Linda and her proud papa

I know I have used this picture before, but not too many of the old film photographs have made it to digital. This was taken in Yellowstone Park, on the way home from a long trip east for my brothers wedding.

happy birthday Linda

May 14, a long time ago, our 4th daughter was born.

This was before fathers were allowed any where near the delivery room, but the doctor was a pretty good friend as was the nurse, so the rules were bent.

At the proper time, they signaled and I stood in the door and took pictures of the delivery. I was a seasoned photographer, and it was not a difficult assignment. My Leicas were certainly up to the low level light, but I am not a medical photographer. I get quimish easily.

And so Linda entered our life. She has been a good daughter. She is extremely talented, works hard and is a good mother to Emily. I have loved her from the time I knew she was on the way. This was long before we had the ability to know the gender of a baby until they was born. My guess was that doctors enjoyed the: “It’s a girl” call.

Emily looks enough like her mother for us to confuse them in pictures. When Linda was born Deanna was 4, Lora 5 and Arline was 9. She was a source of constant amazement to them.

I had no idea we’d have a whole batch of girl babies when Miriam and I started this adventure. My desire, I remember, was that they be healthy and I was richly rewarded.

Linda, I know you didn’t have any choice of who your parents were or when you entered this world, but I love you for enriching our lives all these years.

We’ll see you next weekend.

mom, my sister and I

1943 two years after dad was killed. Here mom is 27.

mothers day

Today is Mothers Day.

I will wish Miriam a special day, she is the resident mother here at my house. I’ll do something special for her (cash is short, so it won’t involve much money), and our daughters will all call and wish her a happy day.

But, I will be thinking of my mother.

Mom was a widow at 24. She was short, but she was tough. Before Dad was killed mom delivered 4 babies and buried two. She was a survivor. My memories of mom are universally good .

Mom was a pillar of strength. She was consistent in her judgment and good advice. She loved Miriam and my daughters (we spent her last decade living a couple of blocks away). When Lora (daughter 2) was just getting the hang of reading, mom gave her a kids picture dictionary. She wrote in it: To Lora, the girl who loves words." Mom noticed.

She dreamed of going to college. After they were married she went to college one semester and loved it, but dad wanted to move on to something else and she dropped out. She talked about her dream of going back to college after she retired. She was a lifelong learner and a pragmatist, but she never got back to college.

She studied accountant, took a correspondence course to increase her knowledge and usefulness. she had the accountant’s interest in details. My artist brain and her accountant brain did not always mesh, but we always got on well.

In his NYTimes column this morning, Thomas Friedman talks about his mom and what she went through, ending with a story of the legendary Bear Bryant, who changed a planned television commercial for the telephone company from: Call your mother; to Call your mother, I wish I could call mine.

Friedman wishes he could call his mom, who died this last year, and I really understand.

I talk to Emily and Jessica about how much my mother would have loved them, and how much they would have loved her. Mom was tough as she needed to be, but she was soft and cuddly too. She would have been a wonderful great grandmother.

Mom made it through one daughter's wedding and a high school graduation or two, was cut way short by cancer. She retired as an accountant for the state health department, and about a year later she was gone. She was just 65.

Each day I think of mom and what a classy woman she was. Every day I wish I could talk to her about this or that. And frequently I imagine a conversation where mom would ask me about that black thing I carry in my hand.

“It’s my telephone mom, I can get calls almost everywhere I go.”

Amazing, she would say in pre-computer wonderment.

Today I will remember mom and I will hug my Jess and Em’s grandmother.

I love you Miriam, I am so glad you are the mother of my daughters and a wonderful grandmother to my grandkids.

But, I really really wish I could call my mom.

my black books

the return of paper

I am moving back to paper.

Since I bought my first computer 20 years ago, I have been sort of a nerd, junior grade. I was pretty sharp with DOS!

I’ve owned PDAs and a pile of computers, some state of the art, some antique. Each time my PDA bit the dust, information got lost. My old computers have died from time to time and each time something was lost. I have deleted files that I should have kept too.

My current MacBook is pretty well state of the art, this year, but long after it becomes quite ancient, I think I’ll be plodding along with her. 

Still I almost always wrote my journals on paper. For one thing, when I did go through a stage of doing journals on the computer, I think I almost forgot how to write. I took classes in calligraphy in art school, and it is so easy to forget. My writing is better now.

So back to paper, which I think I prefer anyway.

I’ve worked with every size and style of Day-Timer made, and have a box full of very nice binders. I invented my own pages and systems, but now that I am retired most of that is not important any more. Time management is not so important and since I have no clients at all, it is easy to remember.

Then I met Moleskine. Found them at a college book store. Daughter 1 had given me a gift certificate to the book store for a birthday, I lost it for a couple of years, then found it agin. The manager of the book store is an old friend and of course she would honor the certificate.

It is not a large college and not a large book store, but on the end of one aisle I found these little black books, the size that might be carried easily, and I was in love.

I have filled 3 of the pocket sized books in the last year and a half. They seem to hold around 20,000 words on those 192 pages. I am hardly ever without mine. I take it to church and make notes. I take it to meetings to help me remember. I make notes about my garden and my appointments, my doctor visits and a reminder of what questions to ask next time. It is a catch all of my activities.

It is not the easiest size to do long essays, but I have a larger book for that purpose, and it seems to work. No system is perfect, including this one, but it has become a part of my life.

I was in a church committee meeting a while back and someone asked me if I had my “little black book” with me. Of course I did, it’s grafted to my hip.

Now I have rediscovered hand made books, and a whole new art/craft thing has begun.

Thank you Arline.

change

Change is always with us, I fear.

In one way or another we are all going through periods of change. We graduate from school, change. We begin or quit a job, change. We find love, we loose love, change. Old love is good, but it changes. One of us will leave before the other, most certainly.

We put on a tough face, but some kinds of change are be rough to handle, at the least.

The worst part of change is the realization that there is not a thing we can do about much of it, and it will happen when we expect it least.

The transmission in our car goes out at the exact wrong time. The cook stove gives out, the car needs a brake job. Teeth need fixed, our eyeglasses are years old and don’t work so good any more.

And as I think of change and all of the ways it impacts all of us, I look at my beloved and wonder what changes will happen in our near future. What will she do when she gets tired of doing puzzles, or will just not do any more.

What will she do and how can I help her?

If I knew I could be a profitable prophet.

Miriam's garden

our back yard when Miriam took care of it. she did the flower garden well. the cat is jenny our cat of many years. she died a couple of years ago on our couch. jenny was a classy lady. She was 17

faith and optimism

Gardeners are the most trusting and optimistic people around.

Let me explain.

If you bought any garden stuff last year, you will be getting catalogs starting soon after Halloween. They will come from all over, and some will strangely look alike. That is because there has been a huge consolidation in the garden supply business and one guy owns a bunch of them.

I digress.

So you get these catalogs from companies you don’t know some from states you only have vague knowledge of, and you send them money, or you do the plastic thing on the internet.

Now they have your money and you don’t even know them. The good news is that they are a pretty honest bunch, who really want your business next year.

These seeds you ordered come in cute little packages, and we trust that the seeds inside indeed will produce the vegetable on the label.

At that point, we put those tiny little spendies in the ground. The moment they touch the dirt, they are basically lost. We cover them and water carefully, and most of the time they pop up in due time.

But, think about it. We trust the seed company with our money, we trust them about the seeds, then we trust that once we bury them (at $3 or more a tiny package), that we will indeed get something from them.

Farmers do somewhat the same thing, except they usually look the seed salesman right in the eye. On the other hand, farmers hand over big hunks of borrowed money (usually) for seeds and have the same faith as the rest of us.

Anyone tell you that they don’t know about faith or optimism, tell them about the garden.

tent camping

When I was a kid we used to go camping. We had an old 9 by 9 canvas tent, and we all slept in that rather small space.

When the kids were young it was pretty intense and we didn’t go camping too much, but we did on occasion.

Now that we are just the two of us, we do quite a lot of camping. It is our low cost way to “vacation.”

On one trip, I got an inspiration.

It would be fun, I thought as well as a good challenge, to put together a tent camping system that would fit into our little car, and yet provide comfortable camping. The gear would have to be carefully chosen, not just for size, but for cost, since our budget is always tight.

It also had to be comfortable if the weather turned cool or rainy.

It turned out that we spent more than one dry and cozy night sleeping through a mountain rain storm. And sometimes we sit in the light of our lantern, Miriam reading a book and me typing on my MacBook!

So we have a fairly large tent, a porta potty, comfortable sleeping and seating, enough cooking gear to eat well, and it all had to fit in that little car.

It has worked out very well. A few years ago I built a small teardrop trailer, which is over the top in comfort, but it is a bit more spendy to take on longer trips. So often we take the tent gear and luxuriate over the 30 miles per gallon.

Camping season is here, except that the weather is cool or even cold. Soon, it will be warm to hot and camping will be where we will go often.

our "creek"

This stream runs down the center of our place here in Idaho. Technically it is a drain ditch, catching the run off from the near by fields, but it runs year around, and is quite a nice addition to our landscape.

home again

We’ve been visiting daughters for the last week.

With fuel costs high, we go visit less often and stay longer when we do. That is fine.

Our daughters are good women and we are very proud of them, and their families, but none live in anything close to luxury (at least by American standards). When we visit two daughters we sleep on the hide a bed in the living room. In one house we take up most of the living room.

One daughter’s house is so small there just isn’t any place for us to sleep, so we bring our tiny trailer, or sleep in a neighbor’s spare room.

In the youngest daughters we sleep on the couch or in granddaughter’s bedroom, while she sleeps on the couch.

None of this is said as a complaint, it is just the way it is. Being with our daughters, sons-in-law and grand children far outweighs any inconvenience.

Still, when the time for visiting is over, it is good to go home, you know the place where you go when you can’t go anywhere else! The house was cold, but the gold fish was alive, and it was really good to be home again.

On the way home we drove through a snow storm, just for fun.

It will be a two week stay at home this time. Not very long.

In two weeks we drive 400 miles to spend the weekend “hanging” with granddaughter Emily, while her mom goes to visit her sister (another of our daughters) for her birthday weekend. In the middle of the week we will go camping with a very dear friend for a few days and then back to SE Washington/NE Oregon for the high school graduation of our 3rd grandson, Alan.

But that is then. Today it is cool, though warmer than the last few days, and the sun is shining. It should be a good day for a breakfast of hot cereal (maybe whole wheat pancakes instead -- hmm) and a good workout in the “back 40.”

Today is may day. We have largely forgotten what that was once all about. Hmm.

It was good to sit and talk with Bri and Amy, Matt and Jessica, Alan and Andrew and Ben. I hugged them all, they are good kids and we love them very much.

smell

I read one time that the sense of smell was one of the first casualties in the AD jungle.

We were driving back from somewhere a few weeks ago and we came across the very itense smell of a skunk who had probably encountered the farmers dog. I commented on it to Miriam.

She said she could smell noting and I let it go.

This last weekend she made a lemon cake. She likes to make cakes, and since they are out of a box they are easy to make.

When we were eating it more than once she commented that it was amazing that this lemon cake had no lemon flavor. It was too bad they got the labels wrong.

Once again a reminder of where we are going.