Last Tuesday, I was
discussing table tennis – we call it ‘ping pong’ here – with a friend and
fellow quilter who used to be quite the star player, even playing in Paris and
such places. I’m no good at it anymore,
but I used to love playing. Larry could always outdo me, though there may
have been a rare time or two when I won a game.
He’s still pretty good at it. He’s quick, and good at spins.
We used to set up a
table in our garage at Christmas time. Caleb had a couple of tables set
up in his garage a few months ago, and a number of people were playing.
It was so funny... a bunch of little kids were also playing with big bouncy
balls all around the tables, and now and then a bouncy ball would find its way
onto the table, whereupon one of the boys would swat it and yell, “SCORE!!!”
which made everyone laugh, including the small fry. Sometimes points were
lost because someone had to avoid treading upon a toddler rather than
connecting with the ball; but no matter – everything was just for fun.
Larry’s sister and
I once played against a couple of girls in high school – one of whom was supposed
to be our friend. She was no good at most sports – and no good at
being a friend, really. Well, she was being a little extra nasty that day,
and when we started the game, I discovered that she thought the way you played
properly was to bounce the ball gently and high. Eh. What
would you do with a high-lobbed ping-pong ball, against a girl who was
being nasty?
Yeah. I done
did it.
On the third good
smash, she lost her cool --- and threw her paddle at me! I ducked,
and it went zinging through my hair.
So I picked up the
ball, laid it gently on the table, laid my paddle atop it, and said, “Forfeit
the game, or I tell the teacher.”
That girl would
have been in serious trouble, had I told on her, and she knew it. The
teacher was quite strict about such things.
Her partner was hissing, “Forfeit! Forfeit!”
So with some degree
of reluctance, and quite a lot of temper, she forfeited. I dislike poor losers. Never wanted to be one; never wanted to play
with one.
I asked my friend
if she was glad she’d done her multi-country traveling back when it was safer,
and she agreed, she was glad. Just this
afternoon, there was breaking news of a terrorist attack in Manchester,
England. At least 22 people have been
killed, 59 injured.
The only other
countries I have been to are Canada, and a wee bit of Mexico, just south of the
border. But I traveled the contingent United States a lot with my parents,
and have been to almost every state, except for maybe a few of the smaller ones
on the eastern seaboard.
Travel is very much
a learning experience. My parents were a learning experience, ha!
– that is to say, they were constantly teaching, without any real effort; it
just came natural. And I loved to learn.
Larry and I would
like to go to Alaska someday. My parents and I were once headed for
Alaska, traveling along the spine of the Rockies through some of the major
national parks in Canada – and then my mother got sick. It was probably
altitude sickness, because she just couldn’t get over it. Daddy and I were so worried about her.
We were almost to
Grande Prairie when Daddy decided we mustn’t go any farther. He turned
east and headed straight for Edmonton, in case we needed to get Mama to the hospital. But as soon as we got down to lower
altitudes, Mama got better.
In Edmonton, we
parked our car and trailer in a school parking lot one night – and wound up
making friends with a Baptist preacher and his family who lived just across the
street. The man invited Daddy to preach at his church the next night, and
Daddy did so. There were two girls a little older than me, and a younger
boy in the family; nice children. We kept in touch for several years.
I will never forget
when we stopped along the road late one night near Grande Prairie (before
turning east the next day and aborting the Alaska trip), climbed out of our
car, and watched in awe and amazement the Aurora Borealis as they unfolded from
the sky like giant curtains, billowing and swirling downward, crackling and
roaring and popping and crashing like a thunder-and-lightning storm. I
have never before or after seen such colors – brilliant crimsons, golds,
flashing blues and teals and bright greens, pinks and yellows, purples from
dark to light lavender. We didn’t breathe a word for half an hour, just
stood mute and gazed upon that wonderful sight. Not another car passed
us, the whole time.
Then, as those
Northern Lights faded to a lovely, flickering, many-hued glow that would last
most of the night, we climbed back into our car and proceeded on, feeling quite
a lot like the Israelites of old: stiff-necked. ha
Later, I would
relate this story to people who informed me in no uncertain terms that there is
absolutely no noise at all to the Auroras, whether Borealis or Australis.
I didn’t believe it, and looked it up in books, and read that people who think
they are hearing noises whilst watching the Auroras are imagining it; it’s all
in their heads, caused by the amazing sight they are seeing.
Well, hmmph.
I don’t get so agog over something that I don’t know what I’ve heard! Furthermore, all three of us heard it. So I didn’t believe the naysayers, and they
didn’t believe me, and we went on like that for years. It was just like
Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “Therefore if I know not the meaning of
the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh
shall be a barbarian unto me.”
And what do the Barbarians know?! (Them, not me.)
Hmmmmm... I just decided to look this up online. I
did an online search a long time ago, probably 18 years ago, but found
nothing. There was a lot less
information on the Web back then. And...
guess what?!!
(Did you guess?)
The Auroras do
make noise! They do, they do! Now, I have realized that there is a
possibility that part of what we were hearing may have been the echoing through
the mountain peaks and valleys of a thunder-and-lightning storm on the other
side of the range we were traveling alongside; but the majority of the snapping
and crackling was indeed the Northern Lights.
Sometimes they can only be heard with special instruments; but plenty of
people have heard them with no amplification at all. Funny, my mother and
I could hear the noises much easier than my father could. Here are a couple of videos, with electronic
amplification:
Daddy was a year
and a half older than Mama. At that time, he would’ve been... ? 55? 56?
I don’t remember what year it was then. (He
was 45 ½ when I was born; Mama was almost 44.) But he had troubles
hearing some sounds, and he thought probably it was because of the deafening
noises from the ship he was on in the Navy, when they bombarded islands over by
the Philippines. He recalled that they sailed up to islands that were
jewel green with jungle foliage – and by morning, there was nothing but brown
earth. But they managed to take the islands from the Japanese and give
them back to the Filipinos! He liked those people – and they liked him.
A third of their
convoy went down one night. He spoke of seeing the ships burst into
flames... blow up in huge fireballs... and just roll over and go down in a
matter of seconds. The ships that weren’t hit were for the most part
unable to help any possible survivors, because they were being attacked
themselves. But there were most likely no survivors anyway.
He told of a tracer
hitting the potato locker up on deck, blowing it up – and potato pieces flying
everywhere. The sailors were all firing back with the big canons and
machine guns... ducking shrapnel... yet he remembers someone yelling, “Where’s
the gravy?!” and someone else shouting, “Now let’s point out the beans for
their next target!”
But even though
they tired of some of the food, they knew they might be in dire straits if they
didn’t have their food supplies.
Daddy was quite the
story-teller. I wish our younger children could have known him.
Last Monday was the
last decent day for hanging clothes outside; it’s been raining a good deal of
the time ever since. The field at the
bottom of the hill is a lake.
Why is it that I
can go all day with nary a phone call, but as soon as I go out on the back deck
to hang up clothes, the phone rings, and I don’t hear it? I run a sink full of water to wash dishes, and
someone texts me – but I don’t hear the notification through the running
water. What this proves is ------ housework
interferes with my social life!
Tuesday evening, baseball-sized hail hit various locations 50-80
miles to our east, and there was flooding to the east and the south.
Wednesday morning,
it was still pouring rain.
But right here on 249th Street, the worst problem was that the cats
couldn’t find a door to exit where the weather was good. They kept coming
to tell me about it.
Tabby: “Meee! Meee!”
Teensy: “Mrr-rrr-rrr-oooww--owww?”
Tiger, in his raspy bass: “MMRRRRROOOW.”
I commiserated with them, and scratched under chins and
behind ears. They purred and strolled off. Five minutes later, they
trotted back to tell me, “But it’s still raining out there!!!”
Before going to my
sewing room, I hunted down a few online books for my blind friend, Penny.
She particularly wanted books by a French preacher from the early 1800s.
In less than a minute, I found the preacher – Adolphe-Louis-Frédéric-Théodore
Monod – and then I was fortunate
enough to find all his books and articles in one place, making things easy.
Reckon Penny’s synthesizer could’ve read them to her properly, had I sent them
in French? Like this:
Un
collègue a dit de lui: « Comme défenseur de la vérité qui est en Christ,
il avait un cœur de lion; comme chrétien, il avait le cœur et la simplicité d’un
petit enfant, un cœur d’agneau – si j’ose ainsi dire –, doux, bon, inoffensif
et toujours débonnaire. Il unissait, dans son caractère chrétien, des qualités
rarement associées: la mâle énergie de saint Paul et la douceur évangélique de
saint Jean. »
Okay... if you must
know what that said...
A colleague said of him: « As a defender of the truth
which is in Christ, he had a lion’s heart; As
a Christian, he had the heart and simplicity of a little child, a heart of a
lamb, if I may so speak, gentle, good, harmless, and always meek. He united in his Christian character
qualities rarely associated: the male energy of St. Paul and the evangelical
sweetness of St. John. »
Sometimes very old
books are a bit hard to plow through, as the prose is so different from today’s
writing style. But I have found that if I first read an author’s
biography, that increases my interest – and by the time I’ve made my way
through the first chapter, my brain has gotten into the swing of things, and
the reading goes easier thereafter.
I copied and pasted
27 articles. I noticed when I was a quarter of the way done
that I was sending Penny notes by the preacher’s brother and father, Theodore
and Horace Monad, too, and decided to just go ahead and give her the whole
works, since I already had them pulled up.
Come to think of
it, maybe Theodore and Adolphe were
one and the same man.
Penny will put
these books into her Braille Lite reader and her computer files, and she’ll be
able to either read them in Braille or listen to them with audio, as she prefers.
My blind friends are so accustomed to their reading synthesizers, that they
turn the speed up almost as fast as it will go. I absolutely cannot tell
what on earth the narrator is saying; it sounds like garbled noise to me.
But... if I slow it down a little and listen for a bit until I can tell what is
being said, I can then start increasing the speed, until I can understand it almost
as fast as my friends can. But not quite, not quite.
“My ears aren’t as
fast as yours!” I tell them.
I headed down to the sewing room to work on my
great-nephew’s wedding gift – coffeepot cozy #2.
That evening, we had our graduation service. First there was a
short song service, and then the children – 84 of them, from 3rd grade through 12th
grade – sang a number of songs. I particularly liked one called Morning Soon Will Come. My nephew Robert read some verses from Proverbs, and after that the
graduates received their diplomas and awards, and there was a slide show.
It was an enjoyable evening. The service is online, if you’d like to hear
it:
It was my nephew Kelvin and wife Rachel’s 30th wedding
anniversary that day. Kelvin is the one who is being treated for colon
cancer. He was well enough to come to church that night.
And... it was my sister Lura Kay’s birthday. She’s
77 now – 20 ½ years older than me. After
church, we took her the coffeepot and cozy. It’s
fun to give things to appreciative people, you know that?
Speaking of being appreciative ... or not... Once upon a time my late sister-in-law
brought us a big tureen of 15-bean soup for supper. I ladled out dishes
for the children, and passed out the spoons. So there was little Hester,
about 3 or 4 years old, pawing through hers distastefully, like one of the cats
with something disagreeable in his bowl.
Then, in a plaintive little voice, she said, said she, “Mine
has more than 15 in it.”
I spent most of the day Thursday adding silk ribbon
embroidery and beads to the coffeepot cozy #2.
More photos are here.
A friend wrote, “This one is going to be a simpler
design?? Didn’t I read that you said
that? Doesn’t look like it.”
I responded, “Well, there’s no ruching (gathering or
pleating)! 😃 I put the crazy-quilting pieces
onto the shaped foundation pieces before sewing the foundation together,
so it was flat rather than shaped. Much easier.”
But it was because of the odd shape that I added the
ruching, out of necessity; and it did look
pretty.
That afternoon, I got a photo of a Baltimore
oriole on the suet feeder. Most male
Baltimores are bright orange, but we’ve had one or two come each year that are
bright yellow, with their contrasting black heads and striped wings.
Then
along came the house finch family, and the babies were hungry, hungry! Papa
Finch had his wings full, because he had five of them. Mama Finch is probably
already sitting on another clutch of eggs in the nest. This is the second brood
of the year.
I did get
a few rare pictures of Mama Finch feeding one of the fledglings; she’d probably
come to the feeder for a little snack before heading quickly back to her nest. The father usually cares for the chicks after
they leave the nest. He takes food to
the mother as she sits on the nest, too.
He’s a busy and industrious little guy!
Every time I do a project that includes ribbon embroidery
and/or beads, I think, I need to do more of this! This is fun!
But then I think the same thing about most of the sewing/ crafts/quilting
I do... which explains why my To-Do List is so impossibly long.
Several of our daughters, daughters-in-law, nieces, and
friends spent a good part of the week preparing for the Farmers’ Market, which
is held on Saturdays in Frankfurt Square, in the middle of the downtown area. They cooked and baked and made watercolor and
quilled and Cricut cards – and then got rained out. Some of them took their goods instead to the
vendor show at Ag Park.
Victoria took some of her food to the
relatives. I bought some chocolate chip
cookies, fresh French bread, apple pie, and wild-berry pie slices. We put pulled pork on the French bread, cooked
some vegetables to go with it, and, along with the pie, that was our Saturday
night supper. Yummy! Fruit pies are my favorite dessert.
By that evening, I’d
made good progress on coffeepot cozy #2.
There is still quite a bit to do before I put the batting and lining in,
though. Most of Saturday was spent doing
cross-stitching on all the vertical seams – and wishing my cross-stitching looked as nice as
it does in the pictures on Pinterest. It doesn’t look like I got much done, but it took a few hours. I didn’t
take pictures of the cross-stitching. You
don’t want to be subjected to every last stitch I take, do you? 😃 
A friend asked me
if I dream about my projects. Yep, I
dream about quilting... embroidering... sewing... car crashes... plane
crashes... being lost in a maze in Madagascar... small UFOs
swarming around my house... going to church in my pajamas (or worse)... and
fish swimming in midair. My dreaming mechanism is very imaginative – and
in color, too! haha
I drew the next
ribbon embroidery design onto the cozy with my vanishing-ink pen, then decided
to go to bed a couple of hours earlier than usual so as not to be tired during
the morning church service.
The results of that
decision:
a)
I awoke two hours earlier than usual
and never did go back to sleep, and
b)
The design I drew with the vanishing
pen vanished into thin air, would you believe.
Sunday, two of our
grandsons had birthdays: Bobby and
Hannah’s son Levi turned 7, and Teddy and Amy’s boy Lyle (named after Larry’s
father, who died of cancer in 1988) turned 10. I rummaged up some
birthday cards, and put their gifts into bags. For Lyle, two books about
lion cubs, including one with pop-ups and sliding tabs that animate the
pictures; and a Thermal lunch bag made to look like a racecar. For Levi, a
couple of books about Merle the Patio Squirrel, a little stuffed puppy, and a
pillow with a teddy bear shape sewn into it.
On one of the
online quilting groups, we’ve been telling how we came to start quilting. My desire to quilt started when I was a teenager looking
through the J. C. Penney’s catalog at all the pretty bedroom sets. I saw
a satin puff quilt that I figured I could make for a whole lot less than what
was listed in the catalog. Sooo... when I got my next paycheck (I worked
in the Word Processing Center at Nebraska Public Power District), I went to our
local fabric store, Fash’n Fab, and bought enough brown, ivory, and peach satin
to make a king-sized quilt. The colors were chosen because my
sister-in-law had just given me a new curtain and sheers set, and the quilt had
to match, of course.
These were not my favorite colors by any means.
But... everything had to coordinate. The carpet was a multi-green
shag. Again, not my favorite color ------- but someone I really liked talked
me into it when I was, oh, about 11 or 12, informing me that if I chose one of
my favorite colors (blue, purple or red), I’d get tired of it. I
was doubtful... but I loved the lady, thought possibly she was right ----- and,
mainly, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
Well. Don’t ever let anybody talk you into that
kind of thing. And don’t ever you try to talk someone else
into such a thing. Let them get whatever
color of shag carpet they dearly so well want!
Except black, of course. Thumbs
down on black. Or gray. That’s uuuuugly.
Okay. Back to the quilt. I hadn’t gotten
started on it yet when Larry and I set our wedding date. I started shopping
for things – and discovered prices of things I’d never priced before. 😲 My father told me to bring him all the
receipts, so he could pay for everything.
But when I did hand him a couple of receipts for something, and
saw his astonishment over the price, I thought, I’m going to pay for all the
things I think my father would never think of, and just keep it a Big Secret.
My father was generous to a fault – but he was frugal
with himself, and would have been horrified to know how much everything really
cost. I preferred not to take advantage of his generosity when I had the
wherewithal to pay for things myself. (Mama knew, of course – nothing
ever got past her – and she slipped me money now and again, despite my
protests.)
Sooooooo... the peach satin went for the dress for
the maid of honor, the brown satin went for the dress for the other bridesmaid,
the ivory satin went for bodices, trim, the flowergirl’s dress, and ringbearer’s
pillow (and, a few years later, an Easter dress for Hannah, when she was two or
three years old). After that, my Friends and Relations (à la Rabbit, of
Winnie-the-Pooh fame) all concluded that my favorite color was peach, and
bought me all manner of gifts, accordingly. Aaaaaaaaaauugghh.
But I still wanted to make a quilt! – and did so, when
Keith and Hannah were little. First, a quilt with a big appliquéd
sailboat for Keith; and, next, a 3D Dahlia quilt (with gathered petals) for
Hannah. That was the one that, when I put away the templates in my
quilting book, I spotted the line in the instructions, “For experienced
quilters only.” By then the quilt was
done, and I was experienced. heh
That was in the early 1980s.
I didn’t have much time for quilting while the children
were growing up, as I made nearly all of their clothes, right down to pjs – and
even coats, once or twice. But sometimes I made ensembles for
soon-to-arrive babies’ nurseries... or embroidered baby quilts... or quilted
vests (remember those Gunne Sax patterns?)...
And then finally the kids were grown, married, or nearly
so, and I didn’t have as many clothes to make ----- and the quilting began in
earnest. A quilt is a whole lot more relaxing to make than a man’s suit
or a teenage girl’s dress that she wants fitted exactly.
I’ve been quilting quite a lot for the last ... hmmm...
? 12? years or so, I suppose. And I’m not tired of it yet.
There’s no end to the list of quilts I want to make. And the list keeps
growing!
When we got home from church last night, I put
chicken fillets in the oven, and when there were ten minutes to go before they
were done, I popped in some ciabatta rolls.
Seven minutes later, I put a bowl of rice and peas into the microwave.
We had some yummy cookies from Amy for
dessert.
Schwan’s ciabatta
rolls are big square rolls that are kind of hard on the outside, but I butter
the tops when they’re just out of the oven to soften them. We put butter and Blackberry Pecan jelly on them. Andrew and Hester gave me the jelly for
Mother’s Day. Mmmmm... droooool...
“Ever notice,” I
asked Hester, “when you bite into a soft roll with a hard bottom, your top
teeth sink in, but your bottom teeth don’t, so the thing tips up and slaps you
butter first right in the schnozz?”
She
laughed, “Food can be dangerous.”
Hee
hee ... That’s what Levi said when he was wee little, trying out the thesaurus
in his busy little head as he ate something he liked: “This is deLICious! This is SCRUMPtious! This is DANgerous!”
Andrew
and Hester also gave me a crossbody bag, just the right size for my tablet,
with plenty of pockets for other things.
Larry headed off on
a bike ride after supper, discovered that 61° is too chilly to ride 15 mph into
the wind (and he gets going well over 30 mph on the downhill slopes) without a
jacket. So he popped back in, grabbed his reflective jacket, and trotted back
out again. For a year and a half now, starting in earnest when he got his
Cannondale road bike, he’s had safe riding. But I’m always glad when I
hear him coming back into the garage with his bike. I’d really like to get him one of those
sensor-thingamagidgits that alert the paramedics and relatives if one tips over. You can cancel the alarm before it sends out
the alert, if you decide you’re still all in one piece.
Larry likes
taking pictures and videos with his phone and posting them on Instagram,
particularly because some of his grandchildren love to see Grandpa’s pictures
(especially when he sings, too). But the
phone isn’t so good at night, and doesn’t have a stabilizer, so it’s awfully
bouncy. Hmmm... I just looked to see if
there’s a GoPro on Amazon that wouldn’t cost too awfully much. I have now found lots of GoPros that cost too
awfully much.
Tabby is trying to eat...
and Teensy, who was out on the front porch, evidently heard the plink-plunk of
the saucer as I set it down, is now scrrrreeeking his paws down the glass on
the door, begging to get in. I’ll let
him in, in a minute, when Tabby gets done eating. Otherwise, Tabby will get distracted and stop
eating, and he needs all the sustenance he can get.
Minutes pass...
Tabby must’ve been
starved! Or the food is extra good. I’d left it on the counter for the last 15
minutes or more, and it’s fresh from the can and room temperature, which he
likes better than cold. I don’t
microwave it after it’s been in the refrigerator, because only once or twice of
that, and he won’t touch it. The
microwaving must change it, somehow.
Teensy is going to
give up on me, travel around to the back of the house, and come in the garage,
if I don’t hurry and let him in.
Tiger is on the
couch with a paw wrapped around his face, the better to sleep through any
possible commotion.
Loren called at
about noon today and asked if I wanted to take pictures of a big turtle
strolling along the ditch by his house. I did.
He keeps his yard
and house looking so pretty (my brother, not the turtle; in fact, the turtle’s
house looks quite messy, what with all that algae growing on it).
Time out while I
rub a little Capzasin on my neck.
I remember Mama
saying one time, “I wonder if I’m losing my mind, because all I can think about
is my back!” Turned out, she had at
least three cracked vertebrae. Made us
feel so bad.
Unlike me, Mama
wasn’t one to complain unless the pain was nearly unbearable. She came by the trait honestly.
Her father, my
Grandpa Winings, was once working out in the field when he cut his thumb rather
badly on something. He didn’t want to
take the time to go the doctor, as he was in the middle of planting or
harvesting. So he wrapped the thumb, went
to the house, sterilized a needle and thread, took it out to the front porch so
as not to get blood on anything in the house, seated himself, and set to work
stitching that thumb back together. He
did the job neat as a pin, without a flinch.
When later he
showed his doctoring work to his real
doctor, the doctor laughed, shook his head, and told Grandpa that he’d done a
neater job than he himself could have done.
Mama, who rarely ranted or raved about
things (again, unlike her youngest daughter), once said that you couldn’t trust a man who had so many
teeth, speaking of President Carter, who always grinned from ear to ear,
whether it was an appropriate time to grin from ear to ear or not. It’s hard to forget statements like that from
a quiet soul who makes them so rarely!
Here’s our front
walk. Those hostas on the left are only
two years old, and already could use some culling and transplanting. They’re prettier, I think, when they’re in
separate mounds, rather than one long bushy row. On the other hand, it’s quite impressive when
they bloom, closer to autumn. The little
blue spruce trees have all sent up bright candles on the ends of every branch.
A customer’s quilt
arrived a little while ago. I took it out
of the box and looked at it. It’s so
pretty, in batiks of coordinating blues and greens. I’d better hurry with
coffeepot cozy #2, so I can get to this quilt.
The lady said it’s okay if I finish the cozy first. That wedding is coming quickly!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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