Sometimes I call him Rick, sometimes I call him Richard, but my favorite name for him these days is Brother.
Since Rick’s beautiful wife Cindra died last November, I’ve been calling him nearly every day. “Hey Brother! What do you know?” I say when he answers.
I look forward to my chats with Richard. Most times we find things to talk about but once in a while, for whatever reason, our calls are little more than I love you calls.
Shortly after arriving in Pennsylvania, we were playing cards with the neighbors and I decided to skip calling him.
“You can go ahead and call him,” that beautiful neighbor lady Steph said, “we’ll wait for you.”
“No, it’s okay. He’ll just think I’m busy. I’ll call him tomorrow.”
Well! Let me tell you! I kinda got my butt chewed — lovingly, but chewed nonetheless!
“From now on, take one minute, call me and tell me you’re playing cards or busy or whatever and you’ll talk to me tomorrow,” Rick said the next day when I next talked to him. “that way I won’t have to worry.”
“You were worried?” I was incredulous. It never crossed my mind that he would worry and I felt bad about that.
Later, when I had a chance to think about it, I laughed. Not because I thought it was funny that he was worried, but because our daily chats have come to mean as much to him as they do to me.
One of the things that Richard and I had recently talked about was collecting rain water. He has four great big two-hundred-fifty gallon containers he calls totes. He has one on each side of his roof, collecting the rain water from both sides of his house, he has two more that he uses for water storage.
“Doesn’t his water get bugs or algae?” you ask.
Nope. Rick treats it with a little chlorine to control the algae and the totes are pretty well sealed so he doesn’t have much of a bug issue.
“The ones at the house I use to fill the swimming pool. The lower ones I use to water the melons. The whole system is gravity fed,” he told me.
During one of our rain showers, I watched the water pouring off the awning and I thought of Richard and our conversation. Sitting on my patio was the thirty gallon trash can that the kittens were born in. I’d washed it out and it was still sitting there. I grabbed the trash can and set it under the water coming off the roof and it was full to overflowing in less than two minutes.
“Two minutes!” Mike says. “More like one minute!”
The rain was coming down really hard.
I have found that having a thirty gallon trash can full of rain water around comes in pretty handy. There are lots of cleaning jobs that I’ve used it for and I also keep the outside cat dishes clean and full of rain water for them to drink.
And then, last Sunday, Mike and Gary put a new pressure tank and softener system in.
“You’ll be without water for a couple of hours,” Mike told me.
“Fine,” I told him. “I’ve got rain water I can flush my toilet with and I’ve got bottled water for my coffee.”
Well! A couple of hours turned into more than a day as something was wrong with the newly installed system.
“I’ll have to have a well guy come and find out what’s wrong,” Mike said. And Mike worried all night long that our well pump may have quit on us.
Monday afternoon the well guys show up. Two of them. They checked here and they checked there and they checked this line and they checked that line — ♫here a check, ♪there a check, ♫every where a check-check♪♫ — and determined the pump was fine; the new system was installed properly; all the electric lines were the correct voltage. The problem, they said, was in the water line itself.
Mike and Gary went to work tearing up the newly installed Advantech flooring they had just laid over top the water lines and found a kink in the pex lines. A snip here and a crimp there, a new elbow here and a crimp there, a connecter here and another crimp — ♫here a crimp, ♪there a crimp, ♫every where a crimp-crimp♪♫ — and we were back in business. We had water again. It just made me twice as glad that I had caught a trash can full of rain water.
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We walked around for a while, got some food to eat and cold water to drink, then stood and watched a water balloon game. You stood under the balloon and pumped water into it until it burst and you got wet. On a hot day like this day it was a fun thing to do.
Then they announced that the kiddy tractor pulls would be starting soon so we hung around and watched those. None of the kids were able to pedal very far once the weight started moving up the sled but there were a couple of ties that had to be broken.
It was a fun way to spend the afternoon.
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Despite my knee pain, I have been interval running in the mornings and in this next section I’d like to show you some pictures from those mornings.
The neighbor lady decorated her tree line with an old headboard.
The salamanders come out on the black top or macadam as we call it in PA, to soak up the morning sun. Many of them lose their lives because of this habit too.
I saw this bunny laying beside the road and passed him up many times before I decided to pick him up and bring him home.
I thought the owner may see it and stop and pick it up, but eventually decided they probably weren’t going to do that.
Someone took the time, the materials, and the talent to make this bunny. It’s mostly felt but the head is some kind of covered wire they coiled up. Someone loved this little bunny and I hated to see it lost beside the road.
“Peg, what if someone threw it away on purpose?” you ask.
I don’t know then.
“What are you going to do with it?” you ask.
I don’t know that either. Nail it up on the wall or make a cat toy out of it or something.
A couple of mornings I’ve seen turkey up on the hill. It was much too far away for me to get a good shot of them, but I wasn’t completely surprised when I found a turkey feather on the road.
Oh dear!
Have I ever seen lots of deer?
Yes I have!
Here is a young buck and doe getting up from sleeping under our weeping willow tree. We planted three weeping willow trees and only one made it.
A little further down the road, on the same morning, I see another deer standing in the field.
The turkeys I spoke of earlier were even higher up in the field than this doe was so now you know why I couldn’t get a good shot of them.
Walking on down the road, with a slightly different perspective, this is what she looks like with full zoom. I snapped a couple of pictures and continue on with my walk.
After only a few steps this doe comes running at me. I was surprised but she stopped a little ways from me. I fired off a couple of more shots then kept going.
I heard her moving again and as I turned around I saw her cross the road just behind me.
Another morning I was so enamored with this young buck standing right next to the road ....
....that I almost missed the three deer right across the road from him.
Getting a little closer he crossed the road and joined the others before they all high-tailed it for the trees.
One more deer photo?
I have several more, but I’ll show you one more and then we’ll move on.
Two does getting up from where they spent the night. There used to be a house here that’s been torn down, but if you look close (just to the left of the picture) you’ll see and old hand pump — something I didn’t notice until I saw the pictures on the computer.
A bee with mullein.
Pickerelweed down by my pond.
Dock. You can use the young leaves with other greens to make a salad. They have a ‘pleasantly bitter, lemony flavor’ but I’ve never tried them.
The beaver dam on our creek. Lamar Kipp has told me that there are two more dams upstream a little farther.
I don’t know what kind of butterfly (or moth) this is, but he’s sitting on a Queen Anne’s lace.
Yarrow. I love making tea with the leaves of the yarrow. It’s even better if you add some bergamot leaves to it too.
Bergamot with a hummingbird moth on it.
Teasel. These plants grow really tall!
This orange and black striped guy is a banded net-winged beetle.
A pretty bird came and sat on a branch in front of me. I have no idea what it is. I’m much better with flowers and bugs.
I went out early one morning and spent some time photographing webs in the morning dew.
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My beautiful cousin Stacey came to see me.
“Peg, I can’t see Stacey’s face!” you say.
I know, right! Stacey, like many of us, doesn’t really like to have her picture taken.
“Get the one from the Penn Lines,” Stacey said referring to a monthly magazine her company puts out. “It was a good one. I actually like that one.”
Well, Stacey, I looked on the web site and couldn’t find it, so you are stuck with the ones I took.
We had a really nice visit and she even brought me a really neat present.
“What did she bring you?” you ask out of curiosity.
Stacey brought me a set of Sullivan County history cards. They show historic places and tell you a little bit about them.
Speaking of beautiful people, look at this good lookin’ bunch would ya!
Mike and I took his helper Gary along with the Kipp’s, Rosie and Lamar, out to the Wyalusing Hotel for a nice dinner one night.
“Where are you?” you ask.
I might be one of those kinds of people who doesn’t like their pictures taken either and since I’m writing this, I don’t have to show it to you.
“Peg, that’s not fair,” I hear Stacey say.
Alright, alright. Here you go. Here’s the photo the waitress took.
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“How are the kittens?” you wonder.
They are great! Kittens are so much fun. I took this picture through the foggy window of the cat room door. Rascal is laying with his little sister Feisty on top of the cat box, Spitfire is laying close by on top of a cinder block.
Shortly after I had taken the kittens to the cat room I noticed that we had ants. There was a whole army of them marching to the cat food dish and back out again.
I’ll fix them, I thought and I went to the RV and got out a four pack of ant traps. I opened it up and set traps about the cat room.
The next morning I saw the traps had been batted around. I’m guessing the kittens were playing with them.
Later that day I noticed Rascal was having trouble walking. “I think he’s hurt,” I told Lamar when he came that day. But there was a niggle in the back of my mind, what if it was the ant poison?
The next morning Rascal wouldn’t get up and come out and play with me. By that afternoon Spitfire was having trouble walking too.
It’s the poison, I know it is, I thought but I wasn’t brave enough to say it right out loud, not yet anyway. I picked up all the ant traps and threw them away.
The next day Rascal was still having trouble walking and now Spitfire wouldn’t get out of bed either. I felt so bad I had to talk to someone. “Rosie, I think I poisoned the kittens,” I cried to Rosie when they came that day to feed the cats.
“Oh yeah?”
“I think it was the ant poison. I thought it was self contained and I didn’t think they could get in to it.”
“I wouldn’t of thought so either,” Rosie said. “I have ant poison right on my countertops and never gave a thought about the cats getting into it. Of course they don’t play with it either.”
Little Feisty, being more cautious than her brothers, never got into the poison, or at least never exhibited any symptoms anyway.
It was a few days of white knuckles and nail biting but Rascal and Spitfire both recovered and don’t seem to have any lasting effects.
The kittens were doing well staying close by the safety of the cat room, but as you may well expect, the older they get, the farther and farther they range away from it.
Pretty soon they found their way to the front of the mill where we spend a lot of time on the patio. Now the kittens pretty much stay up front, not going back to the cat room much at all. I even feed them up front.
Just inside the garage door is some wood stacked tee-pee style against a wall and they have made a new home there, under them.
And trust me, they hear us as soon as we come out the door and they come through the cat flap lookin’ for a little lovin’. Especially that little Rascal. He is by far the purring-est little guy ever! He loves to be held and if he catches you lovin’ on his brother or sister, he’ll give you a little nip.
Itsy, our little eleven year old Yorkie, had a mass growing from the roof of her mouth just behind her front teeth.
When I first saw it I thought it was her little pink tongue peaking through, then, just before our move, I realized it wasn’t her tongue.
Moving is hectic and remodeling is chaotic and I’m afraid that in that busyness, Itsy got put on a back burner. Then I realized her teeth were being pushed around and we got her into the vet. They removed the mass and took out eight teeth but she still has her molars so she’ll still be able to eat just fine. But honestly, it wouldn’t break Itsy’s heart if she had to eat soft food for the rest of her life.
Ginger, that stinker. I had her down at the pond and I’m taking pictures of flowers and bugs and spider webs and not really paying too much attention to her when all of a sudden I hear her hack. I turned and looked at her and her mouth was opening and closing and she seemed to be having trouble breathing.
“Ginger!” I called. “What’s wrong?”
She came up to me and I looked at her mouth and there was a mouse tail sticking out of her mouth. She obviously found a dead one on the path and was trying to get it down before I caught her.
“NO!” I yell at her. I grabbed that mouse tail and tried to pull it out of her throat and mouth but it was slippery and I lost my hold.
“NO!” I yelled again and got a hold of Ginger’s head with one hand and the mouse tail with the other and I pulled again. It slipped again. I gave her head a shake and yelled “NO!” one more time.
“ACCK,” Ginger went and a pretty sad looking mouse, with guts on the outside, landed on the toe of my boot.
“Aaaahhhhh,” I screamed and kicked it off.
Sorry, no pictures.
Now I try to be more vigilant when I take her to the pond.
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Mike found a food truck that had the best Italian sausage sandwich ever! It was so good that he got back in line and ordered another one. I kept him company for quite a while then I decided to get an ice cream cone for me and a chocolate malt for him and I hoped that by the time I got back with that, he would have his food.
No such luck.
It wasn’t all bad though, Mike had lots of people to talk to. There were a bunch of other people waiting for food too. Mike is good at making conversation and that helped him to pass the time.
“I wouldn’t have waited,” you say.
Yeah? Well they collect your money up front so you don’t have a lot of choice.
It was a hot day and my ice cream cone was melting faster than I could lick it. “Dang!” I said. “I dropped ice cream on my camera!” Which was hanging around my neck.
“Don’t worry, ice cream goes with every thing,” a lady standing nearby quipped.
And I had to laugh and thank her for making my boo-boo a little brighter.
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Some of you may know that I had a birthday earlier this month. My fifty-seventh one, to be exact.
Dang! I’m old!
I have the best neighbors and friends in the whole wide world!
The Robinson’s live on one side of us. Jon and Steph brought an ice cream cake and we sat around and ate a great big piece then we played a couple of rounds of Skip-Bo while sipping on a hard soda.
On the other side of us, live the Kipp’s. Rosie and Lamar brought me a bird house for my birthday. Rosie painted it and I have to tell you that I absolutely love it!
And with that, we shall call this one done.
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