Eagles!

           The most exciting thing happened to me this week!

          “What’s that?” I know you wanna know.

          With our bridge being out, we’re having to find alternate routes to get to where we want to go. This week I finished a commission for wedding shower invitations...

Which reminds me. Did you know there’s a difference between a bridal shower and a wedding shower?

I didn’t either!

“Tell us!” you beg.

If the event centers on the bride — with décor, wording, and imagery that highlights her, and it’s just girls, it’s a bridal shower. If it celebrates both partners equally, it’s a wedding shower.

I had a picture of the bride but it was a front view. I had Copilot transform it into something I could paint and turn it for a side view. I also changed the dress so it wouldn’t give anything away before the big day.

My attempts to paint it were futile. I made at least seven attempts and time was running short. I had to get them made and in the mail in time for them to be addressed and sent out. In the end I used the AI generated image and printed it on watercolor paper, which gave it good weight and texture. The same soft pink cardstock I used to print the invite on was also used behind the info panel on the inside, which, by the way, was also printed on watercolor paper. The bells were cut from sign vinyl, which is sticky on one side. There wasn’t any way I was going to cut it on cardstock and try to glue it on. I’d have glue everywhere! That wouldn’t be a good look.

I think they came out halfway decent. My client could’ve had them made anywhere and by people who do this for a living. I’m honored that she asked me to make them for her. I just hope she’s not disappointed. 

I needed to go to the post office and get them mailed. I normally mail everything from our hometown post office, but with the bridge being out, that wasn’t practical. If I’d’ve had another reason to go to Wyalusing, I would’ve. But I didn’t so we didn’t. Tunkhannock it was and we’d do a little shopping while we were there.

The route we took this day was through Williams Corner out to 87, then up past the huge Proctor & Gamble plant, and out to Route 6. Since the post office was our first stop, we turned on Mile Road and went into Tunkhannock that way. It was the most direct route to their post office.

How about some pictures from that part of the trip?

The water was running from the mountainsides and out onto the road in several places. “That’s what you get when you build a road between the mountain and the creek,” I said.

In some place there were waterfalls cascading down the mountains. I wasn’t fast enough to get any decent shots of them and they might not be there the next time we travel this road. Even though this isn’t a great shot, you’ll get the idea.

 I know you can’t see it very well, but this is the house we lived in when my beautiful little sister lost the tip of one of her delicate little fingers to the bite of the spokes of a bicycle wheeel.

“She was only two or three,” my oldest and much-adored sister told me when I asked.

That means I was five or six. I have a vague memory of the moment itself, but I don’t remember the house or garage at all.

“I don’t remember it at all,” Phyllis said when I called her. “But I do remember getting run over by the car.”

“Tell me what you remember about that,” I prompted.

“The world was moving and I remember seeing Mom move that stick on the steering wheel to stop the car so I moved it. When I tried to get out the door knocked me down and the car rolled back on me. Actually, I think it just rocked against me and didn’t go over me. Dad picked me and rushed me into the house and cut my dress off. There were no obvious injuries but I couldn’t move. Mom and Patti rushed me to the hospital. When we got home, they put me on the couch. After a while I had to pee so I got up and went,” she laughed a little. “It must’ve just been hysterical paralysis.”

Patti, being fourteen or fifteen, remembers it best. “It was there at the Colley house. It was a Sunday and we had just gotten home from church and Phyllis had fallen asleep in the car so Mom left her sleep. She was probably four or five. She had the door open a little and knocked the car out of gear when she was getting out. She fell out of the car and her coat caught and she was dragged a little, but she wasn’t hurt. We didn’t even take her to the doctor.”

I don’t remember that one. “So getting her finger cut off and getting dragged by the car both happened in Colley?” I asked.

“No. Her finger happened when we lived at Sick’s house. That’s the house Phyllis was born in.”

Isn’t it funny how the past, how memories, aren’t the same for all of us. How time and telling can change what we remember.  

We pass a place where a man was going down the driveway on his tractor. I laughed when I saw his little dog in the window waiting and watching for him to come home. It made me think of a short video by Wendy Francisco that I’ve always loved — a gentle reminder that the kind of steady, uncomplicated love we see in a dog isn’t all that different from the love we receive from God. It almost always makes me tear up. Here’s the link if you want to check it out.

GoD And DoG by Wendy J Francisco

“There’s an eagle!” I exclaimed and brought my camera up just a little too late. I didn’t ask Mike to go back around and I had little hope it would still be sitting there when we finished our errands in Tunkhannock.

Surprise!

It was still there. Now we’re going in the opposite direction and I’m shooting from the wrong side of the car. Did it stop me from trying?

NO!

          “There’s two of them!” I exclaim as we move far enough for me to see a second eagle behind the trunk of the tree. None of the pictures came out even though I turned around to shoot out the side window behind Mike.

          “I can’t ask you to turn around because it’s not a once in a lifetime shot,” I said. “Because I saw it before. But it is a twice in a lifetime shot.”

          Mike hesitated, his finger on the turn blinker lever, then, “I’m not going to turn around, okay?”

          “I really didn’t expect you would.” I’d already resigned myself to that.

          A minute later we came to a long, straight stretch of road. Mike slowed and pulled to the side. A grin spread across my face! “You’re going to turn around?”

          “Yep.” Mike tried to make a quick U-ey but had to back up once. “I just hope we don’t get hit doing it.”

          We didn’t and I got a fabulous shot of the pair as they watched our car slow and turn onto the side road across from their tree.

Then we go a little farther down the road and I got a shot of a hawk.

I do love seeing the raptors.

 Speaking of family...

Momma popped in for a quick visit this week. Not in the literal sense, but as one of those sudden, vivid memories that show up when you’re not expecting them.

I was standing at the kitchen counter. I needed a piece of butter for whatever I was doing at the time. I got the butter out, unwrapped it, cut off what I needed, and carefully started folding the wrapper back up and that’s when Momma popped in. In my mind’s eye, I watched her fingers push the seam back into place and carefully fold the ends in, just like you’re wrapping a present. She didn’t want any of the butter exposed to dry out or pick up odors from the fridge.

Moments like that remind me how lucky I was to have a mother whose everyday habits became part of me without my even noticing. Little things she did, small, ordinary motions, are still tucked into my hands all these years later.

Like the way she’d slap her hands against the edge of the sink basin to shed the water after she was done washing her hands or doing the dishes. Twice. You have to slap it twice. I can still hear the rhythm. And because the dogs like me to toss their toys while I’m washing the dishes, I do it a lot, and remember her. 

Speaking of family — again...

We have a new addition to our family! This little beauty came into the world on March 27^th. She’s my niece, the daughter of my youngest brother John and his wife Eunice. Her name is Dani Elysse and she weighed in at six pounds two ounces and twenty-one inches long.

In my family, March 27^th is the birthday of two Richards. My brother Richard, who we recently lost, and my uncle Howard Richard. Do you think they should’ve called her Rikki?

“Dani is named after John’s middle name,” my handsome older brother David told me. John’s middle name is Daniel.

 

          That’s pretty much the end of my jibber-jabber for the week, but since I have a whole ‘nother blank page when I print this, I’m gonna jabber on for another minute or so. 

          Easter is a special time of year. It’s the day we remember our risen Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It’s also the time of year for ham dinners and gathering families.

Something else I look forward to is jelly beans.

When I was a kid, I didn’t like and wouldn’t eat jelly beans. Now I love them. I allow myself one bag a year — at Easter time. Unless your feisty, red-haired neighbor buys you one as an Easter gift, then you get to eat two bags!

This year I noticed that there were no black jelly beans in either of the bags I ate. I don’t like the black ones but I eat them anyway because they remind me of young Mattie Stepanek. Have you ever heard of him? He wrote the Heartsongs books, small, powerful collections of poems that touched millions of people. Even though he was so young, had muscular dystrophy, died at thirteen, he had a way of seeing the world that felt older and wiser than most adults. I have two or maybe three of his books but I can’t find them right now. In one of his poems he wrote that black jelly beans taste mean — and he’s right. They do.

 

Lastly, I think of my best old friend Trish in West Virginia. I save odd-shape bottles for her craft projects as well as large pill bottles.

I had one such bottle on my sink one day and tossed it in the dishwater after I’d finished washing the dishes. I thought I’d be an extra nice friend and soak the label off for her. After a while, when I pulled the bottle to drain the sink, some of the label came off but left a mess of paper and glue behind.

It sat on my sink for a week.

Then I found some Goof Off and took it out to the kitchen, put it on the back of the counter, and now I stared at both of them for another week or so.

You just can’t get in a hurry about this stuff.

This week I made up my mind I was gonna try and get the sticky residue off. I got a small container, poured some Goof Off in it, got a paper towel, soaked it, draped it across the bottle, and let it soak.

It stunk!

I eventually took it outside for a few hours.

Goof Off, even after all the time soaking, didn’t make a dent in it.

I tried nail polish remover.

It just moved the glue around.

Then I remembered a tip I’d heard about years ago and decided to try that.

“What’s the tip?” I just know you’ve got bottles sitting around that you wanna get the labels off of, too.

It’s a mixture of cooking oil and baking soda. It works, but I didn’t want to work at it, so I let it sit in the oil mixture for a few hours. It was like magic!

Let’s call this one done!

Inconvenient

            Wowzers!

Talk about inconvenient!

A tractor‑trailer hauling an excavator smacked into the overhead steel trusses of the Rainbow Bridge. I’m not even sure which part hit — whether the boom wasn’t lowered all the way or the top of the cab caught the steel — and those details may come out later. What we do know is that the bridge is now closed and may be closed for months! That changes everything for those of us on this side of the Susquehanna.

This bridge is our quick hop into Wyalusing, usually a round trip of about eight miles. With it shut down the next closest crossing turns that same trip into something closer to sixty miles.

Aye‑yi‑yi.

With gas prices being what they are, you practically need to take out a small loan just to buy groceries!

And it’s not just errands. Plenty of folks on this side of the river work at the kill plant just a few miles past Wyalusing — the biggest employer in our immediate area. Their commute just got a whole lot longer. People who work at Procter & Gamble, about twenty miles downriver, won’t be hit quite as hard, but even then they’ll have to take the mountain roads instead of cruising along US‑6.

Besides errands and work, the bridge closure affects the school, too. The school sits just across the river, and plenty of kids from this side are bused over the Rainbow Bridge every day. With the bridge shut down, those buses suddenly have no direct way across.

           The word going around — and I’m not sure how official this is — is that they may try to make temporary repairs so school buses can still get over the bridge for the rest of the school year. Then, once school lets out, they’d close it again for the summer to finish the real repairs. Hopefully it won’t take any longer than that, because families on this side of the Susquehanna depend on that crossing more than most people realize.

          We had an appointment for an inspection on our car this week. We go back to the dealership in Dickson City to have it done as well as oil changes and tire rotations. We would normally cross the bridge and take the highway.

          “Since we have to go the back way,” Mike started, “why don’t we go past the construction site and see how the new church is coming along?”

          Things like that are always fine by me. We allotted extra time to compensate for the slower, windier, mountain roads.

          Our first look at the bridge.

          As we get closer I can see them working on the far side.

          In all the pictures I’ve seen on the news, I’ve not seen any damage, and I heard the driver hit ten trusses before he got stopped. 

         

          Braintrim Baptist Church in Laceyville started building their new church more than a year ago. I only know what we see when we drive past, and from the looks of it, the work is moving slowly. We watched them do the dirt work last summer, and now it looks like they may have some building supplies staged at the site. It’s progress, just not fast progress.

I snapped a bunch of pictures along our back road detour and on the little side roads Mike took to get us to our car appointment.

          “Did you see the dinosaur?” Mike asked.

          “No. I was focused on the underpass.”

          To my surprise, Mike turned around! So you get to see the train bridge from both directions.

         “There it is,” I said spotting a dragon with a skeleton sitting on his shoulders.

          As we cruised past I see the dinosaur Mike was talking about. "Oh. you did say dinosaur, didn't you."

          The old barn silo is still standing. Since we gave up our Sam’s Club membership, we don’t go past it nearly as often.

          This blue house sits on a triangle where a road passes on both sides. I wonder what that’s like.

          One of our church peeps is getting married in late April. I lost my invitation so I messaged Nick. “Where’s the wedding?”

          “The Old Carter Barn at Lake Carey,” Nick said.

          Hmmm. He says that like I should know where it’s at? And I don’t. Without admitting my ignorance, I asked, “Can you give me the address for my GPS?”

          Nick gave me the address and now, since we were out and about, Mike wanted to do a drive by so we knew where it was. I punched in the address. 

          From the direction we were coming from, we had to wind all the way around this big lake. Most of the houses are built right near the road with the road separating it from the lake. I only took one picture and it’s of this carved seafarer holding a lantern aloft.

I did a little research on Lake Carey. It’s a 182‑acre natural glacial lake, which is wild to think about when you’re just driving past it. Back in the late 1800s it was a full‑blown summer playground. Hotels popped up, picnic groves filled with families, and they even had steamboats — real ones — with names like Marietta and Rosalind chugging people around the water. The Rosalind eventually sank into the mud.

There was an amusement area on the west shore at one point, too — Ferris wheel, carousel, dance pavilion, the whole works. That’s hard to picture now with all the houses lining the shore. And there were summer camps for the kids. One of them, Camp Pokanoket, even hosted a young Aaron Copland long before he became a famous composer.

           We saw the huge barn long before we got there. 

          And now I was curious about the history of this place.

The Old Carter Barn dates back to 1884, when it was built as part of a working dairy farm. In 1911, the owners added a large new section that doubled its size. By the 1950s, the Carter family had turned the property into a turkey farm, and when that closed in the 1970s, the barn sat unused for decades.

In 1998, playwright Douglas Carter Beane inherited the property. His family had owned it since the 1950s. Beane is well‑known in the theater world and has earned five Tony Award nominations for his work on Broadway. He and his husband, composer Lewis Flinn, decided the barn was worth saving. They spent five years restoring it — straightening the structure, repairing the beams, replacing floors and windows, fixing the roof, and clearing out decades of debris. They even floated a Victorian gazebo across Lake Carey to add to the property.

During the 2020–2021 pandemic, they finished the last major updates, adding electricity, lighting, and accessibility improvements. Today the Old Carter Barn is used for weddings, concerts, art shows, and community events, giving the old farm building a new purpose after more than a century.

 

I have another story for you but it doesn’t have any pictures to go with it. I think I’ll just add a few more road pictures then go on with my story.

Speaking of research...

          My old computer is an all-in-one. That just means there’s no separate tower. All the “guts” that make it computer are behind the screen so it’s all-in-one.

I occasionally use my old computer, and this week, while doing something—I don’t remember exactly what—the file explorer froze on me. It’s been an ongoing issue with that computer. Since I didn’t really need it anymore, I decided to copy everything I cared about to an external storage device and reset the computer back to factory settings. I asked Copilot, my artificial-intelligence buddy, how to do that. Since Copilot can make mistakes, I did my own research on the subject. When what I found matched what Copilot told me to do, I went ahead and erased everything, making it just like a brand spankin’ new computer. I even had to register it.

Then I remembered that at one time I had a storage space issue. The all-in-one has a separate area it calls D: drive that’s way bigger than my C: drive and it was empty. I wanted to remove the partition and make it one big space. Once again I asked Copilot how to do that. I started walking through the steps and I wasn’t seeing what Copilot said I should be seeing. I did a screenshot and showed it what I was seeing.

“In order to remove the partition and make it one big storage area,” Copilot said, “they have to be sitting side-by-side. Your D: drive is actually a completely separate physical disk, not a partition on the same drive.”

That means I couldn’t do it. But I can still save large files to it; I just have to do it manually like I used to do.

“What would’ve happened if you tried to do it anyway?” you ask.

If I would’ve tried to delete what I thought was “the partition,” I would actually have deleted the entire one terabyte physical drive, not just a slice of it. I’m so happy I didn’t just try to blunder through the instructions.

         

          I finished reading the story of Rebecca Mary by Annie Hamilton Donnell and I found out a couple of things about that that I didn’t know.

          First, even though it’s old, it’s not cotton paper. I don’t care. The pages are still thick and don’t warp when I paint watercolor on them.

          Second, it’s a children’s book. Again, I don’t care. It was a tender, sweet story written with more craft than you might expect from a book that old.

          I actually really loved the story. And since you probably won’t read it, I’ll tell you what I loved about it. I love that Rebecca Mary called her imaginary doll a soul doll. “She’s not a feel doll,” Rebecca Mary said. It took them a little bit to figure out what she meant.

          The ending carries a quiet emotional weight that sneaks up on you, and it made me teary‑eyed. Maybe that’s just because I’m an old lady, though.

 

          More road pictures.

         I didn’t see the puppies on the porch until I downloaded the photo.

            Turkeys!

          I thought you might like to know that we have new barns around here as well as the old ones.

          Babies! A sure sign of spring.

          We had a couple of really nice days this week. We hit seventy! Then this morning we woke up to nineteen!

          Sigh.

          The girls took advantage of the warmth to lay in the sun.

          Lastly, did you know that I’m not a big chocolate lover? If there are any other flavors besides chocolate, I’ll take them. Chocolate sits at the bottom of my list, and if it’s the only option, well... I’ll take it, but I won’t be thrilled about it.

I made chocolate no‑bake cookies for movie night last week. You can’t just take stuff without tasting it first, don’cha know. As I bit into one, I thought, I like these! And I wondered, Is it because they’re made with cocoa and not chocolate? Are they the same thing?

I told Miss Rosie that even though I’m not crazy about chocolate, I like these cookies.

“Maybe it’s because of the peanut butter in them,” she said.

I do like peanut butter.

         

          Let’s call this one done!