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 →

Queen of Sheba

Jan20

The cup of black tea was almost a little too hot to sip. I happily breathed in its fragrant scent and smiled at how the ceramic mug shared its warmth with my chilled hands. Setting the cup down on a table next to my chair, I pulled up the quilt on my legs, so that I could cuddle under its voluminous folds. Outside the living room window snow drifts were casting chilly blue shadows, while towering pine trees appeared more black than green. It was a good day to stay indoors to read.

Picking up my Bible, I opened to where I had left-off the day before from my ‘one page a day’ reading commitment. I Kings, chapter 10 told about the Queen of Sheba paying a visit to King Solomon to test his wisdom of renown. She arrived in Jerusalem with a huge retinue, camels bearing spices, a large amount of gold and precious stones. Continue reading →

Hell’s Furnace

Jan13

I shivered even though the room was warm. Thinking about the furnace had me anxiously rocking back and forth. My daughter Niki, sitting on the sofa next to me, put her hand comfortingly on my shoulder while her husband Mike nodded in compassion. Arnie and I had had an old fashioned marriage. I took care of cooking, cleaning and laundry. He took care of mowing the lawn, keeping the furnace running and fixing anything that broke down. Four days ago my husband of 37 years had unexpectedly died.

If I had died, a few weeks after the funeral when family and friends went back to their lives, Arnie would have merely starved to death in soiled clothing. This was a fate that I considered far less horrible than the one I was facing at the moment. With Arnie gone, I was sentenced to learning the care and maintenance of the wood-pellet-eating beast in the basement. Knowing that it was-right below where I was sitting-made me shiver again!

Most people have furnaces that are turned on and off with the twist of a thermostat dial and only need a heating specialist’s visit once a year to service the equipment. That would have been too simple and easy for my husband. He bought an unusual furnace that few others have in Central Wisconsin. He installed a furnace that required as much hands-on care as a newborn baby. The dirty thing needed to be burped, diapered and potty trained. All I knew about it at that moment was how to pour in the wood pellets. 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 →

Doorway to Humility

Dec23

I followed my fellow pilgrims off the bus and joined those already standing in a circle around Juan, the owner of Mater Dei Tours. Holding a pole topped with a blue flag showing the tour company logo, he said, “Here, before you is the Church of the Nativity. This is the place where it is believed that Jesus was born.”

All of my life, I had read about Bethlehem in Israel, never guessing that I’d actually travel there some day. Yet here I was with my travel companion daughter, Tammie, far from our Wisconsin home in the United States. Walking toward the church entrance, I glanced up at the gray sky overhead. A chill winter wind blew through the courtyard and I remembered a line from the Bible, “That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep.” Burying my hands in my jacket pocket, I thought, “Even in the subtropics, it gets cold during winter.” Continue reading →

It’s Tradition

Dec16

The house door softly clicked shut behind me. I took a deep breath of the frosty night air. An inch of fresh snow lay on the deck. Shuffling my feet in the fluffy ice crystals, I looked around and saw by the yard light that more snow was falling steadily on our already white farm yard.

Smiling, I held out my arms and tipped my head back to allow the flakes tickle my face as they landed. I felt small in a big world. Inside the house behind me were my four and eight year-old children, in the barn before me was my husband waiting for my help. Continue reading →

Snow Songs

Dec9

Snow started to fall while I was reading the latest comic book Daddy had bought for me while in town to have our oats ground into cow feed. Some latent instinct in my ten-year-old mind must have helped me feel the change in the barometer or the rise in humidity. Putting the Donald Duck comic down, I went to the window. Seeing a white curtain of ice crystals between the house and the barn made me gleefully shout, “Yee-hoo!”

A happy, content feeling enveloped me as I began to think about going out to play in the snow and about all things Christmas; gifts, cookies, candy, the tree, midnight Mass, singing carols, the crèche and vacation from school. Soon restlessness filled my mind. No longer interested in the comic book, I decided to check out the spot where Mom stored the extra Christmas candy every year. Finding it empty just made me feel more excited, knowing that the box of malted milk balls, chocolate covered nuts, caramels and at least ten other goodies along with plain nuts would magically appear there on Christmas Eve. Continue reading →