This week, Victoria and I have been a bit under the weather with a strain of influenza that masquerades evilly as the Bubonic Plague, tuberculosis, and hemolytic streptococcus, all three combined. (Remember, I never exaggerate.) Last Tuesday, in spite of our maladies, and regardless of the ferocity of the weather, I had a couple of errands that had to be done; so we bundled ourselves well, and off we went, straight into the face of Arctic, gale-force winds.
Our first stop was Wal-Mart, where I left some negatives to be developed within the hour. We rushed over to the grocery store...then back to Wal-Mart, where I bought piping (Larry calls it pin striping, ever since I got mixed up and called the pin striping on one of the vehicles he was rebuilding ‘piping’) and then went to get my pictures. It had only been half an hour, and they weren’t quite done; so Victoria and I looked for a calendar for Hannah. Her birthday was approaching, and she’d mentioned that she wanted one...but Wal-Mart has no more; they send back any leftovers by the end of January. Silly people; don’t they know that someone might want to know the date, even in the middle or latter part of the year?
We wandered to the shoe department nearby. We were getting iller by the minute, but Victoria brightened up considerably when we found some pretty white Easter shoes for her. Victoria gathered up the box, and we went back to the photo lab. Soon we were on our way out to the Suburban, mitten-clad, scarves over our noses, squinting into the wind. The temperature was only 4°, and the wind was blowing like fury, and you can be sure, our health was not improving. I’d left the Suburban running each time we stopped, so as to keep it warm inside, which is what people in these Arctic Great Plains do, although it takes the gas mileage right down to .00085 miles per gallon.
Home again, I tucked poor Victoria into bed for a nap.
“All this gallivanting around made us really sicker, didn’t it?” she asked hoarsely, giving me a hug.
Leaving Victoria in the care of her older sisters, I completed one more errand to the post office, and after that I went to bed and let everyone fend for themselves until evening.
Wednesday, our friends Kochs & Crew (you’ll recall, they own an excavation company) knocked down The Boxcar (one of those houses the church recently bought)--and discovered that dear old Mrs. Borchers’ name for it--'The Boxcar' house--wasn’t just a fabrication: it really was a boxcar. Or at least it had been. Inside it were still the handles for holding onto, and various other boxcar trademarks. People were quite amazed.
But I have a vague recollection of that fact now...and I remember, when I was very young, that there was once a family with scores of children living in that house. They were constantly tumbling out the front door by accident--squeeeeak, plop!, slam--the door opening, the kid landing, the door banging shut again--then sitting there on the hard-packed dirt and squalling until their mother popped out, scooped them up, and hauled them back in, clapping the door resoundingly behind herself. We called them ‘The Boxcar Children’.
When Lydia was getting ready for church, she came into my room to look for some shoes (that’s the trouble with having girls whose feet are the same size as mine). She held up a pair of blue pumps with spiked heels.
“How high are these heels?!” she queried, eyebrows high.
“Four inches,” I replied.
“Only four?!” exclaimed Victoria. “That’s younger than me!” she advised us.
After church, Keith and Esther came, bringing Victoria a cute pink-checked, canopied doll bed big enough for her biggest dolls.
Thursday was Hannah’s 21st birthday. Remembering that she’d told me not long ago she would like a calendar with everyone’s birthdates and anniversaries written on it, and unable to find one at Wal-Mart, I took one off my bedroom wall, and into it I wrote names and years as fast as I could write. I tell you, it takes a long time to write 270 people’s birthdays and anniversaries.
I was wondering what else I would give her when a friend of mine called to tell me she had finished painting the 8x10 of Hannah in her wedding dress. I’d given it to my friend several months ago, and I’d forgotten all about it. I’d taken the picture in the school entryway by the oak-banistered ramp shortly before Hannah and Bobby’s wedding, spreading her train all down the steps. After taking the pictures, I’d cut the train off the gown, and used the satin and pearls to remodel the bodice and the excess lace and sequins to trim Victoria’s flowergirl dress.
I’d asked my friend to paint out the door, side wall and railing by the basement stairs, and the ceiling and light fixture. She’d just finished it, and had done such a fabulous job of it that it made my photo look quite professional. I put it into an ivory-matted 11x14 oak frame and admired it for a while before boxing and wrapping it.
Then I went to the Fabric Shop for material to make a belt for a purple silk jacquard robe with the bright gold and yellow lilies printed on it. I bought this robe over a year ago, and planned to give it to Hannah; but it didn’t have a belt. I couldn’t find any purple in the exact color, so I bought some crinkled gold silk. I needed only a fourth yard--and it only cost $.80.
Before coming home, we stopped at the library. Joseph got some books about NASA with which he planned to do a ten-page report. Victoria got her very first library card, and is positively tickled pink. She checked out a book about The Cabbage Patch Kids and three videos: The Pacific Northwest, Exploring the Black Hills, and The Fires of Yellowstone. The films show such beautiful scenery, and those fires were sure dreadful, weren’t they?
Thursday evening, just as it was starting to snow, my sister Lura Kay brought Victoria a beautiful doll that just fits in her new doll bed. Its lacy pink dress matches the canopy and lacy blanket, too. Victoria was delighted.
A little later, Larry went off through the snow to Hy-Vee to buy some soup for supper. By the time he returned, I had my chops all polished for Campbell’s Chicken ’n’ Dumplings soup--but Larry got fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, and dressing instead. It looked like quite a feast, but let me tell you, Hy-Vee chicken and trimmin’s is not to be compared with Kentucky Fried Chicken’s chicken and trimmin’s, and I’m not sure my queasy stomach would have even been able to cope with KFC. Ugh.
After supper, Larry, Joseph, Caleb, Victoria, and I took Hannah her presents. Aaron is such a funny baby; when people build him towers with his blocks, he doesn’t want to knock them down, so he stands and makes funny comments and noises and faces, sticking his arms stiffly straight down beside him, laughing, and so forth.
Bobby, holding him in a standing position beside his tower, told him, “You can knock it down!”
Aaron reached out a hand...nearly touched a block...shivered..."That’s right!" encouraged Bobby--and Aaron, instead of knocking the thing over, pat-a-caked with all his might and main, keeping his hands well back from his prize tower of blocks. We all burst out laughing, so he laughed, too.
Hannah showed me a set of dark mauve and ivory bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths she planned to give some friends of ours for their wedding Sunday evening. She’d done a couple of pieces of lovely crochetwork of purple/lavender/mauve/ivory variegated thread with ribbon woven through it, and intended to put them on the towels, but her sewing machine doesn’t sew through such thicknesses nicely at all. So I brought them home with me, and sewed the crocheting onto the towels with my machine, which sewed it perfectly.
Next, I sewed a double bow for Hester’s hair, of pink material to match the sash and collar of her teal and pink dress. I then made the sleeveholes bigger on her navy/forest green sailor dress. It was not an easy task. I’d used an old pattern, and I have noticed that some of those old dress designs have such small sleeveholes as to make the dress wholly uncomfortable. Perhaps ladies used to have toothpicks for arms? Perhaps, having just arrived fresh from the era of whalebone midriffs, such incommodiousness seemed trifling at best and negligible at worst? Anyway, I shall certainly pay closer attention to the size of sleeveholes in old patterns in the future.
After that, I made two bows of the plaid green/navy/gold thread material of Hester’s sailor dress and then pondered: shall I affix them to the front of the dress, or shall I glue clips on them for her hair? Since I couldn’t find my glue gun, I didn’t glue any clips, and Hester decided she like the bows on the low waist of her dress, just above the wide pleats.
One evening, we watched films about the Challenger disaster and the Yellowstone fires. Wasn’t that awful and hair-raising? Once, a large group of firemen, park rangers, and a couple of reporters and photographers very nearly got trapped by the dreadful inferno that nearly covered the southern half of the Park. We had to turn the volume down, because of objectionable language from the photographer and those around him. What I’d like to know is this: when people are in danger of meeting their Maker, how do they have the audacity to take His Name in vain? You’d think they’d be praying humbly for the Lord to have mercy on them! And then, once they escaped the terrible conflagration, you’d expect them to be thanking God for sparing their lives; but I guess the thought never entered their godless heads.
All day Friday, it snowed like everything, finally stopping by evening.
Joseph decided to write his report on the CIA rather than NASA, so off we went in the snowstorm, back to the library for more books, returning the ones he got the day before. I checked out a Books-on-Tape set, a narration of 14 tapes about the Lewis and Clark expeditions and eight tapes relating the journals of Francis Parkman, called ‘The Oregon Trail’. Now I will have something new to listen to, better than the staticky (staticful? staticous? statical?) radio, when I am sewing.
Early that evening, I was in my room, sitting at my sewing desk, and Victoria was playing on the bed behind me. Teddy was getting ready for his date. All sorts of thumps and bumps were issuing from the shower just the other side of the door near me.
“What is he doing?!” I demanded.
“Trying to make a somersault?” Victoria guessed. hee hee
“Where’s Caleb?” I asked her a few minutes later, looking around for him.
“He’s watering up the ice cube trays,” she informed me.
She likes to page through my songbooks, then bring me the book: “What’s this song?” she asks, and I read her the title.
She begins humming it, the better to remember it until she gets back to the piano. Once there, her fingers search out a key that she thinks sounds okay, and then she starts to play. Sometimes, after a couple of lines, she makes a blunder, and the next few notes elude her. She hunts for the right note, often losing track of the song she was playing entirely. When this happens, she pauses momentarily, then launches with gusto into ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’, after which she again brings me the hymnal and asks, “What’s this song?” and the cycle starts all over again.
That night, while I warmed up the soup that I’d been craving for the last two days, Hester and Lydia made peanut butter cookies from some packages of cookie mix Teddy had bought. They were good, but just can’t equal cookies made from scratch. We weren’t complaining, though.
Afterwards, Larry went out to the garage to work on a go-cart he is making. He got interrupted by a phone call from one of the Kochs wanting to know if he would drive a dump truck for them that night (Saturday morning), starting at 1:30 a.m., hauling snow from the streets uptown. The city owns such a big snowblower that a lineup of twenty dump trucks needn’t wait any time at all before it is their turn to drive under the snorkel. It takes between ten and fifteen seconds for the blower to get a truck loaded with snow, and then they drive to Agricultural Park to dump their load, where they created such enormous mountains of snow that one would wonder if they could possibly melt by August.
Since Larry really needed to sleep before he went out that night, of course he was promptly wide awake and bushy-tailed, completely contrary to what he usually is at that hour of the day. I decided I’d better quit typing and go sew in my room, leaving him to nap in his recliner in peace.
He got up and went off at a quarter after one, and that was the last I saw of him for the night.
I have now finished Hester’s teal and rose dress and am two-thirds done with Lydia’s dress. The background is forest green, printed with lavender-blue roses and dusty rose hyacinths; the sleeves, bodice side pieces, and band at the hemline are dusty rose. When I finish hers, I will sew a ruffly yellow dress for Victoria, and white skirts for Hester and Lydia. After that I will sew things for the Fourth of July picnic.
Larry drove the dump truck until 8:00 Saturday morning, after which he went immediately to Tom’s (Precision Auto-Body) and worked there until noon.
When Larry comes home from work, he usually enters the house in quite a boisterous fashion, jovially greeting the kids and creating a good deal of ruckus all around. But Saturday, I didn’t even know he’d come home until I found him sleeping on his crossed arms on the table, his unfinished lunch beside him. I woke him up and shooed him off to his recliner, where he slept till 4:30 p.m.
Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, as I was sewing away in my room, Victoria playing nearby, we heard a long, stealthy snore issuing forth from the living room. Victoria giggled.
“Listen!” she whispered, “Daddy is being a car!”
Later, he got up, ate, and went into the garage to work on the go-cart. The body is made out of a push-cart he got at Menards. It’s actually beginning to look like a go-cart now.
I sewed, while listening to Francis Parkman’s journal ‘The Oregon Trail’. It’s interesting, and often funny. The party’s cook was French. One day while trying to hitch up his recalcitrant horse, the beast attempted to kick him. Says Francis, “...and he only escaped a healthy blow to the solar plexus by skipping rapidly into the air in a manner such as only a Frenchman can do.”
Sunday night, we attended the wedding of Larry’s cousin’s boy, Andrew, and the young woman who used to stay nights with my mother, Jane. At the reception, we sat by our friends Ricky and Mary Ann, whose daughter Amber is Lydia’s best friend. Mary Ann is the sister of Malinda, my friend who died in childbirth in November, and we have been very good friends ever since I can remember. We sat on the far north side of the church basement, right in front of a big window. We were not half done eating when one of the ushers came and opened the window a good six inches, because people in the middle of the room were hot. Mind you, the outdoors temperature was hovering right around zero degrees that night, and dropping by the minute.
Instantly, there was a gale of subantarctic air swirling around our necks and ankles, and Mary Ann and I, to say nothing of our poor kids, especially the girls in their short-sleeved, flowered dresses, were absolutely, positively frozen solid. I wrapped my hands around my coffee cup and allowed as how, if the hostess kept it filled, I might not have to have my fingers amputated for frost bite; and I asked for two more cups of coffee, one to wrap each foot around. Mary Ann and I suggested that we move our table into the nearby furnace room while we finished eating, and Ricky went through melodramatic theatrics describing what the ushers and waitresses would be saying and thinking when they returned to our table to seat somebody or to fill the sandwich or cake platter--and that thar table weren’t thar no more. Larry proposed that we call in an order of shovels for the snow that we could tell was piling up around our kneecaps, and he asked Ricky if he wanted to borrow a few of our knit ski masks for his children.
We laughed enough that it should have warmed us up. . . but laughter was no match for that cold air. Ricky finally took pity on his poor frozen wife and asked the usher to shut the window a bit.
Mary Ann gave her little boy his own sandwich to hold, and as he took it in his two hands, his eyes grew wider and wider, and then he started to smile, and he smiled bigger and bigger until he was beaming at me across the table, still holding that sandwich in his little hands, unmoving.
“Do you like it?” I asked, and he finally took a big bite.
I ate quickly, and then got my cameras. I have a big problem: I cannot take pictures and videos at the same time. I took only seventeen pictures with my Minolta, but quite a bit of footage with the camcorder. I gave my camera to Larry and asked him to please take lots of pictures. He took one: a picture of his wife taking videos.
We watched the video when we got home. It’s funny.
A little girl in her grandpa’s arms looked past him and spotted me. Suddenly and loudly she pointed at me and cried, “She’s taking pictures!”
Then, having zeroed in on one of Larry’s second cousins who absolutely doesn’t like having her picture taken, she glanced my way, did a double take, grimaced, and shook her head. One of my friends, our organist, covered her face with a paper plate.
Another time, I was videoing three cute little cousins: Anna, Jamie, Melody. They were being their usual exuberant selves, a little bit unbridled, a little bit disorderly. Their grandmother came to tell them that I was taking their picture, and that they should behave, because people who looked at the video later would be able to see everything they were doing.
Anna Beth, clearly the most unrestrained of the set, dimpled at her grandma and piped happily, “I’m rehavin’!”
And now, something to ponder: would you rather live in Massachusetts, or Kentucky? Every citizen of Kentucky is required by law to take a bath once a year. On the other hand, Boston has an ordinance banning bathing without a doctor’s prescription.
One more thing you should know: a ten-gallon cowboy hat holds three quarts, or three-quarters of a gallon. So why do they call it a ‘ten-gallon’??
There! Don’t say you never learn anything of value from my letters.
P.S.: Well, actually, that Boston bath ban was put in place in the year 1845; not having been to Boston lately, I do not know if it is still in effect, nor what the penalties of ignoring said law might be. However, if you plan on visiting that city, ... well, I'd take a lavender pomander with me, if 'twas me.
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