Archive | February 2025

Getting A Schtee

Feb26

My throat was very sore; so sore that it hurt to swallow my spit. I didn’t even want to think about swallowing the soup Mom had given me to eat. Leading me over to a window where there was better light, she ordered, “Open your mouth. I want to see what your throat looks like.” I whined and cried. “Now stop that,” Mom demanded, “I’m just going to look. My looking won’t make your throat hurt worse.”

Opening my mouth, I allowed Mom to turn my head this way and that, so the light from the window could help her to examine every inch of my throat. Daddy, still sitting at the kitchen table asked, “How does her throat look?”

Mom sat down at the table to tell Daddy, “We need to take Kathy to see Doctor Kroeplin again. I think she has strep throat like last spring. Her throat has white spots, and her tonsils are so swollen they are almost touching each other.” Hearing this, I began to howl and sob. Last year when I was in third grade, Dr. Kroeplin prescribed penicillin pills for me. He said I had to take them because the strep infection in my throat could damage my heart.

I suffered from the family curse: the inability to swallow pills. Even when my throat was normal, I couldn’t get pills past my back molars without gagging. I knew Daddy had the same problem. On the rare occasion that he needed to take a pill, he struggled to swallow it. Mom would scold, “It’s just a little pill. I’ve seen you swallow huge bites of raw potato dumplings with no problem!”

To make things worse, the penicillin pills tasted and smelled worse than anything I’d ever known of. Mom tried to hide them in apple sauce. She bribed me with the rare luxury of a glass of orange juice. We even tried to push them down with homemade bread thickly slathered with creamy peanut butter. Nothing worked.

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The Tapioca Incident

Feb19

Holding her largest mixing bowl, Mom vigorously stirred the batter. As if making cookies wasn’t enough work, she was multitasking by making our evening meal at the same time. Glancing at the stove top, Mom grumbled under her breath, “Tisk, why isn’t that burner heating up?” Impatiently, she put her right hand on the electric coil and instantly pulled back with a yelp. It was hot, just not glowing red.

Jumping up from where I had been sitting at the kitchen table, I questioned, “Mom! How badly did you burn your hand?”

Running cold water over her hand at the sink, my mother ruefully commented, “That was a stupid thing to do.” The imprinted rings of the burner could be seen on her fingers and palm, but other than the skin being tender, the burn was surprisingly superficial. Allowing the cold water to continue running over her hand, Mom instructed, “Put the pot of potatoes on that burner.”

I usually never cooked or baked with Mom while I was growing up. I always had the feeling that she preferred to work alone. She never asked for help, even when she was rushed or trying to get other things done at the same time. For years I sat at the kitchen table watching her work and assumed this would help me know what to do someday when I had to make meals.

I know for certain that I did learn a few things. With Mom’s hand burn incident, I learned two things. One was how to injure yourself without saying a single bad word. The second thing I learned was to never touch the stove top, even if it didn’t look hot.

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Dust Bunnies

Feb12

I glanced around my neat living room wondering where Tammie’s gray kittens were. I hadn’t seen them for hours. Worried, I called for them. Suddenly, one of the kittens popped her head out from under my sofa. Surprised, I questioned, “How are you doing that? The opening under the sofa is smaller than your head!” The kitten wriggled out and then the second kitten peeped out at me and sneezed.

One thing Tammie had missed and desired all through her four years of college and two years of grad school, was a kitty for a pet. Since she lived in dorms all those years, this was never possible. Dorm pet policies generally say something along the lines of, “If you want a pet, it has to be able to live underwater.”

Shortly before Tammie graduated from grad school, a stray cat living in Niki and Mike’s backyard gave birth to a litter of kittens. The surprise delivery took place on their back deck during cold, inclement spring weather. Niki felt compelled to take the mother and babies into her house. Her young children loved the unexpected fuzzy play mates and immediately named them based on food and random names they heard.

Having secured a job and apartment to live in immediately following graduation, Tammie asked her sister if she could adopt two kittens from the rescued litter. Although her children protested, Niki didn’t want to keep all six kittens.

Tammie picked a pale gray tabby named Carla, and an orange tuxedo kitten named Macaroni and Cheese. They were wonderful companions for Tammie for the next 16 years. Carla was the first to pass away. After grieving for several months, Tammie went to a Humane Society Shelter and picked out a two-year-old gray and white cat. This kitty had a white bib, paws, and star on her nose, which made us think of the song, “Lucy with Diamonds in the Sky”. Although she was very friendly with humans, we were told Lucy didn’t like other cats, but to our surprise and delight, she peacefully coexisted with Mac until he died a year later.

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Sky Rooms

Feb5

My sisters wanted to paint stars on their bedroom ceiling around the time I was leaving behind my infancy. Like all babies I had spent my first two or three years floating about in a nebulous world. The events and activities of my siblings were indistinct and vague to my perception because little of it had to do with my three most basic needs: nourishment, dry diapers and cuddles. Slowly, I began to understand words, and I began to sort out the tangle of my two arms and two legs, making independent locomotion possible. At that point, I became “the shadow”, following the siblings I could keep up to, while firing endless questions at their backsides.

Agnes and Rosie insisted they had to paint the bedroom they shared a rich navy blue. Mom said, “That color is too dark. A home decorator in one of my women’s magazines recommended that bedrooms on the northside of a house, like yours, should be painted bright colors.” The two girls insisted that they needed the room to be the color of a night sky because they were going to stencil silver stars all over the ceiling.

I was told years later that the girls worked day after day for weeks that summer on their bedroom décor. Arranging the various sized stars so they were evenly spaced was time consuming work. Reaching high overhead to neatly paint the stars using a small detail brush was neck-breaking. They also wanted coordinating room accessories such as a wastepaper basket. To supply this, they found a square five-gallon fuel can, had the top cut off, cleaned it, painted it navy, and stenciled silver stars on it as well.

Despite having two windows, the bedroom was dark like a cave after both the ceiling and walls were painted the rich, dark blue. The advice found in Mom’s woman’s magazine had been correct. A bedroom on the north side of the house needs lighter paint. The ceiling stayed as it was, but my sisters soon repainted the walls a bluish white.

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