Journal: Memorial Day Happenin's

A quilting friend recently made a pretty little quilt with fabric left over from a potholder project.  That reminded me of the time I started making potholders for a bunch of my church friends with some dark green and burgundy squares, but I liked the squares so much that I put them all together and made a quilt and pillows for daughter Hester!  Sorry, buncha church friends.  🤭

Here I am working on that quilt, absolutely crammed into my little upstairs office.  That was when five of the kids were still at home.  I was glad to have that much space!  😉

I wonder what became of that top I was wearing?  I really liked it.  Whataya bet one o’ them thar girls o’ mine cabbaged onta it?

Here’s one of the pillows I made to go with the quilt.  The button in the middle was a very old one from my mother’s big button jar.  (My mother’s name was Hester, too.)

Last Monday evening, Victoria sent an audio clip of herself and Kurt singing Back of the Clouds.  Not that they were back of the clouds when they sang it.

“That’s beautiful!” I told her.  “Did you marry Kurt because his voice harmonizes with yours?”

“I didn’t know his voice harmonized with mine the entire time we went to school together!” she answered.

I then tried telling her a certain tenor part by spelling out the notes:  A, C, Bb, G, A, F.

“I don’t have a piano in front of me so I can’t even comprehend your instructions 🤓,” she informed me.  😆

One time a music teacher in 2^nd grade handed us a page with letter names of notes over words, and asked if anyone could sing that.  I, timid little soul that I was, forgot myself and flung my hand up.  Because I knew I could.  Could sing that, I mean.

She looked at me for a moment (probably stunned that I would actually volunteer for such a thing).  Then, “Well, go right ahead!” she said.

((...GULP...))

I gathered up my chutzpah, opened my mouth, and sang.  I put the song in the timing I thought best, skippity-do-dawing through parts I thought should skippity-do-daw, but always sticking to the notes written over the words.

When I was done, everyone was staring at me, and I had no trap door through which to pitch myself.

Then the teacher said in a sorta snippy voice (and she had always been so nice to me!), “You already knew that song, didn’t you?!”

I said firmly in my 8-year-old voice, “No, I have never seen that song before in my life.”  And I stared right back at her.  The nerve, accusing me unjustly.  (But I was a bit proud of myself, since, obviously, I had sung it right.)

She quickly made up a short line, handed it to me, and said, “Sing that one.”

I sang it.  

So she said, and I quote, “Huh.”

And that was the end of that.

But... why could I look at a page of classical music, and it would not translate from eyeballs to fingertips??  The page might as well have been upside down.  I played mostly by ear.

Tuesday morning, I was just about to go out and refill the bird feeders, when big raindrops started hitting the windows, and thunder began rumbling.  There were thunderstorms, some severe, all around us, and the one coming from the south that I thought would miss us to the east instead came straight north.  Areas to our south were hit with pingpong-sized hail.  To the east, about 10,000 people were without power.  By noon, crews had restored electricity to some 3,000.  Fremont got 8 ½” of rain!  Streets were flooded there, and also in Arlington, where they got 6 ½”.  The storm approaching us was moving at 50 mph, and would hit and be past in 20 minutes.

Half an hour later, there were reports of tennis-ball-sized hail to our east.  A tornado warning was issued for Douglas County, right where those awful tornadoes hit April 26^th, and, once again, it was heading toward northwest Omaha and Standing Bear Lake, which is just north of the memory-care home where Loren lives.

I breathed a sigh of relief when my weather apps finally reported that the tornado warning had been canceled, as the tornado had moved out of the Omaha area.

When Larry came home for lunch, he told me that straight-line winds during the night had knocked down a lot of big trees all around Columbus.  Jeremy and one other local tree-removal service would be very busy for the next few days.  Victoria’s sister-in-law, Allison, posted a picture of three large trees that had fallen in their yard, bringing down power lines and causing a fire in the branches.

Some falling trees and branches landed on homes and vehicles.  Columbus had 3.75” of rain overnight, and it was still coming down.  Five miles east of town there was a report of 7” of rain.  At the airport, wind was clocked at over 90 mph.  There was flooding in multiple places, and a number of roads were closed.

It was Levi’s 14^th birthday and Lyle’s 17^th birthday that day.  We gave them each a tool set.

Hester sent pictures of Oliver and Keira playing in the standing water at the curb in front of their house.  They are on a wide avenue, and this is the parking area, and there’s little traffic.

“Oliver says, ‘It’s fun to play in the muddle!!’” wrote Hester.

“Keira looks like she’s going at it with her usual gusto,” I replied, “and Oliver is looking on admiringly, probably about to imitate his big sister,” I surmised.

“That’s exactly what happened,” Hester laughed, and sent more pictures.

What I didn’t know was that Larry was there at the neighbors’ house where one of his coworkers lives, working on a pickup the man is buying from him.  Hester and the children keep a lookout, in case Grandpa should show up next door.

Larry, seeing the muddle kafuffle, trotted straight over there and proceeded to act like he was about to stamp in the water near Hester.  She skedaddled away, posthaste.  You never know what fathers like Larry might do – maybe even by accident!

I spent the majority of the day quilting, finishing the final borders and cutting the quilt from the frame by 10:30 p.m.

I had planned to work in the flower gardens Wednesday morning, but it was chilly and cloudy, and everything was still damp from Tuesday’s rains.  I decided to shower, eat breakfast, and put the binding on the Farmall Scenes quilt.

By the time I finished showering, the sun was shining.  Isn’t that just the way?!

I finished the binding right before our evening church service, with no time to spare.  Below is the back of the quilt.

Thursday, I spent part of the morning working in another flower garden.

Later, I machine-embroidered a label for the Farmall Scenes quilt, attached it to the back of the quilt, and started working on the matching pillow.

That afternoon, a friend asked me to email her a photo.  It caused me to think of the time years ago when I asked my late sister-in-law Janice to email me a photo.

She was quite reluctant to do so, thinking that if she emailed a picture to me, she would no longer have it.  I tried, but don’t think I ever convinced her, that the picture attached to an email is only a copy.  I even showed her that the picture was still located right in her picture folder.

Evidence notwithstanding, if I ever asked her to send me a picture or a document, she’d still say warily, “Well, I don’t know... will you send it back, after you look at it?”

I miss Janice and her endearing quirks, and her loving ways.

That evening, Joseph sent pictures of Justin, who won 2^nd place in his school for his GPA.  He just finished 6^th grade.

We had lasagna for supper that night.  Mmmmm, mmm. 

After supper, I made the piping that would go around the Farmall Scenes pillow.

A cousin was commenting on Baby Arnold’s four-month picture:  “I think that toothless smile is just as cute as can be.”

So do I.  Isn’t it funny how babies without teeth look just right, their faces all plump and rosy; but older folks who have no teeth don’t look right at all?  😅

The majority of that day, I couldn’t take pictures of the Farmall Scenes quilt out on the back deck, because it was much too windy.  But finally that evening the wind calmed down, and I was able to get some outdoor shots.

The quilt measures 85” x 85”.  The batting is Quilters’ Dream wool.  The tractors and the cow face are appliquéd.  I designed the pattern in EQ8.  I found the Farmall scenes fabric in one of the bins of fabrics my late sister-in-law gave me at Christmastime of 2013 six months before she passed away.  The barn quilt fabric is from Marshall Dry Goods.  I used a dozen different colors of thread, and a variety of kinds:  Omni, Gutermann, Bottom Line, So Fine, Signature, Glide, and Magnifico.  That, because those were what I happened to have in the colors I needed.

Larry finally got his big riding lawn mower adjusted so it would work properly (it kept throwing belts), and got the whole big yard mowed.  Finally, we can see the pretty flowerbeds I’ve been weeding most every morning, without a jungle of a lawn in the way!  It looks so nice.  The lions and tigers that were encamped therein have moved on.

This is Larry, a good deal of the time:

Later, I was about to attach the covered piping I’d made and put together the front and back for the pillow when it occurred to me:  I had not yet quilted those pieces!  Sooo... I turned off machine and all the lights and quit for the night.

In years gone by, I never gave a thought to quilting pillow tops.  Then some lady looked at a pillow I’d done, and asked, “How will you quilt it, now that it’s all put together?”

Uh, ‘quilt it’??

And I realized, Pillows are better when they’re quilted!  So... now I quilt them.

That night, there were tornadoes around Lake McConaughy, Nebraska’s biggest lake.  Several communities were badly damaged.  These pictures were taken by Ty Martin north of the little town of Elsie, Nebraska.

I promptly sent them to Amy, writing, “Tell Elsie there was a tornado right by her town!  Did she know Nebraska has a town named Elsie?  The town of Elsie is southeast of Ogallala, and has a population of 106.  There was a lot of damage, including destroyed homes, all around Lake McConaughy.”

Later that night, there were tornadoes on the east side of the state, too.

Friday, I loaded the front and back pieces for the pillow onto my quilting frame and began quilting them.  As I later paused to rewind a bobbin, I glanced out the window and spotted several half-grown bunnies in the yard.  They’re sooo cute.

When the quilting was done, I sewed front and back together, stuffed it with batting, and hand-sewed the bottom shut.  And Warren’s quilt and pillow were complete.  16 to go!

Those strips of Barn Quilt fabric on the back of the pillow are what was left over at the bottom of the quilt after I finished quilting it.  There is one more piece the same size as one of those strips; that’s all that’s left.  Maybe I could incorporate it into a pillowcase for Warren one of these days.

It was well after dark when I headed out onto the back deck to collect the bird feeders, since we’re not rich enough to feed the entire neighborhood population of raccoons.

One was already out there, clearing out the base of one of the bird feeders.  They’re learning that if they want to partake of the smörgåsbord, they have to be quick these days.

I shined my flashlight on him.

He said, “Thanks; I was havin’ a bit o’ trouble seein’ what I was a-doin,’” and munched on.

At least, I think that’s what he said.  He certainly wasn’t in any hurry to amble his way off the deck!

Saturday, I went to visit Loren.  I found him napping in a big leather easy chair at the back side of the home.  I said, “Hi!” as I pulled a matching chair over beside his.

He opened his eyes, stared at me, and then beamed.  “Oh, I didn’t know you were coming!” he exclaimed.  “How in the world did you ever find me here?”

“Oh, I just wandered around until I spotted you!” I told him, making him laugh.

“But it’s amazing you knew where to look!” he said.

He used to say the same thing when I’d take a meal to his house each day.

Maybe part of the reason he’s always seemed content to be at Prairie Meadows is because, after all, he’d come to believe he was not in his own home when he really was, and often said he needed me to take him home.  At varying times, he thought his home was in Schuyler... in Colorado... or who knows where, since he couldn’t quite think of the name of the town.

I’m always glad when he’s in the nether regions of Prairie Meadows, as we can converse easier than when he’s parked amongst a dozen others in front of a blaring television set.  Ugh.

One of his favorite questions these days is, “How many children do you have now?”

I tell him, “Since we haven’t adopted any new ones, we still have nine.  And we have 29 grandchildren.” 

He chuckles, shaking his head in amazement.

As we later walked down the hallway toward his room, we paused a few times and looked out the windows into the interior courtyard, where pretty bushes and flowers have come to life.  Loren pointed out the roses.  There are a couple of fountains there, too, with watering bubbling from them.

There were a lot of vintage and antique cars traveling the roads that day.  I saw two stalled beside the road with their hoods up, poor blokes.

I saw more of last month’s tornado damage, and flooding near Arlington from last week’s deluge.

There’s a floating trail across Standing Bear Lake!  I’ll have to try it out someday soon.

As I drove home, I watched a cloud formation that kept slowly revolving directly in front of me.  Little tendrils of clouds kept floating down.  And then... a long finger dropped down!  Nothing about it on NOAA weather radio, as, whatever it was, it was quite weak.  Can you see it in this picture?

There’s road construction in Columbus.  I usually avoid it, but decided to see what progress was being made.  My decision definitely hindered my progress, but I did get to see this Laurel-and-Hardymobile.  😄

I got home about 6:30 p.m.  We had scalloped potatoes and ham for supper, and leftover cherry pie with Kemp’s Homemade Vanilla ice cream for dessert.

Below are some new iris blossoms that just opened.  The purples are always gone long before the other colors bloom.

Sunday morning dawned with the sun shining, but everything was still all wet outside from overnight showers.  I hung the bird feeders back outside and then made Georgia Peach coffee and blow-dried and curled my hair in preparation for church.

After our morning services, we took flowers out to the cemetery to put on family graves.

There’s one more family grave to put flowers on – my niece Susan’s.  It’s so hard to believe she’s gone.  There were many flowers around her grave, including easels with flowers attached to them, two pictures of her, and one photo with her whole family.  The pictures are sealed in plastic.

Her gravesite is right next to her brother David’s, and his had many flowers and his picture, too.  The family has decorated it so beautifully every Memorial Day since he was killed in 2002.

I’d forgotten my camera in the morning, so we went back and got some pictures after the evening service.  I enjoy walking through the cemetery and looking at headstones, though it’s sad to see gravestones for young people and children.

Main Street, Columbus, Nebraska

There’s a little cemetery, an old one, in the mountains of Colorado near Central City and Blackhawk.  We walked through it some years ago, and I noticed headstones of several young men who had died on the same day.

“I’ll bet it was a mining accident,” I said.

I looked up the date and the location – and sure enough, a mine had collapsed on that date.  Here are some astonishing statistics:  In the 28 years from 1884-1912, 42,898 coal miners were killed in mine accidents in the United States alone.  Of these, 1,708 were killed in Colorado mines.

Larry fixed his scrumptious waffles for lunch when we got home.

Hannah sent a screen grab (below) from a recent church service.  My sister Lura Kay is sharing a hymnbook with Gracelynn, her little great-granddaughter.  Lura Kay’s daughter-in-law Christine is on the left, and her granddaughter Michelle and Michell’s husband David are on the right.  You can just see their little Elouise’s head and hand behind the pew.

In the next pew back is Samuel, Maria’s brother, holding baby Lincoln.

When I went out to get the bird feeders that night, I interrupted the same cute raccoon.  He has a rusty tinge to the fur around his white underparts, a little different than the other local raccoons.

This morning soon after I hung the feeders back up, a Baltimore oriole landed at the feeding station.  He’d take a few bites of the suet, then warble away.  I couldn’t tell if it was a juvenile male or a female; but judging from the way it was singing, I suspected it was a juvenile male.  His head is still blotchy, and he has more yellow feathers than orange.

Oh! – there’s a male with the usual black head, and here comes a female, with a nearly all-yellow head.  So that pretty well clinches it:  the first one was a juvenile male.

Male Baltimore oriole
Photo from Project FeederWatch

Female Baltimore oriole
Photo from All About Birds

Juvenile male Baltimore oriole
Photo from All About Birds

Larry worked on this and that outside today, doing... uh, stuff.  I did the laundry, listened to Tornado HQ announce new thunderstorms, tornadoes, and marine warnings every few minutes (not in our area, for once).  Here, it was sunny with a few clouds, and windy.  With falling plaster.

There’s a spot in the kitchen ceiling where, if the rain is blowing hard enough from the northwest, it leaks periodically.  We really need to get the new metal roof put on!  Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I came out to eat breakfast, and found my end of the table littered with pieces of plaster ceiling. 

So this afternoon, I was sitting at the table typing away, when I heard, ‘Crackle!’

Knowing where loose pieces of ceiling could fall, I jerked my hand out of the way without even looking up – immediately before a piece of plaster CRASHED! onto the table right where my hand had been.  It wasn’t all that big of a piece, but it was heavy and sharp. 

Aarrgghh.  The ceiling is falling... and my oven is going on the blink – at least, the convection fan is.  I tried using it to bake a pie last Thursday, and it smelled like all the wiring was catching on fire.  I hastily switched from convection to regular ‘Bake’, and turned on the fan over the stove.  The smell dissipated, and the pie turned out good, though the crust was not browned as evenly as if the convection fan had’ve been working. 

Here’s my parents’ headstone.  The words at the bottom have become hard to see, but it’s the first verse of ‘Sweet By and By’.  I had to leave a word or two out in order for it to fit:  “There’s a land that is fairer than day, and by faith I can see it afar; for the Father waits over the way, to prepare us a dwelling place there!”

Here are some of the beautiful homes that were severely damaged at Bennington Lakes by the tornado of April 26.

At 5:30 p.m., Hannah texted me:  “Are you and Daddy doing anything or going anywhere tonight?  If not, would we be able to keep you company later?”

“Sure!” I replied.  “What are you doing for supper?”

Soon we had made plans to have supper together at 7:30.

“Look at me...” said Hannah, “‘Can I come over with my family and be sociable?  Oh, and could you feed us while we’re there?’”

“You offered to visit,” I laughed.  “I offered to feed everyone.  Sounds all right to me.”

Then I did a whole lot of flying around, getting the wooden caddies off the table, pulling the table away from the wall, setting the table, adding the extra chair, sweeping the floor, starting the venison in the Instant Pot, and getting the other food ready to cook as soon as it was time. 

I put three frozen packages of venison into the Instant Pot; that was as many as would fit.  I cooked mashed potatoes and gravy on the stove, along with Mediterranean vegetables.  It didn’t look like enough vegetables, so I poured in some strips of green and red peppers and onions.

There was also 12-grain bread and butter, and apple or peach parfaits for dessert.  An impromptu meal, but good, and filling. 

After we ate, Hannah played the piano and several of us sang.  We enjoy their family so much.

Now the dishes are all washed, and there’s one more load of clothes to put away.  Meanwhile, over on the east side of the country, and in the south, too, there are ongoing thunderstorms and tornadoes.

On the afternoon of Bobby and Hannah’s wedding, June 25, 2000,  a tornado went through just northeast of town.  We could see the rotation and part of the funnel cloud from our house.  

It was an EF-5 for part of its travels through the county, and it pulled corn crops straight out of the ground and took away a foot – a foot! – of topsoil.  As it passed over a deep ravine full of trees, it jerked many straight out of the ground and took them who knows where, breaking and twisting others level with the top of the ravine.  The stumps left behind were totally debarked, leaving them white as new-fallen snow.  It took away an entire farmstead, leaving the place practically debris-free.  There was absolutely nothing left.  You’d have thought someone had dozed the land completely clean.  Parts of tractors and combines and small pieces of the barns, sheds, and house were found many miles away.  We saw a long piece of corrugated metal from a silo wrapped so neatly and tightly around and around a big cottonwood that had lost all its branches, you’d have thought it was machined into place.

But! – the people who lived there survived, because they had a reinforced basement.  By the time the tornado had passed by, there was daylight over their heads, because all the rest of the house was gone.  But they had hung onto support beams in the basement, and they survived.  They said the pull was strong, and they couldn’t hear much of anything for days, from pressure on their eardrums.  There wasn’t much left of their belongings in the basement; it pretty well got emptied out.  Amazing that some of that debris flying violently around in winds over 200 mph had not struck those people.

Hannah’s and Dorcas’ longtime Canadian pen pals, sisters Sarah and Jennifer, had come to visit for the first time, and they were laughing and saying, “When the sirens go off, it’s the signal for Nebraskans to run outside with their cameras and take pictures of the sky!” and “Just wait ’til we tell our mother!” and “Shouldn’t we go inside now?!”

We assured them that the tornado was moving away from us and was going to miss the town.

By the time the wedding photographer arrived, the bad weather had passed, and he walked with Bobby and Hannah over to my mother’s house to take pictures with her.  She was too frail by then to attend the wedding.  See the photographer waving?  Mama had managed to step out on the porch, hoping to see Bobby and Hannah.  They surprised her by going in and having pictures taken with her.

When I went out onto the back deck to get the bird feeders a little while ago, there were two raccoons out there.  They are both big.  The biggest one decided quickly he’d better leave – and he headed in my direction, looking for the stairs, getting a bit mixed up in his anxiousness to hurry off.

A little earlier, I’d gone to the railing to dump some water from the pan of vegetables, and when it splooshed onto the ground one story down, there was a sudden scuffle-scurrying, and I knew I’d startled raccoons down there (or perhaps an opossum or two; it was too dark to see, and I hadn’t grabbed the flashlight).

Time to head for the feathers!  I hope to get started on the photo-scanning tomorrow.

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