The Lost Country

In Star Trek, the future is the Undiscovered Country. The future is the Lost Country for people with memory or cognitive difficulties.

 

My father moved to the lost country. The arduous journey was slow and filled with anguish, especially for my mother. For the first five years, I wasn't sure he was going anywhere. He and Mom sniped at each other about what they had heard on the evening news. We assumed he didn't understand the commentary because he refused to wear his hearing aids. He made mistakes playing his favorite card game. We thought it was because he wouldn't wear his glasses. He stopped calling us by name, and my brother and I compared notes. He told the same story over and over like a pre-recorded loop, and his friends began to avoid him. He stopped using the telephone. He drove to the coffee shop every day like he had a job and had to get to it. He stopped recognizing people and could no longer differentiate between past and present. He would become obsessed with a memory from his youth or childhood and talk about it exclusively, endlessly. He failed the mental cognizance tests at the doctor's office.

He sold his beloved Watusi cattle and got ripped on the price because he couldn't remember which animals were Foundation Pure, 15/16ths or some other lesser cross. What a sad change for a man who loved his cattle as much as his family. When my brother was born, he had told Mom the baby was "as pretty as a newborn calf." A rich compliment from him.




He adopted methods to cope with failing memory. If someone came to visit, he didn't have much to say, but what he did say made perfect sense. "Good to see you." "Glad you dropped by." "Come back again sometime." If he contributed to the conversation at all, it was in the context of an old memory.

When it became obvious he wasn't the same man he used to be, Mom gave me a clipping to read:

   'Don't try to make me understand. Let me rest and know you're with me. Kiss my cheek and hold my hand. I'm confused beyond your concept. I am sad and sick and lost. All I know is that I need you to be with me at all cost. Do not lose your patience with me. Do not scold or curse or cry. I can't help the way I'm acting, can't be different though I try. Just remember that I need you, that the best of me is gone. Please don't fail to stand beside me, love me til my life is done.' Author Unknown

He became belligerent and couldn't be reasoned with. He ridiculed us for saying he shouldn't drive in a blizzard. He didn't notice that his clothes were dirty or foul smelling and refused to bathe. He became incontinent. He declared he was perfectly content with the situation. We were the ones with the problem.

He didn't take that journey alone. My mother was right beside him. She treated him kindly and gently. She kept him presentable. At the proper time, she took the car keys away from him. If he wanted to go drink coffee, she took him. She did everything in her power to maintain a semblance of normalcy and routine. She gave him little chores to do, like setting the table or taking out the trash, and stopped expecting him to be able to mow the grass or change the oil.



With her own strength rapidly fading, my mother made the heart-wrenching decision to move him to long-term care. He adapted well to the new country where they allowed him to wear his cowboy boots and listen to Johnny Cash on Alexa. He thought he was in a hotel with a great restaurant. He was never able to find his room by himself. He watched Lawrence Welk on TV but didn't know how to change the channel. Someone had to remind him to use the toilet. He was easy to get along with.

In the dining room, he hesitated to eat the food placed before him, because he knew he didn't have cash on him. If someone sat with him and said the restaurant was running a tab, he ate with gusto. He always offered his food to someone else if he noticed they weren't eating. He observed that the restaurant catered to the elderly. In fact, he became more talkative and occasionally knew my name.  

Mom spent every day with him. Since she didn't drive after dark, they had a daily argument when she left. He wanted to go with her. When she pointed out that she wasn't able to care for him any longer, he reasonably suggested that she stay there and he would go home. The nursing staff finally asked her to stop telling him when she was leaving.  

I expected the end of the journey to last longer. Two and a half months after entering long-term care, he died of a massive stroke. The personality, mannerisms, and wit of the man I called Dad died years earlier.

NOTE:  If someone in your family can't remember what year it is, the name of the President, what they ate for breakfast, stops liking their favorite activities, or exhibits any of the behavior above, I urge you to seek medical help for them.   https://alz.org/

The Man Who Was Born Twice

My father was born in 1933 in Opelousas, Louisiana. His birth certificate says so. His parents, the ones who raised him, lived in Iuka, Kansas. They didn't meet him until he was five years old. In that five year span there is little known of his life. Somehow a woman named Williams brought him to Kansas. There are two likely scenarios. Either his birth mother up and gave him to this woman, or an agency something like today's social services removed him from the home and placed him in the custody of the Williams lady.

Once he was in Kansas, he ended up at the orphanage at Newton with a different name from the one on his birth certificate. This is a mystery.  

My grandparents already had a five-year-old daughter. She was as cute as a bug and had won a pretty baby contest. But they yearned for another baby and they weren't having any luck. Eventually, they made an appointment with the orphanage and met with the administrator.  Grandma told me she could hear babies crying while the woman lied and claimed there weren't any babies available. However, there was a little boy she'd like for them to meet.

Back in the day, the orphanage was situated on a working farm which provided meat, milk, eggs, and garden produce for their sustenance as well as an income from livestock and crops. She and granddad walked around the area with the shy child. Eventually, they came to a pen of cattle, and the little guy climbed up on the fence.

"I like those cows."

That's all it took to convince Grandpa he had found his son.  One look had melted Grandma's heart and kicked her nurturing instincts into overdrive.

Even after reading the adoption decree it is unclear how or why the orphanage had custody of my dad. However, they swore out an affidavit in court that they had the legal right to release my father to my grandparents. I wonder, now that there is no one to ask, if anyone thought to ask that child if he would like to go home with these strangers.

His new parents immediately changed his name to one of their choosing. For several years the family was subject to visits to make sure the adoptee was being treated correctly. Dad was a rough and tumble child and sometimes he was a little banged up. My grandmother lived in a constant state of anxiety that she could lose him.

When dad was nineteen, she had a new birth certificate filed with the State of Louisiana. Nearly all the vital statistics were the same except for the names of the parents. Finally, she had written proof he was her son and no one could take him away from her.

Singing in the car.

 ♩        ♫     ♩               ♫        ♩        ♩      𝅗𝅥
I know a place where the birds sing bass,
      ♫    ♩     ♫           ♩           ♫     ♩     ♩        𝅗𝅥
And a jackrabbit laughed in a bulldog's face.
      ♫         ♩          ♫        ♩      ♪    ♩      ♩        𝅗𝅥
And the train doesn't stop at my hometown,
          ♫        ♩         ♫            ♩          ♪    ♩    ♩      𝅗𝅥
'Cause the woodpeckers pecked the depot down!

 My grandfather taught this little ditty to my father when he was young. I am under the impression granddad, who was born in 1910, also learned it as a youngster. Very recently, thanks to the internet, I believe I've found the origin of the song.

A soundtrack is included in this website. It is not the same tune that I learned from my dad.
Way Out West in Kansas  I liked the poem better when my imagination supplied a fantasy town in some far off place instead of Kansas.

When riding in the car, my granddaughters listen to songs like The Wheels on the Bus on their i-pads. When I was a kid riding in the car, my dad sang. He knew all the words to dozens of songs and the choruses of many more. For a guy who didn't go to church, he knew a lot of hymns by heart.

These are some of the songs I remember singing.

On Top of Old Smokey
By the time I was through second grade that folk song had morphed into the parody verses of On Top of Spaghetti.

Little Church in the Wildwood

In the Garden

John Brown's Body to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic which he also sang with gusto.

Love songs like Burl Ives' Lavender Blue. Dad would ask, what was the first love song? or what did Adam say to Eve? The answer, naturally, was Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me.

Counting songs like This Old Man, and The Ant's Go Marching One by One to the tune of When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.  Hurrah! He knew the words to that one as well. And of course 99 Bottles of Beer. After listening to that countdown a few times, Mom proclaimed a new rule that said the song had to start with only ten bottles of beer.  Who could forget singing Roll Over?

He liked Gathering Flowers for the Master's Bouquet so much he requested it for his funeral service.

Cowboy gospel by Marty Robbins. He didn't sing it but was crazy for The Master's Call.

Old Rivers sung/spoken by Walter Brennan. If you know the name of the mule in this song you are a music trivia expert.

Cattle Call and Red River Valley. Don't forget the Streets of Laredo.

Yodeling. My dad could yodel. I don't know if he did it very well or not. When I tried, my mother made me stop. Perhaps the car isn't the best place to practice yodeling.

Kawliga, the cigar store Indian.

Ghost Rider's in the Sky by Sons of the Pioneers.

Mom liked to hear How Much is that Doggie in the Window.  That song was always followed by How Much is that Hound Dog in the Winder.

A naughty little ditty called Sweet Violets. I specifically recall a grade school classmate teaching me the words to a moderately risque song called "Two Irishman", not to be confused with "The Scotsman."

Sometimes we'd learn a new song in music class at school and teach it to him. By the way, my mom didn't sing.

We kids sat in back the seat. Until he got too big to fit, my brother rode on the shelf under the back window. Another rule was that we couldn't lean on the back of Mom's chair and touch or breath on her hair. The eyes in the back of her head told her when we were too close.

Maybe my kids will tell theirs about riding in the car and singing Achy, Breaky Heart, John Deere Green, My Grandfather's Clock or especially There Once was a Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.

I would be glad to hear what songs you sang in the car.

The Buick

Until we decided we needed a used 1986 Ford Econoline custom van to haul our kids, their stuff and their friends, we drove a 1978 Buick Regal. It was one of the first autos with plush fabric seats. We were skeptical about the interior but the salesman said research indicated the upholstery would outlast the car.  He was right, too.

Besides the cushy interior, it had cruise control, a button inside the glove box to pop the trunk open, bucket seats, and a sunroof; all the amenities available in 1978. And it was fast too. We loved it.

One day we were in town and decided to run the Buick through the car wash. About half-way through the cycle, the sunroof sprung a leak. On my side of the car. While my husband quickly checked that it was indeed closed all the way, I scrambled to crawl over the console into the back seat. My gallant husband insisted that I stay where I was so the upholstery wouldn't get wet. 

What a guy. 

He wouldn't leave the car wash with the soap still on the car on, so water continued to drip around the seal. By the time the rinse cycle finished, I was thoroughly soaked, but the seat wasn't getting too much water on it.

We pulled out of the automated car wash and drove directly to the Buick dealership with both of us fuming, but I'm sure for different reasons. I was mad that I was wet and couldn't finish the errands we had come to town to do. My husband was ticked off that his pride and joy had malfunctioned. At the dealership we parked at the curb, and I jumped out and beat my husband to the door.

The salesman met me in the middle of the showroom floor. Before I could utter any of the complaints I had mentally rehearsed, he said, "I thought you were supposed to take your bra off for a wet t-shirt contest."

That remark released the pressure valve on the pent-up steam in my system. My husband was close enough behind me to hear the quip. He and several other employees, the owners and a couple of customers howled with laughter while I bit my lip and tried not to say any words that might make their way back to my grandmother. I threatened to kick the guy who suggested I go ahead and take it off, shirt too.

The fix was an easy one. If we hadn't been trapped inside the car wash, we probably would have figured it out. A drain tube from the sunroof had plugged.

The Regal figured in many notable occasions at our house. My son and one of his friends used it for their science fair experiment. If you attach a small propeller to the lead on a voltmeter, you can use said voltmeter as a wind speed indicator once it is calibrated. The boys took turns standing in the open sun roof holding the propeller while I drove various speeds and the other noted the voltage and speed. They received a blue ribbon for that project.

One summer we decided the farm work was caught up enough for us to take a weekend off and go to Wichita for our wedding anniversary. The car was still in great shape because we took good care of it. We packed an overnight bag and jumped in the Buick. We had driven about five miles, chatting about needing a break from round the clock farm work when my husband asked me a question.

"When's the last time you checked the oil on this car?"

I had a lot of jobs besides helping on the farm by driving the tractor, pulling tanks of fertilizer to the field, keeping the records, and driving the grain trucks during harvest time, such as growing a huge garden, canning the excess, raising children, sewing their clothes and ours. This was during the days when the Women's Libbers got in your face and demanded you join their movement. With all the responsibility I already had, my pat answer was always, "If I got any more liberated, I'd have to change the oil on the tractor." Looking under the hood whether it be a car, pickup truck or tractor was something the guys did.

So I said: "There'd have to be a first time before there could be a last time."

He braked to a stop and opened the hood. There was no oil on the dipstick. So, how long had it been since HE checked the oil?

If cell phones had been invented, he would have called his brother to bring a couple of quarts of motor oil. Instead, we drove back home with him complaining about how irresponsible I was while I indignantly pointed out that I had NEVER once been asked to check the oil on ANYTHING. It. Wasn't. My. Job.

Once home, he said not to drive the car until he got a chance to change the oil. He put on his work clothes and went back to the field in his pickup. I unpacked and sulked. I thought then and still do today that it was a clear cut case of Universal Rule # 1: The woman is always right. Enough said?

Why cuss when spitting works better?

I never did fall in love with horses.  The ornery Shetland pony we had when I was a kid probably had a lot to do with that. When I was interested in learning how to ride Dad didn't want me around his working horse.

Instead of telling you why I didn't like the phony, um, I meant pony, here are a couple of things I remember about horses from when I was a kid.

Dad had a roping horse he was real proud of. One of the exercises he did to get the horse accustomed to having a steer on the end of a rope was to pull a railroad tie around the corral. Of all the things my brother and I did with our dad, this one stands out as being all around fun.

He screwed a large eye bolt into the end of the railroad tie and tied one end of his rope to it and hitched the other end around the saddle horn.  After he got the horse, whose name I have forgotten, somewhat used to the strange pressure on the saddle horn he let us come in the corral. Our assignment was to add varying amounts of weight to the railroad tie while it was being dragged around the pen.

As you might imagine, most of the stuff we did with Dad resulted in big trouble with Mom at the state of our clothes. He pretended innocence but I'm sure he had a plan when he told us to stand on the tie. It wasn't moving so it was easy. Just stand there, right? He gave his horse a nudge and it took off. The tie went right out from under our feet.

Then he pretended to be mad but gave us another chance. This time we held hands for balance and told him we were ready. We ended up in the dirt anyway.

The game was actually fun when he and the horse got the tie to sliding along. We would run along beside it, jump on and ride until it hit a bump or a little snag. We never did master staying on when he made the left-hand turn past the cow shed into the south corral.

That's my non-horse-lover fun with horses story.

This is a story Dad told me about what a great animal handler his grandfather was.

Dad said he was in early high school and had been riding his horse through some tall cane feed. That stuff is really juicy and his horse slipped and went down. Dad, fortunately, was thrown clear and hopped back to his feet. The trouble began when he couldn't get his horse back on its feet.

It didn't appear to be injured but it wouldn't stand up. Dad pulled on the reins to no avail. He hollered and cussed with equal results. His horse was embarrassed and also as stubborn as a mule.

From the dining room window at the house his grandfather, Bailey, had seen what happened. Taking his time, he walked out to the patch of feed. By then, my dad was in a lather while his horse just laid on the ground. He had been riding for years and had never come across or heard of an animal behaving in such a manner.

His calm, methodical granddad knelt at the horse's head and patiently worked up a mouthful of saliva. He leaned closer and spat directly into the horse's nostril. The horse surged to its feet. Yes, spitting works better than cussing every time.

Wake UP!

"Get up. Breakfast is ready."

"Are you dressed yet?"

"Wash your face."

"Are you up yet?"

"You're going to miss the school bus!"

The bedrooms in the house where I grew up were all downstairs. So was the bathroom, furnace, clothes dryer and chest deep freeze. The basement stayed cool in the summer. In the winter a gas stove radiated a modest amount of heat. The cement floor directly in front of it was warm and toasty. That is where my brother or I stayed if we were waiting for our turn in the bathroom.

In the mornings when we didn't want to get out of bed our mother would yell instructions, warnings and eventually threats down the stairs from the kitchen. If we lollygagged too long, our dad would assume the 'getting the kids out of bed' duties. He didn't employ threats of dire consequences if we weren't clothed and sitting at the breakfast table in three seconds. He developed a quiet, effective method of persuasion.

Remember that deep freeze I mentioned earlier?

A package of frozen hamburger or tube of frozen orange juice concentrate applied to the bottom of warm feet will result in said sleepy children leaping out of bed and changing from pajamas to school clothes in record time. After the first time, all it took was the sound of the squeaky hinges on the freezer door being raised to persuade us it was time to get ready for school.

The Power of Prayer

It's a wonder I was ever born. It's a miracle my parents ever met. Both of my grandmothers contracted fatal diseases at the tender age of three. Today, antibiotics probably would mitigate the emergency, but this happened over one hundred years ago.

My maternal grandmother came down with diphtheria. The disease causes a thick mucous build-up on the back of the throat which can't be expelled by coughing. It sounds gross, but I've heard that the coating will develop a pseudomembrane much like the skin on cold gravy. It can block the airways resulting in death. The doctor came to the house and showed her mother how to use a hollow goose quill to suck the nasty mucous out of her sick daughter's throat. Beyond that, according to the doctor, it was in the hands of God. My Grammy said she found a quiet place, got on her knees, and prayed.

My other grandmother told me she didn't know what she had, but after picking up peaches in an orchard and eating them, she became very ill. I think she had typhoid fever. Before the illness, she had thick, wildly curling hair. Her mother could scarcely get a comb through it. When the child developed a high fever and fell into a coma, her father summoned his sister Laura. In an era when most folks attended church and read the Bible, Laura was known as being an extremely religious lady. At the little girl's bedside, Aunt Laura 'laid on hands' and prayed. 

Obviously, both little girls recovered from the dreadful illnesses. Our family believes God had something to do with it. The high fever caused my paternal grandmother to lose all her hair. The unruly curls grew back as a gentle wave. Also, her new "do" featured a white streak above her forehead. I've looked up the phenomena. The condition, a lack of melanin in the effected area, is called poliosis. I don't see any evidence of the poliosis in old pictures of her, but perhaps it wasn't noticeable in b&w photography.

So, thanks be to God, the lives of two little girls were spared.

Milk Cows

A milk cow was a family necessity back in the day. Here are three little stories featuring a milk cow.

One of my great-grandmothers grew up in the late 1800's in a hilly wooded area of southeast Missouri. The nearest neighbor with children her age lived over the hill. When she was a young girl the livestock ranged freely. In the mornings, after milking the cow, her father turned it out to graze on whatever it could find to eat. In the late afternoon it moseyed back to the barn because it wanted to be milked again. Other families' livestock often mixed with theirs. She and her girlfriend over the hill would leave notes to one another tied to the cow's horns. Telephone. Telegraph. Tell-a-cow.

There was nothing great about the Great Depression. Just ask anyone who lived through it. My mother's uncle tells about his widowed mother raising six kids during the Depression. Everyone had a few chickens and grew large gardens to survive. In their small town, only one family remained who maintained a milk cow. Much like the above scenario, the cow was milked in the morning then released to graze at the edge of town. On the west side of this little burg was a deep gully. In the afternoon it was the prefect spot to take a pail and lead the cow out of sight to be milked. My great-uncle said half the town stole milk from that cow, but not so much that she wouldn't give any milk at all when she went back to the owner's barn for the evening milking.

I once interviewed an elderly lady whose family homesteaded near me. She and her brothers were mere youngsters when the family pulled up stakes back east and trekked to central Kansas in the early 1880's. By that time the buffalo herds had been wiped out and the wind-swept prairie was littered with their bones. One of the jobs given to the children was to collect the sun-bleached bones and pile them in the buckboard wagon. When the wagon was full, her father would make the two day round trip to the nearest railhead at Larned to sell them. From there they were loaded on rail cars and shipped to eastern states to be ground into fertilizer. 
While father was away, the bored, or perhaps liberated, children devised their own entertainment. Finding an unused board, the boys thought it was about the right size to slide around on if only they had some way to pull it. Using their imagination and the few resources available, they tied a length of wire around the middle of the board and the other end to the cow's tail. One must assume they made certain the wire was long enough to keep the cow from kicking them in the head.
After solemnly promising her brothers she wouldn't tell their father, or mother, the fun commenced. She said they were having a pretty good time taking turns sitting on the board, taking a cow-powered ride around the farmstead. Until...  The front of the board snagged on something in the ground. Her brother rolled off at the sudden stop but was unharmed. However...  The sudden stop produced an opposite and equal reaction when their milk cow kept going. The end of her tail was jerked off.
No amount of threats or coercion could keep this disaster hidden from their father. The punishment? Follow the cow around all summer and keep the flies away.

Nothing ever happens at my house.

I've lived in the same sparsely populated rural neighborhood for over 40 years. Depending on whether you go up the road or down the road, it is five miles to the next farmhouse. Neither of those two families have any reason to drive past my house. About the only people besides the mail lady who use our road are other farmers checking on a field in the vicinity. I see as many tractors as I do pickup trucks. An abandoned farmstead lies approximately one and a half miles southeast from my house as the crow flies. The owners moved away about 20 years ago. It is surrounded by trees and apparently very inviting to dopers who want to get out of the weather while they cook their meth.

The first time I heard that it had been raided (about eighteen years ago) was in the context of a local character who thought the Feds were after him for drinking and driving. When he saw a string of official looking cars bearing down on him, he had visions of being incarcerated for open container, driving under the influence, possibly expired tags and no drivers' license. He was just a good ol' boy taking a leisurely Sunday morning drive while he drank a six-pack of Bud. The guys in the white space suits (bio-hazard personal protective clothing) paid no attention as he threw his beer in the ditch and scrambled for some chewing gum to disguise his breath. 

We heard that the woodwork of the old house was permeated with highly flammable residue from the illegal meth kitchen. Curious neighbors were warned to stay away. Don't light a match!

 A different neighbor who lived off thataway discovered evidence of an outdoor meth lab in his pasture.

In the meantime, crystal meth labs punctuated the evening news. Over-the-counter cold and diet medications containing Ephedrine or Pseudoephedrine were ordered to be kept under lock and key the same as prescription drugs. Clerks at convenience stores received instructions to never sell more than 2 packets to a customer and to keep an eye out for strings of customers coming in to purchase the same product. Especially if they had rotted teeth.

During the same time frame, two counties north of me, hard-to-track mobile meth labs climbed to the top of the national statistical charts. Law abiding folks in the area were looking askance at vans with Barton County plates.

Nearly two years passed from the first time we heard about the meth house in the neighborhood. One evening we answered the phone and it was the sheriff telling us not to open the door to strangers. Law enforcement had raided the house again and a suspect took off on foot. The first thing we did was turn on all outdoor and perimeter lights and turn off all indoor lights. We wanted to be able to see out while no one else could see in. When the coon dogs started barking our daughter freaked out.

We called the sheriff back and he sent a deputy who was there within minutes. He and my husband, both armed, investigated the garage, chicken house and other outbuildings. Finding nothing suspicious, they decided our dogs could probably hear or smell the activity taking place at the raid. A pair of dogs had been brought in to track the suspect. Unfortunately, they lost the scent after a few hundred yards. My husband told them anyone who has ever been coon hunting would know the dogs are useless as soon as the temperature hits dew point.

In the meantime, they were waiting for the airplane with infrared detection equipment. When it arrived we could hear it for hours as it searched the area for the escapee. Eventually, we learned that the suspect was apprehended the next day. He had run twelve miles to town. What good practice for a half marathon.

Life settled down. Every once in a while we noticed a vehicle, a white van, stopped in the road south of our house. Maybe it belonged to a land owner. Maybe our road had turned into lovers' lane. Whoever was in it, they weren't bothering us. One day my husband noticed the plain vanilla van had Barton County plates. Recalling the news about all the mobile meth labs, he called in a report to our county sheriff's office.

The next day all the deputies were laughing about the suspicious van. We weren't the butt of the jokes though. Another agency in Barton County drives unmarked vehicles. This outfit sent an agent to keep an eye on the meth house, but he was to remain inconspicuous. Our sheriff was riled that the KBI was conducting a covert operation in his county. He was amused that a local citizen had turned them in for suspicious behavior.

No, nothing ever happens at my house.

Daddy Was Watching Her

My daughter loves cats. She has since she was a toddler.

Honestly, I don't remember how this story starts. My minds' eye doesn't see what I was doing or where her older brother was. He is strangely absent. This particular memory starts and ends with my husband 'keeping an eye on' our daughter while I did something in the house.

About twenty minutes into his voluntary duties, my mom 6th sense told me to go look in the garage and see how he and the three-year-old were doing. They were still alive. He was fiddling with something mechanical and she was sitting on the floor against the wall singing. On the garage floor, where it wouldn't have surprised me to see spiders. The garage floor, which truly wasn't clean enough to sit on. The garage floor, where I saw something that definitely didn't belong.

"Hey! I thought you said you'd watch her."  I whisper/hissed at him.

"Everything's fine," he insisted. "She's just sitting there singing to the kittens."

"Yeah, you're right. She's singing to them." I grabbed his arm and forced his full attention toward his adorable daughter. "Did you not notice that she has broken the necks of all four of them?"

I went over to her and gently removed a limp body from her tight little fists and placed it with the other three unfortunate kittens.

She had made up a lullaby to sing to her kitties. Since they needed to be rocked to sleep while she sang, she had taken them one at a time in a death grip about the neck and swung them back and forth.

How do you explain to a three-year-old that the kitties aren't going to wake up and play?

We took the kittens and a shovel into the trees and had a solemn cat funeral. We had a lesson about stroking kitties and not squeezing them so hard. We talked about never picking an animal up by the neck.

I would have been mad at my husband, but I have to confess that once when I thought she and her brother were playing nicely together in the yard, the mayhem led to my daughter getting eleven stitches.

Parenting is a learn as you go process. What a lot there was to learn.

Like the time I told the eye doctor my son didn't need shatterproof lenses.

It was a dark and stormy night....

It was a dark and stormy night...  What a trite phrase. It calls to mind campy old movies featuring fearful, defenseless women trapped in a spooky house while the thunder crashes and the knife-wielding murderer slashes.

When I was in high school, I worked part-time at the same restaurant as my mother. It was a pretty good setup because we only needed one vehicle to get back and forth. On a Saturday night, we headed home from the regular 5-9 shift. It was probably 9:30 by the time we left, having everything cleaned up and put away leaving the restaurant ready for the breakfast crowd. 

A fierce storm has blown up, and we drive with extra caution as the wind buffets the car and horizontal sheets of rain beckon us to follow them off the road. At home, the rain has intensified. 

We are faced with a 30-yard dash through the deluge. This involves a Herculean leap over a large puddle where water pools on the slab in front of the garage because over time the cement has settled some. Up one shallow step, through the gate, and a mad race up the sidewalk under wildly whipping tree limbs while nonstop lightning illuminates our path. The biggest challenge is right before the steps up to the door. During my entire life, the gutter has never had a downspout attached to it. The opening is at the corner of the house and water pours out of it onto the sidewalk. Even in a gentle rain a lot of water rolls off the roof. On this night, the cataract resembles the release of floodgates at a reservoir.

I splash behind the curtain of water, which is shooting clear across the walkway. Water is two or three inches deep because it can't flow away from the house as fast as it is gushing out of the gutter. Efforts to avoid puddles have been in vain as cold water floods my shoes. I take the steps in one stride and yank the door open. Mom is right behind me with her head down, clutching her purse and the strings of a plastic rain bonnet protecting her hairdo. Up two more steps and into the kitchen where we stand dripping on the spotless linoleum.

Mom kicks out of her orthopedic support shoes that waitresses and nurses everywhere wear while I toe my soggy white tennies off.  Shivering, we blot our faces and arms on kitchen hand towels, and I help Mom with her zipper as she shrugs out of her sodden uniform. I am reaching behind my back for my own zipper when

BANG BANG BANG.

Someone, disregarding the torrential downpour, is beating on the outer storm door.

Mere seconds have passed since we got out of the car. Our driveway is half a mile long. There were no headlights behind us. No strange vehicles lurked in the circle turn-around in front of the garage. I glance out the window over the sink trying to spy another car, but it's raining so hard I can't even see the garage.

Mom is in her slip and pantyhose, and I read headlines of murdered women in her expression. Thoughts of the Clutter family streak through my mind. A shriek escapes my lips before she shushes me.

Not only is a storm raging; we are also all alone. My father and brother left earlier in the day for a weekend fishing/camping trip. Her horrified expression scares me more than the racket outside. Lightning, followed by another deafening clap of thunder that rattles the windows, reveals two indistinct shapes on the steps. The kitchen wall facing the door is all windows, and my first instinct is to turn off the light so whoever is out there can't see in. Adrenaline surges through my veins as my body prepares to defend itself.

Pasting on an expression that says whatever is out there should be more afraid of her than she is of it, Mom flicks the switch for the outdoor light and yanks the kitchen door open just in time to witness my dad and brother trying to squeeze through the storm door at the same time.

"I knew it was you!" she yells at Dad as he elbows onto the landing in front of my little brother and kicks off his boots. "No self-respecting burglar or rapist would have knocked on the door."

Turtle Tank

When you were a kid, did you have a critter collection?  Did you catch lightning bugs and put them in a jar?  Or capture baby bunnies and try to keep them alive?  Ours were always dead the next morning.  Something about the shock and trauma of being caught and handled.  Did you fill a bucket with toads?

Our house is not at our farm.  We were lucky to find a habitable dwelling in the country, much less one that was handy to where we worked. That being said, if we needed an item at our house, it was a good bet we could come up with something at the farm and drag it home with us. That is how we got a small stock tank in which to keep the kids’ menagerie.

It was about 4 feet across, and if you propped one side up on a couple of bricks, you could have a pond on one side and dry habitat on the other. A maple tree provided plenty of shade.

My kids were always on the lookout for box turtles. The best place to find them was when they crawled across the country roads.

“Stop the car, Mom!  Can you get that turtle for us?”

One must assume the average person knows why you would never, ever bring a turtle inside a vehicle. If we were close enough to the house, good ol’ mom would apprehend said turtle, roll down the drivers’ side window and proceed to the hacienda holding the creature as far from the car as her arm would reach. Just in case you haven't ever held a wild turtle, they STINK! The turtle itself probably doesn't reek. Its self-defense mechanism is to emit a foul smelling urine that seeps into your hands and takes two or three days to wash off. The safest way to pick them up is from the top and hold the side edges of their shells. Keep your hands away from the tail!

Into the tank it went, while said youngsters raided the refrigerator for pieces of lettuce or carrot tops. It was nothing unusual to have three or four turtles in the tank during the summer. The kids diligently caught hop toads and added them to the menagerie, but they kept jumping out. This mom didn’t know toads could jump that high. Did you know toads also pee in reaction to being picked up? Their urine doesn't smell so bad, although I think that's why dogs don't bother them after one experience. It must taste terrible.

One day, about this time of year, I was rotor-tilling the garden plot with the Massey-Ferguson in preparation for spring planting.  It was cool and the toads were still burrowed in.  I unearthed one and hollered for the kids to come and get it.  My four-year-old daughter came running and took the new find to the tank.

Suddenly, I could hear her screaming over the noise of the rotor-tiller.  

What the heck?  Did a wasp sting her?

By the time I ran to the tank, not more than 20 yards away, the toad was in pieces and my innocent daughter was in total melt-down. Four turtles equal four toad limbs to tear off. Did I forget to remind the kids to feed their turtles? 

The carnivorous turtles were released and the stock tank returned to the farm where we never used it to corral wild animals again.

As God is my witness, I thought all those other toads jumped out.

Trapped in the Dungeon!

Although I haven't pursued the subject for several years, at one time I became slightly obsessed with genealogy and family history. I ferreted out each tidbit of information. Family members wearied of my questions.

Where did James and Ila meet?
When was Great-grandpa Miller born?
Why did they come to Kansas?

There is a wealth of information if one knows where to look. The Mormon church has exhaustive records. When I was researching, the nearest microfiche database was located at Wichita, Kansas. Now, all that data plus much more is available on the internet. Ancestry.com and the social security death index are also valuable resources.

One of the things I learned about looking up ancestors who came from Europe is that families were clannish, people seldom strayed more than a few miles from the village where they were born, and they were exceedingly fond of a handful of names. The best place to research is in church baptism records in some parts of the world. I was perplexed by families who gave every boy child the same name.

I asked a helpful lady if she thought those parents kept losing their children to disease or malnutrition and simply gave the same moniker to successive sons.  She explained that the first name honored an ancestor, most likely the grandfather or a favorite uncle, while the second name often was the same as the father. The child was called by the third middle name.

So entries in the church record book might look like this:

Wilhelm Johan Friedrich Schwerdtfeger     b. 8 May 1724
Wilhelm Johan Phillipe Schwerdtfeger       b. 19 Aug 1726
Wilhelm Johan Ernst Schwerdtfeger           b. 21 Feb 1728

Before a bunch of cousins start tearing through their own records, I made up the names and dates off the top of my head. They are examples.

Marriage records, presuming they took place in the same church, lead back to the baptism records. That is one method of ensuring a researcher follows the correct family thread because Ernst Schwerdtfeger might have two or three cousins with the same name, but hopefully not the same birth date.

A cousin on my dad's side of the family delved into his roots. After spending a couple of years painstakingly gathering every shred of evidence, he had a book printed and passed it out to anyone who expressed an interest. Several months later he discovered he had wandered off on a tangent and included the wrong people, possibly not even relatives despite having the same last name, in a big chunk of 1700's history. Back he went to sifting through records and editing his genealogy book.

Old census records are another useful tool for the genealogist. Depending on how detailed the census taker was, one can learn exactly where Great-great-great-grandfather Toland lived, and how many cows, pigs, fruit trees and acres of land he owned. It is cause to jump for joy if the census taker wrote out the names of the family members instead of simply saying something like 4 sons and 3 daughters. Better yet, he may have included their ages.

Through word of mouth I learned that the Stafford County courthouse was the repository of many old census books which had survived since around 1880. I made an appointment by phone to look at them and showed up armed with a notebook and pencils. How I wish now that digital cameras or i-phones had been invented.

To get to the dungeon, the fond name the clerk gave to the record room, one enters the Register of Deeds office on the 2nd floor and descends a steep staircase into the heart of the courthouse. The windowless space must have been created as a tornado shelter, although no one confirmed that theory. I didn't raise a dust in the room, but it was untidy and musty smelling. Shelves took up the floor space leaving a cramped area for a table. Books with broken, peeling spines were haphazardly arranged and the one chair had seen better days.

Fortunately, most of the books I looked at were indexed and it didn't take long to find the information I had been searching for. Happy with the accomplishments of the morning, I gathered my notebook and purse and treaded warily back up to the door at the top of the stairs.

It was locked. From the other side. I rapped on the reinforced frosted glass but no one answered because the entire office had gone to lunch. I descended back into the dungeon and wondered how many minutes it was past noon. I tried to remember if I had told my husband exactly where I was going or if he even paid any attention. I indignantly wondered how the clerk could have forgotten about me and why she found if necessary to lock a door to nowhere when she left the office. I patted myself on the back for not drinking a pot of coffee that morning. I congratulated myself even more for not being a hysterical type.

I was even more thankful that it wasn't 5:00 p.m. Friday afternoon. Nevertheless, questions that didn't bear thinking about forced their way into my thoughts as I impatiently waited for the lunch hour to end. Questions like how long would it take for my husband to notice I hadn't returned. Would local police officers notice a vehicle with out-of-county tags parked at the curb after hours? Would the clerk suddenly think of me in the middle of the night? How long would it be before there was a bathroom emergency?

Twice I climbed the steps hoping it was 1:00 p.m. It was about five minutes after before I was released. The clerk didn't apologize for locking me in. "Oh, I forgot you were down there," she said.

Watering the Cattle

With such frigid temperatures during February, my ranching friends can relate to this tale. 

My dad rented a winter wheat pasture where he grazed his calves. The location included a large, shallow pond at one end where the cattle drank. Cattle don't lick ice. I'm not saying they won't lick some moisture up, but they cannot obtain their daily needs from ice. In the summer the average beef, depending on its' size, the ambient temperature and a variety of other variables, requires around 27 gallons per day. They don't drink that much in the winter, but they must have water. Therefore, when the temperature dropped and a thick layer of ice formed, dad put on his galoshes, tromped a half mile out to the pond with his ax and chopped ice a couple of times a day.  

A big storm blew in, and Dad was unable to tend to the herd. By the time he made it to the pasture carrying his ax, the cattle were eager for a drink. He walked out on the ice, and they came running. The entire herd ran to him. I don't remember how many head he had in that pasture, but at least 50. 

Forty or fifty 600 pound calves joined dad on the frozen pond. Cracking and popping sounds filled the air, but as he watched in horror, the entire slab of ice sank into the frigid water below.  He had no idea of the depth of the pond. He tried walking on water as bone-chilling liquid rapidly topped his galoshes and filled his boots. 

Frantic questions raced through his mind. Could he get out of the pond swimming in frigid water with all the calves? How long would it be before someone wondered where he was? What would his family do without him? Cattle surrounded him, many with their heads down slurping water. Relief filled his heart as the plate of ice settled, leaving him standing in knee deep water. 

Now to create a path through the contentedly drinking herd. He swatted cattle out of the way with his hat and gingerly waded to higher ground. From there, he squished to the road and got in his pickup, wondering if he'd ever be able to feel his toes again. 

He never had to break the ice for that particular group of cattle again. They learned to break ice under their combined weight.

I've been on a diet. In the past I haven't had much luck. It wasn't that I didn't lose weight. The problem was that nothing tasted good when Pepsi and corn chips were screaming my name. When I caved in to the cravings, the weight came back with a vengeance. I didn't follow any health gurus on that diet. I just avoided carbs. In fact I was sort of scared of food. Much later, after the twenty or thirty pounds I had lost plus another five reappeared as fast as it went away, I read that the real reason people on low carb diets lose so much weight is that they are dehydrated. They didn't lose fat, they lost fluids. Therefore the rapid re-gaining of weight.

That was before I heard of the Atkins Diet, or Whole 30, or the Paleo caveman diet, or the Keto diet.

I've graduated from an unacceptable pant size to an embarrassing one. My joke that I'm not overweight, I'm undertall just doesn't work.  "Ewe's not fat, ewe's fluffy" is even worse.  Just FYI: a ewe (pronounced you) is a female sheep.  

Now I'm trying a diet again. One where I keep track of what I eat and don't feel starved. I don't know what kind of success I'll have. It's hard to tell what websites are helpful and which are bogus. I've read daunting articles about physiological reasons why women over 60 can't lose weight. I'm confused about insulin resistance, leptins, inulin, ketones, and a host of other bodily functions I didn't know existed.

Overall, I'm a healthy person. I'm not diabetic or lactose intolerant. I don't have a problem with gluten. I have simply eaten my way into a woeful state. I will find out in time whether it is reversible.

One of the problems I've run into is not knowing the nutritional breakdown of recipes since I've also decided to avoid restaurants and cook at home. I've downloaded several recipe books with tasty looking concoctions, but the fats, carbs and proteins aren't provided. Bummer.

You can find anything on the internet. Right?  Well, here is a simple to use Recipe Calorie and Nutrition Calculator that analyses your favorite dishes. The percent of daily values apparently are obtained from government guidelines. Those on a Keto diet will ignore those recommendations.

There is a small commitment of time to input the recipe. After learning the order the program likes, it can be done very quickly.