Meeting Julia

           Our week started early-early Monday morning. Four-thirty in the a.m. to be exact.

          “Why so early?” you wanna know.

          Mike had a colonoscopy scheduled for eight a.m. I always allow us an hour and fifteen minutes to get to the Robert Packard Hospital in Sayre. Mike’s philosophy is if you’re on time, you’re late. He likes to be early for everything! An hour and a half would’ve been plenty of time but what do we do? We leave two hours early. In fact, I think I was ready before six and we left.

          “What’s the difference if we sit here or up there?” Mike asked.

          For him, no difference. For me? I always have something to do. But I always have my e-book with me so I was okay with getting extra reading time in.

          It was still dark when we left.

          Crossing the Susquehanna, it wasn’t light enough for picture-making. And this is what you get.

          There was enough light in town for me to get a pretty decent shot of the courthouse where my best girl Joanie works.

          The gastroenterology department had moved and they called Mike to tell him where the new location was. I had an idea in my head where it was and when I got lost Mike remembered the rest of the instructions. All in all, we didn’t have too much trouble finding the new location.

          Lanie, the receptionist was checking a couple in. “Excuse me,” she said to them. To us, she said, “First name of the patient to be seen?”

          “Mike,” Mike said.

          She wrote something down, his name I assume, and said, “Okay. I have other people ahead of you. Just have a seat and I’ll call you.”

          “Okay. Thank you,” Mike said and we found a seat.

          It’s hard not to hear the conversation between Lanie and the people she was checking in. “You may have something to drink in the waiting room but we ask that you have no food. Some of my people are hungry and we don’t want anyone to snitch.”

          She had a rote dialog that she used for each and every patient.

          Midway through the next checking-in, she excused herself and asked the guy who walked in by himself, “First name of the patient to be seen?”

          “Mike,” he answered.

          She wrote his name down and told him to have a seat. She’d call him when she was ready for him.

          After finishing with two more check-ins, and two more couples entering, she called, “Mike and his driver.”

          My Mike started to get up but Other Mike beat him to the counter. From the beginning this guy was difficult.

          I leaned over and softly said to Mike, “We’re early anyway. We might just as well let him go first.” We were almost fifty minutes early.

          “Where is your driver?” Lanie asked Other Mike.

          “She’s at home. We only live ten minutes from here.”

          The hospital always calls the cell phone of the person picking you up to make sure the phone is on and ready. Lanie said something and he argued with her.

          “They let us do it this way before,” Other Mike said.

          Lanie gave up and asked, “Cell phone number where she can be reached?”

          “Call the house phone. I can give you that number.”

          After a couple of more check-ins, Lani called Mike and me.

          “We were here before the other Mike but we let him go before us,” I said.

          “Oh. I guess I should tell people that I take them by their appointment time and not the order they came in. Some people are early and some are late.”

          “I bet the late ones mess you up more than the early ones,” I said.

          “Yes, they do!” Lanie agreed.

          She checked us in then we had to wait to be called for pre-op.

          One of the people Lanie checked in when I was listening had a driver whose name is the same as mine. Margaret. After we were seated, I asked, “Do you go by anything other than Margaret?”

          “No. My mother said my name was Margaret and that’s what I was to be called.”

          I like to recount the story of my learning my name was Margaret. “I was always called Peggy and didn’t know my name was Margaret until my mom registered me for school.” I was so surprised that I can remember it to this day.

          Mike was called to pre-op and I settled in to read my book. I’ve read thirty books so far this year and never had any trouble getting into a story like I am with this one. It’s called The Second Chance Store. It got good reviews (or maybe they only posted the good ones). I’m more than a hundred pages in and I’m just not into the story. Do I keep going and hope it gets better or cut my losses now? I wonder.

          I decided to read some of the Bible instead.

          You know, I heard on one of my podcasts, that the Pharisees could’ve taken Jesus outside the city gates and had Him stoned to death. But they didn’t do that. They wanted Jesus hung on a cross because the Bible says any man hung from a tree will be accursed by God and they wanted the people to see that Jesus was accursed by God.

          I dug into the Bible and used some of the tools I learned in my CDI class. I looked up the words “hung” and “nailed” to see if they came from the same Hebrew word. They don’t. Hung is hung. Suspended. And nailed is nailed. Pinned through with a peg.

          That led down a rabbit hole and sidetracked me to the story of Deborah and Barak. In the story, Barak was pursuing Sisera to kill him. The prophetess Deborah told him that God would sell Sisera into the hand of a woman. Sisera was losing the fight, fled the battlefield, and took refuge in the camp of an ally. Jael, a woman, gave him drink and a place to sleep, covered him, then got a tent peg and hammered it through his temple right into the ground.

          In the passage I read it doesn’t say why she did it, only that she did.

          I thought I knew most of the Bibles in the stor— my mind confuses words even when I’m typing! I thought I knew most of the stories in the Bible but I’d never heard that one before.

          I glanced up from where I sat reading my Bible and saw this beautiful face, a Bible opened in her lap.

          “Are you reading your Bible‽” I asked. Just because it looked like a Bible didn’t mean it was a Bible. I met a guy in an airport once who was reading a Bible-like book. Actually, it was a Bible, just not a Christian Bible.

          “Yes, I am,” she answered.

And that’s how I met Julia. We started chatting and the next hour just flew by!

          “I have a friend who makes these for me,” Julia said. “So, in this one, every morning I write what I’m grateful for from the previous day.” She showed me the front of a little notebook that is indeed titled Grateful For.

          It’s what she does with the other one that I found so inspiring.

          “In this one, I write Bible verses. It takes me between two and three months to fill up, then I just write a little note inside the front cover and leave it for someone else to find.”

          “What does the note say?” I wondered.

          “I just say not to throw this away. If they don’t want it, just to leave it for someone else. Then I say these are the verses that I was touched by when I read God’s Word and I hope they will find them an inspiration, too. I leave my phone number and email for them.”

          During our conversation, I kept an eye on the board to follow Mike’s progress through the system. He was in pre-op for more than two hours. The waiting room was starting to get crowded. Lanie came around and told me as well as a couple of other people that our loved one was fine. Nothing was wrong. But someone had scheduled a procedure to be done first that takes a long time to do and they don’t normally do that. It put them behind schedule. It was almost ten-thirty until they got Mike in.

          When he was done, the doctor called me. “Mike is doing good. Everything went well. I didn’t find any polyps and no cancer. He’s good for three years now.”

          I thanked the doctor.

          It was only about ten more minutes until they brought him out.

          “Where do you want to eat?” I asked.

          “Chinese,” he answered.

          “They’re closed on Mondays.”

          “How about that restaurant on the curve? I could eat a Club Sandwich.”

          Reese’s Diner, where Rosie and Lamar used to go whenever they brought her parents up for a doctor’s appointment, burned down a year ago.

          We ended up going to McDonald’s.

          Check out the chairs! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen chairs like this in any other McDonald’s. I thought they were kinda cool.

          “You know that other Mike?” Mike asked me.

          “Yeah?”

          “The whole time we were waiting he did nothing but complain!”

          Mike told me some of the things this jerk said and in general, he was making everyone miserable.

          “You should’ve told him to knock it off,” I said.

          “The nurses kept apologizing but they couldn’t say anything else.”

          “I know they can’t say anything to him, but you should’ve stuck up for the nurses and made that jerk shut up.” I’d like to think I would’ve, but you never really know what you’ll do until you’re in that situation.

          Monday night we had a meeting at our church with the district reps Skip and Venita. I had hoped that by offering to make cookies we’d get a good turnout. We didn’t. There were only a handful of people there to hear the updates on Village Missions.

          Left to right, Skip, Venita, Mary, and Pastor Jay.

          I knew my Monday was going to be full with Mike’s colonoscopy so I made cookies on Sunday. These soft pumpkin cookies with penuche frosting were really good. The only problem is, what do you do with leftover canned pumpkin?

          I dumped it into a bowl, mixed in an egg and enough flour to make a batter and turned it into dog cookies! Raini likes them.

          Speaking of Raini...

          My little Velcro dog was stuck to the back of my feet as I stood mixing cookie batter. She stayed put when I stepped away. All I’ve gotta say is it’s a good thing she makes her presence known when she lays down behind me or I’d be tripping over her all the time!

          Once the dough was mixed, I had to get the cookie scoop. I couldn’t back up to open the drawer so I had to step away again. Don’t you feel sorry for me having to work under such adverse conditions?

          Speaking of our church...

          Did I tell you that we’re building a garage at the parsonage? Mike offered Pastor Jay the black plastic we had bought to line our pond with (and didn’t work) to use as a vapor barrier under the cement.

          “But you might have to help pull it from the pond,” Mike said.

          Pastor Jay and one of his older boys, Luke, helped get the plastic from the pond. We have tons of snails and picked ‘em from the plastic before folding it up.

          “I wonder if you can eat them?” Luke said.

          “Escargot,” Pastor said.

          Luke held one up and was looking at it, turning it this way and that. “I wonder what they look like.”
          “Here’s one without a shell,” I said.

          Luke and Pastor both came to look.

          “That’s not a snail, that’s a leech,” Pastor said.

          I guess I didn’t know what a leech looked like. I took a picture with Google Lens and it says it’s a slug — or a leech. Fat lotta help that is!

          I got to wondering. What is there in my pond for it to feed on?

          Google tells me that 75% of leech species are sanguivores. That means they survive by eating blood only. And they’re not picky about what creatures they suck blood from. Some of the most common hosts are fish, turtles, small mammals, toads, frogs, newts, salamanders, ducks, and larger animals that enter the water, like humans and livestock. You can rule out some of that stuff because I don’t have fish or livestock. We do have turtles and frogs and such. I’ve been waist-deep in the water when we pulled willows from it a few years ago and didn’t get any leeches on me. I’ve been in it since then but not for long and only to my ankles. Raini’s been in but never for long periods of time if that makes any difference.

For the most part, leeches are not dangerous, only icky. If you get one on you don’t pull it off. You could leave the mouth parts behind. Use salt or the heat of a hair dryer to get it to release its hold on you. Or you could wait until he’s full then he’ll drop off.

  How did I get leeches in my pond in the first place‽ That’s what I wanna know.

>>>*<<<

A ride through the country gives you some road pictures.

          The color is starting to pop out.

          This guy has a bunch of these big ol’ honkin’ trucks!

          The cairn is back in the river.

           Never heard of this brand before. Say that three times fast. 

           At home, the Lilies of the Valley have set their seeds. I didn’t see the Daddy Longlegs until I looked at the picture on my ‘puter.

          The Nightshade has set its fruit, too.

          This one I did see. His real name is Harvestmen or Harvest Spider, even though they’re not spiders. They’re in the same class, Arachnida, but a different order. They’re Opiliones.

Urban legend says that Harvestmen are the most venomous spiders in the world. Not true. They don't even have venom glands. And their mouths and jaws are too small to do us much harm.

Harvestmen are omnivorous. They don’t spin webs to catch food but they’ll eat insects, spiders, mites, and plant material.

More than you wanted to know?

“What kind of snake is this?” I asked Mike (knowing he hates snakes).

He looked. “I don’t know and I don’t even want to see it.”

“I thought you knew snakes. Didn’t you used to catch snakes and terrorize your dad with them?”

He did. He’d catch Garter Snakes and present them to his dad knowing he hated snakes. Mike would get yelled at but he thought it was funny. Oh, how the world turns. Now Mike is afraid of snakes!

“Where did you find it?” he asked.

“In the dog run when I was cleaning up poo.”

“Kill it!”

“No! I’d rather have snakes than mice. I don’t know if the dogs would kill it if they saw it. It was little and they didn’t see it and I didn’t point it out to them.”

Google Lens tells me this is a Milk Snake.

Something else I found in the dog run was a Shaggy Mane or Inky Cap mushroom. Actually, two of them. If there’s only two you can’t pick them — and I’m not sure I'd want to eat anything that grows in the dog run anyway. But I have a patch of Shaggy Manes growing up by the upper barn.

I took Raini and went to see if they were up yet. I didn’t find any Shaggy Manes but I found several clusters of these and since I don’t know what they are, I leave them alone. The Shaggy Manes on the other hand are easy to identify.

The leaves of the Rhodie are turning deep red.

My Glads decided to bloom again. It’s a good thing, too! I saw a Hummingbird yesterday and he stopped for a sip or two. Our Hummers have been gone for more than a week so this guy was likely a traveler from farther north.

Deer on a misty morning.

          A whole herd!

          Look what I found on my rug! He was lying in an out-of-the-way place and I might not of seen him if it weren’t for Spitfire. I was at my desk and caught the motion of the cat walking across the carpet out of the corner of my eye. He stopped. I looked. He sniffed something. That’s when I saw there was a blob there. Usually these blobs are the leftover stomach or liver or guts of something the cats have already eaten. I picked it up and saw it was a baby! It was cold and I thought it was dead. The warmth of my hand made him stir and he stretched his head and arm.

          I carried him into the bathroom where my handsome mountain man was getting ready for the day.

          “Look!”

          Mike knew what it was. “It’s a mouse!”

          “Look how cute he is!”

          “I see. Now get it out of here.”

          There’s no way I’m taking care of a baby mouse. I offered it to Raini and she took it, but spit it out. I picked it back up. “Spitfire!” I called. He came. And he ate.

          Speaking of babies...

          I have a Zebra Finch egg this morning! She will lay one egg a day until she has as many as she wants, then she’ll lay on them. He’ll help, too, when she needs to eat. I’m hoping this time comes out better than last time.

          Something Mike and I have been working on is putting the valley on our roof.

          Mike ordered the metal to be cut to the lengths we needed. Here he’s sorting them out. Then we marked them for the order we’d need them.

          Up on the roof, Mike had to cut the angle on each and every piece. We tried tin snips but it took a long time and the pieces were sharp. We got out an attachment for the drill called the Nibbler. It nibbles the metal away one half-moon at a time. Although the half-moons are sharp too, the cut edge wasn’t as sharp and it was a whole lot faster than cutting by hand.

          We thought we’d be finished by the end of the day Thursday (rain was coming Friday) but our ambitions were greater than our old backs could take. We finished all but the last three, maybe four pieces. We got held up having to cut the metal around the legs of the TV antenna. But we should be able to finish it the next time we go up.

          Having Friday as a break from a roof work day, I got to work on my next commissioned piece. Harry the Paddle. My client isn’t really going to use this to spank anyone, it’s more for decoration. I like the look of wood, but Mike thinks I should paint it white.

          “What does your client want, Peg?” you ask.

          He’s pretty much letting me do what I want. All he cares about is that I put a circle in the middle with Harry following the top curve, The straight across, and Paddle following the lower curve.

          I could use white and distress it... I think that would look cool. What do you think?

          I spent a lot of time sanding this and it still has lots of character left in it. I like character. Raini doesn’t like the little palm sander I was using. As soon as I turn it on, she heads for the house. The dog door is behind the propped-open screen door. When she heard me turn the sander off, she came to see if I was done or just taking a break. If I turn it back on, she turns around and goes back in the house.

          Bondi, on the other hand, isn’t bothered by the noise at all and sat in the chair behind me.

          Speaking of chairs...

          This handsome guy is in a chair that has wheels!

          “What happened?!” you exclaim.

          Lamar slipped and broke his ankle. They told him if he stays off it until he sees the orthopedic surgeon, he may not need surgery.

          He’s trying to be good, but for a man who’s used to being active, he’s bored and frustrated and can only dream about running!

          Life is going to look a whole lot different for a lot of people for a while as we take up the slack left by Lamar’s injury. You don’t realize how much someone does until they can’t do it anymore.

          For one thing, Mike and I will be doing mail duty.

          Every day, Lamar gets the mail for our elderly neighbor and carries it down to the house for him. Charlie could manage to get the mail on his own but it’s a good excuse to make sure he’s... what? Alive and kickin’? Up and about? Not in need of anything?

          “Lamar broke his ankle so I’ll be getting your mail for a while,” I told Charlie.

          “Who’s driving?” Charlie asked.

          Mike was sitting on the golf cart, within sight, waiting for me. “He is,” I indicated Mike.

          “Well, he can’t be hurt too bad if he’s driving!” Charlie said.

          It only took a few seconds, a world record for this slow-thinkin’ gal, to realize Charlie thought I was Rosie. “I’m not Rosie. I’m Peg Luby from up the road.”

          “You’re not Rosie?” he asked.

          “Nope. I’m not.”

          Since we’re getting Charlie’s mail anyway, we told the Kipps we’d get their mail, too.

          “I can go down and get the mail,” Rosie protested.

          Lamar slipped and broke his ankle getting the mail. I slipped going up to let Tux out the day they spent hours in the ER getting his ankle looked at.

“We’ll get the mail,” I told Lamar. “If Rosie gets hurt too, you guys’ll have to move in with me!”

Lamar laughed.

          Mike and I will make ourselves available, anytime day or middle of the night, to help with anything that comes up. Other neighbors are throwing their hats in the ring as well. The Robinsons will take over the putting-down-the-garbage on garbage day duty. Luke, Pastor Jay’s son, will do the mowing. Jody, in charge of the Care Ministry at church, has already provided a meal for them. And Jenn, their oldest daughter, made the trip up from Lancaster County to help. Rosie had a whole list of things for her to do. Lamar kept birdseed and cat food in the basement. And their freezer is in the basement as well. Rosie doesn’t do basement stairs. So, Jenn brought up the pet food and a few things Rosie thought she’d need. Another thing about Miss Rosie is she’s not a very tall woman. Vertically challenged, so to speak. It’s never been an issue before because Lamar would get stuff down for her. Now it’s an issue. Jenn brought things down to lower levels for Rosie.

          I’m sure, as time goes on, we’ll find other things Lamar used to do that he can’t do anymore, at least for a while.       

          Let’s call this one done!