"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!

July Afternoon at Deadman's Hollow Corral....

Lee to Gabe:  "When your dad yells, he's being intense....not angry."

Abbie to Lee:  "I need my hair up...because the pigs like to eat my hair when I clean out the feeder."

Pigs: (Squealing!)

Ellie: (screaming)

Ann to Aaron: "Get the baby!"

(on crutches) 

"Don't run!!"

Lizzie and Matt: Daddy/ Daughter dance.....

The moms close the deal....

Family portrait...Landry tries to wipe off the "pig dirt"....and it's off to weigh!

Doin' the Continental

A humid continental climate (Köppen prefix D and a third letter of a or b) is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, which is typified by large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot (and often humid) summers and cold (sometimes severely cold) winters.

Where was spring?  Where were the days we rolled up our tshirt sleeves in April to begin working on our farmers’ tans? Each morning I’d don a short sleeve tee in hopeless optimism….then a long sleeve tee...and a pullover fleece.  The aborigines have their three dog nights, but we marked the April calendar with X after X of three shirt days. Most springs, the first optimistic tomato customer will call soon after April Fool's (coincidence, no doubt), but even the most Pollyanna-ish gardener will save their ammo when the morning low is 19 degrees.  Snow? Unpleasant and messy, but not unheard of. Frost in May: economically damaging and a monkey wrench in any delivery schedule. But NINETEEN DEGREES? “Always winter and never Christmas”, C.S. Lewis would say.

Continental Climate

noun. a climate characterized by hot summers, cold winters, and little rainfall, typical of the interior of a continent. Collins English Dictionary. Copyright © HarperCollins Publishers.

It snowed. It snowed Palm Sunday. Well, that can happen: we noted, with bravado, that March was just going out like a lion. It snowed again, the next weekend, while we were purportedly hosting our annual Open House. Nary a customer braved the roads, but Mark and Laura and Grandma Millie and Grandpa Charlie came to drink lemonade (!) and eat cookies for the kids’ sakes. ‘Cause nothing can really warm you like a cold glass of lemonade.

The next weekend it got serious. Though most of our customers told us to hold their plants until it warmed, some sales have no “rain date”. Necessity being the mother of inventions, we improvised, leaving the tender veggies in the heated houses overnight and swathing every cart in shrink wrap to keep the warmth and moisture from dissipating.  An electric heater kept the semi and the Isuzu above freezing several nights. The gaps in the trailers were even sealed with duct tape so the windchill couldn’t sneak in. The first morning the temperature was above forty degrees, we almost broke out the t-shirts.

Lower 48 States Just Had the Warmest May on Record | The Weather ...

https://weather.com/.../2018-06-06-may-2018-record-hot-temperatures-united-states-n...

Jun 6, 2018 - May 2018 was the hottest of any May in 124 years of recording keeping for the continental United States, eclipsing the extreme heat of that ..

With a flip of the calendar page, frozen April morphed into blistering May. It was so hot, water from a hose  blanched flowers in an instant. It was so hot, hostas bleached and the daffodils that had waited patiently through the freezes around Easter sighed and bowed out for the season.  The wind was a scirocco, sucking the moisture from foliage, flower, and soil. A common refrain was, “Well, I won’t have to mow again!”

One of the few crops that shrugged its shoulders at this schizophrenic weather was the hardy hibiscus.  The hoodlum autumn glory clematis perished in wholesale quantities in my yard, surviving only in the canopy of a century old lilac; the lackadaisical butterfly bushes fainted dead away...literally….but for one pair of leaves I’m fostering like a spark in the darkness. And while the so called “hardy” grasses never broke “dormancy”, leaving behind a thicket of rapier sharp blades for the unlucky gardener to penetrate and dispose of, the hibiscus ignored, as is their wont, the entire frigid calendar page of April, and then, sensing the blaze of May, stretched underground,  and shot to the surface to take a look around.

Now it’s July and the hibiscus are nodding their giant heads in approval over this hot state of affairs.  And so are their potted friends, lined out in rows of ruby and green down by the sweet corn patch. Some of them are blooming: the vibrant Midnight Marvel and silvery Mocha Moon, each blossom lasting but a day.  From cuttings to a three gallon pot is a mere six weeks; but even if you can’t SEE the hibiscus growing, you could certainly MEASURE it day by day….By the end of the summer, the roots are as thick as your fingers and anchored so deeply in the soil beneath the ground cloth that they must be cut with pruners.  But don’t wait that long: plant these voracious growers now while they can still be unpotted without trauma to either plant or gardener and enjoy their flower power for the rest of summer, however hot, wet, dry, or...continental….. it may be…

As for me, it’s off to sleep before another July morning of watering lines of asters and mums, praying for cooler evenings for them to set buds…then an afternoon loading hibiscus, the flower that says….Let’s DO the Continental!
 

Skating Tricks, Licorice Sticks and Other Feats

Old Comiskey, Harry Caray, Jimmy Piersall

I had a dream....

Crinoid stems in limestone

Brachiopod fossil 

I had several dreams, actually.  Ones that I admitted to all the world when I filled out an interest survey in the library of the Orland Junior High.  Of course, I don't know what occupations the other boys and girls signed up for after browsing through the various options. The cards were quite pragmatic about the job prospects for each career.  Because I loved collecting rocks and fossils, walking along stream beds and hiking trails with my head down, I thought being a geologist would be interesting.  The career card was quite frank about the prospects, cautioning me that I was unlikely to get paid for being a rock hound; most geologists worked for petroleum companies after taking lots of science and math.

My other aspiration was even more quixotic:  I wanted to be a baseball announcer.  I had spent my entire life listening to Jack Buck and Harry Caray...even Jack Brickhouse!   I could just see myself taking a seat up in the booth, donning a headset and marking up my scorebook while sending the play by play over the airwaves to fans all over the Midwest.

Alas, I could find no card in the library with the prerequisites for becoming a baseball announcer...

The arrowheads and brachiopods and crinoid stems stayed in their shoeboxes...as did the baseball cards.

Even though Laura and I both had tricycles when we were little, the next step up from three wheels  was not a bicycle, but roller skates. Our house was on a corner lot, so a girl could get a little wind through her hair sweeping around the curve.  Steel wheeled skates like "I've got a brand new pair of roller skates"  didn't have a long life span; the wheels picked up little bits of gravel, pitching the skater onto her knees, and eventually, the bearings would spread and the bb's inside would spill out onto the sidewalk.  What a joy it was to go a skating rink where the wooden wheels glided across the floor!  I learned to skate backwards and even crossover going around the rink.  I may not have been going that fast, but the rumbling of the wheels made me feel like a freight train under a head of steam.

Of course,  I was an utter failure at other athletic endeavors; I could run, but could never master a cartwheel, ruining any chance of being a cheerleader, though I jumped and yelled at recess with all the other little girls.  I flung myself into the air from the mini-trampoline...only to land flat on my back attempting a front flip, losing my breath and walking on tenterhooks for weeks afterwards.

I did write lots of stories, even a book(!)..of sorts...titled Time Machine Travels featuring my two best friends at the time...and me.  Funny thing is I don't even remember which time travel book provided the idea, but I do know that my grandmother's writing was the inspiration.  All those little newsprint note pads covered with 10 year old cursive!  I scribbled on all kinds of scrap paper, numbering every sheet to measure my accomplishment.

Thanks to my father's perseverance, I finally took on a project for life when I stuck a reed in my mouth and learned to assemble the Normandy clarinet he bought for me.  Music, as my father said once, has no evolutionary reason for existing: man can and does live and work without it.  'Why Beethoven', he would ask the air, 'If not for God?'  Certainly the angels plugged their ears for years as I learned the physical mechanisms for making sounds from my licorice stick, but the associated benefits..perseverance, routine, patience, sacrifice...are not limited to the world of music.  Listening to music makes the world richer, but playing an instrument ties you to past, present and future. I first buzzed a reed more than a half century ago...and still do....happily if not perfectly....

Lord knows I can't turn a cartwheel!

And If Not, He is Still Good

I have been known to kick the trash can, slam the door, hurt my toe, and scream 'why me'.  I'm not proud of it. I know good and well these dramatics are unproductive and even silly, especially since this kind of outburst is provoked not by real pain, real trouble, or real distress, but by short term frustration.

Real heartache does not make me shake my fist at the heavens.  Real heartache, wherever and whatever it may be, makes me pray. Then, I am reminded to be thankful for every good thing I take for granted.....filling two cups of coffee at breakfast, comfortable shoes, beautiful music on the radio, challenging work with people I love.  When the tribulations of life come around, I recognize my limitations, taking to heart the Scripture that assures us our entreaties are heard even when they are wordless.


"When we don't know what to pray for..."  My memory is chock full of times when prayers were answered...prayers for healing, for rescue, for happiness, for safety, for good news, but when my father had a stroke and my parents' world was upended, I could not find the words to pray.  We were always winging it, always trying to solve yesterday's problems, trying to wrest contentment and compassion from chaos.  Health and happiness faded as spring bloomed.

But even as we grieved, God's merciful hand was easy to see.  With gratitude we remembered the times we had gathered to celebrate at Redbarn.  The hard choices to uproot them, to buy a house, that seemed so fruitless, upon reflection, turned to blessings as their loving family and our caring community showed patience and compassion and the best of human kindness.  Until the very end of their trip from this world to the next, my mom and dad were together.... as they always had been.  A final gift to them from their loving Father....and a comfort for all of us saying goodbye.

Hard times call for trust. Faith trusts in the story.  And whether or not we understand the story, we are called to believe it.  We will see it clearly someday.

And if not, it is still good.