The switchboard

This is the kind of telephone everybody had back in the switchboard days.

After I rambled on about growing up with a switchboard in the corner of our house, my husband started asking questions I had difficulty answering.  After all, I was only eleven years old when my parents moved to the city and got regular jobs; my memories of the switchboards in various houses where we lived are spotty, at best.  
Cliff asked if there was a "ring" when someone called Central wanting to talk to someone else.  First I said yes, but after thinking about it, I said, "Wait... no, I don't think so.  A drop dropped, and you stuck a plug in the hole behind the 'drop'.  But surely there was a noise, or how would you know someone wanted to make a call if you were in the other room?"  
I know that makes no sense to my readers, but it was coming back to me, the terms my parents used.  They did indeed call those little things drops, and they called the other things plugs!  I'm sure there were proper names for these items.  I only know what I heard as a child.  
I was lamenting the fact that my mom is no longer around to answer our questions about switchboards when it hit me that there is, indeed, somebody who knows all about the old telephone systems:  My sister, who is sixteen years older than I.  She's a winter Texan, and I needed to call and check in with her anyway.  

This is my sister making noodles over the holidays with her great-granddaughter.

 Maxine informed me that when the drop fell down, there was a buzzing sound that was loud enough to be heard if you were in another room.  (Once she told me that, the sound came back to me!)  Because all the communities my parents served were rural, there weren't a lot of customers.  Maxine said there were busy times of day, but most of the time there wasn't a lot of action at the switchboard.  
"But what about during the night," I said.  "Was that buzzing loud enough to wake my parents from a deep sleep?"  
"Well, the rules were that you didn't make any calls after 10 P.M. unless it was an emergency," she told me.  "When we went to bed we flipped a switch so the switchboard made a loud noise if someone made an emergency call."  
At Eagleville, our last switchboard house, there was a siren on a pole in the yard.  If a house caught fire in town, someone would call my parents at the switchboard and they'd turn on the siren.  Then those "drops" would drop like crazy as people called to see where the fire was so they could go assist in the bucket brigade.  Mother would be plugging in plugs with both hands, stating the location of the fire to each person.
The switchboards my sister remembers were the ones in Iowa; when she was a teenager, she spent a lot of time being "Central" at the switchboard.  She remembers knowing all the customers by the sound of their voices.  Sometimes someone would say to her, "Could you call Mom for me?" without giving any name.  Everybody knew everybody.  
Maxine told me that long distance calls back then were really complicated.  Say I lived in Guss, Iowa, and wanted to call Kansas City:  I'd call Central and give them the phone number of the person I wanted to reach.  The operator would say "OK, I'll try to reach that number" and I would hang up.  When the operator reached the number, she'd call me back and connect me with my party.  
Wow.  Things were a lot more difficult in the old days, weren't they?  
By the way, Maxine tells me the grapefruits in her back yard are extra big and delicious this year.

NIce day

Mornings are cool now, and the daily highs are in the seventies.  You just can't beat weather like that.  
My sister Maxine lives only forty miles away from me for six months of the year, so you'd think we'd see her quite a bit.  We don't, though, and I'm terrible at keeping in touch by telephone because I don't like talking on the phone.  
So last week I realized it's almost time for her to head to Mission, Texas, for the winter.  I think we've seen her once since she got back home.  
I know!  It's unforgivable, really.  And she's one of the sweetest people you'd ever meet.  
So I called her Friday and invited her out to dinner (the noon meal) today.  Cliff leaves for work at 2:30, but I figured this would give us some visiting time before and after the meal.  Sunday it occurred to me that my cousin Betty and her husband hadn't seen Maxine for a long time, so I invited them to dinner too.  
What a nice, laid-back time we had.  I fixed Tex-Mex chicken and rice, ratatouille, fried okra, and biscuits (made with self-rising flour and buttermilk, of course).  We had apple pie and ice cream for dessert.  I love having people over for dinner who appreciate the meal, and these guests did.  
Maxine admired the red hibiscus plant I started from seed that Betty gave me last fall, and I sent her the rest of the seeds; I'd kept them all this time in a sealed baggie.  I won't need them any more, now that I have a plant going strong. 
Now I'm asking myself, "Why did I wait so long to have these folks over for a meal?"

Family time

I cooked a LOT yesterday.  I even took time to pick a quart of cherries and make a pie, something I had not planned on doing.  I made meat loaf, using four-and-a-half pounds of ground beef; I'm trying to use the ground beef from the steer, Meat Loaf, and make room for Sir Loin in the freezer.  
All my grandchildren except my daughter's son, who works evenings, were here for supper.  So was my sister.  Because we don't all see my sister often, it was a special time.
  

That's my son, his daughter Amber, my sister, and my daughter's Natalie catching up on family news.  One of my sister's grandsons is soon going to be married in Hawaii, and she'll be attending.  And spending a whole week in Hawaii!
  

All eyes were focused on the great-granddaughter, Kammi.  That child is a world of entertainment all by herself (that's the back of her head in the lower left-hand area).  

And she's beautiful.

She loves my home-made peanut butter cookies.  Of course, she's never seen a cookie she didn't like.

And nothing goes better with cookies than a cold drink of milk.

My sister and I posed for a picture as she was leaving.

And then she got in her big white car and drove away.

And granddaughter Lyndsay took a turn driving the John Deere.  


Great day indeed.


Oh, and I have used the hand egg beater that a reader sent me at least four times daily since my guests arrived.  Thanks, Vicki! 

This is why I'm not a photographer

My sister lives probably thirty miles from me, as the crow flies. That is, when she isn't snowbirding in Texas. We do see her perhaps a half dozen times a year. Her son lives in McPherson, Kansas; her grandsons, in Oklahoma City.

So I was thrilled to find out the whole crew was going to be visiting her this weekend.

Knowing how difficult it is to get a group picture, especially when children are involved, I snapped away; I took three shots.

The first one isn't bad, really. OK, Ethan has a forced smile, but that's a four-year-old for you. Trouble is, Grandma Debra was fussing over her granddaughter. No problem, because I took a second picture.

Oops. Debra blinked. Hmmm, and here I thought the children would be the problem.

One more time:

Alrighty then. This one's pretty good, although you can see Ethan is growing weary of posing; he'd rather be playing with the toys Great-Grandma keeps for him. Of course, there's the usual red-eye caused by the flash; I suppose my daughter could fix that for me if I asked her, but I'm satisfied with this.

Cliff and I started out to my sister's on the motorcycle, but ten miles from home we ran into rain. So we returned home and got the car. It rained all day long in Kansas City, North. Steadily. Persistently. Drip drip drip.

Since we were a little north anyhow, Cliff decided to go about sixty miles farther north to get a scrap piece of tin for his Oliver tractor. Don't say Cliff never takes me anywhere.

I've visited some of the finest junk yards in the state, over the years.

Here's the piece he went after. He paid good money for that!

We arrived home to find out it had only sprinkled here; I poured two drops out of the rain gauge.

I had planned to go to the local high school football game, but we got home starving, with only a half-hour to go before kickoff. So we scratched that.

I found out in the process of making this entry that the Chrome browser doesn't work well with Blogger. It won't let me cut and paste the photos to move them, and spell-check doesn't work when I'm making a blog entry.

Beautiful things

As I sit here at the computer, the sky to the northeast is pink and lovely. I love sunrises.

Our cucumbers are thriving, and I have a stinking batch of them pickling in the kitchen; Cliff's sister just has too much on her mind to worry about pickles, so Cliff and I took some of our excess produce to my sister, over near Gladstone; we also took a few tomatoes.

We ate at Olive Garden and had a good visit. I had Cliff take this picture in front of Maxine's house.

Back at home, my daughter's family came by with my great-granddaughter, Kameron. She's six months old now, and very friendly and outgoing. I cropped my legs out of this picture because I had on a shamelessly short pair of shorts I only wear at home, and I didn't want the world to think I am a hussy.

This is the first time I've allowed Sadie to get close enough to Kami to sniff at her; Sadie is so hyper, I was afraid she'd accidentally scratch the baby. I cropped granddaughter Monica's head out of the picture because it was an unflattering picture of her.

I do a lot of cropping.

Checking in

My sister, Maxine, had major surgery yesterday: after a rocky start to her morning today, she seems to be doing pretty well. She ate a substantial lunch, and is dozing in a chair right now. I brought a "big band" CD I made for her, music that put a smile on her face as she drifted off.

Since she hadn't used her "on-demand" morphine last night or this morning, she'll now be taking pain killers the nurse brings, when she asks for them. So far she has not needed any. I'm thankful that she's not having much pain... except, of course, when she moves or coughs.

I brought the laptop along in order to play the music for her and was surprised to find there's Internet access in the hospital. So if I can't sleep tonight, I can surf away the time.

Wow, I just remembered Pandora radio and created a "big band" station. Maxine can have all the Glenn Miller she wants while I'm here!

Dinner with some pleasant folks

My sister, when she isn't in Texas for the winter, lives not so far away in Kansas City, North. Her only son, on the other hand, lives way out in Kansas; and her two grandsons are in the Oklahoma City area. We don't see Maxine all that often, and we hardly ever see her son, grandsons, and their families. Her son, Larry, and his wife Deborah were in town with their granddaughter, Emalee. So Maxine invited us, as well as our daughter and her family, for a meal.
Rachel's girls blew bubbles with Em.
She's a bit shy. Her grandma wanted so badly for her to show us how well she could read (she's six), but no way was she doing that! She did give us all a big hug when we left, though.

My sister makes the best lemon pie I've ever tasted, and that's what I had for dessert at her house yesterday. She got the recipe years ago from the newspaper: Ann Landers' Lemon Pie. I could absolutely eat the whole thing, and I even thought about it as I drifted off to dreamland last night. Her daughter-in-law, Deborah, asked for the recipe and requested that she write in on a card for us. I'm going to share it with my readers under its new name, and in my sister's handwriting: Maxine's Lemon Pie.

Please don't invite me to your house if you're making this pie. I don't know when to stop, and visions of lemon pie haunt me for days afterward.

By the way, Maxine only uses fresh-squeezed lemon juice, not the bottled stuff.

More on my blue canning jars

Some research on the Internet has led me to believe the jars pictured in my previous entry were made between 1923 and 1933.

This goes along with a story my mother often told me.

Mother acquired a lovely little girl (around four years old, I believe, at the time) when she and my father married in 1932: my half-sister, Maxine, whose mother had died giving birth to our brother.

Someone asked Maxine if she was getting plenty to eat now that she had a step-mother (she called Mother her "foot-mama" at first).

"Oh, I should say we do!" Maxine reportedly replied with great enthusiasm. And then she started naming all the individual things they had been eating, including many canned goods given to them by my maternal grandma as sort of a wedding gift... peaches, green beans, jam, and so forth.

I like to think these old jars are the ones Grandma gave to my parents, full of things so delicious that the flavors and abundance amazed a little girl who had been without a mother for a while.

I'm back from Texas

I think I'd love being a Winter Texan!

I came home from Texas with a bulging suitcase. It was all I could do to lift it above my head to put it into the luggage compartment of the plane. (Notice the "over-the-hill-crossing" sign I brought home?)

This is why. Yes, of course I could buy grapefruit at the store. But they wouldn't be as juicy and sweet as the ones fresh-picked from my sister's tree.

This is the view from my sister's patio; she's in an over-55 retirement park with other "winter Texans".

That's the "clubhouse" where people in the park gather for all sorts of interesting activities: exercise classes, basic computer classes, jam sessions, bingo, card-playing, and swimming... and so many other things.

When I got home, it was 14°. Back in Texas, people were taking advantage of the swimming pool, and my sister had her air conditioning on in the evenings.

Oh, if you want to read about how I almost missed my entire trip to Texas, click HERE.

Dreaming of Texas

That's my sister, Maxine, and me at South Padre Island; my daughter and I flew down to visit her at her winter home in Mission, Texas, in 2003.

A couple of years after that, the daughter, her three children, and I made the trip in her van. What a trip that was! Texas is a big state, and Mission is about as far south as you can get.

That's me and the grandchildren showing off our grapefruits.

Maxine's husband passed away in 2002, I believe. They had wintered in Mission for several years, and all of us wondered if she'd go to Texas by herself in winter, with him gone. You bet she did!

She's eighty years old, and I've intended to go visit her by myself, just once; I'm sure there won't be many more opportunities to go. For a couple of years I've planned the trip, but I'd put off buying tickets and then find myself without funds. This time I was smart: I purchased my airplane tickets in October, before all the winter expenses set in!

So on these recent cold days, I've been reminding myself that I shall soon have four days in sunny Texas, with all the grapefruit I can eat.

Yes!

(Cliff and I sneaked in a long motorcycle ride Sunday... check it out!)