She Fooled Me

Freedom fooled me today.  I go out to the chicken coop every day and check on feed and water.  I opened the door and saw Phoebe standing there so I started looking for Freedom. Phoebe is the chicken that usually freaks out when she sees me.  She peeks around the chicken house whenever I am in their yard so I was surprised she just stood there looking at me. Freedom wasn’t in the house.  I searched all around the yard and then back in the house and could not find her.  I was beginning to think a hawk had gotten her.  I went back into the house and suddenly, I realized it wasn’t Phoebe standing there as nice as you please, but Freedom. She looked just like Phoebe.  They can play the twin trick on me now since they are identical.  Poly-visol has done wonders for that bird.

Also today I heard a lot of cackling coming from the yard and thought maybe, just maybe there would be an egg.  I looked everywhere, but none yet.  Really, I am getting obsessed in finding that first egg.  Considering it will cost about one hundred dollars, it should really be a delicious egg.   Believe me there will be flags flying, fireworks and a parade when I find my very first organic egg.  That’s all for today. Bye.

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 Headless chicken grows in head backwards.

Through the Garden Gate

Those who know me well, know I love to garden.  In the Summer if you are trying to get hold of me, you will find me outside in the garden, weeding, planting, transplanting, watering or mowing.  The garden is something that if you allow  to go for a few days, will get away from you. If I never did anything in my back garden ever again, we would soon have a forest of Redbud and Maple trees as the seedlings are growing all over and have to be pulled out of the flower beds.  My garden would soon become like in the book, The Secret Garden, a mass of overgrown flowers, weeds and trees.  Then a little English girl from India would have to discover it and find two boys to help her clean it up and make it a beautiful garden again.

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As it is, for right now, the garden is under control, but tomorrow will be another day of weeding, cutting small trees and mulching.  I love it.  Hope your garden is growing well even if it is only the garden in your mind.  Bye.

One Flew Over the Chicken Coop or Getting Your Wings Clipped

  My dad raised thousands of chickens in his time.  He ordered about one hundred chickens every year for as long as I can remember and every year, for some reason, he had to order one hundred more.  Probably because we had chicken for dinner almost every Sunday and some of the chickens made the mistake of getting into the lane where the pigs were and were a tasty treat for the pigs.

  I guess as a kid you don’t pay a lot of attention to things that are happening around you sometimes so I didn’t realize chickens were good flyers.

  Yesterday I let the chickens out as usual.  I opened their little door and they all marched down their little ladder and began to peck in the dirt.  I locked their gate and began to go back to the house when I saw Beatrice, or was it Dorcas, strutting around in the yard.  The dogs noticed her also and began to  chase her and, as what has become common around here, I began to scream at the dogs and tried to get the chicken from them. They had her down once and I screamed so loudly, Belle backed off and Bonnie looked stunned.  By that time David, my knight in shining armor had arrived to grab the dogs’ collars.  Beatrice, or was it Dorcas, strutted on as if nothing had happened.  I managed to catch her and get her back into the pen.

  “We are going to have to clip their wings,” David said.  Now I have never clipped a chicken’s wings and I don’t remember ever seeing my daddy do so.  It sounded cruel and inhumane.  So I got on the net and saw many sites where they showed you how to clip chickens wings.  If you clipped them too short, they could bleed badly.  I got a sick feeling in my stomach, but I knew we were going to have to do it.

   I got a pair of sharp scissors and David and I went out to the pen.  Three of the chickens were in the house and easy to catch. The other two were a little harder. We didn’t clip Freedom’s wings because she uses them to balance herself on her bad leg.  You have to be careful what wings you clip and you only clip one wing.  This imbalances the chicken so it cannot fly.  I sat in a lawn chair and held the chicken and spread its wing and David did the cutting. It’s really like clipping your nails.  Just don’t get too close to the blood veins or the chicken will bleed badly.  The chickens looked a little startled and fluffed themselves up.  I saw Beatrice, or is it Dorcas, later trying to fly and she couldn’t get off the ground.  Good.  Mission accomplished.  One more thing I don’t have to worry about.

  A few days ago we were watching the chickens and David said, “That one chicken looks more like a rooster.”  Now when we bought the chicks at Rural King we thought we bought all pullets.  Suddenly the chicken made a roostery sound.  Oh, oh.  Hope it’s just a girl chicken trying to sound masculine because we can’t keep a rooster. Too noisy.  If he/she is a rooster he/she will have to find a new home.  We will just have to wait and see. Still no eggs yet, but it should be happening soon. 

  Here’s to runaway chicks and clipping their wings.  Bye

Grandma’s Camp 2013 or How to Lose Your Mind in Three Short Days

Okay, that last bit on my post was just my crazy sense of humor.  This has been such a busy, hectic, fun, crazy few days.  It started Saturday with a bunch of kids coming to swim in our pool.  They all had a lot of fun.  On Father’s Day, we had some of our children and grandchildren here for swimming and a cook out.  Then three of the boys stayed for another three days.  All of them are under seven.  Need I say more.

We tried to pack a month’s worth of activity in three short days.  Monday we took the boys to the Croc store to buy them all Crocs so that we wouldn’t be fastening sandals all the time and they could get them dirty and we could just wash them off. We took them to the park to play.  We took them to the army museum near our home where they learned just how many of the army vehicles their Grandpa had driven during his thirty-six years in the Army National Guard.  Then we took them to a lake where they bothered an old man fishing so we didn’t stay long there.  They painted birdhouses that their Grandpa had built for them.  They actually got more paint on the birdhouses than on themselves or me.  They helped with the chickens.  They swam for hours.  We took them to McDonald’s where I haven’t eaten in years.  Had forgotten how good a Big Mac is. They sat in the hot tub.  They played Dizzios.  I took them for a two mile walk.  They picked cherries to feed the chickens.  They swam some more.  They watched a movie(only because Grandpa and Grandma needed a break.)  That was just Sunday evening and Monday.

On Tuesday we took them to a really great place in our town called the Kid’s Commons.  It’s a place where kids can do all kinds of things like make giant bubbles, do experiments, play games, build things, crawl in and out of secret places, and get flushed down a giant toilet.  Yes, a giant toilet, but it is actually a slide.  It is advertised as the world’s largest toilet.  Our town needs to be known for something.  The boys loved it.  We spent almost three hours there before lunch.  Then we took them to another great place in our town called Zaharako’s, a wonderful old fashioned ice cream parlor.  It has a calliope they play every so often and a wonderful old time soda fountain.  We almost lost this wonderful place before a man in our town decided to return it to its former glory.  The calliope had been stored somewhere in California and he found it and brought it back and had it installed once again in the parlor.  The boys had root beer floats and ice cream with a cherry on top after their lunch.  By that time, David remembered we were parked in a three hour parking place and we had been gone for four and a half hours.  We walked to the car fearing we would find a parking ticket on our windshield, but we were lucky we did not have one.   Whew.   Then we came home and we tried to get the boys to rest for a while, but no one slept.  We had had a major meltdown Monday evening because all the boys were so tired and we didn’t want it to happen again.  But all was well for the rest of the day.  The boys spent hours in the pool.  I think they must have jumped into the pool a few hundred times and our two youngest started to learn to swim.  A great difference from last year when our youngest grandson was afraid of the water.

Today at seven o’clock, the older grandson and me were in the hot tub.  Soon the others joined us.  Then I went back to take water to the chickens and Bonnie got in the pen and grabbed my lame chicken, Freedom. I got her away from her and then she grabbed her again.  All the time I was screaming for David to come help me as Bonnie is a very big, strong dog.  We finally got her out of the pen and I went to check on Freedom and she was none the worse for wear.  The second time in a week she has been attacked by our dogs.  Gonna have to be more careful going in and out of the pen.  Freedom is one tough little chicken.

We took the boys to the steakhouse for lunch and then drove the two youngest home where the boys played with their pygmy goats and looked at their chickens.  We then took the last grandson to a friend’s house. Driving home David said, “Do you hear that?”  I said, “What?” and he said, “The quiet.”  Yes, I heard it and it kind of made me sad.  I miss them already, but the quiet is nice.

Here are a few pictures from Grandma’s Camp.

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Cousins swimming.

 

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Hot tubbing.

 

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Peter Pan flying.

 

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The soda fountain. Even the cash registers look old but are computerized.  The young man at the register goes to our church.  The red head in the forefront is one of our grandboys.

 

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The old calliope at Zaharako’s.

 

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Tossing basketballs at the Kid’s Commons.

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One of the many places to crawl through.

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Making a giant bubble around them.

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Getting “flushed.”

 

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Proudly displaying the bird houses they had painted.

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Grandpa with his young men. Love this picture.

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Love these guys.

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This is how we all feel after three full days of fun and frolic.  Wonderful memories.  Sweet Dreams.  Bye.

Textiles and Tidbits

I have always liked working with textiles.  Even when I was a little girl I wanted to sew.  I made my first doll out of an old sock. I drew a face on her and was quite proud of her.  I still have her somewhere.  If I can find her, I will show her one day.

My mother sewed a lot while I was growing up and she taught me to sew. I also took home economics in school for six years and learned to make drapes, clothes and other things.  Going to home ec. class was really fun for me because I got to do what I loved doing.  Some of the girls didn’t even know how to thread a sewing machine.  I remember one poor girl who almost had a dress she was making completed and she accidentally cut a hole in it right in front.  My home ec teacher thought of a way to cover the hole with a fabric belt.  It worked perfectly.  I have had many holes happen when I have been sewing and because of that teacher, I learned you can figure out how to cover your mistake.  In fact, something happened like that quite recently with something I was sewing and I covered the hole and no one will ever know.

A new fabric line came out recently called Bake Sale by Lori Holt and I fell in love with it.  I could think of so many things to make with it.  I am making door prizes for a family reunion and anniversary party we are having in July.  I can’t show what I am making, but I can show some of the fabric I am using.

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I also took these two fabrics……DSCN6077

 

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and made this.

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Remember these?  These cute little balls of fluff?  They are getting so big now and I look every day to see if they have laid any eggs yet.  They sure do eat a lot and peck and scratch all day in their yard looking for fat bugs and worms.  I throw them some fresh mint out of the garden sometimes or anything with leaves and they fall on it like it was sirloin steak.   I have one barred rock who races me to the gate every time I leave their yard trying to get out.  She is very sly about doing it.  She can be on the other side of the yard and as soon as I open the gate, she is right at my heels.  I haven’t told you about Belle, our chocolate lab following me into the pen and pouncing on the lame chicken I have been babying for months.  Thankfully, I got her out before she did any damage to her, but I thought for sure I was going to have one dead chicken.

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This is what Freedom looked like a few weeks ago. she couldn’t move unless I moved her and I had to bring her food and water to her.  After weeks of Poly Vi Sol, a couple of Epsom salt soaks and vitamins, she can now stand up from time to time and can get to the food and water all by herself. Now I am going to tell you something some of you will think is crazy, but there is a song I learned in Sunday school about Peter healing a lame man.  The song goes something like “Gold and silver I’ve none, but what I have give I you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk. He went walking and leaping and praising God.  Walking and leaping and praising God.  In the name of Jesus Christ, of Nazareth stand up and walk!”  I sang that song to Freedom every day and one day when I got to the part where I sang “in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk,”  Freedom stood right up on both feet.  I still sing it to her and I think she understands.  I don’t know if she will ever be able to walk well or be able to fly up and sit on a roost, but right now she can get around and is healthy and happy and none of the other chickens dare peck her because I poke them on the beak when they try.  I just know she will be the first one to lay an egg.

 

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Another project I almost have completed is a barn quilt for the front of our house. This is not it.  Last fall when we went to Tennessee to look for barn quilts I decided then I wanted one on our house.  When David and I drove to Chillicothe Ohio a week ago, we saw more barn quilts along the Ohio River than we did in all of Tennessee.   I will show you our barn quilt when David gets it hung, hopefully this week.

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Still getting rhubarb from the garden and instead of a pie, I made these rhubarb tarts. David ate all but one of them.

Here’s to lovely fabric, barn quilts and lame chickens who still love life.  Bye.

 

 

Weekend Update or Dave’s and Kate’s Excellent Adventure

Before I talk about what happened this weekend I want to show you what I have been doing.  I decided the floor in my shop needed to be repainted so with David’s help I took just about everything out of my shop.  I scrubbed the floor and painted it a dark green.  We then cleaned all the things we had taken out and returned them to the shop.  I love the look of the shop now.  So clean and crisp.

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We had this old wash stand that was all rusted and bent and needed some tender loving care.  I sanded it and painted it and then polyurethaned it and now it sits in my shop to hold things.  I love the way it looks now.

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While painting the floor I painted around this picture two of my grandchildren had painted  years ago.  I just could not cover it.

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I also painted around these handprints of one of my grandsons.  This year my three youngest grandsons will be adding their artwork to my floor.

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Now when I am in my shop I can look at my newly painted ceiling and my newly painted floor and sigh with relief all the work is done.  Now all I have to do is sew and quilt and that’s all right by me. Wait, I still have to paint the walls.  But that can wait a while.

Now for our weekend.    My youngest niece graduated this year from high school and Saturday was her open house.  I was looking forward to going and seeing her and my brother and sister-in-law and my other niece who is a veterinarian.  David and I packed up the car for the weekend and away we drove to Ohio.  We go to their house by way of Cincinnati and then it’s a straight shot to Chillicothe.  When we got out of Cincinnati we were driving along the Ohio River.  I said to David, “I don’t remember driving by the Ohio River to get to David’s house.” My brother’s name is also David so don’t get confused.  David reassured me he knew where he was going and we drove along enjoying the beautiful scenery.  We had planned to get there in mid afternoon, but when it got to be three o’clock I said again, “Are you sure we are on the right road?  Nothing looks familiar.”  We had been to Chillicothe several times in the past.  I knew my brother did not live by the Ohio River.  Finally, David stopped at a convenience store and asked this girl how far to Chillicothe and she told him about an hour up the road.  So we drove another hour and got to Portsmouth, Ohio and then I said, “I don’t think we are on the right road.”  “I’ll buy a map at the next service station,” David said.  And he did.

When David came out of the service station carrying the map he said something to me I do not hear very often.  “I was wrong.  You’re right. We are on the wrong road.”  By that time it was about five o’clock and we still had another hour’s drive north to Chillicothe.  The open house would be over before we would get there and I did not have my brother’s phone number with me.  Finally I remembered I had my sister’s phone number memorized and I called her to call my brother to tell him we were lost and that is why we were late.  Then we got to Chillicothe and the road David took to their house had a detour and we didn’t know where to go.  Then my brother called our cell phone and told us where we were and in a few minutes after driving for six hours, we got to my brother’s house.

By that time we were tired, hungry and out of sorts, but we got some food and spent the evening talking about growing up on the farm and all was well.

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Then my niece opened the gift we had for her.  A quilt I had made.  She is named after my mother and there were a few pieces of fabric that my mother had had in her stash in the quilt.  I can’t believe she is grown. We didn’t get to see her very often as they live so far away and now she is grown and going off to college in the fall.

We spent the night in a motel and the next morning we got up and started for home.  Now we took the road we should have been on the day before and everything looked familiar.  We passed a place called the Secret Garden where they sold all kinds of garden sculptures and garden art.  They had little buildings all over with things for sell for the garden and a beautiful garden you could walk through.  About that time the batteries in my camera gave out so I only got this picture.

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A cute birdhouse that David is going to try to replicate.  Wonder where I could find some of these tiny garden tools?

As we drove along we realized we were near a town that had lots of antique stores and little shops, Waynesville, Ohio, so we stopped in for lunch and walked around looking at all the wares that were for sale.  I found an old garden gate that would look good in my garden and we bought it.  Don’t have a picture though  Our last stop was in Shelbyville, Indiana where there is a Cow Palace where we always buy ice cream when we are passing through.  I got Blue Moon and Butter Pecan in a waffle cone and it was so good.

We finally got home late Sunday afternoon and I ran to check on the chickens.  This was the first time I had ever been away from them overnight and we had left their little door open so they could go in and out.  I was hoping I wouldn’t just find feathers laying around.  They were all just fine and didn’t even miss me.

It was fun to get away.  I love weekends like this and I hope we have a few more this summer.

Here’s to husbands who don’t like to ask for directions, nieces, and enjoying the scenery anyway. Bye

 

Scrappy the Raccoon

  It was a gentle early Summer day in the forest.  Scrappy Raccoon was playing along the side of the road with his brothers and sisters.  Scrappy was called Scrappy because he was known to get into little fights with others at the least provocation.  Scrappy’s mother had scolded him so many times about his temper and how badly it made her feel to know he would fight with anyone.   What would happen this Summer day would make Scrappy’s mother think differently about her fighting youngster.

  Mrs. Craig, who lived across the road, decided that afternoon to take her dog, Belle, for a walk.  They walked across the road and since there were no cars on this road on the weekend, Mrs. Craig removed the leash from Belle and allowed her to run free.  Belle loved running and sniffing in the woods, but this day she smelled a different smell than any she had ever smelled before.  She snorted and snuffed and suddenly she came upon a strange creature.  Something she had never seen before.  It was Scrappy and he had not seen the big brown dog coming along in the weeds.  The dog was upon him before he could make a run for it.  Belle began barking and Scrappy fluffed up his fur to make himself look bigger and began to hiss. 

  Around and around Scrappy Belle circled, barking and snapping at him all the time.  Scrappy hissed and lunged at the big brown dog, baring his sharp little teeth, but it kept barking at him and trying to bite him.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Craig was screaming and yelling at Belle to stop.  She grabbed Belle’s collar and Belle jerked and pulled until she got herself free of the collar and went back to attacking the little raccoon.  Mrs. Craig grabbed Belle’s tail and pulled and still Belle kept barking and snapping at Scrappy.  This went on for fifteen minutes.  Suddenly, it became very quiet and Mrs. Craig thought that either the raccoon or Belle was dead.  She had heard that raccoons can kill a dog and that is what she feared had happened.  Then the hissing and barking and snapping began again and she knew the dog and raccoon had just paused to catch their breath. 

  Unable to get Belle away from the little raccoon and afraid Belle would kill it, Mrs. Craig knew she needed help.  She walked back to her house and called Mr. Craig and said, “Get the truck and come quickly.”  Mr. and Mrs. Craig rode in the truck to the place where Scrappy and Belle were in the fight of their lives.  Mr. Craig walked right into the middle of the hissing raccoon and the barking dog and grabbed the scruff of Belle’s neck and pulled her out of the brush.  Mrs. Craig opened the truck door and Belle willingly jumped in and they all headed back to the house.  Belle was covered in mud and the truck and Mrs. Craig were also by the time they got home.  Belle, looking a little chastened, went and got a long drink of water and collapsed on the deck panting heavily.

  Back in the forest Scrappy dragged himself home.  He was mangled a little, wet from dog saliva and completely worn out from the ordeal he had gone through.  His mother saw him walk in the door and said, “What happened to you?”  “I fought a dog and the dog lost,” bragged Scrappy. “Hmmm,” Scrappy’s mother was not sure she was hearing the whole story, but she was happy her little raccoon was home safe.  Belle told her sister, Bonnie, how she fought a raccoon and lived to tell about it.  Scrappy, on the other hand, stayed away from the road from that day forward.

  This is a true story except for the parts I made up.

Summer Beauty and an Angel in the Hottub

You know a few weeks ago I wrote about the vast wasteland in my backyard where it looked so barren and ugly?  Well, a few weeks have worked a miracle and the perennials are busting out all over and it isn’t even June.

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Wait a minute.  Do I see an animal in my flower bed?   Who could it be?

 

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It’s Belle, Mom. I would never get in your flower bed.  Bonnie has a short term memory because she has already forgotten all the flowers she and Belle dug up a few days ago including a brand new clematis that I had surrounded with fencing that they tore out by the roots.  They were in the literal dog house that day.  They like to dig for moles and they are good molers, but they can destroy a flower bed pretty quickly.  Bonnie shows no remorse.

Oh well, that is what you get when you keep dogs that like to dig and allow them the run of the yard.  If I could just teach them to dig up the garden before I planted it because they do till the soil rather well.

David and I went to the pool place the other day to buy one bottle of algaecide and we came out with a hot tub.  Really.  Shopping together is dangerous to our wealth.  We have looked at hot tubs through the years and talked about how nice one would be for our aches and pains, but we always put it out of our minds.  We may have been out of our minds that day, but we now have a hot tub sitting on our patio and I must say David is using it a lot and says it is really helping his arthritis.

The grandkids came to try the hot tub.

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They really enjoyed it. And then I saw an angel in our hot tub.

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A sweet face appeared in the bubbles.

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Turned out it was this handsome lad.  Here’s to flowers, angels and hot tubs.  Bye.

Growing up in the fifties

To many people living today, the nineteen fifties and sixties seem like ages ago.  For those of us who grew up in that time, it seems like only yesterday.

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This is a picture of me and my brothers, Fred, Andy and the baby, David.  I also had another older brother, Jack and an older sister, Joanne.  We all lived in the little house in the background on our daddy’s farm. It had no air conditioning, no central heating and NO bathroom.  Just think, six kids and NO bathroom.   We kids didn’t have a room to ourselves either until some started leaving the nest  Anyway, it must have been Easter because Fred is holding a paddle ball.  We always got paddle balls in our Easter baskets.  Look at those rolled up jeans.  The height of fashion in those days. I’ve never seen a dog mug for the camera like that one was doing.  Can’t remember his name, but he sure is grinning.

It was an idyllic  childhood.  At least it was for me.  There was always something to do and animals to play with.  There were, of course dogs and cats and kittens in the barn, cows chickens, ducks, pigs and at one time a little old ram I raised for 4-H and later a horse that my brother helped me get when I was around twelve or thirteen.

During the summers we never stayed inside for a minute.  In fact, Mom shooed us outside right after breakfast and we stayed outside until dinner at noon and then back outside we would go again until supper.  The only time I spent in the house was when I was helping Mom clean the house or do dishes or when I was sewing on her Singer sewing machine.

 

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See that big wrap around porch behind us?  Also see my little brother’s droopy drawers?  We use to roller skate on it, the porch, not the droopy drawers.   I was so happy when I finally got my first pair of skates.  You know, the kind with a key you had to tighten over your shoes..  I also spent hours on that porch swinging back and forth on the swing as I read one of the many books I got at the library.  In the evenings we would sit outside swinging and listen to the adults as they talked about the day.  Sometimes we would play hide and go seek or kick the can.  We played a game my brothers made up called  Battle Station.  You see, we lived on a very little traveled gravel road so at night if or when a car would go by and if we kids were out in the yard one of my brothers would yell, “Battle station!” and we would all run and hide.  We also looked for flying saucers.  Mom was always seeing them or at least she made us believe she saw them.  Sometimes as we sat on the porch, bats would fly around above us.  I didn’t like that so well.   I watched the Aurora Borealis from this porch with Mom one evening when the atmosphere was just right and they appeared farther south than usual.

 

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See that old watering trough?    The cows drank out of it.  That is how close the house was to the barnyard.  One time I got into the trough to cool down.  My mother was not happy I did that, but I was hot.  I love the picture of that old car.  I’m not sure whether that was ours or if we had visitors that day.  Seems like we had a lot of visitors especially at meal times because my mother was such a good cook.

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This is me and my baby brother, David.  I guess my parents weren’t too afraid of me swinging from so high up.  I just wonder how I got up there.  We always had a dog around. Guess that is why I always like having dogs.  This one seems to be standing guard by David.  Daddy probably made this swing set and the little swing David sits in.  What’s with my hair?  Mom always was giving me home permanents and the frizzier they were the better.  I would come out of her home “salon” looking like Harpo Marx.  I had curls that lasted for months. People always knew when Mom had been doing my hair.  I quit having permanents years ago.  Free at last.

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Whew, I had to get out of that black and white world and get some color into this blog.  Wonder when the world turned from black and white to color?  Hmmm.  There are many tales to tell about living on the farm, like the two men who my brothers heard talking in the barn.  How I almost burnt down the rabbit house.  Whoops, maybe I better keep that one quiet.  Or the time the bull chased me or the time I jumped off something in the barn and ran a nail into my foot or……. well, these stories will just have to wait for another day.  Bye.

 

 

 

 

 

Miscellany

  You know your life is way too busy when you don’t even have time to brush your teeth.  I have found in the past few weeks that half the morning is gone before I get that fur ball feeling in my  mouth like something has crawled in there and died and I know I have forgotten to brush and floss.  I barely run a brush through my hair.  I am beginning to act and look like some backwoods woman. Soon I’ll be smoking a corncob pipe and using snuff.  I have let my hair grow long and I wear the same pair of pants more than two days in a row.

  It’s all because I have become a chicken keeper.  Something happens to your psyche when you take care of chickens every day.  I find myself talking to them in chicken language and spending more time with them than I do the dogs.  Bonnie and Belle are beginning to resent them and growl at them every chance they get.  I have been taking care of Freedom, who has a bad leg and she takes a lot of my time, hand feeding her, cleaning her box, taking her outside for fresh air, returning her to her box at night.

   I have been painting molding around our new back door, planting a new flower bed, trying to finish some sewing projects, and what with the house cleaning, laundry, cooking, etc., etc. I keep very busy.  I just finished a James Bible study also.  I really don’t know how I did anything when I was working.   I thought retirement was supposed to be more relaxing.

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   We went to an auction a couple of weeks ago and there were several boxes of old books.  In one of them was this old book written the same year the Titanic went down.  When I was a girl growing up on the farm, there was a bookcase at the head of the stairs that had a book about the Titanic.  I use to sit on the stairs and read it and wonder about the people who were on that boat.   The book disappeared after Mom and Dad passed away and I have always wished I had gotten it.  I think this is the same book.  Anyway, the first box of books went for thirty-five dollars which was much more than I wanted to pay so when the bidding began on the box with this book I thought I probably wouldn’t get it, but it sold for only five dollars and we got it!  There were several nice books in the box.  There is a very old edition of Swiss Family Robinson.

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  This was the captain of the ship.  He went down with the ship.  In the most recent movie about the Titanic the people on the ship were portrayed as panicking and screaming and running about.  People who were actually there said it was eerily quiet and people were orderly and not scrambling to get on the lifeboats.  In fact, up until the very last many thought it was only a drill.

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  Here is a picture of the Titanic comparing its size to other things such as the great pyramids and the Washington monument.  Impressive. No wonder people thought she was unsinkable.

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  As the ship was going down, the people on the lifeboats heard the ones left on the ship singing this song.  The cries and yelling did not start until the ship went down and people fell into the freezing waters.  How horrible it must have been sitting in a lifeboat and hearing those screams.  Many lost their lives that night.

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 David and I were sitting outside on the swing when we saw this amazing sight.  There were about eleven turkey vultures soaring above us seeming to be playing in the wind currents.  They did this for quite a while until they flew away.

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  Our snowball bush is especially pretty this year.  Years ago, David’s grandmother had a huge snowball bush in her backyard.  She gave me a sapling from off of it and these flowers are from it.  David pruned it pretty heavily last year and I was afraid we wouldn’t have flowers, but its branches are bending down from them.

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  This picture was taken of it at night with no flash.  It looks like the flowers are shining.

  Now, since it is Mother’s Day, I will give you some flowers and other pretties from my garden.

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  Yes, even dandelions are pretty.

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  A new Echinacea that will have a completely green flower.

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  This is the only snail that is welcome in my garden.

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  The new flower bed I am working on.

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  A dragonfly that lights up at night.

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   Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who are mothers or mother someone or would like to be a mother or have a mother.  I was never happier than the days each of my children were born.  I don’t think your children realize how much they are loved until they have children of their own and know the love they feel for them.  That love never goes away, no matter what happens.  Your mother is your best friend for life, would gladly give her life for you, and will love you for eternity.  I was blessed with a wonderful mother and I can’t wait to see her one day in heaven.  Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.  I love you.

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    Love to all of you.  Bye.