Archives

Yuletide Beast

Dec17

The bushy balsam looked as if it was bringing itself into the house. Stomping through the dining room and into the living room, the tree boughs bounced when it stopped and a voice requested, “Help me with the tree stand.” As the tree turned to settle onto the floor in the corner of the room, I finally saw Arnie, my husband. Pulling the tree away from the wall a little, he pointed out, “I think the best side of the tree is facing the room. All I need, is for you to hold the tree steady while I tighten the screws.”

Fresh balsam scent and the aura of cold clinging to the tree’s gray branches and trunk began to mingle with the warmth of the living room. Racing downstairs and into the living room, my nine-year-old daughter Tammie exclaimed, “I could smell the tree from upstairs!” Her thirteen-year-old sister Niki entered the living room a little slower, but with a happy smile.

Flicker, our tuxedo tom cat crept slowly around the outer perimeter of the living room. His black nose twitched; the smell of outdoors to now suddenly be indoors seemed to make him nervous.

By the time our Christmas tree was fully decorated later that afternoon, Flicker came to accept the new feature to our living room. As evening advanced, he seemed enamored with the tree, making a spot under one of the lowest boughs his favorite place to nap. It wasn’t until bedtime that I could see we had a problem. As Tammie walked past the tree, Flicker reached out with his long kitty arms and snagged her ankle with a claw. She let out a yelp.

I scolded, “Naughty kitty! Niki, you’d better put him out in the entryway for the night.”

Niki reached under the tree and scooped up the cat. Petting and cuddling him, she commented, “Look at Flicker! His eyes are crazy looking.”

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Girl Meets Country

Sep10

The realtor placed two sheets of paper on the table in front of Arnie and me. He explained, “I’m going to take you to see these two houses this afternoon. Before we leave the office, you might want to look at the spec sheets. You’ll notice both houses are in the countryside, and both have the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and the backyard you want.”  

Each sheet bore the picture of a house for sale. Below the picture was information about the house. One had fifteen hundred square feet of living space, the other had two thousand. One house had a new roof and with the other a new water heater. The yearly property taxes listed for either property made my eyes water.  

Both houses looked nice, but I had trouble taking my eyes off the brick house. It looked inviting, warm, and friendly. My gut feeling was that it looked like a home…my home. When we toured it, Arnie and I liked what we saw, despite its many faults. The house was built over fifty years before I was born. Some remodeling had been done, some of it very poorly. It was branded with the colors and products of the 1970’s mobile home industry. Most shocking to me, was that the house had two furnaces! One was an oil furnace, and the other was a wood furnace.

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Sky Rooms

Feb5

My sisters wanted to paint stars on their bedroom ceiling around the time I was leaving behind my infancy. Like all babies I had spent my first two or three years floating about in a nebulous world. The events and activities of my siblings were indistinct and vague to my perception because little of it had to do with my three most basic needs: nourishment, dry diapers and cuddles. Slowly, I began to understand words, and I began to sort out the tangle of my two arms and two legs, making independent locomotion possible. At that point, I became “the shadow”, following the siblings I could keep up to, while firing endless questions at their backsides.

Agnes and Rosie insisted they had to paint the bedroom they shared a rich navy blue. Mom said, “That color is too dark. A home decorator in one of my women’s magazines recommended that bedrooms on the northside of a house, like yours, should be painted bright colors.” The two girls insisted that they needed the room to be the color of a night sky because they were going to stencil silver stars all over the ceiling.

I was told years later that the girls worked day after day for weeks that summer on their bedroom décor. Arranging the various sized stars so they were evenly spaced was time consuming work. Reaching high overhead to neatly paint the stars using a small detail brush was neck-breaking. They also wanted coordinating room accessories such as a wastepaper basket. To supply this, they found a square five-gallon fuel can, had the top cut off, cleaned it, painted it navy, and stenciled silver stars on it as well.

Despite having two windows, the bedroom was dark like a cave after both the ceiling and walls were painted the rich, dark blue. The advice found in Mom’s woman’s magazine had been correct. A bedroom on the north side of the house needs lighter paint. The ceiling stayed as it was, but my sisters soon repainted the walls a bluish white.

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Bathing A Cat

Jan22

Scrolling through Instagram, I came across a video of cats being bathed in water by their owners. Some of the animals were docile and cooperative. I commented to my daughter Tammie, “Are these cats for real? And why do the cat owners think cats need baths?”

Tammie defended cat bathing, “Hairless Sphinx cats need to be bathed. They have body oils that need to be washed away. They don’t have hair like other cats, which wicks oil off the skin. There are also other cats with hair like Turkish Vans that enjoy being in water.”

 Unconvinced, I pointed out, “Some cats might like baths, but most turn into screeching, shredding, high-speed rockets whenever someone tries to put them into water. Didn’t you and your sister Niki try to bathe one of our cats when you were kids?”

Nodding, my daughter admitted, “Yes. We tried to bathe Berry.”

Remembering our cat Berry makes me smile. My eight- and twelve-year-old daughters and I found him as an older kitten along our country road one late summer afternoon. We named him Berry because he had been hiding under an elderberry bush.

Our ten-year-old tom cat named Flicker made very little fuss when we added this new feline to the household menagerie. After a while, the two cats grew to like each other so much that they often slept curled around each other. Both cats were tuxedo cats, so it was hard to tell where one cat started and the other left off. They resembled one big furry kitty puddle.

Someone once asked me how I could tell Flicker and Berry apart. While they did look alike from a distance, with a closer look it was easy to see that Flicker had black fur on his nose and muzzle, while Berry had white fur in those places.

One day when Berry was still a new member of the family, and we were playing with him in the backyard, he showed us his belly for scratches and pets. He was happy and comfortable, so he stretched and rolled around on the dusty driveway. His crisp looking white fur picked up dust and grass clippings from the lawn. Niki and Tammie decided their new kitty needed a bath. I stated, “Cats don’t need baths.” The girls insisted that the cat would love being washed clean in a bath. I retorted, “We never bathed cats on the farm I grew up on.”

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Under An Elderberry Bush

Jan15

Gathering clouds made the late summer afternoon feel cooler, so I decided to take a walk. Glancing into the dining room where my eight-year-old and twelve-year-old daughters were sitting at the table, I invited, “Would you girls like to go for a walk with me?” Obviously bored, they eagerly jumped to their feet, but obediently turned back to pick up their drink glasses when I suggested, “Why don’t you put your glasses next to the sink?”

In the driveway Tammie, my younger daughter asked, “How far are we going to walk? Is it going to rain before we get back home?”

“No.” I assured her. “It won’t rain while we’re walking. I only plan to walk one mile. That’s to the top of the hill and just a short distance beyond the oak tree that stands there.

The air was still and felt slightly muggy. Thinking of the dry soil in the garden, I reflected on how we needed rain. Unseen late summer insects hiding in the tall grass along the road and tree tops buzzed. I commented, “The sound that late summer bugs make always reminds me of the sizzling of bacon when it fries.”

Niki, my older daughter chuckled when I added, “The fat of the summer is melting away whenever you hear those bugs.” Both girls groaned when I cheerfully pointed out, “Your school year starts in three weeks.”

All family walks taken along our road must include a stop on the bridge, found one tenth of a mile from our house. We look down into the water and count minnows and crayfish. Pebbles from the road get tossed into the water to see them splash. Leaves are dropped to watch how fast or slow the current of the Little Eau Pleine River takes them away. Without the sun that day, the water looked dark. Tammie complained, “I can’t see fish today.”

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Frog Monster

Jan8

My daughter Niki snuggled down under the covers in her bed. Her younger sister, Tammie, reluctantly crawled into her bed. I turned on a small nightlight on the dresser, then leaned over to pick up clothing from the floor that had been cast off in favor of night clothes. Tammie sat upright to point out, “You forgot to shut the closet door.”

I thought, “That’s nice. Tammie likes having the room look neat at bedtime.”

Niki dismissed that idea when she sleepily commented, “Tammie wants the frog monster to stay in the closet.”

This was the first I’d heard about a frog monster! I looked closely at my youngest daughter. She didn’t look too worried. I asked, “Where did the monster come from? Tell me about it.”

Tammie shrugged as she outlined what she knew about the frog. “I don’t know where the frog came from. He wears a crown and is six feet tall.”

Sleepiness gone, Niki rolled on her side and added with a giggle, “It carries a large trident like Neptune.”

I was impressed. How many children have closet monsters that are six-feet-tall and carry the three-pronged weapon of a Roman sea god? I inquired, “Are you afraid of this giant frog monster?”

Both of my daughters denied being afraid. Tammie informed me, “The frog doesn’t bother us if the closet door is closed.”

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Garden Report Card

Nov6
Who’s their Mama and Papa?

I waded through enthusiastically growing plants, checking on their progress. The amount that plants manage to grow in 30 to 40 days after the seeds and nursery babies are put into the ground never fails to impress me. Beautiful, large leaves umbrellaed over the zucchini and melons, tomato plants, once skinny and delicate looking now looked like happy, healthy, large balls of green leaves and yellow blossoms. Even the slow-to-start carrots showed up bushy and vigorous.

There were few, if any, weeds around the plants and none in the walkway since it was still so early in the summer. When my eyes spotted a row of stubbles instead of green bean plants, I came to a stop and glanced around. Along the empty row I spotted rabbit pellets. “Those darn rabbits!” I huffed angerly. “There’s so much for them to eat outside of the garden this time of the year, why do they have to come in here to eat?”

My garden building was over twenty years old. The structure was showing its age: wooden boards were rotted; a plastic panel was missing from one end, and the plastic skin that covered the whole building was full of holes. Until it was repaired, there was no way I could block the rabbits and deer from entering the garden to graze. There were several places where the hooves of a deer had punctured holes in the plastic mulch sheets. Where the rabbits munched on low-growing plants, deer nibble on taller vegetables. The peas and sunflowers didn’t survive their midnight snacks, either.

At the end of July, a work crew came to replace rotting wood support boards on the hoop building garden and swapped its leaking plastic covering with fresh material. Before they did the work, I weeded the walkway. After they left, I went to work spreading woodchips on the perimeter of the garden. The rabbits continued to visit, but since the peas, beans and sunflowers were gone, they limited themselves to just eating lower leaves.

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The Chaperone

Oct16

I wrung out the dish cloth and laid it on the counter and left the kitchen to look out the living room window to check on my children. I still felt I needed to periodically check on them even though they weren’t little anymore. 14-year-old Niki and 10-year-old Tammie were old enough to take care of themselves while I did housework.

The first few times my daughters played in our backyard when they were younger, I never got anything done in the house because I was constantly peeking out of the windows to make sure they were safe. My friends didn’t seem to feel the need to constantly chaperone their children as I did. Was I an overly anxious mother? My way of thinking was that if one of them got hurt, it wouldn’t be because they were unsupervised.  

The phone rang. It was my mother. She had gone shopping and wanted to tell me about what she’d bought. I sneezed. She commented, “I hope you aren’t coming down with a cold.”

From the window, I spotted my two girls playing badminton on the back lawn. Feeling silly, I paused before asking, “Mom?” 

On the other end of the telephone line, my 86-year-old mother responded, “Yes?”

I repeated, “Mom, when does a mother stop worrying so much about her children?”

My mother answered with a slow, impish drawl, “Umm…. I don’t know!”

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A Famous Relative

Oct9

Excited to attend the fair, my two daughters, Niki, Tammie and their neighborhood friend Dee-Dee, raced ahead of me through the parking lot toward the entry gate. I stopped to make sure my car was locked and was amazed that even this far from the midway, I could hear the screams of people enjoying the carnival rides. A gentle, easterly breeze carried the smell of deep-fried foods to us, but also the smell of animals that were entered at the fair. The unique combination of smells didn’t bother me because through the years I’d grown used to them.  

Of all the Marshfield fairground buildings, the first one and easiest to see from a distance is the huge red one that has a sign on it announcing that it is, “the world’s largest round barn.”  Tammie, my younger daughter, proudly informed her friend Dee-Dee, “My great uncle and his brothers built that round barn!” I smiled to hear my daughter repeating what I tell my children each year when attending the fair.

Knowing that my uncle, Henry Felhofer, and his brothers built this local landmark has always made me feel proud to be related to them. What they achieved was remarkable for so many reasons. The Felhofer brothers bid to the Central Wisconsin Holstein Breeders Association for the job was lower than any of the other bids because the brothers planned to do without using scaffolding.

Although the Felhofer brothers were thoroughly experienced in the building trade, this was the only round barn they ever built. They began to work on Thanksgiving Day, in 1915. Working through a bitterly cold winter, they cut the fingers off their gloves to keep warm and yet be able to handle the nails. Since the building had a round roof, the brothers were not sure how many shingles to order. They made an educated guess which turned out to be spot-on! They had only a handful of shingles left when they were done working. The 150-foot wide, 70-foot-tall barn was completed in the spring of 1916 and used for the fair that summer and ever since.

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Watch Me Dance

Sep25

The smaller grandchildren tumbled about on the living room floor like happy little puppies, while the eldest girl tried to organize the bedlam. Anne kept repeating, “Let’s put on a dance for Grandma!” I smiled. The younger children were lost when Anne wasn’t home to direct their play.

 A golden ray of late afternoon sunshine found its way into the room through a slight opening in the drapes. The wayward shaft of light was like a spotlight on each towheaded child as they obediently trooped out of the room through the light to put on dress-up clothes.

Before the children were dressed and ready to put on a floor show, their mother and youngest sibling returned from town. I got up and walked into the dining room to talk to my daughter. When the children came back downstairs from their visit to my dress-up box, they were wearing prom dresses, scarves, petticoats, and lacy kerchiefs pinned in their hair. Anne begged over and over, “Mom, Grandma, come into the living room and watch us dance!”

We all returned to the living room, and Anne lined her siblings up. I took a picture of the performers. When she said, “Ok” they all began to twirl, jump and leap. If enthusiasm indicates a superior performance, my daughter Niki and I were watching the world’s best dancers.

“Watch me dance” was a demand I heard Anne make often when she was a small girl. It didn’t seem to matter if her siblings danced with her or not. In her mind, she seemed to feel she was on a stage, and that her leaps and twirls were flawlessly choreographed movements.

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