Last Sunday afternoon, we took a drive around some of the more elegant and well-bred neighborhoods, looking at landscaping and taking pictures. I hope to try replicating some of our favorites in our own yard. We may not be cultured or refined ourselves, but we can sho’ ’nuff copycat.
There was thunder – LOUD!! – and lightning during the night and early Monday morning. Walkers had no work in that kind of weather, so Larry took the children to school.
“I’m going to Menards, too,” he told me.
“Could you get the newspaper, stop at the store for some muffins and butter, and cash my check while you’re at it?” I asked.
He obligingly said he would. Reckon I needed to write him a list? You’d better reckon.
Soon Victoria was up, doing the activity page in her God’s World News, coloring in the black parts of panda bears in an abstract diagram that slowly turned into a recognizable picture. Outside, it went on raining. I peered out the window periodically, concerned over my new flower arrangements; but they looked to be planted safely out of the ‘river beds’, as I’d hoped they were.
Larry and I both went to get the children after school. By then, it was bright and sunny. He drove his pickup, because we were going to a farm near Bellwood to get a ‘parts’ motorcycle that had everything he needed to fix up the $15 Honda he got last week. The ‘parts’ motorcycle cost $50. It was located at a neat-as-a-pin farm owned by two brothers, bachelors. There were valuable antiques everywhere, including in a big barn and on the well-kept lawn.
That evening, Keith and Larry worked on the downstairs bathroom. The tub and shower is now in good working order…but it would be nice to have a door on the room.
Tuesday was the last half-day for the grade-school children. Victoria went to kindergarten in the morning. Lydia missed the entire last week, on account of those lousy chicken pox, whose effects can still be plainly seen.
Caleb, playing with a hulahoop, bonked it into a tree, scaring a baby robin straight out of its nest. Hester shinnied onto a branch and put it back. It hopped right out. She returned it again. It hopped back out again.
The kids ran to enlist their father’s aid, all worried because the baby was not at all able to fly well, and those carnivorous cats were wandering around looking – well, carnivorous.
Larry got us tacos for supper, since it was ‘Taco Tuesday’, when tacos are only 50¢ each. He also brought home a dish of cherry dessert that Norma had given him and some M&M cookies that Lawrence’s daughter Barbara had made, too.
I ironed the curtains I discovered in a box in the trailer and hung them. I still can’t find Caleb’s wide rods. Are all the lost wide rods together? Caleb found the clips for his rods… but the clips do no good without the rods.
Wednesday evening, the children were getting ready for church…all but Lydia, that is, who was still bespeckled around the gills {and everywhere else} and decidedly under the weather. {Have you ever thought that that was a funny thing to say – ‘under the weather’? Because, after all, we are always under the weather, aren’t we? The weather is in the sky, and we are under it. So why should that mean that we are sick? Hmmmm…} I was going to stay home with her, because I had the flu. Under the weather, as it were. Larry, I figured, would be going to church. But then he called at 6:20 p.m.: he was just leaving Fremont. He’d gotten stuck with the boom truck three or four times, because their job sites were so muddy. It would take him almost an hour to drive back to the shop, and fifteen minutes to park, lock up, and get home. And church starts at 7:30.
I called Keith. “Is this the Jackson Bus Service?”
Yes, he and Esther would take Hester, Caleb, and Victoria to church. Hester, Caleb, and Victoria, all excited about riding to church with Keith and Esther, got ready in record time. I drove them down old Highway 81, meeting Keith and Esther at the intersection of Rte. 22. When they pulled up, the children hopped out of the Suburban and trotted to Keith’s car, Victoria giggling happily the whole time.
Lydia and I, instead of simply making a U-turn, drove straight on south, not quite to Shady Lake Road, then turned west and went near Lake Oconee, then south toward the river. We would have gone farther on a little dirt lane, but it got muddy, and there was a big puddle up ahead…and neither of us felt well enough to push a Subdivision out of the mud, so we turned around and came home. Everywhere we looked, there were meadowlarks… bob white quail… and surely that was a bluebird sitting by its box… killdeer… ducks… The meadowlarks sing so prettily. I told Lydia what Mama used to tell me they were singing: “Listen now, for I’m a pretty bird!” or “Listen now, I’ll sing a pretty song!” Once somebody sings those words to you right while the meadowlark is warbling, you will think those words, every last time you hear one sing till the end of your life, I guess.
Larry got home around a quarter till eight. He took a bath, got ready for church… Then, because his chest was hurting, he took his blood pressure. It was 152/105, pulse 68. A few minutes later, the diastolic pressure had dropped to the high nineties, but his pulse was 98. Five minutes later, the diastolic pressure was in the low nineties, pulse in the high 80s. Instead of going to church, he laid down and took a nap.
Keith and Esther brought the children home about 9:30, then came back with some ReLiv, the nutritional supplement they’ve sold for a couple of years. Larry’s been taking it for the last few days now; we’ll see if it helps him.
Mr. and Mrs. Blackbird are extremely busy feeding their noisy offspring. A robin is chirping in distress and worry; I do hope the cats aren’t stalking her babies. I wonder what happened to the baby robin who wouldn’t stay in his nest? Hester found black feathers on the basement stairs one morning. :-\
The grass is growing splendidly, except for those areas where the seed did indeed get all washed away. After it rained Monday, grass came up in some places where the ground had been bare.
Thursday, I did the mending. It took several hours, what with all the holy (‘holey’?) jeans. I fixed my winter coat, Lydia’s big lavender-and-calico quilt, and hemmed and took in the elastic on Lydia’s skirt. It’s all done – unless I lose my marbles and decide to mend all those doll clothes that raveled out when I washed them after they got wet in the basement.
While I sewed, Victoria played with waffle blocks on my big lighthouse rug in my office. She’d just had a bath, and I’d washed her hair…and it was drying into long, shiny waves that tumbled down her back. Meanwhile, Lydia was painting a decorative wooden spoon. Victoria painted hers last week; it’s one of the projects in the American Girls' Activity Book.
I finished hanging Caleb’s decorations; it looks really, really, really neat. Caleb is pleased with his room.The high school students, including Hester, went on a field trip to the new hospital that afternoon. They each got a nifty little tape measure with a level on it.
After picking up Hester, we went out to the cemetery and put flowers – red, white, and blue, with ribbons and flags – on Daddy’s and Lyle’s graves. We walked around and looked at all our friends graves, reading dates and verses to the children, telling them about the ones they never knew. David’s gravestone is there now; I hadn’t seen it before. It has his name on one side, Christine’s on the other, and all the children’s names at the bottom after ‘Parents of –‘. Malinda’s headstone is there, too, along with the names of all her children, and a verse from Psalms that is also the words of a song she used to sing. There is an engraved picture of trees along a fence row beside a country lane, and a man and a woman walking side by side.
The high school was having a potluck dinner Friday. So, as soon as I put cabbage on to cook (I like cabbage, so long as it is adorned with nothing more than plenty of butter and salt. Do you? Mama likes it with vinegar. Yuck.), and filled the oven with turkey, mashed potatoes, and peas, I started peeling and slicing apples. After adding sugar and cinnamon, and a bit of flour and cornstarch, I made the crusts, covering them with the last handfuls of Honey Bunches w/Almonds cereal, after which I poured in the filling. Since I had no oatmeal and no brown sugar, the topping was made from two packets of blueberry oatmeal, to which I added more sugar and flour, and lots of butter (taste, add, taste, add, taste, add, taste, add, taste, add, taste, add, taste, add, taste – you get the picture). I baked them for 45 minutes at 350°, and, — Voilá! Apple pie! Downright scrumptious apple pie. One was for Hester’s picnic; one was for us.
I then made banana spice muffins from an old apple spice muffin recipe. (That is, the recipe is old; the apples are not supposed to be.) But it only called for one tablespoon of sugar, along with one tablespoon of baking powder. Sooo…the batter was bitter, and not one bit sweet. I added sugar. More sugar. More sugar. More sugar. Then, worrying that it would be too runny, I added flour. It was still bitter – from the baking powder, I suppose.
“All right,” I said, snatching the lemon juice from the refrigerator, “If it wants to be sour, I’ll make it more sour!”
The kids stared in amazement as several healthy squirts of lemon juice splashed into the batter. But, just like I’d thought it would do, the lemon juice tamed the bitter taste right down. I tossed in another handful of sugar, sprayed the muffins tins, filled them, and popped them into the oven, remarking, “If those things rise, I’ll be amazed.”
Guess what. They rose.
Guess what else. They were good. That was the most surprising thing. They were spicy and tangy and mellow, all at the same time, and the outsides of them were sweet and crunchy, almost as if they’d been fried.
A gentle rain fell that night, making the new grass as green as – uh – well, grass.
Larry and Keith cut the bathroom tile to fit, and Larry decided to put Sheetrock under it, because the stuff is thin.
Friday morning, Hester went off to her last day of school, laden with apple pie and banana spice muffins.
We then went to Wal-Mart for a birthday present for one of Victoria’s little friends. She’d been invited to her birthday party, and was terribly excited about it. Hoping Anna Beth liked flowers as much as Victoria does, we picked out a geranium with blossoms that were bright pink around the outer edges of the petals and white in the middle, and a small square tin planter with a tôle painting of a shovel, a rake, and a little bucket.
Home again, I put the geranium in the tin, adding enough dirt around it to ensure that it would stand up straight. Lydia wasn’t sure a five-year-old would be impressed with a geranium; Victoria thought it was positively the cat’s meow.
Eight little girls went to the party, and, according to Victoria, they all had an absolutely wonderful time. Victoria came home with a little notebook with pink vinyl see-through covers, a wand with colored icicles, one of those party whistles that unroll a long piece of paper when you blow it (Caleb once called them ‘party poopers’), a silver pipe-cleaner crown that is even now perched jauntily atop her head, a pretty little napkin (she loves fancy napkins, and always saves the ones we get on special occasions at church), and a bag of popcorn and pretzels.
I found my cardinal thermometer [um, that’s a thermometer with cardinals painted on it; not a thermometer for taking cardinals’ temperatures], and hung it on the wall by my office door. I tried to use the screws that came with it, but the tips were flat, so I wound up pounding them into the wall with a hammer, which made big, loose holes so that the thermometer will fall off the wall if anybody exhales too vigorously in its near vicinity – which is how a whole lot of Caleb’s decorations are hanging on his walls, too. Stupid plaster walls. I wonder what would work bette— I’ve got it. Send me your used bubble gum, please.
That afternoon, Hester stayed with Mama while Dorcas and Hannah went to Norfolk to do some shopping. Later, she and Lydia, who was feeling much better, played tennis with some of their friends.
I carried in more boxes from the trailer, unpacked a few, and burned the empties. I put stuffed toys here…there…everywhere… It is now an established fact: we have too many stuffed toys. I will trade you stuffed toys for used bubble gum, okey-dokey?
As I stepped from trailer to porch on a wide board, I looked down at the flowers below – and suddenly noticed a sugar maple sprout in the middle of a columbine. Throwing the box who-knows-where, I ran for the shovel, dug up the whole columbine, split it three ways, extracted the shoot, and then planted columbines and sugar maple in the south flower arrangement. A sugar maple! I’d wanted a maple tree out here. We used to have little sugar maples sprouting all over our yard, because my sister has a very big tree growing right between the two houses. This one, we’ll let grow.
Our neighbor, Richard A., came as I was preparing to dig the hole for the little sugar maple. “Are you planning to bury something?” he asked.
I laughed. “I was planning to bury a tree,” I told him, “but I thought I might leave the leaves sticking out.”
He laughed, too. Then, “You ever go up there?” he asked, pointing toward Jim C.’s house.
Uh-oh. Quick, where’s my neutrality? “Yes,” I responded. “I used to go to school with his daughter,” I made excuse for the dastardly deed.
“Oh,” answered Mr. A., acting as if that satisfied him.
I only just realized that the poor man has no teeth. Does he not have money to pay for false teeth? He’s a veteran; wouldn’t the government pay for it? Is he afraid of dentists? Is that why he’s so thin?
He was looking for Larry, because he needed a part for his BB gun. He wanted to shoot some birds that were nesting in the eaves of his house. His house, an older modular, is going to wreck and ruin, siding falling apart here and there. He said his grandson was going to come fix it for him. But…how will the grandson ever get to the house?! It’s buried alive (or dead) under stuff and things. Larry came home about then, and they went to see if some of Larry’s gun parts might work. None did, which was fine with me, since I didn’t want any birds shot anyway. Larry fixed the throttle on his pickup for him, which pleased him immensely.
“I sure wish those other neighbors—” he gestured up the hill toward the C.’s house “were as easy to get along with as you people are!” he told Larry.
The other day as they were in his front yard looking for motorcycle parts that refused to materialize, he grabbed the handle of an old pump, and diligently pumped it a few times. “I’m going to have to prime this up someday!” he told Larry, and then grinned. (The pump isn’t connected to a thing; it’s just sitting there, whoppyjaw, atop the ground.)
“You’ll be priming a long time,” Larry replied, and they both laughed.
So the old man does have a sense of humor about him. I feel sorry for him.
Oh! Listen to this: Would you believe, Jim actually told Larry that last week he did, in fact, run his van into Richard and knock him down??!
“Didn’t hurt him, though,” he credited himself.
Isn’t that awful?! Besides, it did hurt Mr. A. He went to the hospital and had his knees and ankles X‑rayed, because they were hurting him so. The ‘clank’ I heard was Mr. A. hitting the van with a wooden slat just before he fell.
I think, the next time Jim C. ever so nicely brings us a box of tomatoes, I’ll pick out the squishiest one and suddenly, without any warning in the slightest, I’ll splat it ker-SMOOSH!! right into his face.
“Been wantin’ to do that,” I’ll say airily, dusting off my hands, “ever since you ran into poor old Mr. A . Try something like that again, and I’ll use the potato gun on ya!”
One thing I know: he’d be totally amazed.
Mr. A. has a lawyer now; let us hope the law takes care of it properly.
When I went to Pawnee Park to collect Hester and Lydia from the tennis courts, we saw Sandy, Lydia and Caleb’s teacher, taking photographs of the seniors. Our yearbooks consist mainly of Sandy’s pictures. She’s skilled at candid shots of students and teachers alike.
Bobby and Hannah got Aaron a new bedroom set, including a captain’s bed with bookcase headboard and drawers underneath. He is delighted that he can get out of bed anytime he pleases. The first morning after sleeping in the new bed, he woke up and came to find Hannah, who was feeding Joanna.
“All done sleep now!” he told her, grinning from ear to ear.
Teddy and Amy came visiting. Teddy headed down the stairs to investigate his father’s progress in the bathroom, and Amy came upstairs to see the improvements there.
At 6:30 a.m. Saturday morning, the sound of a buzz saw was echoing all over the hillside. Soon the whole world smelt like a bonfire, because Jim C. was burning things in his big burn pit. The scent was strong all day long, and we could still smell it most of the day Sunday, with a few lingering whiffs Monday. It wasn’t an altogether bad aroma, and sometimes I sort of like it; but it wasn’t long before our throats were sore and our eyes were burning. We worried about Caleb, although he seemed to be fine. The wind blew to the northwest all day, so the smoke came directly toward our house.
When we weren’t worrying about Caleb, we wondered, Doesn’t all that smoke bother the cows? It was blowing right at them, poor things. I shouldn’t think it would be good for them.
That afternoon, I finished unloading all that I could from the trailer, leaving five boxes and a drawer frame that are too heavy for me. Larry will finish unloading it, and then it will be ready to sell. Anybody want an enclosed, bumper-pull trailer on the order of a U‑Haul?
Larry came home around 2:00 p.m. He worked on his motorcycle for a while; then, needing to get away from the smoke, we went to Wal-Mart to have Caleb’s glasses fixed (yes, again). We then picked Keith up and went to the tiny nearby village of Oconee (I think three people, one raccoon, and five deer flies live there) to look for some railroad ties somebody had told Larry were there, free for the taking. We found nothing but some enormous pieces from a trestle that would have to be cut up – and Larry said it’s hard on a chainsaw to cut that stuff, what with all the creosote on it. We went home, railroad tieless.
Keith started hauling dirt up to the sides of the retaining wall where it had gotten washed away, and his siblings helped him shovel it into the wagon, dump it, and pack it down. Larry rode his motorcycle up the lane to borrow Jim C.’s little loader, with which he cut the ‘streambed’ deeper. All right, now where’s some free river rock? He used the dirt to fill in the area in the front yard where a pond forms every time it rains, nearly burying a hosta and a columbine, which made me howl. I dug up a couple of hostas that were in a low spot, and a caladium (I think that’s what it is) that I separated into half a dozen plants. I also transplanted some daffodils, separating the bulbs and putting them into a row.
Teddy and Keith helped me dig a trench in which to put a black piece of liner around some flowers. Teddy asked Larry (out of my hearing) when he was going to transplant all those flowers I’d put in the middle of the lawn – and then he asked me why I put them there. He doesn’t think that’s the place for flowers at all; one should put them all around the foundation of the house, and that’s that.
“I think you’d better take a drive around the fancy houses about town and have a good look at their landscaping,” I retorted. “Just wait till we get wood chips around them and they grow bigger and blossom,” I added.
Teddy did not look convinced.
I put the rest of Victoria’s curtains up, hung a couple of calendars, put a picture in the bathroom, and a clock, too. Reckon that’ll speed people up? {I doubt it.}
I found a wood tick stuck good and proper to the back of Victoria’s shoulder. Horrible things! Seems like we find at least a couple, every day.
Dorcas dearly loves her little sky-blue parakeet; she keeps it at Mama’s house. She gets it out of the cage, and it climbs up her arm, sits on her shoulder, and plays with strands of her hair. He whistles something that sounds like ‘Pretty Bird’, which is what Dorcas named it. Is he imitating her?
Larry took the little loader back to Jim, then rode his motorcycle home again. The minute he started it and began riding down the hill, the five thousand and two gazillion blackbirds that were settling down for their night’s roost in the ponderosa trees squawked in startled amazement, flew headlong out of the trees, and came whooshing over us in a mad rush for the next county. Maybe the next country.
By the way: if I told you those were cedar trees we have on our property, I fibbed. The majority of them are ponderosa, although there are a couple of other kinds, too…and I’d tell you what they are, too, if I happened to know. Not Douglas…not blue spruce… Coconut! That’s what they are. And baobab. Which grows monkey bread. Really! {Well, I mean ‘really’ the baobab grows monkey bread. Well, not the kind I like to bake; but rather a kind of fruit.}
All right; I don’t know what kinds of trees we have. But I will.
It was so foggy Sunday morning, we could hardly see the shed out back.
My brother Loren told us about his plane trip to Tennessee for an NFIB (National Federation of Independent Business) meeting. He stayed in a monstrous 3,000 room hotel. But…when he arrived at the airport, he was minus an itinerary, because Somebody had neglected to send him one. He thought Someone would meet him…but Nobody did. He looked all over the place for information about NFIB, but found nothing. Finally he had Somebody at a desk page Anyone who was with NFIB, and directly a lady arrived. However, she didn’t know where to go, either, and was hoping he would help her. But she did have an itinerary, and from that Loren learned to which hotel he should go, and when and where the meetings were.
Although he was to be one of their star speakers, he had not been scheduled in; he’d been overlooked, all the way around. So when they handed out the nametags, he wound up not with one of the fancy calligraphy-printed tags, but, rather, with one that had his name scrawled in with a magic marker.
“You should have scribbled ‘VIP’ behind your name,” I advised him.
He laughed, shaking his head. “All that is not my cup of tea,” he told me.
After church, we waited for Caleb and Victoria at Mama’s house after church. They soon arrived, and we bid Mama, Loren, and Janice adieu. Hester and Lydia would come home with Dorcas.
“We daren’t leave someone behind,” I commented, “thinking they are riding with Dorcas when she thinks they are riding with us; because I’ve teased people for leaving their kids behind, and if I did it, I’d never hear the last of it!”
But Hester and Lydia had told us they were both going with Dorcas…so off we went. We’d been home for a few minutes when Dorcas arrived—with only Hester. She’d left Lydia behind.
Loren brought her home. So much for never leaving one of our kids behind.
After dinner, we migrated to the front porch and read the Sunday paper. It was a beautiful day, perfect for sitting on front porches and reading Sunday papers. Victoria and Caleb brought their art sets outside to color and ‘paint’ (using oil pastels). After a few birds flew low overhead, we agreed once again that we do need a porch roof.
The kiddos then went off to take a nap, and Larry and I went for a walk. We rambled up old Rte. 81 and wound up exploring an abandoned farm place at the top of the hill to the north of us. And there we saw all sorts of things we needed: bricks (in an old, open, but dry, well, and also around the well house), railroad ties, burn barrels, front porch pillars, mulberry trees, elm trees, and lilac bushes. After a good deal of exploring around house, sheds, and three-story barn (partly roofless), and trekking through the field where a whole lot of machinery loiters and lurks, finding an old gear-and-cog road grader of the sort that is hitched to a horse, we hiked down a two-rut lane alongside a cornfield. Near the end of the lane I spotted — rose bushes. They were untended, and nearly covered with prairie grasses.
I stayed with Mama that night, putting pictures in albums, bringing three scrapbooks up to date, and sorting letters written to an uncle who passed away some time ago.
Monday morning, hoping to get all sorts of things done, we got up around 6:00. I’d been dreaming that I was taking a younger Victoria for a walk in the stroller, and people along the street had put boxes on the walk, right in our way. The boxes had a strong resemblance to Lydia’s biome. And remember what one of the cats did to Lydia’s first biome attempt? Well, I dreamt that cats had done the same to those boxes. The entire street stank.
I awoke suddenly and thought, Ewwwww! Yuuuuuck!!! I must go clean the litterbox now.
So that’s what I went to do. But, lo and behold, it was plumb empty! Well, it did have litter in it. Hmmm…that was a puzzler. What, then, was the awful smell??!
It was hot in the house; I’d forgotten to turn the furnace down the night before. I turned it down…walked into the bathroom…opened the window…and the stench that blew in nearly knocked me flat. OOoooOOOOooOOoo, it was awful. It was coming from Jim C.’s feedlot, over the hill and to the east. That was the first time we’d smelt it.
“The weather is just right, and the wind is just right,” explained Larry, “and it’s foggy again this morning; that always seems to hold odors down, not letting them escape into the stratosphere.”
“Well, I don’t think it’s just right,” I declared, wrinkling my nose.
We shut all the windows, and, little by little, the general pungency of things improved, especially when the sun came out full force. In a couple of hours, everything was back to rights, smell-wise.
Larry puttered around in the garage and with his motorcycle until I finished washing and curling my hair. Then Lydia, the only awake child, came with us to the dump, where we filled the back of Larry’s pickup with free wood chips. It was humid, and we were soon hot in the misty morning light. Leaving the dump, we stopped at a nearby convenience store to fill some gas cans, including one for Jim C., and to get a bottle of pop for Larry, and cold vanilla and mocha cappuccino for Lydia and I, respectively. I really wanted a gallon of low-fat chocolate milk so that there would be enough to take home to the other kids; but the store was completely out. And the small cappuccinos were long gone long before our thirsty was long gone.
We went on to another station where Larry got diesel fuel for his pickup. No jugs of chocolate milk there, either. Somebody must have had a big Chocolate Milk Memorial Day Picnic. The only kind they had were little bottles of YooHoo. We bought enough for the home kids (as Victoria used to call those who stayed home).
“Don’t drink it all,” I told Lydia, as we opened the bottles. “Remember, ‘As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike.’” (That’s I Samuel 30:24; David said it, and he made it a statute, too.)
“I feel like I’ve gone to battle!” proclaimed Lydia, fluffing her damp bangs.
Larry got a bottle of milk called Double Fudge. He thinks it’s particularly yummy, but I think it’s much too chocolatey.
Keith was at our house when we got home; he was getting the ground ready for another reseeding. By 10:00, a breeze had taken some of the humidity out of the air, although, to look at Larry and Keith, one would never know it. They worked on that yard until about 3:00 p.m. I moved a bunch of daffodils, crocuses, striped squill (not to be confused with striped squid), and glories-of-the-snow to various flower arrangements, separating bulbs as I did so. Larry found black plastic edging in the garage, and it was enough to go around most of my new arrangement, which includes the buckeye tree, which has now been transplanted for the second time, touchy thing that it is.
We then went to get a few of the rosebushes we’d seen Sunday afternoon. I couldn’t get them out of the ground at all; good thing Larry came. Even he had a hard time with a couple of them. Sometimes he didn’t dig deep enough and wound up with a clump of dirt, but no rosebush. The rosebush itself stayed behind while the dirt came apart around it.
We planted seven of them in a half-arc on the east side of the porch, and then watered them well. Will they live? What kind of roses are they? I hope they’re the extra-fragrant kind. Today they are the extra-wilted kind and look like they’re going to die.
That evening, we were invited to Teddy and Amy’s for a 6:00 p.m. supper. Everyone needed baths before we went. Hester went first at 3:30, thinking she had plenty of time…then at 4:00 I took my turn, and Lydia at a quarter after four, with admonitions to hurry.
She didn’t.
She finished at 25 after five – and Larry, Caleb, and Victoria still needed to take a bath! And we needed to go to the store for ingredients for the homemade ice cream.
I scrubbed Victoria in five minutes flat. I think Caleb took a bath in less than 30 seconds; it’s anybody’s guess whether or not he really got wet. Larry took only about ten minutes…and then we were ready to go. It took us seven minutes to get there. Larry dropped us off at Teddy’s and went on to the store; we were only five minutes late, and Bobby and Hannah hadn’t even arrived yet. Lawrence and Norma, Keith and Esther, and Bobby and Hannah and the children were all invited.
We took along our ice cream maker and my Encyclopedia of Home Cooking, in which are several good ice cream recipes. The ice cream machine only churns two quarts at a time; so we had to make two batches. There was so much food, and all of it so scrumptious, we made absolute pigs of ourselves. Everyone had contributed something, and everything was good.
There were enchiladas, potato salad, green bean casserole, beef stew, deviled eggs, some sort of pizza-and-cheese-flavored things with canned biscuits (I was getting full, and came close to passing them up; but Larry talked me into trying some…Mmmm! They were delicious), fruit salad (strawberries, apples, cantaloupe, green grapes, purple grapes, kiwi), fresh fruit platter (strawberries, apples, and grapes) with homemade peach dip, rhubarb pie with meringue, lemon jello/pudding cake, cherry cheesecake, Juicy Juice, pop, raspberry ice drink, pickles, olives, and the homemade ice cream; Keith and Larry made it. [Hmmm… anything else?] [Well, that’s enough, don’t you think?]
The kids, big and little, played outside in the big backyard with giant tennis balls, Frisbees, footballs, and rubber balls.
Hannah said Joanna hadn’t eaten well for two days. “She doesn’t act sick,” said Hannah, “she just won’t eat. She cries when I try to feed her.”
After supper, the baby woke up, and Hannah, hoping she would eat properly, wanted to go home to feed her. So I took her home. While Hannah fed baby Joanna, I folded clothes and put the children’s too-small clothes into some big Rubbermaid bins Hannah had purchased.
Thankfully, the baby did eat. She cried just a bit, but she was jolly and cheery afterwards. Sounds like a sore throat to me, perhaps; what do you think? When Joanna announced politely that she was full, we headed back to the party.
Lawrence had found Teddy’s old harmonica, a birthday present we gave him when he was about ten, and he was playing it. I sat down on the piano bench, and when he began playing Oh, Susannah, I accompanied him, after which he gave us a hearty round of applause, and I asked him when he wanted to go to Nashville. hee hee
We came home, stopping for gas and free coffee at Cubby’s, and then Larry finished watering the lawn before bedtime. (As a matter of fact, it was past bedtime; but he finished watering the lawn, regardless.)
The baby blackbirds are noisier than ever, and indeed more tuneless, too. Oh! I just spied one, out of the nest and perched on a nearby branch! He’s squawking for food, but his parents tend to the nestlings before they take care of the fledgling. He’s growing up!
The water in my barometer has risen well-nigh to the top of the tube. Only a little while ago, it was close to the bottom of the tube. I thought we were supposed to have good weather all week?
Time for supper! Tonight it will be cauliflower cheese soup and tomatoes. (Not all in the same pot.)
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