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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Dreaming of my Love

Feb14

I put down my book, more interested in sleep than reading and knowing what happened next in the story. With the bedside lamp turned off, I snuggled into my favorite sleep position. A thin stripe of yard light shone though the bedroom windows onto the wall nearest the bed. The alarm clock on the bureau slowly ticked, measuring out the seconds and minutes.

The last thing I remembered was squirming to adjust the pillow under my head and the angle of my hips. Suddenly I found myself in a dream world with Arnie, my late husband and my two daughters when they were in fourth and eighth grade. We were so busy going places that I had trouble completing a satisfying conversation with Arnie. At the social functions we were attending, all of us were with friends, separate from each other.

Each time I spotted Arnie in the crowd, I felt a burst of affection. It was like the crowd was in monochrome black and white with Arnie being the only one in full color. I wanted to shout, “I love you. I miss talking with you. Do you still love me?”

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Fighting For Control

Feb11
The vase on the left is the new one. The one on the right was made in Door County.

Tammie parked her car and turned to me and asked, “Are you excited about our class?” A hot, midsummer sun baked the Door County parking lot.

Not sure how to answer, I wrinkled my nose and shrugged before finally admitting, “I wouldn’t describe how I feel as excited. I feel more nervous than anything, because I want to do well, but I don’t know if I have what it takes.”

 Inside the pottery shop next to the parking lot, we found our instructor preparing a pottery wheel and gathering supplies for our appointment. My daughter had arranged this class for us because I wanted to experience using a pottery wheel. Making one clay bowl wouldn’t make me an experienced potter, any more than watching brain surgery on television would qualify me as a brain surgeon, but I wanted to feel damp clay and make something beautiful.

Our teacher was in his fifties, had a bushy, salt and pepper beard and a durag tied around his head. His clothing was spotted with dried clay and paint. Shelves on both sides of the narrow room were full of different types of clay, paints, and other supplies. Next to the pottery wheel was a water faucet and below it, a drain in the floor.

After greeting us, our instructor handed us plastic aprons to wear, then went back to work. He explained, “Properly centering clay on the wheel takes a lot of practice. Since this is a onetime class, I’m doing it for you.” After demonstrating how to sit at the wheel, he explained that it was very important to keep our hands wet as we worked with the clay.

Tammie and I took turns at the wheel. Frequently dipping our hands into a bowl of water and a lot of assistance from the instructor we each managed to make an unremarkable small bowl. Before taking my last turn at the wheel, I commented, “I’d really like to make a small vase.”

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‘Hip A Hoola’

Feb4

I arrived at the nursing home while my mother was working with a physical therapist. Her nurse for the day encouraged me to go to the physical therapy gym to watch Mom doing her exercises.

Mom looked tired and a little red in her face, but she was using a walker correctly with the help of a staff member. In need of a perm, Mom’s white hair, straight and a little shaggy, covered her forehead. Looking up at me, she tried to joke as she had in the past when something hurt. She said with a dramatic sigh, “Oh! My aching pinfeathers!”

I laughed, despite knowing that she was having pain caused by arthritis. My family had a cartoon inspired vocabulary that we often used even when something bothering us wasn’t a laughing matter.

Comic books drawn and written by Carl Barks were a part of my family as I grew up. Daddy bought them each week for ten or fifteen cents apiece while in town to have oats ground for cow feed. Each member of the family read all the comic books many times, enjoying the funny pictures and storylines. Barks introduced his miserly character, Scrooge McDuck in 1947. Scrooge frequently suffered from ‘aching pinfeathers’. This mysterious ailment troubled him whenever his three-acre money bin was about to be broken into by the wicked Beagle Boys.

Another comic book word that entered my family’s vocabulary was ‘pixilated’. It came from Carl Bark’s story about a pixilated parrot who memorized Scrooge’s vault combination before flying off. The vault held “ninety tons of money”. Afraid the combination would fall into the wrong hands, Scrooge and his nephew Donald, and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie chase after the parrot. In love with another parrot, the troublesome bird manages to get the Ducks shanghaied and they end up in ancient Persia where they discover a lost city.

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Winter Indiscretions

Jan28

The medical assistant pointed at a scale standing next to an exam room doorway, and politely requested, “Please step on the scale.”

Feeling incredibly rude, I responded just as politely, “I don’t want to be weighed today.”

My refusal was accepted with a simple nod. The world didn’t come to an end. I wasn’t scolded.

I know my weight is up. It’s wintertime. The cold weather, snow and ice keep me from going outside and moving around as much as I would during the warmer months. But I cannot blame my weight gain entirely on seasonal inactivity.

My problem stems from my wintertime indiscretions. The odds are stacked against anyone with a healthy appetite. Just as the weather gets colder and the nights grow longer, we have Halloween. I never have trick-and-treaters stop at my house, but I buy candy anyway. It wouldn’t be so bad if I bought just one candy bar. Instead, I buy candy like I’m preparing for a long, sugarless siege.

Not even a full month later, we celebrate Thanksgiving. Despite having about twenty guests at my table, the food was abundant and there were enough leftovers to have held a second feast.

Saint Nicholas takes place December 6th, and of course that means buying more candy. Then several members of my family have birthdays at this time of the year. It would be rude to not bake a cake for them! It would be even ruder not to eat some of that cake. Sometimes I restrain myself from eating cake when with others. I get complimented for having a strong will power. Then, after everyone has gone home, I eat “healthy” calories which end up being more calories than I would have taken in with one slice of cake.

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Goldilocks Goes Swimming

Jan21

I stood in the changing room, shivering, feeling self-conscious in my swimsuit. It had been hard for me to leave my warm, comfortable home on a snowy night, then take off my winter coat, just to change out of my slacks and top to squeeze into a tight swimsuit.  The air at the YMCA was comfortably warm, but the memory of having walked across an icy parking lot to enter the building only moments before made me shudder. Acknowledging that having come this far, I needed to take the next step. I opened the door and entered the pool area.

Less than a dozen people were swimming in the large pool. I remembered taking a swimming class in that pool many years ago. The water had been so cold, it caused my lips to turn blue. I backed away and turned towards the nearby small hot tub. Thinking it would feel nice to soak in that pool for several minutes, I took one step down into the water.

My feet were cold from recently been outdoors, so the water in the hot tub pool felt dangerously hot to my skin. I quickly stepped out of the water thinking ruefully, “Now I know how a lobster feels when it is dropped into boiling water!”

Through a glass door, I saw another pool. It wasn’t as big as the first pool, nor as small as the hot tub pool. No one was in that pool, and the door was locked. Once, many years ago, I’d taken an elderly woman to an exercise class in it for arthritic people. What I remembered was that the water in that pool was comfortably warm.

A lifeguard unlocked the door so I could use the medium-sized pool. The water temperature was perfect, just as I remembered. Submerging up to my neck, I circled my arms, marched back and forth in the pool. Hanging on the pool edge, I paddled my legs. For the first time that evening, I was glad that I’d left my home to come to the YMCA.

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Steamrolled

Jan14

My family had spent Christmas Eve with Mom and my brothers, Billy and Casper. On Christmas Day we stayed home and relaxed. The following day I stopped by to visit Mom with my two daughters in tow.

At ninety years of age, visiting Mom on the family farm sometimes made me feel like I was stepping back in time. This feeling was especially acute during Christmas visits. My two bachelor brothers lived with her in the farmhouse that I had grown up in. When she was no longer able to bake for Christmas, she directed my brothers to make the one favorite spice cookie everyone liked. As in my childhood, the kitchen radio was tuned to a local station from sun-up until it went off the air at sun-down.

After happily greeting Grammie, my teenaged daughters, who had followed me into the living room, sat down on the sofa. Sitting down in a chair closer to Mom, I commented, “You look cozy snuggled in your chair.”

Silver tinsel on the Christmas tree branches glittered in the daylight. Mirror ornaments on the tree reflected nearby balsam branches and other ornaments. Mom sat in her recliner with a small lap-robe covering her lap. Her white hair had tight curls because I’d taken her to have a perm only a few weeks earlier.

Mom requested, “’Would you plug in the tree lights for me?” My movement made the tinsel sway. A draft from the furnace made the mirror ornaments twist and reflect a kaleidoscope of lights.

I asked, “How was your Christmas Day?”

Mom eagerly shared, “It was beautiful and relaxing. Billy played his new Christmas Mannheim Steamroller CD for me after supper. The only lights we had on were the Christmas tree lights. We enjoyed listening to the song ‘Silent Night’ so much, that Billy put it on repeat.”

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