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Under Cover Cats

Oct19

Tammie preferred living in dorms during her college and grad school years. Although the convenience and location worked for her, it also meant that she couldn’t have a pet. “Unless,” my daughter pointed out to me one day, “The pet can breathe under water for more than five minutes.”

I cynically commented, “Well, that rules out a cat. But we could get you a nice, colorful Beta fish, though.”

My daughter exclaimed emphatically, “No! I want a cuddly kitty like the ones I grew up with.”

During the last four years of higher education, Tammie spent countless hours wishfully staring at shelter cat pictures on a computer screen.

One day, shortly before Tammie graduated, she was home for a visit. Her sister Niki commented, “A stray cat has been hanging around our house for the last few weeks. Anne and Jon named her Buttons. Last weekend she crawled under our back deck and gave birth to a litter of six kittens. It was cold and raining, so I ended up taking the mother cat and kittens into the house.”

Tammie snapped to attention. She announced, “I’ll take two of the kittens off your hands. By the time they’re old enough to leave Buttons, I’ll be in the apartment I’ve rented and working as a librarian.”

Niki’s children fell in love with Button’s babies and gave them names. They didn’t want to give any of them up, but two kittens went to a farm family and were never heard from again. The children were allowed to keep two. One was gray, and hilariously named ‘Moldy Cheese’ while the black and white one was called ‘Salt and Pepper’. Tammie took the orange and white cat named ‘Macaroni and Cheese’ and a gray tabby they named ‘Carla’ after they heard Tammie say that was the name of the library director at her new job.

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Chuckle Berries

Oct12

“Mom?” Tammie questioned. “Do you think you can get up and walk around for a while?”

         I looked sadly up at my daughter’s concerned face from where I lay on a cot in the corner of my living room. I’d had a total knee replacement three days earlier. Sick of how painful my leg felt, I complained, “Since my leg hurts even while laying down, I may just as well be up walking!”

Like a good little nurse, Tammie had come home for a few weeks to make sure I was well hydrated, exercised and comforted as I recovered from surgery. She placed the walker next to the cot and I pushed off the mattress with both hands and my good leg. My daughter suggested, “Let’s go out on the deck. It’s in the shade now and the weather is really nice.”

After taking a few steps, my surgical leg really didn’t feel that much worse, so I felt encouraged. Stepping out into the fresh air, I took a deep breath and sighed with satisfaction, “This was a good idea.” I settled down onto a deck chair. A lovely Goldilocks breeze ruffled my bedhead hair.

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Getting the Job Done.

Oct5

I pressed lightly on the gas. The trailer hitched to my SUV inched backward. After a few feet, it became apparent that the trailer was veering too close to the house. Fighting the impulse to crank the steering wheel in the direction I wanted the trailer to go, I cranked it in the opposite direction. Overdoing the wheel turning, the trailer went the direction I wanted, but too much. It quickly jackknifed.

Grunting with disgust, I slammed on the brakes and eased forward. With the car and trailer straightened, I tried once again to back the trailer towards the coal chute. After much rocking back and forth, I finally placed my trailer, loaded with six tons of wood pellets close enough to the chute.

Getting out of the car I mentally prepared myself for the job ahead. Fortunately, many years before, my late husband had installed a coal chute in place of a basement window to make it easier to throw winter fuel into our basement. It was hard work throwing 300 forty-pound wood pellet bags into the basement, but I’d done it before.

Slowly and steadily I worked, tossing the heavy bags into the chute. When the pile of bags in the basement grew too large for more, I went to the basement to stack them on pallets along the walls. After a few hours all six tons were in the basement. The only help I needed was stacking the last two or three tons.

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Two Steps at a Time

Sep28

Hurrying, I grabbed the moving box containing bathroom toiletries and bounded up the staircase in our new house, two steps at a time. Undaunted by the effort, I immediately began to put them into a cupboard. At the moment, the house my husband Arnie and I had bought was a hollow shell. All the rooms were empty. None of them showed that they now belonged to us. Turning this house into a beloved, cozy home for our little family, was up to me.

With the recklessness of youth, I never questioned if I was able do something or not. In addition to being a homemaker, I worked outside of the home as a Certified Nursing Assistant. When male patients worried that I wasn’t big or strong enough to get them up for a walk after surgery, I’d laugh and say, “I’m a farm girl. I can carry two bales of hay the full length of a barn with no problem.” My busy, active life was all as easy as running up a staircase two steps at a time.

I started to get hints that I wouldn’t always be young and physically strong in my mid-thirty’s. Arthritis began to make my hands ache and after sitting for a while my feet and hips would be very stiff and sore. No problem. I just barreled through life ignoring these minor discomforts. If I had stopped to think about it, I would have recognized that my twinges and aches sounded very much like the twinges and aches my elderly mother had described. It was hard to take Mom seriously though. When she had a bad day, she just limped and laugh it off with a complaint of, “Oh, my aching pinfeathers!”

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Secondhand Memories

Sep14
Grandpa Jacob Altmann Senior with Mary and Betty and Casper in the background.

One of my sisters reminisced, “Grandpa kept a pint jar filled with hard candies on a shelf by the door. Whenever we visited him, he’d give us a candy.”

Another sister chimed-in, “I remember going to his apartment in the garage that summer after he died. I took one of the candies from the jar and it was chewy!”

Younger than my sisters by more than a decade, I volunteered, “I remember Grandpa falling when he came into our house. I was standing in the kitchen watching Daddy hold the door open for him.”

“You couldn’t possibly remember that!” scoffed one of my older brothers. “You were just barely two-years-old, too little to remember. What you do remember, is what we’ve told you.”

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Hand-Me-Downs

Sep7

When I saw the garage sale sign, I pulled over to the curb. Children’s toys littered the lawn around the open garage door. In the yard behind the house, I spotted a swing-set. I thought to myself, “This place looks like the perfect place for me to shop.” Inside the garage I spotted several tables heaped with household items and clothing. Across the back of the garage was a rack of children’s clothing.

After a few minutes of looking through the sale items, I realized that the family putting on the sale had daughters just a year or two older than mine. I picked out several items of clothing that my growing daughters needed. Everything was in good condition and clean. Feeling like I’d found a buried treasure, I rushed to pay for them. If I had bought the same items in a store, I wouldn’t have been able to afford them. The woman took the money from me with a big smile. It was a win-win situation. She needed the money and I needed the clothes.

Being the youngest child of my family, I grew up familiar with the concept of secondhand clothing, otherwise known as hand-me-downs. When I became a mother, I quickly realized that with children constantly changing size until their teenaged years, it makes sense to reuse clothing. The minute I take my garage sale purchases home, I put them in the washer and add soap. That instantly makes the secondhand clothing stop belonging to someone else.

One of the small dresses I took over with my “soap and water ownership” method that afternoon was so cute, I put it on my youngest daughter while it was still warm from the dryer. My husband happened to come home just then and suggested, “Let’s take the girls out for a fish fry.”

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Thin Crust

Aug31

The water was only lukewarm when I opened the shower door and reached in to feel it. I shrugged, guessing I hadn’t turned the water valve open far enough to get the heat I wanted. Pushing the valve further open, I stepped under the disappointing cascade of water and warily waited for the much hotter water to begin pelting my skin. Moments passed as I cold shampooed my hair. The shower stubbornly stayed a constant lukewarm temperature. An alarm began to go off in the responsible, homeowner, adult portion of my mind, “What’s wrong with the hot water heater?”

Refreshed by the shower despite its unsatisfying water quality, I quickly forgot about running to the basement to check the water heater. That act of responsibility reentered my mind several hours later as I cleaned the kitchen counters and the kitchen faucet gave an abundance of hot water for me to rinse a dish cloth. I sighed with relief, “There’s nothing to worry about. The hot water heater is fine.”

The next morning, I got up and washed my face as usual. The water from the tap was only just warm, but I attributed that to not having let the water run long enough. With water pipes snaking through the walls of a house up to a second-floor bathroom, it isn’t reasonable to expect instant hot water.

An hour later when I turned on the kitchen faucet, not a single drop of water came out. Deep in the plumbing below the counter I heard, “glurp”, the sound of a pipe choking on an air bubble.

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Please Don’t

Aug24

My sister Mary laid on the bed we shared, reading a book. She giggled as she read and turned the pages. I snuggled close to her on the mattress and looked at the page she was reading. To my disgust, there were no pictures of Donald Duck or any other cartoon character on it. Annoyed that I was breathing in her face, Mary sat up and threw down her book. I glanced at the book’s name. It was, “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” by Jean Kerr. My opinion of Mary’s cartoonless book skyrocketed as I thought, “What a funny title! Who would try eating Daisies? They smell like they’d taste bitter.”

Agnes and Rosie, my two older sisters had moved out of the house and were recently married. Their old bedroom, with its blue ceiling dotted with silver stars, was now my bedroom to share with Mary. She was sixteen-years to my nine years of age, so I annoyed her on a regular basis. Despite that, she was mostly patient with me.

Mary suggested, “Let’s go for a bike ride.” I jumped to accept her invitation. Who knew how long would it be before she was the next sister to move out of the house and get married? As it was, she already didn’t want to ride bike very often any more.

When Mary and I pedaled back into the yard, she wanted to go back to reading. Finding a shady spot for a lawn chair, my sister opened the book and disappeared into it.  

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Cruise Director

Aug17

Billy stood up from the restaurant table and tottered. I moved closer to my brother in case he started to fall. When his blood pressure dropped with a position change, he would often faint. Although both of my brothers had Parkinson’s, he had been diagnosed first and showed more symptoms. Casper, my other brother was already standing at the cashier, looking back to see what was holding us up.

This was a typical Friday night for me for several years.

Going out for a Friday night fish fry had once been an occasional treat. That changed a few years after my husband died. Because of Parkinson’s, my bachelor brothers started to need a little help. I began visiting them at the farm each Friday night to fill their pill boxes and pay bills. Those were the things they needed. But what they wanted was to go out for a Friday fish fry every single week.

I won’t lie, there were a few weeks here and there that I really wished I could stay home or do something else.

To add variety to my brothers Friday night experience, I tried to take them to different restaurants each week. I often invited one of my friends to join us. Some weeks one or both of my daughters joined us, too. When my sister Agnes and her husband Jim moved back to Wisconsin, they also became members of my Friday night fish fry club.

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Moments of Grace

Aug10

The hostess politely inquired, “Would you like to dine inside the restaurant or out on the patio?” I hesitated because I dislike sitting in full sun. As if reading my mind, the hostess quickly put my fears to rest. “Most of the patio is in shade.”

 I confirmed my preference with a smile. “I’d love a table in the shade.”

A tall pergola shaded one half of the patio and most of the other half of the remaining area enjoyed the shade of a sapling tree. Placing a glass of water on the table, the hostess promised that a waiter would take my order after I had a chance to look at the menu. 

While waiting for my order to be filled, I glanced around. Flowerboxes placed on the top of the patio walls were full of flowers and herbs. Healthy vining plants cascaded their tendrils down and swayed in a gentle breeze.

I overheard one woman at a nearby table telling her companion, “I miss Phillip so much. Mornings are especially hard, but today something happened that made me feel better. From the kitchen window I saw a beautiful cardinal perched in the tree Phillip had planted before his illness. Seeing it gave me a feeling of peace. I felt like Phillip was there checking on me.”

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