. He asked, “How many eggs are there in a dozen?” “How many quarters would you need to have two dollars?” “How many ounces are there in one cup, one pint, one quart?” “What country borders the USA to the south?” No one gave the correct answer to any of the questions.  

I exclaimed, “Don’t people learn any of these things in school anymore? This show makes me wonder. At the hospital, to determine if a patient is confused, nurses often ask patients questions like, ‘who’s the president of the United States?’ If someone just doesn’t know, does that mean they are confused?” 

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Vacation food

Jul8

Our daughters had wandered away to play in the living room when they finished eating. My husband and I continued to sit at the table discussing our plans for the rest of the day. Arnie told me where he was going and what time he’d get back home. My response was, “What would you like for supper tonight, hamburgers in mushroom gravy or chicken?”

Arnie turned to look at me with a startled expression on his face. He exclaimed, “My gosh, woman! Don’t you ever stop thinking about food? We just finished eating a meal and now you’re already thinking about eating again!”

I responded indignantly, “Do you somehow think that the meals I make are whipped up in half and hour with no planning? The meat is frozen. It needs to be thawed out. Then it must be prepped and roasted or fried long enough for it to get done!”

To be fair, the only ‘meals’ that my husband ever made were fried eggs, fried freshly caught fish or cheese and sausage sandwiches that he hastily slapped together during a commercial. The ingredients Arnie needed to make these meals were always magically found in the kitchen when he wanted them. He didn’t seem to recognize that it took planning ahead on my part when buying groceries.

Shortly after our daughter, Niki, was married, she commented one day to me about how hard it was to constantly make meals. I knew what she meant. Making one meal is easy, but looking ahead to making a lifetime of meals is intimidating.

Through the years, Niki became a pro at planning and making meals for a large family. Every summer, she takes a vacation with her children. Since eating every meal at restaurants would be very expensive, my daughter makes meals ahead, freezes them, and packs them in ice-filled coolers. Motel room kitchenettes are small and inconvenient, but she manages to provide her children with good, home-made vacation food.

My other daughter, Tammie, and I took a cruise last year. When we got home, we talked non-stop about the wonderful meals that we were served aboard the ship. This year when the opportunity for us to take another cruise came up, I invited Niki to join us. She accepted the invitation and commented she couldn’t remember when she last took a vacation that didn’t require her to make meals ahead that had to be frozen and packed in an icebox.

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