Dear friends,

First, what's up with Gabe today?  He and I were out feeding cats and cows and taking care of my little garden.  I had let several cucumbers get gigantic, so I picked them and tossed them to the calves, who love everything I toss out of the garden, even rotten tomatoes.  Gabe is a "dog in the manger" type, though:  So when the calves lower their heads to get a cucumber, he jumps in their faces growling.  It surprises them, and they drop the cucumber and back away, and Gabe drags it under the fence to the yard.  

When I was done with chores today, I ordered him to the house.  He started to come, then put his nose in the grass, frantically running in circles.  I knew he was searching for a rotten apple, perhaps, or a stick, to sneak inside with him.  Finally he struck pay dirt:  He kept at it until he got the whole whatever-it-was in his mouth.  Had I not seen him doing this I'd have let him right in, but in this case, when he got near the door, I grabbed him and pried his mouth open to discover a dead mole, so big that I wondered how he managed to conceal the whole thing in his mouth.  It's funny, watching a dog try to be sneaky.  

Here's a story Cliff doesn't remember when I relate it (men and their selective memory):  Ricky Skaggs was coming to Kansas City, I wanted to go.  I didn't have a job at the time, but I asked Cliff about it, whined a little, and he consented to take me and his mom, who was always up for some country music.  This was weeks before the event happened.  The time approached.  I had been wanting to see the movie "Tender Mercies", so on a Friday night I got Cliff to take me.  The movie is in a rather religious vein.  The next night we went to see Ricky.  Between songs he spent a lot of time testifying about his Christian faith, among other things.  Right at the beginning, I remember him saying, "They told me this place is haunted, but I haven't seen any ghost; the only ghost I've met is the Holy Ghost."  Cliff's mom and I enjoyed the music, and Cliff wasn't complaining.  

The next day, Sunday, was Mother's Day, so that had elicited an invitation from me for Cliff to attend.  His mother attended the same church, and he sat between us.  All this in one weekend.

When we got home from church, Cliff said, "I feel like I've been in church for three days."  I asked him why, and he explained that everywhere we went for three days, it was as though he was being preached to.  He likes his religion and his church in very tiny doses, you see.   

I hate politics and try to stay out of that mess completely.  On Facebook I have friends of all stripes, and it's interesting to see their opinions, because all it boils down to is "Republicans are horrible, crazy criminals" from all the left-wingers and "Democrats are two-faced liars and Republicans are always right" from the other side.    

I've never been raped.  I'm having trouble making a decision about who is right in this Kavanaugh thing.  I know that high-school boys don't always think with their brains, and I believe if everyone in Congress had to face this kind of trial, not many (if any) of them would be left standing.  Most mature adults have very little similarity to their teenage selves.  So I don't know.  

I will say I relate to the feelings of those who have been raped or molested, because I was touched inappropriately twice in my life, and I was around seven years old.  Oh, you're thinking, she was molested.  Well, not really... Do you call it "molested" if a little boy your own age (7) tries to forcibly pull your panties down because you wouldn't pull them down when he asked?  He just wanted to look, he said.  Children are curious.  The family across the road from us in Guss had two boys near my age.  I went over often to play with them and their little sister.  But I think that might be the last time I played with them.  I escaped across the road and told Momma and that was the end of it.  Why am I telling this?  Because I still get a terrible feeling I can't describe when I think about it; it's like I'm a seven-year-old little girl again, horrified by this action.  I can't imagine what it would be like to remember any sort of rape or attempted rape.  

The next time, I was a year or two older, still in Iowa.  There was a boy who sometimes rode his pony to the one-room country school.  Before school that morning after he tied up the pony, he was allowing other kids to sit in the saddle but ignoring me, the most horse-crazy child anywhere.  My deepest desire was to have a horse of my own.  I wanted to sit in that saddle, but unlike the others, I had to ask.  As I put my foot in the stirrup, he decided to assist me up by grabbing my crotch.  He was probably 13, so his hormones had started kicking in, I suppose.  Here's an interesting thing, though.  I was so ashamed, I never told my mother.

So when people ask the accusers "Why didn't you say something back then", I don't know why I told Momma the first time, but I didn't, the second... maybe because it was a  bigger boy?  I know I felt ashamed, once again.

I doubt if I'm the only one having mixed feelings about this.  I can tell you it brought back a couple of childhood memories I'd rather have left alone.  And these were just children who in no way should be held accountable now.

Yours VERY sincerely, Donna

Getting older isn't too bad, but I miss the ones who are gone

I have enough short items in my notes to make two or three entries, so here goes the first.  

I was rummaging through a drawer for my address book and found a picture of Grandma Stevens' rocking chair.  I asked the cousin who now has the chair to send me a picture of it.  At the time, I was going to ask an artist if he could work with that picture and a picture of Grandma and manage to paint her sitting in the chair.  Turns out even if he could, I couldn't have afforded it at the time; and it really doesn't sound like an idea that would work anyway.  I have a friend who plays around with photoshop who might think of a cute idea for some sort of picture with the chair, but I don't think anybody could sit Grandma down in it to my satisfaction.

It sits in a vacant house now, so this is as close as I'll get to seeing it again.

Grandma stayed busy all the time, but as she grew older, she spent most of her "busyness" quilting and crocheting.  Summers she'd do garden work in the morning while it was cool, but after dinner (noon), she was in that chair mending, crocheting, or writing letters, unless she was upstairs quilting.  She wrote letters on Sunday evenings sitting in the rocker.  When I spent the night with her, she and I would take turns reading a verse aloud of whatever New Testament book she was on before going to bed; she read a chapter every night.  She never had a TV, but she had a radio near her chair, and she listened to soap operas as she sewed.  I remember One Man's Family quite well.  

I was talking to Cliff about my longtime Internet friends, and how a couple of them unwittingly gave me ideas for naming my email addresses.  I started out on AOL, so a person's email, without the @dot com, was her "screen name", which was your name in the chat room.  I wanted something about Missouri in my SN, but most everything I tried was already taken.  Finally I settled for Mo2773 (the numbers are the last four digits of my phone number at the time.  I was called Mo in the chat room and also at the chat room meets, where many of us from across the country gathered and met face to face.  That is the first nickname I ever had in my life, and I loved it.  But it wasn't my last one.  A lady with the screen name JenFar started chatting with us.  She was so proud of her children!  She had a daughter who is a Christian comedian, Chonda Pierce.  She started typing out "Mosie" as my name, so I had yet another nickname.  I loved that woman.  She's one of the only people I didn't mind talking to on the phone for an hour.  I loved hearing her preface stories with, "Well Honey..." in that southern accent.  See, if you spend time in a Christian Senior chat room, people are bound to start dying like flies at some point.  So many of those dear people are no longer with us.

I got burnt out on chat rooms when troublemakers ruined it all.  AOL was going downhill and doing away with a lot of the chat rooms, and I decided it was time to get out of there.  So I needed a name for my new gmail account, which is the one I still use most:  Mosie1944@gmail.com.  (Feel free to write me, but I won't guarantee I'll write back... no spam, please.  Ha!).  1944 is my birth year.  Jen (Virginia) died quite a while back, and I like the fact that my email address was inspired by her.  

Oh, then I was given another nickname:  A Baptist preacher with a wonderful sense of humor, screen name Westbilt, began calling me Mocephas in the chats, inspired no doubt by Hank Williams Jr's nickname, Bocephas.  At that time I was writing a poem a day, most days, and emailing them to any friends in the chat room who requested them; but I wanted a different email for that.  I chose Yahoo and decided on Mocephas57 (because I was 57 at the time).  Well, Westbilt later died.  So now I have two emails honoring the memories of people who have passed away.       

We were watching our usual Friday night Country's Family Reunion, with highlights back to the very first show they filmed, in the late 90's.  Kitty Wells was one of the performers.  When Cliff and I got married I had quite a few country records and a stereo to play them on.  I guess that was my dowry.  We'd stack up those LP records, start them playing, and go to bed listening to Kitty.  Almost all of her songs only required three chords on the guitar, so hers were the first country songs I learned to chord along to.  As luck would have it, most of the songs were in the key of C, which is the easiest one for me to play in and sing in.  

Oh yeah, need I tell you Kitty Wells is dead?  

And that's how it is when you get to be a senior citizen:  Everybody keeps dying.  It really hits home when you open your address book and find half of the people have died.  I hope I don't sound too gloomy.  After all, it's the circle of life.  By the time you're my age, 74, you've come to terms with the fact you're going to die.  It wouldn't even be scary if you knew for sure you wouldn't suffer long before it happens, so that's a worry; but I can do a pretty good job of turning off that worry switch when I need to.  

Yours truly, Donna