Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003 - 9:09 p.m.
Monday
Long time no write. It snowed again last night. What else is new? We only had about 3" or maybe a little more. But the sun came out and it melted nicely. No more until Wednesday and again on Saturday. Why stop now. I was remarking to Mike last night on messenger that we have had more snow this year! He reminded me that I had hung some snowmen on the porch saying Let It Snow! So that could be the reason. But they're down now.
I'm waiting now for Mike to come back online so we can talk about his visits to the oncologist and urologist today. He's been very lucky lately, pain-wise. But he was thrown for a loop the other day when the oncologist told him that this is inoperable, and incurable. I think he was just in such a daze here and on so much medication that he just didn't comprehend it. And then too, he gets conflicting statements too, one doctor saying this, and another saying something different.
We take the car in tomorrow morning for a heater job. It's been squealing so loudly when I turn it on, it's quite unnerving.
Tuesday
It seems like I've been running most of the day, and haven't got that much accomplished. Norm took the car in this morning and they dropped him off at IGA. He had his coffee and got the paper and walked the rest of the way home. It was 7* this morning, with a wind chill of -2, so he had to scurry a bit, I'm sure. At any rate, the car is fixed, we picked it up before lunch, and the squeal is gone, so that's a good thing. It just gripes me to have to pay for car repairs, but we haven't been too unlucky with this car.
I called April at the stables to check on riding this afternoon, and she thought that because it's so cold, she would postpone it until Friday, as it's supposed to be up to 30 by then, so that's fine. They do get so cold even riding in the indoor arena. I stopped by Rural King and picked up some toe and hand warmers for her, so we'll see how they work.
Also called our tax lady from last year to see about a missing form that S.S. is wanting…it seems that the IRS total and the S.S. totals are a bit different…sigh…oh dear…the trouble is that she has retired and moved now, and has all of her records stashed away. But she was very helpful and called back and so we have something to go on now. This is for the caregivers' information. What a mess that has turned out to be. But we are on the right track now and it should work out OK.
I stopped by the store to get more cat food for the Ladies Under the House, as it's supposed to snow again tomorrow. Then by the library and picked up several nice books on afghans and looked through them tonight, but only found a couple that look interesting.
When I picked up Steph after school, and told her no riding today, she said well, it wasn't TOO cold, so she and Nicky would go running! Sheesh! But she was hungry too so we stopped by KFC and she brought some popcorn chicken home to munch on.
I did talk to Mike last night on Messenger and he had a good meeting with the oncologist. But the new urologist leaves quite a bit to be desired. I hope that he can find another one. I'm surprised that Vickie didn't speak up and tell him what for! Probably had to bite her tongue, but Mike said that she was really upset with him. He does need a urologist too, because he needs to have his stint replaced in a couple of months. The oncologist wants to start him on more hormones to help the lupron along. It is shrinking the lymph nodes so that is good. He told him that he does have bladder cancer and is in the last stages of prostate cancer, then gave him a salute when he left. Hmmm.
Today is (son) Greg's birthday. I remember his first birthday, and I was fixing grilled cheese sandwiches for the other kids' lunches when the phone rang and it was Tom saying that Mom had died of an aneurysm. They had taken Mike to the bus station to leave for the Coast Guard that morning, and Dad had gone on to work, after having to fix a flat tire. Billy stayed home with Mom, which was a good thing, so she wasn't by herself when this hit her. I was also almost three months pregnant again with Kim, and almost lost her.
But this is also the birthday of my maternal grandmother, so that was an awful shock for her to receive too.
Her name was Violet, but shrinking she wasn't. Her middle name should have been SPUNK. I don't know anything about her young life, and I wish I would have had sense enough to ask when I had the chance. She was going with a young man from Wales, but married his brother instead because the first couldn't pronounce her name. Not a good choice though, as she caught him dallying with a lady friend in the shed. She sent her packing, and then packed up the kids, my mom and her brother, and hitched up the horse to the wagon, and took off for her parents' home. She worked in a shoe factory for several years. About five years later she met and married 'Pop' Hughes. who was the only grandfather that I ever really knew. She always said that she was too young to be called Grandma, so we had to call her Mom Hughes.
I was born in her front bedroom in November, where my cousin had already made his appearance in May. Must have felt like a pediatric ward that year.
Mom and Dad were living with his parents but for my birth, Mom went home. Dad was working on the river on a dredge boat, and the boss didn't let him know about it for three days, for fear he would want to leave, which he did, permanently.
By the time I was old enough to be able to stay for a week or two during the summer, we had moved to St. Louis. I remember playing paper dolls on the screened in back porch with the honeysuckle scent heavy in the air. She was so proud of her flowers, the sweet williams, the phlox, the sweet-pea bush, which seemed to be blooming just in time for the Decoration Day bouquets for the cemetery. The cistern with the buckets of cold water and the communal dipper, the vegetable garden, the wash house with the stove to heat the water for laundry, the clotheslines, the double outhouse out past the chicken house, the far back patch with the pigs, my own rope swing hanging from the cherry tree, all were interesting and different for a little city girl.
The house was arranged with three rooms in a row on each side of a stairway, with a long porch in front. We slept upstairs in the dormitory style attic with the slanting ceiling, several double beds, and an antique victrola. I loved to go to sleep to the sound of rain on the tin roof, and would love to hear that cozy, comforting sound again. Of course, the boys, Tom and Mike, would have to climb out the windows onto the porch roof. There was a swing on the porch where we snapped string beans, or where the grownups sat after supper in the cool evening while we tried to catch lightning bugs.
In the winter, Dad and Pop, both smoking their pipes, would sit around the stove in the middle room, which was alternately a dining room or a bedroom.
In the summer they would sit on the porch and look at the sky, and speculate about the moon. Little did they know or possibly guess that a grandson would one day be so involved with the space station and space exploration.
In later years when my gr. Grandfather and his third wife were very elderly, they made their home on the other side of the house, and had their own privacy. I have the trunk now that I remember seeing in their kitchen way back then. There was a time when there was a mysterious knocking that could be heard at night, as if someone were knocking on the doors. Pop H. would get up to answer, but no one would be there. It was getting to the point of being very disturbing to him.
On one of our weekend trips there, I decided to solve the mystery. I spent my whole fifty cent allowance on a bag of candy from our little neighborhood confectionery, so that I could sit on the stairs in the middle of the night and have something to sustain me. But the little brothers had to share on the drive down to the country, and when the time came, I was too comfortable in bed to think about getting up. It turned out in the end, that it was decided the little grandma had found a board to knock on that would make the sound travel, and so was doing it to drive poor Pop up the wall. Whether this was true or not, I don't know. After my great grandfather died, the little grandma went back to her people, and the knocking was never heard again.
In later years, Mom and Pop H. would buy little houses to refurbish for resale. She was always quite independent, she used to say that she was as independent as a hog on ice. After Pop died, she eventually had a gentleman friend, but said she was too old to get married again. So he had to be satisfied with the front bedroom.
At ninety, she was outside painting her house when the noonday sun overcame her. She came to, put the lid on the paint can, dragged herself inside, stopped by the telephone to call her older brother, and went to bed. E. was on one of his trips to his daughters'. When I called her and she told me what had happened, and I asked her if she didn't think that she needed to call the doctor, she said that he was out of town, and besides all he'd want to do would be to put her in the hospital, and she had never been in a hospital in her life, and wasn't about to start now!
One evening, when she and E. were resting in their rockers, she opened her eyes, and remarked, "Oh, I must have dozed off." Then she closed them again, and passed away. She was 94.
I brought home the old oak swing that had been on her porch up on the hill, and enjoyed it for many years. When it finally gave out from the weather, I used some of the boards to make country signs, so I have parts of the swing all around me still.
Happy Birthday, Mom Hughes. I hope you have all the gardens that you could possibly want, and no weeding.
