I have had two desktops this past week. An orange leaf among the dried ragweed was up there for most of the week.
The seasons here in Pennsylvania are different than in Missouri as you may well expect. Spring comes later and fall comes earlier. I’ve missed a whole chunk of time by traveling east, don’t you know! In Missouri the ragweed and aster were just starting to bloom and here they have come and gone already! So you won’t have to suffer through too many more wildflower photos. Instead we will move on ‘winter flowers’ as I like to call them.
I took my camera with me when I took Ginger and Itsy out for an early morning walk. I spent a long time taking photos of the dew dripping from leaves and branches, reflecting the early morning sun light. When I saw this one on my computer it immediately caught my attention. There was just something about it that I liked. I made a few clicks with my mouse and made it my desktop photo, minimized my photo editing program to see the desktop and there, in the streak of light is a city with a big round moon above it. Can you see it? And if you use your imagination you can see the city reflected upside down in the water droplet hanging from the branch.
Maybe it’s just me.
You are going to get to see a bunch of these kinds of photos when I get around to posting them, but doggone it! I am so behind on posting! The last date I posted photos to my blog was September twenty-first. You can count how many days there are between then and now and I have twenty-one days with files in them waiting for me to resize and upload for you and every day that passes only adds to that number.
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Have I ever told you that I like to wash dishes?
“Peg, you’re weird!” you say.
Well, I do. I like to wash dishes. There’s just something that I like about having a sink overflowing with bubbles and hot water, taking the dirty dishes and making them sparkly and clean again. It’s almost sad when I pull the plug and watch the bubbles go down the drain. Now, scrubbing pots and pans is a different story but you gotta take the bad with the good.
And if you think that’s weird, there’s another household chore that I like to do too and that would be laundry-at least here in the country anyway. I love to hang the clothes on the clothesline. I love taking each item from the basket, a favorite shirt or pair of jeans, sometimes reliving a memory, giving them a shake to undo the twisted-ness left by the spin cycle of the washer and pinning them to the line. Clothes go on the line upside down and it makes me crazy when I see jeans hanging by the waistband or shirts by the shoulders.
“Why do you hang clothes upside down?” you ask.
Because that’s the way my mother always did it. Besides, it just makes sense to me. The waistband of the jeans and the collars of the shirts are the heaviest parts and hanging allows them more movement in the breeze so they dry better. That and the clothespins tend to leave little teepees that would be obvious on the shoulder of your shirt and hidden if you hang them from the side seams at the bottom.
“So because your mother did it that way makes it right?”
Well, yeah! I have the smartest most beautifulist mama in the whole wide world -- but I’ll Google it.
The first (and only) website I checked was about.com and there is a photo of clothes hung all wrong! Jeans by the waistband, shirts hung from the bottom but folded over the line. My heart sank but I perused the article anyway.
Maybe they would give me their opinion on why they think this is the right way. Imagine my surprise when I discover their photo does not correlate with their written word. In the body of the article it says to hang jeans by the leg and shirts by the bottom side seam.
See! Momma’s right.
Case closed!
Carrying the baskets to the clothesline is good exercise for me. As I’m hanging clothes I love to listen to the bees buzz, the grasshoppers and crickets chirp and the birds sing. I love the sound of the wind as it soughs through the trees and rustles the leaves. I love the feel of the sun on my face and the cool green grass under my feet. I take my time and count my blessings and give thanks to our Lord that I am able to do this chore and that He has sent the birds to sing to me, or the breeze to kiss the sweat from my brow or anything else that I can think of to be thankful for -- and I always find something.
Admittedly, this time of year, the sweat on my brow and sunshine might be in short supply however it doesn’t diminish my love of the job. Even if I’m out there in a jacket and boots and the skies are cloudy and gray and the wind is nipping at my nose and ears, I still love it, I just might not lollygag.
And I do have a drier.
I love walking out to the clothesline, checking to see if things are dry. Walking along, feeling the waistband of jeans -- if they are dry, everything else will be dry too. Scrunching the bath towels and pulling them up to bury my face in them and breathing the scent of the great outdoors.
And who doesn’t love sleeping on sheets that have been line dried?
I love to do the laundry and as we pulled into the driveway of our mountain home, I see my clothesline, waiting there for me and I smile in anticipation, and sigh as I know it will have to wait.
Needless to say, after two days of cleaning, my heart sang as I loaded the washer with blue jeans and socks, added the soap, shut the lid, set the cycle and smiled as I heard the water rushing in and walked away. I retrieved a cup of just made coffee and joined Michael on the patio for a much needed break.
When I went back inside the washer was done. I opened the lid, pulled out the top pair of jeans and they felt wetter than I expected them to feel. I gave them a little shake and dropped them into the waiting basket. I picked up the next pair of jeans and they were even wetter. I dropped them into the basket too. The next pair was wetter yet again. Okay. So now I reverse the process, picking up the jeans I had just deposited into the basket and putting them back into the washer.
I’ll just run the spin cycle again, I thought. I shut the lid, turned the dial to spin, pulled the knob out and...nothing. No spinning going on here! Doggone it! My washer was broke. I took the clothes from the washer and dripped a trail to the door as I took them out to the clothesline and hung them to dry. Talk about a workout! That basket full of jeans and socks was still pretty wet and man! Were they heavy!
“Mike, if the spin doesn’t work does that mean that the agitate doesn’t work either?” I asked Mike.
“I don’t know,” he said.
But I bet it doesn’t.
I texted that beautiful neighbor lady of mine, Stephanie Robinson and asked who fixes washers. She suggested a place and I called.
“It’s sixty-five dollars for a service call,” he told me. “Depending on where you live it could be more. Then there’s labor and parts.”
“I’ll bring the washer out to you,” I volunteered hoping to cut sixty-five dollars off the bill.
“Oh no. My backroom is so full I couldn’t get in there if I wanted to!”
This washer is at least fifteen years old and we didn’t feel like we wanted to put a lot of money into it.
“Just go to Roots and get Peg a hundred dollar washer,” Steph’s husband Jon Robinson told Mike.
After discussing it Mike and I decided we wouldn’t get another washing machine just now. We only plan on being here for two months or less, depending on the weather, and I could get by until we left. There’s a Laundromat in Wyalusing which is only about four miles away. We scheduled a day in our busy schedule to go into town and wash the clothes, (I’d still bring them home and hang them on the line to dry), and that day was several days away. Until then I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. I thought how much it sucks to pack all the laundry up and haul it all out to the car, drive into town and carry it into the Laundromat, sort and start the machines then sit and wait for it to get done. I know, I do it in Missouri all the time as I don’t have a washer or dryer there. The only good thing about Laundromats is that the laundry all gets done at one time, folded and put away at one time and you don’t have to think about it again until the next time. I thought about telling Mike I changed my mind and I wanted a washing machine, but I put on my big girl pants and stuck with the plan.
Laundry day came and Mike was a big help. Besides the two baskets that he carried to the car, we had a couple of blankets too. Mike drove to town and carried everything into the Laundromat for me. The washers here are cheaper than in Missouri but one of the big, glass-front multi-load washers I had chosen washed and rinsed with hardly any water. I considered moving the clothes to a different washer and washing them again but in the end I settled for what I got.
I’ll tell you what. That Laundromat was filthy. Not just dirty-filthy! Discarded dryer sheets collected in drifts around the perimeter of the floor where they had been kicked. A pair of men’s tighty-whitey’s were draped over the half-wall at the end of the line of washers, a sock beside it and other articles of abandoned clothing adorned various locations throughout the place. Dust and dryer lint on every flat surface that hadn’t been recently touched. Rings and rings of laundry soap on top of machines where caps had been set after measuring out the soap.
“If I had a broom I’d sweep the place,” Mike said to me. Does that give you any indication of how dirty it really was?
Once home, Mike carried the baskets to the clothesline for me and helped by handing me clothes as I hung them up. In all the years we have been together this is a first. We had so much laundry that I used all four clotheslines and almost all of the clothespins.
“Let’s take a ride over and see what Root’s has for hundred dollar washers,” Mike suggested.
“Okay,” I readily agreed never letting on that on the inside I was screaming “Yay!” and jumping up and down with joy.
“But just to look,” he cautioned. “There’s a place in Meshoppen that has washers starting at two hundred fifty dollars.”
It didn’t matter to me. Either way it looked like I was getting a new washer. Despite having so much to do, I dropped everything, made a travel cup of coffee and met Mike at the Jeep.
It was a nice fall day for a ride and it allowed me to get photos of the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside with all of it’s fall color. We were past the peak but that didn’t stop me.
Once at Root’s, the used appliance place, Mike started talking with a nice young man about washers. And just in case you had any doubts -- and Mike didn’t -- let me confirm for you. There are no one hundred dollar washers. Instead of just looking, we came home with a new washer. They have a thirty day warranty and Root’s does a great job of cleaning up the used appliances.
At home I helped Mike get the new washer in and hooked up but unfortunately, all the laundry was clean and hanging on the clothesline! It would be a few days until I tried it out.
Later in the day, when the laundry was dry, Mike helped me take it down. I was folding the clothes as I went along but Mike didn’t want to fold.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“Take down the towels, sheets and blankets,” I said. “Socks and underwear.” I didn’t care if they wrinkled in the basket till I got them folded. At some point I thought about telling Mike he needed to shake things before putting them in the basket then I changed my mind. I was afraid he’d quit on me. Mike carried the baskets into the house and set them on the floor in the living room. I picked up the couch cover and heard buzz-buzz.
“We’ve got a bee,” I said and took the cover out and let the bee loose. I came back in, put the cover on the couch, hung the shirts and...that was it. I didn’t get around to taking care of the rest of the laundry for a couple of days. I was spending all of my free time trying to get the last weeks letter done only stopping long enough to take care of the dogs or make another cup of coffee. One nice thing about it though, every time I came back into the house, I could smell the fresh air and sunshine. That was pretty nice.
Once the letter was done and I got around to taking care of the rest of the laundry, I found a couple of spiders in amongst the clothes. I took them outside a little ways from the house and let them loose.
Now, you want to talk about spiders?
“No way! I hate spiders!” I hear some of you say. “They freak me out!”
You might want to skip this next section then.
Steph stopped to see me after work one day last week. “I’m in the shop, come on around,” I told her when she called.
“Peg! Get your camera and come see this spider!” Steph said as soon as she came in the door.
I’d been working on a glass butterfly sun catcher but I quickly put my soldering iron back in it’s holder, detoured through the apartment where I picked up my camera and as we came into the front yard I saw it a mile away! This thing was orange and it was huge!
“Holy cow!” I exclaimed and snapped a few pictures of it. “Steph, we need something to show how big this spider is,” I said but I couldn’t ask her to pick up the spider. “Here,” I said and handed her my camera. “I’ll pick it up and you take it’s picture.” Stephanie actually did a really good job of taking its picture while I held it but then Steph said she wasn’t afraid and we switched roles. She held the spider and I took pictures. I think this photo really shows the size of the spider and Steph definitely has prettier hands and nails then I do. Look at the size of this spider, would ya!
“This spider looks like the one living on the patio except it’s yellow,” I told Steph and after we had enough pictures we took it over to the weeds and set it free.
“Come see the one on the patio,” I said to Steph. “I’m having a hard time getting it’s picture because the sky is behind it and he won’t turn around for me.”
Steph put her hand behind him to block the back light and it also allows you to see that this yellow one is a much smaller spider.
Aren’t they awesome spiders!
“What are they?” you ask.
I’m glad you asked! These are both marbled orb weavers. They come in a variety of colors and make a new spiral web everyday. Females are twice the size of males and stay hidden, having a strand of silk extending all the way into her retreat. If it vibrates, she knows her web has caught something. Females lay orange eggs in a silken sac and attach it near her retreat to guard it. If the weather is warm, the spiderlings will hatch soon after. If it’s cold, the spiderlings will over-winter in the egg sac and hatch in the spring.
Adults are very active during the summer and autumn months. They tend to fall to the ground if they sense danger where they stay hidden until the threat has passed.
Isn’t that interesting?
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A couple of days after I got my new washing machine I did a load of laundry. Mike was on the couch watching TV as I carried the basket through the apartment on my way to the clothesline. “Thank you for buying me a washer,” I told him. “I couldn’t be happier if you’d have bought me diamonds!” I was ridiculously happy.
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Let’s wrap it up this week with a shot of the creek down near the Kipps house. They have a beaver dam! I think I’m jealous!
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