Archives

First Nest

May12

I didn’t glance longingly back at my bedroom’s blue ceiling with the hundreds of silver stars two of my big sisters had lovingly stenciled across it. I just picked up the suitcase I’d packed and took it out to the car my brother had loaned me. The day to move out of my childhood home had finally arrived.

All I could think about was the one half of a dorm room that belonged to me for the next month, and for the month following that if I wanted. The hospital where I would be trained as a Nursing Assistant had run a nursing school and owned a nearby student nurse dormitory. I was fortunate to have a place to stay so close to study and hopefully work afterwards.

It felt great to store my belongings in my half of the furnished room. Though small, it was my new home. I decided where things went and how to spend my time there. There was a desk and lamp across from the narrow bed. Near the foot of the cot was a closet with a built-in dresser. A bathroom with showers was just down the hall. I hadn’t thought about food when I rented this little nest, but the dorm building did have a large kitchen on the first floor. I loved my new home.

Continue reading →

Grandma for Supper

May5

I dropped down in my office chair and opened my email. Every day I looked forward to hearing from my daughter Tammie. Her messages never failed to be full of interesting observations and descriptions of life at grad school in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  My daughter’s undergrad school had been a short, two-hour drive from home. When she decided to earn a master’s degree in library science, she insisted on going to the University of Michigan as one of the best in the United States.

That afternoon, her message described an international foods night at her co-operative house. She said, “I loved trying all the different foods, but one of the drinks offered was rose water. Mom, I took one sip, but couldn’t finish it. The drink made me feel as though I was drinking Grammie!”

I laughed. It was understandable that she associated my Mom with roses.

Grammie wore dresses that were rose-colored, shared bouquets of roses from her flowerbed with us and always smelled like roses. My daughters loved her. With her love of roses, it was easy for my family to buy Mom Mother’s Day gifts. Each year we gave her rose-scented body lotion, rose-scented candles and rose bushes from the greenhouse to replace the ones our Wisconsin winters killed. The mere smell of roses made everyone think of her.

When Tammie and her sister were four and eight years of age, my husband and I were living on a farm. We occasionally invited my Mom to stay overnight with us after I took her for a day of shopping. I remembered how excited my daughters were when I told them that we were going to “have Grammie for supper.” They knew what I meant. It never occurred to us that ‘having Grammie for supper’ sounded cannibalistic.

Continue reading →

Smoke Mama

Apr28
No matter where I sit next to a campfire, tendrils of smoke follow me.

I tore the flap off a cardboard box, folded it and placed it between two logs of wood. After placing several twigs above it and bigger branches above that, I ignited the cardboard. A small orange flame licked tentatively around the edges of the brown corrugated paper for several seconds before it completely became engulfed in eager, leaping flames. I glanced around. What would burn fast and quick to keep the fire going until the logs caught?

         Nearby, laid a pile of small scrub trees I’d cut down last fall, the reddened Christmas tree, a mound of grass raked from the lawn and a bundle of asparagus fern from the garden. I didn’t plan on using the Frazier fir, since I only wanted a small, respectable fire. From experience I knew the Christmas tree would burn too hot, fast with high, leaping flames.

My daughter Tammie joined me by the blaze. Watching me tuck sticks into the embers, she observed, “You really love playing with fire, don’t you?”

I grinned at her and admitted, “I’ve always enjoyed tending fires. When I was small my family burned all our household garbage except bottles, cans and kitchen scraps. It was big excitement for us to all stand around and watch stuff burn. If I got too close to the fire, my brothers and sisters told me that if I fell in and burned off my head, I’d have to wear a kettle to replace my head and that my new name would be little Miss Kettlehead.”

Tammie laughed, “That’s a weird thing to tell a kid.”

I nodded and agreed, “Yes, it is. But when I was a kid, it seemed to make sense.

Sitting down on a small barrel, I watched the fire. Flames licked at a pile of grass next to it. I had raked the grass up this spring. Too damp to ignite, the grass sent up a plume of thick, white smoke. A breeze swirled the smoke towards where Tammie and I were sitting. Coughing, I jumped to my feet.

Continue reading →

Frankenstein Dresses

Apr21

Mom said she felt like sewing a dress for herself. I watched as she carefully laid a beautiful floral-print material on the kitchen table. The day before last, my family made one of our rare visits to Marshfield where she’d bought material and a new pattern.

My only interest when we visited downtown Marshfield was the candy, toy and pet sections at Woolworth’s or Ben Franklin’s. I tried hard to be patient as Mom slowly studied the McCall pattern book before picking out what she wanted. She knew how I felt by my frequent sighs, moans and occasional question, “Can we leave this store pretty soon?”

Most of the tissue paper pattern pieces were pinned to the material when Mom stopped what she was doing and stood quietly. After a moment she spoke as if talking to herself, “The neckline isn’t exactly what I want. Also, I want the sleeves to be longer.” Pulling pattern pieces from other pattern envelopes, Mom began pinning those onto the material to replace the original neckline.

I was just a little kid, but I couldn’t figure out how Mom was going to get everything to fit together without puckers in the cobbled together material. Remembering my long wait for her in the fabric store, I felt restless and decided to go outside for a while.

Continue reading →

Discontented

Apr14
Some problems can be changed by the way we think about them. But there is no solution for the problem of wispy baby fine hair except a perm.

My neighborhood cousins and I were together under the tall trees in front of their farmhouse. Donna sat on the swing, slowly pushing herself side to side. I stood with one leg up over the seat of my bike. Barb and Alice sat on the front porch steps. A cool breeze smelling of lilacs gently fluttered through the yard. We sniffed and sighed appreciatively. Life was good. In the back of my mind I felt contentment because I knew here were only a few more weeks left before school let out for summer vacation.

         The topic that early Saturday afternoon was the middle names we were given at birth. To my great surprise, my young cousins had middle names I recognized as belonging to their older relatives. I didn’t know if I should envy them or feel sorry for them. My middle name, Marie, sounded like plain old vanilla in a world of exotic flavors.

         I didn’t like my first name that much either. Kathy? It had such a babyish sound to it. I imagined that if I could change my name, I’d pick Victoria. To me, that name sounded beautiful and graceful. A person with that name would be confident and proud.

Ruefully, I thought, “A person named Victoria would probably have curly hair, too.” I hated my floppy, baby fine hair. I wondered, “Why couldn’t I have been born with curly hair like Shirley Temple?”

Continue reading →

April Showers

Apr7
Hepatica, the quintessential May flower.

Daylight woke me, but I laid in bed for a long-time daydreaming. The cozy household sounds and the smell of freshly baked bread drifted up from downstairs. Hunger finally made me roll out of bed, get dressed and leave my second story bedroom. When I wandered into the kitchen, Mom turned to exclaim, “Well, you finally decided to get up!”

Slathering a thick layer of butter on a slice of homemade bread, I sat down at the kitchen table. Spring sunshine poured through the nearby window onto the chair I chose and the surrounding floor. The chair’s red vinyl seat felt very warm. I wiggled my toes on the heated flooring. As I ate the bread, I looked out the kitchen window at the lawn. Last week it had been dotted with piles of snow. Today it was starting to turn green.

Last Saturday I’d helped Daddy make small trenches in the yard to speed-up mud puddle drainage. Popping the last of the bread into my mouth, I licked a bit of butter off my fingers before asking, “Mom, I’d like to make a May altar. Do you think May flowers have started to bloom? We’ve had lots of April showers.”

Continue reading →

Devil Winds

Mar31
Devil winds can’t be seen unless they pick up dust, drying hay or water, but you sure can feel the sassy little things if they decide to rearrange your hair.

Rain drops speckled the office window. I stared at my dreary wind-and-rain swept yard with a hot mug of tea in hand. As more and more rain fell, the drops formed rivulets and trickled down out of sight. The smell of bacon from breakfast still hung in the air. Tammie, sitting in the office recliner was working online. I could hear the soft tappity-tap of her keyboard.

Taking a sip of the hot drink, I savored its comforting warmth and taste. I complained, “March is such an unsettling month.”

Looking up from her computer, my daughter asked, “I forget, did the month come in like a lion or a lamb this year?”

Turning to face my daughter, I exclaimed, “That’s what’s wrong with March and spring in general. It has such extreme weather from one day to the next and sometimes from one hour to the next.”

Nodding, Tammie wistfully commented, “When I left the house more often, it was hard to know how to dress on spring mornings. If I left the house without a jacket because it was hot, by the time I returned home in the afternoon, I’d be shivering because it was snowing and there were two inches of slush on the sidewalk.”

I added, laughing, “I’ll bet you left home other mornings bundled up against freezing temperatures and within hours, you wanted to know if there was some way to take off your coat and heavy sweater while caught in a traffic jam.”

Continue reading →

Making the Rounds

Mar24

The unexpected feeling came over me suddenly. I went to stand at my office window. Surveying the blanket of wet snow lying heavily on the flowerbed along the driveway, I cupped my cold hands around a mug of hot tea. Until now, I hadn’t given a thought to the plants and bulbs in my yard since the first major frost in September.

A mix of curiosity and desire, along with a deep, longing to see things growing in the yard where now everything looked dead and frozen filled me. I wanted to know if the daffodils, crocus and grape hyacinths in the flowerbed were going to come up and blossom this spring. Would the herbs I’d planted near the trees along the south driveway flourish or wither this summer?

What triggered my unfulfilled gardener symptoms? I suspected the warm, forty-degree days Wisconsin enjoyed the last week of February. That, and the combination of a snow-covered yard, below-zero days and a five-month respite from gardening gets to the best of us. My mind wanted to jump back into digging in the ground, even though the weather and my body were signaling the desire was at least two months premature.

I complained to my daughter Tammie, “I shouldn’t be feeling this way yet. We’re still at least a full month away from “Making the Rounds” weather!”

Raising one eyebrow, Tammie questioned, “What’s ‘making the rounds weather’?”

Continue reading →

Recording Milestones

Mar17

Tammie sat down on the kitchen step stool while I was preparing supper. She demanded, “Tell me about when I was born.”

I smiled, picked up a potato and began to peal it. Today was Tammie’s eighth birthday. When I was a child, I had often asked my mother the same question. There is no topic more interesting to a child than the day they were born. With each retelling, there is hope for additional nuggets of information. I explained, “You were born by caesarean section, because of your low blood platelet problem.  With your sisters, I just waited until I went into labor. For you, the doctor picked Monday February 22nd, which was a little more than one week before your due date.” 

Tammie prompted, “The day before I was born, you went to eat Sunday dinner at Grammie’s house.”

Dropping the peeled potato into the kettle and picking up another, I agreed, “Yes, and it was a wonderful dinner as always. My brother Casper provided homemade cranberry wine to go with the meal. I could only taste it because I was pregnant with you, but I liked it. I think that’s why Casper gave me a bottle of cranberry wine every year for the rest of his life.”

Continue reading →

Instinctive Scientist

Mar10
I didn’t bring the poinsettia plant in from the deck one night when we had frost. It lost every single leaf. Knowing it would try to make a comeback, I put it in an upstairs bedroom and watered it. When the first leaves came out, I was very happy. It seems to be happy, too. It has decided to blossom for me in February.

Mom opened the oven door and placed a pan of raw cookies inside. I felt the oven breathe heat into the room. I was sitting nearby at the head of the kitchen table. I reached into a bowl on the table and pulled out a handful of peanuts in the shell. As I shelled them, I popped the pale-colored peanuts into my mouth. They were unsalted.

I stated, “I want salt.” Mom turned from cleaning the cupboard and handed me a salt shaker. Shelling more nuts, I discovered the salt refused to stick to the dry peanuts. I licked them and tried again. This time the salt stuck. An idea popped into my mind. I would shell a bunch of nuts, wet them with water, put them on a small pan and shake salt over them. Then, I’d ask Mom to put the pan in the oven. She wouldn’t let me do it myself, because I was only six-years-old.

Mom agreed to my request and placed the nuts on a small, metal syrup-can lid that she used to test cookies. A few minutes later when she took them out, she instructed, “Wait until they’re cool.”

I grabbed a hot peanut when she wasn’t looking. To my dismay, it was chewy. As if knowing what I’d done, Mom chuckled, “When the nuts are cool, they’ll be crunchy again.” She was right. My roasted, salted peanuts were delicious and I felt clever.

Figuring out on my own how to salt and roast peanuts was the start of my life-long career as an instinctive scientist.

One day when I was eight, I opened my brother Casper’s bedside table drawer to look at the fascinating things he kept in there. There were springs, sprockets, batteries, tubes of industrial strength bubble material, bulbs, coins, bits of wire and string. I began to put the things that fascinated me the most on the table top, end to end. When I placed a wire against the end of a battery and a small bulb against the other end of the wire, I saw a flash of light in the bulb. Flashlights had already been invented, but I was excited to realize I was a re-inventor.

Continue reading →