It’s
two days after Christmas, and today is our family get-together.
I
sent off my Christmas letter a couple of weeks ago, and have been enjoying the
responses we’ve been getting.
Admittedly, I break all the rules when it comes to Christmas
letters. They (whoever ‘they’ are) say a
Christmas letter should be no longer than one page, one side only. Mine was (cringe) 16 pages, front and
back. Of course, it was full of pictures,
all the way through, so that used up a lot of those pages.
One
year, I started off by stating the above ‘Christmas letter criterion’, and then
exculpating myself by informing the worthy readers that this was not a ‘letter’;
indeed, it was a ‘book’, and a short one, at that! One cannot judge a Christmas letter for being
long, when it’s not a letter at all, but a book. Plus, it’s free. One can only look on a free Christmas book
with great gratitude. Right?
But
I can’t go through that same malarkey every time.
I
feel like Anne of Green Gables: “If you
only knew how much I wanted to say and didn’t, you’d at least
give me credit for that!”
Indeed,
after skimming through all of last year’s letters and grabbing jetsam and
flotsam I thought I might like to conglomerate into a Christmas letter, I had –
get this – 75 pages! Once that
part is done, I go through it time and again, deleting, deleting, deleting,
until I can’t bear to delete one more word.
Then I click Print, and make Hewlett Packard’s ink division rich.
Actually,
I don’t really spend all that much per page, since I keep a membership with HP,
and they withdraw a wee bit – maybe $2.99? – from my hide every 3 months or
so. I don’t print a whole lot, except
for my Christmas letter. If I’m doing a
lot of pantograph quilting, I do print a few pages of pantos for most
quilts. But that’s about it.
I spent four days last week scanning
photos, finishing album #40 and starting on album #53. (I’m not going in order.) Here’s Lydia (with Keith and Larry in the
background) at Angostura Reservoir, southwest South Dakota, August 09, 1993. Lydia was 2.
We were on our way to Yellowstone National Park.
Tuesday morning, I filled the bird feeders
with black-oil sunflower seeds, even the big one in the front yard that hold 12
pounds of seed – and is tilted on its pole.
Larry keeps threatening to fix it.
😏
This time, I put on a knit headband
when I went out, as it was quite windy. A
week ago Saturday, I filled the feeders in 8° weather with a strong wind
blowing, and wound up with earaches that didn’t go away for hours.
That afternoon, a
friend sent pictures of her newly reorganized shelves of pots and pans. Since the shelves were open, and all the pots
and pans in view, she had polished them all ’til they shone. “Now I no longer have to get down on hands
and knees to find the right pots and pans, as I did when they were in the
cupboard under the counter!” she said happily.
I promptly wrote back
to tell her, “My pots and pans are stored under the sink in our small kitchen. But I never have to get down on hands and
knees to find one. All I have to do is
open the door, and they fall out on my feet. Très efficace.” 🤣
So there I was later that afternoon trying to have a small
spot o’ relaxin’, sippin’ coffee, checking my Quilt-Talk group, and reading
email, the news, the funnies (not necessarily in that order); and all the
lovely ladies on Quilt Talk wouldn’t stop talkin’ and natterin’ about laundry: “My laundry is done”... “I’m doing the sheets”...
“Two loads of laundry to do”...
“Okay, okay!” I wrote. “Laundry. I roused myself from my perch at the kitchen
table, trotted into the laundry room, and started a load of Larry’s work
clothes. Are you happy now? I have two more loads to do.”
My nice quilting friends then laughed at me. 😅
Here’s Larry with the children at Mt. Rushmore in August of
1993. From left to right: Dorcas, Keith, Hannah, Hester, Joseph, Teddy,
and Lydia.
I paid a few bills, put three or four more gifts into bags,
and got back to scanning photos.
Later that afternoon, I took Loren some
food. I cut the meat up for him, hoping that
would make him more likely to eat it.
Also on the menu were mixed vegetables, a banana nut muffin, string
cheese, peaches, and apple juice. His
dishes were washed again.
Jeremy had been there in the morning to
cut up the fallen tree in Loren’s yard, and Loren remembered seeing him out
there. Maybe things would continue to
improve. Or maybe not.
After leaving Loren’s house, I stopped
at The EyeGlass Place to get both pairs of glasses (by-lines and craft) adjusted.
Why do the people at that eyewear store
invariably argue with me over whether or not my glasses are crooked?! Plumb aggravatin’, ’tis. I made matters worse by trying to be friendly
and pleasant, and joking about crooked eyebrows.
“I can’t adjust the glasses to your
eyebrows!” the woman exclaimed testily.
“No, I was kidding.” I looked at her awhile.
She fidgeted, then informed me that
since I hadn’t bought the glasses there, she didn’t want to break them. What, she would’ve wanted to break
them, if I had’ve gotten them there??
(Give me credit for not saying that out loud.)
I said, “It’s okay; I won’t blame you
if they break.” And I handed her the
glasses.
When you practically stuff things
straight into people’s hands, they almost always take them, have you ever
noticed that?
She took the glasses and went off to ‘fix’
them.
After a bit, back she came with
them. I tried them on and looked in the
mirror.
They were no different than they had
been before.
I made sure to push the side that was
down too far even farther down, so she might be able to tell,
then turned to her. “This side is too
low,” I said, pointing at it. “Compare
the top edge of the frame to my pupils.”
She looked. “They look straight to me!”
They were noticeably not straight. And even if they were not, didn’t
anyone ever teach her that the customer is always right??!
She added, “You should take them back
to where you bought them, and have them adjusted there!”
Yeah, well. That’s 80 miles away. And The EyeGlass Place advertises ‘Free
adjustments to all, no matter where you got the glasses!’ (I am sometimes a paying customer
there.)
“Well,” I said, ignoring that last bit
and holding out the glasses, “I can see the top edge of the left frame, but not
the right. So just adjust the left side
up a bit.”
She wanted to be huffy, but I smiled
sooo sweetly, she reluctantly took the glasses and marched off to readjust
them.
When she returned, they were better,
but not perfect. I decided to put up
with it.
I then handed her the craft glasses,
explaining, “I bumped these into a door, and now they’re too loose.”
“I can try to tighten them a little,”
she said, scowling at them like they were something the cat drug in.
At least she got these tightened
nicely, though she did inform me that it was a lucky thing the edges of the
lenses didn’t- get chipped when she did it.
 |
Dorcas, Lydia, & Larry,
Chief Joseph Scenic Highway, northwest Wyoming, August 11, 1993. Larry had fixed up the 1966 Holiday Rambler;
it was like new again. The Suburban used
to be my father’s.
I thanked her politely and asked how
much I owed, just for the fun of it.
“Nothing,” she said, scowling.
I expressed my appreciation, but she
had already gone storming off to (loudly) ask the lady at the front desk
something.
So I gathered my tightened and still slightly
crooked glasses and made my exit without another glance back.
You might think she was snotty because
I didn’t have a mask on; a couple of other customers were wearing one. The sign on the door said they were required,
after all. When I first got inside, I’d
fished mine out of my purse – and then noticed that none of the receptionists or
assistants were wearing masks. I shoved
the dumb thing back into my purse. What’s
good for the goose is good for the ... other goose.
The customers ahead of me finished
their business and departed, so I wasn’t keeping her from anyone. One more thing: the lady at the front desk is not deaf; I
know this for a fact. Therefore I assume
Mrs. Crabbypants is crabby with everybody, not just me.
Anyway, I’m a little more adjusted than
I was before, and I’m out no pennies, so I’m happy. Especially after writing a whole page of
complaint about it, I’m happy. 😁
Home again, I put a load of clothes in
the dryer and another in the washer, then upstairs I went to scan more photos. And whataya know, I turned a page in the
album, and there was Lydia in the little red sunglasses I’d mentioned to
someone the very night before.
We hadn’t driven far on this trip when
it became clear that Lydia needed sunglasses, as each afternoon found us
driving straight into the sun, and the visors were of no use to her in her car
seat there between Larry and me. We
stopped at the next convenience store and went in to look for sunglasses – and
found a whole rack of them, just for children.
(The other kids got some too, of course.)
I pointed out some cute ones with pink
frames and a kitten in the middle.
Nope, those wouldn’t do. Lydia wanted the red ones with the airplane
in the middle!
How about the blue ones with the dolly
in the middle?
Nope!
Red with an airplane, those were the ones.
We got her the red-framed sunglasses
with the airplane in the middle. 🤣
That evening, the National
Weather Service confirmed that there were indeed two tornadoes in Platte County
the previous week on Wednesday, December 15.
They were the first in the area since 1998, and the first in town since ever.
The stronger of the two Platte County tornadoes passed
through Columbus just after 3:00 p.m. It
took a straight 2.7-mile path through town, starting along Howard Boulevard
near West Park Elementary School (that’s where I went to school as a child, and
about three blocks from our church and school) and heading northeast for about
two minutes until it stopped near the intersection of 18th Avenue
and 53rd Street (quite close to Loren’s house). Rated by the NWS as a 2 on the Enhanced
Fujita (EF) scale, the Columbus tornado reached wind speeds of 115 mph. An EF2 or higher is considered a ‘significant
tornado’.
The second Platte County tornado swept into
Platte Center, 10 miles to our north, at about the same time as the
one in Columbus and reached 105 mph, earning an EF1 rating.
Both tornadoes moved through quickly at about 80 mph, each
lasting only a minute or two. There was
a lot of straight-line wind damage, too.
Here’s the ending
point of the tornado, and Loren’s house:
After all this excitement, you can
imagine that people were less than impressed when we got an emergency alert
test on phones and tablets at 11:00 p.m. Tuesday night.
Did Roger Cooley (name changed to
protect the ignorant) accidentally sit on the button?
That’s an old joke. Years ago, a pompous, not-nice-at-all
policeman who somehow got on the local police force (but wasn’t on it for long
before he got himself fired) boosted himself up onto a high counter in the control
room, where plump, pompous policemen were not supposed to sit.
He sat on the button.
The button that set off all the tornado
sirens in town, that is.
He was the butt of many jokes
thereafter.
From then on, if any sirens or horns or
whistles go off unexpectedly or for no discernible reason, we all say, “Did
Roger Cooley sit on the button?”
Early Wednesday morning, the State
Patrol, looking a bit unkempt what with all that egg on their respective faces,
apologized and announced that the late-night monthly alert was an accident. The wireless ‘emergency push alert’ was not
supposed to go to wireless devices, only to radio and television.
I made Loren some food and took it to
him: Alaskan cod, broccoli, and clam
chowder. I added to it with things we had
stocked in his refrigerator: peaches,
applesauce, and cranberry juice.
That night was our Christmas program. Daddy would be so amazed to see our church
now. Membership is 442. When he
started here, the membership was 26. Here’s the original church. The parsonage is on the right, and that’s the
family dog Spot. I have a vague
recollection of him; he was already getting old by the time I was born in 1960.
In 1969, we added onto the church; and
in 1991 we started our church school (the red brick part of the building, to
the left, is the school).
Below is our current church. The new two-story school is on the other side.
16 of our 25 grandchildren were in the
program. Since Loren was not with us, we
sat in the newly-finished balcony for the first time.
We sang a number of Christmas songs...
the brass and the strings played... Robert gave a sermon from the wonderful old
Christmas story... and then the schoolchildren sang and recited verses.
Afterwards, everyone received bags of
nuts, fruit, and candy, and the young people passed out the sacks full of cards
for each family. I love going through all
the cards and pictures our friends and family give us.
Thursday, Dorcas sent pictures of
Trevor with the sock monkey we sent him.
My late sister-in-law Janice made it; I found two of them in a bin in
Loren’s lower level, along with other things she had made and planned to give
away. I bought a couple of books to go
with them, Sock
Monkey Takes A Bath. The other monkey and book will go
to Ian, who’s just a week older than Trevor.
When Caleb was a young teenager and old enough to stay home
now and then when we went on half-day trips, he often said, “Bring me home a
monkey!” So one day we stopped at one of
the nicer, and very large, secondhand stores in Omaha – and I hit the jackpot. Someone had donated what looked like a truckload
of stuffed monkeys in every size and variety possible. They were anywhere from $.50 to $1.50, even
the big ones.
I bought the whole works, except for a few odd pink and
lavender ones.
That evening, Larry kept Caleb occupied while I snuck those
monkeys into the house from the garage, spirited them upstairs to Caleb’s room,
and arranged them just so-so all over his room and bed.
Then I went back downstairs and acted innocent. (That should’ve been the give-away, right?) Victoria, who at about age eleven was in on
the secret, could hardly contain herself. (But since Victoria could often hardly
contain herself, that was no give-away at all. 😂)
A little while later, Caleb headed to his bedroom.
We heard a yelp, and then Caleb’s contagious laugh rippled
down the stairs.
Worth every penny, were those monkeys. 😄
Thursday night,
since we know there’s another set of pickup keys somewhere that we haven’t
found, Larry sneaked in the garage and unplugged the computer box under the hood
of the pickup. So that thing won’t
be going anywhere. Then he found a
stepladder, shinnied up, and unplugged the garage door. He left the cord in place so it looks like it’s
still plugged in.
Loren was obviously feeling better,
getting his strength back... and thinking he needed to go somewhere.
He was sleeping when I got there
Thursday afternoon. Old food from the
previous day was on his table, and he hadn’t washed the dishes. I threw out the food, put the dishes in the
sink, and put his fresh food on the table with clean silverware. I left his bag of Christmas cards from church
on the table, and quietly made an exit.
Two electric shavers were on the table. So he must be trying to shave. Or at least thinking about it. He hadn’t shaved since he got sick.
Returning home, I went back to scanning old photos. Here are Teddy and Joseph, August 11, 1993, mistakenly digging in a tent plot that we thought was a nice big sandbox for kids at a KOA campground north of the Medicine Bow Mts. in Wyoming.
The campground manager was quite bent out of shape about it, and descended on
the boys, instead of one of their parents! He did not at all gracefully accept our
apologies and our promise to fix it (which we did). Nor did he appreciate
my humor when I asked him how tenters could possibly be comfortable atop those
boulders. 😅
I quietly told the little boys that men
like that should be stuck into the nice hole they’d dug, and covered right up
to their necks. Teddy and Joseph, who had gone all pale and wide-eyed, stopped looking so
worried and giggled. Poor little guys! They didn’t mean to do anything wrong.
 |
| Hester, Dorcas, Lydia, and Hannah |
In looking at these
old photos, I was reminded of the time my mother-in-law Norma made Hester a
German chocolate birthday cake for her third birthday. Hester took a bite... sighed... and said
happily, “My Grandma makes the best German shepherd cakes!”
When
I opened the garage door Friday afternoon to go to Loren’s house, I discovered
Larry’s motorcycle behind the BMW. I
called him, but he wasn’t answering his phone.
 |
| Joseph |
I
came back inside, wondering what to do.
The Jeep was out front, but it really does sound awful, with something
clanking and banging in the motor. Larry
drives it anyway now and then – probably because he can’t hear how bad it
really is.
Larry
finally called back. He was in Wichita, Kansas,
getting the snowplow he was unable to get last month. He’d forgotten to move the motorcycle. He told me to take the Jeep, and assured me
it wouldn’t hurt it. I didn’t believe
him, but since there didn’t seem to be a choice, I headed out the front
door. I almost got to the Jeep when
Teddy called; he could come move the motorcycle; he’d be here in two minutes.
 |
| Lydia and Hester |
“We
have to go rescue Uncle Loren... you and your family have to come rescue us!” I
said to him. 😏
That
motorcycle weighs 800 pounds, but Teddy got it backed up and moved around to
the front of the house without trouble.
I looked at him,
looked at the wide-open door, and said, “Well, it looks like you’re back in
now!”
Hannah
He laughed, and I
asked, “How did you get back in?”
He didn’t seem to understand the
question. “I don’t know!” he answered.
“I’ve been locked in for three days!”
he said.
Ah.
In or out, that is the question.
(I figured this had something to do with the inoperative garage door, as we know he was both in and out just fine; but I never put words in his mouth,
especially if it might open a can o’ worms [not gummy]. If he can’t think how to say
it, I have no idea what he’s talking about, right? Right.)
“Looks like everything is fine now,” I
said, walking in.
Dorcas
“Are you going to pack me back to my
house?” he asked, following me up the stairs.
“This is your house!” I told
him. “And I’ve brought you some food!”
He then told me he didn’t have his
electric razors, and needed to ‘go home’ to get them.
“Your razors are right here on the table,”
I told him, pointing them out. They were
right beside his plate.
(What, don’t you shave at the
table?)
“Are you sure?” he asked, looking at
them, not recognizing them.
“Yep,” I said, handing him one.
He promptly turned it on and started shaving
with it.
“Aaaaaaaaa!” I exclaimed, putting the tin
foil back over the chicken. “You’re
getting hair in your food!”
Teddy
He laughed and moved to the other end of
the table, muttering something about needing to shave.
“Yes,” I agreed, “You are looking
a bit like an old prospector.”
He chuckled, then winced, exclaiming,
“This thing bites!”
He’s got such a
forest growing, those electric razors can hardly plow through it.
He told me multiple times that he’d been
alone in that house for three days, and nobody had been there.
“I was here with your food yesterday,” I
said, “but you were sound asleep, and I didn’t want to wake you up.”
For some reason, that made him
agitated. “Well, I’m not talking about
that!!!” Then, “Can you pack me back
home so I can eat?” he asked.
Aleutia, our funny Siberian husky, eating in our Holiday Rambler camper
“Your food is right here!” I told him,
pointing at it. “Come over here to this
end of the table, and you can eat it before it gets cold!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in
exaggerated tones, putting his palms together and bowing slightly, bobbing up
and down.
I ignored that. Never have been particularly fond of smart
alecs. “Eat,” I said in my best schoolmarm tone, pointing again at the food.
He sat down obediently and picked up his
spoon.
Keith & Joseph; Aleutia in the doorway of our 1966 Holiday Rambler
Then he said, “How did you know to bring
my food here, and that you’d find me here?”
He shook his head. “That’s
amazing, that you’d know where to find me.”
“This is your house where I bring you
your food each day,” I answered. “I come
here every day.”
He went back and forth from being
astonished to unbelieving. He told me, “I’m
very lonely! I can’t stay here all by
myself. I need to get back to the house
where my wife is!”
Looking west from the Big Horn Mts.
After one of the several times he said
that, he then changed his mind, saying in a pondering tone, “But I guess I don’t
have a wife. Maybe she passed away.”
However, when he asked me a pointblank
question and I agreed, “Yes, your wife has passed away,” he got all riled up
and said, “I’m not talking about the dead!
I’m talking about the dead!”
Huh.
I busied myself in the kitchen, feigning deafness.
Hester and Joseph
Again he asked how I found him there, and
how I knew I should bring him some food – “and save my life!”, and again I told
him, “This is your house, where you always are, and where I always bring your
food.”
This time, he laughed and said, “Oh, that’s
right! You were probably afraid I was
going to steal your house!” (Sometimes
he thinks it’s my house.)
I told him Larry had stayed with him
several nights. He shook his head and
held up two fingers. “Two. Only two nights.”
“He stayed with you each night for over a
week,” I said. “But he had to get up
early for work, so he left you some breakfast each morning.”
“So I didn’t see him!” Loren said
triumphantly.
Obviously, it doesn’t count, if he doesn’t
see us. That’s understandable, I
guess.
Since he didn’t seem to see them, and to
turn the conversation to another vein, I pointed out the bowl with the green
beans. “There’s green beans in there,” I
said.
Loren took the lid off, stared into the
bowl distastefully (though other times he’s said green beans were the only
vegetable he likes). “I can’t eat these
all by themselves,” he complained.
Keith
Right there in front of him was his
chicken breast filet, which I had cut into bite-sized pieces, cottage cheese,
rice pudding, Thompson grapes, applesauce, yogurt, white-cran peach
juice... I pointed at these other
things, and said, “Eat them with a little of all these other things! Everything is better that way anyway.”
He made an exclaiming noise, scowled, and
said, “I’d be sicker’n a dog if I did that!!!”
I raised my eyebrows, grinned at him, and
said, “What other way to eat is there, then? I guess you could put the bowl upside down on
your head and throw a tantrum.”
Then he laughed and said, yes, maybe he could
do that.
So
I quoted the poem from the Winnie-the-Pooh book: “Whatever’s the matter with Mary Jane? She’s screaming, and won’t eat her lovely
rice pudding again!”
That made him laugh, too.
Hannah at Mammoth Hot Springs
He asked if Larry would be coming before
dark, and if it would still be ‘warm enough’.
I said I didn’t know. Loren said,
“I can’t ride that motorcycle after dark, or if it’s too cold.”
“He won’t be taking you anywhere on the
motorcycle,” I said, trying for a reassuring tone.
“But how am I going to get home?!” he
asked.
“You are home,” I said. “Where are you wanting to go?”
“I need to get back to ... “ he waved an
arm toward the east. “Our house where
Mama and Daddy are!”
“They’ve passed away,” I told him.
Hannah, Hester, and Keith
“Oh, that’s right,” he said, surprised, but not overly so; it was almost like he expected
it. “I
forgot Mama had passed away. But where’s
Daddy?”
“Daddy passed away in 1992,” I said. “Mama passed away in 2003.”
He threw up both arms. “Well, I can’t remember dates!”
I added, “And this is your home; you don’t
have any other one but this one. This is
where you’ve lived for many years.”
At one point (I can never keep these
dialogues straight, or remember the order they went in), he laughed and said, “You
must think I’m just going around collecting houses everywhere!”
He picked up his spoon again and ate a
bite or two of yogurt, then set the spoon down and went to look out the
ever-enticing front window.
Teddy; Aleutia in background; Ft. Randall dam
We’d gotten him some
toothpaste for sensitive teeth and a new toothbrush. I reminded him that they were on his bathroom
counter, but he informed me, “That thing scares me.”
I told him I’d gotten
myself one just like it, and it hasn’t bitten me once. He laughed, and said he’d give it a try.
He had washed some dishes and then
strewed them on the counter to dry, so I put them away, and threw out some
garbage. I reminded him about the
Christmas cards, as he hadn’t finished looking at all of them yet.
“I looked at a lot of pictures,” he said,
and agreed with me when I said that was one of my favorite things to do – look
at all the pictures friends and family give us at Christmas time.
Siggghhhhh... I told Teddy, “I think he’s getting
well! – he’s back to normal.” 🙄🥴
Since I also told
Teddy that Loren was lonely and saying he couldn’t stay there all by himself,
Teddy stopped by a little later to give him a package of his favorite Biscoff ‘coffee
cookies’, and to visit with him for half an hour or so.
Lydia and Larry
His lights were all
out shortly thereafter; he’d gone to bed.
An online quilting friend, upon seeing the picture of our
1966 Holiday Rambler that Larry fixed all up, and which we took to Yellowstone
in 1993 and Jasper National Park in 1994, asked, “Where did you all sleep? Like sardines in a tin?”
Larry and I had the back bedroom,
which had its own exterior door. The
table and front couch folded down into a full-sized bed; that was for Hannah
and Dorcas. Keith and Teddy had their
bed in the back of the Suburban after we folded down the seats. We had plenty of thick sleeping bags; they
never got cold. Joseph had a little bed
on the floor of the kitchen area. The
older Holiday Ramblers didn’t have slide-outs like new campers do, but they
were wider than most campers back then, so there was plenty of room for him. The little girls, Hester and Lydia, made their
bed at the foot of Hannah and Dorcas’ bed.
One night there was a muffled
yelp, I went to see what the trouble was -- and found that Dorcas’ favorite
satin blanket had slid right off the bed onto Lydia! 😅 I extracted
her, and made sure Dorcas’s blanket was tucked in under the mattress so that
wouldn’t happen again.
Hester
The next year, we had one more child
– Caleb. That year, we pulled the camper
with a crewcab pickup, on which was a popup pickup camper, which added more
sleeping and eating areas. That was 1994
– and we went all the way to Jasper, Alberta, Canada, going through eleven
National Parks as we went.
At a quarter ’til two late that night, I found an audio clip Levi had sent. He’d named it, “wish you a merry krissmas”. Levi is the kid with perfect pitch. Listening to this ‘tune’, unable to decipher just what that instrument might be that he was torturing, I laughed ’til I cried.
Jackson Lake and the Tetons
I learned from Hannah the next day that
the instrument is a French horn. And Levi had laid his cell phone smack-dab
inside the bell to record it. He made the recording especially for his second
cousin Carsen, but he couldn’t waste such a marvy effort, and thus had to send
it to his Grandma, too. 😄
I scanned a total of 76 photos that
day, not any record-breaker. Along with
a few pictures from 1993, I scanned photos of the grandchildren that we’d gotten
in our Christmas cards (well, we didn’t get the grandchildren in our cards;
only the photos, you understand), and one of John H. and Lura Kay in a
touching card from Lura Kay. First
Christmases after the loss of a husband or wife are difficult, I know.
 |
| Teddy, Joseph, Hannah, Hester, Keith, Dorcas, Larry, and Lydia |
Ethan is a senior this year; he’s graduating in January.
At Christmas time in 1993, I got our little manger scene off the shelf where I had stored it. My late sister-in-law had given it to us the first Christmas we were married, and I treasured it. The children helped to carefully unwrap the ceramic pieces from the cloths in which I had enveloped them. They duly admired the pieces, from the majestic kings on their camels to the little lamb that Hester, age 4, placed beside the smallest shepherd boy so it didn’t get ‘losted’.
But the children’s favorite was Baby
Jesus.
There was a pause as Teddy, age 10,
pulled it from its cloth and they all looked at the Baby’s beautiful
face. The artist who had created the little set had truly done a
wonderful job, especially on little Jesus.
Once the figurines were removed from
the box, the stable, in which they’d been nestled, could be lifted out and set
up. Keith, the oldest at 13, set it on one of the end tables, and then
the children turned to retrieve the small statues from the table upon which
they’d laid them.
Hannah, who was 12, put Mary and Joseph
against the middle back of the little structure, and Teddy arranged the Wise
Men on the right side of it.
“I thought we usually put the shepherds
on that side,” objected Dorcas, 11, poised to do so with the three in her
hands.
Teddy adjusted one just so and then
turned to look at his sister. “They have
to come from the east,” he informed her, and indeed they were coming
from the east.
(Aside to the reader:
did you know that the Wise Men didn’t come to see Baby Jesus until He was two
years old, and living in Bethlehem in a house with His parents? Nevertheless, we put the Wise Men in the
stable. One more point: the word ‘stable’ is not in the Bible’s
Christmas story. It was more like a
cave, of sorts. But let us continue.)
Dorcas gave it a moment’s thought and
then nodded seriously. The shepherds went on the left, and Hester
scurried to put the lamb with his master, “before he gets scared and
baa-aa-aa-aas,” she said, sounding quite like a little lamb herself.
Joseph, age 8, set the donkey, the cow,
and the sheep in their places, and then it was time for the Most Important
Piece of all: Baby Jesus.
Hannah reached for it.
It wasn’t there.
The table was empty; nothing was on it
at all.
“Where’s Baby Jesus?” asked Hannah.
Hester turned and looked at the
table. Then, all in an alarmed panic, “Baby Jesus is losted!!!” she
howled.
“But we just had it,” breathed
Dorcas in distressed horror.
Someone has simply misplaced it, I thought, and
looked quickly around the room.
There was Lydia, just 2 ½, sitting in
her favorite little wooden chair, the tiny figurine cradled in the crook of one
arm while her other hand was wrapped protectively around it. She was
rocking gently back and forth, and we had stopped talking suddenly enough that
we all heard her singing sweetly, “ ♫ ♪ Little Baby in the manger, ♪ ♫ I love you! ♫ ♪ “
Then, realizing everything had gotten
very quiet, her head popped up, a questioning look on her face. Her eyes
fell on the stable, and then it dawned on her:
Baby Jesus was the only figure missing.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, jumping to her
feet, “Here He is, I has Him!”
As we had done for many years, we
allowed the youngest able child to place the Baby in the stable. That was
Lydia, since Caleb was only 2 months old. Her eyes shone with delight as
she carefully laid manger and Baby directly in front of Mary and Joseph in the
spot saved for Him.
I went to the piano, everyone gathered ’round,
and we sang a few Christmas songs.
I love Christmas.
Saturday afternoon, Christmas Day, Teddy
took Loren for a little ride, winding up out at his house, where he showed
Loren all his animals. Larry took him
some soup shortly after Teddy took him back home. Loren had already gone to bed when Larry got there
at 5:00, but he got up and ate about half of the bowl of soup when Larry warmed
it up.
Here’s one of Hannah’s Australian
shepherds, Chimera; and below are Teddy’s cow and calf, with his White Lab
Molly overseeing things from the top of the hay bale.
Saturday, after
a family group chat wherein we all debated and discussed and discoursed and
dissected and deliberated and contemplated and contested and considered and
reconsidered, we finally set the time for our
family get-together for Monday (today), the 27th of December.
Since I had already let everyone know that whatever
time they came up with would work fine for Larry and me, since we didn’t have
all those pesky in-laws and outlaws to harmonize and compromise with, I let
much of the debate go on without me, and busied myself with sweeping, mopping,
and vacuuming the floors, and then filling the bird feeders.
 |
| The Grand Teton itself |
On
the Chicago radio station Sunday morning, they were telling of the multitudes
of people lined up here and there around the country waiting to take Covid-19
tests. One brilliant ‘scientist’(?)
intoned, all doomsday of timbre and milieu, “It’s very concerning; and of particular
concern is that over half of those who tested positive show no
symptoms!”
Ooooo. Run and scream. Panic in the streets. No symptoms. Do these people ever consider their own
idiocy?!
That day, we had our usual Sunday
School and morning church service, then a Christmas dinner in the Fellowship
Hall.
Lydia, Hannah, and Hester
Bobby’s younger brother Stephen had the
Sunday School hour. He was almost finished when my nephew Kelvin’s
son-in-law Mark had a seizure. He cut
his head on something, and it was bleeding rather badly, and he was totally
stiff and shaking violently. His wife, my great-niece Jamie, was in the
baby room with their new baby Kelvin right then, their oldest little girl
McKenna was in Sunday School, and only their three-year-old, Laura was sitting beside
Mark. The poor little girl started crying, and a cousin’s little boy
started crying, too.
Several men rushed to help, but it’s
really hard to handle a person who’s having a full-blown seizure. The
ambulance arrived shortly, and by then Mark was able to get up and get onto the
stretcher.
He had another seizure at the hospital,
but was soon stabilized.
He had a seizure a couple of years ago after
he and Jamie had Covid-19 (the virus hadn’t even been named yet). Jamie,
too, had a seizure, right while she was in the hospital room with Mark. Mark had recovered and stopped taking the
anti-seizures medicine, and everyone was hopeful that the condition had been
temporary. It’s always such a worry,
when it happens again.
He was discharged Sunday afternoon. We are praying that he will be all right,
with the appropriate medication, and be able to go on with life normally. They are a dear and special young family.
 |
| Lydia at the KOA in Wyoming |
Loren didn’t feel like going to the
dinner. Larry called him about noon,
just as the morning service was ending, and Loren said yep, he was ready. So Larry drove out to his house, but Loren wasn’t
at all ready. Larry started helping him,
but it wasn’t long before Loren sat down on the bed and said he really didn’t
feel up to going.
So Larry came back to the dinner, a
little late; but at least the food was still warm.
The evening service was moved to 2:00
p.m., so we wouldn’t all have to go home just to turn around and come right
back again.
After the second service, we took Loren
a dinner from the church. I no sooner walked inside his house than he
informed me, “I’m not eating here!!! I will only eat at home.”
“This is your home,” I said,
heading for the table with some of the food, while Larry brought a couple of
other Styrofoam boxes full of food.
Loren went on insisting he needed to go
home while I warmed up his food and Larry opened the box with the salad and
buttered toast and strawberry jello salad. Loren launched right into the
jello; he goes for anything dessertish first, always.
I brought the box with the warmed food
back to the table. It contained roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy,
green beans, and carrots. “Here’s the
main course,” I said, and moved the other box out of the way, which didn’t
exactly suit him. Dessert first!
He then informed us (while he ate food
he’d said he wouldn’t eat) that he’d been left in that house for four days,
and all of his vehicles keys are ‘chained up’.
“You can go look!” he told Larry.
We got him started eating, then told
him we needed to go home and change, since we hadn’t been home since 9:30 a.m.,
and still had our church clothes on.
“People say that,” he said.
We looked at him.
“They say half an hour, but it’s an
hour and a half!” he ‘explained’. Then, “Four days is a long time to
wait.”
Siggghhhh...
We went home and tried for a peaceful
evening, though Larry intended to go back to Loren’s house a little later, if
for nothing else than to make sure any food he hadn’t eaten got put into the
refrigerator. Loren used to be such a stickler for keeping everything in
the refrigerator. Not no mo’, no mo’, no mo’.
Then I learned that no one had helped
Linda, one of my blind friends, go through her Christmas cards and gifts that
she’d received the previous Wednesday night.
I’d sho’ ’nuff be a-wishin’ for a reader and describer, iffen it was
me!
So at a quarter after 6, Larry dropped
me off at Linda’s house, and while he went on to Loren’s house, I read through
her Christmas cards with her, describing any pictures she got, and adding
stories about the families who’d given them to her.
Years ago, I was surprised to learn
that my blind friends enjoyed getting pictures, because, even though they couldn’t
see them, they sometimes liked to display them in their houses for visitors to
see, and they often carried the photos with them when they traveled back to
their hometowns so they could show friends and family. One of the ladies told me how it intrigued
her to hold a small card-sized photo in her hand, and know that there were many
faces on it, and people could actually look at that little piece of photo
paper, and recognize the people printed thereon! I felt bad that I hadn’t known or thought of
this earlier, and from then on, I never neglected to give my blind friends
photos when I doled them out at Christmas time.
Linda has only been here 14 or 15
years, I think; so she doesn’t know some of the history. The other blind
ladies moved here when I was 8 years old.
That’s 53 years ago! – they know almost as much of our history as I
do. 😉
I opened the gifts Linda had received,
telling her who they were from and all about them, while she typed my
descriptions into her Braille Lite. And
thus I spent an enjoyable hour or two with my friend.
Meanwhile, Larry arrived at Loren’s house. Loren was asleep by the time he got
there. I think he looks out the window, sees that it’s dark, and thinks, Oh,
NO! I’m late for bed!!! and runs for the feathers as fast as he can
go.
Amazingly, the table was all cleaned
off, and the dishes were all washed. Loren hadn’t cleaned the table for a
while. Larry looked in the refrigerator. No Christmas dinner, nor
the partial remains of same. He looked in the living room. No
Christmas dinner. He looked in the Wrangler (one day last week, he found
the chicken I’d given Loren for supper in his Jeep, long after Loren had gone
to bed). He looked in the lower level. No Christmas dinner. He
looked in the garbage. He went outside and looked in the big
trashcan. No Christmas dinner.
The only places he didn’t look were in
Loren’s bedroom (because he was sleeping), on the deck (he and Janice used to
feed stray cats on the deck, so...), and in the freezer. I hope it’s in
the freezer; there was a lot of yummy food in those Styrofoam boxes. But
Loren hasn’t put anything in the freezer for years.
Early
this afternoon, I loaded the BMW with as many boxes of gifts as would fit, and
took them out to the River View Cabin at the confluence of the Loup and Platte
Rivers. It’s 13 ½ miles from our house
to the cabin.
I
carried all the boxes inside, put a few gifts around the tall and
beautifully-decorated Christmas tree, and headed home again.
I
stopped at Hy-Vee on the way back and got a couple of fruit pizzas, two bags of
mandarin oranges, two gallons of old-fashioned apple juice, two bags of freshly-baked-in-the-Hy-Vee-bakery
tortilla chips, and a cluster of bananas.
Everything but the bananas will go back out to the cabin.
Here’s
the view from the back door, looking south at Platte River.
Larry
will be home any minute! Time to gather
up camera, purse, and coffee mugs! Larry
will load the last two big boxes of Christmas gifts.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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