Here it is, another week gone past.
And another month all but gone too. The next time I write it will be April and three months of 2016 will be under our belts.
I had this pretty springtime photo up as my desktop photo for a while. I am happy to have pretty things to photograph again.
I was pleased when I opened my inbox on the email and saw I had notes from some of you. I love when something I’ve written has caused you to pick up pen and paper and respond. Okay, in the old days that’s what you would have done, these days you hit the reply button and type it out, but be that as it may, the sentiment is the same and I appreciate it.
Dear Peg,
You take the most beautiful photographs. Some look like Georgia O’Keefe paintings, only photographs. I’m sure she would have loved to have painted some of your photographs.
Keep up the wonderful work, you need to publish them so many more people can enjoy. You really have a gifted eye for capturing beauty, whatever the subject matter.
Wow. Thank you Marsha. I’d love to be paid for taking photographs or writing or for any of the other things that I love to do. I don’t know how to make that happen though. So for now, they will remain free.
Marsha, for those of you who don’t know, is Miss Helen’s daughter.
I got this note from my cousin Lorraine.
Andrew is so adorable. I knew about the fairies wash because Mom also talked about them. They are mesmerizing in the photos you took. Spring flowers are beautiful too!
My mom and Lorraine’s mom were sisters; this I know. But hearing about the things they have in common gives me a glimpse of their lives, their past, their childhood.
Lorraine, I hope you are not tired of spring flowers yet because I have a feeling there will be more at the end of this letter!
Another beautiful cousin of mine is Lorraine’s sister, Rosemary. She sent me a photo of her hand! LOL!
This is the oldest hand in our generation, she wrote.
How cool is that!
Hands…they tell a story, don’t they.
About a month ago I talked about Andrew helping me make his daddy’s birthday present and Andrew pronounced birthday as birday. That was when cousin Stacey sent me this note:
Andrew calling birthday birday made me laugh…many years ago Ean’s tenth birthday, he’ll be 20 this month, in my rush to get everything ready for his birthday I wrote Happy birday Ean on his cake…totally forgetting the th…it’s been a standing joke ever since and each kid gets a cake with happy birday every year in our house!
Yesterday Stacey sent me a photograph of Cole’s birday cake.
Thought you might like to see this…LOL! You can tell Andrew he is correct in our family!
Cole is Stacey’s son and he had his fourteenth birthday just this past week.
Happy (belated) birthday to Cole!
I love family. I love having family. I love knowing we are family. And even friends can be family. Family, by definition isn’t just people living together, or a group of relatives, or lineage, or offspring; family can be a group with something in common and the something that everyone reading this has in common, is me!
Tuesday this past week, I spent a day helping one of my favorite old people with her flowerbeds.
“Miss Helen, where you offended when I called you old in my letter?” I asked her.
“Pshaw,” she said with a little laugh, “No.”
Miss Helen has always loved her flower beds. She loved everything about them from putting them in to maintaining them to the pretty flowers they produce. But this past year she hasn’t been able to keep them up and it distresses her to see them neglected and overgrown. “I’m just going to take them out and let them go back to grass,” she told me. “That will make it easier for the guy who cuts my yard.”
That is just so like this beautiful and kind-hearted lady; always thinking about someone else.
So this past week, I spent a nice afternoon with her.
“Get me the white chair from the shed and I’ll sit and help,” Miss Helen told me. I went to the shed and got the chair.
I gathered the tools.
When all was ready I hovered near Miss Helen as she made her way down the kitchen steps, — Thank you Frank for putting in such a sturdy handrail! — had the walker waiting at the bottom for her, stayed close as she made her way across the patio, up three steps to the yard, across the yard and finally had her seated in the waiting chair.
“Get me that pillow out of the garage, would you please?” Miss Helen said. “These old bones can’t sit on anything hard anymore without aching.”
I was off to do her biding even before she was done with her request but in my anxiousness I neglected to ask where it was. I stopped and called, “Where should I look?”
“What?” she asked.
Doggone it! I have to remember not to call from halfway across the yard (or from the other room if we are in the house). Her ears are old too! All kidding aside, Miss Helen still hears pretty well, just not when I’m soo far away.
(Let’s see, excessive to is spelled too, so excessive so is spelled soo?)
I went back to where Miss Helen sat in the warm sunshine and repeated my question.
“It’s in that stuff that’s right outside the door.”
I went into the garage and just outside the door into the house, under some things, was her pillow. I shook my head. She’s still got it, I thought. I bet it’s been most of six months since she’s used the pillow and yet she still knew where it was.
I brought it back to her and got her comfortable. “Did you put your bug spray on?” I asked.
“Oh no! I didn’t.”
“Where is it? In the utility room?”
“Yes.”
And I didn’t have any trouble finding it. When I got back with it I gave Miss Helen a good spraying. The last thing she needed was to have any of those little bloodsuckers on her.
“Aren’t you going to use any?” she asked when I put the can down.
“I’ve got some natural bug spray on already,” I told her. “I even sprayed Ginger with it.”
Then we got to work and spent the next four hours pruning the rose of Sharon’s which have taken over one of the flowerbeds. I used loppers to cut them back as far as I could, on the ones she wanted removed, and halfway back on the ones she wanted to leave.
“If anything happens to the neighbors fence I want to have a few to act as a screen,” Miss Helen explained to me.
As I cut the branches I tossed them to where Miss Helen sat with a pair of hand clippers making little sticks out of big sticks, or breaking them when she could, and dropping them into a black trash bag tied to her walker.
That is going to take forever! I bemoaned to myself. “Maybe we could just cut them and have Gary haul them off in his truck,” I said to Miss Helen.
“I would like to have it cleaned up and not leave it if we don’t have too,” Miss Helen said. “We could take’em out to the ditch and burn’em but it’s too windy today. I have a lady that I can call and she’ll come and get them if I put them in bags for her.”
So when I was too far ahead of her, when her pile was too big, I stopped clipping and helped to clean up the pile.
Sitting there, chatting with Miss Helen, I found disassembling the branches very satisfying. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle in reverse! And it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought it would.
“Now I know why you cut them up,” I told Miss Helen.
“They go in the bag much easier and I can get more in a bag without tearing the bags up,” she said, and that is what I figured out too.
Now Ginger…
That little stinker!
I walked both dogs before I left the grouse so they would be comfortable and nap with Mike while I was gone, but Ginger wasn’t having any of that. As soon as I opened the door to the garage she shot through. The outside door was already open and I didn’t want Ginger to run off, so, since she was so determined to go with me, I opened the Jeep door, “Com’on,” I called, “load up!”
The command to load up works much better with the golf cart than the Jeep; the Jeep is too tall. She can’t get in on her own, but the command had the intended effect. She was at my feet. I reached down, scooped her up and dumped her on the seat. “You can go but you won’t have a good time,” I told her.
At Miss Helen’s I tied Ginger’s leash to a tree close by so I could keep an eye on her and she was so good we hardly knew she was there at all. Then the neighbor’s dog barked and Ginger barked back. That was the only time she barked.
“I can’t believe how quiet she is,” Miss Helen said after I shushed Ginger.
Ginger moved from the flower bed, where she was napping, to a little patch of irises the lived against the house.
“She’s watching something,” I told Miss Helen.
“Maybe it’s a little ground squirrel or a lizard,” she said.
Ginger sat there and sat there and sat there for a long time just staring. I saw her alert on something once, but whatever poked it’s head up must have pulled it back down pretty quick, because Ginger relaxed again and took up her station just staring.
Once Miss Helen and I had quit for the day, I cleaned up the tools, knotted the tops of our five bags of sticks, stowed them behind the garage for pickup, and helped Miss Helen get back into the house.
Then I went back out through the kitchen door to collect Ginger. I untied her leash and headed for the Jeep. “Com’on, let’s go!” I said totally expecting her to follow. But she didn’t. She was dead weight on the other end of my leash. I turned around to see what was wrong and she had her bottom planted firmly on the ground, ears perked up, and an expression on her face I could read perfectly.
“I’m not going,” she said.
I don’t know what was so interesting that it kept her attention for over an hour and even now she did not want to abandon her post, but she wasn’t budging. I had to walk back and pick her up and carry her.
I had intended to help Miss Helen on Wednesday too but Monday Mike received a call from Camping World in Columbia. The parts were in to fix our RV and we needed to be there Wednesday morning for our appointment.
“Mike will want to leave this afternoon,” I told Miss Helen and when I got home, I was right. He wanted to go up Tuesday night rather than drive early Wednesday morning. So once I was back from Miss Helen’s I started getting stuff picked up, packed up and tucked in for our eighty mile trip.
“We’ll be home tomorrow afternoon,” Mike said. “Why don’t we just leave the cats here?”
“Okay by me,” I said and we went looking for the cats. We found Macchiato but we couldn’t find Molly anywhere! We’ve seen Molly come out on top of the RV tire by the table before so we know she goes under there somewhere - but where! We took flashlights and crawled under the RV but couldn’t find her.
“I’m going to start the RV,” Mike said. “That should scare her out.”
I stood watch while Mike started the RV, but it didn’t work. No Molly. Mike put the RV in gear and moved it a little forward and a little backward thinking the motion would spook her. It didn’t work. No Molly.
“Let’s go get a bite to eat and maybe when things are quiet she’ll come out,” I suggested.
Mike and I got in the car and went through the drive thru at McDonalds and brought our supper back here to eat it. We hadn’t been sitting and eating for two minutes before Molly came creeping out from under the RV.
We have no idea where she was hiding.
With all of our critters safely inside the RV, Mike opens the huge overhead door and takes the RV out. Then we transferred the cats back into the grouse. There was no use to stress them out for just an overnight trip.
I took a few pictures on the way to Columbia.
A barge as we crossed the Missouri River in Jeff City.
An abandoned house with graffiti.
And cows!
Safe and secure in the parking lot of Camping World, we settled in for the night. Mike watching TV, me on my computer when…
OUCH!
Something bit me! Right on my hip. I opened the front of my jeans and as soon as I exposed my hip, I saw him. That little bloodsucker! I picked him from my skin and gave him a taste of a Bic I keep handy for just such occasions. Well, for that and for lighting incense. The cat litter box sits near my desk and is sometimes a little stinky.
I settled back and before long I felt a tickle on my arm and there was another one! This little tick met the same fate as the first one. Sometimes, when you light them up, they pop you know, just like a kernel of popcorn.
After finding two, all bets were off. Now every little tickle, real or imagined, had me checking for a tick.
This is ridiculous, I thought and got up from my seat, went to the back and stripped. I picked several more ticks from both my body and the inside of my clothes.
Sigh.
Just because my homemade bug spray didn’t work this time doesn’t mean I am going to quit on it. I mixed it according to the directions. Twenty drops in eight ounces of water or witch hazel to make a spray. I didn’t have witch hazel so I used water, but maybe it was still my fault. With the witch hazel you don’t have to reapply as often and I was out for four hours and didn’t reapply at all. So maybe it was my fault and I’m going to try again using witch hazel. I love the idea of using essential oils for pest control.
Camping World replaced our slide motor but didn’t fix the steps.
“We can fix the part that’s on recall,” Jeff, the head of service told us, “but we can’t fix the part that’s broken. We’ll have to order it.”
Mike was not happy but what can you do?
That means another trip to Columbia when the parts come in and in the meantime, we have to use my kitchen step stool to get into and out of the RV.
Sigh.
What a pain.
Let’s end this with springtime photos.
I love the wild plums but they are reaching their peak so after today I don’t think there will be anymore of these.
I used to photograph the blossoms of an apple tree that lived on the edge of a parking lot just off the Strip but last year they tore it out.
It made me sad.
I lost a mimosa tree two years ago, and that made me sad.
Earlier this week, walking past the lilac bush that I like to photograph for you, I see it is gone now too. I got some awesome hummingbird moth photos there.
Sad again.
But I don’t dwell.
I walked down a road I don’t normally go down and found violets.
Then I see a whole patch of pink blossoms. I don’t know blossoms well enough to know what these are, and I haven’t been in the area to see the fruit.
I think this is a pear blossom.
The redbuds have opened.
I don’t know what this is.
Or this. I have no idea, but these are tiny little flowers on a shrub like plant.
I don’t know this one either, but it is a good example of a green flower.
New leaves with no flower.
The honeysuckle bush is coming on.
And so are the gooseberries.
Johnny-jump-ups. I know, they look like violets to me too.
Field cress.
Rose verbena are my current desktop photo.
I was going to try to end it here, but I just have to show you a couple of more photographs I took this past week.
For one, we may not be happy to see the dandelions come on, but the ants are!
Yeah. All those specks you see sprinkled amongst the dandelions petals are ants.
And check out this orb weaver. He was hanging there, upside down, all curled around himself, just hanging out.
“Is he dead?” I asked Mike.
“No, watch,” and with that Mike lifted his hand.
“Don’t hurt him!”
Mike dropped his hand, drew in a great breath and blew on him. Mr. Orb Weaver took off and scrambled so as to not lose his anchor line. I shot off picture after picture trying to focus on him. Then, when all was still, he settled back into his cradle again.
Isn’t he cool!
And with that, we will call this one done!
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