Several members of our family have had
colds and flu the last couple of weeks, including Larry, who is finally
recovering (though I can’t imagine why, since he seems to be doing everything
under the sun to foil said recovery).
One day I was inquiring into the
welfare of Hester and her family, and she in turn inquired about her
father. “Hopefully he doesn’t get too
sick and stays out of the cold!!” she said.
“Him?! Stay out of the cold?!!” I retorted.
“Well, at least wear his heated coat!!”
she answered, laughing.
He got himself an excellent
battery-operated heated coat in November, using money Walkers gives their
workers each autumn specifically for purchasing warm clothing.
“Yes!” I agreed, then asked, “Did you
hear Teddy teasing him, because he was outside freezing to death trying to get
a pickup started – while his heated coat was in the house just a few yards
away?”
“Yes,” replied Hester. “Sometimes it’s hard to stop when you’re in
the middle of something!”
Teddy likes to drop Larry a pin to his
GPS and explain how close he is (they live a mile to our east), in case Larry needs
help with anything. But Larry often has
the same attitude my nephew Robert used to have when he was a wee little guy
about two years old: “Me do by self!”
Ever since I’ve known Larry, from the
time we were 13 years old, he’s always thinking, regarding any motorized object
on which he happens to be working, Just one more crank of the starter, and
this thing’ll START. He’s run down more
batteries with that, uh, ‘optimism’(?) than anyone else I know. (To be fair, he can also get more things
running than anyone else I know.)
He stayed home from church last week, but
went to work. He hardly ever
stays home from work.
I once asked him, “Aren’t you afraid
people will think you’re just playing hooky from church, when you go to work
but not to church?”
He replied, “I’ll just sneeze and
cough on them, if they act that way.”
Larry drives the boom truck or works
on vehicles in Walkers’ shop, and he’s mostly by himself; so, unlike at church,
there’s nobody around to share his germs with, the majority of the time.
Hester and I were then talking about
the time we visited Larry’s Great Uncle Frank and Great Aunt Ardis in the
little town of Porter, Minnesota, which was where his father was born. The population as of 2023 was 163. When we were there in 1998, it was 203.
Lyle was born on January 8, 1936,
during a blizzard. (Back then, the
population was 256.) His father went for
the doctor with horse and sleigh – and didn’t get back until after the baby had
arrived – and the baby only weighed a little over four pounds! His first tiny bed was a shoebox, and they
kept him in the kitchen where the stove was, to keep the baby warm.
Uncle Frank and Aunt Ardis lived in
the same house where they’d lived from the time they were married, or shortly
thereafter. It was nicely kept up,
though it would’ve doubtless felt kind of small, when all six of their children
(four girls and two boys) were home.
Aunt Ardis was a busy, energetic person.
She had built the fireplace and laid the hearth in their home, and done
plenty of other work around the house besides.
Some time during our visit, Uncle
Frank, along with Larry, Keith, and Teddy, went AWOL. Aunt Ardis, upon discovering this,
immediately guessed (correctly) that they’d gone in Frank’s pickup to their
cabin on the edge of town. She decided
to take the rest of us over there, and we all had to gird up our loins and run
like crazy to stay up with her, jump in the car, and not get run over as she
backed that big car out of the skinny garage and went bombing over to the other
side of the little town.
Here’s the little red house where Lyle
was born, with Larry’s brother Kenny and parents Norma and Lyle standing in
front of it. Aunt Ardis took the picture
in 1979 or 1980. That house was red when
Lyle was born – and it was still red when we saw it in 1998, though it had been
turned into a garage.
When we left Uncle Frank and Aunt
Ardis’ house, Hannah was crocheting – and all of a sudden she thought one of
her brothers was pulling a prank on her, pulling and unraveling her yarn. “Hey!” she protested.
I looked back, saw her desperately
hanging onto her yarn while it unraveled despite her efforts – and I saw that the
other end of the yarn went right out the door.
She’d dropped the skein when she climbed in!
“Stop, quick!” I cried, and Larry hit
the brakes. “Hannah’s yarn is caught on
something!”
Larry got out and went to get it. He found the yarn all wrapped around the trailer
axle, with the skein bouncing along behind on the graveled street. Gathering it up the best he could, he brought
it back to the truck.
“Ooooohhh,” moaned Hannah.
“It’s all right,” I assured her. “Just cut off whatever yarn is ruined, and
dust off the rest. When you’re done with
the crocheting, we’ll wash it carefully by hand.”
So that’s what she did, splicing the
yarn together and carrying on with it.
I don’t remember what she was making,
but it was surely a baby gift of one sort or another, as no less than eight
babies were born that year to friends of ours, and one of those babies was
Hannah’s first cousin twice removed.
Here she is, sitting on Uncle Frank
and Aunt Ardis’ couch crocheting. The
wayward skein is there on the right.
Yes, of course, it was white. Did
you expect anything else?!
Okay, I just sent the picture to
Hannah and asked what she was making, and here’s her answer:
“It was an Afghan with roses and squares. I took it to Dale and Christine’s craft sale. They bought it, and I used the money for a
leather jacket for Bobby’s Christmas present.”
Dale and Christine are our son-in-law Kurt’s paternal grandparents.
That was the trip where we went
farther north to Duluth, Minnesota, to get some vehicle parts. Then we crossed the John A. Blatnik Bridge over
the Saint Louis River and Bay, which flows into Lake Superior, bringing us into
Superior, Wisconsin. We stayed the night
in a tent in Pattison State Park, about 13 miles south of Superior, Wisconsin,
which is on the west shore of Lake Superior.
We were close enough to Big Manitou
Falls that we could hear the sound of the rushing water all night long. At 165 feet, Big Manitou Falls is Wisconsin’s
tallest waterfall.
In the morning, I thought Lydia had
mosquito bites all over her – but they kept getting worse, and more swollen,
until she was just one raised hive all over, and I knew she was having an
allergic reaction to the antibiotics she was on. I gave her water to drink, hoping to dilute
the medication.
By the time we loaded everything into
the pickup and headed south, her voice was starting to sound funny, because her
throat was swelling. I kept trying to
give her water, but her throat was so swollen, part of the water was trickling
down her chin. Scared me to death.
Heading back west toward Minnesota
I35, we got into an area where we had cell service, and I called our doctor,
using that first big honkin’ car phone of Larry’s. He told me to keep giving Lydia water, get
some antihistamine for her as soon as we could, and to continue on to an emergency
room as quickly as possible. He no
sooner said that than we lost connection.
We were way up there in the boonies,
far between towns, driving the six-door pickup with a big, loaded slant trailer
on behind – and Larry was taking that rig up and down the hills of Minnesota at
100 miles per hour, trying to get to the next town and emergency room in time.
Then we saw a convenience store up
ahead, so we went rushing in, got some liquid Benadryl, and managed to get some
down her.
A short while later, we found an emergency
room at a hospital in a little town; but by then the water and the Benadryl
were lessening the allergic reaction, Lydia’s voice was sounding normal again,
and we decided she was going to be all right.
No more Amoxicillin for her, EVER. Whew.
Tuesday morning, I filled my three
new bird feeders with black oil sunflower seeds and hung them, taking down some
of the old dilapidated feeders. I left
some of the old-but-still-nice feeders up, but didn’t fill them, partly because
it was only 7° with a windchill of -13° and my fingers were getting too cold to
work the carabiners from which the feeders hung, and partly because I figured the
birds would more likely use the new feeders if the old ones were empty.
It wasn’t long before the birds were
eating from all three of the new feeders. They are called ‘squirrel-proof’, though they
really ought to be called ‘somewhat squirrel-resistant’. These
two hold five pounds of seed each.
The first one (above) is by Perky Pet
Squirrel-Be-Gone, and is very nicely made. The second one is pretty, and the perches
adjust for weight activation – and I no sooner wrote that than I looked out the
window and discovered that the squirrels had found the new feeders, and the
closing perches weren’t bothering them in the slightest, since I hadn’t made a
place to hang that feeder far enough above the deck railing.
Okay, grab the camera... the big
lens...
If I have to feed the squirrels, at
least I can get cute pictures of them!
Here’s a young squirrel sneaking
closer, coming stealthily along the railing, just in case that thing is a Scary
Squirrel Trap.
It didn’t take long before he was
contentedly having himself a feast. Only
one or two times of putting his paw on the perch and having the whole thing go
closed on him, and he knew not to do that again.
I took a bunch of pictures, then
bundled up and went out to hang that feeder farther away from the railing. I filled the nyjer seed feeder while I was at
it.
I cleaned the window through which I
was taking pictures, as it was too cold to just haul off and open it, as
I often do in the summertime, but it kept icing up on the outside and getting
moisture on the inside. It started
snowing again.
The little red feeder is nicely made,
but much smaller than expected. I wouldn’t
have paid as much as I did for it, had I known how small it is.
I headed back upstairs to continue
working on the ‘Mane Event’ quilt for Josiah. I was allllllmost done putting the top
together.
A while later, I went downstairs to refill my
coffee mug. I opened the microwave – and
found a bowl of Swedish
meatballs that Larry had evidently warmed up for himself and then forgotten
when he stopped by at lunchtime. Would
he wonder why he was hungry, halfway through the afternoon?
He would. I texted to tell him what I’d found, and he
responded, “No wonder I’m still hungry. 🤨”
Later that afternoon, I paused to take
a few more pictures of the birds. After
a few shots, I thought, Those finches sure are striped darkly... and
then... those finches have yellow feathers under their tails and wings! –
and then one flipped upside down, the better to get at a wayward seed, and I
knew, Yep, the Pine siskins are back!
Pine siskins are in the finch family,
and even smaller than the little goldfinches. We only see them when they migrate from the
north in the winter, and sporadically at that, as they don’t stick with any one
migration pattern, but follow the paths of the most abundant of the seeds they
prefer. I don’t think they were here last year. They nest in the northern Canadian provinces,
the Northwest Territories, and a good chunk of southern Alaska. Here’s a look at those yellow feathers:
The other two birds on the feeder are
American goldfinches in their winter plumage.
Pine siskins get
through cold nights by ramping up their metabolic rate, typically 40% higher
than a ‘normal’ songbird of their size. When
temperatures plunge as low as -94°F, they can accelerate that rate up to five
times normal for several hours. They
also put on half again as much winter fat as their Common redpoll and American goldfinch
relatives.
From All About
Birds: Pine siskins can temporarily
store seeds totaling as much as 10% of their body mass in their crops. The energy in that amount of food could get
them through five or six nighttime hours of subzero temperatures. Every couple of years, Pine siskins make
unpredictable movements called irruptions into southern and eastern North
America. Though they’re erratic, these
movements may not be entirely random. Banding data suggests that some birds may fly
west-east across the continent while others move north-south. The oldest recorded Pine siskin was at least
9 years, 2 months old when it was found in North Carolina in 2016. It had been banded in Minnesota in 2008.
By midnight, the
Mane Event quilt top for grandson Josiah was complete, and I had pieced the
middle of the backing; that’s all the navy cowboy print I have. The quilt
top measures 96” x 101”. The center section of the backing measures 32” x
42 ½”. The skinny light blue striped strips are from some of Larry’s retired
work shirts. Amazingly enough, several of the backs of them had usable
fabric (meaning, neither stained nor ripped nor weld-burned)!
Wednesday,
we got a few inches of snow. At noon, it
was 6°, with a windchill of -12°. By the
time I got home from church that evening, it was 0°, with a windchill of -18°.
After a late supper, I finished putting
together the backing for the Mane Event, and also the backing for Levi’s Heaven & Nature Sing – except 6
yards wasn’t quite enough fabric for Heaven & Nature Sing. I ordered more; it’ll be here soon.
Thursday
was a sunny day, but a cold 10°. The
first thing on the agenda was to make a pillowcase for Grant to go with the
quilt I gave him for Christmas, ‘Consider the Heavens’. That didn’t take long.
Next, I loaded Josiah’s ‘Mane Event’ quilt on
my quilting frame and started quilting it.
That afternoon, Larry headed to Pocatello,
Idaho, to pick up a flatbed trailer he’d bought online. He planned to then continue on to North Dakota
to get some metal roofing he had purchased.
He thought he could get to Pocatello, usually a 14-hour drive, by the
next morning.
The weather did not cooperate.
He lost time on I80 through Wyoming
because of 55-65 mph straight winds, with higher gusts, and it was nighttime. That route is notoriously bad in the
wintertime.
Early Friday afternoon, I saw news of a fiery
crash in the westbound tunnel on I80 at Green River, Wyoming. It happened at around 11:30 a.m. local
time. We would later learn that three
people lost their lives, and five were seriously hurt. The accident involved 26 vehicles, including
cars and semis.
I looked at Larry’s Google Activity, and was
relieved to see that he was right then using Google Maps to find the place in
Idaho where the flatbed trailer was located.
Later, in calculating his route and determining where he might have been
at what time, Larry recalled that he had stopped for diesel in Green
River. He probably went through the
tunnel mere minutes before that accident occurred.
He met our son Keith, his wife Korrine,
and Korrine’s youngest daughter Kenzie at Texas Roadhouse in Pocatello. They live in Layton, Utah, a suburb of Salt
Lake City. Korrine’s mother and sister
live in Pocatello. It’s a two-hour drive
from Layton to Pocatello.
There was snow in Idaho, and some
places got up to a foot. After
collecting the flatbed trailer, Larry continued north to Montana and then east
toward Fullerton, North Dakota, another 14 ½-hour drive. He had planned to meet the person from whom
he had bought the roofing Saturday morning; but seeing that that wasn’t
going to happen, he rescheduled for 5:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
That didn’t happen, either.
First, the roads were ice- and
snow-covered. Second, there was the
little matter of the necessity of sleep. He has a tendency to calculate his mileage
when he’s feeling all chipper and bright-eyed, and cannot fathom that he might
get sleepy at some point in the excursion.
At least there were a few
moments of sunshine. This was in Montana, north of Yellowstone.
That evening, I went to Caleb and
Maria’s for little Maisie’s first birthday party.
The fire in the tunnel at Green River,
Wyoming, burned for over nine hours before firefighters could get it out. One truck was hauling electrical
transformers, and they were blowing up, one after another. One trucker had to kick his front
windshield out in order to escape. Black smoke poured
from both ends of the tunnel all day long.
Saturday, one of my quilting friends was
telling about attending a quilt show with her husband. As she stood next to him looking at one of
the quilts on display, she said, “Honey, are you ready to move on to the next
quilt?” and began to take his arm – except it was not her husband. 😄 In her defense, though, the other man did have
on the very same coat her husband was wearing!
That story reminded me of this one:
Some years ago, I worked as an
Administrative Assistant in an office that procured right-of-way in rural areas
of our state. My coworker LaVonne and I
often took phoned-in reports from field reps. LaVonne also talked with some frequency to her
husband on the phone (no worries; she was a good worker, and the office was
friendly to our families). LaVonne
invariably ended her conversations with her husband with, “Love ya!”
(Now you know exactly where this story
is going, don’t you. 😅)
So there she was one morning, typing
up a notice and, at the same time, talking on the phone to field rep Tommy.
“Okay, will do,” she finished up the
call. “Love ya!!” ---- and then
immediately, eyes wide in horror, “AAAAAAAAA!!!” and she slammed down
the receiver, THTHWWAACKCK.
A moment of dead silence, and then she
scurried pell-mell over to my desk. “Did
you hear what I just did?!!!” she hissed. “I said ‘Love ya’ to Tommy!”
I was trying valiantly not to laugh. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I assured her. “You gave him a brain concussion immediately
thereafter; he’ll never remember it.”
And then we both laughed like idiots.
Epilogue: The next time Tommy came into the office,
LaVonne wouldn’t so much as look at him, much less talk with him.
I spent the majority of the day
quilting, and was able to finish the first row, roll the quilt forward to the
second row, and do a small amount of quilting there before quitting for the night.
Saturday afternoon at 1:30 p.m., it was
13° here with a windchill of -15°; and it was 1° in North Dakota where Larry
was traveling, with a windchill of -17°.
This old farmhouse is drafty and cold.
Taking a short break from quilting, I
went downstairs and peeled myself a yummy Fuji apple – and it was so cold, it
made my hands hurt. I had the big
EdenPURE spare heater running on high upstairs in my quilting studio ever since
noon, but it just never got quite warm enough. I had on two sweaters, leggings, thick socks
and Sherpa slippers, and I was cold. Brrrr...
I added one more sweater and a thick,
soft scarf, drank some hot coffee and simultaneously warmed my hands on the
mug, and was soon nice and warm.
This just scrolled through on my
screensaver. That’s Victoria fishing at
a lake near Buena Vista, Colorado, back in... hmmm... 2011, maybe.
It snowed most of the day, and the
wind blew at 35-45 mph with higher gusts.
We were issued a high-wind warning, a winter weather advisory, and an
extreme cold warning.
Looking out my north-facing window
from my upstairs sewing room, I watched the wind whipping snow around some
evergreens a little distance up the hill, creating fancy, jagged drifts, and
sometimes snow whirlwinds.
The wind was supposed to die down
around 6:00 p.m., right at sunset, and I considered bundling up and going out
to clear the front walk and the windshield and windows on the Mercedes so I could
walk out there without too much trouble the next morning when it was time to go
to church.
But the wind didn’t die down much at
all. At 6:00 p.m., the temperature was
9° with a windchill of -26°. I not only
didn’t want to shovel snow in the dark, I also didn’t want to clear sidewalk
and windshield off just to have the wind blow all the snow back again. I decided I would just wear my warmest boots
out to the vehicle the next morning and carry my good shoes. I could clean off the windshield when I got
out there.
The plan worked out fine the next
morning (other than the wind messing up my Sunday hairdo) – until I got to the
driveway and discovered that the Mercedes was partially encircled by a drift 2
½ feet high.
I waded through it, glad I’d tied my
boots tightly at the top. I put Bible,
purse, and good shoes in the car, grabbed the scraper/brush, and went to deal
with the windshield.
Because of the extreme cold, the snow
was light and fluffy. I brushed it off
the driver’s side with no problem, waded around to the other side, swiped at it
– and the wind gusted and blew the whole works ka-WHOOSH right into my face and
all over the front of me. My wool coat,
the fur around my hood, my fleece scarf, and my fleece-and-leather gloves were
totally covered with snow.
Texans know (or should know)
not to spit into the wind.
Nebraskans should know not to stand downwind of a heap o’ snow they’re
brushing off of something. And theoretically, I do
know that.
Yet there I stood, making like the
Abominable Snowman. Or maybe just
Frosty.
Stepping to the side, I got the rest
of the snow off the windshield, swiped somewhat uselessly at my coat, and
clambered into the car. I scooted the
seat back as far as it would go, brushed off more snow, and traded boots for
shoes. Then I scooted the seat back into
place and headed for church, feeling somewhat the worse for wear.
 |
| I80 in Nebraska today |
Larry, meanwhile, had again
rescheduled his meeting with the man who had the roofing for 3:00 p.m.; and
this time, he managed to get there at the scheduled time. The roofing was in a big heated building, and
the man let Larry drive straight in while he loaded the metal onto Larry’s
trailer. Larry appreciated that, because
it was cold, cold there.
Leaving Fullerton, North Dakota, at
3:30 p.m., he drove an hour south to Aberdeen, South Dakota, where he stopped
to sleep for an hour or so.
Our oldest granddaughter Joanna sang a
duet with her father Bobby at church last night. The song was I Want to See My Savior First
of All. I love that song, and I love
to hear Bobby and Joanna sing together.
Home again after the service, I had a
bowl of Campbells’ Chicken Sausage Gumbo. We’re out of crackers, and that stuff is hot
and spicy by itself; so I had a slice of Nature Crafted 12-grain bread with it
and a little chunk of Mozzarella cheese, and that yummy Tropicana orange juice
that’s not from concentrate. For
dessert, I had peach Oui yogurt.
Larry finally got home at around 2:30
a.m., feeling a whole lot more ‘worse for wear’ than I had. Not only was he exhausted, as he only had about seven
hours of sleep in total since he got up Thursday morning, but he’d been
subjected to the strong odor of antifreeze most of the way home. This, because the hood was bumping on the
radiator cap, breaking the seal; and the area around the gear shift was not
sealed well, either, and was letting that odor right into the cab. Larry got all that fixed this evening, and it
was an easy enough job, he wished he would’ve done it before he left on this
excursion. Did I mention that this was his
1989 red and white Chevy pickup?
He rebuilt this pickup in the early
1990s and sold it in 1994, I think. He
discovered it somewhere in poor shape in about 2015, maybe, rebought it, and is
gradually getting it all fixed up again.
At 4:00 this afternoon, it was snowing hard. The temperature was -2°, with a windchill of
-27°. Larry didn’t go to work today, but
this evening he went to help a coworker push snow.
Here’s a little Downy woodpecker
playing peek-a-boo.
“I really don’t get near as many birds
as you!” said Hester when I was showing her some of my pictures. “Most of the ones around here are just the
little brown and grey ones.” Then she
added, “I do sometimes realize that the reason for no birds is because there’s
a hawk eating one in the tree.” 😬
Yikes. Back in the summertime, I saw a red-tailed
hawk swoop through the front yard and grab a Eurasian collared dove right off
of Larry’s scissor lift.
“Remember the people who went on a
bird safari to Africa,” I asked Hester, “and their guide kept pointing out
Elbybees, and they couldn’t seem to see the ones he was pointing at to save
their lives? Back at their hotel, they
mentioned to their waiter that they had yet to see the Elbybee. The man started laughing and told them the
guide was saying ‘LBB’ – Little Brown Bird, which was his name for any small
brown bird he didn’t know the name of.”
“Hmmph. Just
look at that varmint, depleting our sunflower seeds.”
By 5:30 p.m., it was -4°, and felt like
-33°. And now it is 2:35 a.m., -10°,
windchill, -31°.
Time to jump into bed and pull up the covers!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
