“Here what is?” you ask.
Boy, you guys fall for that every time! Here it is, another week gone by and pretty soon we can say that about the year.
Are you looking forward to Letter Facts?
“What are Letter Facts?” you ask.
Letter Facts are where I tell you how many letters I wrote you during the year; how many pages; sometimes how many pictures.
And speaking of pictures…
I wasn’t in any hurry to start this letter blog this week because I didn’t think I had anything to talk about. Then, as I was sorting through the weeks photographs, I found so many pictures I wanted to share with you. Thirty-six! That’s three zero six! Three zero is thirty, get it?
I crack myself up.
My desktop this week changed several times. I started out with this one. Walking down to get the mail one day, I notice a small tree with these very bright red berries on it. I went back with my camera, took a few pictures and used this one for a desktop photo for a while. Don’t ask me what they are because I don’t know.
Our little country church hosted a talent show two weeks ago now.
“Are you going?” the Kipp’s asked me and Mike.
“I think so,” I told them.
“Rosie and I are going to sing a song. Jenn and Marla will be up here too. Jenn is going to sing and Marla is going to recite a poem she wrote.” Jenn and Marla are their daughters and live down in the southern part of the state.
“Really?” I asked. “I didn’t know Marla wrote poetry.”
“When Marla recites her poetry, I’m not here anymore. I’m transported to whatever world she’s talking about,” Lamar told me.
And I thought that was just the pride of a father.
Then the night of the talent show came around. The church asked for us to bring a snack to pass and I made a homemade toffee from a recipe my dear, sweet Aunt B had given me and my go-to microwave fudge recipe.
It was a fun night and the kids were so stinkin’ cute!
Some of the adult talent was good and some was very good. I’d never say anything bad about anyone who has the gumption to get up in front of an audience and just put it out there for all the world to see; risking humiliation in front of family, friends, and the whole congregation! But in this case, everyone was fabulous!
“We’re up third,” Rosie told me. “If we have to wait any longer than that, I’ll chicken out.”
When their turn came, Lamar stood beside Rosie and Rosie stood behind the pulpit as they sang. Rosie is such a little woman that you could only see her eyes and the top of her redhead. And those daughters of theirs!
Jenn sang a cappella (without music) and has a beautiful voice.
But Marla impressed me beyond words.
Words.
As a person who writes all the time — does that make me a writer? — I appreciate words. I appreciate the pictures they make in your head and the feelings they impart.
And Lamar was right. When Marla recites her poetry, you can get lost in it. It was pure poetry.
“Do you think Marla would mind if I used one of her poems in my letter blog?” I asked Lamar.
“I don’t know. Call her.” And he gave me her phone number.
“Can I use one of your poems?” I asked Marla when she answered the phone.
“Sure,” she said. “Which one are you thinking about using?”
“I don’t know. They are all beautiful. Which one is your favorite?”
“Wrestling With Maple,” Marla answered without hesitation. “Although I really like Moon-Gasp too.”
So here is Marla’s poem.
Wrestling With Maple.
What I plant and tend withers;
What I deny sprouts and grows.
So I go digging before maple starts cracking foundations;
Leaving us out, weather-beaten.
You need open spaces—
And I bend—
Without your grace in the wind, I bend
Searching for an origin.
Slugs, mud, rocks, brown spiders to get at your roots
Hips squared to shovel
Putting my foot down to wrench tree from dirt.
Unearth a green old soldier, rifle butt poised toward long-gone foe
And I want to ask him if they shoot their wounded
Or leave them to bleed out memories and dreams,
Die with bittersweet smiles and unearthly gains
But I’m afraid what the neighbors might say
So I tuck this away and keep wrestling with maple.
What I plant and tend withers;
What I deny sprouts and grows.
Hearing Marla’s recitation really made this and all of her poems come alive. “When did you start writing poems?” I asked Marla.
“When I was about ten years old, I think.”
“Did you save all the poems you’ve ever written?” I wondered.
“Most of them. Maybe not some from elementary school. I’ve even saved bits of napkins with ideas on them, even when the idea is gone. I’m a bit of a hoarder. I save everything.”
“Packrat sounds better,” I told Marla. Packrats save lots of things, but most of it’s good. Hoarders save trash. I’m a bit of a packrat myself.
“What sparked your interest in writing poems?” I asked.
“Dad wrote poems, although he was more Ogden Nash-ish, and Mom was an English teacher. I guess it was just in my blood.”
Ogden Nash-ish?
I didn’t know what that meant. I Googled it.
Ogden Nash was an American poet best known for his light verse.
A Flea And A Fly In A Flue
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
He also penned lots of quotes.
Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker — Ogden Nash said that!
He also said:
To keep your marriage brimming, With love in the loving cup, Whenever you’re wrong, admit it, Whenever you’re right, shut up.
Ogden Nash died in 1971.
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Mike and I took a different route to go to a home improvement store we’ve been to many times over the years. That allowed me get a few new road pictures.
Check out the mud flaps on this semi.
Do you know what this is?
No?
Let me tell you.
This is what’s left after a cat fight.
Early one morning, just before it gets light outside, Mike let Macchiato go out. Then he heard a cat fight and went to check. It was Macchiato and a cat that hangs out at the Robinson’s named Jerry and they were facing off. Mike tried to break them up but wasn’t having any luck so he figured they’d sort it out and left them to it.
It wasn’t long after that that I got up and took the girls, Itsy and Ginger out for their morning constitution. Macchiato came in with us and he was limping. All day long his limp got worse and he took to bed. The next day he spent all day in bed except once when he came out for a drink and the litter box, then he went right back to bed. The next day was pretty much the same. Macchiato spent all day in bed but came out once for a drink and the litter box, except this day, his paw was worse. Much worse. He wasn’t walking on it at all, just hopping around three-legged like.
Mike and I both checked him over carefully but couldn’t feel or see anything. I’ve often heard that animals can’t or don’t show pain, but in Macchiato’s case, it isn’t true. As I gingerly felt along his leg, he moaned in pain. He didn’t hiss, he didn’t growl, he moaned just like you or I would, and he didn’t try to pull away from me; he let me check him out.
Macchiato spent another day in bed but when he came out for a drink and to use the litter box, he was using his paw again, although with a heavy limp. He even had a bite to eat before he went back to bed.
The next day, his fifth, he felt well enough to spend the day on the couch instead of going in to the bed and he was eating. He even asked to go outside but we didn’t allow him to.
It wasn’t until he was on the mend that I found a patch of dried and matted fur on his shoulder, which explains why we didn’t find anything wrong with his leg or paw. I’m guessing he was bitten on the shoulder, but it never festered, it just healed. Had it festered, we’d have found it and maybe taken him to the vet.
Pets.
I’m telling’ ya!
We worry about our pets as much as we worried about our children.
>>>>><<<<<
I walked around with my camera another day and took pictures of winter flowers.
This one, with the pretty red leaves is on my desktop now. Isn’t it interesting how, even in winter, some things mange to keep some color and maybe even grow a little?
“Peg, I know what that is,” you say. “I’d recognize those evil multiflora roses anywhere!”
Yeah. That’s what it is. It kind of reminds you of Marla’s poem, doesn’t it. What I plant and tend withers; What I deny sprouts and grows.
<<<<<>>>>>
Nothing is close in Pennsylvania, you may have heard me say that before, and the Elk Lake School is 45 minutes from our house. But, as I said, it was a benefit for one of the kids clubs, so we went.
We parked and got out of Steph’s car. It was cold and blustery. We walked up to the big double doors of the school, pulled on the handle and walked in.
“I haven’t been in a school in years,” I said. “Things don’t change much. It still looks like a school.”
Steph laughed. “It still smells like a school too!”
As we made our way down the hall, I enjoyed seeing the kids artwork hanging in the hallways. Then we spot a lady laying out cookies and another stirring hot chocolate at a small table in the middle of the hallway,
“We have about seventy people signed up so it’s split between two rooms,” the lady said. “You can go into either one.”
Steph knew one of her friends was there, because she saw her car in the parking lot, so she peaked into the first room and didn’t see her. “Let’s go to the other one,” Steph said and I followed her up the hall.
“We have the fireplace on in the library,” the lady told us as we walked past.
We painted a snowman and we even got to put some glitter in our paint when it was still wet.
We all took the same class with the same paints and the same instructor and yet no two painting were exactly alike.
One man even turned his canvas sideways. It was a fun night.
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One of the things Mike wanted done before we installed our door knobs was to have all the locks keyed the same. “We only have to carry one key that way,” Mike said. It took us weeks to find someone who would do it. The internet didn’t turn up anyone. We asked everyone we met in Wyalusing, Wysox, Towanda and Athens and no one knew anywhere to get it done.“Won’t Lowe’s do it?” you ask.
Lowe’s will do it, if you buy the locks from them. But Mike likes the locks from Ace Hardware. Someone told us there was a locksmith in Waverly, but we couldn’t get anyone to answer the number they gave us.
Then I went old school. I pulled out the phone book and found a guy in Lopez, that’s a small town about twenty miles from here, down past Dushore.
Mike called him, “I’ve never done an Ace lock before. I’ll have to look at it first,” locksmith Al said.
We mentioned to the Kipp’s, on their morning visit, that we found a locksmith in Lopez to re-key the locks for us. “Lopez is always colder than anyplace around here,” Lamar observed.
I made a travel mug o’joe, walked the girls, grabbed my camera, then it was road trip day.
Geese sitting on the foundation of an old barn.
The barn where the farmer’s market was just outside of New Albany.
Old Ford truck.
Then we start up the hill out of Dushore and I’m on roads I’ve only ever been on once or twice before. That’s code for lots of things to see. Sometimes, in situations like this, I do more gawking than picture taking, and I miss lots of good shots. At least in my mind they would have been good shots. As we neared Lopez, we noticed there was more snow on the ground there than what we had and the outside temperature dropped by ten degrees.
We dropped the locks off with Al — who looked at the locks and determined he could do the job — and we headed for home.
This is the old hotel in Dushore.
That night we had snow. I took my camera out with me the next morning when I walked the girls and our outside kittens followed me. This is Rascal and he’s the biggest of the litter that was born last May; that means they’re seven months old now. His beautiful orange coat really stood out against the starkness of the black and white winter morning.
I turned to take a picture of our pond — Yay! It has water in it! — and I see Spitfire, the middle size kitten.
Feisty followed too but the county truck was spreading salt or cinders on the road and as it approached our place, and he kicked on the shaker, Feisty turned tail and ran. I bet she beat us back to the house because I didn’t see her again.
<<<<<>>>>>
A couple of days later, when we went back to Lopez to pick up our locks, I was a little more ready to take pictures. Our snow was gone, but not the snow in Lopez.
I saw a hawk in a tree. I got my camera up in time but it isn’t focused very well.
The same barn as a couple of pictures ago, but going the other way.
A little hard to see, with all the ‘stuff’ sitting around, but these folks put up Christmas lights.
Watch that bottom step.
New barn, old barn.
I like the pumpkins on the rail.
Horses.
Yeah. Like I needed to tell you that.
I started a new craft project this past week. Do you want to see it?
I used a wire weaving technique and made this bracelet from copper scraps.
I love copper and Mike saves me all of his scrap pieces. I won’t let him throw any of it away. I’ve used some in my stained glass suncatchers but I have a lot of copper.
I showed my bracelet off all week, despite the fact that it’s my first and a little wonky. Well, that’s only half true. The center of the bracelet — this is my fourth attempt at that. The first time I used wire that was a really small gauge and it wouldn’t hold its shape. Then I used a bigger gauge wire and it was too big, and hard to work with, but I finished the strand anyway. For my third try, I used a smaller gauge wire, but it was still too big and I didn’t finish it.
(My table cloth has seen better days.)
I searched and searched in my copper box but the size wire that I needed for this project just isn’t a size that Mike ever uses. The only reason I have that really small gauge wire at all is because it’s from a larger gauge of stranded wire that I took apart. Mike doesn’t normally buy stranded wire but a few times he did accidentally so I don’t have a lot of it.
“Just buy what you need,” Mike said to me.
“That defeats the purpose. I wanted to make something with the wire I already have,” I told him. I let it rattle around in my head for a while and guess what I decided to try. I doubled the really thin gauge wire that I used the first time and got a passable braid.
“How long have you been making jewelry?” one gal asked me.
“This is my first piece,” I told her and laughed a little. “It’s a pretty ambitious design for the first time, don’t you think?”
“It’s beautiful,” she said and I didn’t point out it’s flaws to her.
“What made you want to make it?” one of my beautiful sisters asked me.
I have a little amnesia here. I don’t know how it happened. But this I do know. When Kat died and we cleaned out her apartment, I kept her craft things. One of those things was a thingy that you wrap wire around to make jewelry. I knew what it was for, I didn’t know what it was called. I saw Kat’s things when we packed up to move from Missouri and when I unpacked the RV at this end. The small bag of things sit in my craft room/library now and I see it from time to time. I don’t know if I went looking for something in the bag or if I finally put two and two together and decided it might be time to try that jewelry making thingy with all the scraps our renovation project is generating.
So on one particular day this past week, I got on the internet and Googled “thing to make jewelry with”. The search brought up over seventeen million results. I clicked on the button that just brings up images and I scrolled through until I saw the jewelry making thingy. It’s called a wire jig. One You Tube video led to another, which led to the tutorial on making this bracelet and I loved it from the moment I saw it and I wanted to make one.
And it doesn’t even use the wire jig at all!
With that, let’s call this one done!
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