"IF....Roadtripping with Grandpa 2018 Version

“If...you give a moose a muffin…..”

“If...you give a mouse a cookie….”

“If ...you give a dog a donut…….”

“If...you give a cat a cupcake….”

To these popular and well loved titles by author Laura Numeroff, I would suggest an addendum, lacking perhaps in alliteration, but leading to an equally logical chain of incremental links:

“If ….you give a boy a Road Atlas…”  

Especially if that boy is Levi....

If you give a boy a Road Atlas, he will tell you the next exit.  And the exit after that. He will ask you if you’re in Kansas...and a little while later, he will ask you if you’re still in Kansas…

But...he’s just checking on YOUR navigation, because if you give a boy a Road Atlas, he will know how to read the map.  He will keep you on your toes, inventing new and intricate routes to your destination, particularly if these routes include cities or states he’d really like to drive through.  It can be difficult to stay excited about I -70 across Kansas to Denver….

“If...you give a boy a menu, he’ll order a cheeseburger..”

If you give a boy a cheeseburger, he’ll ask if there’s barbeque sauce.

Especially if that boy is Josh....

This makes meals with Josh both the easiest of times and the hardest of times.  Steak houses, burger joints, even Mexican places can be relied upon to have something satisfactory on the menu.  Given his preferences, credit Josh with a generosity of culinary adventurism the evening a sudden Vail thunderstorm drove us into the only place that would seat a grandpa, a grandma, and six kids….a German restaurant with an empty second floor.

“If...you add kids to water, pretty soon you have ….fun.”

Kids in ankle-high water moccasins wading through the busy brown water of the Colorado;

kids bumping over the waves in an inner tube.  

Kids tippy toeing over the rocks across a mountain stream;

kids skipping stones and heaving sticks;

kids building towers in the middle of the creek;

kids washing pebbles and putting the prettiest ones in their pockets to carry home….Kids, rub a dub dub, half a dozen of them,  escaping the mountain chill in the hot tub.

 “If…. someone asks what a belly flop looks like…..? ”

Trust me, Josh is your guy.  Not only that, but the ensuing splat will be a 10 point 0 on the Richter scale.  

“If you give a kid some money, he’ll need a souvenir….or a snack!”  Refrigerator magnets are a family tradition; Levi is captivated by Abbie’s Colorado Flag magnet so we make a trip to the gift car on the Leadville & Colorado Southern excursion train.

Because breakfast that morning was early, Gabe and Aaron need a root beer….Gabe is on a growth spurt and has spent most of the trip hungry. This is why we have a snack bag at all times....

Josh, despite remonstrances from his older brother, buys a pocket knife on the train.  This is a grandparent sponsored trip and Josh has his own money, so the likelihood that this pocket knife will follow past souvenir pocket knives into the kingdom of lost tools is irrelevant.  (At last report, the train pocket knife was not yet lost, even though the recent move from rental to new house may have altered that status: in this case, entirely understandable!)

 

Aaron broke even on the trip: one College World Series hat became someone else’s souvenir in Eagle, Colorado. It is replaced by one carefully considered cap purchased in Vail.

 

Not thirty seconds after the conductor on the train cautioned everyone to hold tight to their ticket, Lizzie, leaning out the window to take a picture (with, thankfully, her camera on a lanyard!) watched her ticket flutter away under the train’s wheels.  She turned to me, aghast, crying out, ‘I’ve lost my ticket!’ Of course she did! Fortunately, our receipt proved she was accounted for...though this particular blond headed conductor did not look the sort to leave a little girl beside the tracks, 142 miles from Denver…..

The grandparents did their part:  six kids got into the rental van in Kansas City, and six kids got back out four days later.  During those four days, no one got hurt (really), no one got sick, (well, just a little), no one fought or argued (except when they were really really tired).  The cousins were considerate and kind to each other even during the long drive there and back. They helped their grandparents, and they helped each other. I’ll never forget that.  

Nor will I forget drying towels at all hours, the blessed luxury of a washer and dryer for six kids and two adults, Blake bringing back frozen pizzas the night we arrived and how we attacked them like they were gourmet, not just DiGiorno.  No, no one wanted to sleep with Josh...or Gabe...or even Levi, (snoring? kicking?) but it all worked out with the bonus of a bedtime story or two and the chance for this grandma to “tuck in” all her kids…

There was no time to read, no time to use our phones...except to take pictures to send home! Time was the present and that was busy enough....

For a week afterwards, I woke up feeling I should count noses….

And “If"….I could do it all again, I would!

Weather Change

The weather ruled our summer.  From June on, there was never a day that didn’t revolve around the dry skies, the dry ground, the heat.  We pulled hoses at work. We ran sprinklers at home. We drenched for crown rot and sprayed for pests. And while the fall plants responded to the attention beyond all hopes, no effort of man was sufficient to sustain the fields, the roadsides, or take the gray haze of fires far away from the skies.

So when I drove home in a driving rain the other day to Tarkio’s empty and quiet streets, I pictured the inhabitants of every house inside, dry and cozy, watching water stream down the windows, down on their knees in thankfulness for the refreshment. If they weren’t literally kneeling, surely, like me, they felt a relief, a deliverance over and above all expectation.  While our human brains know the weather will always turn, our human hearts can be discouraged, beaten down, wrung out of gratitude.

Rain.  Some years, some droughts, you kinda stop looking for it; the forecast never changes, the heat never wavers.  But this year, we could see the rain on the radar: it was always out west or up north. Even if those green or yellow reflections drifted across the Missouri, nothing reached the ground.  Showers would pop up...and fizzle out. Neighbors and friends and acquaintances all across the state told the same tales. The USDA forecast record yields everywhere else. But here is Mis-er-y, all we had was company….

Missouri Drought summer 2018

Then, one day, as sudden as a tropical monsoon, the rains came.  The first three inches didn’t budge our pond a bit. But the next week’s inch brought a few inches of cover to the bare cottonwood log on the bank.  The next two inches made the grass grow rank so quickly that lawn mowers roared into life early every morning. If it wasn’t raining! But we didn’t complain, even if Labor Day activities were of the indoor variety and we squelched and slid on the sodden grass loading our trailer loads of drippy mums.

The corn fields are weary and bedraggled, yellowed prematurely with big brown dead patches on the steeper thinner hillsides. Blake brought in ears from the bottom and ears from the hillside; the hill ears are thinner and shorter, like the lean and mean cows of Exodus.

It will be a leaner and meaner corn harvest.  Sometimes the ears don’t dry properly when the plants die prematurely.  The lines at the elevator will certainly be shorter. Maybe we will pick most of the corn before we even start soybeans, which appear to be maturing  normally. But the nearly 7 inches of rain in August will refresh the earth, replenishing our shallow wells. The football boys won’t land as hard on the field.  There will be fewer grass fires or field fires than last year. Perhaps the cover crops we sow will germinate. Here’s hoping the trees and grasses, gardens and crop land will go into the winter chock full of moisture and ready for more than 2018’s 48 hours of spring!