This is why I love baseball.

        I love baseball because I love these two baseball players.       

  One son starts the game ….

and the other son closes the game.

Some days are glorious, some are painful.

Losing hurts worse than winning feels good.

But even in the painful times, they have each other. 

I don’t really love baseball.  I like baseball.

I really love them.

I just found my great-great-grandmother last week.  I didn’t know she was  in the same town in which I reside.  In fact, she’s only two blocks down the street!  Imagine my surprise when I found her!  We had a rather one-sided conversation, however, because unfortunately, she died in 1862.  How I would have loved to ask her a hundred questions. 

What was it like being the wife of a large plantation owner in Virginia?  Did you lose the plantation when your husband died?  Why did you and your three married children and their families all move to the midwest in 1851?  Did you have a say in this adventure or did your children insist you come along?  What was it like traveling across the country with five grandchildren, ages 9, 6, 2 and two infants?  What was our town like in the mid 1800s?  Why did you settle in this town?  So many questions I’d like to ask.

Moving is not easy for me.  But when we came to this town six years ago, I didn’t have to pack up a wagon and ride hundreds of miles across rough terrain.  I didn’t have to say goodbye to a childhood home I would never see again.  Somehow, it’s comforting to know that my great-great-grandmother came before me and that for some reason, we have both been destined to leave our marks on this place. 

Thank you for being brave, Sarah Roe Newbill Powell, and venturing out to the new state of Wisconsin.  I don’t know what brought you here and I don’t know if you were happy here, but I’m glad you were here.   I’ll stop by every once in a while to say hi.

 

This is Bo, our Boggle (Boston Terrier/Beagle combo).  She is usually camera-shy, but gave me this sweet look before running from the camera.  Bo is pretty much scared of everything.  If the big blue exercise ball is in the room, she won’t come through the door.  When the vacuum cleaner starts up, she high-tails it to the farthest corner of the house.  When the camera is pointed in her direction, she turns away and tiptoes out of the room.  She won’t play fetch because she’s afraid of the tennis ball.  It’s a sad way to live.

When she goes to bed at night, we put up a flimsy piece of cardboard to keep her in her corner.  If she wanted to, she could knock it over with the tip of her nose, but for some reason she thinks the cardboard is impenetrable.  Bo is convinced that she is powerless.  This dog is fed, bathed, petted, walked, given treats, talked to, and loved.  But something is holding her back from her true dog-ly-ness and we’ll probably never know what it is. 

Know anybody like that?

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the undogly… I mean, ungodly.  Romans 5:6  (Sorry.)

It’s been a glorious few days, with all the little birdies back in the nest.  That means all the kids were home at the same time for a stretch.  For the life of me, I can’t remember how I ever managed to cope when they were all under the roof all the time.  I must have had more energy.  I must have been younger.  I must have never slept.  Add in a son-in-law, and a few girlfriend/boyfriends and kapowie – we don’t even all fit around the dinner table. 

The prospect of all four children going forth and multiplying someday is mind-boggling.  If all four of them get married and have four kids, that will mean…. um……  hold on, I’m getting out the calculator…. that will mean I will need to cook for 26 people.  And if I am blessed to live long enough to see great-grandchildren and they keep procreating at the same rate, I could wind up with…. just a minute…. 64 great-grandchildren.  How will I remember all their birthdays?  How many batches of chocolate chip cookies will I need to make?  I don’t have enough silverware.  Or chairs.

I’m getting a little ahead of myself I suppose. 

It’s been a glorious few days.  But it’s been a little like a Tilt-O-Whirl ride.  Time to get back in the swing.

When I was pregnant with our fourth child, my husband was asked to counsel at a church camp for a week.  Oh, and a few days before he left, the other three little ones (ages 8, 5, and 2) all got chicken pox.  He left for a week.  And I had a houseful of itchy, spotted, miserable children.  And I was pregnant.  And he left for a week. 

Camp week  has changed over the years.  My husband went from counselor to director; that was 22 years ago.  There’s a lot of work involved in directing a camp.  Hands down, I’d rather be at home with three feverish children than be responsible for 80 kids out in the woods.  However, in those early years, the week dad went to camp was the hardest string of days in our summer.  I tried to be the fun parent and plan outings to the water park, go to McDonalds for lunch and spend an afternoon at the beach, but it was exhausting.  I was better suited for creating chore charts and instituting a non-negotiable quiet reading hour in the afternoon.  Dad was definitely the fun parent.  Back in those days, there were two rules for camp week: 1) No inviting friends over.  2) If you get invited over to anybody’s house, you can go.

One by one, the kids got old enough to go off to camp with dad and suddenly, one summer, I found myself alone for a whole glorious week.  I was giddy!  Finally, payback for the year of the chicken pox. 

I still love camp week, although all five of them don’t go anymore.  But I still look forward to those glorious few days.  Here’s my revised rules for camp week:

1) No laundry. Do it all the day they leave and then don’t do any washing of clothes until they get back.  (One year, my wonderful hubby stopped at a laundromat on the way home and all five of them came back with bags full of clean clothes!  Glory halleluiah!)

2) No cooking.  Eat fruit and cereal and go to Taco Bell.  Buy favorite flavors of yogurt with no fear of someone else eating it.  Run dishwasher once all week long.

3) Girl-i-fy the bathroom.  Clean it real good when they leave and revel in the fact that it will stay clean: no whiskers in the sink, no toilet seat left up, no toothpaste spray on the mirror.  Leave facial mask, fingernail polish and make up on the counter in pretty trays.

4) Go to the library and check out a stack of decorating and craft magazines.  In the evening, sit on the deck and read them with no tv background noise.

5) Turn off the air conditioning and open all the windows.  (There’s usually a thermostat war going on – he sets it at 69 degrees, I change it to 80 degrees; and back and forth we go.)

Now you see why I love camp week.  It’s like being on vacation without leaving the comforts of home.  Perfect.  Except by the end of camp week, I’ve had enough peace and quiet for one year and can’t wait to have the craziness of family life pick back up.  Also perfect.

 I took my husband to a pick-your-own strawberry patch.  Now that the children are grown, I need someone to help with the household chores.  He has always been willing to offer a hand, but as the nest empties, his interests are expanding.  This summer we are tending our first garden in years and visions of a shelf full of canned goods is on his mind.  My hubby has always been a man in search of new adventures, so a trip into the country to pick berries sounded good to him.  He also likes my strawberry jam.  The fact that the jam cupboard has been empty since February provided good motivation.  The sweet stuff really is like a taste of summer in the deep midwinter.  There’s nothing  like a piece of warm buttery toast slathered with sugar-laden strawberry jam right before going to bed on a cold January night.  Mmmm, comfort food.

I usually fill two flats with ripe, juicy berries and head home to whip up several batches of jam.  When all the kids were little and peanut butter and jelly was the lunch of choice, I often made as many as six or seven batches to get the whole family through the winter. 

Now what you need to know about my wonderful husband is that he thinks big.  He comes up with great ideas, and usually finds a way to pull them off.  Most of the time I admire that outlook on life.  If a 12 ounce cup of coffee is good, 24 ounces is better.  If a one mile walk is good,  four miles is better. If a 15 passenger van is good, a 48 passenger bus is better.  In this case, 15 pounds of strawberries would’ve been good, but 30# was better.  “Besides,” he reasoned, “with the economy the way it is, we should try to preserve as much as we can.”  I am comforted to know that if  Wall Street crashes, at least we will have plenty of jam to eat.

I made ten batches. 

And froze another eight quarts of sliced berries. 

And made strawberry shortcake. 

And will put berries on my cereal every morning this week. 

To his credit, my husband hung in there with me, helping to wash and mash most of those berries.  He even ran to the store to get more containers when I had three more batches ready to go and no more margarine containers.  In a couple weeks, it will be blueberry picking time on the farm.  I’d better stock up on sugar and plastic freezer bags.  Blueberries taste pretty good in January, too.

Graduation Day arrived on Sunday for Anna!   Here’s the week-end update.

Parents and brothers left for Minneapolis early Saturday morning.  Well, 9:00 a.m. is early for Sam and Jake.  It was a quiet ride.   Aren’t they cute with their look-alike Packer blankets?

We arrived and helped Anna load all her worldly belongings into her Ford Escort station wagon.

I drew the short stick and got stuffed in the back seat of the van with her mattress and box spring.   Here’s my view:

Anna, Sam and Jake (now awake) in front of the cool house on a lake Anna and five girlfriends get to live in for the summer.

Anna got what every Vocal Music Education grad longs for: an old record player that plays these really big CDs.

Sunday morning.  Stained glass and rock music.  Sitting next to my husband in church – a rare blessing.

Happy Gopher Grad jumpin’ for joy!  No more tests, no more papers, no more studying!

Look, mom!  My hat has a tassel!

Jake pretending he’s the grad.

Proud parents!  Hey!  Who’s the homeless man off to the side??

Ah!! The homeless man jumped into the pic…

Anna’s wishing  Sam and Jake would put down their cell phones for one minute.  Hold on…that’s no cell phone…that’s Jake playing Pokemon on his gameboy….

Ceremony time!  Jake checked out when he realized that after the four speeches, over one thousand grads were going to have to walk across that stage.

Diploma!  Sun’s kinda bright.

Quiet ride home.

Blake took this on the way home through the rear view mirror while steering with his knee going 70 mph down the interstate.   Pretty, huh?

She did it!  We did it!  Thank you Jesus!

Katie and Noah- I’m getting this photography/blog thing down.  Just wait till you are here this summer!  More good times coming!

My dad is 87 years old and beginning to forget things.  He can’t do crossword puzzles anymore and that makes me really sad.  From my earliest days, I remember dad getting out the crossword from the Wisconsin State Journal at night after supper.  He would take a pen out of his front shirt pocket and click it into action.  A pen!  No pencil for my dad, which proved his great intelligence to me.  A 4.0 in his younger days at the university didn’t impress me as much as brandishing a ball point pen and confidently filling in all the little boxes on the paper.   He could work through a puzzle in no time.  I liked sitting there watching him, probably because it got me out of clearing the table or doing the dishes.  But, the smell of the farm on his clothes and the twinkle in his eye and his mastery of words made a complete image of him in my memory.  Sometimes he’d ask me an easy one and sometimes I’d get one right, but I knew I was no match.

In his later years, his daily pleasure was sitting at the breakfast table doing the crossword with his morning coffee.  Sometimes when I called him, our phone conversations revolved around the puzzle and what the hard clues were.  It was something we could talk about together.  What once was a daily pleasure has now become a frustration.

When we visited him in the hospital awhile ago, I noticed he had tried to do the puzzle, in ink of course.  It was on the chair and caught my eye because I had just done that very one the night before.  It also got my attention because it was full of mistakes.  The words going across were appropriate, but inaccurate, which made the words going down senseless.  Honestly, the idea that he might be mixing up his medications, or the fact that he sometimes gets disoriented when out driving, doesn’t bother me as much as the reality that he can’t do crossword puzzles anymore.

I’m 50 years old, and I still can’t get up the nerve to do the daily crossword with a ball point pen.

Somebody left two raw hamburger patties in the trunk of our car for a week. ( I say” Somebody” because as a mother I must protect the identity and innocence of my youngest son.)  Anyway,  “Somebody” went to a Brewer baseball game and loaded up the cooler with all the makings for a great tailgate party: brats, burgers, onions, tomatoes, ketchup, mustard, sour kraut.   He packed matches, a spatula, paper towels, a small grill – the complete package.  Off he went, down I-94 to Milwaukee and a Friday night at the ballpark.

The car pulled into the driveway late Saturday night, after a fun weekend with friends.  Of course, church was the next morning and then he was off to work for the rest of the day.  The car was due to be at the garage bright and early Monday morning for some repairs.  Unfortunately, the part that needed to be ordered didn’t come in until Friday….and the guy at the garage didn’t get to it until the following Monday….

When we went to pick up the car Monday afternoon, I noticed all the windows were rolled down, which I thought was kind of strange. However, it was a nice warm day so I just dropped off my husband and went on my way, happy to finally be getting the car back after a week.  Evidently, when my hubby got in to drive the car home, he was lambasted with a stench that brought out the green undertones of his skin.  He fought the overwhelming urge to throw up and settled with coughing and gagging all the way home.

What happens when two raw hamburger patties sit in the trunk of a car for ten days, you ask?  Well, when you open the trunk, a swarm of flies engulf your head.  You reel back on your heels because the fumes are so toxic.  When you foolishly open the mini cooler, you are greeted by a mass of slimy slithering maggots.  Yes, maggots.  The leftover onions and tomatoes are swimming in a lethal juice covered with green mold.   The sour kraut is in a bag that has ballooned because of the deadly gas being produced within.  You put on a pair of gloves, take the cooler and all it’s contaminated contents and put it in a black garbage bag, drive to a dumpster behind a gas station on the other side of town after dark, throw it in, and then run for your life.  That night, you have bad dreams.

We aired out the car for a week, driving everywhere with the windows down and the trunk lid up.  Somebody bought four air fresheners – new car smell.  Ha!  They didn’t stand a chance.  I hope Somebody learned his lesson from all of this.  Like, “Unpack the car as soon as you get home or else you might end up with a trunk full of maggots”.  Or, “Don’t become an auto mechanic because you might have to fix a car that smells like rotting meat”.