A couple of days
later, Highway 81 to our north had reopened, and we would be able to get
through. So we left at about 11:00 p.m.
last Sunday night after the wedding of son-in-law Kurt’s older brother Timothy
and his bride Allison.
We had 247 miles to
go. We had a reservation at a Super 8
motel in Estherville, Iowa, 37 miles east of Ledyard. There were no motels closer to Ledyard.
We ran into no
detours because of the flooding. But on one road in northeastern
Nebraska, there were two- and three-foot piles of debris lining the highway. Snowplows had evidently scraped the junk left
on the road by floodwaters off to the sides. We did encounter some mighty bad potholes!
Once in northern
Iowa, we went over a bridge that had a few inches of water over it. We couldn’t tell it at all, until we were
right on it. It made the pickup hydroplane, jerking truck and trailer sideways. Larry calmly steered out of it, but my hair
stayed straight up on end for a good long while thereafter. Me à
I called the local
police and reported it, so they could at least put up a warning sign.
We got to our motel in Estherville, Iowa, at about 4:20 a.m. It was a
quarter ’til five before we got everything carried in and were ready to climb
in bed.
 |
| Estherville Public Library |
Larry slept for an hour and a half, then drove the 37 miles to Ledyard,
where the man lives from whom he bought the skid loader. He loaded the
loader (that sounds funny, like ‘quilting a quilt’) and was back at the motel
by 9:30 a.m., crawling back in bed to get a little more sleep.
I got up at 11, showered, washed my hair, dried and curled it... and accidentally
woke Larry up at about noon when an ad on my tablet came on full blast.
The manager had
told us we could stay until afternoon, since it was so late (early?) when we
checked in. The big ol’ bossy chambermaid was not of the same persuasion,
however. She pounded on our door a few minutes before we were ready to
leave, told us checkout time was long past, and she “really didn’t want
to charge us for another day.”
(Actually, she
really did. You know she did.)
Larry politely told
her we were almost ready to go. When she pressed the issue, he informed
her (just as politely) that we’d been told we could stay later, since we hadn’t
checked in until after 4:00 a.m.
“I know,”
said she (though she probably didn’t), “But checkout time is past, and
we need to clean the rooms.”
“And she’s big
enough to throw both of us out!” Larry told me, eyes wide in mock
fright, after smiling and nodding politely and shutting the door.
You know, that rooming-cleaning
thing might’ve been a valid point, had there been more than one other solitary
visitor besides us in the entire motel the previous night. 🙄
By 3:30 p.m., we were
in Spirit Lake, driving around the Lake itself.
This is in the Iowa Great Lakes region.
The lakes include Iowa’s largest natural lake, Spirit Lake, and five
interconnecting lakes: West Okoboji,
East Okoboji, Upper Gar, Lower Gar, and Minnewashta. There’s a large number of smaller lakes all
around the vicinity, too. We saw
fishermen out on the ice in their huts, ice fishing. Even though the snow had been melting for a
few days, there were still drifts up to the house eaves, especially on the
Wisconsin side of the State Line.
An opossum waddled
out in front of us as we drove beside Loon Lake, nearly made it to the other
side of the road, changed his mind, and hurriedly waddled back the other
way. We came to a total stop so as not
to hit him.
Well, if you’re going to stop for me, he thought,
reconsidering – and rapidly shuffled back the way he’d intended to go in the
first place. Larry obligingly put in the
dialogue for him: “Me go this way! No, that
way! Well, maybe not; how ’bout... this way!” As he rushed away, tail spiraling, Larry
added the noise of a small scooter, all wound up: “Ying-ing-ing-ing-ing!” 😂
A white-tail deer
fed in a cornfield beside Spirit Lake, and hundreds of Canada geese stood in
the shallows, or swam in the waters farther out.
I wrote back, “We
always used to say ‘Eddy-o-syncracies’, because we had a good friend... with
lots of ’em. hee hee”
Eddy was a mechanic,
and he often wore coveralls. He was a big
man – and his coveralls were bigger. Furthermore, they were salmon
pink. 😲
Now, I do not know
if they were salmon pink when they were new; perhaps something
unfortunate happened in the wash, once upon a time. (Maybe he wore them
to remind his wife Cora to wash her maroon silk broomstick skirt with her own
white things, just go right ahead and turn them salmon pink, but to
leave his coveralls out of the mix?)
I also don’t know
if the coveralls we frequently saw him wearing were one pair, the same pair,
each and every day; or if he had multiples, all in that same salmon pink.
One of his nephews
began calling all coveralls “Uncle Eddy suits.” Going to go work in the
garage? “Gotta put on my Uncle Eddy suit.” Going to mow? “Gotta
put on my Uncle Eddy suit.” Going to shovel snow? “Gotta put on my
Uncle Eddy suit.”
To this day,
youngsters who never even knew Eddy, nor do they know the story behind
the moniker, call coveralls thick and thin ‘Uncle Eddys’.
Eddy would be
proud.
At 7:00 that
evening, we drove through Wayne, Nebraska. There were 92 miles to go
before we’d be home. We were getting hungry, but didn’t want to stop
while it was still light out. It’s
easier to see big potholes in the daytime.
By 7:35 p.m., we
were in Norfolk, and the sun was going down.
We ate supper at the Perkins Restaurant.
We had a turkey and dressing dinner.
Larry got green beans, and mashed potatoes and gravy with his. I had lettuce salad and fresh fruit. The dinner came with a roll and cranberry
sauce, too. And whataya know, on Mondays
Perkins offers a free slice of pie with every order! Larry ordered coconut cream, and I requested wild
berry. That was a very good meal, and
only cost us $22.
The pickup Larry recently
traded for is a bright red 1995 GMC Sierra three-quarter-ton club cab, all
fixed up with new manual 5-speed transmission, LED headlights, transfer case and
clutch, gauges for boost, pyrometer, inner cooler for engine, a brand-spankin’-new
Bluetooth radio and speakers, and, best of all, a Cummins motor with only
150,000 miles on it. These motors will easily run a million miles.
The speakers on
that radio are every bit as good as my good speakers up in my quilting studio,
even though mine have woofer and tweeters.
They synchronized automatically to his phone, so he played some
music. Sounds much better than it did in the Dodge.
I like going places
with Larry. Well, er, uh, so long as the pickup isn’t on fire, or the
brakes don’t work, or the trailer hitch isn’t breaking, or the wheels aren’t
popping off of the trailer, or, or, or... 😏
At least he’s
always been able to fix anything. 😉
I once tried
cross-stitching while riding in one of our trucks. I was more adept at poking the needle into my
fingers than into the fabric.
Gave that up right quick-like.
A little after 9:30
p.m., we topped the hill northwest of Columbus, and ♫ ♪ I see the lights of ♪ ♫ that city, up ahead! ♪ ♫
And there was our
corner. We live seven miles west of town.
The cats were glad
to see us. Teensy meows and meows,
telling us all about the lonely day he spent without us, while Tiger mrrrowgrrs
in his growly voice and rush-waddles in figure eights around our ankles, doing
his best to trip us up, get stepped on, and thereby receive some much-wanted
attention.
I gave them some
soft food, crushing Teensy’s little pill for hypothyroidism into his. It always seems that there is at least one
flavor in a big box of Fancy Feast variety that the cats don’t particularly
care for. Their taste is subject to
change, however, so one can never be sure just when one or both might turn
their noses up at lovely Shrimp and Tuna Cocktail, or at Beef Nibbles and
Giblets in Gravy.
Brings to mind Alan
Alexander Milne’s poem, Rice Pudding. Do you know it? He was the author of the original
Winnie-the-Pooh books. Here are the
first and last of five verses:
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's crying with all her might and main,
And she won't eat her dinner - rice pudding
again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
...
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She's perfectly well and she hasn't a pain,
And it's lovely rice pudding for dinner
again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
The illustration is by Ernest H. Shepard.
Last Sunday night
before we left for Iowa, Larry and I coaxed and coaxed Teensy, trying to get
him to eat his medicine-laced food. Sometimes he simply doesn’t like the
flavor; but sometimes I do something – like move a pan – and he hightails it
out of there. He acts like any noise of pans, or of putting something in
the oven, scares the furballs out of him.
(That sounds rude. My mother would’ve ‘tsk-tsked’ at me.) This
is a recent development. Maybe the pans
get out of the cupboard and jump at him, when we are gone?
Teensy gave us a
haughty look, tossed his head, and then went to eat dry food from the dispenser. I snatched up the saucer of soft food and ker-plunked
it down right on top of the dispenser bowl. You could almost see an
exclamation mark pop right out the top of his head.
He backed up,
looked the situation over, then in a Well, I guess there’s nothing else for
it, ate the whole works. 😂
Hannah came out to
give him his medicine Monday morning while we were gone. Once again, he wouldn’t eat it. She eventually left it on the table in the
hopes that he’d jump up there and eat it later – and indeed he must’ve, for it
was nearly gone when we got home.
Tiger doesn’t get
up on the table, so there were no worries about him getting into the medicine.
He can’t get up there; he’s
too fat. Sometimes, if he sees Teensy on the table (he likes to sit on
the corner and look out the front window), Tiger bawls at him in his gravelly
voice, “MRRRRROOOWWWRRR!!!” I’m pretty sure that translates to, Hey, no fair sitting up there when I
can’t! You get down, right this minute!”
Teensy looks down
on him, smug as a centipede with new tennis shoes.
By 9:45 p.m., I had
everything all put away, and was looking at pictures of the flood online.
Many photos showed water
everywhere, humongous slabs of ice the size of cars and garage doors tossed
around in fields like so many tiddlywinks – and a pretty sky above once-picturesque
farms and little towns.
We learned that another
person had died because of the flooding – an 80-year-old lady. Larry used to do work on her late husband’s
pickups, and their son was in his class at school. She was trapped in her house. The
waters were raging so that the rescue teams could not make it by boat, and the
wind was blowing so hard – 60+ mph – that the National Guard couldn’t save her
by helicopter. Teams were able to get to her the next morning – but it
was too late.
A news notice arrived,
saying that the cost of this flood to agriculture in this state alone will
easily top one billion dollars. Some fields will be planted late, risking
frost in the autumn; and some fields will not be planted at all, because the
floodwaters carried away all the topsoil.
Millions of dollars’-worth of livestock have been lost. It’s the
calving season, and before this flood came raging through, fields were dotted
with frolicking newborn calves.
Many farmers
already have it rough. Whatever will they do now? Many are not
insured against flooding. The majority of farmers are not young, these
days. How does one start over, if one is in one’s 50s, 60s, 70s, and even
80s? Some will not even try, most likely.
I still have a $25
gift certificate, awarded at last year’s State Fair, for Calico Annie’s Quilt
Shop in Newman Grove. But... Newman
Grove has been badly flooded. I wonder
what happened to the quilt shop?
Here’s a picture
extracted from a drone video taken by a couple of young men, Brady Sokol and
Dylan Bagley, who live near Newman Grove.
The water was receding, here in Columbus. The Loup River,
which runs about a mile south of our house, has almost returned to normal
levels. However, the Missouri River is still rising, and will for days. Communities all the way down into the
Mississippi basin are going to be experiencing flooding.
It will be a massive job to repair roads and bridges
that have been washed out. Nebraska
Department of Roads managed to plow a road into Fremont so trucks hauling
groceries and supplies could get through last Monday, single file, behind a
pilot vehicle. The city was running very low on all sorts of necessities.
Tuesday afternoon,
it rained. I knew it was raining, because WeatherCat (that’s Teensy) came
in, dripping wet. He wanted up on my lap – best place to dry and warm his
paws, you know. I told him to stay down: “You’re all wet and dirty!”
— and then he did what he always does when I say that, whether he’s
really wet and dirty or not: he shook vigorously, and sat down to wash
his little furry padded feet. 😄
“Does the Weather
Cat work along the same line as the Weather Rock?” asked a friend.
“Yes,” I replied, “but
WeatherCat is quite a lot more displeased with said weather than the rock ever
was.”
The Platte, which
had gone down and was flowing right at flood stage, rose some because of the
rain, and overflowed its banks again in low-lying areas. The ground was saturated and still mostly
frozen. There were many areas where things would not improve until
temperatures were warm enough to dry everything, and there was no rain for a
while.
Officials are warning the public not to give
money to anything but well-known charity groups. As usual, fake ‘charities’
are being set up online. There are always those poised to take advantage
of others’ tragedies. May they reap what they sow!
I quilted all day Tuesday and
Wednesday on the New York Beauty quilt, with a break for our midweek church
service Wednesday evening.
I have a
penchant for quilting myself into a corner, and when it’s apparent that it’s
happening, my machine panics, and makes a worried, scribbly, little
conglomeration. (It’s not me, is it? It’s just the machine. Right?)
Thursday morning, for the second time in two days, the FedEx arrived while I was taking a bath and washing my
hair. They won’t simply leave the package, because the sender put a
signature requirement on it. It’s nothing but a coffee mug, for pity’s
sake. 🙄 I called FedEx and rescheduled
the delivery for Friday afternoon.
It was 45° Thursday
afternoon, the warmest it had been for quite a while. I actually opened a
couple of windows for a little while.
There are 350 miles
of roads, 11 bridges, and three approaches in Nebraska that need to be
rebuilt. There are still flood warnings for several rivers, and that
could continue well into May. The Platte and Loup Rivers and Shell Creek,
in our vicinity, were down quite a bit. Damage
and loss estimates had risen to over 1 ½ billion dollars.
We had chicken
casserole for supper that night. Afterwards,
I headed back to my quilting studio... realized I was too hot in the winter
sweater I was wearing, and went to change.
I looked at the weekly forecast: temperatures
were rising, and most likely it would not again be as cold as it was a couple
of weeks ago. I decided it was time to
exchange winter clothes for summer in my closet. This time, since I cleared so much stuff out
of the closet recently, I didn’t have nearly so much to move. I only needed to pull out enough winter
things to make room for the summer things – and summer things don’t take up as
much room.
I repaired a hole
in a knit sweater before putting it in a drawer, and then I was done. It took 35 minutes, and multiple trips up and
down the stairs. Why do I have so many clothes??!!!
After 6 ½ hours of quilting, I was up to 299 hours
on the New York Beauty quilt.
Friday morning, another levee failed in the
southeast part of the state, and more
farmland flooded. We were expecting rain in the next few days; that will
cause a bit more flooding, too. Thousands and thousands of farm animals,
mostly cattle, have died. Many others are still stranded, having trouble
getting to food, and getting sick. Air National Guard has dropped many
big round hay bales to cattle near Richland, 15 miles east of Columbus.
Many newborn calves especially didn’t stand a chance against the flooding.
Now there’s a huge cleanup needed all over the state.
But most likely the worst
is over – at least for us. Farther south along
the Missouri and the Mississippi, there’s bound to be trouble.
Though I’d
rescheduled the delivery from the FedEx for later, the truck arrived even earlier
Friday morning than it had the previous two mornings. I signed my name, and the man handed me the
box and trotted off. The box said,
“Tinkle.”
Uh, oh. That’s never good.
The handle was
broken off the cup and in two pieces.
I ordered this cup,
an 1892 Maxwell House commemorative cup, to go with a placemat I made for
Lawrence, Larry’s late stepfather, several years ago. Norma found the placemat recently and gave it
back to me, but the matching cup got lost when she married my brother last year
and moved to his house. I also ordered a
matching tin, both items from eBay sellers.
I will
say that when I contacted the seller, she immediately apologized and returned
all my money pronto. “This has never
happened before!” she exclaimed.
The tin, on the other hand, was wrapped thoroughly
in bubble wrap, and packed in a very sturdy box.
Larry
brought the mail in when he got home from work.
My Alaska Quilting book had not arrived.
USPS tracking said the book was ‘Out for Delivery, by 8:00 p.m.’ That was odd.
USPS brings our mail before noon, usually. The book had already been delayed a week by
flooding that made the roads impassable between Omaha and Columbus.
That evening, we had a supper
of ancient grain-encrusted cod (the grain is ancient; not the cod),
green beans, applesauce, a fruit mixture of papaya, mango, and pineapple, and
strawberry cheesecake ice cream with chocolate chunk/peanut butter chip cookies
for dessert.
I quilted a little
longer after supper, rolling the quilt forward a few inches – and then the top
of the fifth row was showing.
The suncatchers in the window are special to me. The round one with the cardinal on it was my
mother’s; it hung in her kitchen window for many years. Cardinals were her favorite bird. My daughter Hester, named after my mother, gave
me the sunflower suncatcher a couple of years ago.
A quilting friend
was bemoaning the bad haircut she’d just gotten that day. She asked the hairdresser to cut about an
inch off, all around.
The woman left her with no more than an inch on
her head, all around.
Aarrgghh, why do
hairdressers do that?! – remove way more hair than the customer asks
for?? I started cutting my own hair when I was 13 years old, because the
lady who did all our family’s haircutting was making a wreck of it, cutting my
hair way too short, and all choppy and odd. So I rode my bike to a salon
just a couple of blocks from my house and had another lady cut it. But my folks didn’t really like me doing
that, because the first lady was one of our parishioners, and they felt we
should give her our business.
My hair went
straight after our first child, Keith, was born. It started getting wavy
again, and then Hannah was born, a year later. It went straight, and
never got wavy again. So I curl it with a curling iron.
Supper that night
consisted of chicken tortilla soup,
cheese-stuffed breadsticks, big soft sweet muffins that Larry brought home from
some truck stop or convenience store somewhere, and the rest of the previous
night’s tropical fruit mixture.
My Alaska Quilting
book was listed as “Delivered at Mailbox” – but it wasn’t there. The mail lady must’ve put it in someone else’s
box. We lose a lot of mail. A couple of months ago, we lost a credit card
the company had sent us, so they had to close that number and issue a new
one. We often get neighbors’ mail, and
one day we got pieces of mail belonging to three
different neighbors, including two pieces for one of them. If she can, the mail lady folds books so she
can cram them into our mailbox, instead of bringing them to the door. Twice last month when the temperature was
around 0°, she put a box in our front door – but not far enough inside that she
could close the main door; she just left it open. I found it like that an hour later. The temperature in the living room and
kitchen had fallen to about 60°, and the furnace was struggling in vain to
bring it up to the set temperature on the thermostat. That woman does stuff like that because she’s
mad about having to bring boxes to the door, especially if there’s snow
outside. She hates snow, and snarls like a trapped wolverine when there’s any on
the ground. She also hates rain and cold
and heat, and snarls about that, too. Fine thing, to be a mail lady when you hate
the majority of the weather in Nebraska!
I spent a good part
of the day quilting Saturday, finishing row four and rolling the quilt forward
to start row five. I’m on the downhill
side!
Last night after
church, we went to Kurt and Victoria’s house.
We took chocolate chunk/ peanut butter chip cookies (frozen, from Schwan’s)
and Black Cherry frozen yogurt for dessert, and baked the cookies in their
oven. Kurt and Victoria stopped at Taco
Bell on their way home and got Mexican food to share with us. They got me a burrito. Mmmm, yummy.
Kurt made lattes, too. Carolyn
and Violet are such sweet little dears.
We had a lovely time. Carolyn
reminds me a lot of Victoria.
When Victoria was
little, she liked to take pictures of her feet everywhere we went, using the
Vivitar digital camera that used to be mine.
That, because she liked her new ‘vacation shoes’. We have umpteen pictures of a little pair of
feet, some clad in leather-on-wood-sole clogs with turquoise beads on the vamp,
dangling over a mountain stream; some in turquoise sandals with giant silk
turquoise flowers on top, perched cross-ankled on a picnic table; some in
bright pink athletic shoes, planted on a big granite boulder; and some in
fuchsia-and-black boating shoes, lolling in the cockpit of a kayak.
This is from August
of 2005. Victoria was 8, and we were
camping near Dolores, Colorado, on the banks of the Dolores River. Can you tell from the toes of her clogs that the
grass still had dew on it?
On one of the online
quilting groups, we’ve been talking about when we learned to drive. Many of us learned on stick shifts.
I have a story or
two about learning to drive... (I always have stories, don’t I?)
I was 15 years old,
and had a learner’s permit. I was behind the wheel of one of my father’s
diesel Peugeots, Daddy in the passenger seat, and Lyle, my future
father-in-law, riding in the rear seat. The drive went uneventfully –
until we got back home. I slowed at the bottom of the sloped drive,
shifted down... I’d never driven up the drive before. And it was a
manual, 4-speed transmission.
And then Daddy said, said he, “Now, you have to give it a little more
gas to get up the drive without lugging it – “
No sooner said than done. I was nothing if not quick on the
trigger.
In one fell swoop, I stuck it in first, stepped down on the throttle,
and smoothly lifted my foot from the clutch.
Scrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!
Up the drive we shot, laying two black strips of rubber all the way, the
looming garage door seeming to fly at us headlong. Nobody had the
slightest chance to say a word—I imagine they were still inhaling
sharply—before I jerked right foot from gas pedal and slammed it down hard
on brake pedal, simultaneously shoving in the clutch with my left foot.
We came to a squalling, abrupt stop mere inches from the garage door,
car rocking so violently one could hear the fuel sloshing in the tank in the
dead silence that ensued.
I waited, cringing, for my father to come unglued.
But into the silence, Lyle said in his low drawl, “Could somebody please
come ‘round and get me out of the glove compartment?”
My father took a breath, started to say something, coughed, tried again,
spluttered, – and suddenly burst out laughing in his big, rollicking
laugh. So my life was spared.
He later told my mother, “I never knew diesel Peugeots were so snappy!”
And to my brother, who sometimes went with me on my learning excursions,
“You don’t need to tell her not to lug it. Ever.”
You’ve heard of The
Cat in the Hat? Well, here’s The Cat in
the Sink:
This afternoon, I
texted a note to Larry: “Could you pick
up black oil sunflower seed and Nyjer seed? The birds are nesting, and
soon I’ll want pictures of them feeding their babies!”
Larry responded, “Ok chirp chirp 🐣 🐥 🐦”
So I retorted, “You
a-callin’ me a chirp-chirp?!”
He brought in the
mail – along with big bags of bird seed – when he got home from work. There is a late notice from the electric
company. But we never got the first one!
Okay, this sloppy mail delivering has got to be reported. That late payment will cost us $10! Bah, humbug.
Bedtime! I’m yawning. My friend Penny tells a story about her father: when he was about two, he came
running into the kitchen exclaiming, “Mama, Mama! I tried to make a sleepy, and it turned into
a gesundheit!”
* * *
Thought for the
Day:
Multi-tasking is
overrated. A good deal of the time, it just means “Trying to do a whole
lot of things at once – poorly – and getting none of them completed.” 😄
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