Last Monday, Teddy finished Hannah’s car, all but the seat part of the back seat. (That’s the part you sit on.) (Excuse me; I mean, that’s the part upon which one sits.) (My grammar teacher just looked over my shoulder.) Larry has found the part of the seat they need in Omaha, and will be going to get it soon.
One evening, Teddy came home with a big box under his arm.
“Caleb,” he said, “look what I found laying out in the middle of the street.”
He handed Caleb the box. Caleb looked down at the picture on the front of it, gazed up wonderingly into Teddy’s face, looked back down at the box, and began to grin.
“Oh, Teddy!” he exclaimed. “What is it?!”
“I don’t know,” fibbed Teddy; “maybe you’d better look!”
Of course, Caleb knew what it was, because there was a picture of the contents right on the box lid. He giggled. He set the box down on the floor, dropped to his knees before it, and carefully lifted the lid.
And there inside were nestled a pair of roller blades, dark teal with bright blue wheels and buckles.
“Ohhhh,” breathed Caleb.
He pulled one out and stuck his foot into it.
“It’s just my size!” he said in delight.
He put the other one on, and Teddy helped him buckle them. Then he took Caleb’s hands, and Caleb scrambled to his feet. Minutes later, the child was whizzing through the house, terrorizing humanity and general feline population alike.
“What is it,” I asked Teddy, “an early birthday present?”
Teddy looked surprised. “Oh, it’s his birthday?”
I rolled my eyes. “It will be, in about a month.”
“Oh,” said Teddy. “No, I just thought he needed roller blades, and I noticed these as I was walking through Wal-Mart.”
I gave him a sideways glance. “You noticed them? Accidentally, I suppose.”
I happen to know that the skates are not in an aisle one would normally walk through, unless one was specifically hunting for skates.
Teddy grinned. “Well, uh, he did need skates.”
I spent one day this week mending clothes again. It really does seem to me that, as soon as everyone notices I have mended and patched a few things, they all band together and rush around seeing how many holes they can make in the knees of their jeans or how many hems they can rip out or how many buttons they can lose. When the mending was done, I turned some bibbed culottes into the jumper we’d thought it was when we purchased it for Hester. It’s a fairly quick and easy job, providing I remember to straighten the hemline before putting the hem back in.
Finished with that, I launched into the bookwork, of which I had two-months’ work to do. It took three days to get it all completed. And there is a problem: my arms are shrinking.
When the ledger is in the proper position so that I can see it nicely, I can hardly reach far enough to write in it.
Eh? Wuzzat? You're a-thinkin' I'm a-needin' glasses??
Wellllll. . . all right, yes. I am steadily having more difficulty seeing to read or do bookwork. If I make an effort, I can easily focus, but that makes my head hurt. So I let everything blur, and only focus every now and then to make sure I have the numbers right, and to ascertain that I am writing them into the proper columns. Reading is okay, sort of, if I hold the book as far away as my arm will reach.
Do they make arm extensions?
Mind you, I have no difficulty whatsoever determining what kind of sneakers a golden-mantled mountain squirrel is wearing, when he is atop Mt. Evans and I am down at Echo Lake. I can tell you what variety of seeds a purple finch is dining on from three counties away. Why, I can easily count the passengers in a 767, passing overhead at an altitude of 55,000 feet.
This ability, unfortunately, is not immediately profitable.
That evening, I asked Teddy if he would take a disk to the Haddocks for me. I made sure not to say ‘to Amy’, although that is, in fact, what he would be doing. Even so, he accidentally grinned a silly grin while trying to look properly grave and solemn.
“Well, what’s so funny about that?” I demanded, not cracking a smile. “Seems like a pretty straight forward request to me.”
About that time, his foot bumped the leg of the fan. Mind you, Teddy is usually as graceful and coordinated as they come.
“Oooo, do be careful!” I cried. “Don’t get so out-of-kilter and go around tripping all over everything, just because I asked you to deliver a disk!”
His siblings all chortled in merry appreciation, and Teddy, for once, had no quick and cutting retort. I grinned at him and handed over the disk.
Larry left for Elkhart, Indiana, Monday night. He’d put new batteries in his pickup—the old ones were finally so shot they refused to start the pickup. He also put in a new U-joint.
Dorcas’ car is out of commission. Teddy has been taking Dorcas to work, and bringing her back home again…but that is not yet the end of the story…
Tuesday was a beautiful day, sunny and blue, with a temperature of about 80°. I took Victoria for a long walk. I like these end-of-summer days, when the weather is just right, flowers are blooming like everything, trees are beginning to think about turning scarlet and orange and golden, and the migrating birds are gathering together in flocks and herds (yesirree, birds do too go in ‘herds’—sandhill cranes, for instance!) and gaggles (geese) and sieges (bitterns and herons) and charms (finches) and watches (nightingales) and coveys (partridges) and musters (peacocks) and rookeries (rooks, what else) and flings (sandpipers) and doles (bananas) (no, sorry; it’s turtle doves) and games (swans) and companies (widgeons; they favor Fortune 500s) and—my favorite—exaltations (larks).
Our yearbooks arrived and, as usual, Mama got one for every schoolchild in our house. And I did what I’ve had a penchant for doing lately: in writing the children’s names inside the covers of their books, I wrote Hester’s, “Hester Maurine”. Well, that may be my mother’s name, but it is not Hester Yvonne’s name. At our house, the middle name of ‘Maurine’ belongs to Victoria!
It wasn’t long before Hester noticed. She brought the book to me.
“Who’s book is this?” she asked.
I opened the front cover and pointed to the name I’d written. “Yours,” I replied.
She tried not to grin. “No, it isn’t,” she contradicted. “That’s not my name.”
I stared at her blankly for a second or two, and then looked back in the book. “Hester Maurine.”
“Aauugghh!” I howled, “I did it again! Go get the Wite-Out!”
Hester trotted off, laughing, to do my bidding, and I soon had the blunder repaired. Sometimes Alzheimer’s rears its ugly head early.
The Schwan man came, and we outdid ourselves with all the vegetables and ‘pockets’ and pizza and ice cream we bought…and we splurged on some Golden Nugget Bars, too. Our new Schwan man is sho’ ’nuff gonna like us, just see if he doesn’t! (The old Schwan man got promoted, did I say that? {Not that he’s old ‘old’; he’s the same age as us, which is quite young, really, just past teenagehood, if you ask me.} [You did ask, did you not?] He’d had the highest sales volume in a couple-hundred-mile radius, probably on account of the Jacksons of Forty-Second Avenue.)
Larry called from a motel in Morrison, Illinois, just west of Joliet, Tuesday night. He thought he would be home by 9 or 10 a.m. Wednesday.
“So you should see him by 10:00 p.m.,” said a friend of mine, and I allowed as how that was probably correct.
Wednesday, I thought it was another beautiful day—Victoria even told me it was—so we went off for another stroll. I was not halfway across the street before I realized, “It’s hot out here.” When we got to the corner and I could see the digital thermometer on the bank, I saw that it said 97°! No wonder I was having a hard time finding enough air to breathe. We shortened our walk to only seven blocks that afternoon. Whewwww!
Larry called at 4:30 p.m. He was no closer than the eastern edge of Iowa, because he’d gotten stopped early on after leaving Morrison by a BigHat Scaleboy who determined that he was pulling his two trailers (the flatbed and the cargo trailer hitched behind it) illegally, on account of the alleged fact that, in order to do so, one must have the sort of hitch that the semis have—one of those big U-shaped plate hitches. Nobody knows why people can tow a fifth-wheel camper with a boat or a Durango or a Subdivision behind that, without one o' them there horseshoe plate things.
So Larry had to leave the rear trailer behind. He drove 60 miles, unhitched his flatbed trailer, and drove back to get the enclosed trailer. Then he drove 120 miles before unhitching and going back to get the flatbed with the three cargo trailers on it. He towed the flatbed 120 miles, unhitched, and went back 60 miles to retrieve the cargo trailer. And on and on, just like someone told me we should do with our kids on vacations, since we haven’t enough seatbelts to strap everybody in at once…until eventually he had all the trailers east of the Mississippi, where he hitched everything together again and backed them straight into the river in disgust.
No, no; what I meant to say was, he hitched everything together again and quit with the backtracking. As you might guess, he did not make it home in time for church.
Just before church that night, I learned that our friends' new baby Helen has a cataract on one eye and will have to have surgery. She will then be fitted with a kind of long-wear contact until she is about two, after which she will have surgery—perhaps a cornea transplant? The surgery is scheduled for tomorrow, and everyone is concerned about it. Poor little sweet baby; don’t those sorts of things make you feel bad? That baby is only a little over seven pounds.
Larry got home at 11:30 p.m.
“You were wrong!” I later informed my friend. “It wasn’t ten p.m. when Larry got home.” I paused. “It was 11:30 p.m.”
He pulled up in the school parking area on 17th St., then walked around the corner and across the street to our house to ask me to follow him to his shop, so he could park the rig and I could bring him home again. Victoria came along, joyful and exuberant, because her Daddy was home again. The other children were in bed by then, and Victoria is indeed smug that she has privileges they do not.
At suppertime Friday evening, I asked Hester to start the vegetables. She did—leaving the plastic handle of the waffle iron hanging over the burner, which she forgot to change from ‘large’ to ‘small’. I was in the living room; everyone else went outside to play soccer baseball until supper was ready. By the time I smelt the melting plastic, the house was filling with smoke. Ewwwww, the stench was terrible. Everybody’s noses and throats and eyes were burning. We opened all the windows and turned on all the fans, but it just simply wasn’t helping much.
So I loaded all the food into the Suburban, and we drove to Pawnee Park to eat, even though it was already dark. We found a picnic table under a light, and launched in.
It is finally starting to get chilly at night, a welcome relief from the stifling weather we’ve had all summer. One more thing I like about autumn: it gets cold enough at night that the bugs find themselves coping with premature rigor mortis, and forget to beleaguer me.
A couple of weeks ago when Teddy and Joseph went swimming with some friends, Teddy got into something poisonous somewhere along the lake shore. Whatever it is, it’s a good deal worse than poison ivy, and lasts longer, too. The rash on Teddy’s ankles and feet are now worse than ever. It turns into big blisters, then peels off, leaving huge, awful sores. I finally called Dr. Luckey, who said to use rubbing alcohol (Teddy would land in the attic) and triple antibiotic.
Teddy agreed with the antibiotic, and declined the alcohol. And since I am not big enough to sit on him and hold him down while applying the stuff, I shall let him ‘do as seemeth him best’.
At 4:00 a.m. Friday morning, Larry headed off to Berthoud with his load of enclosed trailers, hoping the laws of Illinois were not being enforced in Colorado.
That afternoon we staged another foray on the Salvation Army and the Goodwill. Hannah went with us. We got shirts for Caleb, and a few dresses for Victoria, Hester, and Lydia. All children’s things were 33¢ each, and we found several items with their original tags still on them. I paid $11.00 for a full cartload of clothes. Hester always manages to find several good books—and they were only 25¢ each. Lydia’s a whiz at finding brand-new stuffed animals. We bought a white fur coat with white leather trim and gold-rimmed white leather buttons for Lydia for church—and the lady only charged us 33¢, even though the sale was not supposed to include coats.
And then Hester hit the jackpot—she found a pair of almost-new roller blades for only $3.00. You can be sure, there was a good deal of action on the sidewalks of Forty-Second Avenue that evening!
Larry called from Berthoud at 4:00 p.m.; he was unloaded and ready to head for Denver, where he had a vehicle to collect for a customer in Columbus, and where he hoped to locate a car for Dorcas at Lincoln Auto. He called again at 11:00 p.m.; he was at the inn at Ft. Morgan. And he had two cars on his trailer. Two.
Yes, he was bringing home a car for Dorcas. It’s a Mazda Protégé, 1992, maroon metallic. It was damaged in a flood, but most everything has already been repaired. He put a new alternator on it yesterday, and tomorrow he will put a new starter on it. There are a couple of small dents on the right side, but no damage to the paint, so he will have a friend who does Paintless Dent Removal (that’s the name of his business) fix it.
Dorcas is excited; she can hardly wait to drive it.
Friday night Teddy and Joseph, and Keith, too, went to play football with their friends. Teddy came home with his face all messed up from trying to employ it as a ski. Faces do not appreciate this sort of abuse, you see; they prefer to be pressed into service, if they must, as pontoons, because, you see, water is more forgiving to one’s delicate epidermis than turf is.
What happened, you see, was that he and another harpastum player collided, Teddy fell, and, due to the great velocity wherewith he had been loping along, skidded an extensive distance on his face. There he went then, sliding pell-mell toward the curb, legs arched up over his back, mute horror gripping actor and audience alike—and then his head hit a bump, turning him a complete somersault and landing him sitting in a puddle on the street side of the curb.
The show was over, with nothing more than a skinned face and sore neck to boast of, for all his troubles and exertion.
Hannah and Dorcas went garage sailing together Saturday morning. They brought home a jar full of what they thought were Monarch butterfly caterpillars, along with West Virginia White caterpillars, or perhaps Northern Marble caterpillars. Why, who knows, maybe they were even Chiricahua Whites! I tell you, those girls were more enchanted over their creepy crawlies than they were over the numerous acquisitions they had made, even though they were first-rate bargains.
“What if they are not Monarchs or Whites or Sulphurs?” I asked. “What if they are Curtain-Eating Moths?”
Hannah assured me that they were, indeed, Monarchs and Whites, because the lady at the house where they had come across all those crawly critters said so.
“Yes, but,” I protested, “the lady’s signs read, ‘GARAGE SELL’. What does she know?!”
Hannah laughed and went happily off with her share of the willy-nilly things, planning to give a few to her mother-in-law, Bethany Wright, for her science class.
Bethany took one look and informed her, “Those are not caterpillars.”
And John, her husband, quickly affirmed in his deepest bass voice, “You’ve got worms.” haha
Nevertheless, in spite of the disillusionment, Dorcas is still nurturing her woolly worms, and hoping one will soon spin himself a chrysalis. She made an aquarium out of a glass gallon jug, and Teddy, despite his disparaging remarks, punched holes in the lid for her. Then she filled it with leaves and twigs and such like, and laughed at the littles as they giggled at the fuzzy creatures hurrying up and down the sticks, their fluffy bodies alternately stretching and retracting, extending and withdrawing.
Larry called a little after noon, telling me he was on his way to Sumner, which would not be too far out of the way, to look at a longer slant trailer he knew about. He’s hoping to trade an unfinished pickup, parts and all, for the trailer. He said he’d be home by 2 or 2:30 p.m.
The afternoon progressed on. 3:00…3:30…4:00…4:30…5:00… At 5:30 he called from the shop; he was back. (I think he gets a wee bit mixed up over whether ‘home’ is actually here or there.) And then, about 8:30 p.m., there he was, marching in the front door, just as if he belonged here!
We decided to let him stay.
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