Archives

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 →

Retired, but not Tired

Nov11

After studying my foot X-rays, the young doctor said, “Your feet are in bad shape. You have arthritis in every joint. Some of the joints have worn down to bone-on-bone.”

I frowned and said, “Ah…I see.” As strange as it may sound, although what I was told wasn’t a good thing, I felt a sense of relief. My pain had just been validated. I thought, “I’m not just being a big baby when I whine about my feet hurting! There is a true, physical reason for the pain.”

Some days my feet feel good, but there are other days where they hurt. That led me to think there was nothing seriously wrong with them. In my mind I figured that major problems like joints wore down to bone-on-bone would hurt all of the time. Evidently I was wrong. Continue reading →

Not By Choice

Sep7

Not By Choice

Even though the weather was hot and humid, the minute I arrived home from work, I decided that I needed to prepare my fair entries for delivery to the Central Wisconsin State Fair. I looked forward to relaxing when that job was finished.

Allowing myself a few minutes of respite from my scheduled labor, I sat down at the desk and checked my email account. I found a message from the company that owns The Buyer’s Guide, a weekly advertisement newspaper that I’ve had a column in for the last 25 years and three months.

My eyes widened as I read, “As you may know, we are undergoing some changes in how we allocate editorial resources for the Hub City Times. As part of this, we have moved away from a paid columnist structure. Effective immediately, we will no longer be able to pay for the Lifelines column.”

I thought, “What?” I knew that the paper had moved away from publishing just advertisements and my column to having local news stories and other columnists. Since I never go to the office, I hadn’t known that my column was at risk.

Picking up the telephone, I called my daughter, Tammie.

“What’s up, Mom?” She asked.

I said, “The Buyer’s Guide just fired me via e-mail.” Continue reading →

It’s Snow Good

Feb11

The house felt warm and cozy. Not a glimmer of light from outside marred the bathroom’s black windowpane. It wasn’t the middle of night, though. Only half an hour before, the annoying, buzzing insistence of my alarm clock persuaded me to leave my warm bed. Unable to put off leaving for work, I checked my reflection in the mirror above the sink one last time, and turned out the light. Continue reading →

Facing the Truth

Feb4

I stood in the dim hallway outside our farmhouse bathroom, alternating between knocking on the door, and noisily snuffling into the door frame. On some basic, instinctive level, my five-year-old mind knew that when a little sister pounds on the bathroom door long enough, big sisters usually forgo their desire for privacy. Continue reading →