Chicken Dog, Watch Cat, and Snail Trails

Today on my walk I saw some things that brought back memories of Verlin.  I love memories.  They help us stay connected.  Memories are like following trails.  If we let them in and follow them, one thing leads to another until we are in quite a different place from where we started.

My first step into my memories today was when I was on my way home from the cemetery.  I noticed a dog across the street who was chasing some chickens in the yard.  At first I thought he was chasing them with evil intent.  That reminded me of a dog we had when I was a kid who chased--and killed--chickens.  So I was a bit worried for the dog across the street.  But as I watched, it appeared that he was not trying to harm them.  He seemed to be coaxing them to stay in their yard in much the same manner that a sheepdog herds his flock of sheep.   Chicken Dog does not sound like a position of high esteem but he seemed to be content.

Thinking of Chicken Dog reminded me of Watch Cat.  Yesterday when I came home from running errands, I noticed that the house was empty.  I didn't pay much attention as I walked through the front door, but upon rounding the corner into the kitchen, I glanced over at the kitchen window with a small degree of alarm as I noticed the "guardian of the house" that Heber had placed in the kitchen window before they left.  It only took a second to realize it was not a real cat, but its remarkable size and likeness to a jungle cat would be a phenomenal deterrent for any burglar.

What a marvelous Watch Cat.

Back to my morning walk and memories...It is not uncommon to see occasional snail trails on the sidewalks in the neighborhood.  This morning was no exception.
 In fact, there were more than usual because of the heavy rain of the previous evening.  But this morning there was also an abundance of snails still in the process of their tedious migration across the sidewalks and paths that I walked.  I had to pay special attention where I stepped to avoid stepping on the little critters.

You might ask what does all of this have to do with memories of Verlin.  I'm getting to that.  Here is the way my mind works.  The sheepdog-aspiring Chicken Dog led me to think of the  jungle-missing Watch Cat which led me to think of the migrating snails which led me to think of a trip I took with Verlin.  I believe it was when we traveled as chaperones for the 12th Ward Youth Traveling Road Show when the youth performed the amazing musical production about Joseph Smith.  We stopped for lunch at a picnic area near the shore of the Snake River across the river from the Idaho Falls Temple.  There is a walking trail that winds along the shoreline.  Verlin and I decided to go for a short stroll during our lunch break.  We met Steve and Debi Holley just returning from a similar outing.  They warned us to watch our step.  We smiled and walked on.  Then we discovered what they were referencing.

The river was a perfect hangout for dabbling ducks and gaggles of geese.  As a result, the walking path was a veritable mine field of large bird droppings that we had to traverse with great care.  Ahhhh what great memories!

Oops, there goes another snail.

Going Back Once More

Today I was working on another grandbaby quilt. As I was ironing quilt pieces I thought of how much I enjoy my extra wide ironing board and lightweight steam iron. For an instant I went back to when I was a child in my semi-pioneer home in Montana. I call it that because it was a homesteader's home built about 1900 and then converted to fit my parents' growing family when we moved there in 1951. It was outfitted with conveniences like the old tin tub, the "outhouse", the oil-burning stove (later changed to coal burning stove), and a few conveniences that came later like an electric washing machine, and even later an electric dryer and eventually even a telephone by the time I was in junior high school.

When I was really young, my mom had a couple of the old-fashioned irons (the original flatirons which are not even remotely like the "flatirons" used for hair today) that have to be heated on a stove or other heat source.
(These are similar to the ones I saw as a child.)
She showed us how to use them, but we had an electric iron so we didn't need to use them for real. One needed to own more than one so that there would always be a hot one. When one cooled off, it was placed back on the heat in exchange for a hot one.

Denise and I started ironing clothes at a very young age. We started with handkerchiefs, dish towels and pillow cases and later graduated to shirts and dresses. Nearly everything we wore had to be ironed because there were not many synthetic fabrics then, mostly cottons. We didn't have steam irons so we had to "sprinkle" the clothes to help get the wrinkles out. We would get all ambitious and sprinkle the whole batch at once and then begin ironing. Of course we didn't get through even a small portion of them so what did we do to keep the rest of the clothes from getting mildew until we could iron them? Easy. We just put the clothes in the freezer until next ironing day.


My mom was lucky at some point to get an Ironrite mangle iron; don't ask me where she got it. It was similar to this one (This lady is not related:)) It looks like something you might have seen at a dry cleaners. It didn't seem to me that we were rich enough to own such a device. It was quite an impressive machine, and I loved to watch mom operate it. She actually used it for the large parts of shirts and dresses but it was hard to do the areas like collars, sleeves, and yokes. Though the machine was a bit intimidating, I do remember ironing handkerchiefs and dish towels with it. I was just wondering why this amazing piece of technology of the 1940s and 1950s didn't survive to become a household necessity standing in every home of America right next to the television.

What Takes You Back?

The other day Katrina asked me to put some lotion on her arms, as she has had carpal tunnel surgery and her right hand was in a splint and she couldn't do it by herself. I told her that I liked the scent of the lotion. She said the smell of it took her back to her mission days because it was a brand that was used a lot there.

That comment reminded me of my morning walks this summer that have brought me in contact with reminders of my childhood. I think the senses that Heavenly Father has blessed us with are an amazing form of time travel. These are some of the sights, smells and sounds of small town/country life that have transported me back to our Montana farm this summer.


As I walked by the river bank leading to the Wellsville dam, I saw this abandoned car down in the old river bed a ways from the dam. On our farm, we had a few pieces of old equipment that sat in the fields rusting away. We liked to play on them. Some of them later became collectors items that Dad was able to sell. Unfortunately people really did follow up on the urge to push a useless vehicle over a cliff such as you see here. Someone at some point before we moved there in 1951 abandoned an old truck in the Musselshell River just beyond our barnyard. It just happened to be about the deepest part of the River for some distance, so it became our swimming hole. I was always kind of afraid to go near the truck when I was young, but as I got older and braver, I discovered I could touch it with my tiptoes and still have my head above water, then push away and do kind of a surface dive away from it. I never tried to explore it's depths but imagine it would look something like this old car that I guess was exposed after the dam was built on this river.






The fields with alfalfa






and sweet clover evince several memories...

the bustle of hay harvest time, scorching summer heat, dried alfalfa leaves stuck on glistening moist skin, field mice taking refuge under the bales of hay, trapdoor spiders hiding among the stubble, hershey bars tucked away in the glovebox to provide a welcome treat, the sweating canvas water bag that was our lifeline as we worked and the welcome midday meal followed by a short siesta until the sun began it's downward descent and we once more made our way to the fields.





We didn't have a flower garden when I was young, besides lilac bushes. But I enjoyed the wildflowers--that I later discovered are mostly weeds--like the dandelion--

and the morning glory. What I found interesting about both of them is that they respond to the light, their blossoms opening up in sunlight and closing up at night. We used the dandelion to predict whether someone liked butter. (If you hold a dandelion under your chin, your chin will reflect yellow in response to your love of butter, or so we were told.) I don't know how many handfuls of dandelions my mom accepted from us and graciously placed in a cup of water to beautify our kitchen:)
Another weed that I saw recently was what we erroneously called Indian tobacco. I asked Katrina if she knew the proper name and she said she thought it was Curly Dock. According to Mr. Google, it is Curly Dock.












As we played along the ditchbanks and the banks of the Musselshell River, we discovered a more elegant flower, the wild rose, whose scent no perfumer, in my opinion, has been able to successfully reproduce. I love that smell!

According to God's plan, there are also some irksome plants to afflict and torment man. Among those that I despised as a child were the Russian thistle (which turns into a tumbleweed when it is dry),

the foxtail,










purple thistle,









the burdock and cocklebur













and other sock-grabbing plants.











Then there were the trees, my favorite--but most annoying in the springtime when the cotton was flying--was the big cottonwood tree that we used to climb. We loved making whistles with the leaves.















Other plants of my childhood that fell someplace between shrubs and trees were the berry producing bushes that we enjoyed. This one was a tree, the crabapple. We used to help Mom pick crabapples from a neighbor's tree and she would make apple jelly with them. The fruit was small and it took a ton or so to make a batch of jelly. It's tartness challenged our tastebuds, and they were kind of hard to eat because they were small, the majority of the fruit being the core.


We also went on excursions with Mom to find currant bushes. I don't remember any on our property but I remember stopping along the roadside to pick a basket of currants, which my mom also turned into a beautiful, dark translucent jelly. I thought it was a form of magic the way she transformed those rather unpalatable baskets of fruit into succulent jellies.


Even though the previously mentioned fruits tasted sour to me, I felt we had made a joyful discovery the first time I tried another berry that grew along the river. This one was the Buffalo berry. It took a whole handful to make a bite. If one were to try just one berry, it would yield far less than a single pomegranate seed. The center of the berry was similar to the pulp of the pomegranate. Because the berries were so small, we didn't attempt to stand there and fill a bucket with the tiny berries. Instead, we would each break off a branch or two (we had no idea that was diminishing next year's harvest) and we would go back to the house and pick and eat the berries at our leisure. It is a very tart berry but we enjoyed eating them to see if we could eat a handful without pulling a "sour face." The most miraculous thing happened once the first frost hit those berries. Their scarlet-red color deepened in hue as they turned more translucent and they became sweet and wonderful to eat.


Lastly, as I walked past the cornfields, I was reminded of the cultivated crops in the summers of my youth--which included, in addition to our garden vegetables, the potato patches and fields of field corn. We used what is called a grain drill to plant grain as a starter crop for new alfalfa and I think to plant the corn too.

This picture that I found reminds me a lot of the grain drill that my dad had, according to my very young memory, since these were not crops that he repeated every year like the hay.






I remember sitting in the garage cutting the many gunnysacks full of seed potatoes into small pieces, making sure to have an eye or two in each chunk. Then Dad dumped the potatoes into the tractor-guided planter which distributed them in neat rows in the field. This picture reminds me of the field where Dad set us to work plucking off the potato bugs from the plants to save his crop. It was probably only about an acre of potatoes, so not his greatest farming venture, but it sure looked big to me as we set out in the morning to cover all of the rows and find the annoying potato bugs.

Another of the aged pieces of equipment that we used to play on was an old potato sorter, similar to this one. Ours was simpler and very crude, a wooden frame with a conveyor belt that sent the potatoes down to two areas.
There was a chute that could be moved back and forth between two bags to separate the small and large potatoes. I don't think we ever used it for what it was intended but we had fun on it.

Well, this ends my trip back in time, traipsing through my memories. I am actually rather exhausted but it has been quite fun!!

A New Key to Freedom

Does this look familiar to anyone? Many of you may know that I have been having a few car problems the last couple months. I have wondered how much life was left in my old white car, but I found that it took me a lot further than Verlin and I anticipated when we bought it. We thought we would try and make it go for a year so we would have time to buy a new car. Thanks to Ammon and Jiffy-Lube it lasted two years longer than I hoped. In the last month or two, Ammon had to change the key switch, the battery, and the water pump. Then the fuel pump failed so I was stranded for a time. Ammon and I started searching online to see if we could find a car but it is hard for me to shop long distance while I am in Richfield.

I had a chance to spend this week in American Fork with Ammon's kids while Abby is at Girl's Camp so Ammon came to Richfield and picked me up. When we pulled up to the house, this was sitting in the driveway with a big red bow on it. A brand new Subaru Impreza that Ammon and Andrew picked out for me.




Abby came out and presented me with the keys. I cannot describe the emotions that I felt in those first moments--shock, wonderment, disbelief but mostly gratitude!

Wow! I have never had a brand new car. I hope I don't get too mental worrying about keeping it in brand new condition. After all, everyone drives used cars don't they? I will never drive it without thinking about the unselfish act that made it possible for me to have a reliable car and peace of mind when I travel.

Hummingbirds and Moms (and Dads)

As I was looking for a document the other day, I found a story I had written about our summer of the hummingbird (the year Teresa left for college). It goes like this:

************

One summer day, without announcement or invitation, our temporary guest moved in. Well, not in just a day, more like a few weeks. The porch light seemed like a good choice for a home. With its plastic panes long since gone, victims of time and use, the frame hung there gathering cobwebs and dirt. It seemed apparent that she would not be disturbed here. Only one light bulb worked now, and oddly enough, she chose the corner farthest away from the working light bulb. At first it just looked like bits of leaves caught in another cobweb, but after a few days, I could tell these fragments were carefully and intentionally placed. It seemed to take forever, but soon the nest resembled half a walnut shell, just the right size to hold a hummingbird, and she moved in.


She was very cautious at first, sitting tentatively in her nest ready to take flight whenever we walked in and out through the front door. It became a habit to look up at the nest whenever I went in or out to see if I could get a glimpse of her before the hum of wings and flash of color announced her retreat.
It wasn't long before she seemed accustomed to the clamor in our yard and remained in the nest in spite of the traffic and noise. I had only seen a few hummingbirds in my life, and never so close up, but I realized that since it is not common to be able to get such a close-up view of a hummingbird, her strong resolve to remain in the nest must have grown from the fact that there were eggs in the nest. I decided that the next time she took flight, I would look in the nest and see for myself. I got a mirror ready and when the opportunity presented itself, I chanced to peek. Sure enough, the mirror revealed two little pea-sized white eggs.


I went to the Internet and looked up information about the hummingbird to see what the incubation time would be. I wasn't sure exactly when the eggs were laid, but the incubation time is usually between 14-21 days, depending on the temperature. I calculated that by the time we returned from a weekend trip for a family reunion, the hatching should be complete. Upon arriving home, I took the first opportunity I could to check the nest. The mother was gone so I grabbed my mirror and looked in. At first all I could see was the broken egg shells, and I was saddened that they did not make it, but in an instant I could detect two little open mouths in the grayness of the nest. The hatchlings had both survived.


Now the mother hummingbird's courage was tenfold as she remained on the nest to keep her babies warm until their feathers grew sufficiently and yet taking frequent flights to forage for food for them. I watched her whenever I passed by the window and occasionally saw her feeding her young. It was a daunting task to think about, because hummingbirds use so much energy just in ordinary flight, that they require great amounts of food to maintain their own energy, let alone feeding two growing babies.


Over the next few weeks we watched as the baby hummingbirds grew larger. First we could see the tips of their beaks, then more and more until we could see their heads. It didn't take long for their bodies to completely fill the nest and it seemed that the nest would soon break apart with the load placed on it by two nearly full grown chicks.


During all this time, at intervals the mother would appear, perch on the edge of the nest and feed her babies, and then take off again. Finally the day came when the baby birds left the nest.



They did not immediately fly away, rather landed on the porch below, flitted from one spot to the next as they tried their wings, and after a period of "practice" they gained the strength to fly away.



As I watched this mother hummingbird caring for her babies and then stepping back and letting them try their wings, I thought of our own years of caring for our children that seems to be drawing to a close as our youngest child has recently gone away to college. Does that mother hummingbird feel the same emptiness inside that I feel when she looks at her empty nest? I hope she finds comfort in knowing that her children have learned how to fly. Hopefully they will know she misses them and come back to visit…

*********

Now I can stand back and watch all of you and cheer you on. I think your Dad is cheering too. You are who you are in large part because of his influence. Way to "fly"!!

Historic Washington, D.C.

Well, I finally made it to the Nation's Capitol, Washington D.C. I spent 2 1/2 weeks in June with Bryce, Heidi and Isaiah so that Heidi could start training for a new job. I got there a few days before she had to start work so we could do some sightseeing. Can you believe I forgot to take my camera?! Luckily, Heidi took her camera...well she actually forgot her camera part of the time too :), but we got some pictures to document my visit. The weather started out nice and we were able to see quite a few monuments/memorials in the first couple days before the weather got rainy. Isaiah was very good to sit in his stroller all day long while we rode the Metro and roamed the National Mall. The first day we visited the Washington Monument Lincoln Memorial Jefferson Memorial and Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Korean War Memorial, World War II Memorial, and the Holocaust Museum. We also saw the Capitol Building and White House but did not tour them. (As a side note, two weeks later, on June 10, an 88-year-old man went to the Holocaust Museum and opened fire with a rifle and ended up killing a guard.)

The second day we went to Arlington Cemetery and wandered around and watched the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. That was about all we could manage that day because it was quite warm


Sunday afternoon we drove to Baltimore and visited Fort McHenry and watched them retire the enormous "Garrison Flag" (a replica of the 30' X 42' flag with 15 stars and 15 stripes that flew over Fort McHenry when Francis Scott Key wrote the words of the "Star Spangled Banner". That flag is now in the Smithsonian) and raise a smaller American Flag for the night

Then we drove past Johns Hopkins University so I can tell people "I went to Johns Hopkins". I'll bet Alex is so envious!


From there we drove back to D.C. and visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial...


followed by a brief stop at the National Archives Building. I kind of teased with Heidi all week about finally being able to stand...not on the famous ground where memorials are built to our founding fathers but...where Nicholas Cage stood during the making of "National Treasure". It's true!! But we did see the original Declaration of Independence and the other documents in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom. It was kind of dark and cold in there but I had a reverent feeling in that room.


Next stop was the fairly new Air Force Memorial. There was not a large throng of people here and we enjoyed a peaceful visit to the monument built to honor members of the Air Force.

I thought of Verlin even though the only time he flew in the Air Force was when he was traveling from one place to the next. From the Air Force Memorial we could see the Pentagon and part of Arlington Cemetery.




Heidi then took us on a roundabout route back home on I-495 so that I could view the Washington D.C. Temple as it suddenly loomed in front of us as we rounded the bend.

It was beautiful in the evening sun but more so when we drove to the temple grounds and viewed it from a closer perspective. It was the perfect ending to our day. The following Tuesday evening I had the privilege of attending the temple with Heidi. On my last day in Maryland, Bryce and Heidi took me to the National Cryptologic Museum next door to the National Security Agency in D.C. It explains the role of the NSA in the history of cryptology and national defense. As with the other places we visited there was far too much to see and read in a short period of time but the video gave us a good overview of the history of cryptology, breaking and making codes to pass or intercept secret messages during the various wars including the cold war and in today's complex global fight against terrorism. Following our visit we stopped for lunch and then Heidi took me to the airport. I was introduced to a new favorite sandwich shop while I was in Maryland. It is called Potbelly Sandwich Works and they have yummy sandwiches! I had a great time and was sad to see it end. But there are bound to be new adventures ahead.