That's the way it was...

My brother was so kind as to scan so many slides that my father had created over the years. I picked a few fun ones to highlight here.

The one below is from the early 1960's when we used to travel 'up' north to Grandma and Grandpa's house to celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving.
Can you see why I like winter???

We spent summers in this tiny cottage which had two rooms and a bathroom. We had cold running water but no tub or shower. If I recall, the tiny house was built for my Grandmother's parents to live out their elder years. 

[I don't know the person on the bench with the dog...but that is the only shot I found of the little house]

My dad stayed in the 'city' working while we lived in the cottage all summer. He'd come up for his vacation and stay with us. I wonder how hard it was to not see his family for months on end. Mom would go to Grandpa's house for a weekly phone call from Dad [I think]. 

We spent a lot of time with our cousins whose father had horses. This is where we learned to ride and where we learned not to fear falling off. 

These two horses were my Uncle's best animals. The mother is on the right. She was named Babe. On the left was Dusty, her daughter. I'm in the front and my sister is behind me.

We were probably in the wooden round pen where Lyle trained horses.

We also spent quite a bit of time at my other Uncle's house. He was a dairy farmer among other things. The experiences of living two separate lives really shaped how I feel about city and rural living.

Our summer time did not include TV, phones, or obviously the internet. We played, we rode our bikes to the lake, went swimming, played cards, fought, and worked in the garden. We were kids. We rarely wore shoes in the summer. Shoes were saved for 'good' and for school when we were required to wear them.

Our lives were divided between the North Shore of Chicago and NW Wisconsin.

I may have mentioned somewhere before that I had an eye/vision issue. I still do, but here I am at 16 years old with my birthday gifts from mom. Just what I wanted! Once a Tomboy, always a Tomboy.

Since my eyes don't work together, I don't have normal depth perception like other people. I often had to wear an eye patch to try and make the weaker eye much stronger. I wore glasses since I was very young and by this age, I could see pretty well thanks to the efforts of my parents who paid for eye surgery when I was a little kid.

I learned a different way of telling distances from how things moved. Don't ask me how, but I was pretty good at softball!

In the mid 1960's my dad rented a house from a friend at work and our lives changed again. We stayed in a house on the Big Island of Hawaii in a place called Puako. We scrimped and saved each year for this opportunity. We got to spend up to a month on the island for several summers.

Below is a shot of myself and my sister sitting out on the lava flow watching the ocean and probably imagining things.

My mom loved fishing so she took up a part time job so we could charter a boat during our vacations. I don't know how many times we went out on the Spooky Luki, but eventually Zander Budge, the captain, did allow me to drive along the Kona Coast. I'm sure each of us took a turn in the calm waters we were in, but I recall this vividly. I loved being out on the ocean.

There was nothing quite like it.

What can I say? My parents were pretty awesome.

In 2001, I had the wonderful opportunity to go back to the Big Island with Dad for two weeks.

That trip was amazing. 

Photo of Dad in Kona in front of the King Kam Hotel.

And now? I'm still that adventurous kid at heart. 

Well...for as long as I can be....

Memories

My brother and his wife took care of my father in his last few years of life. This was all before I became a Caregiver myself. They did this while raising children on their own.

My dad lived in a modified area downstairs in my brother's house. I really do think it was an act of selflessness that impresses me to no end. 

My dad had 'stuff' that he'd brought with him. You know, the usual stuff. Photos, slides, and papers that we like to hang on to.

Recently my brother had to go through my dad's things again and do more sorting for a documentary that was being done on a place my father worked at. 

I opened the box and started going through it. A Time Capsule! There was a photo of me at 18 months old with one shoe on, one shoe off and holding a Mickey Mouse guitar backwards. I guess you can say that my musical abilities were abysmally evident even at that young age.

Then there was a photo of my dad sitting with my brother and I. Dad was wearing a kids' cowboy hat. He looks somewhere between perplexed and slightly embarrassed that his picture was being taken. Or he is just trying to figure out what my brother is trying to do. 

I am just sitting there staring off into the distance:

Eventually a doctor suggested eye surgery to help me see. It was a success and paired with glasses I could see. Not like normal people [I didn't learn until much later that my depth perception doesn't exist], but I got along just fine. 

I was definitely my 'own' person.

One of the most startling items I found was an undated assignment from school in which I must have been practicing cursive writing.

It was a letter to each of my parents.

It is interesting to note what I said to each of my folks then. Dad was the softy, he might scold in a mild tone or let me know that what I'd done wrong was indeed wrong..., but he never raised a hand to me.

My mom for whatever reason seemed to delight in finding things I'd done wrong and being the punisher. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Her anger was swift and punishment immediate on all levels. 

She was very hard to please and I'd said something like that in my cursive assignment. More along the lines of 'I like to make you happy.' 

I wonder why dad kept those papers?

In the letter to him, I mentioned that I liked how 'he yelled at me'. The preference for one parent over the other was glaringly obvious in the two pages I read.

I see it now. I wonder IF they saw it then?

Oh and I wonder if I am reading too much into something written so long ago.

Mom was always difficult for me to please. Dad never seemed disappointed. 
I think I'll just go with that.

I am so tickled to be able to go through this box of items. What a Time Capsule.

It is all his fault!

My Father that is. He was creative and had a playful mind.

One of the biggest regrets is that I don't have many photos of him. And I realize why. When he first picked up a camera, there was NO such thing as selfies. 

I don't know when this photo was taken or who took it. But there he is with a Brownie reading a light meter. I remember him with a Pentax film camera. He had one lens and it was a long lens. He used to let me hold it and pretend to take photos. Other times he'd have me make a box with my fingers and hands to make a 'frame'.
It was a game we played. I could frame a photo with my hands and we would go over what his light meter said.

I can't imagine the challenges that he had when taking photos of us kids doing activities. The winter photo could be around 1965 when we had a huge snowstorm. We took turns leaping off the piled up snow into the yard. 
The one leaping is me.

I seemed to leap a lot...

I am a bit less carefree about leaping now. 

I often wonder how things would be different had my father been able to learn and own a digital camera. Considering that he had to manually focus and meter most of his photos, he did quite well. 

We all loved and hated it when he'd walk around with that long lens of his. I think I was in trouble for something here and had a time out to think. Dad must have gone into another room and captured this through the doorway. 

The shot below is from one of the times we rented a house in Puako on the Big Island.
I fell deeply in love with this dog and it followed me everywhere for the month we stayed. I recall crying like a baby when we had to leave. 

I think we called him Hero.

Hero even showed up in a portrait my father did of all the women that had gone on the trip. This included mom, sis, me & Hero, my mom's friend, and my cousin.

See? It is my dad's fault that I love photography so much. 

Probably my dad's fault that I'd like to go back to the Big Island again. So many happy and wonderful memories were created over the years there.

So this past Father's Day had me thinking about Dad and all the cool stuff he enabled us to do with his crazy ideas.

The first time we went to Hawaii, Dad had asked to rent a friend's house he'd seen a photo of.

The friend said sure.

Dad wanted to rent the house for a family vacation. Dad thought it was in Florida.

It wasn't. 

But somehow my parents actually made it happen. And we went each summer from 1965-1974.

It was all Dad's Fault.

True Friends are Forever

Grade School:

6th grade was the time I changed course.

I got picked on a lot as a kid and I was small.  My mom said I was a tough little shit. She told me to fight back and don't let the others win. Of course, I surmised that it was also wise to become one of the bullies. Better to dish it out than take it. 

I even for a while hung out with a gal named Nancy who was Big and Tall. She could whup any boy on the playground with her hands tied behind her back. She and I got into a lot of trouble in 4th and 5th grade. Enough so, that we were separated to different classrooms. I was labeled as a trouble maker and a Little Bully. I just was one of those little kids that fought back and fought dirty.

Then some new kids came to school. They were nonidentical twins came from somewhere else. 

They became instant targets by the other kids. I can't say why things suddenly changed, but I liked the twins. They sure didn't look like twins or even act like twins. But they were smart.

On the playground they were harassed and even Big Nancy started to physically bully them.
I saw that they were defenseless and perhaps I saw a little of me in them. I became infuriated, well as much as an 11 year old can become infuriated.  Somehow I sort of became their friend...and play ground protector.
It wasn't pity, I was angry that other kids could be so mean. It would have been easier to stay in the bully crowd.
Pushing back was a much tougher decision. I am not sure why or how I did it... 

But push back I did. Enough so no one touched them. I ended up having a stand down/up with the main bully girl. I looked up at her and told her in no uncertain terms that I'd fight tooth and nail if she didn't stop 'being mean' [I don't think harassing was in my vocabulary, nor was bullying a label yet].

Let's fast forward about 55 years. Thanks to Facebook, I got a message from one of the twins. She and her family were coming to LaCrosse, could we meet up and have supper together? Of course.

Her boys were just going to college. I started early raising kids, she started later.

She'd grown up to be one smart and graceful woman. Her job title and job were quite impressive. But she never tossed that in my face. She was a successful business woman and I ...well, I'd quit the business world to be a backwoods farm woman. It was as though time had never passed and we were still 6th grade buddies.

Sunday evening I posted some Art on FB, I think there was a comment about feeling in the dumps so I'd decided to do some abstract art as a distraction.

Yesterday my FB messenger came alive with messages from my grade school friend.

"Are you ok?"

Yes I am ok. Just felt dumpy the other day.

"Are you sure?"

...well, I wasn't able to answer because I had just let the dog out and walked out to do the chores.

My phone kept pinging and dinging while I was outside.

I walked in to hear it ping again and as I reached for it, I saw it was my grade school friend calling.

"Hey!" she said, "Are you okay? I didn't think I could just keep messaging you and decided to call you instead."

I let her know that I really was okay. The Isolation, the pressure from everything 'out there' going on, caring for Rich, and trying to be Normal was getting to me. Plus there was the crap weather and The Horrid Brown Season of Dreary-ness. I explained to her that I was fine. Just Stuff.

You know, that ordinary Stuff that goes on while taking care of a loved one who has memory/brain issues along with other things. 

She then informed me that she was going to make a Care Package and drive out with her husband and drop it off. 
I convinced her not to make the 3 hour drive. She had said they'd mask up and stay distanced. I suggested a visit in the warm weather instead of cold.

She conceded. The Care Package of goodies will come by mail. And she has decided that we need conversation more often. She lives just outside of Milwaukee and understands the atmosphere of Covid.

The point is.
Well you should get the point.

We had become best of friends so young.
And we still were.

This is to my hero Lin, who always seems to know when she has to have my back.

Vanessa

From pre 1960 to 1964 we lived just outside Chicago in a town called Evanston. We rented the lower floor of a huge house. 

I started school at Oakton Elementary School and recall walking to school. It wasn't far I guess from where we rented lived. 

Apparently I liked Kindergarten. I know I went to school there until 3rd grade when we moved to Northbrook.

It was in that Evanston house that I met Vanessa. She was hired by the upstairs landlord to be a housekeeper I think. I'm not exactly sure. All I know, is that she was there weekly in our house. 

She was black and I went to school with black kids. Though, at the time, none of that really mattered much to a kid my age.

Vanessa was like having a cool Auntie around the house. She always took time with us. She would be there and then not there. 

My school was black and white also, but I'm not even sure that I noticed. 

My young life was all about school, staying out of trouble with mom, and playing.

The crabby man next door liked to yell at us if we played to close to his house or if we stepped on his lawn.

There was the lonely lady right across the street. We would go visit her and have juice and treats. Once a huge storm toppled a tree in her back yard and she let us come over and climb all over it until the tree trimmers came to clean it up.

She had neat juice glasses with bunnies on it. 

I know my life at the time was busy and confusing. I had to have eye surgery. I was constantly causing a ruckus at school. I was a little rebel of sorts.

At one point in time my mom disappeared for a while. We were told she was sick and in the hospital. 

All I know is that Vanessa stepped in and took care of us.

I think she came during the day and got us off to school. She prepared breakfasts for us and was there to feed us supper. I don't really recall much about it. Just that she was there and full of love while the other adults were busy.

I do recall her making Fried Bologna Sandwiches for lunch one day. It was the most divine sandwich ever! It smoked up the house.

Her oatmeal sucked. But then we had to instruct her how mom would make it. We found it completely odd that Vanessa didn't know how to make oatmeal. I recall we told her she had to put some salt in the water. We ended up with some vile tasting oatmeal. It didn't matter. We laughed about it and off to school we went with lunches packed by Vanessa.

Vanessa was free with hugs and had an endless patience for 3 kids. 

One day my parents announced that we were moving. The new place we were renting was out in the country. Mom and Dad had taken us to several places they'd looked at. I was hoping they had picked a place where we could have a pony.

It was in a small town called Northbrook. Indeed the street we would live on had a farm house across the street and fields behind it.

Vanessa came to help us clean and move our items.

Vanessa worked all day scrubbing and cleaning as we moved in. I was so happy to have her around. I would take any opportunity possible to take her hand and receive a loving embrace. She had gazillions of warm hugs.

Done.

We had moved in.

At the end of the day we had to take Vanessa back home. We piled into our car and took a long drive to somewhere deep in Chicago. We pulled up in front of a rather dull looking bunch of buildings and Vanessa gathered her things. 

I'd been sitting in the back seat with her and played with her shiny pin that she always wore. 

As my parents talked with Vanessa, I realized that she wouldn't be seeing us any more. 

This was the end. I was horrified and threw a fit. I cried and clung to her. Vanessa consoled me. Why couldn't she still be in our lives?

Why couldn't she just live with us?

Vanessa shocked me then. She quietly explained that she did have a family and children of her own that lived in the housing complex we were at.  

I was stunned. How could she have a family. We were her family. 

Vanessa untangled herself from me and pulled her shiny pin off from her jacket.

"Here, to remember me by." 

Tears blurred my eyes as I watched her walk away and out of my life.

I clutched the pin.

I implored my parents to let Vanessa and her family to come live with us.

It wasn't possible they said.

And Vanessa couldn't take the bus to our house anymore because we had moved so far away.

I was crushed.

I asked my parents if I could go live with Vanessa.

A resounding ... No.

I have never forgotten Vanessa. I may have forgotten the names of children I played with, I may have forgotten so many things.

But I have never forgotten Vanessa.

And when I see a pin like the one above, I can't help but to think about that night when Vanessa pulled the pin off her jacket and handed it to me in the back seat of my parents' car.

As I child I never understood why Vanessa had to live with her family in public housing and we could live in a nice house nearly out in the country. Oh for the innocence of being a young child.

Vanessa made such an impression on my life that I don't think I could ever forget her.

Stay At Home is not new to me

When we were kids, mom packed us up in the car a few days after school let out and we made a long drive 'Up North' to spend the summer in a small cottage on the same property as my Grandparents, Fred and Pearl.

From our cottage you could not see any other house other than Grandma and Grandpa's place. My Uncle and wife...and kids for a time lived on Grandpa's old place. We could walk there to play with cousins.

At first, my Grandparents had a party line for their phone. It was a few years later that you could actually dial direct. I recall sitting in the their kitchen and Grandpa getting on the party line to catch up on the gossip going around.

It was the Facebook of the early 60's!

Grandma cooked on a woodstove. We had an electric stove in our cottage.
Grandpa had a tiny TV that was black and white...I think. At first I thought summer programming only consisted of baseball games.

I can recall my sister and I playing crazy eights and keeping a score for the whole summer. We used the back of old envelopes as to never waste a piece of paper.

A game we played

...higher

and 

higher.

I'm the one leaping over the stick.

We created games to play and rarely told anyone 'there is nothing to do!' No TV, no real radio, no electronics. Just a lot of imagination and self entertaining.

So now we are are in what some people are calling a 'lockdown'. Well, it is a stay at home order. Or as our Governor says #SaferatHome. He softened the words.

We can go to local state and county parks, walk our dogs or other pets. Playgrounds are closed.
It hasn't affected me that much. Last week I was stressed out as I'd gotten into a routine going to CrossFit each day.

This week? My mind has turned to tasks at hand. Fencing, clearing burdock plants, worming the equine, figuring out how to trim feet on my own. Clearing the garden of weeds, fixing a flat tire on the lawn mower....

And I am doing it. I have buckled down and redone the front pasture just as I thought it should be done. And it works better than ever before...but just don't tell Rich!
I actually sat down and drew it all out on paper first. I spent a whole afternoon working on it. When done, I kept the drawings and stuck them in my journal. My drawings suck, but they are reminders of how I am learning to help myself get through a problem by working it out visually on paper instead.

We had a funny conversation the other morning.

Him: Can you shoot squirrel?
Me: Of course I can.
Him: Times get tough, you'll need to get us squirrel.
Me: Okay but I'm not sure how to clean it.
Him: I'll talk you through it.
...He winks.

I have eaten squirrel. I've even had mystery meat in a burger that Grandma cooked on a 'Smokey Joe' that my mom had brought for grilling while we were there for the summer.

I'm settled into a good routine now and don't miss the outside world that much ... like I did last week.
I have jobs to do.


And oh...so much more. The shed is waiting its next organizing effort too.

I did find skunk cabbage today on our walk.

Once upon a Time

My trip "North" was all about going to a wedding for one of my cousin's sons. Well the second reason I was compelled to go was to meet up with my cousins that I had not seen in 42 years. That is right, 42 years we'd been apart.

It had been ages since I'd been back to this part of the country.  I'd made a quick trip in 2000 when my Grandmother had passed away.
Before that?

Well it gets complicated a bit and I am not going to go into all of that.

But the last time I'd set foot on the place photographed above was 1980.  I'd taken my first born son to see his great grandmother who was living with my Aunt.

This was my Aunt and Uncle's place. This was a gathering place for the cousins. We usually only saw my cousins in the summer and we had to go back to the Chicago suburbs for the school year.
To me leaving this area at the end of each summer always brought me heartache.

I would sit in the back seat as a child and think of all the reasons I should be allowed to just stay with all my cousins. I didn't like the 'city'. I always longed for the end of the school year and the long trip north each summer.

Sunday morning I left my cousin Sharon's place. We'd had such a great time visit.  The boys, Aaron and John had asked if I'd gone past their mom's place.  I hadn't and wasn't sure I would.
But just north of Luck, I turned down the road I thought I recognized.

I recognized the train bridge that we used to go under. As a kid I can recall my Grandfather sitting in the the front seat and hollering out "Duck!" as we passed underneath.
His ball cap would flip off and land in the back seat. He'd exclaim, "I didn't duck in time!"
It would never fail and we would always laugh.

When I got close to the Larson place. I slowed down. The roads were no longer gravel like they used to be. I pulled over and tried to peer up the driveway.
The large hill behind the house was now grown up in magnificent pine trees.

The urge to pull in and wander around was very strong. However I knew that the boys had a tenant and I couldn't see myself just pulling in on a Sunday morning and saying..."Hey I used to play here as a kid."

Memories however did flood over me in huge waves. It was like seeing a movie reel in my mind. Here is where I learned to shoot .BB guns, .22's, slingshots, we climbed trees, rode horses, fell off from the pony called Thunder, did garden work,...and spent countless hours doing kid stuff. I wanted to see if the 'Tarzan Rope' was still there.
In my mind I could hear the laughter and snippets of words just beyond my reach. I could hear our mothers calling to us. I could remember the guinea hens and the chickens, the swamp muck, frogs, snakes, and our hands getting sticky from climbing pine trees with sap.
There were nights were we would try and watch TV with our Uncle and we watched static.

As cousins we plotted out our lives and dreams.
And each summer I'd loath returning to the suburbs and school.

This was one of the places that shaped my love for the outdoors and adventure. My other Aunt and Uncle had a farm which played another part in my love of the outdoors.

But both my Uncle Lyle and now Aunt Myrtle were gone. But the memories of them and our childhood still lingered now even stronger than it had in a very long time.

I felt such strong raw emotion as I peered at the pond and the barn off in the distance.

I longed to relive just for a few moments those days long ago ... and Once Upon a Time.

Romantic Memories of being a kid

Or should I say that the memories of being a kid are not romantic but perhaps bittersweet?

I picked up a red Huffy bicycle from my mom that she had for sale a while ago.
Sunday night promised to be beautiful so after supper I took out the Huffy.

The first bike I rode on was my brother's red Huffy boy's bike.  We rode that bike it seemed like forever.  To this day I recall choosing to ride the red bike over the girl's bike mom got us.

I hopped on and tried to ride up the hill on the skid steer path back to see my husband who was working on a brush pile.  I couldn't make the hill.  However I did ride from the crest down into the pasture where he was and proceeded to exclaim how much fun I was having.
And nearly crashed.  The brakes barely worked.

Husband laughed and laughed and so did I.  I started out by saying, "When I was a kid...!"  Well that caused more laughter as I am not a kid anymore.  Not in body.

The bike needed air in the tires and the chain needed oiling.  Soon I was on my way cruising up and down the flat part of the driveway hitting bumps and negotiating some rough stuff.  
I had the mule/horse/donkey herds' attention.  Some snorted, the horses ran willy nilly, and Sally the donkey stood solid and watched my fiasco.  Soon the red sisters, Sunshine and Sundance joined her.

I rode up to Siera and Fred's paddock.  They bolted and Fred came back.  Siera perked her ears and gave me the stare as if I was a three headed monster.  She watched and didn't move a muscle.  I sat for a while alongside the fence and talked to her.  She just watched me.  Perhaps she thought I'd grown some strange looking legs.

I guess I found something she could use some work with. A bicycle.

I walked the old bike up the steep driveway and hopped on by the mailboxes.  I pedaled and rode the gravel road like the wind.  Well perhaps in my mind!  

I did have a slight downhill to assist me.  I rode along the relatively flat ridge road and then stopped to enjoy the sunset.

My week ahead was going to be filled with many work hours and the construction on our Little House Remodel was supposed to start on Monday.

I took a few moments to enjoy the skies and then slowly pedaled towards home wondering why it was so much easier when I was just 12.

Perhaps I need to get the old Red Huffy out more often, I'd forgotten the thrill of the speed.

Grandma's Hands

One of the things I recall from childhood is my Grandmother's hands.  

She gardened with gusto, she almost never wore shoes in the garden or around the place either.  She had a razor sharp hoe, but when it got to the nitty gritty, she got into the dirt and pulled weeds with her hands.

She never wore gloves.  I'm not sure there were gardening gloves back then for women.  You just went out into the garden and got your hands dirty.

I can recall going over to her house to get her.  Mom was going to get in the car and we were all going to go to town.

Grandma was in her house with a scrub brush soaping her fingertips and scrubbing away at the dirt that had embedded itself into her fingers.

I always thought it was neat how the dirt made the lines in her hands stand out.  

I learned to understand that she didn't.  She didn't like the dirt that was embedded and tried to get it out before she went anywhere public.  Especially to town.

She explained once that the women in town didn't have dirt in their hands like hers.

I didn't understand it when I was young, but I think the town ladies looked down on the ones who lived in the countryside and worked 'in the dirt'.  I saw it as cool and a sign that my Grandma Pearl was tough as nails.

She wasn't a soft lady who drank tea and always wore dresses.

I think her hands embarrassed her when she was around the church ladies or town people.  It never bothered me, I liked her rough hands.  They were nice to hold as a child.

I looked down at my hands after pulling weeds in the perennial garden this year.  The gloves were still in my back pocket.  I always intend to wear gloves when weeding and pulling, but they always come off.

My hands become embedded with dirt and sometimes the hardest scrubbing won't take the dirt out.  I find myself then thinking about those hands of Grandma's and I smile a bit.

"A little dirt never hurt anybody," she was fond of saying.

I think she was right.

I do love getting my hands into the soil.  It just doesn't feel right with gloves on.  You can't feel the roots of the plant you are pulling out.