Bits Of Nature II

This week has been a week full of stories!
And pictures!
Lots and lots of pictures!
First, my current desktop photo, a black-eyed Susan.

Second, greetings and salutations to you. It has been a long time since I’ve wished you happiness and health, so let me do that now.
I hope this letter blog finds you happy and healthy.
The last time I wrote I told you of our adventures going to Pennsylvania and back again. The story became so long (twenty-eight pages when printed) that I broke it into two chapters. I didn’t finish the story either, saving a little for next time — er,  this time.
Guess what?
“On this date in history, June 25-26, 1876  Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was killed in the Battle of Little Big Horn?”
Wow. I’m impressed you knew that. But no, that’s not what I was going to say. What I was going to say is that I’m not going to finish the rest of the story this time either.
“Why not, Peg?” you ask.
Really, truly, and in all honesty, I don’t have the time. The stories are rattling around in my head and I need to get them out, but we have been so busy this past week that I’ve had no time to sit and write. So let’s do this. Let’s finish up the photos I didn’t get to use in Bits Of Nature; there are more than thirty of them, and I’ll get busy this week writing the new stories, if you think you’d like to hear them.
Bits of Nature, Eastward Ho and Westward Ho bring us up to June eleventh, even though I didn’t get the stories written and published until a week later. I’ve taken over 2,300 photos since then and I’ve sorted out about a hundred new ones to show you, some for the stories and some just photos.

A summer azure. I just love these little guys!

Black bee fly?

Pearl crescent.

I don’t know but they have a pretty green color.

This guy just watched as the girls and I quietly approached. I will never know how close we could have gotten because a car came down the road and scared him off.

Northern water snake. Ginger scared him from the bank and into the water. I saw him go, she didn’t.

Wild onion.

Grass flowers.

Oreo cows! Okay, their real name is belted Galloway’s, a Scottish beef cow.

Yellow iris with a bug on it.

Weepy grass.

Spotted cucumber beetle, a southern root worm in it’s larval stage.

On the same thistle was a click beetle.

Ladybug.

Prairie parsley.

Fooled me.

Pretty ox-eye daisy’s.

Ginger sniffed out a turtle. I let her torment him for a few minutes.

This one has been in my file for a while now. Right after Mother’s Day as a matter of fact. Hmmm. Who throw the dozen roses out the car window and why? I wonder.

I know what they’re doing, but I don’t know what they are.

Honeysuckle.

Young grapes

Yellow sweet clover.

Vines on a fence post.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures. 

Let’s call this one done,

Lots and lots of love,

Peg and Mike

Westward Ho!

Comfort Inn served a full breakfast in the morning. There were scrambled eggs cooked in rounds, a piece of cheese in the center and folded over, toast, sausage, pancakes, waffles, fruit, yogurt, Danish, biscuits and gravy, cereal, a couple of different juices, tea and coffee of course. Although nothing to write home about, it was totally editable.
Our trip west began in earnest this day. There was no center console in the front of our rental car but the backseat had one in the middle of the seat. I pulled it down and it was covered with bits of food and spilled milkshake.
Disgusting!
And shame on the rental car place for not checking to see if it needed to be cleaned.
“It looks like there were kids in the backseat,” I  said and told Mike what I had found.
“Maybe they should allow dogs and ban kids,” he suggested.
Most of our stuff was in the way-back of the Trax. Itsy was in her car seat on the backseat center console. We hung Mike’s shirts on the hook over the backseat window, our pillows were on the seat beside Itsy, bottled water on the other side of her, purse and snacks on the floor within easy reach, Ginger and a blanket on my lap, and we were off.
We head out of Wysox, cross the Susquehanna River and I can see the little town of Towanda where a younger brother and sister of mine were born. I was born about twenty miles north of there.
Turn left on route 220 and we pass through the even smaller town of Monroeton where I see one of the old houses had burned since the last time we had been through there.

Itsy, in the backseat, alone, by herself, wasn’t happy. She whined and snorted and scratched at the edge of her car seat. Scratching is her signal for down or up or in this case, “I want out of here!” And she can be persistent, that’s for sure.
Ginger was as good as she always is but I had to unbuckle and reach for things in the backseat a few times and to do that I had to get Ginger off my lap. I tossed her (gently, of course) onto the pillows in the backseat and she stayed there the rest of the way home. Oh, she tried to come up front a time or two but I said “NO” in a stern voice and pushed her back onto the pillows. Ginger wasn’t happy about it but she settled down, curled into a ball and slept.
Itsy was tied but had enough length on her leash that she was in and out of her car seat. Ginger barely moved as Itsy walked all over her and even tolerated it as Itsy sat down on top of her.

But I was surprised when I looked back and saw that Itsy had laid down with Ginger and slept for a while. In all of her eleven years she has seldom rested while we’re traveling.

“Maybe that’s the trick,” Mike said. “Keeping them together.”
Eating was a bit of a challenge on our westward trip. It was hot! It was really hot! In the upper 90’s and way too hot to leave the dogs in the car without air conditioning. Going east we left the truck running and locked the doors because we had the spare key. But that stinkin’ rental car place only gave us one key for the Trax so one of us always had to stay with the girls.
But we didn’t miss any meals, let me tell you.
I “awww’d” my way across the states of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Every time — well no, not every time, but a lot of the times — when I spotted an animal laying dead beside the road, I’d say “Awwww,” and be sad for a moment or two. Believe it or not, we even saw a bear laying dead beside the road in Pennsylvania! I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
On the westward leg of our trip, as we approached Indianapolis, Indiana, traffic started jamming up.
“Construction?” we guessed.
Mike picked a lane and as we inched forward we see a helicopter above us. “Do you think it’s a news helicopter?” Mike asked.
“Ummm, no, I think it kept going,” I said, then as we watched, it circled back. “Maybe it is a news helicopter,” I conceded.
I snapped a picture thinking I could zoom in and see where he was from but I didn’t get a good picture.

“There’s no traffic in the eastbound lanes,” Mike observed.
Then we saw the flashing lights. “Awwww,” I said and it was a deeper, more heartfelt ‘aww’ this time because someone could be hurt. Someone someone loved could be hurt or maybe even dead.
Then we see a police officer in the fast lane. We thought he was having the traffic merge to the slow lane, then I saw the truth. “He’s making everyone exit,” I told Mike. I could see down my side to the exit ramp and saw it was a steady line of cars exiting.

We were never very close to the accident but I snapped away with my camera on full zoom until all I photographed were trees. Then, as Mike followed the traffic onto the off ramp, I hit my review button and zoomed in to see what I had gotten. “There’s a helicopter on the road!” I exclaimed and I visited the world of grief and sadness all over again.

Our daughter Kat was Life-Flighted from the scene of her accident the day she died, but I’m sure you knew that’s what I was referring to.
As we left the ramp, Mike was following the traffic and some turned left and some kept going. “Which way?” Mike asked but I didn’t know so we followed where the most people were going and made a left turn when the traffic allowed.
We found ourselves in a truck stop.
“Does the road go around behind it?” we wondered.
A parking lot, with no exit, soon dashed our hopes and we had to make a u-turn and go back out — but we weren’t the only ones!
As we gained the entrance of the truck stop we had to wait as a steady stream of traffic came off the highway from one direction and the eastbound detourers kept the other lane busy making a left hand turn difficult, but eventually there was a break big enough for us to squeeze into.
I took a few photos on our jaunt around the countryside, nothing fabulous but things we wouldn’t have seen had we not left the highway.

 By the time we made it back to I-70 traffic was starting to flow again, at least in the westbound lane. Eastbound was still at a standstill.
“They must have just shut our side down while the helicopter landed,” Mike guessed and we never saw him land.
Hot dogs from the gas station convenience stores, eaten in the car was our lunch on all the days of our travel, (we won’t talk about the chips and Cheetos we ate on the side). We tried to have a longer break and a more nutritious meal at supper time but with this only-one-key issue, that wasn’t going to happen this night.
My stomach was in an uproar from all of the junk food and greasy hot dogs and I felt a need for a salad. “How about Subway?” I suggested. A lot of the truck stops have Subway’s in them and I usually get a lot of veggies on our roast beef, no dressing, and that was the healthiest thing I could think of since we couldn’t leave the dogs and had to eat in the car.
“Fine,” Mike said.
At the next truck stop that advertised a Subway we stopped. I walked the girls while Mike filled the tank, then he pulled away from the pump and parked in front of the store. I carried the girls across the burning hot blacktop and dropped them off with him and went in for our food. I was pleased to see there was only one other customer ahead of me so I wouldn’t have long to wait and we could put more miles under our tires.
“Do you want anything else on this?” she asked the man she was waiting on.
“No,” he replied.
“For here or to go?”
“To go.”
She closed up the box of his personal pizza, pulled her food handling gloves off and rings up the sale. “Would you like to add chips and a drink for a dollar ninety-nine?”
“No,” he said then remembered his manners. “Thank you.”
He tried to hand her his plastic money but she indicated that he could swipe it himself. She finished the sale and greeted me.
“How are you?”
“Fine,” I said not engaging her in small talk.
She grabbed a couple of disposable gloves from the box and as she fumbled with the first one trying to put it on she dropped it on the floor. “Geesh,” she says, reaches down, scoops it up and throws it away. Then she had to go back to the box for another glove.
“What can I get for you today?”
“Foot long, Italian herb and cheese, roast beef,” I said not wanting to get too far ahead of her.
She got the bread, set it on the counter, sliced the top the way they do, opened it, flatted it out the way they do, and reached for the roast beef. She didn’t like the little end pieces of the stack she picked up, so she tossed it back in the bin and got another stack. I watched as she fumbled with this stack and couldn’t seem to get the slices apart. She tossed that one in the bin too and got another stack out. They only put so many slices on your sub and I was already getting frustrated so I turned my back and watched the news playing out on the TV in the corner while she counted.
Another gal came up and waited her turn beside me.
“What kind of cheese?” she asked.
I turned back to her. “Provolone,” I answered.
“Do you want it toasted?”
“No thank you.”
I expected she was going to have as much trouble with the cheese as she did with everything else so I turned back to the news for a moment. I expected to hear, “What would you like on this?”
But did I hear, “What would you like on this?”
NO!
“What can I get for you?” she asks.
I turn around and she is laying the last slice of provolone on my sub and she pushes it to the next station where they normally add the veggies and she looks up at the gal waiting in line beside me. If we had come in together I could see her making both subs at the same time, but we weren’t together. Why isn’t she finishing my order? I wondered.
“I’m going to have a foot long Italian BMT tonight,” she answered.
Oh that explains it. She comes in here all the time and they know each other. Still I was feeling perturbed. Normally, in every Subway I have ever been in, if there is only one person working, they finish your order before starting another one.
“Calm down, Peg,” I heard Mike in my head. “It’ll be all right.” That’s what he says to me when I’m about to cop an attitude.
“But I’m in a hurry! We want to get back on the road!” I dignify. I’m sure I was glaring but she wouldn’t even look at me!
“Jake!” she calls over her shoulder toward the back. “Can you help me?”
She could probably feel my righteous indignation on her. I give up glaring and turned back to the TV where rescue crews were on a beach, frantically trying to dig a college kid from a caved in sand tunnel.
No Jake.
She continues to build the other gals sandwich. “Jake?” she calls again. The Italian BMT takes three different kinds of meat. Pepperoni, salami and ham.
“Shouldn’t it be called an Italian PSH?” you ask.
I know, right! But it’s named for a subway, the Brooklyn Manhattan Transit.
When she finished counting out all the slices of all the different kinds of meat she asks, “What kind of cheese?”
“Provolone,” she answered, same as me.
“Do you want it toasted?” she asked the gal.
“Not tonight,” she answers.
Now she had no place to go but the veggie station and Jake wasn’t there yet. She pushes my sub further down, making room for new one, turns and goes to the kitchen door, pushing it open with her gloved hand. “Jake, can you come and help me please?”
There were only two of us and she needed help? Maybe she didn’t like me. Maybe she was mad because I turned my back on her.
“What would you like on your sub?” she addressed me when she came back.
“Spinach, tomato, cucumber and peppers, peppers, peppers.” I like the peppers. All of them. The green ones, the banana ones and a sprinkling of jalapeños on top.
Jake appeared and she met him a little ways from the counter and had words with him in a low tone. I have no idea what she was telling him but I took this opportunity to vent a little. “Why didn’t she finish mine before she started yours?” I asked.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“No, it’s not your fault, I just wondered why she did that.”
“I don’t know,” she said and leaned in. “But did you see she pushed the kitchen door open with her gloves on?” she finished in a conspiring voice.
“Yes, but it probably won’t kill me.”
“I know but… yuck!”
“Dressing?” Jake asks me as he fumbles with gloves.
“No.” I didn’t even say thank you. Just no.
“Salt and pepper?”
“No.”
“For here or to go?” Jake asks as he wraps my sub in the paper.
“To go.”
“Would you like to add chips and a drink for a dollar ninety-nine?”
“No.”
I swiped my card, took my receipt and left without so much as a thank you or have-a-nice-day. On my way through the convenience store I picked up a small Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough to share with Mike after we eat our sub. I thought a little ice cream was deserved.
“Do you have spoons for this?” I asked the clerk as I paid for it.
“Get one from Subway,” he said and before I could wonder about that he clarified. “Ours suck.”
Another employee, cleaning the food area, heard and remarked. “They don’t have spoons anymore since they stopped selling soup.”
“That’s okay, I’m not going back into Subway anyway because I’m mad. Where are yours?”
“Around the corner and in the top of that gray bin,” she answered and pointed.
“Thank you,” I said, went around the corner and found the sporks; a hybrid of spoon and fork.

Out in the car, Mike asked, “What took so long?”
And I vented.
“Calm down, Peg, it’ll be alright.” See! I told you that’s what he tells me.
Mike ate his half of the sub there in the parking lot then started driving again. Once I had my half done I reached for the Ben & Jerry’s. It was frozen solid when I bought it and it hadn’t softened up very much in the time it took us to eat our subs. I struggled with the spork, getting bites out for us, bending it and breaking the little fork tines on the end of the spoon.
Then a picture flashed in my mind’s eye. A picture of one of my kitchen spoons, wrapped in paper towel, inside a plastic bag, in my purse. My coffee spoon! It was in my purse!
“You have a coffee spoon in your purse?” you ask.
Yes. I really prefer my instant coffee and all of the gas stations will give you hot water free if you have your own cup, which I did, or for a small fee if you use one of their cups.
I reached for my purse just as Mike says, “You could use your coffee spoon.”
“Can you read my mind or what!?” I ask and dig the spoon out. With a normal spoon we made short work of the ice cream.
After a few more hours of driving, Mike had had enough. “Why don’t you look on the GPS for a motel around Effingham (IL) and call and see if they take dogs?” Mike said.
Aren’t GPS’s just the greatest invention since sliced bread! No matter which way you go, they always get you where you need to be, I was thinking. Hey! Just like God! No matter which way you go, which decision you make, He can work all things to fulfill His plan.
In this case though, we hadn’t made a wrong turn, we needed a motel. The days of phone books are long gone. Besides telling you latitude, longitude and elevation, it can find you restaurants and shopping, gas stations and banks. It gives you address and phone numbers. I hit the lodging icon, put our destination in and hit go. A long list came up and I started calling.
“Sorry, not pets.”
“Sorry, we don’t have any rooms left tonight.”
All the while we were hurtling towards Effingham at 75 miles an hour.
“Hurry up Peg,” Mike says.
I called another one. “Yes, we take pets.”
“Do you have a king size bed?” I inquired.
“We do,” the clerk answered.
I was happy! “Great! How much will that be?”
“Let’s see,” pause, “It’ll be a hundred and seventy-four dollars.”
“Oh, hold on,” and I dropped the phone from my mouth. “It’s a hundred and seventy-four dollars,” I repeated trying not to sound too shocked. Mike shook his head no. “Okay, thank you,” I told the clerk and hung up.
I broadened our search and saw there was a Red Roof Inn just short of Effingham. “Hi. I’m looking for a room tonight and we have two little Yorkies,” I told the guy who answered the phone.
“We take pets,” he said.
“Great,” I tried not to sound too excited. “Do you have a king size bed?”
“Yes we do.”
Now for the coup de grâce, “How much will that be?”
“Forty-eight plus a twenty dollar pet fee.”
“How much?” I asked thinking I heard wrong.
“It’ll be forty-eight dollars plus a twenty dollar pet fee,” he repeated.
I repeated it to Mike and he nodded okay. “Okay, we’re only about five or six miles away so we’ll see you in a few minutes,” and I hung up my phone.
What kind of a room do you get for forty-eight bucks, we wondered.
“Was he Indian?” Mike asks.
“Yeah, I think so,” but he spoke very well.
We pulled into the motel and there was only one other car there.
“Please ring bell,” a sign on the door read. Dutifully I pushed the button thinking they kept the door locked but pulling on the door handle anyway, I found it wasn’t. We entered a room with a counter straight ahead of us. Off to the left was an area with a sink, counter, and two tables with chairs. We waited and waited. I could see into the apartment in the back and there was a TV sitting on the floor, a book bag tossed into a corner, and a pair of shoes and socks like your kids would leave laying around. The buzzer was probably to let them know you were there.
After a few minutes an Indian boy came around the corner in his stocking feet, a young man really. “Hi,” I greeted. “We need a room for tonight.”
“Did you call a few minutes ago?” he asks and he pulls a registration slip from a stack and went looking for his pen.
“Yes, but would you mind if we looked at it first?”
“No,” he answers. “Just a minute,” and he goes into the back.
Mike and I waited and waited and waited. I thought he had just gone for his shoes but he was taking a really long time. Finally he comes back out carrying a key card. Maybe he had trouble keying the card, I think.
“It’ll be 106,” he says. “It’s seven or eight doors down and you can drive there if you want.”
Mike and I got back in the car and drove to the end of the motel, parked in front of room 106 and waited for the young man to join us. Silently we stood by as he unlocked the door and pushed it open. We followed him into the room as he turned a light on.
It looked okay, but… “Do you have bed bugs?” I asked. He was standing there watching us and I just didn’t know how to ask tactfully so I just spit it out.
“We’ve never had any complaints. Do you want to look?”
“I do,” I said and pulled the cover from a corner of the bed. The sheet had a stain on it; like a rust stain from water. I pulled the sheet and checked the seams of the mattress. I saw no small, dark spots that would indicate the presence of bed bugs. That was all I knew to do. We have an RV, people! We don’t stay in motels!
“Looks good,” I said to him. “We’ll take it.”
He handed Mike the key card as he left the room.
“Would you check us in?” Mike asked. “I’m tired.”
“Sure.”
Mike fishes the credit card from his shirt pocket and hands it to me.
I walked back to the office where the young man waited for me and we chatted as we filled out the registration card.
“There’s not very many cars here,” I said stating the obvious. “Are you doing all right?”
“It’s a little early yet but we fill up most nights.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“Fifteen,” he replied.
“And you work here?”
“Yes, I help my parents out.”
“Are you in school?”
“I’m a sophomore,” he answered.
“What do you want to be when you…” I couldn’t think of the words finish high school, instead, what came out after a short pause was, “grow up?”
He didn’t seem to be offended.
“I want to be a pediatrician.”
“Wow,” I said, impressed. “Why do you want to be a pediatrician?” I was thinking there may be a story here.
“I just like kids,” was the short and simple answer.
I thanked him and went back to help unload the car.
Back at our car I carried in our clothes and shower things, dog food so I could feed the girls, and my computer. I pulled back the covers and checked the sheets. They were clean. There was a lack of outlets to plug devices into but eventually I found a place to plug my computer in.
Accident on I-70 on 6-11-16 near Indianapolis, I Googled. Lots of accidents on I-70 came up. After changing my search words a few times I found the one that detoured us.
“Tabitha Perry was listed in serious condition Sunday afternoon at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, after being taken there by medical helicopter late Saturday afternoon,” I read to Mike. “An eight year old passenger in her car was taken to Reid Health with injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening.”

I skimmed the rest of the article silently, reporting the cause of the accident to Mike. “Driver inattention. She ran into the back of a semi that had slowed because of the construction.”
Mike listened, grunted and went back to channel surfing.
I got theis picture from the news story and it was taken by Mickey Shuey of Pal-Item, a news service.
The next morning we were up and on the road early. I’m pretty sure the motel offered a continental breakfast, aka donuts, muffins, toast, coffee and juice, but we opted to stop at the first McDonalds we saw. Mike loves the Sausage McMuffin with egg and the Egg McMuffin is on my diet, which I follow loosely. Very loosely.
Late morning found us passing through Wentzville, MO and that was the pre-arranged spot for Mike to call his buddy Gary. That would be his signal to head out and meet us in Jefferson City, where we had to drop the rental car.
“Do you have any Windex?” Mike asked.
“Yeah,” Gary answered.
“Will you bring it with you when you pick us up?”
“Sure,” Gary replied. “What do you need Windex for?”
“Well, Ginger got nose prints on the windows which is the only evidence we had a dog in the car so we have to wash the windows.”
“Alright,” Gary agreed.
We arrived in Jefferson City, capitol city of Missouri, around noon, well before the drop off time of 5:30. We transferred everything to Gary’s Lincoln, cleaned the Ginger prints from the front windows, locked the rental car, dropped the keys in the drop box and headed home, 45 miles away.
Mike spent the rest of Sunday recovering and I started writing this story. Even though the story isn’t quite through (and will be continued) it has brought me to a good stopping point.
The next day would be Monday.
A new week with new stories.
And with that my loves, we will call this one done.

Eastward Ho!

Oh my goodness, oh my goodness! What adventures I have had this past week! I hardly know where to begin!
I think I should start by telling you that Mike and I have sold Luby’s Plaza on the Strip in Lake Ozark, Missouri!
Yay!
It’s been a long time coming as we’ve wanted to sell for a few years now.
“Who bought it?” you may wonder.
“George and his brother Gregory of Tucker’s Shucker’s, a neighboring business, bought us out.
Word of the sale had gotten around town and our friends and business associates threw us a party. There was cake and ice cream, a beautiful certificate and a bouquet of flowers in a beautiful antique pitcher.

When we were told of the party Mike was sure that no one would show up. At the appointed time we walked out to the stage in our parking lot and there were about a dozen people gathered there. We greeted everyone and sat for a photograph and then there were kind words spoken before the cutting of the cake.

Mike was truly touched and got all choked up and could hardly speak. He cleared his throat and continued his thank you speech. All of this was captured on video and can be seen online at Lake of the Ozarks News Update, June 6, 2016. Here’s the link, copy and paste it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GigobaSXBc&feature=player_embedded&list=PLSH6wE0oJYY6zjjViSw5dDTQ6tYCAwKfg
  As time went on even more people drifted in to bid us so long…
♫♪So long, ♪farewell, ♫auf wiedersehen, ♪adieu♫♪
♪Adieu, adieu to you and you and you♫♪
There. You got to hear me sing. (That was from The Sound of Music.)
We’ve had a verbal agreement with George on this sale for several months now but until the papers were signed I hadn’t wanted to say anything. I didn’t want to jinx it. I didn’t even want to get my hopes up because you may remember that we had a sale pending about a year ago and the night before the papers were to be signed the guy backed out. I didn’t want to go through that again. Boy! What a let down!
But it all worked out and the guy that would have bought it last year has since closed one of his business’s so maybe it was all for the best anyway.
“What are you going to do now?” you ask.
Mike and I want to finish our house in Pennsylvania. So our plans are to go there for the rest of the summer. After that? Who knows. Things can turn on a dime around here.
Needless to say, with the flurry of packing going on around here, everything is in an uproar.
I made time to visit with Miss Helen last week and I gave her the news.
“Will you have time to come and help me?” Miss Helen asked.
“Absolutely!” I told her. Even if I didn’t have the time, I’d make the time.
It’s been hot here. Really hot. Too hot to be out in the blaze of the afternoon sun. So Miss Helen and I made plans for me to come in the evening and help in her flower beds.
Doesn’t she look fabulous!

For two nights in a row I pulled weeds and flowers and …
“Wait, wait, wait, Peg,” you say. “You pulled flowers?”
Yes, flowers. Iris’s mostly. Miss Helen loves her flowerbeds. She loves to be outside and she loves taking care of her flowerbeds. But Miss Helen is getting to a point in her life where it’s getting harder and harder for her to do this work and the kid who mows for her doesn’t do it.
“I would even be willing to pay him a little extra,” she told me. But it’s a struggle just to get the mowing and weed-eating done, let alone anything extra like pulling the trees and weeds that grow up amongst the flowers!
Seeing the flowerbeds in such a state just breaks Miss Helen’s heart. “I’m just going to get rid of the beds and let him weed-eat everything down,” she told me. Not having flowerbeds at all is better than seeing them uncared for.

So, with no particular care, I pulled iris’s, lilies of the valley, rose of Sharon’s, ivy from the brick wall of her tidy little home, trimmed back the clematis, and pulled a ton of wild grape vines off her bush honeysuckle.
Whew!
Miss Helen helped me get everything bagged up and ready for a lady that will come and take her garden debris away for her.
“What does she do with it?” I asked her once.
“I think she uses it in composting,” Miss Helen said.
I saved some of the flowers to share with my best girl, Linda,

and because iris bulbs can be dried and stored for long periods of time, I’ll take a bunch back to Pennsylvania for family and my neighbors if they want some.
Something else I needed to get done before we move is make a dragonfly with Kathryn. She’s the young gal that lives in our old apartment (her boyfriend calls her Kat). We talked about doing this since the last time we were together and made owls and now with our move imminent, I figured we had better get it done.
Kathryn had some time on Wednesday and when she got there I set her to work picking her colors. She picked red gobs for the center of the dragonfly and two different blues for the wings. She traced the wing pattern onto the glass and cut them out while I picked out the pattern for a couple of simple angels I wanted to make for Miss Helen. Then while Kathryn was grinding her pieces, I cut mine, and as she foiled hers, I ground mine.
I’d forgotten I needed to make halos for the angels and had to go looking for the piece of pipe I use to form them with.
“Where in the world did I put that,” I mumbled as much to myself as to Kathryn as I searched through boxes and tubs. “ ♪Where oh where can it be♫” I ended up singing. “There, you got to hear me sing,” I told her. “Aren’t you glad?” Truly, if you ever hear me sing, you won’t be glad, unless you like off-key, can’t carry a tune in a bucket kind of singing, then I’m right up your alley!
I didn’t seem to have the right size pipe so I had to raid Mike’s stash of plumbing in the garage and I found one that worked.
And did I take a picture of Miss Helen’s angels?
NO!
Although I wasn’t crazy about the colors that Kathryn picked — it’s her dragonfly, it can be whatever color she wants it to be — when it was done I thought it was really cute!

“You need to be careful when you wash this. Solder isn’t strong and you’ll break it,” I warned Kathryn.
“Okay,” she says and about that time Mike comes in and we start chatting as she’s scrubbing away with a soft bristle brush, soap and warm water, and slowly her flattened hand comes up into a cup…
I saw the dragonfly bend. “Careful, hon,” I told her.
Kathryn turned the water off and as she dried her dragonfly (and straightened it back out) it broke.
“Oh!” she exclaimed.
Our time was running out and Kathryn had to get going to work.
“I know you don’t have time so I’ll fix it for you and you can pick it up after work tonight,” I volunteered. Kathryn holds down three part time jobs and this is her in her Casey’s smock.

If there is time before Mike and I get out of the state, she would like to make a Longdangly or wind chime. And that will teach her how to drill holes in glass.
Thursday morning Mike and I took off with our big red truck and a trailer full of stuff. Just stuff! We have way too much stuff! But don’t we all just love our stuff? Stuff, stuff, stuff!
I didn’t really take very many pictures on this trip because I’ve been on these roads so many times and taken so many pictures of the barns and critters along the route and then did nothing with the photos — I figured why bother. If I get one or two barn photos for you guys that would be enough.
I thought this heart shaped window in the sleeper of this semi was different and something you don’t see every day.

We made our first gas stop in Kingdom City, just before we jump onto I-70 and even though we had only gone about 90 miles, it’s a chance to check tires and make sure everything is riding okay.
There are at least six double sided gas pumps at this truck stop and there was only one car there.
One car!
And guess which pump he was at?
“The one you want?” you guess.
Yes! The one we need! Big Red is diesel and this guy was at the only pump that had diesel.
“Why don’t you use the pumps the semis use?” you wonder.
The nozzles for the semis are much larger and the fuel pumps really fast. With no room for the air to escape it back splashes. So we have to use the diesel at the car pumps.
Mike pulled up behind this young couple with New Mexico, USA plates on the car and there was nothing to do but wait. The gas nozzle was sticking out of their car and he was washing the windshield.
“Maybe they’re about done,” I tried to temper Mike’s impatience.
“The pump is already off,” Mike said as he sat behind the wheel, twiddling his thumbs. I looked and saw he was right. The pump had kicked off.
The girl gets out of the car and gets one of those things you use to wash your windows with…
What do they call those things? I wonder. Is there a name for them?
I switched windows on my computer and posted to Facebook:
“Hey! Help me out! When you go to a gas station and you wash your windows-is there a name for that window washing thing?” I posted, then I decided to Google it while I waited. All the pictures on all the images that came up in my search called it a washer/squeegee. I went back to my letter blog and continued to write, deciding to call it a window washer. It wasn’t too long until Michelle, one of my beautiful daughter-in-law’s beautiful sisters replied.
“Squeegee??” she guessed.
A few minutes later another of Kandyce’s beautiful sisters, in fact her twin Krysten, confirmed Michelle’s guess. “A squeegee,” she replied.
Good enough for me.
So the girl gets out of the car and gets a squeegee from one of the other stations and starts washing the side windows on her side of the car as the guy walks around the front of the car to do her side of the windshield.
Ding! goes my computer. It notifies me when someone responds to my posts. I switched over and it was that handsome youngest son of ours, Kevin.
“Oh wait, I believe it’s called a squirrel,” he replied.
A squirrel? I rolled it over in my head a couple of times. Is he pulling my leg or is he serious? I wondered. I know that people often have pet names for common things. Like those pieces of tires along the highways. Truckers call them alligators. So I guess it’s possible in some world it’s called a squirrel.
“Really!” I replied.
“Yep,” he answered.
I was on the verge of Googling it when Kevin laughed, “LOL.” So I do think he was just pulling my leg. Smart aleck kid!
The pump is off, the guy is washing the passenger side windshield, the gal picked up a squeegee and is slowly washing the side windows and they never look at us as we sat there waiting for them to move — and they knew we were there. How could they not know! That big ol’ honkin’ F-550, four door, four wheel drive, with 11-22-5 tires (the means they are semi tires) Freightliner polished aluminum wheels, with 10 lug nuts, (guess who made me write all that?) diesel engine running (and you know how loud that is), pulling a twenty-four foot trailer — they knew! And they never once looked at us. They were talking across the car to each other and in my mind’s eye I could hear their conversation.
“Why didn’t they pick a different pump?”
“I don’t know but screw them! We were here first. They can just wait!”
And they just weren’t in any hurry at all as the man finished the passenger side of the front windshield, goes around the front of the car, drops his squeegee back in the bucket, takes the gas nozzle from his car and hangs it up.
“Finally!” we say in unison and breathe a sigh of relief.
Then the man picked up the squeegee again, shook off the excess fluid and proceeded to wash the side windows on his side of the car as the woman moved around the back of the car and washes the back window!
Ay-yay-yay!
“Maybe this is God’s way of keeping us off the road right now,” I speculated.
She finished the back window, he finished his side and I think they are finally going to move, but do they move?
NO!
She didn’t do a good enough job on the back window and he has to wash it all over again!
“I should have pulled up closer so the heat of the engine’s on them,” Mike said. “In fact…” He sat up a little straighter, put the truck in gear and seriously invaded their space.
“This is bullshit,” I can hear the man say in my mind’s eye.
“Com’on honey, let’s just go,” she says.
And they put the squeegees back in the buckets, got in their car, started it up and drove around to the next gas pump where they both got back out.
As Mike’s filling the truck, I watch as they get a squeegee from a bucket and start to wash the windows again.
Really?
Mike climbs back in the truck. “I gotta pee before we get going again.”
“Me too, and the girls too,” I say. “Let’s go over by the grass.”
Mike pulls the truck away from the pumps and we park. I walk the girls and as we head in to the restrooms, we see that couple is still sitting there washing those windows!
We got back on the road and got through St. Louis just fine. On the other side though, traffic was stopped.

“Accident?” I ask.
“Maybe that’s why we were supposed to stay off the road,” Mike mused.
It was stop and go for many miles, more stopping than going, but eventually we get close enough to see the reason. Road construction.

And you know what happens when everyone has to get into one lane, don’t you? People come up in the wrong lane, thinking to jump the line and that just makes everything worse than if they had waited their turn. Eventually a guy in a truck pulls up beside us and doesn’t let anyone else through and we started moving pretty good then. Once we reached the point where he had to merge into our lane we let him over in front of us in gratitude for stopping the line jumpers.
We hit rush hour traffic going through Indy then another bottle neck in Ohio, but both times we were only slowed and not stopped.
Ginger travels really well. She will curl up in my lap and sleep until she feels us slow down then she’ll get up and look out the window. Itsy…not so much. She is not a good traveler. I used to have to tie her so she had to stay on the couch during our travels in the RV, otherwise she wanted to ride under Mike’s feet; which is dangerous, or on my shoulder; which makes me have a sore neck. Then a couple of years ago we found a pet car booster seat, one that strapped over the center console in your car and Itsy rides in that pretty well.
Our old RV, the Thor, had a post with a tabletop that you could set up between the two front seats when you weren’t traveling. Mike took a piece of 2 by 12 and made a small table top with two cup holders in it. It fits on the base and is just the right size to strap Itsy’s car seat to while we travel. It worked so well that I never bothered to change the table tops, just leaving the homemade one on all the time. Then when we traded for our Bago we had a bracket installed for Itsy’s pedestal car seat. And I use the little table all the time! When we are parked it holds my little fan and often time what ever story I’m working on.
“What are those marks all over it?” you ask. “They look like burns.”

Well, they are. When we come back in from our walks, I’ll sit in my seat and pick the hitchhikers from the girls and with my trusty Bic, this is where they meet their fate.
So our problems with Itsy on this trip were unexpected. We had her car seat strapped to the center console in the truck but she wasn’t happy and kept scratching at Mike until she had a hole worn clean through his arm.
“She can’t see out of the windshield,” Mike said.
Whatever the reason for her misbehavior, I had to eventually tie her in the back seat from whence she cried and cried. But what else could we do!
As the day was coming to a close and Mike was tired from a full day of driving, he let me know he had been worrying about something.
“Do you think we could sleep in the truck tonight?” he asked.
I was shocked! In the past it has always been me who wanted to save a hundred bucks and sleep in our vehicle. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Well, the truck topper doesn’t lock and I’m afraid someone will break into it at the motel. Do you think these seats will recline far enough?”
“I don’t know. I guess we could try.”
Just north of Columbus, Ohio, in a Flying J truck stop, we pulled over for the night. We reclined our seats and after a few minutes we realized we needed to block the lights from the parking lot.
“Should I use one of my shirts?” Mike asked.
“I guess so.”
We really weren’t prepared for this but we would make do. He reached back and pulled one of his shirts from where it hung on its hanger in the back, lowered his window, tucked the shirt in and then shut the window on it.
“Do you want one too?” Mike asked.
“Yeah,” and he reached back and got me one of his shirts for my window.
Luckily we had our pillows with us and I always pack a couple of little Indian blankets. Mike likes the air conditioning cooler than I do so I often throw one across my lap as we travel. I had thrown a towel in the bottom of one of our bags to protect our clothes and I dug that out for us to hang across the windshield. Then we tried to sleep.
What a horrible night! It was hot, Mike would start the truck, then he got cold and shut it off, then it would get hot and he’d start it up again, then he got cold…anyway you get the idea.
Mike, with his long legs, had a terrible night. He not only had to sleep with the steering wheel in front of him, he had pedals on the floor to deal with. I could put my feet up on the dash or curl onto my side on the seat. Itsy slept on one of the blankets on the center console but Ginger wanted to sleep on my lap and that made it hard to change positions. I’d throw her off but as soon as I settled she climbed right back on me.
After what seemed like forever I managed to drifted off only to be woken by a click, click, clicking sound coming from my door. What in the world is that? I wondered. I looked over at Mike and he was curled onto his side, snoring. He’d found a position he could catch a few winks in and the clicking wasn’t loud enough to wake him.
I opened and closed my window, but it didn’t seem to affect the clicking. I took a chance and thumped my door panel hoping to not wake Mike but it was enough noise to rouse him and he shifted positions. The clicking stopped and I drifted back into a fitful sleep.
Neither one of us slept much that night and we were up early the next morning.
“Let’s get breakfast and I’ll walk the girls when we come back out,” I suggested to Mike.
This Flying J had a Denny’s so we went in for a sit down breakfast. There were only a couple of people there and we were shown to a table and given water and coffee. We ordered, chatted and sipped our drinks as we waited and the whole time people were trickling in by ones and twos and even fours!
From my seat I had a view of the kitchen and the lone cook. I watched as she filled the orders and kept the food coming out of the kitchen at a regular pace. We had our food without too much of a wait and I’ll tell you what! My food was good. It was all prepared perfectly. Nothing underdone or overdone. The oil she used to cook in was fresh. The bacon was light and crisp, but not too crisp and not too floppy. The pancakes were light and fluffy and believe it or not, the syrup was thick and not all watered down like you get in a lot of places.
As we paid our ticket I sent my compliments to the cook, both for her skill as a cook and for the speed at which she got the food out. I’ve had so much bad food in my 50 some years that I appreciate good food — even if it was just at a Denny’s!
I saved the girls some of my breakfast and when we got back out to the truck they greeted me with much anticipation. They could smell the food on us! I gave them some scrambled egg with cheese and a half a piece of bacon. Then while Mike did a pre-trip check of the truck, I walked the girls.
“What in the world happened to the side mirrors?” Mike asked when I got back.
And it clicked in my head. “So that’s what it was!” and I told Mike what had happened in the night.
“I had my foot on the button that adjusts the mirrors, huh?”
“I guess so!”
“When I tried to fix it, it clicked for a long time before it finally moved.”
Pennsylvania had some road work going on too. Maybe road work isn’t quite the right way to say it but what they were doing was building these berms on either side of the bridge overpasses between the east and westbound lanes.

“Do so many people drive off those things that they have to do that?” I wondered out loud. As we kept heading east I saw that some of these berms have been in place for so long that they have mature trees growing from them. I’m sure I’ve noticed them before but never gave them any thought.
We arrived at our Pennsylvania Mountain Home in mid afternoon. As we drove down the dirt road I put the window down and let the girls hang out. Ginger really enjoys this; Itsy? Not so much. But she will stick her head out for a few minutes.

At the mill we backed our trailer full of treasures into one of the barns and dropped it. Mike wanted to find a motel but I wanted to check out the mill. He turned on the lights and the water and I wanted to spend the night there rather than get a motel, until I remembered there were no washrags and only one towel for a shower. That and the place really needed a good cleaning before we stayed in it.
We were shutting things back down when Mike said, “Lookie here.”
“Where?” I questioned.
“In the trash can.”

I walked over and looked and there in the bottom of a thirty gallon trash can were three beautiful kittens, fat and sassy, with eyes clean and clear! That was the first thing I noticed about them; their eyes. We have had a virus at the mill that affects kittens. Their eyes get all goopy and their noses run and they sneeze and sneeze and sneeze! It isn’t usually fatal though.

“How do we get rid of it?” I asked our vet when it first started happening.
“You can’t have any cats there for five years,” came the answer.
Well, that wasn’t really an option for us. We wanted to have cats to keep the mice down plus Mike is a big cat lover. I don’t understand that, but whatever. Me? I like kittens. In subsequent research I found out that the cats would eventually build up an immunity toward it. In the meantime, we cleaned kitten eyes with a mild solution of boric acid and kept them sheltered and fed. We provide for our clowder even when we can’t be there. Over the years more kittens were born healthy than sick and here was a litter with all healthy ones.
I struggled with myself on what to do about the kittens; help them out of the trash can or leave them be. The mother was taking good care of them and there was a rabbit foot in the can, a left over from one of their meals, I’m sure. I thought maybe I would pick one of the kittens up but they had other ideas about that. As soon as I started to reach in they were all spit and fur and needle sharp kitten teeth and claws. They were born there in the darkness of the mill and even the lights had to be scary for them, let alone a strange looking giant!
“Well, if I hadn’t of been there, the mother would have to get the kittens out on her own,” I reason to my mother on the phone that night. “Or maybe they will be able to jump out before long. They looked to be between six and eight weeks old.”
“I’m sure.” Momma is very supportive.
“I guess if I get back and there are three dead kittens in the bottom of the can, I made the wrong decision.”
“There’ll be more kittens next year,” Momma says and that’s the practical side of her. She doesn’t like to see critters suffer and die unnecessarily either.
Our conversation moved on. “Patti took me shopping for some new blouses yesterday,” she told me.
“Yeah?”
“Yes! And I got some pretty blouses too!”
“Yeah?” I said again.
Momma mused. “I didn’t really need them, the ones I have are still good enough for around the house, but when I go out I like to look a little bit nicer.”
“I know how you feel,” I commiserated. “I’m kinda the same way.”
“Peggy, they are so pretty! And they make me feel pretty too.”
“I know, right!” And I truly do know. “Clothes that fit well do make you look better and feel better. “You should have Patti take a picture so I can see’em.”
Later that day my phone dings. I recognized the sound as meaning I got a new text message. I picked it up and see Patti sent me this picture of my beautiful Momma. Immediately I called her. “You look beautiful Momma!”

“Thank you sweetheart,” she says and I love the way she says sweetheart when calls me that.
I forwarded the picture to our son Kevin and asked him to send it to my email. I wanted to show it to you and I don’t have any way to get it off my archaic flip phone; I still have to hit the number 7 four times to get an ess when I’m texting!
  Momma just turned 85, doesn’t she look fabulous!
“Peg, isn’t your mother on oxygen full time?” you ask. “Did she take the hose off for the picture?”
No, actually, someone may have been fooling with the picture a little and edited out her umbilical cord, as I call her oxygen hose.
So! We are at our Mountain Home and we have the trailer put away. “Should we call the Kipps and tell them we’re here?” I asked Mike.
“The Kipps are gone this weekend,” he told me.
“How about Jon and Steph? Do you wanna see if they want to have dinner with us?”
Mike called but the Robinson’s were busy with Relay For Life, a cancer fund raising event.
“Let’s go see if we can get our rental car,” Mike suggested.
We were going to spend Friday night with the Robinson’s and Kipp’s, get a room, pick up the rental car on Saturday morning, tuck Big Red into the barn beside the trailer and head back to Missouri. But we had arrived ahead of schedule, Kipp’s were gone, Robinson’s were busy, there was no reason to hang around and there was still time to get to the rental car place before they closed.
Mike had reserved a mini van so we would have plenty of room, and they assured us that with a couple of days notice they would have one for us. We called a couple of days in advance and they said no problem.
Yeah.
On our trip east we got a call from the rental car place.
“We can’t get you a van. How about a Jeep Cherokee?”
“I guess,” Mike said.
The rental car place was in Wysox, fourteen miles from our little town of Wyalusing and we headed over there. They didn’t have it. Since our scheduled pick up was Saturday, the guy that works on Saturday was going to bring it with him in the morning.
“I’ll just give him a call and see if we can get you going,” Jay, the young man taking care of us, said and called the guy.
Guess what?
No Jeep Cherokee either. He was bringing some other car.
“It’s smaller and will be cheaper for you.”
Mike didn’t care as much about cheap as he did comfort. “How about that Chevy Trax right there?” he asked pointing to a medium size car sitting in the parking lot in front of us.
“Sure. That one just came in but I think it’s ready to go. How many days do you want it for?”
“We should be home in two days but we better say three just to be safe. What happens if we return it early?” Mike asked.
“We’ll credit you back that day.”
“What if it’s on a Sunday?”
“We’re closed here on Sunday’s. If someone calls and says they’ll return it by a certain time on Sunday, one of us will swing by to make sure it’s here. Then we won’t charge them for that day. That’s how we do it here.”
Then, if all of that wasn’t bad enough, they had issues with their credit card system. Every time Jay hit the button to fix the time it added another day to our rental. More days equals more money. Twenty minutes later he had it resolved and we signed the papers.
“No smoking and no pets,” Jay said as we were checking out the car. “If there is any evidence of that, there’ll be a one hundred dollar cleaning fee.”
“No pets!” you exclaim. “How are you going to get Itsy and Ginger home?”
Mike discussed the issue with them up front. “If they are small and don’t make a mess, we don’t really say anything.”
Mike drove Big Red and I followed in the Trax and we headed fourteen miles back to Wyalusing to transfer our luggage and get the truck put away.
“Do you want to stay in Wyalusing or Wysox?” I asked Mike.
“Let’s stay at the Wyalusing Hotel but I want to stay in the new part.”
I called and was told that they only allow pets in the old part.
“Let’s go to Wysox then,” Mike said.
I thought most hotels and motels were pet friendly, but I have no idea why I thought that. This trip has certainly given me an education on that! Now that I had a heads-up I called first.
“Yes, we take pets,” the Comfort Inn said, “But there is an extra 27.50 charge for that.”
We headed to Wysox and once on the Golden Mile, as they call their main street, we happen on the Fairfield Inn, another motel chain.
“You wanna stop at this one?” Mike asked.
“I don’t care,” and we stopped there first.
“I’m sorry, we don’t allow any animals except service animals,” we were told.
Back in the car we go for the short drive to the Comfort Inn. As we pulled in we were surprised at the almost empty parking lot. There were three motorcycles and two cars, that was it, and you know at least one of those cars belonged to the help.
Beth, the lady that checked us in, was so nice. “We can’t understand it,” she said. “They get all the business and they’re more expensive!”
After the hard night in the truck the night before, we both went to sleep early and slept soundly in the king size bed and air conditioning.  

To Be Continued…