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Old Stuff for this Fantastic Friday

Old Stuff for this Fantastic Friday

IMG_0737This Fantastic Friday post is a trip down memory lane. First stop is seven years ago, when Mom broke up housekeeping. Second stop is almost fifty years ago. Third stop is the present, with the pictures framed and on the wall, as the new photo above shows.

I’m a sucker for old stuff. And a whole bunch of old stuff found its way to our place after Mom sold her house last March. My original plan was to immediately do some creative decorating with the treasures. But with weddings, one niece graduating from high school and another from college, and a new book contract the original plan got sidetracked.

But in this brief respite, I hope to find time to play with my favorite goodies – three brightly colored, cardboard Disney puzzles. They’re relics from the late 1950s which somehow survived our childhoods in almost perfect condition. How  a miracle like that happened, I don’t know, unless Mom stored them on a high shelf and allowed us to play with them under her watchful eye only after washing our hands thoroughly. If that’s how she did it, we kids must have thought she was the meanest mom in the whole world. However she managed to preserve the puzzles, fifty years later, I am thankful.

Every time I see the puzzles, it’s Sunday night in Le Mars again. Mom and Dad are playing cards with my aunt and uncle in the dining room. My sister, brother, and our three girl cousins are in the living room, watching Walt Disney, eating popcorn, and shooing the dogs away when they get too close to the popcorn bowls.

Walt Disney, the most creative man in the universe, is talking directly to me. He’s dropping hints about a new movie called Mary Poppins, inviting my family to visit a theme park named Disneyland in California. While his attention turns to Mickey and Donald, who are up to their usual hijinks, I daydream about visiting Disneyland and meeting Walt at the gage. Then, I remember that my dad’s in a wheelchair, so even if we could afford to drive across the country, he couldn’t ride the rides.

For a little while, I’m sad and jealous of my sister who got to go on a camping trip to California with my aunt and uncle a few years ago. But I break out of my funk during the commercial. My brother and I go to the kitchen to get more popcorn from a huge Tupperware bowl.

Our uncle stops us. “Hey, Jo-Bo. Hey, Johnny. How would you like to go with us to the Black Hills and Colorado this summer? You girls can break in the new TeePee pop-up camper.” He turned to my brother. “And you and me, we’ll sleep in the trunk of the car every night. Whaddya think?”

My brother and I look at each other. We grin and nod furiously, then run to the living room to spread the good news. Before long, the popcorn is gone. The dogs are scavenging for crumbs. We’re wrestling on the floor with our cousins. Walt Disney’s voice mingles with my parents’ voices and my aunt and uncle’s as they say good-bye and push our protesting cousins out the door.

Every time I see those Walt Disney puzzles, I smell the popcorn and hear Walt Disney saying good night and asking us to come back next week. I remember our trip to the Black Hills and Colorado and see the morning light glowing outside the canvas sides of the Tee-Pee camper. I am jealous of my brother who is sleeping in the trunk with my uncle. I am wading in a mountain stream, building a dam across it with my cousins.

It’s time to frame the puzzles and put them on the wall. They should be where I can see them.

Life Is Good When…for this Fantastic Friday

Life Is Good When…for this Fantastic Friday

A close relationship with extended family members shows the joy that grows in the sharing of our ordinary days.An enduring joy of my life has been close relationships with many of my cousins. Thankfully, my daughter has similar relationships with several of her cousins  and second cousins (Right to left: Lara, Tessa, Anne, Caitlyn, and Lauren). Both the post and the picture make me grateful that these young ladies have one another in their ordinary, everyday lives on this Fantastic Friday.

Life Is Good When…

For the past month and a half, my cousin has been forwarding emails from her daughter, Lara, who is studying in Spain this semester. Lara is four days older than my daughter, and like Anne, she’s a junior in college.

Reading Lara’s adventures has been pure delight. She’s learned to live with cold showers, cook with butane fuel and purchase new fuel when the tank runs dry. She’s been befriended by a family of Bolivian immigrants, eats weekend meals and goes to church with them, and bakes them banana bread. She’s climbed mountains, ridden trains, taken taxies, and to make the most of this opportunity, forces herself to speak Spanish instead of English to fellow students to improve her language skills.

The wisdom of a comment she made in a recent email makes me smile whenever it comes to mind. After Lara describing a busy weekend with the Bolivian family, washing laundry and cooking meals together, she said this. “You know life is good when doing mundane, everyday activities is nice.”

Her insight delighted but didn’t surprise me. She’s part of the pack of girl cousins (Anne, my brother’s two girls, Lara and two of her cousins) who were born in a span of four years. They spend as much time as possible crammed together like puppies, playing games, talking, sharing clothes, writing stories. When they aren’t together in body, they connect on Facebook, joyfully sharing their “mundane, everyday activities.”

I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t predict the joys and sorrows in Lara’s future or those of her pack of puppy cousins. But these young women already know what Dorothy had to learn over the rainbow and what many people spend their whole life never learn: life’s greatest pleasures are the small things, the ordinary days, and the people who experience them. They have what they need to appreciate the joys and weather the sorrows sure to come.

They’re ready to face the world.

Top Ten Treasures to Pass Along to the Grands

Top Ten Treasures to Pass Along to the Grands

The treasures I hope to pass along to my grandchildren aren't silver and gold. They are treasures of the heart passed on to me from my grandparents.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Mom’s parents, Vernon and Josephine Hess. Because my paternal grandma died before I was born and my paternal grandpa died when I was 8, Grandpa and Grandma Hess were the only grandparents present throughout my childhood. Their style was more hands-off than hands-on, perhaps because they didn’t have enough hands or time to be actively involved in the lives of 39 grandchildren. Even so, I hope to pass down to my grandchildren many of the heart treasures they passed down to all of their grandkids. Here’s my top ten list.

10. Playing cards. My grandparents didn’t play many board games, but they loved playing cards. Our grandson will old enough to appreciate the finer points of Go Fish! From there, we will move onto Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Uno, Skippo, Hearts, Cribbage, and Shangai Rummy. Once his younger cousins can join the fun, we’ll add Nertz to the mix, too.

9.  Love of house plants. Specifically geraniums. Do a Gravel Road website search of “geraniums” for more information.

8.  Love for the land. My grandparents were farmers who loved the land. 6 of their 8 children were farmers. We were “town kids” and loved spending time on the farms with our cousins. Because my son is a farmer, I hope my grandparents’ love for the land survives for another generation.

7.  Good money management. Grandpa and Grandma raised 8 kids during the Great Depression. Grandma was a gifted money manager. My mom inherited the skill from her, my siblings and I inherited it from her, and hopefully it will be passed along to the grands, too.

6.  Strong work ethic. My memories of Grandpa and Grandma all revolve around work. After he retired, Grandpa still helped my uncles on their farms. Grandma was constantly cooking, cleaning, and quilting. The only big whoo-ha of the week was watching Lawrence Welk on Saturday night.

5.  Love of cooking. As was mentioned before, Grandma spent a lot of time cooking. And she was a fantastic cook. May of the recipes on this blog originated with her. My grandson and I usually do some kind of “cooking” during weekend visits. Pretty soon, the other grands will join the fun, too.

4.  Family history. My grandparents and parents constantly told stories about their growing up years, and stories about their parents and grandparents. My mother even wrote stories about growing up in the depression. My sister illustrates them, puts them in book form, and gives one to Mom each Christmas. She also gives Mom’s great-grands sets of the books when they are born. The stories I wrote for my kids about growing up with a dad in a wheelchair were what nudged me into a writing career. I hope my kids and grands treasure our family stories and add their own to the narrative.

3.  Sense of belonging. Though my grandparents didn’t have lots of time to spend with each individual grandchild, they made it very clear that we belonged to them. All my life, being part of their family has been a deep sense of security. What better gift can I give my grands than the same sense of security and belonging?

2.  Family love. Unconditional. Unending. All-encompassing. Love that sees not only who a person is in the present, but sees future potential. What a precious gift to pass along to a new generation.

1.  Memories of Grandpa and Grandma’s house. My grandparents’ house in town is still standing. I could walk in today and identify where Grandma’s sewing machine stood, where Grandpa sat in the kitchen nook and scraped his grapefruit rind clean, where Grandma hid the red hots, and the exact spot where the bed with a mattress so soft we always slid to the middle stood, where the board games were stored in the coat closet, and where Grandma stored extra pajamas for her grandkids, who sometimes stayed overnight unexpectedly, in the bottom drawer of a dresser in the hallway. Though I haven’t been in the house for 33 years, those memories and many more, are clear and vivid in my mind. When my grandchildren turn 50, then 60, and older, I hope their memories of Papoo and Grammy Jo’s house remain crystal clear and timeless treasures in their hearts.

What do you hope to pass along to your grands? Leave a comment.

 

Top 10 Reasons to Look Forward to a Cousins’ Reunion

Top 10 Reasons to Look Forward to a Cousins’ Reunion

Cousins reunion 1

My mother and her 7 sibs were a prolific bunch in their heyday. They and their spouses produced 39 children from the mid 1940s until the early 1970s. This coming Saturday a goodly percentage of the 37 living cousins, their extended families, and a few members of Mom’s greatest generation will gather for a family reunion. Here are the top ten reasons I’m looking forward to the day.

10.  We all remember Lawrence Welk differently from the rest of the world. To us, he’s not the maestro of national television’s squeaky cleanest dance band of the 1960s. To us, he’s the leader of a traveling 1930s and 1940s North Dakota band that sometimes played in dance halls around the midwest. They were so wild our parents weren’t allowed to attend their dances for fear of being corrupted.

9.  After lunch, we reinact reunions of our childhood. It starts when someone asks for a dime to go swimming. (Yes, way back when pool admission was one thin dime.) Then everyone responds in unison, “Ask in 30 minutes, once your food’s had time to settle.”

8.   We share the same memories of Grandma Josie’s kitchen: sugar bread eaten in the backyard on painted aluminum chairs, Grandpa’s pink wintergreen mints and Grandma’s red hot candies hidden in the top shelf of the cupboard by the refrigerator, and oatmeal raisin cookies stored in the hat box in the bottom shelf of the cupboard across from the stove.

7.  Everyone shares tips for raising African violets and geraniums.

6.  It’s rare to be with so many people who take such pride in the state of their vegetable gardens.

5.   We all appreciate the value of fresh tomatoes and kohlrabi.

4.   Our reunions are a rare opportunity for math nerds and theater geeks to rub shoulders, because we’ve got plenty of both.

3.   Being with my older cousins makes me feel young again.

2.   I see the faces of Grandpa Hess, Grandma Josie, and my aunts and uncles in the faces around me.

1.   Reunions with my cousins renew the security and sense of belonging I experienced at family gatherings during childhood. Could I ask for anything more?

Cousins Reunion 2

Top Ten Blessings of a Large, Extended Family

Top Ten Blessings of a Large, Extended Family

Hess Cousins

Over the weekend, Mom’s side of the family gathered to say good-bye to her brother Leo. Our time together was a reminder of the many blessings of a large extended family. Here are my top ten:

10.  Mom (and her kids) always have a place to stay when visiting her hometown.

9.    When a high school reunion committee includes Mom’s name in a hometown newspaper listing of those for whom they need contact information, someone will see the ad and reply.

8.   Everyone knows Lange’s Cafe is the place to go for supper as a family.

7.   One topic of conversation at supper is the general health and well-being of our geraniums.

6.   Though the older generation of our family was not outwardly demonstrative, our generation has become very huggy, and we even say, “I love you” to one another.

5.   When those from far away are driving home, those who don’t have so far to travel call to see how the trip is going.

4.   When one person says, “Mom, Dad, can I have a dime to go swimming?” everyone else responds, “In a half hour, once your meal has time to settle.”

3.   When Mom’s nephews and nieces look at her, they see her not only as an increasingly frail and elderly woman, but as the young firecracker who used to make them mind, drive the tractor, bale hay, and milk cows.

2.   Eyes light up at the mention of fresh kohlrabi from Grandma and Grandpa’s garden and of Grandma’s tapioca fruit salad at Christmas.

1.   When travel complications mean Mom’s the only member of her generation able to attend a funeral, she never feels alone because every niece and nephew in the large crowd of nieces and nephews make sure she knows she’s loved and her presence there is important to them.