Journal: Sunsets, Antique Stores, Old Photos, & Teabloom

 

It rained off and on most of the day Tuesday.  I spent part of the day hunting down and sorting through old family pictures on my computer in order to have some reprinted.  I will put them in the old wooden-covered album that my mother started when my brother Loren was a baby, back in 1938.  The original black construction-like pages are crumbling away to dust, so I bought new photo-safe paper at Hobby Lobby, cut pages to the right size, and punched holes for the leather cord that holds it together.

Here is a picture of my older siblings, taken sometime around late 1944 or early 1945.  Loren was about 6, Lura Kay about 4, and G.W. about 1 year old.

I always get carried away with my projects.  I cut so many pages for that album, I’m going to have to print hundreds of pictures to fill it!  🙄

Loren must be doing all right, as I have heard nothing from doctors or nurses at Prairie Meadows for the last week.  No news is good news, with the nursing home, as they always let me know immediately if anything is the matter.

But I know he is declining, and that’s part of the reason I want to get this album done.

Here’s the old wooden album, and a picture of Loren when he was about one year old.

As I looked through pictures, I was sipping Butterscotch Toffee coffee from Aroma Ridge.  (The beans are roasted with the flavor; the coffee is black.)  Good stuff.

Here’s my mother when she was one year old.  She was born October 31, 1918.

I ordered 147 reprints.  I’ll get more later, possibly.

That evening, Victoria sent a picture of the vegetable zuppa they were having for supper, made from the dried soup we got in South Dakota and gave them for Christmas.  She added a can of kidney beans and a can of chicken, and put crumbled bacon on top.  They were eating outside at their patio table.  

“There are some types of soups that you can keep adding ingredients to, it seems, and it just keeps on getting better.  Others... not so much,” I commented.

“Creamy potato soup is one that you don’t want to mess with excessively,” Victoria agreed.

“Right,” said I.  “Someone somewhere added sliced summer squash to theirs.  >>gag<<  (I may have been the only one who couldn’t bear it; others were eating with gusto.)  (Or maybe they were just trying to get it over with, heh.)”

I once learned, early in my cooking career, that canned peas (and they were ‘good’ ones – Del Monte) (not nearly as good as frozen peas, of course) really must be drained before you put them in the soup.  Otherwise, the whole soup tastes like peas, just in different textures.  The soup was really good, up until I did that.  It was getting a bit too thick, so I thought the liquid in the can of peas would be just the thing.  Wrong.

As we chatted, Victoria was baking three loaves of bread:  cinnamon raisin, cheesy garlic herb, and wheat bread.

A quilting friend, upon seeing this photo of my Great-Grandpa John Jackson Winings and Cynthia Ella [Tohill] Winings on their wedding day in approximately 1880, remarked, “I really hate that nobody ever smiles in these old photos!”

There’s a reason for that (no smiles):  The exposure time for daguerreotypes in the 1800s was originally anywhere from five minutes to half an hour, making sitting for a portrait a painful and often unsuccessful process, for if anyone moved, the photo would then very likely be blurry.  Innovations in the 1840s increased the sensitivity of the photographic plates and reduced the exposure time to under a minute.  But even 30-45 seconds is too long for most people to hold a fixed smile.  Give it try, and you’ll understand.  If they changed expressions, their faces might look distorted in the picture.  So the best bet was a serious look that could be held for some time.

Victoria sent pictures of several crocheting projects she’s made lately, and some that she’s still working on.  Isn’t this baby afghan pretty?

Little Willie, who’s 2, is going to need leg braces and a lot of physical therapy, because his troubles walking weren’t all from the tethered spinal cord.  He’s getting fitted for braces tomorrow and should have them in a couple of weeks.  

“That’s a bit discouraging,” said Victoria, “but at the same time I’m glad to have ways to help him.”

The doctors have determined that he has hypomyelination.  The neurons in the brain are supposed to have myelin on them, which sends signals to each other.  His are lacking that coating, not completely but enough to cause ‘relay’ issues.  This condition could resolve, stay the same, or get worse.  Right now, it’s causing what the doctors call ‘dynamic tone’.  When he tries to move his leg muscles quickly, they catch and almost get ‘stuck’.  They will also be taking X-rays of his lower extremities tomorrow to find out if he has hip dysplasia.

I had not heard of hypomyelination, so I looked it up.  (Looking up a medical condition online – any medical condition – is scary!)  Scientists are working on gene therapy for this condition, but it’s not available yet.

“It sure makes me happy to see Arnold trying to crawl already after all of this worry with Willie,” said Victoria.  “The things you take for granted...  For now, the best thing we can do is retrain his muscles with therapy.  Or, rather, retrain his brain to use the muscles differently.  Fortunately, at this age, they adapt really well.”

Having ordered the reprints I wanted, I then put the few pictures that had already been in the album in the first place back into it on the new pages cut from the sheets of black photo-safe pages.

Here are my maternal grandparents, George ‘Rollo’ Winings and Lura Mabel [Bacon] Winings.

Grandpa Winings had an eye that turned in, just like two of our boys.  He didn’t learn until some time after he was married that glasses would correct that issue.  See, there in the second photo, taken on their 50^th wedding anniversary, I think, he’s wearing glasses, and the eye problem is corrected.

Grandpa Winings took the train from Illinois to South Dakota in about 1930 – he would’ve been 45 then – and brought back a small herd of wild mustangs, which he broke, mostly to saddle, some to pull carriages or wagons.  He sold them, and it was this money that he used to buy land in North Dakota.  A freight car carried his team of work horses there, along with several Jersey cows, and chickens.  He had to milk the cows and collect the chickens’ eggs each day as they traveled.  He would trade this produce for sugar, flour, and meat on that freight train ride to North Dakota. 

However, it was hard times for people in many parts of the country, so he often just gave the products away, particularly if he thought another was worse off than he himself was.

Wednesday morning, I weeded one of the front flower gardens.  It was damp from the previous day’s rain.  I tried to steer clear of the mud, and stay in the grass.

My mother used to say that I was the cleanest child she ever had.  😄  She said she could send me out in the morning in a white summer dress, I could play outside all day long, and come back inside in the evening with my white dress still as spotlessly pristine as it had been when I went out.  🤣  I don’t know how, except I never did like to get dirty; but I played hard, with all my might and main!  (Perhaps Mama was exaggerating a wee bit?)

Weeding isn’t my most favorite thing to do; but I keep telling myself the exercise is good for me, and the results are nice.  😏

I put together a few more sawtooth stars for Maisie’s quilt that afternoon, with a welcome break for our evening church service.

Thursday, I had several errands to do in town.  First, I went to Tapestries ~ Vintage Store to get a gift certificate for Hester, whose 35^th birthday was Saturday.  She picks up the niftiest things at antique stores and sometimes thrift stores, some of which she displays in her beautiful 1926 home, and some of which she sells for nice profits.  Here’s one of her displays:

 Next, I picked up one of my suit jackets at the cleaners, then dropped off some things at the Salvation Army.  I needed to pick up an order at Wal-Mart, but it wasn’t ready yet, so I went on into the Salvation Army store and wandered around looking at things – and actually found a few things I could use.  I got a couple of birthday gift bags, a fleece blanket with Scotty dogs printed on it, and a longish piece of fabric with appliqués on it and loops on one side, which I later determined to be a valance for a baby nursery.  I will cut it into blocks and use them in a quilt.  The fleece could be used as a quilt back, or I might just give it away as is, since it looks brand new.  The blanket and the valance were $1.97 apiece; the bags were $.97 each.

I would’ve wandered around a bit more, and I might’ve gone back for a lady’s top that I liked, but my phone signaled me that my Wal-Mart order was ready, so I paid for my things and went on to Wal-Mart (thereby saving the $3.97 that the top would’ve cost).

It was windy that day.  I noticed my poor potted hibiscus about to blow over in the wind, and the leaves were a bit curled, so I dashed out with a gallon of water and doused that pot good and proper.  It didn’t take long before the leaves already looked better, and the weight of the water was holding the pot steady.  While I was at it, I watered the other plants on the porch, and filled the birdbath.

Larry and I were once walking around Summit Lake on the way up Mount Evans (now Mount Blue Sky 🙄).  The elevation of the mountain is 14,265 feet, and the road, Mount Blue Sky Scenic Byway, is the highest paved road in North America, reaching an altitude of 14,130 feet.  Summit Lake is located at the 12,830-foot mark. 

It was October 11, 1997, and they had already had snowstorms and blizzards in the mountains, so the road was closed the rest of the way to the summit.

It was cold and very windy that day.  I wanted to walk along the trail around the lake and look at the canyon and the lakes that could only be seen from the far side of Summit Lake, but the kids wanted to stay in the pickup where it was warm.  Keith, Dorcas, and Teddy had stayed home, but the rest of the children had come with us.  Hannah was 16, Joseph was 12, Hester was 8, Lydia was 6, Caleb would be 4 in two days, and Victoria was 8 months old. 

We met another couple.  We greeted them and, pointing at the lake, I started to say, “If it was any windier, I’d be —”  At that moment, an extra-strong gust lifted me up and put me back down right on a large, flat boulder, neat as a pin.  You can see that rock behind me, on the right, on the cliff above the lake. 

The lady laughed so hard, she nearly sat down, too.  hee hee  If you zoom in on that picture, you can see the couple on the trail to the left, heading back to the parking lot.

There’s our red and white 1989 Chevrolet dually crewcab pickup with the Cummins motor.  Larry sold the truck a couple of years later, and then purchased it again a few years ago.

The day before when we were up there on the mountain, the sun had come out and shined on the opposite wall of the canyon just long enough for me to snap a picture or two.  

Below are the smaller lakes of the canyon, and off in the distance (on the right) is Echo Lake.

After getting home from running errands in town, I proceeded to spoil my supper by eating a banana, a piece of string cheese, and three or four crackers.  I like Ritz FlipSides pretzel crackers, with cheese.

Larry is usually late getting home from work, and if it’s still light out when he gets here, he likes to do as much as he can outside before coming in for supper.  I decided to fix supper later than usual, hoping to be hungry again by then.  And I was.

I baked the salmon I’d picked up at Wal-Mart, and steamed some broccoli.  We had applesauce and cran-grape juice with it.

Joanna sent me this picture:

It reminded me of the Basset hound puppies that my sister fostered for a couple of months when the mother dog had a dozen or more puppies, too many for her to care for.  Lura Kay was up every couple of hours every night for many nights in a row, feeding puppies – and of course every two hours all day long, too.

Even when those hounds were mere babies, the tracking instinct was strong.  They’d trip themselves up, stepping on their own ears; but they had the baying, howling part down cold.

So there they were, loping clumsily through the back yard, noses on the trail.  They rounded the corner of the house – and ka-bonked headlong into the back end of their quarry:  Lura Kay’s big, bossy cat.

She switched her tail, looked back over her shoulder at those annoying pups, and said, “MEOW.”

“YIPE!” said the pups in unison, and turned to flee for their lives.  That fluffy beast had needles on the ends of her fluffy paws!  In their hurry and consternation, they stepped on each other’s ears, and both turned a somersault at the same time.

The cat regally seated herself, the better to watch the show.

One time Lura Kay and the rest of the family were on their way to church, trying to walk out the door, whilst simultaneously trying to keep said hound puppies in the garage.

The pups got out.

One took a leap toward freedom – and wound up going right through Lura Kay’s purse strap.  It got stuck around his plump little tummy, in front of his hind legs.  He took off like a shot, partly because that’s what he’d intended in the first place, and partly because the purse had startled him, bumping into his tummy.

It was a wet, early spring day, and the yard wasn’t just wet, it was also muddy.

So there went Pup #1, bounding along with the purse bounding with him, splatting through every mud puddle in the yard.

And there went Pup #2, hot on his trail, nose to the ground, baying, “OooOOOOooo,” – as if he could not see his brother, directly in front of him, but had to trail him.

Then he stepped into the purse handle, and did three cartwheels totally by accident.

It was Lura Kay’s best – and newest – church purse.  But she stood there and laughed ’til she cried.

I didn’t turn off my sewing machine and shut down all the lights and the iron until I had the last of the ten sawtooth stars sewn together.

Friday was a pretty day.  The first order of business in the quilting studio that day was to add strips to opposing sides of the stars to make them alternate positions down the sides of the center panel.  Next, I removed the paper from the ten star blocks.  I paper-pieced them because the triangles and squares were odd sizes, and not easily cut exactly right with a ruler.  Besides, paper-piecing always makes for crisp, neat points.  I use newsprint, which is fairly easy to tear away.  Removing the paper is time-consuming, but oddly satisfying.

We had grilled cheese sandwiches and Panera Bread’s chicken tortilla soup for supper.  Larry liked the soup, but I didn’t.  There was something in it... oregano, maybe? – and a bit too acidy of a flavor to suit me.  I love Panera Bread’s tomato basil soup, though.

I was working away that evening when I happened to look toward the window, and discovered that, while there had been storms all around us, right here we had a beautiful sunset going on, and I had very nearly missed it!  The sun was already halfway over the horizon.  I grabbed my camera and snapped away.

By a quarter ’til midnight, I was done with the central section of Maisie’s ‘You Are Loved’ quilt.

Saturday morning, I prepared to go visit my brother Loren.  While I showered, I ‘ironed’ my clothes – that is, I put them into the dryer on ‘steam’ setting, with a wet towel.

Soon I was donning wrinkle-free duds (gotta be careful of hot metal decorations and zippers!  Oooo, ahhh!).  I put the bird feeders back out (I bring them in at night, because otherwise the raccoons will eat us out of house and home), made a pot of Butterscotch Toffee coffee, and then blow-dried and curled my hair.

I finished washing the clothes and put the last load of towels into the dryer.

For breakfast, I had half a bagel, toasted, with cinnamon-honey butter on it.  Yummy.

Loren, as last week, just could not stay awake to visit.  I kept trying to wake him up, and he would turn his head toward me a bit and smile; but a good deal of the time, he simply couldn’t get his eyelids to open.

I’ve only missed a visit half a dozen times, ever since he’s been there.  Though he can’t really keep track of what day it is, sometimes he greets me with, “You’re late!” (looking at his watch that isn’t running).  Other times, in great astonishment, “I had no idea you were coming!” or, “How in the world did you ever find me?!” or, “It’s just astonishing that you knew where to look for me!”

Once I told him, “I used my Geiger counter to zero in on you,” which made him laugh.

But he’s getting less and less able to put together an entire sentence, and if he does get one together, it rarely makes sense.  I go on talking to him the same as I ever did, though I have to speak a little slower, and often repeat myself before he understands.  I tell him all sorts of stories.  He likes the ones that include our parents, from when I was little, or anything about my children and grandchildren.

He asks regularly, “How many children do you have now?”

I say, “Nine, at last count, unless the alligators got one.”  In case he meant grandchildren, I tell him how many of those we have, too.  (29, last time I looked.) 

He looks right properly amazed.

It rained most of the drive to Omaha and back home again, though not hard.  I saw a 1961 Chevrolet Impala with the top down.  Does he really want that fixed-up vehicle getting all wet inside?!  There were motorcycles and trikes galore, too.  Some of the riders looked pretty much like drowned rats.

On my way home, I stopped at Sapp Bros. Truck Stop in Fremont, walked into the rest room and was waiting in line, when Gina, my former coworker at Megavision Internet when I worked there in 2005, walked in!  At least, I was pretty sure it was Gina.  She’s a big, pretty lady (despite the dark burgundy hair). 

She smiled and said, “You look familiar!”  And then I knew it was Gina. 

“Gina!” I exclaimed.

She’d just been to Omaha to visit her daughter Lily, 22, who has just graduated from college.

Funny as always, Gina said, “It’s been a long time since seeing you!  And then we meet – in a truck stop rest room.”  hee hee

After leaving Fremont, I talked to Hannah on the phone, and made plans to meet her and Joanna at Hannah’s in-law’s house.  Her mother-in-law Bethany, a very good friend of mine, passed away last August.  Bethany sewed an untold number of clothes and quilts.  I had offered to make John and Bethany’s daughter Esther, who still lives at home and helped care for her mother for many years, a quilt from Bethany’s fabrics, or from clothing items Bethany had made.  So Saturday evening, we looked through boxes and bins of fabric, and sorted through clothes Bethany had made for Esther when she was little, and I wound up with a large bin full of fabric.

Here’s a picture of Hester at age 1, wearing a dress Bethany had made for Esther the previous year.  Esther is a year older than Hester.

After I got home, Amy sent me pictures of their Anatolian Shepherd’s 15 puppies.  Yes, fifteen!  They are a week old.  She actually had 16 total, but one was stillborn.

Amy and the children have been switching puppies every couple of hours so the mother dog hasn’t had all of them at the same time.  They’re feeding her well, and the puppies all seem to be thriving.  Altogether when they were born, they totaled 22 pounds!

Larry and I decided to use one of our gift cards and eat at the Pizza Ranch in town that evening.

One look at the overflowing parking lot, and we headed straight across the street to Burrito King, a family-owned authentic Mexican restaurant.  We didn’t have a gift card for Burrito King, but we sure do love their food!

I got a beef fajita dinner.  Larry got a chicken fajita dinner.  You can just count on it:  if I order first, Larry will either order the very same thing, or something very similar. 

“Order something different, so we can share flavors!” I tell him time and again.

“But what you order sounds good!” he protests.  Siggghhhh... There’s nothing on the menu that doesn’t sound good.

When we got home, I hurried back to my quilting studio to put the coordinating borders on Maisie’s “You Are Loved” quilt.  Dawn Rosengren designed this panel for the Henry Glass Fabric Company, patterning it after her very own farm and the animals she has there, both domesticated and wild.

It was getting late, but I was determined to get it done – and get it done I did.  Maisie’s flimsy is finished and ready to be quilted.

We gave Hester her birthday gift the next day after church:  a little vintage pin shaped like a folded umbrella with a small purse hanging from its handle, both covered with tiny needlepoint designs.  I gave it to Norma years ago.  I have one more similar set that I plan to give to Lydia. 

In addition to the gift certificate to Tapestries ~ Vintage, we also gave Hester a canister of Teabloom fruit tea, learned I hadn’t given her a Teabloom teapot last year, and so ordered one.  It should be on her doorstep tomorrow. 

I got another canister of teas for Lydia, and I know for sure she has the teapot, because Malinda was all excited to watch the teas ‘bloom’ in the diffuser, and Lydia sent me a little video of the tea ‘blooming’.

I told Hester how, when I went to Tapestries ~ Vintage, I walked into the wrong antique store on the opposite side of the street by accident.  Hester had once told me how nifty the store is, with everything in appealing little settings, and pretty things everywhere you look.

What I walked into, though, looked mostly like a junkyard.  I thought, This is not the store Hester likes.  I politely asked the partially deaf gentleman in the store where Tapestries was, and he redirected me.

“I’ve been in there,” said Hester, “and gotten a few nice things for nearly nothing.  He’s a nice man, who owns the store; but it’s a wonder he didn’t tell you his entire life’s history!”

Hester likes old family pictures, never mind whose old family.

“I bought these people 😆 at a garage sale,” she told me, showing me a quite antique picture, probably circa mid-1800s.  “At some point, I might have to get rid of random people’s pictures or the kids will be confused about who their relatives are,” she added.

“Well, at least those ancient (I meant to say ‘antique’, haha) people are nice-looking!  Maybe just go ahead and name them with ancestors’ names for whom you have no picture,” I suggested.

“😄😄😄 I like that idea,” Hester laughed.

For lunch that afternoon, we had eggs over-easy on Jalapeño-Cheddar biscuits (a mix from Cabela’s).  Mmmm, it was good.  Hot, hot, hot, but good!  Larry fixed the eggs; I made the biscuits.

For supper after church last night, we had the rest of our fajita meal that we got at Burrito King.  Since we paid $34 for our meal, and it lasted for two meals, that means we actually paid only $17 for two, both Saturday night and last night.  It was filling and scrumptious.

I didn’t do any weeding today; I was too stiff and achy to care about weeds when I got up.  I’m a wimp, probably.

When Mama was in the hospital and in quite a lot of pain and they’d ask her to rate her pain on a scale of 1 to 10, she’d ponder a moment, and then say, “Oh, about a 3,” almost every time.  I would’ve probably been announcing that the scale needed to go up to 15, at the very least.

Most of the fabrics Esther gave me Saturday afternoon are large-print florals.  So... this afternoon I designed in EQ8 the quilt I want to make for her.  It’s called Hanging Gardens.

I’ve been wanting to make this pattern for a while now, and now I have the large florals to do it justice.  EQ8 didn’t have the exact pattern, so I used the EasyDraw part of the program.  Reckon someone will sue me?

Designers usually cannot copyright things like this, because it’s just a combination of a quarter of a log cabin block, with four-patches thrown in.  And those patterns were designed in, oh, about 4,500 BC, I think.

Esther gave me fabrics for the grandchildren’s quilts, too.  There’s some with firetruck scenes that I think I’ll use for Jonathan.   I’ll start on Esther’s as soon as I’m done with Baby Maisie’s quilt.   

Any one of these projects might get interrupted when my daughter-in-law Korrine, oldest son Keith’s wife, sends me a commemorative quilt she made for her daughter Keyara, who just graduated.  I think it’s a T-shirt quilt, judging from Keith’s description of it.  They live in Salt Lake City.  They asked how much I would charge to quilt it for her, and I informed them that I do not charge for quilting for children, or children-in-law, and that’s final.  😊

I hope you got all the names in this journal straight.  There will be a quiz.

I just realized it’s past 7:30 p.m.!  I’d better fix some supper; Larry will be home soon.  I think soup would be just the ticket.

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,