I Got a Hole in My Pocket

 I have never claimed to be wealthy, in fact we are not. However; we are pretty frugal and on top of that we have done nothing to spend money outside our regularly scheduled spending, like groceries, in about 3 years. 

Which is a really, really good thing.

The first year of no spending was my wheelchair adventure, followed by physical therapy, followed by a five day stint in the hospital with blood sepsis (do you know they told me I almost died??), followed by a month of bedrest, followed by resumed physical therapy and then Merry Christmas. The next year was COVID and this year is  much of the same. 

So, we had some money. For us, it seemed like a lot. Of course, that ain't saying much. I remember when we first got married, we had $34.00 left over one month and it was like we'd won the lottery. That's the kind of mentality you are dealing with here.

Anyway, in June things began to fall apart. We had to have a new air conditioning unit in the sun room. The "old" unit was 22 years old. that was nearly $4500.00 dollars. We had to have (yes, I know you don't "have" to have) a new dishwasher unit. Right at $2100.00 and I still don't have the dishwasher, but that's another story entirely, apparently the song the whole country is singing "We can't get it shipped to our warehouse". Then, the fella who was doing our pressure washing told us the screws on the metal roof were coming out. The people who  put the roof on put screws that were too short, way- to- save- money- may- you- pay- for- it- in- other- ways- roof- man. Believe this or not, $3,000.00. We had a small leaky spot on the bathroom ceiling. The guys who did the long screws that cost more than gold apparently, said there had been one screw completely out and that was probably where the leak was because the rest of the roof looked good.

He was wrong.

We had now a giant moldy ceiling. He got a little biddy feller to crawl up in our attic. Our 34 year old sky light was leaking. Good-bye $2400.

My digital pad that controls oven temperature went out (again). $345.00.

And after that, every time we preheated the oven it stunk, stank. Until the last time it smoked and we thought it was going to catch fire. Guy came. Wasn't his fault, one had nothing to do with the other, the mice that had stored dog food everywhere else had stored it under the floor of the oven. One pile was ashes, the other blackened. He said he had no idea why it didn't catch fire. But he cleaned up the mess and put the oven back together. He felt sorry for us because I talked about all the above and only charged $60.00

Our laptop stopped connecting to the internet. $95.00.

One afternoon Husband and I went outside to look at something or other and couldn't get back in. Our outside part of our door doesn't have a door knob, rather a handle and a latch you push down with  your thumb. It broke. Had to break a window pane to get into our own house. Husband took the handle off, which left us with a door knob size hole in the door. Now, I didn't want to leave it like that, who wants a hole in their door? 

So I figured out how to fix that. It's called Appalachian Ingenuity:

For you city slickers who don't know what that is, it's a canning lid for when  you home can food.

New door hardware, $100.00

And some other miscellaneous stuff, $825.00. We have yet to pay our work man for putting the door back together because he's coming next week to repair the bathroom ceiling and put a new window pane in and we'll pay him for all of it at once.

Oh, and did I mention all cars decided to tear up in some shape, form or fashion? $4100.00

This adds up to a million dollars. Don't bother to count it, I know for sure.

I wonder if we have $34.00 left...

Death by Chocolate

We've been joking for a few months about having rats/mice in our pantry, as Husband sketched one of each for me there. The rat is reading the newspaper, and the mouse is reading (one of my) books. 

Cute, huh?

Then a few days ago, when I got a coffee cup out of the pantry, what did I see?

Mouse poop!

Life imitating art, I reckon.

Husband set a few traps with yummy cheese and peanut butter, but they weren't touched.

There was a good sized piece of...something that had been drug between the mugs. Husband investigated. Chocolate. 

After another night of not taking the bait in the traps, I told Husband he was going to have to bait it with chocolate. 

"She's going to have babies in the pantry the next thing you know."

Wait a minute, said he. "How do you know it's a female?"

"Hello? Chocolate!"  Because that morning we had found a Hershey's Kiss she had dragged between the mugs to nibble on. 

So, reluctantly, he baited the trap with a kiss.

Bingo.

Hoisted with her own petard.

R.I.P, Miz Mouse.

Remembering...or not.

I've been in a bit of a shock. And to be honest, I'm shocked I was shocked.

Mother gave me a little bag full of "stuff" that she said mostly came from Daddy's wallet, and thought I might enjoy looking through it.

And I did, at first. There was a lot of paperwork that was just run of the mill. There were wallet sized photos of us, one of mother in her twenties, that kind of thing.

There was a photo of him on an i. d. card from Lockheed, but it gave his status as retired, so it was done at the time he retired. The back of the card says they hope he enjoys his retirement, blah, blah, blah. The photo made me smile, because he had gotten fat! I remember he had to work on losing that, and he did. The photo says it was taken in 1985. I don't think I'd ever seen it before.

The photo I think favors him the most was taken seven or eight months before he died. He is sitting at the table and he looks up at the camera and smiles. He was fifty-eight, but he looked to be in his forties with the black hair and smooth, coppery colored skin. 

He had to retire because of the massive heart attack he had, but he stayed pretty busy. He tended to  his toddler grandson a lot, and my grandmother, his mother-in-law, lived with them, so they kept each other company. And he visited his mother until she passed away in October of '87. Of course, Mother never drove, so he took  her back and forth to work too.

In April of '88 he went into the hospital to have his esophagus stretched. While he was still sedated an aide let his bed down and he aspirated into his lungs. They put him on a vent and he was in ICU for three weeks. No one expected him to pull out of it. But he did. He came home, but he was very weak.

I remember it all in vivid detail. I remember he went into the hospital with black hair and touches of silver and came out three weeks later with silver hair and not much black. I remember my husband visiting him while he was still in ICU. He had not seen Daddy in three days. He told me later when they let him in ICU he couldn't find my daddy. He went back and asked the nurse and she took him back to a bed he had been to, but my daddy had aged so much he didn't recognize him. I remember this.

But the other day I saw a photo of those results. He had his driver's license renewed on May tenth because his birthday was on the fourteenth. This photo looks like that of a man in his middle eighties. He died twenty-five days after the photo was taken.

Here's the thing: This photo stunned me. I couldn't think. I couldn't stop staring at it. My heart broke all over again.

Because I truly don't remember him looking like that.

The mind is powerful, and I guess I had erased this image, replacing it with the way he looked up until April. He looked that way for less than three months. So I "forgot" it.

And to be honest? I'm still stunned.

 I never want to see that photo again.

Pandemic!

 I don't know if you've noticed this, but we are in a pandemic. First one (and hopefully the last) in my life. 

For the most part, I've not minded staying home. I do that most the time anyway. I miss church. I miss lunch with friends whenever we fancy. I miss the freedom of  knowing I can go even if I don't want to, just having it be a possibility is often enough. 

Our gap in our safety is Daughter, who still has to go to work every day. She wears a mask, but her peers do not (even though one just lost a family member to this virus). She is protected from customers pretty well by plexiglass and lots of bleach cleaning and hand washing. She takes off her shoes before entering the house, goes straight up stairs and washes and changes clothes. So she does the best she can. 

But when the cats begin to look at  you like they wish you'd leave, it's time to get out of the house. So, Husband went to the grocery store, geared up in his hazmat suit and I visited my 91 year old mother who I don't touch or get really close to.

Yay.

We did venture out last week and got our first vaccine. Our second comes in a month. I'm now hearing how the side effects are worse with the second one, so I'm really excited.

I've been stunned more than once over deaths to this virus and I guess I will be again. 

On another topic, I'm waiting for at least one big snow this winter. We've had a few baby snows, and one of them gave me joy because I got to watch it snow all day long. 

Tomorrow marks our 36th wedding anniversary. I pray we get to see many more. We've had some great snows on past anniversaries.

Here's to you, my fellow inmates. May we be freed soon. 

You Just Never Know

I had already written a blog in my head - I just had a few more things to do in the house to catch up so I could sit down and type it out. I thought it was well done, witty and something you could relate to without too much effort.

My last chore was a phone call to check on a friend who had been ill. I hadn't heard from her in four or five days, and when I checked my last message to her, she had not responded. This wasn't unusual for her, so I didn't really worry. I had meant to call  her brother the day before, but I was having a "bad pain day" myself, so I put it off.

After a moments hesitation he responded to my question about how she was doing. 

She had passed away earlier that morning.

I was truly stunned. I knew she was sick. I knew she was very, very sick because she was 82 years old and had COVID. But for some reason I had no idea she would die. She was healthy otherwise, and in my mind she would pull through and have something to talk about the next time she called.

We had known each other since I was in my twenties. Over forty years. She was the psychiatrist who came from Atlanta weekly to do a clinic where I worked as a counselor. Somehow we hit it off, and no matter where she lived - Atlanta, Kentucky, New Mexico, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma and finally back to her hometown, Birmingham, Alabama - we never lost touch. 

I sang at her son's christening. I sang at her wedding. Accompanied by a harp, no less.

She visited fairly often, spending a couple of nights before going on, but this stopped a few years ago as she felt she was getting too old to drive great distances alone.

She loved my books. Every time she wanted to buy a gift for friends, she would send them one or eight of my books. I'm afraid she may have forced them on folks sometimes. She was insistent that I was the next big author. 

We called each other several times a year, always on our birthdays. Her birthday was the same day as my grandmother's and we seemed to always mention that.

Next month, on my birthday, I won't get to hear her raucous off key rendition of happy birthday.

Well, this blog was obviously more for me than it was for  you. But I would venture to say that every one of you who reads this has been touched by this hateful pandemic. You have lost someone to it, or have been fearful until they recovered. And if you haven't been touched by it, thank God right now.

You just never know, you know?

Well, Foot! Or Cold Feet

 Before the great fall of '06, when I had cold feet, all I had to do was crawl in bed, stick 'em on Husband's back and they got warm pretty fast. Of course, his screaming was annoying, but I suppose there's a price  you pay for everything.

Now my feet are almost never warm. I have a floor foot warmer for the studio, I have a bag full of horse corn that I heat up in the microwave at night. Then I put it between covers, under a pillow, cover it up more, and put a pillow on top of that in order to hold the heat in all night. Most the time this will, eventually, get my poor tootsies toasty.

As anyone who knows me at all knows, I love, and I mean love snow. In fact I love a lot that goes with cold weather, excluding my terrifyingly cold feet.

You think I'm obsessed with my paws? Yes, yes I am. You try living with feeling like you are standing in ice cold water all the time. It's something that's hard not to think about.

And another thing. You probably think I've not blogged in like, forever. You'd be wrong. I blog every day, sometimes twice. I have failed to write them down, however.

Last year was a very hard year for me. Lost the ability to walk for a while. Almost died with e-coli in my bloodstream caused by a UTI that had gone unnoticed for sometime due to all the pain I was having which was causing my leg to stop working. So, I had a few things on my mind.

And this year? Need I say more?

Now, I can't promise  how often I'll continue to blog. I'm trying to write another novel, so when I sit down for a few minutes, I try to concentrate on that. But  maybe I'll blog more often that I've been at.

Thanks!

Of Birthdays and Snowfall

Last week I had a birthday. And it snowed all day on my birthday, too.

Now, if you don't know me, you don't understand what a big deal this is. I have a friend who says my love for snow is an affliction.
I was waxing poetic about past snows and Husband called me a "snow savant".

The next day it snowed a lot, we got five inches at my house. People were sending me messages like crazy about how I got my birthday wish.

I told them most my birthday wishes were granted. 1. Snow 2. A fire in the fireplace all day 3. Maxwell House coffee instead of the organic mess Husband makes and 4. A million dollars.

Still waiting on that last one.

But it was a good day anyway.

I remember many things about special snow times. My daddy dragging me out of my warm bed and carrying me to the door, pulling back the curtain and showing me a winter wonderland. I couldn't have been more than 3 at the time.

My grandmother calling me early morning every time it snowed to tell me, and to hurry and come on so we could make snow cream. I think of her every single snow.

Trying to get up the hill  to my friend's house to play in the snow and not able to get enough traction to do so.

Snowball fights and many, many snowmen. I remember we had a huge snow when I was fifteen or sixteen. All the neighborhood teen boys and young men got together and built a giant snowman in the churchyard. It was as tall as the second story windows. As you can imagine, it made the paper.

The love of snow never left me growing up, even though it was scarier sometimes. After Husband and I built this house, getting home before it was too late was of  utmost importance. Sometimes we  made it "too late" and had to do all sorts of things to get to our house. The road getting here is straight up. He would gun the car and we would careen up the mountain, praying no one would decide to come down it.  Most the time we made it - after the second or third try.

Of course, the biggest snow I ever encountered was the blizzard of '93. Since there had never been a recorded blizzard in the North Georgia Mountains, it's no wonder.

Daughter was not three years old yet, and she was sick on top of that. But the doctor had said he'd heard a really bad storm was coming up, she he gave her an antibiotic shot, and we rushed to the drugstore to get the medications fill. It was snowing by that time. 

The middle of the night winds were harrowing. It snowed so hard we couldn't see past the windows. I'd never experienced thunder and lightning during a snowstorm, either.

By morning our electricity was history and it dropped to fifty degrees inside our house quickly. At that time our house was all electric (that got remedied shortly afterwards!) It dropped down to below freezing in the house before our power was restored.

Thank God, our neighbors, who visited occasionally from Florida, were here. They called and asked did we have heat. They had a wood burning furnace in their basement and told us to get there as soon as we could. 

There are a lot of God stories about the blizzard, and one involves a snowsuit and snow boots we were able to dress Daughter in. A three minute walk took twenty as we struggled against the snow and howling wind. Our two boxers went ahead of us, sort of plowing a path for us.

We stayed at their house five days, virtual strangers. And we had a sick toddler. Bless 'em.

Finally, my brother's four wheel drive was able to get us to Mother's where we stayed until our electricity was restored, some days later. 

I think we had either 24 or 27 inches of snow. I remember the day after it was ten degrees, but the wind had stilled. The storm was over!

For some years we had very little snow, then in 2014 we had many. 
Last winter was a bummer, with one or two very light dustings and one scary icy morning.

For those of  you who aren't fans of snow, I guess that was good, but for me, not so much.

Birthdays that stand out: My sixth. It was raining and my next door neighbor got me a child's size umbrella, which I'd never seen before. My seventh. I was in first grade and my teacher's birthday was the same as mine, so Mother brought cupcakes to the class. My ninth. Mother let me have a real party and I cleaned like crazy. I remember we played pin the tail on the donkey, and ring toss on Bullwinkle's antlers. My sixteenth. Mother cooked whatever I wanted and let me invite my boyfriend for supper. My twenty-first. I cried because I was now officially an adult. My 27th because I got to see the Monkees in concert - well, Mickey, Davey, Peter and Mickey's sister. Close enough. My 40th. My then sister-in-law went to a huge amount of trouble and put together an elaborate album of my life. And this year, because it was just a few days ago. Ha!

Don't remember  many years when snow and birthdays collided, but I'm always grateful when they do!