Archives

Moments of Grace

Feb8

From the large window in our farmhouse living room, I inspected the thin layer of snow covering our farm yard. It had fallen over a week ago, and looked paltry. I wished for more to fall, a lot more. I didn’t want to go out and play in it as I did when I was little. After all, I was now a grown-up fifteen-year-old. I just liked the way a thick layer of snow looked.

Feeling bored and restless, I paced around the house for a while, then finally sat down on the sofa, pulled an afghan around my shoulders and grabbed one of Mom’s woman’s magazines from the end table.

One of my brothers leaned into the room and said, “There’s a big snow storm coming. I’m going to walk down to the woods while the walking is still easy. Do you want to come along?”   Continue reading →

Chef B

Feb1

My husband Arnie opened the door and I stepped into the small, old-fashioned café. Three old men leaning over steaming cups of coffee at a large table glanced casually at us before returning to their conversation. They were busily discussing how to solve major world problems, such as famine, war and snotty youngsters.

Sliding into a booth, I looked around for Arnie. I spotted him across the room at the cash register sifting through a pile of newspapers. He’d stopped to select reading material to enjoy while he ate breakfast. I hoped the paper he picked had a funnies page. I didn’t like anything too heavy with my jellied toast and coffee.

Arnie loved what he called, “Mom and Pop restaurants”. He’d say, “Those places have homemade food that’s far better than anything you can get at a franchise place.” I had to agree with him.

We were visiting a town neither of us had been to before. How he had spotted this place, I didn’t know. The street facade was unremarkable. I suspected that finding places like this was connected to his uncanny ability of seldom getting lost.

After our waitress, Alice, took our order and Arnie started reading the paper, I looked around more closely. The café looked like a stage set from Mayberry RFD. The vintage décor wasn’t just a decorator’s attempt at inducing nostalgia. I suspected that they had opened their doors four or five decades earlier. Other than keeping the kitchen and dining room clean, no one had thought to update the wallpaper, furniture or anything else. If it wasn’t broken, it clearly didn’t need to be fixed. Continue reading →

Mouse, Mouse, RAT

Jan25

My cousins and I stood at the backdoor of their house admiring the pristine white blanket of snow covering their back lawn. Barb said, “Let’s play duck-duck-goose.” The four of us were ages nine through eleven.

Plowing into the unsullied expanse, Donna called out, “I’ll make the circle.”

We fell in line behind her and all went around three times for good measure. Our tracks were wide and easy to see. A weak January sun cast blue shadows in the ruts we’d trampled. Alice, the youngest, complained, “When we play this game in the snow, our tracks show if we cut across the circle!”

Big sister Barb chuckled, “That’s a good thing, because cutting across the circle is cheating!” Continue reading →

The Missing Link

Jan18

I shivered and pulled my sweater shut, buttoning it absentmindedly without checking to see if the buttons and holes lined up. A jigsaw puzzle on the card table in front of me held all of my attention. Should I set aside all of the flesh and blue dress pieces first or the red barn ones? My decision to put the little girl together first came just as I reached the top button on my sweater and discovered there wasn’t a matching button hole across from it. Looking down, I realized that I’d mismatched them.

A sweet memory of my Dad popped into mind. One day when he was growing older, he put on a sweater and like I had just done, mismatched its buttons and holes. Looking down, he’d commented, “I look like a lopdeeddle.” Smiling, I shrugged and went to work sorting the puzzle pieces by color.

The silly word Daddy used was so typical of his self-depreciating sense of humor. In my family’s dictionary of funny words, a lopdeeddle was a silly, clumsy, inept person. He felt silly because he’d done the buttons wrong.

Shivering again, I pulled an afghan off the sofa and pulled it over my lap. From memory, I could hear my late husband asking me, “Why are you so stubborn?” I had laughed at him when he said that. To my way of thinking, I was a willow constantly swaying to his wishes and suggestions. I didn’t consider myself stubborn.

It was only after Arnie was gone that I finally recognized the trait he’d seen in me. Once I make up my mind about something, I stick to the plan. One thing I decided as a widow is that a person doesn’t need to heat a house until the inside thermometer never goes above 58 degrees. Continue reading →

The Happy Castaway

Jan11

A patch of January sun streamed through the living room’s south windows and stretched over the gray linoleum floor. I sat in the center of the warm pool of light. Behind me, the tinsel on our Christmas tree glittered and winked. Mirrored ornaments swung and turned in the breeze from the heat register, reflecting flashes of the sun on all four walls. Reaching into a candy dish next to the sofa, I selected a chocolate-covered angel food candy and admired the tree. Our family never put up and decorated the tree until Christmas Eve, but then kept it up for most of January.

Reaching into the pile of gifts still under the tree, I pulled out a book and flipped it open. Before learning to read, I had constantly begged to be read to. After I learned to read, I resented it at first when my big brothers and sisters insisted that I do my own reading. Now, as a thirteen-year-old, I loved escaping into the pages of a book where I became the person having the adventures. Continue reading →

Animal Talk

Jan4

The ends of the two scarves wound around my head and neck flapped in the frigid wind. I leaned over to pour sunflower seeds into a bird feeder, thankful for the warmth of Arnie’s old work jacket. Even though it hung off my shoulders, past the tips of my fingers and made my movements clumsy, I could pull my gloved hands and neck deeper into the generous folds of my late husband’s coat like a turtle.

A chick-a-dee openly hopped around on nearby branches in contrast to a shy woodpecker hidden on the far side of the flowering crabapple tree trunk, but giving away his presence by a rhythmic, “thunk-thunk-thunk!”

I announced, “I didn’t forget about you, woodpecker! I’m putting a suet seed cake in the cage.”

Carrying the rest of the seeds and suet to the birdfeeders on the other side of the house, I slowly trudged through the snow, examining animal tracks along the way. Something with skinny limbs had leapt through the deep snow to a tree. Then there were no more tracks. I looked up. The tree branches touched the next tree and the next. That had to have been a squirrel from along the river. Those greedy rodents like to gobble seeds whenever they find a birdfeeder. Continue reading →

Malted Milk Balls

Dec28

I looked around at everyone seated at our kitchen table. Normally crowded with the nine members of our family, today we were wedged together like sardines with our guests. The chicken Mom had made was so tender that it fell off the bones and melted in my mouth. Mashed potatoes, rich with butter and tender green beans kept me busy and quiet. Finishing the last bite, I considered licking my plate, but somehow knew Mom wouldn’t like that. It was hard being eight years old, the youngest of a large family.

Earlier in the week Mom had said, “It’s my brother Bushwa’s birthday on Sunday. I’ll make sure he and Augie come for dinner. They don’t know that our sister Tressie and Art will be here, too. I’m going to make a very special meal with a birthday cake for dessert.”

Excited, I thought about what Mom had said. Bushwa and Augie were bachelor uncles who dropped by for weekly visits and a meal. Tressie was my aunt whom I loved. Art was her husband. I was a little afraid of him. He had white hair and a florid face, especially when he talked politics. They lived in far northern Wisconsin, so we didn’t see them often. Continue reading →

First Snow

Dec14

Resigned to our dreary Wisconsin November weather, I pulled on a coat and slowly walked down the driveway to the mailbox. After the wind roared in the tree tops a few days earlier, the yard seemed unusually quiet today. From somewhere in the flowering crab apple tree, a chickadee wheezed, “Chee-dee-dee.”

I thought, “Now that’s a wintery sound! I wonder when it’s going to start looking like winter?” The kid in me looked forward to the first snow of the year.  As an adult, I knew that snow made travel horrid. Looking up at the gray sky, I sighed, “But it is so pretty to watch as it slowly, lazily falls to the earth!” Continue reading →

Reaching a Verdict

Dec7

Just as my big brother entered our farmhouse, I reached the bottom of the staircase. The warm smells of beef roasting in the oven collided with the cold, fresh air that had rushed in when he opened the back door. Even after the door was shut, icy air surrounded him like an aura. He handed Mom letters from the mail box and then asked, “Who wants to be the first to read the newspaper?”

“Me!” I announced, as I snatched it from him. The folded and rolled paper felt as cold as ice. Holding it away from me, I said, “Burrr! It must be really cold outside today!”

My brother laughed and said, “You didn’t even read the paper, yet you found out something from it! It’s 20 degrees below zero.” Turning to go back outside to finish barn chores, he teased, “Have fun reading the front page.”

There were ten years of age difference between my brother and me. He liked to joke about how I thought reading the funnies and letters to Ann Landers was actually reading the newspaper. He sometimes scoffed, “I’ll bet you think the front page of the paper is where the funnies are found.” Continue reading →

Traditions

Nov30

When I arrived home, I sat down at the kitchen table with my bag of goodies. Mom was standing at the stove stirring a pot of chili. Looking over her shoulder, she said, “Don’t spoil your supper with candy. You can eat whatever you want later.”

I protested, “I just want to look at what I got at school.” Opening a small brown paper bag, I dumped it next to my cereal bowl, filled during the night with chocolate covered peanuts, vanilla creams, hard candies and an orange. Mom left the stove to look over my shoulder as I examined my new loot. There was a red and white candy cane, a bunch of peanuts in the shell, several chewy red, white and green mints in wrappers and a popcorn ball. On the way home from school, I’d gobbled down the malted milk balls.

Mom asked, “Did you get to see Saint Nicholas today?”

Shaking my head and grinning with the superiority of a ten-year-old, I said, “Nah. It was just like other years. When we came back inside from our last recess of the day, everyone had a bag like this on their desk.” As Mom sliced bread, I said, “My classmates all celebrate Christmas pretty much the same, but not Saint Nicholas. Only a few put letters to Santa in a cereal bowl like we do. Some of them set out shoes, others hang socks…” Continue reading →