Well Trained

My dogs are at my bedside the instant my feet touch the floor in the morning.  The bounce about like they have springs attached to their feet.  They twirl in circles.  Apparently, twirling in circles helps them get what they want.

I grope my way to the bathroom, where the dancing continues.  Up and down and around they go.  Worthy of any trained circus dog.  Any pictures that I have tried to take of this morning dance have been nothing more than brown fuzzy blurs.

I stagger into the kitchen, followed by the Yorkie Dance Team.  Before I get the coffee on, which is the most important part of my day, I grab the jar that holds their treats.  As I unscrew the top, the dancing and whirling escalates.  You would think that a ham bone for each was awaiting them.  But the treats are small.  Smaller than a quarter.

By now, they are standing on their hind legs in anticipation of goodies in their near future.  I give each of them a treat.  Jessie runs as fast as her short little legs will carry her back to my bedroom and hides behind my bed to eat her treat.  And Lily is off and running in the opposite direction to hide behind the coffee table in the living room.  They don't share well.

By the time I get the lid back on the jar and start my morning coffee, both are back in their beds, where they sleep until the middle of the morning.

I, on the other hand, am still struggling to get my eyes open all the way.

They have me very well trained.

Dad and the Monsters

When I was a little girl I was afraid of the dark.
Monsters lived under my bed.
They hid in my closet.
I would lay in my bed, perfectly still, making sure that
my fingers and my toes didn't stray off the edge of the mattress.
If they did, the monster under the bed would grab them.
When the monsters were at their biggest and meanest,
Dad would come into my room.
He would sit in the rocking chair.
And he would quietly sit and rock until I fell asleep.
The monsters never got me.
Dad was there.

Ode to Spring

"Spring has sprung,
The grass has riz,
I wonder where
The flowers is."

Recited by my Dad every spring as far back as I can remember.  Usually performed as though he were a little boy who was standing in the front of an old country school room reciting his lessons, and always with a silly little smile on his face.

Isn't it funny, the little things that you remember......and miss.

It's Official. Spring is Here.

When I got up this morning, I looked out my living room window to see what the weather was doing.  On a branch of the little tree that grows there, sat a robin.  First one I have seen this year.  Spring is here.  I am so ready for it.  I want to see green lawns, green leaves and the first spring flowers.

I wonder if my kids remember going for a ride through the woods one spring on logging roads with Uncle Bruce and Aunt Etta.  That was back when going for a ride on a Sunday afternoon was a popular activity.  Before computers and video games and iPods and cell phones consumed our lives.  Going for a ride meant piling into the car and driving wherever one felt like going, seeing whatever nature had provided for us to look at.  This time, Uncle Bruce wanted to show the kids all of the beautiful May flowers that bloom in the north woods in the spring.  I particularly remember the tiny purple violets among the tall pines, along with many other varieties of flowers.  And the chokecherry trees in full bloom.

I'm not so sure that anyone but me will remember violets, but they might remember the two black bear cubs that wandered out onto the trail ahead of us.  We watched them for a time while they explored the world that was new to them, and then they scampered off into the woods.  The kids were young enough so that they wanted to get out of the car and go pet them, but Uncle Bruce said that their mama, although we never saw her, was close by, and she wouldn't be very happy to have anyone close to her cubs.

I think that sometime soon, after the river that is now busy flooding the walkway along it, goes back inside its banks, Jessie, Lily and I will have to go for a stroll along it and see if we can find some spring flowers.

Some Days Are Better Than Others

There are times when I am totally ashamed of myself.  I had a bad day yesterday.  Arthritis is not fun.  It hurts.  Some days it hurts more than other days.  I found myself irritated because I couldn't do some of the things I wanted to do.  I also found myself in the middle of a pity party.  Shame on me.

My brother understands what this is all about.  Arthritis is our family inheritance.  How he keeps on keeping on, working in a physically demanding job, is beyond me.  I admire his strength and courage.

So in the middle of my mental whining (Whining out loud around here doesn't mean a thing.  The dogs ignore me and the cats could care less!) and feeling sorry for myself, I thought about my brother.  And then I thought about my mother, who was in a wheelchair and in a nursing home at a much younger age than I am now because of this disease.  I was able to get out of bed yesterday morning.  Mother could only get out of bed if someone lifted her.  I was able to take a shower alone, get dressed alone, fix my coffee and my meals without help and my hands still worked well enough to do some sewing.  Mother was unable to do any of these things.  What she would have given to have been able to function without help, I can only guess.

Today, on the other hand, is one of my Better Days.  I have been busy doing some of the household chores that were left undone yesterday.  I have been up and down the stairs in my building a couple of times without much of a problem.  I am back to normal, whatever normal is.  But I am left with a sense of shame at letting yesterday's trials get me down.  I try really hard not to do that.  Most of the time I succeed.  And when I don't, I think of those who are much worse off than I am.

It is sort of like the person who complained he had no shoes right up until he met a man who had no feet.

I think I need to concentrate more on what I do have, and be grateful for it.

Food Obsession

Yes, I have developed an obsession with food.  Not so much the eating of it, although I will fight you to the death if you try to deprive me of my chocolate, but of the preserving of it.  Although I owe nobody any explanations of the way I choose to live, I feel as though I need to address this issue.  Mostly to give my children an understanding of what their mother is about.  Especially since some of them think I have stepped off the edge of reality.

When I was a young girl, my family had a large garden.  Every summer and fall we spent hours and hours in the kitchen canning and freezing the produce from this garden.  Money was tight.  Mother was ill most of her life.  She couldn't work outside of our home to provide extra family income.  Preserving garden produce insured that we would eat over the winter.

Later, when my children were young, I had a huge garden.  I canned and froze as much as possible, for money was very tight then as well.  Some of my children still remember the jars of food;  fruit, jam and jelly, pickles and relishes, meat and vegetables, that filled the basement shelves.  We may have been poor, but there was always enough to eat.

Things have changed.  I now live alone and have nobody to feed but myself.  I am not rich, but neither am I poor.  What I am is a widow living on a fixed income.  Every month that passes, my income is stretched thinner and thinner.  I am fortunate that I don't need a vehicle and the expense that goes along with it.  But other expenses like medical and groceries and rent, keep going up.  My income does not.

So I decided to change my lifestyle a bit to compensate.  I rarely eat out.  Twice a month I go out for breakfast with my oldest son.  We have been doing this for the last few years, and although I enjoy our breakfasts at a restaurant, it is more about the company.  But I get my fix of restaurant food at those times and it is enough.  I bake most of my own bread.  I can bake at least four loaves for the price of one loaf of store-bought bread.  I scoured the internet and found recipes for things like brownie mix, baking mix, cornbread mix, hamburger helper mix and stuffing mix.  These I can make for much, much less than I can buy them, and they taste good.  I buy bulk seasonings and spices and make things like taco mix, spaghetti sauce mix, onion soup mix and chicken coating mix.  All for very much less than the commercial equivalents.  And I have the added advantage of knowing what is in them as opposed to foods with unpronounceable chemicals included.

I don't have a garden as I did in the past.  Living in a city apartment makes that impossible.  Stuff just doesn't grow well in an asphalt parking lot!  So I buy fresh and frozen vegetables at the grocery store when they are on sale.  These can be either canned or dehydrated.  The canned vegetables I can use as a side dish with a meal or in casseroles and other dishes (I love creamed peas on toast.) and the dehydrated vegetables work really well in soups and stews.  If left frozen, they develop freezer burn long before I could use them up.  There is a Farmer's Market here and I hope to be able to buy tomatoes and other fresh produce there over the summer.  So much better than supermarket fare.

When meat is on sale, I buy as much as I can afford, freeze what I will use within a month and pressure can the rest.  I am not really good at meal planning.  It is more like deciding about 3 PM what would taste good for supper.  Yesterday I defrosted a pork chop, baked it in the oven along with potatoes and carrots that I had canned together just for that purpose.  The potatoes and carrots browned nicely in the oven and it was really good tasting.  Another day I opened a jar of chicken, another of peas and carrots, tossed them together with macaroni, dehydrated onion and mayo, and had a chicken macaroni salad for supper, along with a slice of homemade bread.  This is one reason that I can food.  I tend to get busy doing other things and forget about meals until I start to get hungry.  It is nice to be able to open a jar or two and supper is served.

Contrary to popular opinion, I have not, nor do I intend to join a survivalist group.  Not my thing.  Granted, I would prefer living in a country setting and having a garden and all of the things that go along with country living, but at this stage of my life I am realistic enough to know that this isn't going to happen.  I am more into preparedness.  Life has a way of blindsiding us from time to time.  I am pretty sure that people in Japan weren't aware when they went to work in the morning that their lives would drastically change by late afternoon.  Not that I think that we will suffer an earthquake, and a tsunami is unlikely to cover Minnesota any time soon, but things beyond our control can and do happen.  I just believe in being as prepared as I can be.

There are things that the hard-core preparedness people do that I don't.  I have no guns or ammunition stockpiled.  I haven't invested in a solar oven or propane camp stove.  I haven't converted savings into precious metals.  There are many of these things that just aren't practical for me to do or that I would be comfortable with doing.  But the one thing I can do to be prepared for the unexpected is to have food canned and dehydrated.  At present, I have probably 4 to 5 months worth of food put by.  My goal is a years worth.  I realize that at my present weight and girth, chances are I probably won't starve to death any time soon.  But I don't want to be one of those elderly people we hear about who have to choose between paying for the medications they need to keep them alive and buying food to eat.

I also don't want to have to ask for help, although there are times when a little help is greatly appreciated.  Being as self-sufficient as possible is particularly important to me.  It keeps me out of the nursing home.  It makes me feel as though I have some self-worth when I can take care of myself.  And by preserving food for future use, I can insure that I won't have to ask any of my family for help with the groceries, with the possible exception of hauling them up the stairs to my apartment.

I also really like the part where I don't have to rush to the store to stock up on essentials just before a snow storm.  I remember doing that in the past and fighting crowds of people doing the same thing.  I only go to the store now to buy the sale items or to replenish my kitchen pantry when I use the last bottle of ketchup or jar of mayo or need a dozen eggs.  I have everything I need to get through any storm or other unforeseen disaster.

So you all can stop worrying that Mom has gone over the edge or that her mind is going because she preserves food.  There is a method in this madness.  Now, if I begin to have meaningful conversations with Elvis, then you can worry.

2 AM Musings

One should never fall asleep around suppertime and wake up after 9 PM.  It really wrecks going to bed at a decent hour.

And to make it worse, strange thoughts float around in one's head at 2 AM.  Well, to be perfectly honest, strange thoughts aren't really all that unusual for me, but I digress.

I was wondering, at 2 AM, why my parent's generation was so terribly worried about what people would think.  Like the time when my Mother's doctor prescribed a shot of brandy at night to help her sleep.  Mother made Dad get the brandy from the druggist rather than the liquor store, even though he paid twice the price at the drug store for brandy in a prescription bottle, because she was afraid of what people would say if they saw him coming out of the liquor store.

As a kid, I went through a stage where I wore mostly jeans and my Dad's old flannel shirts.  I lived in the country.  I played in the woods.  I grubbed around in the garden.  I did yard work.  I sat up in apple trees and read books.  I liked jeans and old comfy flannel shirts.  But Mother was always after me to change clothes because what would people say if we got company and they saw me dressed like that.

My 4-H softball team practiced on Sunday afternoons.  I loved playing softball.  I was a pretty fair shortstop.  But Mother was worried about what people would say if they knew that I was playing ball on Sunday, which was a day of rest.

I always wondered who "They" were.  Who were these people who were just waiting for my family to do something out of the ordinary so they could say whatever it was that they were going to say.  I probably, in retrospect, shouldn't have posed this question to Mom, for, as I recall, it got me a week of living in my bedroom and a month of Wednesday night Prayer Meeting at the church, no doubt to pray for the state of my rebellious soul.  I think that having a daughter who was, at that time, a bit of a free spirit, must have been a trial for her.

Odd, the things one remembers at 2 AM.