peaches, and blogging problems

Phew! Thank goodness the peaches are all off the tree. In spite of several branches breaking off and ruining the fruits on them, in spite of squirrels eating bites out of half the peaches on the tree AND on the ground, and even in spite of worms... I have discovered that there aren't many things you can do with peaches. I like them straight off the tree, but how many can one person eat in a day?

I froze quite a few without sugar for making pies to eat this winter, and I froze smaller freezer bags with a little sugar on them to put on our cereal; but we are two old people who don't eat as much of anything as we once did. There was a time I probably made some kind of pie almost every week, but these days I doubt if I make more that two or three in a year. Anyway, today the last of the peaches are on my kitchen table. When I started this little story yesterday, I had four ice cream buckets full of peaches, covered with towels to keep the fruit flies away from them. There's also a small dish of vinegar sitting beside the buckets, waiting for those fruit flies to swim to their death.

I'm glad to be getting all the fruit flies out, and all the sweet stickiness off of the countertop.

Now, on to the next topic: a while back, I messed up the the part of my blog only I can see; now it's telling me to remove myself from my blog. I had hoped my daughter could get my blog back to normal, but apparently not, and she was the one who was supposed to tell everybody I'm dead or in an institution of some sort. Now this is all I see.

This is how it should look; this is my old blog, and I'm thinking about just using it again. Why? Because it worries me that my last entry on Just Me has had over 1,500 people supposedly following me! That can't be right.

Over on the top right side below... and the numbers keep growing.

I can't even delete my blog if I wanted to.

But I am still allowed to create blog entries??? After telling myself to get off my own blog?

Strange things happen when one isn't as sharp as she used to be.

How I learned to cook

I've tried to remember the times Mother tried to get me to bake something as a kid, and I can only think of one time.  A friend had given her a recipe for a chocolate cake, and for whatever reason, she wanted me to make it.  I was in the fifth grade.  Why she wanted me to try something like that for my first baking challenge, I do not know.  It was in the mid-fifties:  there was no electric mixer in the kitchen, and I think I was supposed to stir the batter with a spoon for 300 times.  I did finally get it in the oven, and when it was done, it looked and smelled good.

Now back in that time, most women had pottery crocks to hold their salt, instead of leaving the salt in the box it came in; at least that's how it was in Harrison County, Missouri.  Unfortunately, I didn't realize that, and I put salt in  thinking it was sugar.  My bad.  The chickens wouldn't even eat it.  Maybe that's why my mom never asked me to cook again.  

When we moved to the Harlem area of Kansas City, Mother did have me fix Chef Boyardee spaghetti sometimes though, so when she got home from work she didn't have to make our meal.  Really, you could hardly call that "cooking". 

My brother-in-law offered to take me to my job in North Kansas City, and I think my mom took me home in the evening.  However, soon after I got that job, my parents moved to Blue Springs.  My folks wanted me to learn to drive, but I refused; I had taken driver's school at North Kansas City High School, and the teacher did nothing but make fun of me in front of the other kids after he saw I knew nothing about driving.  The thing is, I was scared to death.  I still have no desire to drive.

When my parents moved, I got an apartment on 11th street in Kansas City and used the KC busses to go to work and other places.  Anyway, once I was on my own if I wanted some good food, I was going to have to fix it.  All I really cooked at first was Campbell's Soup, pancakes, and toasted cheese sandwiches.  I certainly couldn't eat out, because my job started me at minimum wage.  Later on I moved to another apartment right down the road from my job in North Kansas City, and I began learning to cook.  My sister is one of the best cooks ever, and I knew she cooked out of a Better Home and Gardens cookbook, so I went somewhere and bought one.

The first things I tried out were sweets.  I made cookies of all kinds, and then worked on making pie crust.  That cookbook taught me everything I wanted to know about cooking and baking, although when I married Clifford in 1966, I knew very little about how to cook meats except for ground beef, sausage, and bacon.  Remember, I wasn't making much money, and the largest raise I ever got was five cents.

Why am I telling you all this?  Well, I absolutely ruined that book letting things splash on it after several years of marriage, and the pages were falling out; I threw it away.  I bought another newer Better Home and Garden book, but they had mostly different recipes, and not many were my favorites.  I had bought several of their newer used books on Ebay through my life, but very few of my kind of recipes exist in them.  Last week I found one like my first one, though.  It was in pretty good shape, and when it arrived, I spent a lot of time just looking and remembering all the things that book had given to me.  Believe me, it won't be sitting anywhere near where I am cooking; it's mainly just a look back in time.  

Here are some of the recipes from this book I've been making for sixty years:

    

One thing though:  When I made a peach pie last week, I decided to use the pie crust recipe in an old Betty Crocker cookbook just for a change, and I liked that pie crust better than the one I've made for sixty years.  

You can always learn something new.

Oh, and I just remembered what people call that salt thing:  Salt cellar!  Also Here's a more detailed breakdown:

• Salt Cellar:

  This is the most common and formal term for the container. 
• Salt Box:

  This term is also frequently used, particularly for open-topped containers. 
• Salt Pig:

  This term often refers to a specific type of salt cellar, typically a wider, open-topped container, often ceramic, shaped like a pig. 
• Other terms:

  Depending on the specific design or context, you might also hear terms like "open salt" or simply "salt". 

The things I CAN do

It's easy, isn't it, to notice things gone wrong in your life?  If you begin to think too much about happenings you don't like, it gets overwhelming.  For instance, my tomatoes this year are even worse than they have ever been, and if you have followed me on all this drivel, you know how I love tomatoes.  Oh yes, and the cantaloupe:  I had a photo of myself holding the first one, the one that almost made it but didn't, because it was partly rotted from the mud after a rain.  The rest have been much worse than that, and I have had to buy cantaloupe if I want some.

But lately I've decided to think about the things in my garden that do go well, and I realize most of the foods I grow get along just fine.  Green beans, corn, spinach in it's early season, peas, sweet potatoes, turnips, eggplant, zucchini, radishes, even carrots sometimes.

My husband is having frequent dizzy spells again, and he's so tired of fighting it; that makes it easy for me to give in to depression because he doesn't deserve it.  He'll have a week or so of being able to do a few things, then the next morning he can hardly walk without falling.  The only thing the medical community has given him is some exercises, which do nothing for him.  So all he can do is sit on the couch.  

I don't drive, and every time we go shopping I pray we make it; I am now a Walmart Plus member, so even here, I can get anything we need, although we are 15 miles from the nearest store.  There's no charge for that, as long as I buy more than $35 dollars' worth... plus a small tip for the person bringing it.  To see my husband have to go through this upsets me, but all I can do is just try to be nice to him, because I can't even imagine how he stands it.  I do thank God that I have my husband beside me still.  Even with his trials, he is always trying to take good care of me, as he has done for fifty-eight years.    

I try to do my 10,000 steps each day.  I'll be glad when the days aren't in the nineties so I can actually enjoy the outside again.  We get some laughs watching E.R., because the doctors and nurses do things in that show that no hospital would allow.  For instance, one of the doctors sneaked around to heal a horse outside of the hospital in a horse trailer because his little girl wanted him to.  Yeah, that would happen.

We have always made jokes about everything and everybody, when it's just us here, and that is probably much of the reason we are still together.

Never lose your sense of humor.

Through any trials, I always remember this old poem I've put on my blog before:  

The optimist fell ten stories.
And at each window bar
He shouted to his friend below:
“I'm all right so far!”

Author unknown

I'm surprised I am still alive

 I almost always played outside from the time I was old enough to understand where I could and couldn't go alone; I found very little fun inside the house unless Mother was cooking something good.  Yes, it's fun to eat in a house when my mother was cooking.  If she baked a cake, I licked not only the spoon, but the bowl also.  If she baked a pie, she cooked the little scraps of pie dough she had cut off and gave them to me.  Some folks have told me their mothers put sugar and cinnamon on the dough before cooking theirs, but I liked it just plain.  But I digress.

In spring, summer, and fall, I always had chiggers becauses they live in the grass, and I did too.  I don't remember having much trouble with mosquitoes then, in Iowa or Missouri either.  Oh, but those chiggers found their blood on the most intimate parts of my body!  Their favorite place, bar none, was my belly button.  I had trouble getting to sleep because they made me itch so badly.  I'd stick my finger in trying to scratch it, but that only seemed to make it worse!  

I probably shouldn't tell you this, but at a certain age around two years old, and sometimes lasting a lot longer, children are pigs.  For instance, they pick their noses no matter who is around, sometimes even putting the stuff they harvest on their finger so they can check it out.  If it makes the grade, they might even see if it tastes good.  Again, I digress, because not one chigger ever went up my nose.  However, as a little pigs do, I got curious and sniffed my finger.  What a terrible smell inside my belly button!  Like any good little pig, I made it a regular thing to check my belly button every time the red bugs decided to torture me.   

Now I am living with mosquitoes.  I reached through the okra row trying to see if there were any pods yet (there were none), and was almost carried away by mosquitoes!  Get this: The mosquito is the world’s deadliest animal. Spreading diseases like malaria, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya, and lymphatic filariasis, the mosquito kills more people than any other creature in the world.  How on earth have I lived so long?

Oh yes, and I have picked more ticks this year than usual.  Ticks can spread disease. 

Not all ticks can cause disease and not all bites will make you sick, but as these diseases become more common it's important to learn how to prevent a bite, how to remove a tick and what to do if you think you could have a tick-borne disease.

Lyme disease is the most common disease spread by ticks in New York but there are other serious diseases transmitted by ticks including babesiosis, anaplasmosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, hard tick relapsing fever, and Powassan encephalitis.

 I guess I'm just lucky.

I went to my family reunion

 We went to my small family reunion yesterday.  The high temperature was 73 degrees.  I was a little chilly for awhile.  Who wears a coat in August!  

I know people who have followed me either on my blog or on Facebook for years are tired of this old picture, but here it is.  I never remember who which baby is except for myself, but it has become a yearly thing with us girls.

The Allen baby girls of 1944. I'm the baby in the bonnet.

Most of my dad's people weren't very tall; I think my father was 5'7", same as my mother; if she wore high heels, she was taller than him. Look at me, towering over all the others! I took after my mother. I'm also the oldest. I just noticed the strange way I'm standing, but there's a reason for it. No, I didn't need to go to the bathroom. My left leg is straight because that's the one with the knee replacement. Now I have only one knock knee. Since the replaced knee hurts exactly like the other one, I saw no reason to get another. Why bother?

I have one old picture to show you. I have my mother's body, her curly hair, and her size. I used to have her bra size but as I aged I wasn't very comfy with them (age changes your body) and got rid of over half what I had. But I digress. Cliff has told me for a long time that my high cheekbones are exactly like my dad's; I could never see it.

Yesterday I put a picture of me and my dog, Gabe, on Facebook. It was his eighth birthday. By the way, he got over sixty likes. Today, looking for old pictures, I found one of my dad with me, and I saw it. Not on this picture, because my baby fat covers it up, but it shows on his face. Now look at the picture below it.

I'm really glad Frances had her eyes open this year.

From the woman who loses her words

 Oh yes, that's me.  I forget most names these days, although I know them when I see them.  I still read, and I know what the words mean.  But later I can't recall those same words.  I have an longtime friend who is also in the stages of dementia.  She calls me and tells the same story three times in thirty minutes of talking.  I wondered if I was doing that, because I wouldn't know even if I did. 

So I asked Cliff if he had noticed me repeating things over and over, and he said no.  The only thing he notices is my not knowing the words for simple things, which is every time I open my mouth.  So I use words like "that thing over there", or sometimes I just say "never mind".  I have made a game of it though.  One of the earlier words I lost was "microwave".  Another was one that I wanted to put on the grocery list but couldn't think what it was called.  I needed coffee filters, and I would write coffee and finally just put coffee paper.  A while back I decided to get those two words back, come hell or high water.  Most of the time now I can remember microwave, but for some reason I couldn't get the word filter to stay in my brain even five minutes.  I'd say filter, filter, filter... to no avail.  

Then I decided to think of something familiar that it sounded like, and thought fill, fill, fill... and realized that part sounds like Cliff's oldest brother's name:  Phil!  It didn't work all by itself though, and I couldn't think of the rest.  Nothing sounded like "..ter".  As I washed dishes I kept saying, FILter, FILter.  Then I thought, I'll just think about Phil and his wife, and substitute "her" for "ter": Phil Her.  That sounds enough like filter that I know what it is now.   

Does playing the game help anything?  No, I can't play that many word games, but I like that I've gotten two words back.  I made games from those two words.  

I still read, and I know what every word means when I read.  I still like to try for my 10,000 steps a day, although it's been rather hard these hot days.  Sometimes I get it done between six and seven A.M.  Yesterday morning was surprisingly cool, so I hurried out with Gabe to the pasture.  Wouldn't you know I had the most awful walk ever!  The temperature was great, but mosquitoes followed me on the whole walk!  

I still love being in my garden and enjoy cooking, and I don't mess things up any more.  When I started on this journey I ruined several meals, but I have learned to take my time, and haven't had to throw any food out lately.  

I'm about as happy as I have a mind to be.  I don't let myself worry about the future.  Every little thing is going to be alright!   

I say the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm at least twice a day and so far have remembered the words as I learned them as a child.  Also the Beatitudes.  And yes, I can still sing Me and Bobby McGee!  

It's a wonderful life.   

I couldn't wait

Between yesterday and today, we received five inches of rain... at least I think so.  We have two rain gauges: one says we got we got 4 inches, one says five.  Some of it came very fast, and more may be coming.    Yesterday I tilled a lot of my garden and planted some seeds for our autumn garden.  With all that rain landing on tilled ground, here's how it looked.  

I thought to myself, "I would sink to my knees if I tried to walk in there, but I want to see my melons."  

So I walked around the outside of the fence, back behind the corn where the cantaloupes are and saw the one I've been waiting for, looking ready to eat.  

I figured out that if I stayed near the inside of the fence, I wouldn't sink in so much, so I made my way to the end of the garden.  The "umbilical cord" that has been feeding the melon came right off as it should, and I carried my treasure back through the mud and into the house.

It weighed almost 15 pounds.

However, I was a little bit hasty.  Although it looks like it would be delicious... and it is, in the middle... it needed to be left alone for another day or two, because the closer to the rind you get, the less sweet it is.  

So I'll be back here after I wait properly and won't be in such a hurry.  It's the story of my life.  When I was a child one of my mom's hens was setting on eggs waiting to hatch.  I was so wanting to play with them that when I saw the chicks were pecking holes trying to escape, I decided to help one get out of the shell.  It lived for a day, but it wasn't right.  If I had waited one more day, it would have gotten out on its own like the rest of them.  I never told my mom that I was the cause of that chick's untimely death, but I sure felt badly about it.

That's all for now.

I'm excited. I'm also afraid of failure.

 We went to Lexington last spring to see what plants I needed to put in my garden.  Among other things, I bought two cantaloupe plants.  Back in the 70's I had good luck with them, passing them around to anyone who wanted them.   Any time I've tried since then, though, I might get the first one to ripen, but then the plants died.

Those two plants struggled for quite a while, but once they started growing they have been doing very well, and there must be a hundred cantaloupes of all sizes on the vines.  There is one now that looks ready, but I want to wait a day or so.  Maybe it's the goat poop I spread over the garden, or maybe God felt sorry for my failures this year, but I can't believe two plants are doing that well. 

Seeing is believing, so here are some photos:

 Looking to the north:

And looking from the other end:

Here is the one we will be eating soon if nothing happens to it; that's a gallon jug sitting beside it so you can tell how huge it is:

Don't congratulate me, please!  It might bring me bad luck.  This year has been a bad one for my garden.  By the way, the white stuff on the leaves is harmless.  It's food grade diatomaceous earth; it doesn't kill anything, but the bugs, mice, moles and such don't like it.

Oh, the shame

 I am a poor gardener this year.  With very little rain and too much heat, I lost all interest.  We usually start getting tomatoes around July fourth, but not this year.  Not a single red tomato have we had.  I had a few green beans, but I just let most of them pass me by.  Weeds began to sprout everywhere and I couldn't have cared less, so I let them grow.  The week of July fourth, our son was here with his wife, and the day after the fourth we had our usual friends and relatives around.  Everyone brought food.

Our nephew Brian (one of Cliff's late brother's sons) always brings his family, and they want to see my garden.  I told him it was a mess this year and the weeds were getting pretty high, but there we were, walking through the weeds and all, and even with the sad state of my garden, they found things to admire.  So last Monday and for the rest of the last week, I went out at six every morning and pulled weeds for at least an hour; sometimes quite a bit more.  One day I had my 10,000 steps before 8:30 A.M.  Here's how I looked when I'd come inside:

Mud on my clothes and even on my socks, because there had been a little rain, before I started the project; and every time I pulled up a big weed, damp dirt on the roots would go all over me... in my hair, and inside the boots I wear in the garden.  My fingernails were dirty and my face and body were sweaty.  My 81-year-old legs and knees were killing me, but I went out again every morning. 

It's a good thing Brian and his family came, because otherwise my garden would have been a thing of the past.   We have not had much rain.  But I might be trying for a fall garden.

I messed up my blog a while back trying to make sure my daughter could get in it and let people know if or when I've stopped blogging.  I can still blog, but I can't let people who comment on my older blog stories be seen.  And I can never change the picture at the top of my blog.  It makes me even less interested in blogging, and I have no idea how to fix it.

Another interesting visiter to my blog

 On my last entry, I was surprised to find a stranger commenting on my blog.  I always like to hear from people telling me how they used Google to drop in on my random stories, and this is quite an interesting one.  

 Hi Donna! I am a certified Genealogist. My name is Paula Smith and I live in Franklin, NC. I am working on a family tree of which you are a part, and I was led to your Facebook page which helps me find information and clues on trees I am working on. I just wanted you to know that I enjoyed your 1979 song so much I shared it to my own friends on Facebook. I am your same age and can relate to a lot of your elocutions. Yesterday I had the privilege of reading about the Depression era which was written by Lola. I learned so very much about how they managed to work so hard with so little. You have a very talented family!

The several entries that share my mother's story (she is the Lola this lady speaks of) are some of the most popular stories I have shared here, and it's all in her own words.  If she only knew how many people have read it, she'd be proud and amazed. 

I looked at the 1979 entry she spoke of; Cliff and I had a big laugh about a song I wrote and made a video of at the start of the Covid disaster in which anything could go wrong, and did.  I'm surprised I even put it on the blog to be seen, and then left it there, but there it is.  Feel free to laugh at it with me.  It's right HERE. 

Yes, it's hot

Gabe and I have been starting our walk at 6 AM.  I'm only walking every other day.  The days I don't walk, I go out to the garden early.  One day this week we disturbed a little spotted deer.  We would never have seen her, but she saw us from where she was lying in the grass, started running, and Gabe decided to protect me from her.  He chased her until she got away, then ran back and looked up at me, waiting for me to tell him what a brave boy he was.  

Our high temperatures have been in the middle 90's.  Listening to the weather folks, you would think we were all going to die from the heat.  Cliff and I laughed when a weatherman said, "Be careful of the life-threatening heat."  Really?  It's always been hot at this time of the year in Missouri.  If my grandma was around, she would wonder what the big deal is.  She never had an air conditioner in her house.  That said, we didn't either until we moved to the trailer house, which was after 2010.   But brother, I sure am glad we have it now!

June 30 our son and his wife will be here all that week and leave Sunday morning the sixth of July.  I am beginning to get things together and start fixing things I can put in the freezer so I can just take them out and cook them when we're ready.  Right now I'm going to make noodles and put them in the freezer; I make them, put them on cookie sheets to freeze, then I put them in gallon bags, ready when I need them.  My sister started doing that some time ago, and I found out it works just fine.

I must get moving, but now you all know I'm still around and doing things.  Thanks for caring.

My seldom blog posts

 In my last blog post, I just put two videos on without actually using actual words.  There's a reason for that:  I already knew very few people would watch them, but I wanted them there for myself, so when Gabe is gone, I can remember our walks.

I just don't want to blog any more.  It's harder now, because it takes a lot more time for me to get all the words right.  Even when I've spent the time doing it, I publish it and still find errors.  And I just can't think of any reason to blog.

There's always the weather, right?  This is the fourth year that we have had very little rain for our gardens.  For all of these years, the weather-guessers have promised all sorts of rain, but 90% of the storms split when they get almost to us; one half goes north and one half goes south.  When my husband and I watch the weather every evening,  they often say there's 100% chance of rain and we fake-laugh, knowing it won't happen.

In this fourth year of droughts, this morning I was reminded of the Israelites after they fled from Egypt, where they had been slaves.  When they came to the Wilderness of Sin, the whole pack of them began crying that they wished they had died in Egypt, because at least they had food to eat there, and it was great food!  They had quite the pity party.

So God gave them Manna, freshly made each morning six of the seven days each week.  Also, He gave them quails to provide them meat in the evening.  When they had no water He gave them water from a rock.  But they were never pleased.  Instead of being thankful for what they had, they griped and whined.   

This morning it came to me that I, too, am a whiner.  I don't always talk about the drought, but often, in my mind, I tell myself how much I want rain for the garden and it gets me down emotionally .  When I think about it, I don't need a garden:  In this country we can buy anything we want to eat, and it's affordable.  I just enjoy knowing I can raise food for the table... it's fun for me.  Tomatoes in grocery stores aren't good, but there are people everywhere growing home-grown tomatoes and selling them.  

So I'm going to try and stop whining about it... even in my thoughts. 

take a walk with me and my dog

I am so sorry I kept people locked out of my blog for awhile. I changed my old blog, My Country Life, so nobody could read it because there were lots of spam comments. And somehow, it affected this blog too! Actually, it was probably me that caused it, but I don't really know what or how I did it!

 

I realize when I try to show the trees on all sides I do it too fast. Walking and looking through a camera all at once isn't easy.

An experiment

Almost any gardener has one favorite vegetable in the garden, one that, if everything else in that garden failed except for that one, it would still worth having a garden.  For me and Cliff, it is tomatoes.  

Ever since 1980, I've had some amount of blight on my tomatoes; it is primarily caused by fungal or bacterial pathogens.  I shouldn't complain, because we always have enough tomatoes to eat until frost anyhow.  I have tried all kinds of tricks hoping to find something that works:  putting straw around the plants to keep them off the dirt, or always putting tomato plants in a different place than where they were in the two previous years.  I've sprayed that stinking old copper spray on them and pulled half the black leaves off the plants in hopes that would stop the death march of my plants, but alas and alack, nothing works very well.   

This year I'm trying something different.  It appears that many of the old trusted breeds have had a facelift.  I have Celebrity Plus, Jet Star Plus, Early Bird Hybrid, and Better Boy Hybrid.  Also Big Daddy, Bodacious Hybrid and Mountain Magic (that's a cherry tomato plant).  Those last two were started with seeds I planted in the garden; the others I bought as plants.  I have made a map of all my tomatoes, with their names written down so I don't forget what's in each space.  

I've learned a few things about tomato plants already, and it wasn't necessarily about blight.  For instance, if some nighttime creature eats every leaf on a baby plant, leaving only the lonesome stem of the plant sticking out of the ground, if you don't bother it, more leaves will come. 

These three plants will be the first ones to give us tomatoes to eat.  The two on the right are Celebrity Plus, and the one on the left is called Super Fantastic.

And these will be one of the last ones to give us tomatoes:

They won't likely have anything to harvest until sometime in August.  No matter; at least I'll know which ones fit in best next year.

We had creamed new potatoes and peas from the garden yesterday, and I have beets ready to eat.  We had several rounds of spinach before it started to bolt.  I've started preparing the new strawberry patch and already got rid of the patch we ate from this year.

My boysenberries are coming on strong, and I may have enough for a pie this week, if I can manage to stop eating every ripe one I see while I'm in the garden.  Boysenberries taste a lot like raspberries, although you won't find them in the grocery store because they are too soft to travel.

So there you have it.  I wouldn't know what to do with myself if it weren't for my garden.

Here's three and a half hours I'll never get back

I have noticed for a while that I "talk" better when I'm writing (or typing) than I actually talk out loud.  Obviously, when I'm writing the words, I have lots of time to get things right,with nobody watching or hearing.  When I blog, I have the internet to find the right word and then change things accordingly.  Just above, I tried several way to spell "obviously" and never got close to getting it right.  After trying three or four times, I used autocorrect to get it right.  Even then, I couldn't think what the word autocorrect was, so I asked Google this question:  "Why does my cell phone sometimes change a word?"

I could go on, but you get the picture.  If I want to have a conversation with someone, I can't say, "Just a minute, I'll get my computer."  

Last week Cliff helped me put new strings on my guitar.  I got them all tuned up and started to sing "Bobby McGee" and couldn't even remember the first line.  It is my favorite song to sing, and relatives know it's "my song".  It's one of the few songs I could sing without lyrics nearby.  When my grandaughter Monica was four years old or so, she was going somewhere with her dad; he had his radio on and Janis Joplin came on singing Bobby McGee; Monica said to her dad, "Why is that woman singing Grandma's song?"

I couldn't believe I've forgotten that song I'd sang so often.  I did google the lyrics and tried to sing it, but even then I made a mess of it.

So this morning I got a thought:  Maybe if I start writing the words, one line will lead to another?  Thank goodness I did manage to remember the first line.  And sure enough, I eventually got all of it without looking it up.  A couple of times I couldn't remember a word or line, so I'd leave space for it and go to the next line, which I remembered.  Sure enough, I got every word of it without looking up the lyrics.  

To make it harder, I was writing those words with my left hand.  Some of you may remember during the Covid years I learned to write with my left hand (barely).  I mostly abandoned the idea, and you're lucky if you can read it because it's the worst penmanship you will ever see, but here it is.

  And then, without reading the lyrics at all, I sang the whole song.  

I'm just glad to be here

When I started telling people I had dementia of some kind or other, I have seen several ways people respond.  In the beginning, all the older folks would tell me, "Oh, I forget things all the time; that's just normal."

They don't say that now.  I have days when I can't remember many common words, and names of people are almost out of the question.  They see it now.  Many folks say, "Oh, no!!" when I tell them.  Before Cliff took me to Church yesterday, I told him I had better not do much talking to people when I got there, because words weren't coming to me very well; some days are better than others.  

One relative said to me, "What a terrible thing to have happen!"

But here at home, I'm in my garden a lot, which is where I love to be.  I'm still reading books, although perhaps not as much as I did.  I am letting my husband help me out when we go shopping, because I can't be trusted to deal with money.  I tried using a credit card to pay for groceries, but last week when we came home, I couldn't find the card I had used to pay for groceries.  I still play Wordle, but I don't put it on Facebook any more because I often can't think of any words.

I am, for the most part, just living one day at a time and not worrying about the future.  Why should I let the end of my life get me down when I have had almost eighty years of doing whatever I wanted to do?  I've had a great run!  

I don't want to hurt anyone these days, and if I want to tell someone how much I appreciate them, I do so.  I have apologized here and there for things I have said and done.  I am now able to talk about Jesus even though others think he's a hoax, while still knowing that their beliefs seem as real to them as mine are to me.  I just thank God I am capable of believing.  

"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things.  Sufficient for the day is its own trouble."  Matthew 6:34

And yes, I am still, in this moment, just glad to be here.  I can hardly wait for the green beans from the garden that I'll have in perhaps two weeks.  I'm looking forward to baby goats that will be born in late September and early October.  I'm hoping against hope that the storm we are supposed to get tomorrow will actually come and soak my poor garden.

Life is still good.

Goats are working for Kansas City

For the third year, Kansas City has goats working for them.  I like the idea. 

A movie from long ago

Once upon a time in the mid-nineteen-sixties when I lived alone in my apartment in Kansas City, I first heard this song while watching a 1952 black-and-white movie on my not-very-big, black-and-white television. It has haunted me ever since, and often reminded me that even in the valley of the shadow of death, I am not alone, ever. It was a time when "method acting" was all the rage and it seemed to me the actors went overboard with their actions. That movie… "Member of the Wedding"... seemed very much over-active, but I have never forgotten the song.

If you want to see some of the over-acting, here is a longer version from the movie, a clip that leads up to the song.

You don't want to hear us old ladies singing

Four of my readers commented on my last post that I should have recorded our singing.  Ha!  In the first place, by the time I saw the comments it was over.  This was not a big event... there were five of us women.  Three of us are over 80 years old, and two of us have dementia.  Having not been together for maybe thirty years, probably more, we didn't all know the same songs, a couple of the guitars weren't all in tune, and neither were our voices.  It was really more of a homecoming, and I loved it.  We did much more talking than singing.  Lorraine said she is going to have us over again soon.

With that said, I have a silly true story to tell you.

Cliff can't sleep laying down in a bed any more, so I have the bedroom to myself.  There is a bathroom in there, thank goodness, because if I thought waking up four times to pee was bad, it's even worse now, because I'm on a water pill for edema.  

The toilet is right beside the bathroom sink.  I sat down and heard strange noises coming out from under the sink, where we keep our towels.  I was probably in there six times through the night, and every time, something was moving, and it sounded like it was eating something.  We have an occasional mouse, and we have mouse traps and/or mouse poison where they are needed.  But I've never had a mouse whose teeth could be heard clacking every time I was in there, all night long.

I'm not afraid of mice.  But I figured this was something bigger, and I did not want to see what it was.  Rats scare me, not that I've ever had any in my house; and what if something even bigger had made a way to come up from below the trailer house?  Obviously, I had little sleep that night.

I'm usually up at four; Cliff sleeps until seven or so in the morning.  So as he got up, I said, "Go open the doors under the sink in the bathroom; there's something in there, and I can tell it's eating something."

What would there be that would keep chewing on our towels and washcloths all night?

Well, here it is: my husband had put one of those sticky things that we put down in places that spiders like, and a mouse was stuck on it, chewing on it and trying to get away.  He was still alive.  Cliff took care of him.

What a night.  By the time I got out of bed, I was picturing a pack of rats in there.

Most people never see a mouse or spider in their homes.  We just happen to be on the other side of the track, and as long as we can control them somehow, we're happy.  There's nowhere else I'd rather be than living right here, in a trailer house that's seen better days, with my garden and goats and a place to walk in the pasture.

And now you know how the other half lives.

I am excited

I used to occasionally have the pleasure of sitting with folks who played and sang country music: different groups, at different times of my life.  People who just simply loved to sing with others.  Most all of them had guitars, and I had a whole family of next-door neighbors who were always ready to sing around their son's piano fifty years ago; their daughter has a little country band these days.  I learned to play guitar in a group of people who went to church where my family did;.  For a time I sang in a quartet of like-minded ladies;  we would practice once or twice each month, then take our songs to sing to people in old folks' homes.  One way or another, I have always felt a desire to sing with folks, just for the fun of it.  By the year 2000, that had long become a thing of the past.

I am not a social person, and I never have driven a car except when I was supposed to be learning to drive in school; the teacher said he'd let me pass if I promised to never drive again, and I haven't (true story, and he said it in front of the whole class).  So that limited me, because I had no way to get around any people who sang.  I have sung at three different churches in our town because if I attended for awhile, someone would say, "Do you still write songs," or "Didn't you used to sing?"  I'd tell them I hadn't done that for a very long time; but they always kept after me to sing at church, and I would do it, mainly for the opportunity to sing the songs I have written, knowing that those songs will never see the light of day after I die.  But I would much rather have had some people to get together with, and sing just for the joy it gives me.

About a year ago, an old friend I worked with in the 1970's came to visit.  She said she still had some old tapes of me singing, and listened to them all the time.  She said she was in some stage of dementia, and I told her, "Welcome to the club."  She was one of the people in the groups I sometimes sang with when we worked together.  She wanted to get together again, although she said she can't play guitar or sing any more.

That's the last I heard of that, likely because of her failing memory, until a couple weeks ago.  Terri called me and said another lady we used to sing with, Lorraine Ramey, wanted us to come and relive the old days of making a joyful noise.  Her husband was a very good singer and guitar player who loved bluegrass, but he died quite some time ago, way too soon.  

Well, today's the day.  I hardly ever play my guitar alone at home any more, unless I'm tuning it up to take it to church.  So yesterday I got it out just to see if I could even play it.   The thing about this sort of gathering is that you don't have to be good:  If you miss a word or two, or hit a wrong chord, nobody cares.  And by the way, there is as much talking as there is singing when folks get together like this.  

That wonderful lady in Buckner has given me the best gift I could possibly have received.  A singalong!

One more time with feeling, friends, so take it from the top.  This one is bound to be the last one, so let's give it everything we've got.  

with apologies to Kristofferson, may he rest in peace, for me messing with his "One More Time With Feeling" lyrics.

Feeding the goats

With the billy goat in the pen with my lady goats, I didn't want to tie them out to eat grass.  For one thing, when I go to the pen, they all three come to the gate; I don't want the billy out because he isn't used to being tied up, and he would be the first one out the gate if I tried to get the girls out.  He is strong!

They always have hay to eat, but I like them to have grass from the pasture.  There's quite a bit of clover growing tall out there, so I decided to pick the clover for them, putting it in a bucket, and taking it to them.  I found out I could get a bucket full in ten minutes, packing it down tight, and decided to do that twice a day.

Twice a day they see me going to the pasture and yell at me to hurry up (in goat language).  Twice a day they eat every single bit of it.  I reach up over the fence, turn the bucket upside down, and the clover falls on their heads, which makes a silly picture for about 20 seconds until it all falls off of them. 

I sure hope one of their girl babies looks like their daddy; I really like his coloring.  I intend to milk one of the mamas for awhile, just so I can have some goat milk.  Cliff won't drink it, but I will.  It's been a long time since my milking days, and I can't wait. 

Here's what's happening in the garden

Yesterday I didn't go for a walk, and yet, my Fitbit said I made 14,868 steps.  I tilled the garden and put the few plants I bought Thursday at Colonial Gardens in my own dirt.  All the plants that can be planted early were 40 percent off.

Celery, simply because I've never grown it before 

Tomatoes, four different varieties.  I'm trying to find tomatoes that can "fight the blight".  I have two new varieties coming from Burpees that are supposed to not ever have blight at all.  I'll believe it when I see it.  These were full price, not 40 percent off

Berries are doing well.

Red Cabbage, 40 percent off

Strawberries looking good

onions and potatoes

I'll have more fun outside today!