After accidentally spilling birdseed on the deck, I saw many more birds coming to eat. One of my favorites is the Eastern Towhee. To me, he is a fancy bird – colorful and with pretty white markings on the black feathers on his back.
We’ve had song sparrows all along, but with easier access to the seed, more came. I enjoyed watching a mother feed her baby. She would eat about four seeds and turn to pop one into the baby’s mouth. It took a while for me to realize the baby was pecking at seeds himself, while crying for her to feed him. I wanted to tell her to make him do the dishes.
The horse chestnut trees had more blooms this year than I’ve seen before. One tree presented a blossom for my inspection on a low branch near the creek. The ones I used to see in New York were much, much larger and whiter than this. Perhaps there are different kinds, or maybe the altitude makes a difference.
No one was taken to the hospital, although things looked serious with our little street clogged by two emergency vehicles. A sobering thought — all the adults I know in these six houses are over 60.
I was hurrying to get breakfast on the table. We were driving to Tennessee to pick up our repaired van, and grandson David was finding out that he had to work later. John had gone outside because of the emergency and came back with Logan. As I walked food to the table, Logan (7) made a squeaky sound with his sneakers, rubber soles on wood. Think basketball practice in a resonant gym. John asked if I had a granola bar for him to take to school for a snack. I did, but I didn’t want Logan to know where I hid them. I asked the boy to go all the way to David’s room and back while making that noise. That gave me time to get out the snack, and I could track him by the sound. An added bonus was rousing David to come to breakfast. I suspect Logan was tired of having to squeak, because he didn’t do it any more.
I asked if he had eaten, and he said he had. As John ate, Logan’s eyes kept going to my plate with a buttered English muffin. I asked, “Would you like that muffin? Eat that one, and I’ll make another for myself.”
Logan finished half the muffin when John was ready to go, and he took the other half in the car. As you might guess, grandmotherly types love to feed people.
We came back from Tennessee mid-afternoon. We found that our neighbor was home, still waiting for results of tests. For those of you so inclined, please pray for patience and healing. Thank you.
I hope Mother’s Day was pleasant for everyone. I had greetings from daughter Lise in Denmark and talked on the phone with daughter Kate and both grandsons. That leaves the Johns – husband and son – to talk about. I was very thankful they were with me.
Son John $ lifted a heavy object on Friday and felt something shift in his back. The pain came later. Personnel at the walk-in clinic feared a fractured pelvis. The ER doctor ruled out a fracture after looking at the images. He may have a herniated disc or nerve damage. He felt well enough to drive his stick-shift car here for Mother’s Day. Since sitting was painful for him, I chatted with him as he lay on the bed after our meal.
Husband’s problems were more far-ranging. The dealer worked on his car on Thursday. The next time he took it out was Saturday when he headed for the train club in Tennessee. He never made it there. When the power steering failed, he was able to pull in a shopping area. After an expensive tow to the nearest dealer, they found the new belt, just installed, had broken off and done lots of damage. A nearby rental place happened to have a minivan that had just been canceled. That was necessary to bring back the caboose that he is delivering to New York. You can understand why I was very glad to have John home on Sunday.
John was relaying his amusement at the tow-man. As they chatted while driving, Mr. Tennessee asked where John was from. After hearing Brooklyn, he said with surprise, “You don’t have a heavy accent like they do, and you don’t act like you know everything!”
Breaking news is that the caboose was delivered on time on Long Island. The photo shows it sitting in our car before all the exciting events of the weekend.
John offered to take me on a day trip of my choosing between his trips to Tennessee and New York. We both decided the first one I mentioned would be saved for a day with our grandsons. That one involved beautiful views of mountains and a hike to a waterfall. We headed for Beech Mountain and Banner Elk. We found out that Beech Mountain is the town at the highest altitude east of the Rockies. The off-season population is 350. It swells considerably during ski season, and probably in the spring and autumn, too. I took one photograph from Beech Mountain that shows mountains in the distance and a restaurant that is for sale.
Banner Elk sits below Beech Mountain and has a population of just over 1,000. I didn’t take any pictures in the town, but the live webcam (http://www.resortcams.com/webcams/banner-elk/) sits atop the restaurant where we ate lunch.
John picked a mountain road to begin our trip home. As we drove, I asked, “Is this the area where we saw the mailbox that was high off the ground?”
Within five minutes, I saw it. By the time I’d commented on it, we were beyond it. John offered to turn around, but I said I’d find the picture I took before. Four years ago, I wrote the following about son John $’s tour:
As we drove down a small road, I exclaimed about a mailbox and insisted $ turn around so he and his dad could see it, too. There with other normal boxes was one way up high in the air. Someone must have installed it as a prank. The photo doesn’t show it, but the box was painted in red, white, and blue, with US Mail clearly written on the side.
Here is the original photo:
I wonder if that mailbox was installed when we still had air mail.
How long should memories last? Some you’d like to keep forever, like the one time you saw your great-grandmother or the one where your mean sister landed face-first in the snow. Other memories you could live without, because they are painful. I have many unimportant memories for which I want a delete button. I would like the brain space for things I want to remember.
A week ago I had a wellness visit with my doctor, which included a memory test. The PA told me three words I should remember for a few minutes. While holding onto those words for dear life, I had to fill in a circle with the numbers for a clock and draw the hands at a particular time. I don’t remember numbers easily, so I couldn’t tell you what time I depicted. I should not have worried about the words, because days later I could tell you they were mouse, sky, and quarter in that order.
The reason I want a delete button is that as soon as I finished repeating the three words, I could have told her that I remembered pen and table from the previous year. That was 14 months ago. I remembered writing about it, and sure enough, the words were pen, table, and apple. I didn’t need those words! I discarded apple along the way, but I clung to pen and table. Almost daily I press an icon on my phone that cleans up notifications. Zip! Zip! Zip! The junk disappears. Would you stand in line with me to buy a brain vac?
When neighbor Logan (7) came across the street to visit us, he and John played three games of checkers. Logan won the first two. John said his strategic thinking is excellent. I avoid playing against the boy, because it is too embarrassing for me.
The fellows played games on the computer for a little while. Just before Logan had to go home, he was quizzing John on state capitols. He held a magnetic puzzle, named a state, and waited for John to give the answer. John hesitated on one that I knew, so I felt a little victorious. I shouldn’t mention that I missed the next five.
As Logan put on his shoes, John asked him to repeat the Bible verse they had worked on. I motioned to John to quote the verse into my phone so that Shawn would know what they had done. I was proud of Logan for memorizing the verse and of John for dictating it perfectly without being intimidated by the phone.
A red-bellied woodpecker came to the deck repeatedly to hammer away at seeds. Supposedly there is a bit of pink on his belly, but you can see bright red on the back of his head and above his beak. I was amused at the way he moved. Most birds stand tall on their legs, but this one was used to clinging to the side of trees. His feet were far apart, and his tail provided balance where none was needed. I would have named the bird belly-dragger.
What a fabulous few days I had with niece Julie! She grew up 700 miles from me, so we will be making up for lost time until the end of our lives. We had the house to ourselves most of the time, since John was having his own delights running trains in middle Tennessee. When she checked in for work occasionally, I read email and blog posts. In between, we talked non-stop. On Saturday we took the whole day off to roam the mountains. First stop was Looking Glass Falls, which she had never seen. I took a lucky selfie with the falls in the background. I say lucky because the camera looks only one way, not two like most cell phones. You can’t see exactly what you are aiming for. Not bad for a blind shot, right?
This waterfall needs a picture on its own. It has to be one of the most accessible tourist sights in the world. The highway that John and I cross on our morning walk is the one that goes right beside the water. There is parallel parking on the highway. Julie snagged the spot only three spaces from the beginning of the stairs. We enjoyed watching the water and the young, energetic people who went down to the water’s edge. A couple and a bunch of teens RAN up those steps! Julie noticed the man wore a tee shirt with the name of the county where she grew up. As we drove away, that man was boarding a bus with the name of the church she went to as a child. She texted a former neighbor still living in the neighborhood and found the group was having a weekend mountain retreat. The people we saw were not of her generation, but they were a link to her childhood.
We saw small falls from the car. With no reference point for gauging the size, you could imagine this one as a roaring cascade. In actuality, it produced only small gurgles.
Julie paused to snap a picture of the entrance to one of the tunnels on the Blue Ridge Parkway. That style is used for most of the tunnels on the road.
The photos I took of the long-range mountain views were not impressive. The lack of color, gray skies, and smoky haze erased the visual excitement. There is one shot of the next waterfall grandson David wants to explore. There were few leaves showing in the landscape, but a small tree beside the road was showering our car with petals.
After church we had lunch at a restaurant in Asheville that never got very busy. The staff didn’t mind that we sat and chatted for a couple of hours. Julie asked John some questions about history, so this was her chance to catch up with him. The entrance to the interstate was nearby. She headed east, and we headed west. That was the end of a most satisfying visit.
Neighbor Shawn texted me an image of her son Logan and granddaughter Lily. That’s when I became aware of happy shouts outside. Checking that the camera was in my pocket, I rushed out the door. What fun they were having! Water was spraying, and the children were running and sliding around the obstacle course. I took a few still shots and asked if they would do it one more time for a video. Luckily for me, it was a fairly good one.
Both children looked cold, but only one would admit to it. They wrapped themselves in fluffy towels, shivered a bit, and ran off to play on the swing set. I enjoyed a chat with Shawn before she went to check on the children and I headed home to niece Julie. Julie came for a working vacation for a few days. Between phone appointments and computer work, she and I jabbered away.
For the record, it is not summer yet. We’ve barely had a few good spring days. After dinner, Julie and I sat on the porch with a couple of candles burning, but we retreated to the warmth of the house after a short while.
A convergence of neighbors had Marla and me chatting with Shawn. All of us were in the middle of something. I was walking back from the creek, and Marla was ending her walk with Albert. Shawn stopped her car to chat with us on the way to the bus stop. Free-spirit Logan jumped out of the car and danced a bit of excessive energy around us. Soon he ran to the end of the road, where I took a photo without zooming in. It was a distance!
The camera reached out for him as he began to run back toward us. I don’t remember that he came all the way back, because he got side-tracked jumping ditches.
When he heard the bus chugging up the hill, he ran back to the stop sign, waiting for the signal from the driver that it was safe to cross the road.
I love watching Logan get on the bus, and I’m not sure why. If he were my child, I would be feeling relief that he was gone for the day. I enjoy having him around, so relief is not the right word. Perhaps it is just the proper thing to happen after the sun comes up. We knew him before he went to school, and now he is growing up. It’s the beginning of his journey to make his way in the world. World, are you ready???
We’ll go back to the beginning of the day to get a proper start. It was supposed to get cold in the night. Often the weather doesn’t get as dramatic as the weatherman wants, but I took the new fountain in, anyway. Before we went walking in the morning, I stepped on the deck. The hummingbird moat was frozen, and so was the birdbath. I pressed down with a thumb as hard as I could, and the ice didn’t even creak. A dove tried to get a drink, so I filled a watering pot with hot water to pour over the ice. By the time we got home from walking, the temp had already risen ten degrees. We wore jackets after breakfast as we started out for the next lowest southern state.
John’s New York sister Barbara and husband Thom flew to South Carolina to be with the other sister Chris and husband Steve. For about 50 years we lived near each other and celebrated birthdays and holidays together. We were delighted they thought of meeting halfway, so that we could share a meal and visit for several hours. There were two things that I thought were significant. I don’t want to disprove NY friend Al’s theory, but he says you can’t have a group of older people without a discussion of ailments and medications. Never once did we bring up those topics! In all fairness, we talked about those things via telephone when they were pertinent. My other observation is that our phones were not out except to check a couple of things and to take photographs. Wait staff at the restaurant took the picture of the six of us. There were no silences to be filled.
Steve talked about an air show and some of the amazing things he saw. I was most happy to have heard about it and not experienced the three-hour wait to get out of the parking area. We asked Thom about his upcoming installation as a deacon, wanting to be there to participate at the end of his two-year course.
If we had an agenda, catching up on news would be considered new business. I had recently seen or texted Chris and Steve’s daughters and didn’t need to ask about them. Before we sat down, we asked for a quick comment about Barbara and Thom’s recent babysitting of their youngest granddaughter near Boston. A few days before, we had talked on the phone about the grandchildren who are in walking distance of their house in NY. Missing were accounts of the twins and their six boys in Maryland. That was a big hole, left unfilled.
Barbara asked about two of our children, Lise and John $. I’m kicking myself for not asking about our daughter Kate. Barbara and Thom see Kate every other week, which is about ten times the amount of time we see her.
In our imaginary agenda, I put questions about childhood under “old business”. Any number of times, John has said he should ask his sisters about their memories. Just recently he wondered about what they had for breakfast growing up. He thought they had orange juice, bacon, an egg, toast, cereal, and milk on weekday mornings. I questioned it, knowing his mother did not particularly like to cook. John was right! They had that every day! I always admired Mom, but my view of her went up another hundred miles. Chris talked about “egg nog” that Mom occasionally prepared. She beat the egg whites and yolks separately, added milk and chocolate sauce, and served in a glass. This was visually exciting when the liquid formed layers in the glass.
In reviewing our marvelous mini-reunion, I’m thinking I need a written agenda. I missed too many people I really wanted to know about.
My name is Suki, my human is a writer, and this is about my world. The world according to Suki The Cat. My humans smell funny, look weird, and I can't understand a thing they say, but they feed me, so hey, what are you gonna do?
Mehrling Muse 