We’ve had a lot of rain. Last Sunday set a new rainfall record for the date. And I hate to complain (and, really, I’m not complaining), because we just came through a pretty dry summer. After a really wet spring. Which led to problems with growing things. And, says the exterminator, an increase in vermin. But the much, much larger problem is this: we’ve not been able to do things with Peter that we’ve wanted to do.
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I have a lot of doctors. A few, like the gastroenterologist and the cardiologist, are specialty guys that I only see for special occasions, like the super-special colonoscopy, and that sort of thing. Others, I see often enough that I ought to be sending them Christmas cards. There’s:
my Primary Care Physician (at least twice a year)
my Ophthalmologist (every 4 to 6 months)
my Retina Specialist (also every 4 to 6 months)
my Dentist (um, I really need to make an appointment)
the kidney guys (every 3 to 6 months)
and, my Podiatrist (every 3 to 6 months, unless …) And we have had a recent “unless.”
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I’ve mentioned before that my mother sewed for us. Some of that sewing was for Halloween.
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I was driving home a week or so ago, and I noticed some Halloween decorations in a yard in the next street over from us. I smiled to see several happy Jack-o-Lanterns on the lawn. They were created by using decorative trash bags that some company makes so people can fill the bags with the leaves from their trees, and have a low-cost source of holiday happiness that they can easily get rid of by dumping the leaves into their compost or their green recycling bins (or maybe putting them in the actual trash, but let’s don’t go there). I drove around the block and looked at them again. And I wondered, “Where’d they get the leaves to fill up those bags?”
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I was listening to a speaker (I think on PBS Ted Radio Hour) who was talking about a little girl, decades ago, who could not sit still in her chair at school. A specialist, after watching the child, from a distance, bounding and leaping and bouncing around his office, said to her mother, “She needs to move. Put her in dance class.” And the girl became a famous dancer and teacher of dance.
“It was before ADHD was invented,” the presenter said. “Before people knew they could have such a thing.”
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I got a text, with photo, from April last week. It was charming, and cute, and humorous, and, quite honestly, a little bit frightening. Peter is on their back porch, playing in a large pan of damp sand. Here’s the picture and the message:
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This just in from Waco, Texas. Long-time resident, Gayle Lintz, reports that, Tuesday, late afternoon, she went to her kitchen to prepare a dinner-time meal for her husband.
“I was planning to attend my Knitting Group’s meeting at 5:00. I opened the freezer section of my refrigerator and reached in for a frozen chicken breast to heat up for him to eat when he got home. My hand touched a freezer-weight zip-locking bag of previously sauteed onions and peppers. It was soft. Next to that was a bag that held some leftover spaghetti in marinara sauce that had unexpectedly begun to smell, far sooner than it should have. My husband had bagged it up and put it in the freezer until trash day. (It smelled that bad). It was absolutely squishy. Homemade popsicles that I had made for my grandson had turned back into apple juice.”
The ice maker with the ho-hum, maybe I will, maybe I won’t attitude
Mrs. Lintz says that, a couple of weeks earlier, the ice maker had stopped making ice.
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I seem to forget, from year to year, how very long summer lasts here in Central Texas. It’s back to school time, and magazines are full of pictures of apples (for teachers) and footballs (games have already begun) and cool weather clothing (which, of course, family members will need, in another two months, WE HOPE!!).
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Who *wouldn’t* want to chat with somebody as cute as this! With such a darling hat!!
I confessed to a class once, when I was teaching Child Development courses at our community college, that I can’t help myself; I talk to little kids at the grocery store. I will talk to them anywhere, but the grocery store provides more opportunities, as they are corralled in a seat in a cart. And, while their nearby adult is putting groceries on the conveyor belt, I am pretty much face-to-face with them, and it just seems a little rude not to chat. I am careful to keep my distance, and I never reach out or touch them.
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A friend at the knitting group meeting, a couple of weeks ago, asked what the Tall Painting from Fun with Friends looked like, when it was all finished. “Oh,” I said. “I should do a follow-up. Like The Rest of the Story.”
She looked a little confused. So I explained (because she is somewhat younger than I am, and I couldn’t remember how many years earlier Paul Harvey had been on the radio). “There used to be a radio commentator, named Paul Harvey. And he would share news items, and sometimes, he’d talk about the first part, and then, after a commercial break, he’d say, ‘And now: The Rest of the Story.’ He was kind of a folksy guy. Like Garrison Keillor, on ‘Prairie Home Companion?” And I began to wonder if anything I was saying made any sense.
“I didn’t grow up in this country,” she reminded me. Oh, yeah. Well, she’s at least heard of Garrison Keillor.
Anyway, here’s some catching up, filling in, and more story:
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