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Strawberry Robbers

Jun4

After checking the carrots and potatoes in stovetop kettles, I loudly announced, “Everything is ready. Let’s pray, so we can sit down to eat.”

My four youngest grandchildren, Luke, Jacob, Gemma and Blaise, wandered into the kitchen where my daughter Niki, sisters Rosie and Agnes, and I stood. Looking around, Jacob questioned, “What are we having?”

I’d made a fresh loaf of bread. Rosie brought a bowl of fruit salad, and Agnes brought a jar of pickled okra, and cheese curds to go with supper. Niki made roasted chicken thighs. She instructed, “The plates and silverware are on the counter next to the stove. Mom’s bread is on the counter next to the refrigerator. When you have what you want, find a place to sit at the table. The rest is on the table.”

This was our weekly Tuesday night family meal, where each week we enjoy good food and conversation. When the meal was over, my company started to think about going home to relax for the night. Agnes and Rosie hugged each other, then they hugged me and Niki, then the children hugged my sisters and me.

I stepped out the back door of my house, pleasantly surprised at how velvety warm the evening spring air felt. A chorus of spring peepers from by the nearby river were peeping loudly and a flock of birds in a grove of trees sounded like they were squabbling over which branches to roost on for the night. Stepping out of the house to join me on the deck, my sister Rosie chirped, “It’s been lovely! I’ll see you all next week.” I watched everyone get into their cars and drive away.

From a tree next to the house, a robin warbled a song of praise and thanksgiving. From the top of the yard light pole, another robin joyfully answered. The sound was delightfully pure.

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Spring’s First Flower

May28

Melting snow exposed muddy ruts next to the cow yard. Tall tufts of brown grass lined the yard. Last summer’s smooth, green lawn now looked dreary, brown, and treacherously uneven. A wet cardboard box, softened and broken down, littered the yard as a strong westerly wind pushed and pulled it about between outbuildings. The farmhouse and barn appear bleak under the overcast sky. They looked naked without summertime foliage to conceal weather-weary paint, and lack of structural beauty. The winter-ravaged farmyard had never looked worse.

With nothing better to do, I rode my bike around and around the farmyard’s circle driveway. When I realized I could also ride around the old house which sat next to the driveway, I enjoyed changing up my route by doing figure eights. I felt warm despite the chilly wind.

Billy, my big brother, stood in the doorway of the milkhouse when he and Daddy finished doing the morning barn chores. I rode over to him and stopped. He said, “Listen to all the birds that have come back for the summer. Do you recognize robin song and red-wing-black bird calls?”

I responded, “Of course I do. I’m not a baby.”

My brother asked, “Have you noticed how big the buds have gotten on the cottonwood trees? It won’t be long before they leaf out.”

I hadn’t noticed that. With consternation, I exclaimed, “Those branches look dead! Everywhere I look, the tree branches are bare. I hate this time of spring. Nothing is growing yet.”

Smiling, my twenty-year-old brother said, “That’s not true. Let me show you something.” Leaning my bike against the milkhouse, I followed my brother to the sunny side of our barn. He stopped and pointed at a small tuft of green growing against the stone foundation.

It was a dandelion. A few steps beyond that was another one, and that one had a bright yellow blossom, too. Seeing it made my gloomy opinion of early spring disappear. Protected by the building, warmed by the sun and the heated stones, these brave plants grew and produced spring’s first flower. Billy picked a dandelion blossom, and we went into the house where he presented the wildflower to Mom.

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Daughter Like Mother

May7

I cleared clutter off the dining room table and put away a coat that had been draped over a dining room chair. Returning to the kitchen, I placed a bowl in the dishwasher, closed it and turned it on. The sound of a vehicle pulling into the yard made my cats run to hide. A swirl of cool spring air accompanied my younger grandchildren as they trooped into the house. Luke sniffed appreciatively as he commented, “I can tell you have a loaf of bread in the oven. It smells great!”

Hugging Luke, Jacob, Gemma and Blaise, I announced, “You can eat some of the fresh bread as soon as it cools off a little.” My daughter Niki followed the children into the kitchen, carrying a large pan. Smiling, I instructed, “My bread is finished baking, so I’ll take it out. Then you can put the pork and sauerkraut in the oven. I’ll turn the temperature down, so it doesn’t dry out.”

Niki turned and spotted a loaf of sweet bread on the kitchen counter and asked, “What’s this?”

I explained with a shrug, “I saw a recipe for rice bread on Instagram the other day and I had to try it. I put dried fruit in it.” Seeing the questioning look on my daughter’s face, I added, “It’s ok, but I’ve thought of a few tweaks I could give the recipe to make it better. I’m going make it again.”

When Niki left for her appointment, I gathered art supplies and sat down at the dining room table with my grandchildren. I explained, “I saw an interesting craft on Instagram the other day and I want to do it with you.” For the next hour we made spring blossoms using white, absorbent paper and Q-tips. After putting spots of marker color on the petals, we put the stems into water and watched as dampness spread and made the color bleed beautifully out to the ends of the petals. The craft was fun, and we enjoyed the rainbow streaks of color.

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Baby Khruschev

Apr30

When it began to rain, I wandered into the living room. Unable to work in her flowerbeds, Mom was already there, comfortably cuddled in her rocking chair with a lap robe over her knees, reading a woman’s magazine. Stretching out on the linoleum floor next to Mom, I listened to the rain softly pattering on the cedar tree and lilies growing alongside our house. After a muggy morning, the gentle breeze coming through the window screen, scented so beautifully by green plants and the earth, felt like a bit of heaven.

I spotted the shoe box Mom used to store family pictures on the floor next to Daddy’s favorite chair. Remembering his smiles and head shakes as he went through them last evening, I decided to spend my rainy-day afternoon looking at pictures. There were many of them but not in order. Old pictures and new ones were all jumbled together, so I began to sort them. Being twelve years old and having looked at the pictures often through the years, I knew almost everybody in the pictures, even those taken of my older siblings, before I was born, when they were very young.

Mom had somehow pulled together enough money during the war years to buy a black square, box-camera called a Kodak Brownie. She’d made good use of it. Everyone in the family recognized that having a camera was a luxury. Although the pictures were never put in a photo album, they were often looked at and enjoyed.

Being the baby of my family, an inordinate number of pictures were taken of me. I made a pile of my favorite ones: the one with me on my belly to watch close-up how our cat ate; three-year-old me wearing a polk-a-dot dress and chasing a small flock of guinea hens past the old house; me being held up by my brother Casper, high among the branches of a heavily blooming apple tree. Some pictures showed me looking like a cute toddler, but pictures of me as a tiny baby were much different. One of my infant pictures had caught me on the back lawn, crying with my mouth wide open and my eyes closed. As a baby I was fat and very bald. I stared at my image in disbelief. It was like I saw this picture for the first time. My preteen sensibilities were jarred. What a very ugly baby I had been!  

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Weird Sense of Humor

Apr23

I felt totally comfortable with my husband and often shared funny asides and comments about life when we were together. Arnie usually laughed at my observations, but sometimes exclaimed to me, “You and your weird Altmann sense of humor!” Despite his negative description of my family’s humor, I got the distinct impression that Arnie loved it, was sometimes bewildered by it, and even, at times, secretly admired our outlook on life.

A sense of humor is a personality trait that allows people to understand funny things, appreciate jokes, and in general, see the funny side of life. I don’t think living a perfectly happy life necessarily produces happy, joke-spewing people. If you have a sense of humor, it will show up even in the darkest of times. When I gave birth to a baby with an obvious birth defect, I joked, “At least we know we brought the right baby home from the hospital. There was no way there could have been a mix-up. Ours looks different!” This is an example of ‘dark humor.’

Does everyone in a family share the same type of humor? Not always, but I know my daughter Tammie shares my dark humor abilities. She once said she never worries about anyone stealing her winter coat from public coat hooks because, “Not many people can use a short-armed coat!”

Is a sense of humor trait something people can learn, soak up, or discover like a treasure? I’m not sure, but can verifiably report that, if that is possible, that is what happened to me and my family. During the 1950’s when the lean years of the depression and war was over, Daddy bought every Donald Duck comic book written by Carl Barks as they were published. At first, each of these comic books cost only five cents a copy, which was very affordable for our farm family.  

We loved these comic books because they contained references to geography, history, literature and science. The humor Carl Barks infused into the duck family’s experiences was sublime and clean. We read and reread each issue. Our meal-time discussions sometimes centered around the duck’s latest adventure. One of our favorite, playful family insults was taken from one of the stories. The horrid Beagle Boys had been outsmarted by the wily old duck once again.  Holding Scrooge by the feet, upside down, Beagle Boy number 716-617 angerly shouted, “You rich pig of a duck!”

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Fuzzy Yellow Chick

Apr16

Daddy jumped out of the family car when he saw us approach. My brother Billy sat in the car’s backseat calmly eating fried pork skins. Clearly relieved to see us, Daddy fussed, “I worried that you might be having so much fun shopping, that you’d forget what time to come back to the car!”

Mom assured him, “I had fun, but I remembered you wanted to get home at a reasonable time. You start your evening chores at 4 p.m. every day like clockwork. Then you milk the cows.” Betty, Mary and I got into the car. My three siblings and their purchases were packed in the backseat, while I wedged myself between Mom and Daddy in the front seat along with more packages. As we pulled away from where our car was parked, I worried that Daddy was in such a big hurry to get home to do barn chores, that he would skip my favorite part of a shopping trip to Marshfield. I leaned against him and begged, “Please Daddy, can we stop at Clover Cream for ice cream?”

With a twinkle in his eyes, Daddy cheerfully responded, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!” I knew his answer was ‘yes!’ He liked the rhyme, which was from an old-time song, and often said it when we asked for ice cream.  

Living on a farm 12 miles from Marshfield, we seldom went shopping in the bigger city. Most of our supplies came from Stratford, a small town only three miles from our farm. However, with Easter Sunday being three weeks away, Mom determined that we needed to visit Marshfield to buy new hats and gloves to wear to church. We found what we were looking for, and more!

After supper, Mom hid one of her shopping bags in a closet. I smiled, realizing it contained Easter Bunny treats. Together, we admired the pretty hats Mom had bought. I especially liked my new lavender spring jacket, because last year’s jacket was too small.

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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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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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Amazing Grace

Dec24

After the nurse stepped out of the room, I stared at the ceiling over my bed. My ears were on high alert for the sounds of nurses passing my room in the hallway and their murmured conversations. Nightime darkness shrouded the curtained window, but the pale hallway light sent mysterious, elongated shadows deep into the room. It was one o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted from having just given birth, but sleep was the last thing on my mind.   

Having given birth, I was now a mother to a tiny, helpless infant. When I thought about motherhood, what came to mind was my mom and Mary, mother of Jesus. I wasn’t even in Mom’s league, let alone Mary’s. Giving birth had elevated me into a sphere that was too lofty for a nineteen-year-old who’d never even had the experience of babysitting to attain. Mom and Mary knew so much, while I knew nothing, and yet here I was, a mother, just like them.           

My motherhood hadn’t been a surprise. I’d known a baby was on the way for nearly the entire nine months of my pregnancy. Delving deep into my amazement, I realized the shock I felt was the sudden intense feeling of responsibility for the new soul my husband and I had brought into the world. Up until now the only person I ever had to take care of was myself. Maintaining a house, a marriage and my employment in the very hospital unit where I was now a patient, didn’t seem like anything more than taking care of myself. But now I had a helpless person to look after for the next eighteen years! The immensity of this reality had never dawned on me until now.

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