Summer Memories

Maybe it's because I've not been well this tail end of summer and bed has been a good place to find me. Maybe it's because the weather has been wonderful for sleeping with windows open; highs in the 80's with nights cooling off to the low to mid 60's. Maybe I'm just nostalgic. I'm not quite sure what it is, but night has brought back some wonderfully warm memories as August turned into September.

My mother's mother lived in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. One of the things we kids looked forward to was the ability to spend a week with Gram during the summer. She often had to work part of the week we were there, but, when we were old enough, that wasn't a problem. My sister and I went together and we took the bus everywhere. We even walked the couple of miles to a cousin's house. His wife was aghast that we had walked, but, to us, it was no big deal and we were rather proud of ourselves for finding their house. I remember walking to the Dairy Queen on First Avenue, which is, incidentally, still there.

The one thing I'm remembering with much fondness is lying awake at night and listening to the sounds of the city. Gram lived 2 blocks from busy First Avenue, which was the major arterial from south to north Cedar Rapids. When I was a child and visiting, there was a train spur 6 blocks south of her which ran, usually at night.

I remember the sounds. Late at night, after she had watched Johnny Carson and had gone to bed, the sounds of the city were so unfamiliar and so fascinating to a country girl. I would try to stay awake and then, at midnight-ish, there would be the sounds of traffic. There would be the sounds of night insects. Oh I was familiar with crickets and the buzzing insects of evening, but they sounded different in the city. There would be the rare siren and an even rarer train horn. It was just different and so unusual.

I've found myself, over the course of the last month and a half, waking up occasionally at 1 or 2 in the morning. The windows are open. A cat is snoozing beside me and there is the sound of a city summer night. I'm 4 blocks from Roosevelt Road, a major arterial going east west through Wheaton. I can hear the sounds of traffic. Two blocks to my west is a secondary north south route on which emergency vehicles go to get to the north side of Wheaton. It's rare, but I can hear those sounds. And there are the insects. It's the same sound of buzzing and chirping that I remember from summers in Cedar Rapids.

It is all so very familiar. I found myself lying in bed with my eyes closed straining to hear the TV and Johnny Carson's voice. I could almost feel myself lying in the guest bed with a gentle southern breeze coming in the window. My grandmother was a complicated woman but this summer, I've found myself wishing I could go back to a summer so many years ago and lie in a bed in her house and just listen.

Beverage:  Dr Pepper

Deb

Things I See-November Edition

Here's another collection of things I saw worthy enough for a photograph.

I visited Carole at the end of October. On the way back, I needed a restroom and some tea. Dunkin' Donuts is my go-to place for tea, except, maybe, in western Pennsylvania.

I couldn't toss this even after I'd finished the tea because I can recycle the cup in my recycling. So, a Penn State item made its way into my Iowa Hawkeye house. The tea is always good, even if it came in the wrong color cup.

I've always wanted to make a braided rug. I used to have one that my great-great aunt made. She used wool scraps from a variety of sources. It wore really well for awhile and then disintegrated one day as I was, I thought, gently shaking out crumbs and dirt. I have a booklet that tells me how to make these kinds of rugs and it seems easy enough. It's a great way to use up fabric and is a craft that ties us to our ancestors.

What so great about these rugs, seen in a building I was inspecting, is that they are made from plastic bags. I'm not kidding. I saw these and knew, right away, what they were. I've known, for a long time, about places doing this. It's a great fund raiser for groups and a number of homeless shelters will have residents make rugs. If you accumulate a lot of bags and have no place to recycle them, it might be something you'd like to try. Here's a tutorial on the process.

I loved the colors in the stack. I didn't find out if they sold any of these or, because there were a lot of them, and bags, shoved onto this shelf unit, had the bottom dropped out of sale of plastic bag braided rugs.

This is coal.

Seriously. That's coal on the ground. Some of the people I were with had never seen real coal. Who knows how long it's been here. It's not something that's going to decompose quickly.

Seeing it brought back memories of the manual furnace that heated the farm house I grew up in. We used wood and coal. Coal gave off a smell, but burned for a long time and gave off a lot of heat, once you got it lit. Dad would start the fire in the fall with wood and then toss in the coal. We sometimes had to endure a warm house because he didn't want the fire to go out and have to start the process all over again if the warm spell was going to be just a few days. In the morning, the house was often chilly as the fire wound down, and we got dressed for school in the kitchen with the oven door open to remove the chill from the air.

The chimney had to be cleaned periodically because the layers of soot deposited on the inside could catch fire. We had that happen once. I remember sitting on the steps in the unheated back entry because the soot in the chimney caught fire. We were wrapped in blankets to keep warm. Mom and dad were dousing the red hot coal fire with water in an attempt to create enough steam to put out the chimney fire. Oh the smell and the smoke! Windows and doors were open to create drafts to get the smoke out of the house. I remember having to clean everything for weeks afterward because there was a thin layer of soot everywhere.

It's hard to see, but there is a spider the size of a half-dollar in the upper right corner of this door. Two of my co-workers are very scared of spiders. I would not have a tarantula in my house nor would I stroke one or pick one up or have one crawl across my hand. I'm not, however, terrified of spiders. I usually try to herd them onto the fly swatter or a piece of paper and toss them outside. They do more good out there anyway.

I don't think this gal spun a web in a food-rich environment. This was a courtyard, surrounded by 10 foot tall brick walls and covered with a mesh grating. I'm seeing very tiny spiders in the house now, spiders who were hatched at the middle of fall and who are looking for food before dying off in the winter. They just sort of show up, in the dish drainer, in the corner of windows, in front of books in the bookcase. I just look at them and wonder why they thought where they are was going to yield any sort of meal. Then I squash them.

Speaking of doors,

This was the main entry to a warehouse. The building was built in the 1930's and was reused in the 1980's as a warehouse. Security doors aren't made like this anymore.

A bunch of blocks. I was in a basement and these blocks date from the 1930's. What's so special about these blocks? Well, I don't know much about building construction, particularly older construction. They are interesting on their own and make me curious. What struck me was the Reg. US. Pat. Off. mark. Reguspatoff. I know it stands for "Registered, US Patent Office", meaning the bricks have a patent. It was also the name of a computer in a Saturday morning cartoon.

Someone told me it was in Rocky and Bullwinkle but that was the WAYBACK machine, which was an homage to the UNIVAC from the early age of computing. That age coincided with the germination in Jay Ward's mind, of a subversive cartoon which has just as much relevance to today as it did back in the late 1950's and early 1960's. Find and watch "The Boxtop Robbery" or "Wossamotta U". (The Wossamotta U fight song is directly purloined from the fight song for the Minnesota Golden Gophers. I can't hear their fight song without singing, "Wossamotta, hats off to you. To your colors, ocher and Alice Blue. We shall e're be faithful and true. Hail Wossamotta hail. Better we should be in jail. Hail Wossamotta U.")

Back to Reguspatoff. I'm almost certain it was in Underdog, but I can't find independent confirmation. Since I don't get cable, I can't watch Cartoon Network which might have Underdog on the schedule. Seeing this on these bricks made me snicker. I didn't point this out to my companions as I was pretty sure none of them had the same frame of reference I did.

Finally, I saw this in the basement of a building.

Did you ride face first or feet first? I could never get up the courage to ride face first. My brothers and sister did, but not me. I didn't mind being in the front, but I could never expose my face to a wipe out.

I would go again. Grab the great nieces and nephews, find a hill with a soft landing, put on layers and layers and go sledding. We would start up by the garage and, if lucky, you'd make it all the way down the hill past the barn and to the bridge over the creek. Sometimes, if conditions were right, you could get across the bridge, onto the flat beyond and up the other side of the hill a bit. Ice was the worst. Hit a patch and you lost control. We'd spend hours outside. It took a good 10 minutes to drag the sled back up to the garage to ride it down again, always hoping for just the right mix of speed and dexterity to go even farther up the other side than you had before.

Sometimes, it was too dangerous to go down the hill by the barn, so we'd try to see if we could make it around the windmill and over the hump by the house. Hairpin curves are not a sled's forte. You made wide, sweeping curves. If you had to swerve quickly, the best course of action was to simply fall off the sled, which resulted in faces full of snow and lots and lots of laughter. Yeah, I'd do it again.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

It's Not Godzilla But...

I was on the phone with my daughter while still at the office and I happened to notice an image on my office window.

It really was quite large, probably 2 inches long.

I remember these from my youth. Oh lordy are they one of the insects I dislike. While riding home on the school bus from picture day in early September of the 4th grade, one of the boys grabbed one, crunched it just enough to disable it and dropped it down the back of my dress expecting me to scream like a...well...girl. (I dislike that phrase immensely. Some of the biggest scaredy cats I've ever met have been men. Why isn't it, "Scream like a guy" as if women have a lock on screaming?) When we got home, mom insisted on photos on the front porch. Somewhere, I have that photo. I sit, all prim and proper, in my light green seersucker dress all the while this grasshopper in the throes of death is squirming on my back.

I remember bursting into tears when she was done and peeling off the top, ripping the armholes in the process. Mom was friends with the guy's mother so she took the offending grasshopper to Katie and demanded an apology. I think I got one, half-hearted. He was a small in stature guy and I'm sure he was bullied about his height or lack thereof. His way of dealing with it was to move the bullying down the line. He was already disappointed that I didn't scream or squeal when he dropped it down my back. Being forced to stand in front of all of us, his and my parents, and apologize was a huge humiliation. But, he never picked on any of us again. I never, ever liked him, but I really liked his parents.

Locusts are bigger than this. My dad would tell stories about watching them come in clouds at the end of summer. It seems to me that these 'clouds' weren't like the ones the Plains states had during the Dust Bowl years. But I'm fairly certain there would have been clouds, more like a bulbous group, coming and settling into the fields and eating anything they could. I also remember dad saying grasshoppers were great fishing lures. I don't remember what liked them, but I do remember him spearing the hook and tossing the still wiggling insect into the Mississippi.

I was scared of them for many years after the bus incident. They are wholly unpredictable. One insect might engage you in a staring contest. Another might hop straight up as you approach and then there are the ones hidden that fly off as you walk by. How many times have I been startled by a hopper that happens to share his air space with my body? That's when I scream simply because it's large and it startled me.

It took awhile, but they don't scare me anymore. They are quite fascinating when you get down at their level and look at them. Compound eyes and leg muscles which, if translated to humans would allow us to jump almost to the moon. Still, they should keep their distance from me. I can yelp, only don't tell me I sound like a girl.

Beverage:  Water

Deb

Finishing

Found it.

After a long search, which did involve sweeping the floor because I was moving things about, I found this piece I stitched several years ago but never finished. This is to be a Christmas present for a friend. It's a wall or door hanging.

In order to finish it, I need to wash it, then iron it. I need to get backing material; I'm thinking a green fabric. I had thought about green felt, but felt isn't the sturdiest of fabrics. This piece isn't very big so a quarter of a yard of something is going to give me a chunk of fabric left over. Oh well. That fabric can go into the "some day I'll make a quilt" box.

I need to purchase a dowel on which to hang this and some yarn or heavy thread to make a hanger and it's done.

While searching for this, I came across a piece I stitched a very long time ago. I think this might have been the first piece I ever did, come to think of it. It was stamped cross-stitch on linen and I think I did this when I was in 8th grade.

I have decided to wash and iron this and, when I take the geese sampler just finished to be framed, this goes too. I think the gap in the bottom middle was where you were supposed to stitch your name. I never did. I don't remember that I had any plans for this other than doing it. I think it will look marvelous on my wall and it really is a memory of the past. 

I found the chart for my next project. I completed my taxes today, too. Once I get my refund, these pieces will be finished. It's a gorgeously sunny day. I feel quite productive. 

Beverage:  English Breakfast tea

Deb

Day 11- The Book that made you fall in love with reading

I'll always remember this as the first book that made me realize this reading stuff was wonderful.

This is a very simple story. Johnny goes bear hunting and finds an orphaned cub. He brings the cub home and proceeds to raise him, not realizing what a fully grown bear needs. There is a happy ending which I won't give away. This book could have qualified for one that I read again and again and again because I do remember checking it out of the library multiple times. Yes, I own a copy.

Lynd Ward illustrated this book as well as wrote the story. He is considered to be the father of the graphic novel having published 6 novels beginning in 1929, whose story is told only via engravings. The Biggest Bear won the 1953 Caldecott Medal for most distinguished children's picture book. I think that's why I was drawn to it. The illustrations are deep and rich and full of detail. The prose is simple and tells a story but the illustrations make that prose come alive. There is one illustration in the book that is kind of scary so if you are looking for a children's book and chance upon this, page through it. The bear with the honey might be a bit disturbing to young children just because of the perspective.

This has always been my favorite children's book that I can remember. It's still in print and well worth it to add to your library. Oh dear, I'm recommending a book. I said I wouldn't do that.

Beverage:  Earl Gray Tea

Deb

Front Door Smiles

Soon, the real thing will blossom.

When I was growing up, below my bedroom window was one of two huge Persian lilac bushes. They usually bloomed right before Memorial Day, right after school let out, just as the days and nights took on a summer tone. The heady fragrance of lilacs would fill my bedroom at night. I would take my pillow and dooze on the windowsill, just breathing in that scent. To this day, lilacs remain my favorite flower and favorite scent. I will go out of my way in May to smell a lilac bush. I don't care for the Miss Kim variety of lilacs as their scent is too spicy. Give me an old-fashioned Persian lilac's intoxicating fragrance.

There are times when I wish one could get lilacs to bloom all year 'round and you could walk into a florist in December an purchase a branch with blossoms on it. But that would make it as ordinary as anything else a florist sells. By keeping lilacs a 2 week explosion in May, Mother Nature assures me they are rare and meant to be smelled when they do show up.

There are buds on the bushes in my yard. Blossoms are coming.

Beverage: Ginger Ale

Deb