Dragging

You know the inspirational poem "Footprints in the Sand"? Written by, well, we don't really know who it was written by because at least three possible authors would like to claim the a share of the proceeds for all the coffee mugs and framed prints and other tchotchkes based on this poem I had thought was written by the prolific "Anonymous."

If you have not read this poem (and if you haven't, congratulations on getting out of the sensory deprivation chamber because isolation is the only way you could have avoided it) the poem recounts the author's dream of walking along the beach with God, and seeing two sets of footprints where God had accompanied the dreamer through life. But at a certain point the second set of footprints disappears and the dreamer realizes this occurs during low periods.

"Where were you, God?" the walker cries out in the dream. "I needed you!" God replies, "My beloved child, that's when I was carrying you."

I have heard an appendix to this story, and I was reminded of that version this week as I saw several of my loved ones dealing with issues in their lives. The author is still looking for an explanation:

"And God, there is a part of my life where all I see are my footprints and two long furrows in the sand. What's up with that?"

"My beloved child, those are still my footprints. That's where I was dragging you."

Grace and peace to you, my best beloveds, as you are being dragged.

The Iowa Way to Treat You

My absolute favorite musical of all time is The Music Man. I had an LP of the soundtrack when I was a kid, and I played it over and over and over until I knew all of the songs by heart. The Boys thought it was oh, so special when every time we crossed over the state line into Iowa I had to sing "Iowa Stubborn":

Ooooooh, there's nothin' halfway

About the Iowa way to treat you!

I didn't actually burst into song when I sat down to this meal during our Iowa weekend but those lyrics were going through my mind. I grew up on a farm but I've become a city girl who assumes the ingredients for her meals will be found shrink-wrapped in Dillons--but every single ingredient here came off the farm where we were consuming it. 

The smoked chicken had just days earlier been scratching around in the yard. The sliced tomatoes and the cabbage for the slaw came out of the garden. Heck, even the ice cubes were made from rural water, although the tea may have come from the local Dillons equivalent. Husband and I oooooh-ed and aaaah-ed over the deliciosity of the meal, and took seconds (and thirds) of the healthy goodness. It was aaaaah-mazing.

But our lovely relatives were not finished treating us. When we got in the car to come back to Small Town, the back seat was filled with this:

and this:

and this:

oh, and don't forget the chicken:

Nope, nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you. 

You really ought to give Iowa a try.

Is This Heaven?

When I was growing up, my mother always made sure that Labor Day was no fun at all.

It was a day off, and her five children insisted that it was a holiday. Not so, she said. "It is Labor Day, so we labor," she told us firmly. We cleaned the garage, or washed windows, or scrubbed the basement or whatever she could imagine that would keep us busy and tired enough that we didn't squabble with our siblings.

My mother was very wise.

For this Labor Day, though, Husband and I wanted to take advantage of our status as Faux Senior Citizens and visit my favorite Iowa in-laws. S&K (Husband's brother and his wife) have retired to a beautiful house that's near their oldest daughter's family. Don't try to straighten out that confusing syntax, just be aware that their beautiful house is in the country and we had not visited for way too many years.

As late as Friday at noon, though, my crushing deadlines were still making me crazy. I wasn't sure I wanted to get on the road, or if I just wanted to crawl into bed and try to fight off the virus that was making me sick as well as tired. But I have traveled enough in the past few months that my carry-on bag practically walks out the door by itself so I followed it to Pearl and off we went.

Do you see what I would have missed if I had followed my first instinct?

S&K's house sits at an angle, and the room where they spend most of their time is essentially one large window looking out on the northwest half of the farm. I sat in a white rocking chair in that room for two days, rocking idly and looking out those windows. This part of the world has had unusually abundant rain this summer, and what I saw could have been ordered up by a movie producer wanting to wanting to portray an unrealistically perfect farm vista. I watched the horses and chickens on the other side of the glass, chatting idly with Husband and my in-laws as we watched storm clouds build up in the west.

Husband checked the progress of the storm on his computer, and S. went to shelter the horses before the downpour began. You can barely see him in today's picture, a tiny white dot leading the pony named Peanut Butter into the barn.

Then we watched the rain and played Spades as the lightning flashed outside.

Is this heaven?

No, it's Iowa.

Friday Orts and a Blurb

This week's FO&B photo was chosen to illustrate that it wasn't always Boy#1 who was the onion in the petunia patch of our group pictures. This shot was taken when the four were 4- to 10-year-olds, and six-year-old Boy#3 was cute but acting goofy. Or, to put that a different way, he hasn't changed a bit.

*****
Husband and I are leaving today to take a second car to Boy#1 and Lovely Girl, followed by a Labor Day trip to see relatives in another state.

It marks the return to an almost-forgotten status for the House on the Corner, that of being a two-car family. We have always been folks who drove cars until they fall apart like the One Hoss Shay. But since the owner of the One Hoss Shay can't count on that shay to not fall apart at the least opportune moment, since the early days of our marriage we've kept at least one extra car around. (To those who have spare tires instead of spare cars, we say, "Whazzup, slackers?")

At one giddy point in our family's history when all four Boys were drivers and Husband's mother had given up driving but still needed the accessibility of a mini-van, we had seven cars in our family of six persons. It was a parking nightmare and a carbon footprint embarrassment. As the Boys have moved out and taken their cars with them, though, the number of combustion engines clustered at the curbs has diminished until as of Friday, we will have only Pearl and the pick-up.

The street sweeper is going to be delighted to not have to drive around our parked cars on the curb, but when we need to take one of the flivvers in for repair, I'm going to ask him for a ride to the grocery store.

*****

I love this place

Okay, I know all of you QueenBee hive occupants know about these cool things a long time before I do, but if you live in Kansas, may I direct you to a resource that is fabulous? And will save you a ton of money? And will make your wobbly neck skin tighter? Well, maybe it doesn't do that last one, but so far it's doing everything else I ask of it.

The next time you are tempted to click on the fast-purchase button on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, click over to the Kansas State Library instead. Did you know you can download e-books OR audible books, in the privacy of your own home without having to put on your shoes? And that they are FREE?

During these past few weeks of long drives I have been happily whiling away the miles listening to best sellers on my iPad instead of  frantically trying to find NPR while I'm in radio station purgatory and silently weeping when I fail.

Of course, if you do not live in Kansas this resource is not available to you, and I'm sorry. Sorry that you can't access the library but mostly sorry that you don't live in Kansas. What is WRONG with you?

Ad astra per aspera, baby.

What Day Is It?

I mentioned a few weeks ago that students are back and classes have started at Small College. Yay! What I didn't mention is that as a result my work group is being CRUSHED by deadlines right now. Crushed, I say.

And in my currently flattened state, I neglected to even mention shark week as it went whizzing past. This is a true shame because I had the perfect illustration for whatever I would have written, had it actually been written.

This hat, which I knitted with my own knobbly-knuckled hands, is perhaps one of the best craft projects I have ever done. It was created in honor of our webmaster, who had won a Sharkie award, and who wore the hat through the entire party celebrating his achievement.

Not only was it amazingly easy and quick to knit, the shark hat was made with scrap yarn which meant it was disposable. I did hear that the recipient's four-year-old son thought it was pretty cool, though, so it had a second life as a child's hat.

I bring up this hat because I no longer can keep up with what day we are celebrating in the world. Remember when the only special days were Mother's Day, Father's Day, and a handful of patriotic bank closings? I do, but of course I'm 150 years old.

Now there is an entire industry based around today being National Dog Day (which was yesterday, and I salute you, Our Late Dog Pepper), National Chili Sauce Day, National Just Because Day, and whatever.

Today is National Cherry Turnover Day.

Yes. It is.

I see you do not believe me, so here is proof. Oddly, the creators of that calendar could not find evidence of whom might have been the originator of National Cherry Turnover Day. I'm going to take a wild swing and say maybe McDonald's, with its delicious but mouth-searing cherry pies?

Mmmmm....excuse me, please. I need to go knit a cherry turnover.

An Open Letter to the Grocery Sacker

Dear Grocery Sacker,

I love you.

Oh, I know, this is undoubtedly an inappropriate conversation between a woman such as myself, whose sell-by date has pretty much come and gone, and a young person such as yourself, who still thinks Axe body spray is just jim-dandy. But do you know how many groceries I have bought over the course of feeding up four sons from infancy to adulthoodcy?

Thousands of dollars worth. Tens of thousands. Maybe even hundreds of thousands.

Do you know how many sacks of these groceries had to be carried from the store to the car, and from the car to the house?

Every dadgummed one of them.

"But MomQueenBee," you are saying, with just a hint of adolescent arrogance, "didn't you claim you were having kids solely so that you would never have to carry grocery sacks again?"

Yes, young man, I did say that. I have since classified that with the other statements I made before I had kids that now make me laugh heartily. Statements such as "Oh, once you have all the stuff for the first kid none of the rest of them cost anything at all." And "It's just a little baby--it doesn't have a big enough stomach to barf very much."

You see, if I ever wanted a few minutes to myself while the Boys were growing up, all I had to do is go to the grocery store. Those seven gallons of milk that would last us exactly one week? The seven boxes of cereal that would get us through the same week? The fruits and vegetables, the by-the-bulk chicken quarters and the 20-pound sacks of potatoes? They all had to be carried in, and the carrying moment always hit at exactly the same time as the paper route or the piano lesson or the soccer practice or something that kept all those young muscles from helping an old lady out. The Boys were pretty much never around to tote the fuel that would keep them running for another week.

But you? You have been there for me. You and the grocery sackers who came before you in the past two decades were always beside me making polite chit-chat on the way to the car. (A word of advice: Please do not comment on how many Brussels sprouts I buy. I like Brussels sprouts, okay? And they're good for me, okay? Enough with the Brussels sprouts amazement.)

You loaded up the back of the Surburban or the Buick or whatever enormous vehicle I was driving at the time, and you laughed when I asked if you didn't want to come and unload them on the other end, and I asked every single time. I wasn't kidding, but we'll let that slide.

Now that I'm only buying for Husband and me, I still carry a fond place in my heart for grocery sackers. As you toss those three boxes of cereal in the car (all bran derivatives, enough to last six weeks) please know that your life is much easier than that of your predecessors. I won't even ask you if you would mind unloading these at the house.

But I still love you.

All my best,
MomQueenBee

So Much Closer

Oh, my gosh! Look who's back in town!

Well, not exactly back in town, but back in the Midwest, which is pretty much the same as in town when the alternative has been located planes, trains, and automobiles away. We are now only automobiles away from Boy#1 and Lovely Girl!

Ahem. I apologize for the overuse of exclamation points (and also for the lousy photography, but the restaurant was dimly lit) but our first-born and our first girl-other-than-me in the family are now living in an adjacent state. Over the weekend Husband and I took them their car, which had been stored at our house during their too-complicated-to-park days in our nation's capital, so that they could quit making their Wal-Mart runs in a 12-foot Penske truck.

We arrived Friday night when they'd been in their new hometown for only a day. This was enough time that they had moved everything from the truck into their new apartment, but clearly there was still work to be done. By the time we started back for Small Town 36 hours later, it was as if magical elves and bluebirds had transformed the place. The packing boxes were gone, art was on the walls, and except for one cable television wire that still needed to be tacked down, you wouldn't know they hadn't lived there for years.

I cannot take credit for a single bit of this transformation. That's because I'm still traumatized by my own reaction to my mother-in-law's lovely gesture of trying to clean the drip pans of my stove. That happened 30 years ago, and the way I carried on then pretty much proved that I was a total jerk.

Boy#1 and Lovely Girl, if you were wondering why I sat on the couch doing a crossword puzzle while you were putting away linens and trying to find the screws for the headboard, it's because I am a total jerk but also because I'm aware that it's easier to put away your own linens and find the screws for the headboard in the boxes you packed yourself, rather than trying to involve someone else in the process. Next time I'll bake cookies or something. (I won't clean drip pans unless you ask me to do so.)

And welcome back to next door to God's country! I may not have done any work, but my exclamation points are the barometer of my excitement!