This week, the house cleaning has begun in earnest. Hannah’s and Dorcas’ penpals, Jennifer and Sarah McDonald, who live in Ontario, are scheduled to arrive here a week from tomorrow. They will stay a week. Although we have never met them before, we have corresponded for twelve years or more; so we are all looking forward to seeing them.
We bought several lidded bins at Wal-Mart, hoping this would help us in our cleaning endeavors; but I think we need several dozen more, in order to “have a place for everything, and have everything in its place”. The truth is, we need Windsor Palace, with all its wardrobes and bureaus and dressers and chests and cupboards and closets, in order to have space for all of our Jetsam and Flotsam, Junk and Stuff. (But let me tell you, it’s A-One, First-Class Junk and Stuff, make no mistake!)
Monday was Dorcas’ first day at work at the All About Kids daycare center. One little girl kept crying and wanting Dorcas to hold her. Dorcas did so, and the child started falling asleep. That’s when Dorcas learned that they are not supposed to let the children sleep, because then they will not sleep for their parents when they get home. And heaven knows, the parents couldn’t stand that. Why do you suppose they get rid of them all day??! Another little girl didn’t feel well, and wanted to lie down. They wouldn’t let her. Oooo, I think that is so mean.
The women who take care of the children are not supposed to say anything about God, or the Bible, or sing any songs of a religious nature. They have no idea that if they would do just that, the daycare center would be full of better behaved, happier children! What a godless country we have turned into.
Monday evening, I took Victoria for a walk; but we didn’t go very far, because it was a bit too chilly. By Thursday and Friday, the coolness of the earlier part of the week was long for gotten. One day it was 105°.
Larry has given his two-week notice at Quail Run, because they just plain don’t pay enough. Since the shop is sold, there will not be that additional income. The new owners are giving him ninety days to clear out – and that is not long enough, when he is working another full-time job. He has four rebuilders to finish, and there are untold bits and pieces of this and that in the shop and around it that will have to be moved somewhere. After that – he has not decided what to do.
One afternoon I went out to the garage to hunt for the mop. Teddy informed me that someone had thrown it away, because the head was all wrecked up. Now, a new mop costs $10; a new head $2. Bother. I headed off to Wal-Mart to buy a mop.
The lady at the checkout stand, observing my assortment of cleaning detergents and mop, said, “Ooooo, this doesn’t look like fun!” She grimaced. “But it has to be done,” she added ruefully.
“Yes,” I agreed, “once every five years, whether it needs it or not.”
She guffawed so loudly, several people turned and looked at us. When I left, she chirruped gaily, “Have a nice day!!” – and everyone nearby laughed, because they could see the cleaning things and the mop sticking out of my cart.
When I got home, I found the old mop in the corner of the kitchen. Botheration.
Tuesday, Teddy brought home a bowl full of mulberries – two quarts of them. I promised to bake something yummy, soon. And I knew, if I was to bake anything at all, it must be soon, because the littles were having a good many, unbaked.
Lawrence and Norma, and Keith and Esther came visiting after the Wednesday evening service. I’d been cleaning Victoria’s room, and was having great hopes of finishing it that night. But one can’t stay in the back bedroom when one has company, so I got out Victoria’s dress, started pinning appliqués on it, and trimming more appliqués. I still have several more to pin on, and then I will sew them all on by hand. I will use long stitches, the better to be able to remove them after the wedding, so that I can cut the dress shorter. Then she will be able to wear it to church again. I really did not want to go to all the time and expense of such a beautiful dress – and Hannah, too, has spent many hours putting strands of pearls and sequins on it – to have Victoria wear it only once.
Later, Larry and I went to the store for milk – and wound up getting ourselves cream cheese Danishes and chocolate milk. Feeling a bit guilty, since some of the children were still awake and waiting at home for us, we bought a package of doughnuts for them. We drove a little ways out on Shady Lake Road, eating our Danishes; then home with the doughnuts, which immediately brought several children out of the feathers, noses fairly wriggling, appetites renewed.
I finally learned where the pictures were that I took of Hannah at church, when her train was still attached to her wedding gown. Thank goodness…I thought that roll of film was lost forever, and of course there was no way I could retake the pictures, since I’d already cut the train off and chopped it to smithereens. I’d thought the film was PhotoWorks; but Wal-Mart called today and said they had some pictures of mine that had been there (as the girl said), “Since like May 12th, sorta.”
So we like sorta fetched the pictures with great anticipation – and there they like were, sorta! – Hannah, wedding gown, train, and like all, sorta! (How do people talk like that, sorta? And do they like know how ignorant it like makes them sound, I wonder, sorta?)
Just as I thought, the pictures are not ‘close-up’ enough to suit me, since I had to be far enough away to get the entire train in the picture. It is a bit difficult to see Hannah’s face, and the lighting is not the best…but there is one I especially like, sorta, (oops) (sorry) where she is looking toward the window, and her train is spread out on the steps, and she is near the wooden railing and newel post. I will have an 8x10 made of it, and, if it turns out good enough, I may ask a friend of mine to paint out the background—wall, door, and ceiling—and replace it with a blue dappled setting that will show up Hannah’s wedding dress in all its glory.
Thursday was Hester’s eleventh birthday. A friend of ours gave Hester and Lydia super-duper, high-powered squirt guns, which they immediately filled with water and tried out – outside, of course. I tell you, we could wash the church windows from our front porch, with those things! And heaven help anyone who happened to open the glass while we were at it.
Keith and Esther gave Hester a funny sprinkler with long colored hoses that stick out and flop around every which way when the water is turned on. So I can well imagine the piles of wet clothing we will be coping with, the rest of the summer.
Hester’s first-, second-, and third-grade teacher, whose birthday is on the same day as Hester’s, brought a big watermelon. A blind lady to whom Hester was Secret Pal several years ago gave her some money, as did my mother. We gave her a ruffly nightgown, a package of neon pens, another of two blue, one black, and one red pen with flex-grips, a fat pen with four differently colored ink cartridges, and some money for books at the Read All About It Bookstore.
My brother Loren and his wife Janice returned home from Colorado, and Janice called Hannah to come out and get the things they had bought at Sam’s Warehouse for Bobby and Hannah’s wedding reception. When Hannah tried to pay her, Janice wouldn’t take the money. “It’s all taken care of,” she informed Hannah.
Hannah raised her eyebrows. “I suppose that means Grandma Swiney paid for it?” she asked, and Janice verified that my mother had indeed paid for all those food items. This, despite the fact that she had already given us a large amount of money for the food! There is no end to my mother’s generosity, it seems.
The end of the week approached quickly…and we continued cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. I finished two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and started on the kitchen. I put in order some cupboards that I had not planned to reorganize…I don’t have time to clean out cupboards; I must first concentrate on surface clutter and grime; but we were suffering from an acute case of Cubbicreep. That’s when the cupboard doors will no longer completely shut, and when we push on one door of the cupboard, everything creeps out the other side. In fact, it was rapidly developing into a case of Cubbilanche: every time we opened the cupboard with the Bibles and books, an avalanche of books buried our feet…and there were still piles of Bibles on the counters! The cupboard with the large bowls behaved similarly. So I cleaned them out.
Isn’t it amazing how many more things will fit into a small space, when everything in the space is in rank, tidy and orderly?
I trotted down the stairs to look at the children’s rooms. They are without fail alarmingly frightful, and that day was no exception. I promptly threatened all the kids that, if they don’t have their clothes picked up by the time I am ready to come downstairs and clean, I shall bring a box of black garbage bags down with me, and I will pick everything up and cram it into the bag, whatever it happens to be. The bags will all then go out to the garage. The most I will do is label the bags as to which rooms the jumble came from. And if they wind up losing important belongings, tough. Too bad, so sad. They should’ve tried a little harder to clean those pigsties. So there.
Cleaning efforts progressed with more vigor than they had BTBT. (Before The Big Threat.)
Teddy is doing a good enough job on the garage that I shall give him one extra day on his room, however. How do those kids make such messes?! And better yet, how can they survive in such muddles??!! Good grief.
Joseph can’t seem to get anything at all accomplished in his room; it’s a hideous calamity, and I think he has no more idea than the man in the moon where to begin. Hester and Lydia are doing better than he is.
Thursday afternoon Teddy took Hester, Lydia, and Caleb down by the Loup River on the guise of picking more mulberries. They came home a couple of hours later, soaked and sunburnt and happy as larks – sans mulberries. They did not even have telltale purple stains around their mouths. I’m not so sure mulberry picking had been anywhere near the top of the agenda, what do you think?
Meanwhile, Teddy, worried about Mandy, the neighbor’s dog, being left outside in this heat without any shade, let her into our house. Everything was fine – she likes us all well enough – until Teddy departed. Then she yiped and yelped at the door until I yiped and yelped at her to “Stop barking!” She calmed down and was okay until Teddy returned. She especially loves him; I think she really believes she is his dog; and she probably wonders why she always has to return to the ‘neighbor’s’ house each evening and stay there all night long, where people are not nearly so nice to her as they are here, poor dog. She comes visiting every time she sees any of us outside. She stayed here with Teddy all afternoon and evening, while he was cleaning the garage, and if he came in the house, she yelped at the door.
Friday I made mulberry cobbler with all those mulberries Teddy picked, and there were enough for a double batch. Dorcas got us vanilla ice cream to go with it…Mmmmm! It was really scrumptious, especially when the cobbler was still hot.
After supper we went for a bike ride – Larry with Victoria in the bike seat; and Teddy, Joseph, Hester, Caleb, and I in random and varying formation fore and aft. Halfway around the ‘Section’, as we call the one-mile square northwest of Larry’s shop, Joseph had a blowout on his rear tire. For a little ways he walked his bike…then he hid the bicycle in a nearby cornfield and Larry helped him up on the handlebars of his bike. They started off, Larry pedaling laboriously.
I looked at the front tire – and backed off a ways, squinting involuntarily in anticipation of The Big Bang Theory replicating itself. It was discovered, some distance down the road, that one reason Larry was having such difficulty pedaling was because Joseph’s foot was against the brake cable, and he was effectively applying the brakes as they rode!
I grew more and more concerned over the state of that squished front tire; and then, finally, on the incline to the railroad track on 19th Street, Larry told Joseph it was the end of the line, kindly alight, so Joseph alit.
Caleb then climbed onto the carrier on the back of my bike, and Joseph rode Caleb’s bike the rest of the way home. Now, why didn’t we think of that in the first place? Lucky thing Joseph is not much bigger than Caleb.
It was very hot again Friday; but by the time we went riding, a strong storm cell was pushing in from the east. It was reported on our scanner that it had just come through Omaha, and was coming our way at 70 mph. The wind did blow hard for a while; but evidently the brunt of the storm bypassed us.
Home again, I read more of the Creation story to the children. We reached the part where God used Adam’s rib to make Eve. We know the Lord with His infinite skill did not hurt Adam; so how then can you explain how Adam, upon awakening and seeing Eve, knew immediately not only that this was his ‘helpmeet’, but also that she was ‘bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh, and had been taken out of Man’?
I then read a couple of chapters of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. The children sat enrapt and wide-eyed while Grandpa Ingalls and his horse barely escaped from a puma.
After we finished reading, Caleb put his hand on my arm and said, “Feel how hot my hands are.”
Hot, indeed! The child was burning up. I hastily took his temperature – and it was 102°. Poor little boy – and here we were, dragging him out on a bike ride. I discharged my duty just as well as any good doctor would have: I gave him Ibuprofen and sent him to bed.
The boys who have been hired at Quail Run Golf Course for the summer have been having all sorts of troubles doing such things as starting the mowers, keeping the Cushmans (or is the plural of ‘Cushman’, ‘Cushmen’?) running, and so forth. If one of them should happen to turn his mower off on a far stretch of the course, more often than not another boy comes riding into the shop telling Larry, “Something’s wrong with the mower; it won’t start!”
So Larry gets on a Cushman and goes hunting for the stranded teen. He puts all the switches in the right position, climbs on, and turns the key. The mower starts. The boys groan.
“This is getting embarrassing!” said one, after the same thing had occurred a number of times.
Yesterday, a couple of them asked Larry what jobs they should do. “You can mow around the clubhouse first,” he said, “and then I’ll meet you at the potholes and show you how to mow them – oh, say, in about five minutes or so.”
Their eyes got big. “Five minutes!” exclaimed one boy.
And then Larry laughed, and they realize he was kidding. Of course, they couldn’t possibly mow all around the clubhouse in only five minutes.
One morning, one of the boys hit a bump good and hard with the Cushman, causing the auxiliary transmission to switch from High in Neutral, after which it wouldn’t go, of course. The boy was alarmed, thinking he’d really ruined it. He rushed off to Larry for help.
“Did you check the High and Low lever?” asked Larry.
“Yes,” the boy affirmed.
Larry walked out and looked at the Cushman. Sure enough, the lever – yes, the ‘checked’ lever – was in Neutral. Larry put it in High, and they drove back to the shop, with the boy’s typical sheepish look well in place.
“You always make me feel like a real dummy,” he exclaimed good-naturedly.
Larry laughed. “Oh, don’t worry,” he assured the boy, “It takes a little while to get onto these things.” (No mention of the fact that he had never had such troubles with mechanical things, not even when he was a pre-teen.)
One boy could not start the SandPro—a three-wheeled vehicle with a blade on the front and a drag on the back that is used to drag the sand traps, to smooth the sand down. He headed for Larry. Larry told him he would come start it as soon as he put away the big tractor he’d been using. The boy walked back toward the SandPro, tossing back over his shoulder ruefully, “It’ll probably start, now that I told you it won’t.”
Sure enough, by the time Larry got there, the boy had managed to get it started. “Well, we’re making progress!” said Larry, and they both laughed.
Saturday we started cleaning the ‘shelf room’ in the basement. I tell you, this looks like a hopeless task – and the McDonald girls will be here a week from Monday! Aarrgghh. I worked all day, and it seemed like I made little headway.
That afternoon, we sold our pop-up camper. Larry wants to go to Valley, Nebraska – maybe Tuesday – to get a camper that will go on the back of his pickup. We will use part of the money from the pop-up camper to purchase the pickup camper.
Being hungry for spaghetti for supper Saturday evening, I went out to the garage, looking for the canned tomato juice we had out there. It was not to found. “Where’s the tomato juice?” I asked Teddy, who was in the final stages of garage cleaning.
He raised his eyebrows and achieved Woodstock’s Innocent Look without much trouble at all. “Uh,” he relied, “I threw it out.”
“What?!” I exclaimed. “Why??”
“Um, because it was really old and icky,” he answered.
“It was not!” I retorted. “Where is it?!”
“Out by the garbage,” he said meekly.
I marched out to get it.
Retrieving five large cans of tomato juice, I brought it back into the house and made Spaghetti Tomato Soup for supper. This is an old-fashioned recipe my Grandmother Swiney used to make, and the whole family absolutely loves it. But when I first fixed it, not long after we were married, Larry was baffled and mystified. Why on earth would anyone make spaghetti without tomato paste and meatballs?!!
Actually, the very first time I cooked that cuisine, it was a complete disaster. I will tell you what I did, if you promise not to tell:
Instead of first cooking the spaghetti in water, partially draining it, adding tomato juice, then a dab of baking soda to keep it from clabbering, and then enough milk to turn it a nice shade of pink, I put the milk into a pan, put the spaghetti into the cold milk, and then boiled milk, spaghetti, and all – ‘and all’ meaning, I determinedly endeavored to boil the pan, too. Soon, the milk was scorched and stuck to the bottom of the pan, and the spaghetti had the consistency of old rotten rubber. But I valiantly carried on. Not knowing about soda, I poured in the tomato juice.
Now, it might not have been too bad, if one didn’t mind large curd cottage cheese floating about in tomato juice and old tires that had been run through a ricer. And it might not have been too bad, if one didn’t mind tomato juice and riced tires flavored with Burnt Large Curd Cottage Cheese.
I minded.
And I supposed Larry would mind even more.
I reluctantly threw out the first attempt, picked up the phone, called my mother, and humbly asked for the recipe.
It turned out perfectly, the second time. My still-fairly-new husband came to the table, seated himself, started to close his eyes to ask the blessing for the food, opened them back up to peek at the contents of his bowl, started again to close them, and then opened them wide and stared at that pink liquid with the strands of spaghetti floating around in it.
“What is it,” he breathed.
“Roundworm soup,” I answered impatiently. “Go ahead and pray.”
He looked at me for a moment, then bowed his head and prayed. He did bless the food; but I noticed that his usual line of “bless the hands that prepared it” was conspicuously missing.
“Amen,” he soon finished, and opened his eyes again. He picked up his fork, pawed cautiously through his bowl, and twisted a strand of spaghetti on the tines. He warily put it into his mouth. Then he took his spoon, and tried some of the soup.
“I like it,” he said politely.
He took another bite.
“Don’t we have any hamburger?” he asked.
“It’s not supposed to have meatballs in it,” I informed him. “It’s Spaghetti Tomato Soup.”
“Oh,” he replied doubtfully, putting another forkful of spaghetti into his mouth. “It’s good,” he said around the bite.
And it was. Although he has always liked Spaghetti and Meatballs better, Spaghetti Tomato Soup is also a welcome dish at the Jackson Abode.
Just before supper, I went to Un-Smart (Also known as ‘Sun-Mart’) Foods with Larry to get a big light bulb – 300w – for the shelf room, so that we could see what we were trying to do. I’m not sure but what this proved more discouraging than ever, since then we could better see what an impossible chaos everything really was. While at the store, we smelled baked chicken in the deli, and, before we know it, we’d bought two eight-piece cartons of it.
“That looks greasy,” I told Larry.
“No, UnSmart’s chicken isn’t very greasy at all,” he contradicted me.
We returned home, and I put one or two pieces of chicken on everyone’s plates, with the size of the serving directly related to the size of the person behind the plate. I held out my drippy, shiny hand to Larry.
“Did you say this chicken isn’t greasy?” I asked.
He looked at my hand. “Un-Smart’s chicken is really greasy,” he remarked, “just like I told you.”
He should not have been surprised when he got his ears pulled.
That night, I typed a few of Hannah’s “Please-Do” notes for friends who will help with the wedding and reception. It seems silly to have to ask certain ladies to wash the dishes, when those ladies always wash dishes, without ever being told to. But we are following the list we were given, and the list says to give those ladies a note; so a note they shall have. We did try to make them a bit more interesting than the usual run-of-the-mill do-this, do-that notes; witness:
Dear Jane:
Would you please pin flowers onto people (well, preferably onto their shoulder pad, rather than onto their shoulder) at my wedding?
Thank you.
Love, Hannah
And:
Dear June:
Would you please fill coffee cups at my reception? (Nobody told me to tell you what to fill them with…)
Love, Hannah
Dorcas is glad she doesn’t have to work on Saturdays; she is nearly worn to a frizzle-frazzle. For one thing, some of the kids are brats; for another, the room where she most often works is very hot. But she is pleased with her job, in spite of the drawbacks.
“Well, Dorcas,” I told her, “You may not be able to talk to them about Jesus, but you can tell them what’s right and wrong, and whether or not what they did was good or bad. If you get right down on the same nose level as a child, look him straight in the eyes and tell him just exactly what was wrong with what he did, and that he certainly ought not do it again, it will make a big difference. But remember,” I continued, “if you really love the children, they will really love you. And the very best way to get a child to obey is to cause him to want to, just because he likes you so much!”
This, I think, has already been happening for Dorcas with some of the children. There are several who call her “Mommy”; and she heard one little girl tell another lady, “Dorcas is nice!” One child advised her, “I really like you, because you wear such pretty dresses!”
I stayed home from church this morning with Caleb, who still had a fever and a headache. Hannah and Dorcas were nearly late for Sunday School, because their clock downstairs was late. I thought everyone had already gone, but fortunately Caleb knew they were still down there. He looked at the clock, his eyes got wide, and all of a sudden, without saying a word to me, he went scampering down the stairs to inform his sisters, “It’s 9:35!”
They finished fixing their hair in record time, stuck their feet into their shoes, and raced out the door.
We had Larry’s famous waffles for dinner, and we put raspberry syrup flavoring into our maple syrup. Yum!
 |
| Wild Pea |
After dinner, we went for a drive west of town. I took many photos of picturesque farms, young calves, dickcissals, and scenic views of the Loup River. The Wild Prairie Roses are in full bloom, with all their varied colors of pink glowing brightly beside the roadways. There are numerous other wildflowers blossoming in ditches and pastures, most notably the big yellow blooms of the prickly pear cactus, fireweed of the evening primrose family, and the wild sweet pea. The fireweed, with its spikes of purplish flowers, is so named because it is often one of the first plants to appear in a burned-over area. We have seen fields where there have been prairie fires that have been completely taken over with fireweed, for the plant spreads on underground runners that can quickly cover an area. The rippling purple and lavender pastures are certainly pretty, but I’ll bet the ranchers don’t see much beauty in it.
The wild sweet peas, or lupines, are dainty and attractive with the lavender blossoms; but some varieties are poisonous enough to incapacitate grazing animals.
The verses in Genesis always prove to be true: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:17-19)
Why, I myself nearly returned to dust while I was taking pictures of the prairie roses, when a big old farm truck came barreling down the country road, enveloping me in clouds of dust and dirt.
Not too far from the Loup River, near Oconee, a calf had gotten out of the fence. His mother lowed worriedly at him as he trotted alongside the fence, not seeming to have the faintest notion from whence he had escaped. I hope hunger will give him the incentive he needs to find his way back in.
Caleb was better tonight, so we all managed to go to church together. Keith and Esther came visiting after church, and we sent Teddy to the store for ice cream. The kid deserves an advance: he brought home…Danishes! Cream cheese, almond, cherry, and apple Danishes.
So ended another week at our house. How was yours?
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.