Journal: The Loss of A Friend

 

Last Monday evening, I had a chat with Levi.  He sent me a picture of a cat eating a watermelon and asked, “Did your cats ever eat things like that?”

So I told him about Purr-Purr:

When I was little, I had a Siamese cat named Purr-Purr.  Here he is on my lap, October 6, 1966 – my 6^th birthday.  And yes, his eyes really were blue.  Anytime I sat down to read (and I did so often; I loved to read), Purr-Purr would scramble up on my lap, purring as he came.

Purr-Purr loved corn on the cob.  He’d hold it steady with a paw on either end of the ear, and turn it and nibble the kernels off, one row at a time.  If it didn’t have enough butter on it, he’d look up with those piercing eyes of his and say, “MMMmrrrrrRRRRRooWWWW!”  

So my mother would put a little more butter on the ear (Purr-Purr would not let go of the ear of corn to let her butter it), and then he’d make a little “Prrrrthhthgg” thank-you noise and get back to eating.

The skies were all smoky again Tuesday, and we were issued an air quality alert.  Before the day was over, we got another alert:  There’s a mountain lion roaming around near Fullerton again.  That’s about 32 miles to our southwest.  They often follow the Loup River, and can easily travel 20 miles a day.  Game cams on the Loup a mile south of our house have picked up video of mountain lions several times since we moved out here, 7 miles west of town.

That day, I got the cat silhouettes appliquéd onto Violet’s Pink Split-Blade Pinwheel quilt, and a turquoise bow attached to one kitty.  Now I feel better about those girls’ quilts!  😻

I put the last load of clothes into the washing machine... swept the kitchen floor... patched three pairs of Larry’s jeans... rehemmed a skirt of mine... and then fixed stuffed peppers for supper.  I (over)cooked the peppers in the Instant Pot; next time I’ll do a manual release of pressure, rather than letting it depressurize on its own. 

It was Larry’s fault, of course; I was trying to keep everything warm until he got home with the sour cream and the picanté sauce!  (But I should’ve released the pressure and then just pressed the ‘Keep Warm’ button.)

Every time I go in the laundry room, it seems, another cluster of geranium blossoms has bloomed.  These are the geraniums Caleb, Maria, and Eva gave me for Mother’s Day.  It was blooming when Maria brought it, and there have been three blooming incidents (uh, Incidents of Bloom? 😄) since.

Did I ever mention that I told the seller of the citrus juicer that I had finally found the box way out yonder where the slipshod, slapdash mail person had left it, and so I therefore owed him for the second one?  I told him where I’d found it, and said that while both the outer and the inner box, along with the instructions, were ruined by the several rainstorms we’d had, the juicer itself was perfectly fine.  He declined payment.  Twice I told the man that I really wanted to pay him, and was happy to do so, as I’d given the juicer in the good box to my daughter and son-in-law for an anniversary gift, and was keeping the other one for myself. 

He absolutely insisted that no, he would not take my money for the mishap.

So I finally thanked him, and let it be.

After supper, I started on Malinda’s Cross-Stitched Bears quilt.

There were critters busy in the rafters over my quilting studio that night, so I set off an odor bomb in the cubbyhole behind the closet in the little library, next door to my quilting studio.  I shut all the doors behind me as I exited – cubbyhole door, closet door, and room door, but there’s a lot of ways that aroma can seep into other areas, and seep, it did.  It soon smelt so good in my quilting studio, I could hardly stand it.  ‘Tranquil Skies’, that’s the fragrance name.

Anyway, at least all those little paws that were playing hopscotch overhead hotfooted it elsewhere.  It was squirrels, probably.  Larry finds their entrance holes, and, after making sure they are all out by using one of those odor bombs, seals it up again with new boards.  But it’s never too awfully long before the critters chew themselves a doorway again.

By midnight, I had cut apart the Cross-Stitched Teddy blocks, and cut white fabric pieces with which to frame each block.  So there I was, working away on the blocks, when all of a sudden I thought, Oh, no, this one has a big stain on it!  But nothing spilled on it.  Did I scorch it with the iron??  😧

And then, Oh.  It’s just a yellow balloon from a block underneath showing through.  🙄

About the time eight of the twelve blocks were framed and trimmed, I realized that every one of them were half an inch too small.  Bother!

Oh, well; they would all get a double frame now.  It took twice as long, but...

On Facebook, I posted pictures of the EQ8 design of the Cross-Stitched Teddies quilt and each of the Cross-Stitched Teddy blocks, telling how Amy found them at a Thrift Shop, and so forth.  The very first comment under the pictures:  “Are these appliqués, or just printed panels?”  🙄

From News Channel Nebraska:  Omaha police say they arrested a man after he fled from an accident with a tree. 

Huh.  I wonder how big the tree was that he fled with?  With which he fled.  Something.  (I shouldn’t make fun of News Channel Nebraska if I can do no better, right?  But truly, their writing skills are pathetic.)

Here’s another news article; this was seen in Norfolk.  That’s Howdy Doody the Watusi bull riding shotgun with his owner, Lee Meyer of Neligh, Nebraska, in a modified Ford Crown Victoria sedan.  Howdy Doody is a pet, gentle and tame, and something of a celebrity in the little town where the Meyers live.  But they took a 35-mile joyride to nearby Norfolk, and someone called the police.  The police stopped Meyer, gave him a warning, and sent him home with his bull.

Reporters, however, were on hand, and soon the story went viral – not just in the United States, but in other countries as well.

Some news articles have described Howdy Doody as a ‘giant bull’ or a ‘humongous bull’.  Don’t reporters do any research these days??  A Watusi bull is a medium-sized bull, ranging in weight from 1,000 to 1,600 pounds. 

Maine-Anjou bulls, on the other hand, can weight over 4,000 pounds.  One in particular was officially weighed at the Paris International Agriculture Show in 2016, and he topped the scales at 4,299 pounds.  Other heavy-weight bulls include the Chianina bulls.  One named Donetto weighed 3,920 pounds and stood 6 feet 1 inch tall.  Howdy Doody would look like a runt, next to those!

After getting the frames sewn around the Cross-Stitched Teddy blocks, I began cutting the white background pieces for the rest of the quilt.  It occurred to me that all these whites – a whole lot of different white-on-white prints – are leftovers from the New York Beauty quilt I made Jeremy and Lydia, Malinda’s parents.  I’ll point that out to her; she’ll think that’s neat.

Next time I need white-on-white prints, believe me, I’ll be getting all one print.  This cutting of o.n.e...p.i.e.c.e...a.t...a...t.i.m.e. is enough to irk a saint.  I could be cutting six strips at once!  But nooooo... I have something like 24 smallish pieces of white prints to cut from.  And it’ll be just the same with the colored fabrics, as I will be making the quilt scrappy.  I don’t have enough of any two or three fabrics to do otherwise, and I would very much like to use up all these little bits, in any case.

Thursday morning at 8:25 a.m., my phone rang.  It was Hannah.  She rarely calls that early, and she would normally have been helping Nathanael and Levi get ready for school.  I picked up my phone, thinking, Bethany passed away.

And that’s what she told me.  Bethany was her mother-in-law, and a dear friend of mine since before I was old enough to remember.  Here’s a picture of sisters Kathy and Bethany, and me on the right.  

We were playing in my room, and it was 1963 or 1964.  Kathy is a few months older than me (she was always a little thing), and Bethany was 11 months older than Kathy.  Bethany has been unwell for many years.  Still, it’s always hard to believe it when a good friend is suddenly gone.  She was 64.

Bethany was the high-school science teacher at our church school for 15 years.  She sewed clothes for her six children and her 19 grandchildren, and made quilts, too.  She wrote over 200 poems, some of which she set to music, and she drew beautifully.  Here’s a dress she made for her little girl Esther and then loaned to our Hester.  This was taken on Hester’s first birthday, June 8, 1990.

John and Bethany’s wedding was August 5, 1979 – less than a month after Larry and I were married.  They, like us, just celebrated their 44^th wedding anniversary.

It had to be a Saturday morning funeral, due to the holiday, and quite a number of others in this area needing to schedule funerals before Labor Day, too.

Once again, I was glad I spent the time scanning all my old photos, as Hannah asked for pictures of Bethany.  I didn’t have many, because she never liked having her picture taken; but that one with both Kathy and Bethany in it made it worth the search.

I took the SD card to Hannah, then went on to Wal-Mart to get a birthday present for Carolyn.  She would be 6 on Saturday, and we were invited to their house for a birthday party Friday night.  I chose a Honey Bee Acres house with a kitty inside, and The Barksters Dog Family to go with it.

I also got myself some medications for a cold – Theraflu tea, liquid Dayquil, and extra-strength Cepacol cough drops.  Wednesday, I thought I had hay fever, and it kept me awake a good part of the night.  By Thursday afternoon, it had disintegrated into a nasty ol’ cold.  Ugh.  There was too much to do to be sick!

A quilting friend was telling about her husband arriving home from work, and she proceeded to hand him the mop – because he’d spilled something, then gone away and left it. 

I commiserated with her, saying, “Here’s Larry, on spills left to ferment and/or coagulate:  ‘I thought it would evaporate!’” 😂  Men, tsk.

Big black ants invaded our house Monday and Tuesday.  They probably came in on a box FedEx left on our porch, and then invited their friends and relations in.  We set out some Terro Liquid Ant Bait Wednesday night, and they were nearly all gone by the next day.

I was still sick Friday, so we didn’t go to Carolyn’s birthday party.  Larry needed to finish painting a vehicle for his friend’s son in Genoa, too.  Victoria made Carolyn a cake with what looked like a chocolate-covered ice cream cone upside down on top of it, spilling its chocolate over it and down the sides.  Carolyn was tickled pink with that cake.

Kurt and Victoria gave Carolyn a little battery-operated sewing machine.  She made a little stuffed butterfly with it already.

I did get most of the 1 3/16” strips cut for the small white squares in the Cross-Stitched Teddies quilt.  I needed 480 small white squares.  I looked at the colored-square count by accident – and cut 600 of them.  Oops.  Where in the world will I ever use 1 3/16” white strips again?!

Here’s a fact:  It takes a whole lot longer to cut pieces for a scrappy quilt than it does to cut pieces for a 2- or 3-color quilt.  This quilt won’t just be scrappy in the colors, but also in the whites.  As I mentioned, I’m still using up all those whites and creams I got from Marshall Dry Goods back when I made Jeremy and Lydia’s New York Beauty quilt.  Next time I need white or cream (will I ever need white or cream, ever again?!), I will get all one print, not 30-35 different prints!  Ah, well... I do like the way it looks.  Please pass the Theraflu lemon-honey tea.

Saturday morning, I listened online to the funeral service for Bethany, since I was still sick and couldn’t go.  Bobby and Joanna sang I Will Not Forget Thee, one of Bethany’s favorite songs.  It was so beautiful, so touching.  When Brother Robert’s sermon was over, the congregation sang the final song, I Shall Be Like Him.  The cameras panned around the congregation – and there was Bethany’s daughter Esther wiping a tear away, and then there was Hannah wiping tears – and then I was, too.  The main text was “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.”  

‘Saints’ simply means ‘believers’, even with all our faults.  A saint is not some ultra-holy person – as it says in Romans, “There is none righteous, no, not one” – except for Christ.  A saint is not some deceased person that others vote into sainthood by virtue of their past ‘holy’ life.  People who believe that will never find it even in their own version of the Bible.

Here, get a load of this, from a reputable website:  “The sainthood process entails expenses for research, travel, translation and, if the cause progresses, beatification and canonization ceremonies.  On average, costs have been reported to total around $250,000 — with some high-profile causes potentially topping $1 million.”

So now you know – or should know – why some insist this is the only way to sainthood.

Now compare it with what Isaiah said:  “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”  ‘Milk’ here speaks of the Word of God, the ‘sincere milk of the Word’, as Peter said; ‘Wine’ is the joy of the Lord that ‘gladdens the heart’, as it says in Psalms.

God’s saving grace is free.  We don’t work for it; we only believe! 

(Those last four or five paragraphs were not in the sermon; I added them, free of charge.)

Brother Robert read a statement made by a beloved pastor from years gone by as he lay dying, his family close at hand.  One asked him, “How are you feeling?” and that dear old man smiled and said, “Almost well.”  So we smile through our tears and are thankful that Bethany is no longer sick and suffering, as she has done for so many years.

There are a whole lot of white-lined moths flitting around the hosta blossoms.  There was also a red admiral butterfly out there – and he did not want to share the pollen!  He attacked one of the sphinx moths, which was much bigger than he is, and chased it away. 

The poor leaves on the hostas are all brown and dried up – not so much for lack of water, but because of the week when temperatures were around 100°, and they are not in areas where they get much shade.  Some get no shade all day long.  Back when I planted them years ago, there were tall Austrian pines all over our front yard; but the pine beetles killed them all, one after another.  One of these days, the blue spruce trees will be big enough to provide more shade.  The cedar tree helped, but it was big and unsightly, and cedars use up a whole lot of water that should go to other plants.  Larry took it down a couple of weeks ago, and the hosta leaves are now browner than ever from all the sun.

Aauugghh!  I just poured myself a cup of coffee... stuck it into the microwave... pulled it out a minute later ---- and found a small miller, one of those pretty little ones with pink stripes on their wings, floating in it.  I do not appreciate him committing suicide in my lovely Cinnamon Viennese coffee.  (He probably did appreciate it, either.)

Saturday afternoon, Hannah brought me a bouquet from the funeral.  It has cut flowers in it, but we think there is also a living plant in there somewhere.  Guess I’ll find out, when the flowers fade.

I didn’t feel like doing much of anything yesterday, but I did get several hundred pictures from last week’s trip to Omaha and to the Sunken Gardens in Lincoln edited.  You can see them here.  There are four sets of photos; keep clicking ‘Newer Post’ at the bottom to see the next sets.

It’s a lovely place.  I’m always amazed when I start looking at my pictures on my big laptop screen, and see vehicles on roads in the background.  Somehow, one just doesn’t hear them at all when in the Gardens.

I did not realize the first time I went there, some years ago, that there were all sorts of animals, birds, and landmarks incorporated into the metalwork of the pavilion dome.  Can you see the Nebraska State Capitol Building, lower right?  There’s a scarecrow with birds on its arms on the left... a plane directly above the scarecrow... a windmill below and to the right of the scarecrow... birds and squirrels all over the place... and the more you look, the more you see.

Back in the early 1900s, that whole area of the Gardens used to be a neighborhood dump.  Hard to believe, looking at it now.

Larry spent the afternoon working on the camper, which we will be taking to the Black Hills after we leave the Nebraska State Fair tomorrow evening.  The vinyl flooring had buckled because of the severe winter, then the extreme heat this summer.  But there don’t seem to be any broken water pipes, thankfully.  He also took Carolyn her present – and brought home some birthday cake for us to share.

At 6:30 p.m., I badly needed a nap.  Instead, I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup and some black cherry Oui yogurt.  That perked me up enough to continue with the pictures.

When I got them done and uploaded, I drank a cup of nighttime Theraflu.  Earlier, I took the last of the Benadryl and thought I could then use the Mucinex – and discovered that the pills are way too big for me to swallow.  They’d be too big any time – but how much more, when I have a severe sore throat!  Yikes.

The Dayquil and Theraflu will have to do.  Oh, wait!  I just found a bottle of TopCare Mucus Relief DM in the cupboard!  Lydia gave it to Larry last Christmas when he got so sick after being outside too long in the below-zero weather.  These tablets aren’t too awfully big; I’ll be able to take them.  Not right then, though, since I just drank Theraflu.  It was time to hit the hay.

I set my alarm, since I did not want to sleep as long as I had done the previous two nights.  What a waste of time, when there’s so much to do!  Ah, well.  I should remember what Daddy said to me once when I was a little girl, bemoaning the fact that I had to go to bed, when there were so many things to do. 

“The Bible says, ‘He giveth His beloved sleep,’” said Daddy.  “So if God gives it to us, and we have the ability to sleep and be refreshed, don’t you think we should be thankful for it?”

Oh.  Huh.  How ’bout that.  So I got me a brand new attitude about sleep, after that.

(I still preferred to get as much done as possible, and not spend too much time sleeping – but never again did I complain about the fact that we all need sleep.)

Larry’s new truck (Walkers’, really, but Larry gets to drive it) is finally, finally all done!!  He used it Friday for the first time.  It weighs 55,000 pounds – that’s 27 ½ tons.  He drove it to Wahoo, picked up forms, brought it back, unloaded it, and then took the old truck to Omaha to have the cat track that holds the hoses in the outrigger replaced.  So that one trip to Wahoo is all he’s gotten to use it, so far.

While we’re gone for the next week and a half, Caleb might use the other truck, but it has a damaged section on the boom, so the reach is 7 feet short.  We told him it would be highly unfair, if he should use the new truck.  He laughed.  He laughed!

I tried listening to our church services today, but I’ve run out of high-speed internet, and the broadcast quit in the middle of the first song.  It usually works better to listen to it later, after they post it online, than to try to hear it live.  Or I can wait until Larry is home and use the hotspot on his phone, which is still high-speed.

I’m gradually feeling better.  This afternoon I gathered together the clothes we will need, and washed the sheets from the bed in the camper.

“What’s everyone gonna think,” I asked Victoria, “if I miss church but then go to the State Fair Monday, and vacation thereafter?!!” 

“They won’t know, 😎” she answered reassuringly.  Funny girl.

“I have to pick up those quilts, though,” I continued.  “They say right in the entry forms that you only have a small window of time to get them before they donate everything to a secondhand store.”

“That’s terrifying,” remarked Victoria, in her Victoria-like way.  “It’s distinctly different sitting in church while sick than riding in your car,” she added.

“Shall I wear a fake nose and mustache to the fair, so no one will recognize me?” I asked.

“The chances of seeing anyone you know are probably very slim,” she laughed.

“We’ve seen people we know, every single time we’ve gone there!” I protested.

“Oh well.  I doubt anyone would give it a thought,” said she.

I decided, “If they march up and say, ‘YOU WEREN’T AT CHURCH YESTERDAY!’ I’ll say, ‘GET BACK, OR I’LL COUGH ON YOU!’”

(It just occurred to me – one of those quilts I have to pick up at the State Fair is Kurt and Victoria’s!  No wonder she thought that threat of donating unclaimed quilts to a secondhand store ‘terrifying’.  😅)

Having gotten those details ironed out, I continued getting ready.

We have reservations at Whispering Pines Campground in Hill City, South Dakota, Tuesday night and the next eight nights thereafter.  Quilts are due at the Hill City Quilt Show Friday.

I now have most of our clothes loaded into the camper, along with towels, shampoo, soap, and suchlike.  We keep lightweight pots and pans, dishes, glasses, silverware, cooking utensils, dishcloths and dish towels in the camper, so I didn’t need to haul any of that out to the camper, thankfully.  Yep, I’m definitely getting better, even if I am speaking in nasal bass tones.  It’s always good when your voice gets all croaky, so that everyone knows you’re really sick and not just pretending, right?

I made biscuits when Larry got home from church – Uncle Buck’s Bacon and Cheddar Biscuits from a mix I got at Cabela’s a couple of weeks ago.  Mmmmm, they are so good.

And now, I’d better get some sleep!

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