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Home Sweet Home

May4

The phone rang at 7 a.m. Its jangling didn’t wake me despite the early hour, but I was still in bed. Reaching across my husband, I pulled the receiver off the cradle and answered. On the other end of the line my mother, with a catch in her voice blurted, “I waited until I thought you’d be up. I have a horrible pain in my back and I don’t know what to do.”

Arnie tickled me and I frowned at him and shook my head. I said, “I’ll be right over to take you to the clinic, Mom.”

My mother was approaching her 99th birthday and had never before called to complain of pain. I rolled out of bed and quickly dressed. It was Valentine’s Day 2005, less than one month before Mom would pass away.

For her first 28 years of life my Mom lived half a mile down the road from the farm where I grew up. When she married Daddy, she made her one and only lifetime move. After Daddy died, the many years took their toll, but my siblings and I were able to provide the care she needed. My two bachelor brothers lived with her and helped by making meals and keeping her company. I took care of her healthcare, shopping and personal needs. Together, we were able to keep her living at home until that last hospitalization. Continue reading →

The check is in the Mail

Mar23

Putting down a steaming bowl of hamburgers swimming in a pool of brown mushroom gravy, I glanced up at the clock on the dining room wall. As I turned to get the boiled potatoes, I questioned in surprise, “Seven o’clock already? It’s still so light out!”

After dumping half the potatoes onto his plate a few moments later, my husband ladled meat and gravy over them answering me, “Daylight savings begins next week.”

“You’re so busy this time of the year,” I commented, thinking about how many long hours he was away from home to deliver his customers’ organic seeds and fertilizers.

Arnie forked food into his mouth and nodded. After swallowing he said, “It’s a good business, but right now, all the farmers have on their minds is getting into their fields the minute the soil is warm and dry enough. They want the product they’ve ordered to be there when they need it.”

I took the last of the cooked carrots from the serving bowl and savored their sweetness in silence. A cool breeze from the open kitchen window made me shiver. The sweet carol of a robin came in along with the breeze and filled me with pleasure. I said, “It was so warm this afternoon, I opened a few windows. Now that it’s getting chilly again, I’d better shut them.”

The phone rang while I was away from the table. I groaned because I hate to have meal-time interrupted by telemarketers. When I sat back down I could tell Arnie was talking to a customer. He said, “I want you to have a check ready for me when I deliver the product tomorrow.” After listening to the person on the other end of the line for a few minutes, he said, “Look, I’m not your banker. You’re not taking out a loan. I need to be paid.” Continue reading →

First Silver

Mar16
fork

Example of fork from wedding set.

The diamond ring sparkled as I pushed my left hand back and forth through the bath water to work up more bubbles. Leaning back in the old fashioned claw-footed bathtub, I held up my hand to better examine the ring. The bright silver etched band had scallops which corresponded to the wedding band Arnie would be putting on my finger in one month. Light from the window behind me made the amazing stone and the bubbles around it sparkle with flashes of silver, gold, green and blue.

I smiled, thinking about Arnie. He was handsome and fun to be around and I knew without a doubt that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. Thoughts about our wedding preparations and the many things I had planned to do that day suddenly made me feel restless. Pulling the plug on the tub, I rinsed off bubbles, dried and dressed.

The bathroom window was open a crack and a warm March breeze whispered in, smelling fresh and with a hint of the red, bulging buds on the maple trees which towered over the house. Six months ago an elderly lady named Alma had rented me an upstairs bedroom and a bath in this house. I loved the place because it was just two blocks from the hospital where I worked. I didn’t own a car. Today I planned to walk twelve blocks to the stores downtown to buy a few things that I needed. Continue reading →

Spring Forward

Mar9

Bare-branched trees along the driveway whipped back and forth in a wearisome wind. I knew from my walk around the yard earlier, that the wind was cold, despite the bright sunshine and blue sky. Patches of snow covered most of the lawn. Very little ice melts on days like this. On my desk calendar I spotted small print on one of the days in mid March. Knowing what I’d see, I leaned in closer anyway. It said, “Daylight saving time begins.”

Although Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1784, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” he was not the man who introduced daylight saving. His satire merely proposed that Parisians get up earlier in the morning and go to bed earlier to save on candles. It was New Zealander George Hudson who proposed daylight saving in 1895. Continue reading →

Good Friday’s Fish

Feb17

Pale light was filtering into my bedroom when I awoke. My first thought was to wonder whether my big brother, Casper, had returned home.” Sliding out of bed, I padded over to the bedroom window and pulled the curtain aside. His car was parked in its usual place in the farmyard driveway below my window. In bare tree branches near the house, several small birds twittered and trilled their spring-time joy.

Only a few small patches of dirty snow still dotted the yard. Yesterday I’d helped Daddy make shallow trenches in the driveway to help hasten drainage from the lawn around our house. Although it was still early morning, they were already filled with water. I smiled, Easter would be warm this year and I could wear my lavender coat and flowered hat to church.

No one was in the kitchen. I grabbed a slice of bread and buttered it. Hearing voices in the basement, I slowly crept down the steps, munching on the bread. Mom and Casper were working at the sink, gutting and washing small fish that were only three to four inches long. Next to them was a large milk-can nearly full with more fish. Continue reading →

Compassionate Valentines

Feb10

My big sisters slammed the back door as they left the house. To hurry me along, Mom said, “Put your scarf on and go…Daddy’s waiting in the car.” I pulled a small purple nylon wisp of material from my coat pocket, folded it diagonally and put it over my head and tied a small knot under my chin. Pushing my glasses further up onto the bridge of my nose, I ran out of our farmhouse, slamming the door behind me.

The air felt sharp that February morning, as sharp as any of the January mornings the previous month, but something seemed different. I couldn’t place what it was. A bird sang as I clambered into the family car. The sound made me pause. It was not one that I’d heard since last fall. As cold as it was, some of the summer birds were returning!

There was a hole in our green Dodge’s floor boards behind the driver’s seat. As Daddy drove through the yard to the road, I instinctively put my foot over the hole as we approached a big mud puddle. Instead of a splash against the bottom of my foot like happened after school yesterday, we heard the sound of shattering glass. I loved the sound. During first recess at school, my friends and I would go all over the playground and break the panels of ice that covered each puddle. Continue reading →

Middle Child

Feb3

Agnes, my eldest sister sat at Mom’s sewing machine slowly, patiently feeding a bright, flowered material to the shiny mechanically powered needle. It darted up and down as the motor made a low humming sound. The machine was new, delivered only a day or two before. I tried to remember the old machine, but could only recall that it had a foot pedal which Mom had to pump to work.

Tired of watching Agnes sew, I found Rosie, who was a year younger than Agnes. She was in the bedroom they shared, brushing her hair. Bored, I began to ramble around though the house checking on the rest of my siblings. My sister Mary, who was seven years older than me, was in the living room reading. Betty, who was one year younger than Mary was on the back lawn playing with a kitten. I found Casper, who was a year older than Agnes, in the garage. He was building a bird house.

After searching for a while, I finally found Billy in the garden with Mom, who was inspecting her new seedlings. Billy had been born after Casper, Agnes and Rosie, but well before Mary, Betty and I. While I saw him as one of the big kids in my family, he was also one of us younger kids. Continue reading →

Germinated Gardener

Jan27

I leaned against my bedroom window, soaking in the beauty of a brilliant winter sunrise and wondered when the Mid West had last enjoyed a full day of sunshine. Yesterday was overcast and gray, so was the day before that and the day before that. Seasonal Affective Disorder doesn’t bother me, but after weeks and weeks of minimal sunshine, seeing the jolly face of our giant earth-star rising up in the east certainly made me feel very happy. I contentedly sighed, “The days are getting longer again.”

Despite enjoying sunshine peeking into my house that morning, I knew it was very cold outside. The furnace was running almost constantly. Pulling the living room drapes open, I checked the thermometer outside the north window. It read, ‘Ten degrees below zero’. Nodding, I remembered that the weatherman had said that it would ‘warm up’ to five degrees by noon.

As the morning passed, I went again and again to the windows to admire the sunshine. I wanted to go outside, but even at five degrees above zero, it was too cold to really enjoy being in the backyard. The only hospitable place would be inside my unheated greenhouse. When the sun shines though the plastic, it gets warm. Eyeing the drifts between the house and my greenhouse, I calculated whether the struggle to get there was worth it. It was. Continue reading →

Chicken Steps

Jan6

Although legally blind, Mom knew me when I walked into the living room. Macular degeneration hadn’t destroyed her peripheral vision. She said, “You shouldn’t have come today. I heard on the radio that the roads are slippery.”

I glanced at the rosary in my 95 year-old mother’s hands and wondered how many times her continual prayers had assisted my six siblings and me through stressful times. Sitting down on a dining room chair across from where she was ensconced in her mauve recliner, I said, “The roads were a little slippery, but I was safe because I drove slowly and didn’t take chances.”

Every Friday I reloaded Mom’s pill box, helped her bathe and did other chores like change the bedding and pay bills. I did this year in and year out. It didn’t matter if I was leaving for a week’s vacation, or that Christmas had been four days earlier and a New Year’s Eve celebration was night after-next. Mom, who lived with my two bachelor brothers in the farmhouse where I had spent my childhood, needed help. Continue reading →

Over The Next Hill

Dec30

Tammie looked over at me from behind the steering wheel. She asked, “So, Mom, when are you going to retire?”

Without thinking, I laughed and said, “Me? I’m not old enough to retire. That’s at least two or three years away yet.” In the silence that followed, I looked out the passenger window at the fields, ponds and houses we were passing on highway 41. As our car crested a small rise and a whole new vista opened to us, I acknowledged to myself that maybe it was time for me to start thinking about retirement. I’d be sixty five in less than a year and a half.

Throughout most of the thirty seven years that Arnie and I were married, my husband frequently said, “We’re going to work it out so that you can quit working at the hospital.” That never happened, probably because my job provided our family with health insurance. All was good, I liked what I did and I worked only four days a week.

When Arnie and I were fifty-six years old, Arnie died suddenly. After that I had no more thoughts about quitting work. Continue reading →