Last week my letter was later than usual, because the night I finally typed it and started printing it, I ran out of ink after Wal-Mart had already closed. Humbug. Nearby towns have all-night Wal-Marts; why can’t Columbus?! I’m quite sure I could make it worth their while!
Dorcas stayed overnight with Mama from Sunday through Wednesday. Have you ever noticed how accustomed you get to having somebody around the house at a certain time, and how much you miss them when they are gone? We all discovered that was certainly the case with Dorcas.
Thursday we trotted off to Wal-Mart for ink and to spend Caleb’s $15 gift certificate from his Grandpa and Grandma Fricke. I wound up getting a cartload of Christmas presents and cards for next year, because there were so many smashing bargains. I got Victoria two pretty dresses for Easter, and a couple of pairs of colorful Christmas socks with jingle bells on the sides. I bought five big red plastic bins to put a heap of shirts in that had fallen from a collapsed clothes rack in the clothes room. Metal tube racks with plastic elbow joints holding them together are not made to hold a gazillion shirts.
Caleb got an Ultra Corps police set, with a tall action figure and all sorts of accessories, including a watch, a hiking bag, a bullhorn, a club, a bullet-proof vest, a pistol, handcuffs, and a 12-gauge shotgun and holster. That was $10; he still had $5 to go. So he got a little police station set, which included a police car, a garage, and two connecting ramps; and that took care of the gift card.
After all that, I did manage to remember my ink. I tell you, I have been remembering things so well lately, I’m beginning to think I don’t have Alzheimer’s, after all! (Halfzeimer’s, possibly, but not Allzheimer’s.)
That evening we had chicken and dumplings, one of my favorites. After supper, we played a few games of ping-pong. Victoria, at her end of the table, periodically hopped up and down with all her might and main just to make the bells on her new socks ring. I played Larry about four games, and I actually beat him once. (Was he just being nice, I wonder?)
We then watched another of the Moody Science videos from Lawrence and Norma. We enjoy them; they tell us the most incredible facts about things about which we thought we already knew everything there was to know; but, as it turns out, we know hardly enough to scratch the surface.
One of the most amazing videos that I’ve watched so far has been about the honey bee. Scientists have videoed worker bees as they return to the hive, and have documented the methods the bees use to inform the other bees about new nectar sources they have found. Within minutes, fresh bees arrive at the source about which they have been told--and by markings scientists make on the bees, they know that only those bees who have been told about the nectar go to that particular spot. Bee behavior and abilities are astounding, they truly are.
Our dishwasher has gone on the blink, making commotions rather as though it intends to eat someone for breakfast, or at least climb out of the wall and make a junket to Dinosaur National Monument or somewhere of like feather. (Did dinosaurs have feathers?) Hester pulled out numerous objects from around the motor: a diary key, a spout from the dishwash detergent, a string cheese wrapper, and a fork. The thing still sounds sick. Did we ruin the motor with all that jetsam and flotsam?
I think we will finish the dishes and eat off of paper plates for the rest of our lives, wonder how that will strike the local Jackson citizens?
One afternoon my sister Lura Kay called for Teddy and Joseph to come get some presents--and they came back heavily laden with wonderful gifts for all of us. Hmmmmm ...wasn’t that my sister who called me up just a few days ago and told me not to get carried away buying too many presents for them, they didn’t need anything, we couldn’t afford it, etc., etc.? But I wasn’t going to complain; not right then, I wasn’t, anyway!--because my gift happened to be the autobiography of Dr. Ben Carson, ‘Gifted Hands’. He was the pediatric neurosurgeon who helped separate the Siamese twins from West Germany (well, actually, what I mean is not that he separated the twins from Germany, but that the twins were from Germany, and the doctor separated them) (that is, the German twins from Germany were separated by the doctor in Boston) (what I’m trying to say is, the twins who were attached to each other, were separated from each other by the doctor, and, although they were separated from Germany until they recovered, they were eventually returned to their homeland, to which they were attached, although they were young enough that they may not have known it at the time, and this is a very sticky English problem, and I am going to detach myself from it immediately), and he has performed untold hemispherectomies, sometimes as a solution for infantile hemiplegia, a disease that causes seizures and brain deterioration, and sometimes to save the life of a child with Rasmussen’s encephalitis, an extremely rare inflammation of the brain tissue that progressively leads to permanent paralysis on one side of the body, mental retardation, and then death. Time and time again, Dr. Carson has brought a child back from the brink of death to very nearly normal.
Thursday night Dorcas was home again; another young woman who helps Mama was back at her post after a few days off. Dorcas was soon playing the piano, something we’d missed when she was gone. She’d bought herself a beautiful new coat from Schwesers, probably the warmest coat she’s ever had. She’s needed a better coat for at least a year, I think. Dorcas has a habit of trying on a jacket not much heavier than a rain coat on a hot, sunny, summer day--and then declaring it to be positively the warmest coat ever. That girl would not be one to make it to the North Pole; she’d put on a silk scarf, Mary Janes (to keep her feet from getting sweaty, don’t you know), and a pair of vinyl gloves with faux fur at the wrists. Then she’d gather up her Skittles and there she’d be then, all set and rarin’ to go. (“What?! I should wear long socks?!” said she in amazed tones. “But I don’t have any that match my outfit!!”)
She also bought herself something she didn’t need, but which has brought a good deal of enjoyment, nonetheless: walkie-talkies. Jodie and Sharon, the young Walker cousins down the block, got some for Christmas, too, and all the girls--and sometimes some of the boys--have been ever so busy talking to each other, since Larry and Joseph have walkie-talkies, too. Dorcas talks to us from Mama’s house--and once Mama herself talked to one of the little girls.
Late that night, I thought I heard one of the cats on the table. I leapt silently to my feet and dashed for the kitchen, making Lydia, who was standing there getting a drink, jump out of her skin.
“I’m nice now,” she quavered in a high-pitched tone, just as she used to say to me when she was two, and one of her siblings had told on her about some misdeed she’d allegedly committed, and I had come to see what it was all about.
I’m sure you’ve heard all about Buffalo, New York, having seven feet of snow last week. No fair, no fair! Why don’t we ever get a big pile of snow to play in?? Every now and then a few flakes have come flurrying down, but that was the extent of it.
Finally Friday our small weather announcer, who was standing looking out the window, as weather announcers are oft wont to do, suddenly laughed gleefully and came rushing down the hall to tell me, “It’s snowing! It’s snowing!” (That was Victoria.)
Sure enough, it was. And it was snowing rather hard, too. So the littles and I hurriedly collected hats, mittens, and scarves and scurried off into the countryside to take pictures and see what we could see. We found a field full of Canada geese, and we watched as they took flight and headed off toward the Platte River, where they would probably spend the night before refueling in the harvested cornfields the next morning, and then resume their southward migration. We continued west through Monroe, then traveled down a country road to a hilltop where we watched the sky partially clear in the west and show us a fiery sunset. We drove on to Genoa, where we got hot coffee and hot chocolate, and then we returned home by way of Duncan.
Larry and Joseph were still not home; they’d gone to scout out locations for hunting deer, as Larry has a musket license.
Teddy and Amy came for a bit, and Amy played the piano while Teddy played his saxophone.
Later, we took the littles ice skating. Or ice running, as was the case for those who had no skates. Where are those little two-bladed skates we had for the children, when their feet were the same size as Victoria’s?! And where are the skates that are Lydia’s size? Hester, who has hardly ice skated before, looked like an old pro on the ice, doubtless because she can rollerblade so well. Caleb, by contrast, looked like a disaster shortly before it occurs, and possibly as it occurs. Eeeeek.
We didn’t stay long, because the temperature was only 13°, and the wind was blowing hard, and it was still snowing. The wind chill was somewhere below zero, and Victoria was possibly the only one of us who was almost warm enough, dressed as she was in a fleece-lined dress, tights, socks, snowsuit, boots, coat atop the snowsuit, scarf, hat, two hoods, gloves, and mittens atop the gloves. Larry brought along our kerosene and propane heaters, but one ran out of fuel, and the other simply couldn’t compete with the icy wind blasting us from the north.
We came home and improved our general well being with big mugs full of hot chocolate. Mmmmm, that’s the life.
Saturday, the little girls cleaned the kitchen while I managed to cram all the fallen shirts, hangers and all, into three red bins, and washed stacks of clothes that had been accumulating and multiplying like guppies and bunnies. In the meanwhile, Larry cleaned the garage.
At a quarter till five, we went for a ride out to a friend’s farm along the Platte River, and Larry brought his gun, just in case a deer should walk out in front of us and ask politely if we wouldn’t like to have him for supper, and here he is, then, go ahead and shoot, close your eyes, children. But all we saw were hundreds and hundreds of ducks, one flock of geese, and several fields full of curious cows. The sun went down in a blaze of color, and we came back home again.
Robert preached from Matthew 2 Sunday, finishing the wonderful old Christmas story. Have you ever heard people make disparaging remarks about the gifts the Wise Men brought to Baby Jesus? Well, whoever does so is seriously unenlightened about things in general and the Bible in particular. First, everything the Wise Men gave the Lord had a symbolic meaning: Gold is a tribute to a King. The fragrant aroma of frankincense is especially honoring to God. Myrrh, used in embalming, was a gift to the Man who would die on the cross for the sins of the world. So the gifts were to the Lord in His persons of King of kings, God of gods, and Son of man. Furthermore, Joseph and Mary, being poor people, would have been unable to travel with little Jesus to Egypt to protect Him from the murderous King Herod, had they not had these gifts with which to pay their way.
As I type, Victoria is playing with her new MagnaDoodle set from Lawrence and Norma, and Hester just drew a dog for her. Larry took a look at it and politely remarked that it looked like a cross between a black lab and a Kenworth truck. Hester rolled her eyes, informed her father that he looked like a monkey, erased it, brought the MagnaDoodle board to me, and requested that I draw a dog. I drew something that looked singularly like a donkey, so I added a mane, and sure enough, that’s what it was, just as I had thought: a donkey.
“Nice dog,” observed Hester, eyebrows arched high.
“Well, he was almost done when he told me he wanted to be a donkey, so I thought I should give him a mane, just to keep him happy,” I explained.
“Yes,” agreed Hester, “dogs do that; it’s not our fault.”
Dorcas, Joseph, Lydia, Caleb, and Victoria, along with their cousins, are chatting on the walkie-talkies. Joseph called Victoria ‘Chloe Jackson’, and she immediately informed him, “That’s not my name!”
“Well, then, what is your name?” he queried.
“Victoria Maurine Chloe,” she replied with nary a pause.
We have recently returned from ice skating at Pawnee Park, and everyone’s toes are in various stages of ‘unthawing’, as Keith and Hannah used to say when they were little. Larry managed to find the double-bladed skates for Victoria, and a pair for Lydia, too, although they are a bit too large. Hester’s are too big, too. Seems to me that somewhere there ought to be some skates to fit those girls; after all!--Hannah and Dorcas had skates! But maybe they squished their feet into size 6’s as long as they could and then, when we bought new ones, we bought size 9’s and 10’s, so they’d have room to grow. Victoria had a marvelous time on her skates, and Larry and Joseph took turns whisking her across the ice.
We didn’t stay long, because it was only 11° when we got there, and it was 8° by the time we left. Before we reached home, it was 6°. But the wind was hardly blowing, so it didn’t feel nearly as cold as the last time.
And now it is midnight, and the sound of fireworks can be heard all over town.
Happy Ne w Year!
May God’s richest blessings be yours throughout the entire year.
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