Hi everyone,
Well, here it is, another week gone by.
My current desktop is just some berries. I don’t know what they are but every time I pass them I see all the pretty colors.
I had a photo of some grasses up for a while too. Not a fabulous photo, but something a little different to look at.
I have been working all this past week with Mike. His helper Gary has gone off and left him. He went to see a daughter in St. Louis then he flew out to Denver to see another daughter. So Mike is stuck with me for the next couple of weeks. We are working on his new garage, putting the dividing wall up between the two bays. I’ll tell you what. It has been so hot! The heat just really takes it out of you, you know what I mean?
Mike hired Wade,
a restaurant repair technician, to help him install a Mitsubishi Ductless HVAC system in our new garage. They worked on it all day Saturday and Mike was just soaked through with sweat by the time they were done.
At the end of the day, Mike says to me, “Peg, I can’t find my sunglasses.”
I’m afraid I didn’t have much sympathy for him. I do have some because since his cataract surgery his eyes are sensitive to sunlight but we have five or six pairs of sunglasses laying around here that he could wear but doesn’t like.
“You’ll have to look for them,” I said because I was busy with other things. As a result, Mike didn’t have his sunglasses for the rest of the day.
Having this system installed on Saturday meant that our ritual Saturday morning breakfast at the Golden Corral had to be put off until Sunday morning.
“I think you are confused about what day this is,” Roger, the manager, said as he unlocked the front door to let us in. We are always there when they open at 7:30.
I laughed, “You mean it’s not Saturday?”
Sue, our favorite waitress, always takes very good care of us making sure our coffee, water and juice are on our usual table by the time we are through paying for breakfast.
Sue has been getting my letters and stories for quite a while now. “I love them and save them all,” she told me once. “I have a big file of them.” And the first thing I do when I walk through the door is to hand Sue the newest one.
This morning she was talking about Wildflowers And Babies which is what I titled the letter of August 23. “How’s the ramp working?” she asked.
“It works great!” I told her. “Itsy and Ginger both use it to climb in bed at night and need no coaxing now.” And this reminded me that I do sometimes forget to update you on the outcome of some of the things I write about. I am still having a problem getting Ginger to use the ramp to get down in the mornings but I can usually call her back from the edge when I see she’s going to jump and put her on the bed at the top of the ramp and tell her to go down and she will. She just won’t do it on her own. I guess it’s faster to jump.
Itsy, on the other hand, hasn’t stayed all night in the bed with us since we put the ramp in and I’d bet you a hundred dollars she’s using it. She won’t jump. Before Mike made the ramp, when I would come back from a nature call in the middle of the night she would ask me to put her down and I would. Itsy doesn’t like to be disturbed when she’s sleeping and I tend to move a lot in my sleep so she doesn’t like to sleep in the bed with us. Never has.
Now, I have to tell you that the ramp works great when a special little fellow wants to get Mimi’s Nook, which lives on the bedside table. Andrew has learned to use the ramp too!
At breakfast Sue was telling us about the last letter. “My grandson said to me, ‘Grandma, can I read Wildflowers And Babies?’ I said sure. He thinks the baby is cute, and he thought the ramp was a great idea, and we can do that when we get a little dog,” Sue laughed as she told us. I got the impression that there wouldn’t be any dog in their near future because they live with Grandma.
“How old is he?” I asked.
“He’s eight.”
“And he reads my letters?” I was surprised. Surprised that he would have any interest at all in reading my letters.
“I used to read them to him, but he reads at a sixth grade level now and reads them on his own,” Sue said with evident pride. And I would be proud too! Reading opens whole new worlds to us. Reading teaches us to empathize with others and feel what it’s like to be in situations we may never have been in or ever be in. Reading helps us to walk in someone else’s shoes.
“Wow. I bet he’s my youngest fan.”
When we got back from breakfast Mike again brought up his lost sunglasses. “Maybe you’ll help me look for them?” he queries.
“I can’t right now. You look for them first,” I said going into the house. “Retrace all of your steps yesterday and see if you can find them.” This was advice given to me by a very wise old woman whom I love with all of my heart. Yeah. Momma. And it works too!
An hour or so later, Mike comes in. “Well, I guess they’re gone. I can’t find them anywhere.”
At this point I was feeling a little more sorry for him. He loves that particular pair of sunglasses. “I’ll take a quick look around and see if I can find them. Did you look in the old garage?” I asked. Mike will typically take them off and set them down when he comes in from outside. I could see him going into the garage yesterday looking for tools or parts for Wade and setting them down.
“Yeah.”
So I started in the new garage. I checked the scissor lift that they had been working from, going so far as to pick up a rag and shake it. Mike was following somewhat behind me and I worked my way down the side of the lift, picking up a sheet of cardboard and peeking under it. “If they’re under there, they’re smushed,” I said letting the cardboard settle back into place. They weren’t there. I turned around and there’s Big Red, Mike’s big red truck. Big Red has had to stay in the parking lot for the last three or four days because we were working where he is normally parked and yesterday Mike brought Big Red back into the garage. I reached for the door handle.
“I looked in the truck,” Mike said.
“So? I’m going to look again,” I opened the door, scanning the area in front of the drivers seat, not there. I scan the dash. Not anywhere I could see easily from my vantage point, I’d look better after I got in. I stepped up on the running board, grabbed the steering wheel and climbed in checking to see if they had slid down between the seat and consol, not there, then I check the consol, not there, then... as I lift my gaze... what do I see sitting right there in plain sight -- right on the passenger seat? Mike’s beloved sunglasses.
I grinned and picked them up, climbed down out of the truck being careful to not hit the door on the lift, shut the door, hold the sunglasses high and triumphantly say, “What are these!”
“Oh. Thank you,” Mike said reaching for them.
Those gremlins! I’m tellin’ ya!
Wade, the HVAC guy, brought his wife along to help on this little side job.
Mike and I had gotten things ready which included pulling the RV out of the garage. I thought I was going to have a free day and I’d get an early start on my Sunday letter. Yeah. The best laid plans. The door opens, I swivel from my desk and Mike is standing there with a woman I never met before.
“Peg, this is Glenda, Wade’s wife,” Mike said.
“Hi,” she says with a smile and a little wave of her hand.
“Hi,” I said trying to be nice but really resenting being interrupted. I’m sure it showed. I’m not good at hiding my feelings.
“Why don’t you show her…” Mike let it trail off.
“What Mike?” I asked maybe a little too tersely.
“Mike invited me to come in when I get too hot,” Glenda supplied.
Funny, I had some kind of idea I was supposed to show her my photos, but maybe he was going to say, “the RV.” I let it slide.
“Absolutely!” I said regaining my footing and remembering to smile, be nice and mind my manners.
“It was nice to meet you,” Glenda says and starts to back away. “I’d better get back before Wade needs me.”
“Okay. Nice to meet you too!” I say as cheerfully as I can. Mike closes the door and I breathe a sigh of relief and go back to work, but I wasn’t getting much done other than going through photos. Prepping photos is a big part of doing a blog or story or letter like I do and it’s time consuming.
I don’t know what I’m going to write about this week, I think. I had an Andrew story from last week that I didn’t write about, maybe I’ll write about that. Lucky you! So I start to sort photos making a story in my head as I go.
“Andrew, do you want to walk the dogs with me?” I asked and he did. We get shoes on and harnessed the dogs and headed out. We had had a nice rain the night before and Pop-pop has some fantabulous water puddles in his parking lot.
“Andrew, do you want to get your feet wet?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he says. We took the dogs back in and I grabbed my camera. At first Andrew tip-toed through the puddles.
Then he spots something and picks it up.
I didn’t know what it was but I think it reminds Andrew of money. Like a quarter. Like the day he splashed through puddles, playing with his daddy, holding two quarters in his little fist. Then we get down to some serious puddle splashing.
When do we lose the joy of splashing in a puddle?
Andrew runs back and forth through the puddle, holding his treasure, having a good time, while I stand by snapping photos.
Andrew dropped his ‘quarter’.
He swishes the water.
He finds it… And picks it up.
Back and forth through the puddle Andrew goes, so fast that his feet never touch the ground.
Ooops!
Down he went.
He got wet but didn’t cry. He did, however, lose his ‘quarter’ again.
He looked for it but didn’t find it. Andrew started to walk away so I went over to help him find it.
“Here it is!” I told him and got my first good look at his treasure.
Andrew picked it up and still had it in his fist when we moved on to another favorite game of his which is playing on the bleachers.
I don’t know what it is about the bleachers that Andrew likes, but he really likes it.
Could it be the sound his feet make slapping on the metal? Is it running down the valley between the seats? Is it just the climbing? I don’t know. I’m sitting there, watching Andrew climb around on the bleachers, running back and forth, jumping off when he gets to the end of a row, turning around and getting back up on them. All was fine and he was having a great time when all of a sudden he gets to the end of a row, stops, and stands there looking at me with an air of expectancy on his face. I was confused and it took me a minute to put it together. Andrew was one step higher than he had ever jumped from before and he was waiting for me to tell him no.
“Go ahead,” I told him. We’re talking about a difference of only a few inches here. Andrew looked at it and I could tell he was thinking about it, but he decided to not try it, turned around and went the other way. He climbed down one step, ran to the end and jumped from the bleachers. Then it was on to the stage.
If Pop-pop had been there they would have played a game where Andrew runs and flings himself at Pop-pop and Pop-pop catches him. But I was sitting on a bleacher watching and taking photographs. Andrew walks out to the end and looks at me.
“Go ahead,” I tell him again, and he makes me proud as he gets down on his belly, hangs off the end of the stage and drops to the ground.
Totally the way I would have done it. I really thought he was going to stick the landing too, but he didn’t and he landed on his bottom.
Andrew gets up and we walk across the parking lot, hitting a few puddles on the way and Andrew goes over to the fence and peeks between the boards.
“Pop-pop doesn’t live up there anymore,” I tell him. He seemed to accept that and we head back to the RV.
Once inside, we get his wet shorts off and put a dry nappy on him (sounds better than diaper, don’t you think?) and he was yawning and rubbing his eyes. “Why don’t you lay down for a little bit?” I asked Andrew.
“No,” he says.
“Yes,” I says. I get a blanket and pillow and put them up on his play deck with his toys. “Lay down for a little while,” I tell him.
“No,” he says again starting to whine and still rubbing at his eyes.
“Yes,” I tell him again and pat the blankets. “Come here and lay down.”
“No.” And he goes as far from me and the blanket as he can get.
He wasn’t yet crying very hard so I decided to let him be and the next time I look, this is what I see. Andrew sleeping on the lid to one of his toy tubs.
It wasn’t long until he was uncomfortable enough that he woke up and started crying.
“Aww, come here baby,” I say and I reach for sleepy Andrew. I picked him up and took him to the bed and gave him a pillow and little blanket, which he promptly kicked off and I could see our battle was going to start all over again. His whines turn into a full blown crying jag.
“Lay here for a little bit then you can get up,” I tell him.
“NO!” he screamed. OMG, he was so tired and the harder I tried to get him to quiet down the louder he was getting.
I’ve mentioned before that I listen to a Christian radio station here at the Lake and it was just a few days before that I heard a program on parenting. I don’t normally pay much attention when these programs are on because my kids are all grown up. I was laying in bed, playing solitaire on my Nook and only half listening, waiting for another program to come on when the conversation caught my attention. The guest speakers were talking about how they dealt with tantrums when their children were little. I think the conversation was about teaching and following through with consequences.
“So I picked her up with her blanket and took her outside, set her down, closed the door and locked it,” he said and everyone laughed.
“No!” The other guy exclaimed. “You didn’t lock it!”
“I locked it,” he confirmed. “Pretty soon she quiets down then there’s a little knock on the door and I hear this little voice saying, ’Daddy can I come in now please?’ I open the door and she takes her little blanket and goes right upstairs to her room and we don’t see or hear another peep out of her all night.” Everyone laughs again. I hadn’t caught the beginning of the conversation but I can imagine he had told her that if she didn’t stay in bed and be quit, she could just sleep outside and he followed through with his threat.
And I’m thinking, OMG, I bet you can’t do that these days!
The other guy said that he and his wife used to sing hymns, at first to just drown out the cries, but pretty soon the kid would stop crying and join in.
A woman on the same program said she used to talk real quiet to the kid, almost a whisper, and he would have to quiet down to hear what she was saying.
Well, there was only one option here for me to try and frankly I was glad to have an option I had never thought of to try.
“Andrew, lay here for just a few minutes and you can get up,” I said quietly over and over but Andrew wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t care what I had to say! I gave up and speaking normally to Andrew I said, “Get yourself under control, stop crying and you can get up. Okay?”
“Kay,” he said quieting almost immediately. He laid there, sniffled and hiccupped and wiped his eyes. He was working hard to comply with my wishes, and I had every intention of allowing him to get up too, but then, as he got quieter, his eyes started to flutter. They were getting heavy and he’d close them for a moment, then open them, then sniff and wipe his eyes again and then his eyes would close again and with every round, his eyes would stay closed for longer and longer. Pretty soon he had drifted back into sleep. Whew! I knew he needed it.
Andrew slept until he was slept out and when he got up he was ready to tackle the world again. He saw my camera and wanted to take some pictures. I gave him his camera and I got mine and we took a picture of each other.
Well, only one of us got a picture. My little photographer hasn’t mastered taking indoor photos yet. He needs to hold the button longer for the flash to build up a charge and he just doesn’t wait long enough.
About this time Kevin comes for him and Andrew turns the camera on him.
“Hold it hold it hold it,” I chant encouragingly. Kevin did his part and stood still until the flash went off and Andrew got his very first flash photo.
Something Andrew has mastered and I am super surprised and proud is one of the games on my Nook. It’s not a little kid game, it’s my game! It’s called Pudding Monsters and you have to take these blobs of pudding and put them all together to make one big blob, but you have to be careful. Once you get them moving they keep going until they hit something or go off the table and they yell as they go over the edge. For the longest time that’s all Andrew did was to send them off the table and delight in their screams. Then he did it. All on his own! I heard it make the win sound. OMG! You should have heard me. I was a cheerleader. “You did it Andrew! You figured it out! And that was a hard one too!” Then I watched as he played the next game. It was awesome to watch as he picked a blob and pushed him in a different direction each time until he found the one that worked, then he went on to the next blob. It was all very methodical.
How does he know how to do this? How does he know to solve a problem by trying all of the possibilities? At this rate he’s going to be smarter than me by the time he’s six years old!
And that my loves was the letter that I was writing in my head, sitting at my desk in the RV, in the parking lot, while Mike and Glenda helped Wade put our new HVAC system up in the garage.
Knock, knock, knock, came at the door as I was picking out the photos. I swiveled in my chair, reached down, opened the door, and there was Glenda. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asks.
“Sure, come on in.” Glenda came in and shut the door. “Do you know how to use an RV toilet?” I asked.
“I guess I don’t.” She looked a little confused. “Is it different than a regular toilet?”
“There’s a foot peddle you have to step on to flush it,” I told her. “Half way down lets the water in, the whole way flushes it.” I thought to tell her how to flush it, but not where it was. She headed to the back of the RV, sees the bed and turns toward a closed door.
“In here?” she asks.
“Yep,” I say and I turn back to my photos.
Pretty soon Glenda comes out and we start talking.
“I had to clean the sink after I washed my hands,” she said. “My hands were dirtier than I thought.”
I smiled. “It probably wasn’t all that clean to begin with.”
“I don’t feel comfortable if I go to someone’s house and everything is like perfect. I’m afraid to touch anything,” Glenda said.
“Yeah, housework isn’t my strong suit,” I agreed stating the obvious.
“Mine either,” she confessed. “I keep it clean, but not perfect. It’s lived in, you know what I mean?”
“Uh-huh.”
“In fact, before someone comes to my house, I go to their house first. If it’s like, all clean and perfect, then I don’t invite them to my house.”
I laughed. “I’d love to put you on my webpage with that quote, would that be okay?” I asked.
“Sure.”
And she let me take a few photos of her.
Then the door opens and there’s Mike looking for Glenda to come and help.
After they left I tried to get back to work but I wasn’t having much luck. I was thinking how fun Glenda was and I wanted to continue our conversation. I put my shoes on, grabbed my coffee, camera and voice recorder and went out into the garage to where they were working.
I really enjoyed Glenda much more than I thought I would and she told me other things about her that were interesting. Like she and Wade had been married on the day before her birthday. “So I can wake up with you as my present,” is what Glenda said Wade said.
“I bet,” cynical me says. “It’s probably so he can remember his anniversary date.” And I could kick myself. That was mean. So I had to do a little backpedaling. “But I think that was a very sweet thing to say. Wade, I didn’t know you were such a sweet guy!”
“Yeah, just don’t tell the guys I work with, I have a reputation to uphold you know,” he said with a laugh.
In the end I used one of Glenda’s other quotes for my webpage. One that showed she was a woman of God and even an abusive and controlling first husband wasn’t going to keep her from practicing her faith. “Sometimes I had to fight to go to church,” she told me.
At one point I had to help Mike do something on the backside of the garage and while back there I spied the passionflowers. I love passionflowers and wondered if Glenda knew about them.
We finished our job and I helped to carry the tools back around to the front. “Glenda, do you know what passionflowers are?” I asked her.
“No.”
“Well, they are beautiful and they are a fast growing vine and if you have a fence or something for them to grow on, they’ll grow as high as they can go!” I told her then I took her around back and we picked a flower.
“They’re beautiful,” Glenda said, lifting it to her nose. “They smell good too.”
“Funny,” I told her. “I’ve never smelled one.” But in my own defense, I’ve never picked one before either.
Glenda held it out to me and I sniffed. “Mmmm, they do smell really good! I read on the internet that you can grow them from the fruit, but I haven’t tried it yet. Do you want to try to grow some?”
“Sure,” she said. And we picked three fruits for her.
“You can eat passion fruit too and the deer and other critters love them.”
We headed back around to the garage and chatted the whole time. During the course of our conversation I found out the Glenda is an artist too and paints landscapes, but has been too busy lately to paint much of anything.
My mind does crazy things when I’m talking to people and most times I can reign it in and focus on them and their stories. I try very hard to not think about myself or tell my stories. I ask questions and never participate in one-upmanship but this day, talking about artists, I know this artist has to have an outlet for her creativity. Weather it be writing or taking photos, crocheting dishrags and scrubbies, making stained glass sun catchers or vinyl stickers...
Stickers!
And that brought to mind all the stickers I had made for my beautiful daughter Kat.
Kat’s stickers.
They were in a box.
Right there in the garage.
Kat hadn’t had a chance to decorate her craft room with them, as she had planned, before she died. While cleaning her apartment, I found them and I cried. She loved them and never got to use them. Even though they were fun for me to make, I still worked hard on them and it was a shame to let them sit, unappreciated in a box.
“Check out the stickers I made,” I told Glenda coming back with the bag that contained all of these stickers.
She seemed to really like them and I offered her to have some if she wanted them. She picked out the heart with wings and a halo right away then a few for her kids including a butterfly in her daughters favorite color and a mushroom and when it came to the freestyle ones that I made mostly from embellishments and scraps, she really seemed interested.
I was shuffling through them and she picked one, then another and another. “Oh! Can I have that one too?” she asked when True Love came up, then I think she felt guilty about how many she was taking. “That is if you don’t mind?” she added.
“No, not at all!” I said and handed it to her. She didn’t know it, or maybe she did, but I was pleased that she liked these stickers so well. “You can put them on glass if you want to and they come off pretty easy, but be careful if you put them on a wall, they’ll take the paint when you peel them off,” I warned her. And despite our slow start, I really enjoyed spending a few hours chatting with her, and sharing the gifts of flowers and stickers.
I want to tell you something that occurs to me as I proof this letter-story and it may be something that you didn’t even note as I breezed through.
“And what would that be, Peg?” you ask.
I might have been a little aggravated at having my ‘free’ time interrupted when Mike brought Glenda to meet me... Okay, not ‘might have been’, I was a little aggravated. I don’t know if it makes me sound like a meany or antisocial or just a crotchety old woman. But here’s the thing. I don’t get near enough time to write. There could be fifty hours in a day and I still wouldn’t have enough time to write all the stories rattling around in my head and I have yet to get my mother to Arizona! I’m afraid I’m losing the details of The Great RV Adventure since it’s been three months ago now and I didn’t keep many notes.
And here’s one more thing.
Life keeps happening. I’m finishing up this letter-story a week late and in the meantime I have more stories to tell you! I truly do like people and want to hear their stories, and write about them, but I’m full up, guys! I need to get some out before I put more in! So, for right now, I’m trying to not meet anyone new.
Yeah. The best laid plans.
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