Journal: Gardening, Decluttering, Scanning, Repeat

Amid the gas shortage in the southeast, here in Middle Cornland, we’re well prepared:

Last Tuesday, I paid bills and cleaned the kitchen with the windows and doors open, the better to hear the birds singing away.

Then I trotted upstairs to continue the photo-scanning.  I sent Keith a number of old pictures, including this one of him slugging a baseball, and the one below with his graduating class.  Keith is the one in the light-colored suit.

Kenzie, upon seeing that one, laughed and said, “That was when you had hair!”

The next bunch of photos were taken on a trip to Guthrie, Oklahoma, in May of 1998, to pick up some wrecked vehicles that Larry would rebuild and sell.  He owned Columbus Auto Rebuilders back then.  On our way home, the children picked sloes (wild plums) at a rest area in Kansas, and when we got home, I made Wild Plum jelly.  Note that they were using bowls, as opposed to handled buckets or baskets.  Bowls were all we had.  Can you hazard any guesses as to how many times I helped one or the other of them pick up all their plums when they spilt them? 

Caleb

Hester

Take a look at Lydia in the photo below.  See that black eye she’s sporting?

It came about in the following way:

On the way down to Guthrie, one of the children bought a souvenir baseball.

So... there we were at the salvage yard in Guthrie where Larry purchased the vehicles.  It was getting dark.  Caleb picked up the baseball and, not seeing his sister a little distance away, wound up from the shoelaces and let ’er fly.

I saw what was about to happen... yelled... but little arms (and balls) can’t stop in mid-throw.

SMACK 💥

The ball hit Lydia right in the eye, giving her quite a whiplash.

“It just about knocked me down,” said Lydia, upon seeing the pictures again.  “At least, I think I stayed on my feet.”

“Anyway,” I told Lydia, “you should be able to hold it over Caleb’s head for the rest of your life, I should think.”

“Not when he looked so sad about it and still is!” she protested.  (She never did hold it against him, not even right when it happened.)

“Yeah... poor little kiddos, both of you,” I agreed.  “He’s never had a mean bone in him.”

“I was pretty far away, too!” she added.  “It was a pro pitch.  haha”

“He turned almost as pale as you did,” I remembered.

“We got along really well,” said Lydia.  “I did enough ‘boy things’ that we had a lot of fun.”  😃

One time we were feeding catfish in the Loup Canal with corn on the cob someone had given us in a box the size of a refrigerator.  It was inedible – it was either field corn, or sweet corn that had been left on the stalk way too long.

Dorcas tried flinging a cob into the canal – and smacked Keith quite properly on the back of the head.  Nearly sent him into the canal.

“Trevor does stuff like that and Dorcas tells him to stop being like his mom,” laughed Lydia when I mentioned the incident.  “He was throwing food to the goats when we were there and hit someone with a carrot, and Dorcas remembered the corn cob.”  😂

Below is the smaller tent Keith and Teddy slept in on our excursion to Oklahoma (Keith is in the tent’s doorway):

In the background is the building with the restrooms and the showers – and the shower section was open to the sky above!!!  Furthermore, there was a military base mere miles to the east, and all evening and well into the night they were practicing not just with jets, but with manned balloons, for cryin’ out loud.

I’m here to tell you, we did not dilly-dally in the showers.

Here is the big tent the rest of us slept in (that’s Caleb in front of the door).  

Wednesday, I was glad to see that the frost we had both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings did not damage the plants; the leaves were still healthy and green. 

The white-edged hostas will bloom first, with little lavender bell-shaped flowers.  The green-veined hostas bloom later, and sometimes keep blooming until late October.  Their bell-shaped flowers are white and larger.  Both blossoms smell a lot like Lily-of-the-Valley.  Hummingbirds love them.

The hostas like shade.  Some of mine wound up in the sun from morning ’til night after the Austrian pine trees that had shaded them died.  Usually they do all right despite all the sun, but last year the leaves burned in early July, and they looked shabby the rest of the year.  This year, I’ll try to prevent that by putting a sprinkler on them during the hottest days.  Eventually, the Blue Spruce trees we planted a few years ago will shade them again; but Blue spruce grows slowly.

This is the load of vehicles Larry picked up in Guthrie.  Keith is helping Larry get everything strapped down onto the trailer.  At the front of the six-door pickup are Dorcas, Hannah, and Victoria.

The squirrels are invading the bird feeders!  I have a large new squirrel-resistant feeder, but I need help putting it up.

Here are Hester, Lydia, and Caleb, BBE (Before Black Eye).

Below is Victoria at our 4^th (actually, 3^rd, that year) of July picnic in1998.  She loved that little pocket on her skirt.

Wednesday night was our graduation program.  All the children from grades 3 through 12 sang a number of songs, and a few of the boys played their horns.  Then we looked at pictures of the school children, especially the seniors, on our big screen, and Brother Robert doled out the diplomas.  Joanna, our oldest granddaughter, and her cousin Tiffany got two special books apiece as awards for getting straight A’s – one book was for straight A’s throughout grade 12, the other was for achieving straight A’s from kindergarten on.

I pulled into the church parking lot that evening at the same time as Kurt and Victoria, and parked near them.  Carolyn spotted me, beamed, started running toward me, remembered her dolly, whirled around and dashed back for it, then came running back to greet me.

About that time, I noticed that Kurt had some bad scrapes on his face.  He told me that the previous day he’d been stepping from the back of a pickup down to a hitch, missed the spot he’d intended to step on, and come crashing down, hitting his face on some part of the hitch.  Aaiiiyiiiyiiieee.

Larry saw him in the restroom at the shop washing blood off his face shortly after it happened.  He told Kurt that if he needed them, he has an extra pair of dentures.  🙄  Sympathetic fathers-in-law.  Tsk.

Wednesday morning Kurt went to the chiropractor and the dentist.  The dentist said his teeth are all right, nothing is broken.  His mouth and gums were only bruised and should heal all right, thankfully.

Our menfolk work hard at jobs that are sometimes perilous!  There are innumerable ways for them to have accidents. 

Here is Victoria, 16 months, playing at Pawnee Park (with some help from Hannah), and below is Kurt, 13 months, July 3, 1998, also at the park.  Eighteen years and four months later, Kurt became our son-in-law.

Thursday morning it was finally warm enough to work in the yard – 50° by 8:30 a.m. 

Early that afternoon, I started baking a large roast beef from Schwans, along with potatoes, carrots, onions.  By the time I called Loren at 3:00 p.m., the whole house smelled scrumptious.

I took him his laundry when I went, and gathered another load of things from his lower level while there.

Before going home, I drove into town and picked up Teensy’s medication.  The clinic was quite full of people – and I was the only one without a mask.  After all, a grinning President Biden had that very day informed John Q. Public that he may go indoors without a mask!

Nobody griped at me, and nobody ordered me to put a mask on.  I kept my distance, smiled sweetly – and everyone was nice as could be.  There are advantages to being a li’l ol’ lady! 

Home again, I sorted through the stuff I’d brought from Loren’s house.  I threw away a large bag of old phone books, empty boxes, etc., and took a bunch of scritch-scratchy blankets, coffee mugs, Christmas décor, and more to the Goodwill.  Maybe someone will be delighted to find a brand-spankin’-new flip-phone, still in the box, with all the other paraphernalia?

And no, I should not have kept it in case Loren ever needs it.  He has a hard enough time using his cellphone without having to learn to use a different kind than the one he’s already using (his has a sliding keyboard) (not that he ever remembers that it slides, or needs to actually use the inside keyboard for anything; he does not text).

Here is Keith at six months, and next on his first birthday, February 22, 1981.  Norma made him the little outfit.

When I stopped with the photo scanning that night, I didn’t feel like going to bed yet, so I looked at some YouTube videos of game cams positioned on busy animal trails, first in Florida, then in Wisconsin.  This caused YouTube to recommend a video clip of three little black bear cubs playing and wrestling and disputing together on a hammock.  Here’s the link, if you’d like to watch it, too:

Hammock Cubs

Thursday morning was frost-free, so I headed outside to uproot weeds, trip over cats, whack down the volunteer trees that grow in the most inopportune locations, wend my way around the cats, fill bird feeders, lead the cats away from said feeders (i.e. ‘bait stations’), freshen birdbaths, apologize to cats if they were inadvertently dampened by the spray, listen to the birds singing their hearts out, and pet the cats.

Here is Hannah at six months.

I got an email telling me that the big fabric shop in Fremont, Country Traditions, where we got my Handi Quilter Avanté, is for sale.  They are in the process of ‘downsizing’.  😑😞

Larry sold and delivered a scissor lift to a man in Lincoln, then went on to a town in Iowa to pick up a 2002 silver BMW X5 SUV that he bought at quite a good price.

Friday night, we took it for a little drive to Albion, a small town about 37 miles to our northwest, right on the eastern edge of the Sandhills.  We ate supper at the Subway and then wandered around the town admiring the many big old houses that have been all fixed up.

I spent an hour and a half working in the flower gardens Saturday morning.  I transplanted a white-edged hosta that accidentally came up with a big weed I dug up.  Some poison ivy has taken root in one bed in the south part of our property.  I removed a bunch of it.  I first found the stuff there about three years ago, and have been pulling it out ever since.  The gardening gloves are now in the washing machine awaiting the next load of wash.  As soon as I finished pulling out ivy, I washed my hands and arms before continuing with the gardening, and afterwards I took a bath and washed my hair.  I have had no poison ivy rashes; but Larry did, a couple of years ago.  He probably hit it with the mower, and splattered the urushiol oil far and wide.

Loren finally remembered to take a look at his lower level, and was quite pleased with the progress I’ve made in cleaning it.  He did ask, “What have you done with all my stuff?!” – and then he laughed.  

I told him what I did with a few things, such as a big hamper with a broken lid full of old towels and linens that I took to the Goodwill. 

“Your linen closets are full of nice towels,” I told him, “and when things won’t fit in our closets, well, we just don’t need them.”

He paused, thinking about all the possible uses for towels old and new... but then nodded in agreement.

“A clean house is worth more than a few old towels,” I added for good measure, and he nodded again, with a little more conviction this time.

I didn’t breathe a word about the old coffee maker I threw in the garbage (though I took the glass carafe to the Goodwill)... or the queen-sized memory foam I donated (after all, it was folded and stuffed haphazardly into a corner)... or the stacks of yellowed newspaper clippings I discarded... or his NFIB notebooks I tossed.  Those notebooks are definitely better in the trash, because Loren sometimes imagines that he’s selling memberships again, and off somewhere in whatever territory he believes he’s working.  We certainly don’t need him to find the list of addresses of people to whom he sold memberships, and head off to revisit them!

I did tell him that I gave Janice’s jewelry to her sister.  

“I figured she was the right one to give it to,” I told him, and he agreed.

But I know perfectly well if he was ‘helping’ me haul things out, he’d be thinking he needed to keep a good deal of it.  So I give him his supper – and then hurry to load the Jeep before he comes to see what I’m doing.  I’ve probably hauled away 20 Jeeploads now.  The bedroom and sitting room are looking better, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Here’s Aaron at age 1, holding my little rhyming dictionary.  We gave him a pile of baby books, but he preferred the rhyming dictionary. 

Hannah said, “I remember he liked books with lots of pages; he enjoyed smaller books with real pages at that age.  He gave up baby books, such as the board books we took to church, pretty quickly.”

“So did you,” I told her.  “By the time you were one and a half, you called board books ‘toys’.”  😄

A few minutes before 7:00 p.m. Saturday night, Loren arrived at the church, suit-clad.  When he discovered the choir there practicing, he evidently realized his mistake, went back out to his Wrangler, and headed home before anyone had a chance to talk to him.

I’ll betcha anything he took a nap after he ate supper, and woke up thinking it was Wednesday evening.  I have learned in reading about it that this happens a lot with Lewy Body Dementia – waking from sleep or a nap finds the person in a different world, almost, because they have ‘lucid dreams’, as they are called.

When I left his house a little after 5:00 p.m., he had known the next day was Sunday, and that Sunday School started at 9:45 a.m.

He never mentions it to me when he gets mixed up and goes somewhere at the wrong time.  I don’t know if he forgets, or if he doesn’t want me to know.  If I ever ask him what happened, I’m liable to get a really, really strange story.  I therefore refrain from asking.

I pulled up Amazon and ordered this clock with large numbers and the day and date; it can sit right on his table.  He has a similar one on the wall, but rarely looks at it, and it’s hard to read.

I had barely clicked ‘Buy Now’ when Loren called, worrying because the neighbor man, Kevin, had ‘forgotten to turn his water off, and it’s been on all day’.  No one lives at the neighbors’ home anymore; Kevin’s mother, who lived there alone after her husband passed away, has evidently been moved to a nursing home.  Kevin comes by now and then to take care of the house and the lawn.  He was there at 5:00 when I was at Loren’s. 

I told Loren, “It wasn’t on when I was there at 5, and the lawn looked like it needed watering; so I think everything’s fine.”  (I didn’t know until later that there is an underground sprinkler system, and it’s on a timer.  Loren used to know this, too.)

He laughed an ‘I don’t believe you’ laugh and informed me that it was on at noon.  (Probably noon one day last August.)  He asked for the man’s name so he could call him.  Kevin likely has only a cellphone and is not listed in the phonebook.  I have no idea what happened after that.  Hopefully Loren forgot all about it and went to bed.

Sunday it was rainy most of the day.  After our Sunday School and church services, we took Loren some dinner.  Larry put new batteries in the SpotTrace we keep in Loren’s Jeep, and Loren remarked that we were keeping stock high in Energizer.  😅  He thinks it’s an anti-theft device... which it is, but he has no idea we put it in his Jeep in case he ever gets lost.  I upgraded the account, and was then able to put a geofence around Columbus.  We’ll get an alert if he goes outside that area.

After the evening service, Larry and I took a rare trip to the grocery store to load up on such things as yogurt, milk, orange juice, potato salad, coleslaw, bread, ice cream, fresh-cut pineapple, and frozen pizza – all the things I can’t order online and have delivered.  We got crabmeat sandwiches to eat on the way home, and a lettuce salad with strawberries, blueberries, and almonds, along with a baby-spinach-leaf salad with sliced hard-boiled eggs, bacon, and cheese, to eat when we got home. 

We overestimated our hunger and underestimated the crabmeat sandwich, and could only eat a small part of the salads.

This morning I worked in the flower gardens for almost an hour and a half.  They’re looking quite nice, but it’s a never-ending job.  I’m trying to pretend I enjoy it... and in fact I do enjoy the results of my labors.

This afternoon I fixed Loren a hamburger, corn and peas, peaches, a blueberry streusel muffin, Chobani blueberry Greek yogurt, and Pure Leaf organic green tea in Fuji apple and ginger flavors.  More often than not, when I put his food on the table, he looks it over, then chooses whatever looks the most like dessert and launches right in.  Doing this, of course, makes the main meal less appealing.  There are reasons why desserts are saved for last!  

I discovered in my studying of Lewy Body Dementia that many dementia and Alzheimer’s patients acquire sweet tooths, even if they haven’t really had one in the past, and sometimes dessert is all they want to eat.  Trouble is, that’s the very kind of food they should not have.  Sugar can make people who are prone for ‘sundowning’ (becoming more mixed up, agitated, and even angry in the evenings) much worse.

Since I rarely take Loren anything more sugary than a blueberry or banana nut muffin, I don’t reckon he’s causing himself too much harm if he eats the muffin first.

The large-digit clock arrived this morning, so I took it and set it up on his table.  Hopefully, this will help him.  He was pleased with it; he’s always liked clocks.  He still remembers to wind his big grandfather clock periodically.

While Loren ate his meal, I collected two large bins, two boxes, and a big barrel.  When I got home and began looking through everything, I found two big stuffed bunnies and two sock monkeys that Janice had made (and a few days ago I found a boy Cabbage Patch doll), doubtless intending to give them to some of her great-nieces and great-nephews for Christmas.  So... that’s what I’ll do with them.  I put some children’s books into my bookcase, and the rest of the stuff went to the Goodwill (and part of it went into the trash).

Just think how much of our lives we spend doing and/or making things we think are really important, only to have people trash a good deal of it after we depart this earth.  This doesn’t really trouble me; I am thankful that we have been blessed with an abundance.  We obviously have a whole lot more Stuff and Things than we really need (though most of us think we could do with a heap more $$$$$$$$$$, ha).  I figure if such things bother me, then I’m forgetting to look forward to what the Lord has prepared for us.  As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.”

Problem:  Twice I have discovered a matching pillow to one I already took to the Goodwill – and one of them belonged on the bed in Loren’s lower level!  So... shall I go into the Goodwill and see if I can find it, and buy it back again??

I’ve now scanned 18,340 photos and am on the 62^nd album.  65 albums to go (because I recently spotted an album with ‘Volume 127’ written on its spine; I thought 126 was the last one).  Reckon there’s a ‘Volume 128’ lurking evilly amongst the albums still to be scanned?

Time for bed!

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