Fuzzy snapshots

Snapshot photos are deteriorating, yellowing, in the photo albums under the clear "protective" film. They aren't held in place by little photo corners purchased at the Ben Franklin for a quarter like my first albums. The 1965 photos from my Kodak Brownie Starmite camera are still clear. Snapshots of Grandma, her house, her older sister, Myrtle, Camp Fire Girl cook-outs, and slumber parties when we packed our nightgowns in our moms' Samsonite cosmetic cases are all well-preserved. How bizarre. We thought nothing of taking a bubble bath, three nine-year-old girls in a tub back then. We would bake a cake, lick the beaters, or eat tuna fish sandwiches and watch Alfred Hitchcock Presents...

These yellowed photos are more recent; color Kodaks from the summer of 1985 taken on a visit to hotter-than-hell Tyler, Texas. My brother was back from England with his wife and small son. My sister, mother, two sons and I drove down from Nebraska to see them. We arrived in Tyler, and went to McDonald's. Jeff, approaching his third birthday, tried to slide down the metal slippery slide in his little Carters outfit. Yow! It was hotter than McDonald's coffee, but in a less litigious era. The snapshots look like they were baked on that slippery slide like Jeff's little legs. Just remembering nursing the four-month-old Danger Baby in the backseat of the car parked on the asphalt at the Paris, Texas, DQ overheats a mama.

Who are those young, skinny people in the hazy photos?

Tomorrow I will drive across Oklahoma to find a college for a son who wasn't even born when this photo album was arranged. Sunday, Jeff will meet up with my brother and nephew at my dad's house. I hope they will take snapshots, make memories, and stay off the slippery slides.

Butter Tarts

Coming home from coffee with friends today, I kept thinking I should get the recipe for delicious butter tarts for Fritzi. She could make it for the bridge club ladies. That got me pretty choked up when reality kicked in. I will still get the recipe from JJ. Maybe you know some bridge club ladies who would enjoy a tasty, warm, buttery and sweet treat with coffee.

JJ got the recipe from her granny-in-law who lived in a rural Louisiana house with no plumbing and seven or eleven sons. With no plumbing, seven wouldn't be much different than eleven. Probably had kerosene lamps. Told her sons scary tales of the Red Eye, or loup-garou lurking in the bayous at night.

Fritzi always said her nose was crooked because of kerosene lamps. She bent over to light a match on the wooden floor of their farmhouse (only five kids, no indoor plumbing), and hit her nose on the back of a kitchen chair. My nose is crooked because of riding a saucer sled over a retaining wall. Sent my nephew an old, old lantern recently, to play Wild West or Lewis and Clark. I forget how his dad got a crooked nose, but we will all say a deviated septum is a low-level aggravation in the big scheme of things, but worth the effort of avoiding.

On my dad's side of the family there are also wise words on the subject of noses. He had an aunt, or maybe great-aunt, who used to holler out her screen door to approaching children, "You can come in if your nose is clean!" Teaching preschoolers in winter often reminds me of that saying, even if I can't use it.

The little grey-green bird returns

Did some dirt therapy yesterday, fussing and digging in my little patio container garden. Planted two miniature rose bushes from Home Depot because one I received as a gift has proven so hardy and bloomed often. That one was pale pink. The new ones are red and coral.

I want to have fewer containers this year, and only terra cotta ones. Dumped out the white plastic flower pots back along the fence. This morning the little grey green bird returned to fuss and dig around in the myrtle looking for bugs in the dumped and dug up dirt. It's a very little bird, about four inches in length. The closest image in my bird guidebook is an immature Tennessee warbler. The bars on the wings aren't prominent, and the bird doesn't have a yellow rump.


I walked the Katy Trail with my exercise buddy today. We have been talking about doing this for at least a year. On our walk we met a bird watcher. I told her about my mystery bird, and she asked about the yellow rump. No yellow rump. The bird watcher suggested my bird was probably a pine warbler. Maybe so. My feeling is still that the little bird is a link to Fritzi, a message of hope and love. I have such a powerful connection to Mom flow through me when I see this little bird.



In one of my dreams this week I came upon a row of bushes with purple leaves. Red-spotted purple butterflies were floating and landing briefly on the purple bushes. My dream self stood and watched them, and I had a powerful sense of my mother beside me but unseen also enjoying this beautiful scene. Recalling my dream images, I am surprised to find the dream had a scent of warm dust, wild flowers, and an undefinable essence of Estes Park, Colorado!

A white cabbage butterfly floated about the emerging redbuds as we walked the trail today, but it is still early for most butterflies. The mourning cloak butterfly is usually one of the earliest in the spring. I am not wearing a mourning cloak. How could I when Fritzi is so close, reminding me to look for new life in my own backyard?

Fears For Tears

Tears are such scary things to women of my preferred label vintage. We try so hard to manage our homes, careers, children, elderly parents, money, health, weight, relations with spouses or exes, communications with extended family or in-laws. Tears seem uncontrollable, so we fear and loathe them, as Hunter S. Thompson might have written if he had a sex-change operation in Las Vegas.

Nearly every woman I know is in this strange region of caring for others, loss, and grief. It is exhausting emotional work, but we are afraid to let our emotions do their best work. We shut them down, when they can serve us best by flooding.

The ancient Egyptians knew the annual flood of the Nile provided the fertile growth. A flood of tears can move us into a new growth of creativity, sensitivity, and awareness. It's a new experience for me, and I resisted it to my utmost. I'm pleased to find it is making me a richer human being, and a better teacher, too. Letting the tears flow doesn't remove the loss or lessen our honor of our parent or relative. Letting the tears flow irrigates and energizes us to use our loss. It makes us more approachable and inspiring adults. The tears let us unload many large black yard-size trashbags of unimportant garbage from the mildewed cardboard storage boxes in our worry-laden emotional basements.

Shoo Fly Pie And Apple Pan Dowdy

Lisa, Dad's next door neighbor, brought over a huge pan of apple pan dowdy in the first few days after Mom passed away. We had some other pie, so my sister and I divided the apple pan dowdy into many freezer containers for Dad to enjoy for bedtime snacks. He is still enjoying it many evenings like last night. You can't help singing the song, and it does put you in a happy mood:

If you wanna do right by your appetite,
If you're fussy about your food,
Take a choo-choo today, head New England way,
And we'll put you in the happiest mood. with:
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
Makes your eyes light up,
Your tummy say "Howdy."
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
I never get enough of that wonderful stuff.
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan dowdy makes the sun come out
When Heavens are cloudy,
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy,
I never get enough of that wonderful stuff!
Mama! When you bake,
Mama! I don't want cake;
Mama! For my sake
Go to the oven and make some ever lovin' Sh,
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
Makes your eyes light up,
Your tummy say "Howdy,"
Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
I never get enough of that wonderful stuff!

(words by Sammy Gallop; music by Guy Wood)
Best selling records in 1946 by Dinah Shore (Columbia); Stan Kenton and His Orchestra (Capitol); and Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians (Decca).

(Recipes for Apple Pan Dowdy)

In the very, very olden days I was an only child. This would be 1955-1958. After that I became the very, very big girl big sister, a title I still hold. (They can't take that away from me!) Both of these roles conveyed certain privileges and responsibilities*. In the beginning, the main privilege was staying up very late, after 8:00 p.m. CST, to watch the "Dinah Shore Chevy Show" on the little black and white t.v., and to eat Skyline Dairy Swiss Almond ice cream with my parents. Ms. Shore used to end her show by singing, "See the USA in your Chevrolet", swirling about in her Barbie fashion dress, and then tossing me a big kiss. Our car was a Chevrolet, a pea-green 1954 to be exact, and even if we weren't seeing much of the USA in those days, I knew this t.v. show was being sent directly to me in the egocentric way a preschooler understands the world. The "Dinah Shore Show" went off the air in 1963, about the time Roberts Dairy purchased Skyline Dairy. After that the ice cream just wasn't as good. President Kennedy was assassinated, and then the Great Alaskan Good Friday Earthquake of 1964 changed my world view. Television wasn't about me. It was about "stuff out there" as reported by Walter Cronkite.



*If you can remember the gravity with which Bert Parks explained the responsibility of the Miss America runner-up to take over if Miss America should be unable to fulfill her duties, you will understand that I seriously believed from age three that I might have to take charge should my parents be unable to complete their duties as parents for my younger siblings.


They Can't Take That Away From Me
(Written by George and Ira Gershwin)

There are many many crazy things
That will keep me loving you
And with your permission
May I list a few
The way you wear your hat
The way you sip your tea
The memory of all that
No they can’t take that away from me
The way your smile just beams
The way you sing off key
The way you haunt my dreams
No they can’t take that away from me
We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love
But I’ll always, always keep the memory of
The way you hold your knife
The way we danced till three
The way you changed my life
No they can’t take that away from me