Category Archives: Family

Family, Kids, Nature

Looking at Clouds

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This post is from littlejailbird.

Barbara in Rivertown’s comment on Name That Carrot: “It’s kind of looking at clouds…” inspired this post.

My mom is a big fan of looking at clouds and seeing various things in them. She has told me, more than once, of how, when she was a kid, she liked to lie down outdoors and just see how many things she could see in the clouds. I suppose when you grow up in Iowa there is a lot of sky and clouds to look at.

This penchant for looking at clouds has apparently passed down to other generations. One day, when the twins (her great-grandchildren) and I were outside, they were looking up at the sky. We talked about what the clouds looked like. Twin 2 said, “I see a…BUTT!” and they both dissolved in laughter.

Tell us something funny that a child you know has said or done.

Family, Nature, Stories

Losing Peanut

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Today’s post comes to us from Crystal Bay.

RIP dear Peanut. Last night, as I was weeping knowing it was our last night together, the old guy walked up to me and licked my tears. He’s been hiding for days, but last night he came for what used to be our nightly ritual. He hadn’t done this in months as he grew weaker. He walks up to the cover I pull up to my chin, paws it down, then I lift it into a tent for him to enter. He then makes three circles before finally plopping down close to my face. I then kiss him a dozen times while repeating, “I love you, Peanut”. Every night for 14 years. I wish that I’d created more of a dialogue with him over all of these years, but this is all I ever said to him.

The vet showed up at 10 this morning. He was on my lap relaxing in front of a space heater he’s always loved. My dear friend, Bruce, was here, and right up to the moment of the quick-acting sedation shot, I kept asking if I was doing the right thing. Did he have more time to live? Should nature just decide when it was his time to die? Was he really suffering or just old and skinny? The sweet vet told me that I didn’t have to go through with it; that she’d come back another time.

He sprawled across my lap as she administered the sedative, and slowly got sleepier. “Peanut, I love you” over and over. I was still so ambivalent that I asked her if he could revive from the sedative if I changed my mind. All I could think of was how spending the last day and night with him was so painful that I couldn’t go through this process again a few weeks or even months from now, so she very gently inserted the needle and pushed in the medication which would stop his heart.

I held his limp body, crying my heart out. I had decided just this morning that I didn’t want to bury him after all because the vision of lowering him into a black hole was just too much. The vet brought in a small kitty bed with a soft little blanket. I placed him in it. And then he was gone from my life. A piece of me and a part of what’s kept my world in balance went with him. I wrote a letter to him:

Dear Peanut, I found you in the middle of Crystal Bay Road 14 years ago on September 1, 2003. Your little eyes were glued shut with infection and your back leg was crushed. I rushed you to the vet who said that you were, at best, 4 weeks old and doubted that you’d survive. I came back several hours later, and there you were, bright eyed and bushy tailed, eating dry kibbles.

For the next two months, I kept you on or very near my body 24/7. When with clients, you nestled on my shoulder. I took you grocery shopping in a tiny box, to my volunteer work, to lunch dates. And every single day, I kissed the top of your head a thousand times, saying, “Peanut, I love you”.

For the twelve years following my divorce, you were the only warm body in my world who alleviated my loneliness. No matter how my day had gone, you were there at the end of it with our silly ritual, letting me know that you loved and needed me. I thank you for that.

Your buddy, Izzy, is already searching the cottage for you. I’ve always cared for her, but she’s not you, Peanut. Perhaps, after the six years she’s been here, she’ll come out of her shell and show some affection and bond with me? Right now, she’s lying next to me on the foot stool by the heater, something she’s never done before. Only an hour ago, you were there.  She’s always deferred to you, even in this last year as you grew weaker, she’d box with you then suddenly jump off the bed out of respect for you.

You were my fur person, my devoted companion, and the only constant presence in my life. Thank you for the 14 years you graced my life.

I love you Peanut, Mama

What’s the name of your favorite pet?

Family, Food, gardening, Uncategorized

Name That Carrot

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Husband is now able to put some weight on his right foot, by using one crutch and his walking cast. Yesterday he was able to do some garden harvest; he came up with some lovely carrots and potatoes, and of course thousands of cherry tomatoes.

In past years we have unearthed some wonderful carrots – here is one we called Carrot Man from 2014…

And today I can’t resist taking a couple of pictures of one special (set of) carrot. I had a caption ready for it/them, but thought it would be fun to let the baboons come up with a caption

Do you have a special vegetable memory in your past?

Name That Carrot.

Family, Stories, Uncategorized, Words

More About My Mom

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Today’s post comes from Occasional Caroline.

My mother is intelligent, loving, and feisty. She also has some type of learning disability, probably some type of dyslexia; they didn’t recognize that kind of thing in the 1920’s. She says that she hated school until she got to college. She convinced her mother she was sick and couldn’t go to school more days of the week than not, all through high school. But she loved everything about Macalester College and doesn’t recall ever missing a single class. Smart as she is, she has never, ever been able to spell. Anything. At all. She clearly remembers the agony of multiple failed attempts to get her first library card because she couldn’t spell her 16-letter full name on the application form.

When she went to Macalester, she had a note on file from a psychologist, stating that she wasn’t stupid or uneducated, but she couldn’t spell, and her professors should cut her some slack in that regard. She graduated from Mac in 1947 with a double major in Sociology and Theater. Not too shabby for any women in that era, especially one who couldn’t spell.

She can’t look up a word in the dictionary. She can’t even get to the right page, let alone to the right word. If spell check had come along 30 years earlier, she would have been one of it’s greatest beneficiaries, but she was born to soon.

She’s an avid reader, which seems odd to me. She read aloud to us when we were kids and we didn’t notice until much later that she pronounced many words differently than most people do. We frequently had “samriches” for lunch, for example.

Throughout my childhood, she would ask me how to spell simple words. Every time one of us missed school and she had to write an excuse note, she’d ask me how to spell stumpers like “with” and the dreaded “sincerely.” She had a cheat sheet in her stationery box, but nearly always asked, because the words just didn’t look right to her.

She always writes individual notes in her Christmas cards, but it takes her forever, because she writes them out on scratch paper and has me correct the spelling before she copies it over to the card. It’s the bane of her existence. She would almost rather not get gifts because the mandatory thank you notes are so frustrating to compose. Her notes are always heartfelt, but brief.

Mom will be 93 in October. At somewhere around 75 she started taking to heart the information she was seeing about how crucial it is to keep your mind challenged as you age. She couldn’t do the Highlights for Children crossword puzzles, let alone the ones in the New York Times, as was frequently recommended. She couldn’t do word search puzzles, as many of her friends did, and don’t even mention playing Scrabble! So she came up with her own brand of brain training; she memorized all the insignia/logos on cars. For the last 20 years or so, riding in the car with her is a running monologue on the makes of the cars going by. “Oh, there’s a Toyota, that’s an Acura (a’ cura, in her pronunciation), that one’s a Mercedes, I think those are very expensive.” She’s only focused on the make, models are not her thing, except for one particular Hyundai (I think it’s a Hyundai, of course I can’t come with model right now) that every time she sees one, she points out what a remarkably good looking car it is.

What do you do to compensate for your weaknesses?

Family, History, Nature, Uncategorized

Museum Memories

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Today’s post is by Steve Grooms

My heart sank months ago when I read that the Bell Museum at the University of Minnesota would be destroyed. Built in 1940, the Bell had unique charm, with an ivy-covered façade and Art Deco styling. The Bell housed a fascinating set of displays featuring fish, mammals, reptiles and birds of Minnesota in natural settings. The most spectacular of its displays were the large dioramas depicting sweeping scenes in which taxidermy animals interacted with each other and with their habitat. A particularly poignant display showed a family of passenger pigeons. Once a super-abundant bird whose flocks darkened the skies over Minnesota, the passenger has been extinct for over a century. The only passenger pigeons I’ll ever see were those in the Bell.

The story in the paper said the old building was aging so badly it had become an unsafe environment for employees. Decrepit plumbing frequently flooded the basement. Because the paintings that formed the backdrop for the dioramas were painted right on the walls, they could not be removed and installed in a new location. Reading that story was like hearing that a friend had an inoperable cancer.

My erstwife and I were University students when we met, so we often ducked into the Bell in between classes to talk. The Bell was cool on hot summer days. We enjoyed many movies that the University Film Society projected in the Bell’s theater. Every other building on that vast campus is a serious place where people debate academic issues. The Bell could hardly have been more different. It was beautiful, natural and visually exotic.

After administrators explained why it would be impossible to move the museum’s displays to a new location, public support for the Bell was so strong that the University was obliged to change its mind. Someone finally found enough money (about 50 million dollars) to protect its displays and move them to a new museum on the Saint Paul campus. That lovely campus is where wildlife management is taught, making it an appropriate home for the Bell’s dioramas.

An excellent story about this move, written by Briana Biersbach, was recently published on MinnPost, an online Minnesota news site: https://www.minnpost.com/education/2017/08/bell-wheels-how-minnesotas-only-natural-history-museum-got-minneapolis-st-paul

My daughter and I used to roam the Bell together so I could share my love for the natural world. The Bell was a sort of zoo where we paid nothing to enter and where animals were close-up and easy to see. Molly grew up knowing what the inside of a beaver lodge looked like because the Bell included a beaver lodge among its displays, a clever display that offered a view of the lodge both above and below water. Molly and I enjoyed studying the dioramas to see how cunningly their creators had blended the painted backdrops with the taxidermy foreground displays. When Molly got older we played more challenging games, such as “can you spot the chickadee?” or “what kind of owl is skulking next to that tree trunk?”

Molly especially enjoyed the Touch and See room, a place where kids were encouraged to explore wildlife in a hands-on way. I have a photo of her as a toddler kneeling to examine books in that room. Before her is a book about wolves. Several years later Molly and I would both write books on wolves that were published in the same month.

We were in the Bell one Saturday afternoon when my toddler daughter had an intellectual breakthrough. The Bell has a diorama showing a family of black bears. While two cubs frolic nearby, the mama bear captures a fish. A gorgeous, multi-hued brook trout lies in her paw.

Molly was thunderstruck when she spotted that fish. At the time her favorite bathtub toy was a blue plastic whale. Molly suddenly made the connection between that toy and the fish in the bear’s paw. The world of her bathtub and this world of animals were connected by that little fish. It was a sort of Helen Keller moment when Molly understood that objects could be categorized and understood. Pointing at the brook trout, Molly began howling, “Whale! Whale! Whale!”

One of my favorite college professors was passing by at that moment. I was tempted to explain why a little girl would call a tiny brook trout a “whale,” but he was grinning so much I let it go. He had raised several children of his own, and perhaps he had guessed our story.

I am not likely to see the new home for my beloved old museum. It opens in 2018. But I know better than to say it “never” will happen. If my family moves again we will land in Saint Paul, and I’m sure my grandson will enjoy the old dioramas.

Have you ever had a special moment in a museum

Family, Fifty Words, Nature, Uncategorized

Nice Work If You Can Get It

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Our daughter is a social worker. Yesterday, as part of her job, she went fishing and caught a three foot long shark in Puget Sound. I don’t usually associate social work with shark fishing. How wacky!

What is the wackiest thing you had to do as part of a job?

 

Family, Nature, Science, Uncategorized

Moonrise/Sunset

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Today’s post comes from Barbara in Rivertown.

[I figured we should have a little astronomy before Monday.]

Just a few blocks from our house in Winona, there is a spit of land beyond the levee that juts out into the Mississippi. Boat trailers can be driven down to put in (and pull out) their boats. Even farther out are chunks of concrete that you can climb over, and once you get all the way out there, you feel like you’re right in the river. It’s a great place to watch ducks and other water birds, and the barges being pushed by the (ironically-named) tugboats.

During the warmer months, on the evenings of the full moon, we go there at sunset, climb out and look West until the sun goes down behind (in this case) the hills in an island in the river. Then we turn ourselves 180 degrees to the East, and wait for the moon to come up. It’s tricky to predict exactly where it will rise * – and the orb is hard to see because it’s still quite light out. But finally it appears:  a big golden- orange roundness edging up into the sky, and it’s thrilling each time we do this.

Before I met Husband, he lived in the country up on the ridge, where he was able to see lots of sunsets. Because of the tilt of Earth’s axis and its rotation, each night the sun goes down (* and the moon comes up) at a little different spot on the horizon. These photos were taken on the July 9 full moon by my friend Angela. In August the sun went down considerably to the left of that hill you see, and the moon also came up left of what’s pictured.

Tell about a memorable solar, lunar, or stellar event in your past.

Any baboons traveling to see the solar eclipse?

 

Family, Stories, Uncategorized

It Could Have Been Much, Much Worse!

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Today’s post comes from Occasional Caroline.

My mother lives in South St. Paul, but goes to church about 25 miles away, in Hudson Wisconsin. The church has formed the “Driving Miss Daisy” ministry to take my mom and her friend, Dorothy (both in their 90s) to and from church on Sunday mornings. I have the “bring them home” shift every first and third week. This past Sunday, a new volunteer had been drafted to bring them home because the regularly scheduled driver has left the church; so this was Jane’s first time. She dropped Dorothy off and took Mom home. She helped her to the door, but when they opened it, a strong gas smell wafted out. Mom hurried in to find her husband and get him outside. He has completely lost his sense of smell, so resisted leaving the house, thinking she was over reacting. Jane discovered that one of the stove burner knobs was on with no flame. She turned it off, got everyone outside and called 911 (I’m not positive that was the exact order of events). Anyway, the fire fighters arrived, checked the house for any other gas sources, opened all the windows and allowed them to go back in.  And all is well. Thank goodness for Jane; what a dramatic start to a volunteer gig! Note: Mom’s husband, still unable to smell anything, starts closing windows to keep Sunday’s cool, fresh air from coming in! 

Have you ever had to call 911?

Family, Kids, Nature, The Future, Uncategorized

The Doldrums

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It is a slow time of year right now. Clients are waiting until school begins to resume therapy The garden is in a “wait and watch” stage, with beans developing, the third crop of spinach growing, and tomatoes slowly reddening.  Who knows what is happening beneath the potato plants. They just keep flowering.

This is the first time since 1991 that we haven’t had a child in school or college. I feel as though I am in the doldrums, just waiting for something to happen.  The wait isn’t necessarily refreshing or pleasant. Husband’s father goes to a Memory Care Center this week. We are sort of waiting for things to happen with him, too. Who knows how he will adjust. This time of year is usually busy and forward looking. Not this year.  Send in the clowns!

How do you handle the doldrums?

 

Family, Technology, Travel

The Trouble with Ratchets

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Today’s post comes from Chris, Reneeinnd’s husband.

Due to an anomaly at birth, I am partially ambidextrous.  I learn to do simple tasks with my left hand and complex tasks with my right.  I allow other people to demonstrate their mechanical prowess while I stand aside to lend assistance.  Attempts to tackle jobs with moving parts commonly end in frustration, absurdity, or disaster.

In July, Renee and  I traveled to see our son and his wife in Brookings, South Dakota so Renee could do a therapy presentation and we could help the kids move into a new apartment.  The new place was quite a step up: it had three bedrooms on two levels, with two and a half bathrooms!  Son and his wife had bought new furniture and had it delivered to the new apartment.  They had to leave several pieces of furniture, including a huge, dilapidated sectional sofa, in the old apartment so it could be removed and hauled to the landfill with my pickup.

We arrived on Friday evening, delighted to see the new apartment. Renee and Son would be at the presentation the next day.  After a pleasant meal, the four of us went to the Lowe’s to get what would be needed for the big move– a big tarp and a set of ratchets with straps.

Son and I went over to the old place and proceeded to load the bulky pieces of the sofa into my pickup and cover them with the tarp.  The next step was to secure the load with the straps and ratchets.

Son and I usually work well together, but he has dexterity problems of his own.  Secretly, I didn’t have a clue–I’d let him take the lead.  Neither of us knew how to spool the straps through the ratchet.  Son used the expedient of the young–he looked up the procedure on YouTube.  By this time, it was getting dark and he  had to use his phone as a flashlight.  He figured out what to do, and we threw the hooked end of the strap over the top of the load.  At that point we inadvertently violated the cardinal rule of ratcheting–always keep the strap straight!  If you don’t, the strap will  twist and get stuck in the spool while you’re tightening it with the ratchet.

Of course the strap got tangled, and the strength of two big men was not enough to unwind it.  Fortuitously, Son’s upstairs neighbor, a veteran  of multiple collegiate moves, arrived.  He was able to pull out the strap so it could be spooled back in to the ratchet.  We tried again, secured the load, and drove the truck to the new apartment, tired but satisfied with a job well done.

On Saturday, Daughter in Law  and I got to do the fun part–driving the pickup to the landfill so we could dispose of the sofa.  We gleefully flung the cruddy pieces onto a smelly pile of rubbish.  We were very careful to wind the straps back into ratchets without twisting them.  I had not repeated the same mistake and was proud of my newfound competence.  I could now use a ratchet on my own–without help!

We showed Son the neatly spooled ratchets when he got home, only to find that the straps were horribly stuck! You’re not supposed to rewind the strap through the back of the ratchet!  Son pulled with all  his might and was able to get one of the spools unstuck.  He had to resort to cutting the other one.  A mysterious third strap was involved.  Although  Son remained calm and patient, he was  clearly disgusted by the situation.  He advised me to ask one of “my mechanically inclined” friends for assistance in the future.

The straps and ratchets are stored in a compartment of my truck.  I am too embarrassed to show my incompetence by asking a casual friend or neighbor for help.  I vowed never to use an  unspooled ratchet and strap again– if I can avoid it.

Have you ever had a guilty secret?  What did you do to conceal your shame?