:Family Matters

March 15, 2007

The above isn’t the real date but instead is the date which I intended to write having set a goal of a letter a week and while you dear reader, and I, will know that I fudged just a teensy little bit. I figure that if I ever go back and read these again I probably won’t notice as the dates will be in chronological order. Clever of me, right?

So, just to bring you up to date on the status of MGH’s toe-nails, which I am sure, you have been waiting to hear about with bated breath as I recently wrote how they had been a matter of quite a bit of anxiety in our Retirement Home. After a good three weeks they finally stopped oozing and no longer needed to have the dressing changed every day, much to the relief of both of us but most particularly to MGH. I came to the conclusion one day this week that I no longer needed to keep the tape/gauze/medication/pain-killer/scissors handy after they had been moved to the counter in my bathroom where I had placed them once it occurred to me the week before that that I no longer needed to keep them discretely hidden under the love seat where they were easily available for our daily ‘surgery’. (Not to worry as there were no little children around for the three weeks of active treatment and Mesa; (an eight year old black lab that claims Sherman and Vicky and their two girls, as her people and comes to spend time with us occasionally) didn’t seem at all interested after the first sniff. Having come to this realization I returned them to their proper places and considered my part finished in the whole operation. As for MGH he can now wear his regular shoes to church and as long as no one steps on his toes he figures he is good to go.

I have to tease him a little by telling him that while he knew he would die sometime I bet he never figured it would be by bits and pieces!

Since I am reporting on the status of various projects now under way I may as well let you know that I have the bathroom repainted. It looks very nice, thank you, with nary a mark or smudge to mar its pristine surface which is why I have put a sign on the door saying, ‘Out of Order’ so I can keep it that way. This project has dragged on longer than is needful as I find that my enthusiasm for painting is just a shadow of its former self and as that was never much in the first place it requires no effort on my part to find ‘other’ things that need my attention like the dishes which if I don’t attend to them fairly regularly soon overflow the sink and counter top. This could present a problem if allowed to go on for too long but I am kept an honest woman by the fact that running out of clean dishes and utensils presents a problem at meal times and using paper towels as substitutes leaves something to be desired if one is having mashed potatoes and gravy.

MGH and I have a friend who never washed anything, she just kept buying more dishes/pots/pans/silverware until every available surface in her kitchen and porch was completely covered. It would have been interesting to see how long she could have gone on this way except her husband finally got fed up and divorced her. She then moved to Chicago and I haven’t seen her since. Why she didn’t used throw-away paper plates and plastic utensils remains a mystery to me but as the old saw says, “Everyone is a little crazy except me and thee and sometimes I am not really sure about thee”.

On the other hand I once read that the way to keep your house uncluttered is to have a room reserved for currently unused items such as magazines with articles you want to save as well as the odd bits of clothing that just might be usable if you could only lose 20 pounds and fashion comes full circle, which it always does—look at the pointy toed shoes women are wearing today, I can remember wearing the same shoes 40 years ago and if I had only had the good sense to hang on to them I wouldn’t have to go out and buy new, not that I would, you understand as I still remember how they pinched—but it does make my point. The odd bits of furniture that need to be repaired could also go into this room where they are useful for holding boxes of ‘things’ which you can’t quite decide what to do with but are sure they will come in handy like old Christmas cards and pictures your children colored when they were in Kindergarten. You get the idea. When this room is completely packed you close the door and lock it and move onto filling another room. If you plan right by the time you die you will only be living in your bedroom with access to the kitchen and bathroom which is all you need by then and you will leave your children something to remember you by. (Come to think of it this pretty well describes our garage, which if the current trend continues, will soon no longer have room for our car, sigh.)

The Magnolia outside the front door is covered with blossoms which will last until the snow that is predicted for next week arrives. They aren’t alone as the apricot trees are ‘popping’ with blossoms as well—is there anything as beautiful as blossoming trees to winter starved eyes as trees decked out in their ‘best’? There is considerable greening taking place but mostly, as far as I can tell, it is weeds. After surveying the little portion of the planet that is under my care I am feeling like, “The weeds has got it, the weeds can have it”, but that is only because I know how much work it will take to get everything under control again.

This makes me think of my Visiting teaching partner who, after fighting diabetes for over 50 years has reached the point where her body just can’t fight any more. She shares some of her worries with me as we drive to visit the ‘sisters’ assigned to us. I sense a deep regret and sorrow from her as she acknowledges that her time is rapidly coming to an end. Sorrow at the pain her death will bring to her husband who loves her dearly. Sorrow for leaving her children and grandchildren—the joy of simply being able to watch them all grow older causes her heart to ache. It is a fine line that she walks now, between the pain her body is subjecting her to and the great love she has for her family. She has gotten quite limited in what she can do in caring for her home although she tells me she still does the cooking with the aid of an office chair which allows her to ‘roll’ rather than walk around her kitchen. Her husband now cares for the house and she laughs at how much concern he shows over keeping his carefully scrubbed floors clean even to the point of asking her if she remembered to wipe her feet on the mat before she came into the house! He has taken to telling her that he never realized how much work went into caring for a home and what’s more—it never stays done which I think is the thing that amazes him most. I remind her, not that she has forgotten, that he doesn’t know how easy he has it as they no longer have children at home. I know that while we all love our children dearly the sheer amount of work they can generate is mind-boggling—just ask any new parent or even better the parent of a toddler who all seem to have the middle name ‘destruction’ as they whiz about poking/exploring/enjoying everything in your house that you hold near and dear. Eventually the situation corrects its self and with proper ‘training’ almost any parent can become a survivor.

Ah well, as I am discovering, life is all too soon over even for those who live to be a hundred. As Tramp says, “It’s a short life but a merry one”. And with that profound thought I shall leave you for the kitchen where a sink full of dishes awaits me.

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We’ve returned to the ‘devil’s time’. At least that is what Hy Stevenson’s wife called it when we were living in Iowa in the early 60’s. At least that was the reason she gave MGH on why she couldn’t come to church although the truth of the matter was that she rarely attended when we were on Standard Time. This is a subject that can generate intense feelings on either side of the question which seems to me to depend on what you like to do in the evenings.
Having lived in Wisconsin where the mosquito is the state bird and no one ventures outside in the evening hours unless it is a life or death situation the whole business about using less electricity, which is supposedly the reason for jiggering things around in the first place, becomes rather moot. The theory, as I understand it, is that if we use less electricity because we are doing things outside where sunlight is free for the taking we are helping to reduce the demand on our nation’s power grid which is so heavily burdened by our need for air conditioners as well as hair dryers and electronic gadgets of ever kind and persuasion that every summer we face the threat of rolling blackouts which is truly scary as I never can find where I put my candles, that is if I even have any left after Halloween where they seem to get used for lighting up the insides of jack-o-lanterns.
This reminds me of the story Dad used to tell about being down on the Mt. Sterling farm one day (thank goodness it wasn’t evening as he probably wouldn’t have lived to tell his tale) when he was attacked by such a huge swarm of mosquitoes that he was forced to take cover under a large iron kettle in the barnyard which provided some relief until reinforcements arrived and the kettle was upended leaving him helpless. He would look at us and solemnly say,
“The man you see before you is all that remains after the mosquitoes were finished.”
Not being inclined to be uncooperative toward authority, I am a Gano girl after all; I dutifully reset the clocks in the kitchen on the micro-wave and stove before I went to bed on Saturday last. While there were more clocks in the house that needed adjusting (and here I must insert a quote MGH deciphered as part of his daily routine in the morning when he does the cross word puzzle as well as the crypto quote, to as he puts it, “keep his brain oiled”, that is pertinent to the current discussion: “A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure. Lee Segall”. This is certainly the case in our house.) That being so, I figured the correct time would be somewhere if I just looked hard enough which would insure we didn’t miss meetings on Sunday provided I could remember which clock was set and which wasn’t. Not to worry, as I knew I could depend on MGH for backup, if needed, since this was something that would not require much physical effort on his part as his brain still works just fine, thank you, even if the rest of him has decided to retire.
Sunday we woke somewhere near the time we needed to, at least it was close enough not to matter one way or the other, which had been just fine the morning before but as this was the morning after, it left both of us yawning all day long. (Our ward choir director not only forgot to change his clock he also forgot that it was Stake Conference which meant that he arrived for church at the usual time which is 1:00 p.m. but as the new order of the day is now (2:00 p.m.) he found no one at the chapel, not that there would have been anyway as everyone else had gone to meetings at ten o’clock.) After awhile all this messing around with time begins to have a surreal feel to it, don’t you think?
When I was growing up on the farm in Iowa the time we got up and went to bed was determined to a large extent by the season. Of course there were always chores no matter if it was hot or cold as the livestock had to be cared for. The chickens were always mother’s project so she saw that they were fed and watered which meant that she assigned her daughters that task most of the time. Dad handled the larger animal population, again with assistance from his daughters who did their best but were unable to provide the ‘muscle’ that sons could. We did what we could with often comical results which were only funny long after the fact and sometimes not even then. In order to keep cows producing at the highest output for the longest time it was necessary to keep to a regular schedule as much as possible so it really made no difference how much light there was outside we just did what had to be done when it needed to be done.
During the summer hours Dad would remain out in the fields long after the sun had set trying to stay ahead of the planting and then the cultivating of the growing weeds that were always contending for the precious resources that the land offered up. When he worked the fields close to home we could watch the lights from the tractor going slowly up and down the rows often continuing long after we had gone to bed. Like most farmers Dad worked long, hard hours to earn a living.
When Nikita Krushchev visited this country in 1959 he was invited on a tour of Iowa farms by Roswell Garst a prominent developer of hybrid seed corn whose home was in Coon Rapids, Iowa. Garst had begun selling seed corn in the Soviet union, at their request, in 1955 where he played a role in developing communication between the U.S. and Russia even going so far as to issue an invitation to come visit him in Iowa.
Some of the questions Krushchev asked, after observing the tractor lights moving up and down the fields on not just one farm but on farm after farm, were,
“How do you keep your farmers working so late in their fields? Where are the guards that are keeping these people working? Isn’t it expensive to have so many guards?”
When it was explained to him that guards weren’t necessary he thought he was being lied to until he was taken to many farms so that he could observe with his own eyes the complete absence of any force being needed. The sight of so much class A farmland (Iowa has one fourth of the worlds class A farmland) must have amazed and discouraged Krushchev as Mother Russia struggled to feed her people with the collective farms that were organized as part of the great communist experiment under way at that time. (One of the quotes from this period has a Russian peasant saying, “They agree to pay us and we agree to work” and there in lay the problem.)
The answer to his question was given to me in Ft. Atkinson, Wisconsin where we were having lunch with Bill Betchler the Holstein Friesian field man for Jefferson County who was showing us springing heifers at various dairies when we were on a buying trip. I had asked him why there were different prices from farm to farm for animals of similar quality. He looked at me and replied, hitting the table for emphasis, his voice accented by the German accent of his immigrant parents.
“‘Dat’s die American vay!”
And, indeed, this gift of being able to improve one’s lot in life through hard work has been the thing that has allowed this country to be so successful and the envy of the rest of the world.
Ah well, life will continue its allotted course no matter what time we say it is or isn’t—don’t you agree?

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He’s back. The fat bellied robin that flies in ahead of the rest of his compatriots has been spotted sitting high up in the cottonwood tree in our backyard with his feathers fluffed and fully extended around him as he tries to stay warm in our still quite cold temperatures. I can’t help but wonder if he isn’t one of those free spirits who didn’t listen when his mother told him to wait for the rest of the family so they could all go together when the temperatures were just right much like the teenagers in our home used to run on ahead when we were hiking so they could get to the ‘top’ of where ever we were going first with complete disregard for safety. Personally, I think it is because he wants to stake out the strawberry patch as his and operates on ‘the early bird gets the worm’ theory but in this case we are talking about strawberries.

There have been killer tornado’s sweeping through the middle-west and southern states this past week. So strong that even a well built school was no match for the twisting, howling winds that collapsed its walls onto the students that were inside the building resulting in eight deaths in that location alone. How terrifying it must have been for everyone caught up in those storms. There has been some second guessing about whether the school should have sent the students home when they first received the word of the impending threat. Hindsight being what it is it is easy to say, yes, they should have. Ah, if only we had known—probably the saddest words ever spoken.

MGH(My Good Husband) has always been of the opinion that by the time the warning siren goes off it is to late too take cover as the fierce storms that can produce such devastating effects don’t wait while we puny humans run for cover which also raises the question—where is one truly safe? When we were living in East Lansing, Michigan where MGH was attending Michigan State in the early 70’s we lived in Spartan Village the married student housing complex which was a huge maze of apartment buildings that required a guide to lead you in until you learned the twists and turns that led to your apartment. Because tornados were always a possibility and being a governmental institution there were ‘rules’ about what to do if a tornado was headed our way. These rules required everyone who lived there to leave immediately and take shelter on campus in a pre-assigned building that was thought to be sturdy enough to provide protection.

Sounds good, right? The only problem was that it required all the residents to get into their various and sundry vehicles and drive to the university campus which was about a mile away. MGH always claimed that this put people in more danger as their only protection was then, what was offered by their vehicle as the sheer numbers involved guaranteed that all that would happen was a traffic tie-up of colossal proportions which meant few would actually reach the designated shelter before the storm struck.

We had a chance to test his theory once. The storm warning was issued and of course our family with its eight children was scattered to the four winds with some at the church where they were involved in Wednesday night youth activities while MGH and I were off on some errand or the other which left Dawn, who was then either a junior or a senior in high school at home with the younger children. Fortunately, no great damage was done in that particular storm other than the usual trees being blown over and wires down type thing. The scariest thing for us was having everyone so scattered and not knowing just what was happening to them (this was long before the days of instantaneous communication provided by the cell phones of today’s world). MGH and I knew where we were and that we were alright which left us wondering/worrying how the rest of the family was faring.

What a relief it was to get home and arrive just in time to see Dawn along with Ford (5), Sylvia (8) and Jay (11) emerging from our apartment dressed in their winter coats complete with hats and mittens which Dawn had them put on by way of preparation even though it was quite mild outside. She told us that the warning siren had gone off and that campus security had come with flashing lights and bull horns giving instructions for every one to leave immediately and go to their assigned shelters. This presented a problem as she had no way to get there with them as we were gone with the car. Realizing that they were going to have to ride out the storm where they were she saw that they were dressed warmly and had them go into the bathroom which had no windows and was in the center of our unit, and climb into the tub where they sat huddled while the storm raged outside while Dawn read to them from the Book of Mormon. I’ve always felt that Dawn deserved a lot of credit for her heads up handling of a really frightening situation.

I don’t know if it is my imagination or what but it seems like the storms we are seeing today are much more frequent and devastating than those in days gone by. Maybe it is good for our collective souls to realize that where nature is concerned we are very puny indeed in spite of all the marvelous technology that has been developed that allows us to live so regally and most of the time, at least, in apparent disregard of normal temperature variations with our heated/air conditioned homes, food grown and often prepared by hands other than our own, transportation to quickly whisk us where we wish to travel, to list just a few. This allows us, I fear, to think we have somehow become greater/better than those who have gone before who were not as blessed as we are by these physical amenities. I am always touched by the comments of people who have survived losing everything they own who then say what’s really important is that we are still together as a family, we still have each other—we can always replace a house. . . .MGH tells me that for awhile his parents lost a number of new born colts/calves which for a struggling farm family, as they were, was absolutely devastating to them and their future. They kept it in perspective by saying, “At least it was only in the barn”.
As for fleeing or staying put—I’d have to say the jury is still out on that one which means MGH could well be right. Me, I’ll head for the basement.

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