File under "Life Goes On"

 I dropped Emily for band camp this morning, to the only people she trusts, her peers.

On consideration, of course.

Five homes in fifteen years, five different sets of care givers.

Ignored by the brother she adores and struggled so hard to get here.

He has not contacted her in two months, in spite of the fact,

to quote a gleeful Emily to an old friend, two years ago,

"They were stupid enough to give us computers and phones."

She's so smart, she carries over a four point average.

Yet she seems uninterested in researching colleges that might interest her, and scholarships.

In two years these people will be gone, too

Big decisions between now and then.

My thoughts this morning, while hanging my laundry. It looks lovely, in a gentle breeze under blue skies, the awful clouds above cleared away. Tomorrow a service for Walt. Dear Mark, who has soldiered through this first test of life, death of a parent, with grace, said simply "I can't talk about him in front of a lot of people." 

I asked an older relative to speak about my mother, and now I'm the last one standing. I wrote out many index cards. Mark read them and even laughed several times.  Jan thinks it may not be long enough; I'll take questions from the audience.

There was a severe storm over night. I took a trip through the garden this morning.

The new rose on the trellis. A kind of multiflora, grows up to six feet tall.

It lost some petals in the storm, but not many. It's fairly protected.

A toad who waited patiently. We disturbed his home to plant the rose yesterday,

but he nimbly hopped aside.

The phlox lost a lot of petals.

 The rain seems to have beat through the petals of some flowers.

You all have given me this flower's name before. I hope to hear it again.

Funny, I managed to recover all my nouns after the stroke,

but I struggle with the ones I never knew.

Another one whose name I've been told. Maybe this time it will stick.

I was after the bumble bee, but they are in and out of these flowers so fast!

See him there a little left of center.

Petals from the purple flower were knocked down last night,

And the balloon flower has many petals made seer.

School starts in three weeks. Life goes on.

The old cornmudgin left us

Our brother, Walt, left us this week. A bit of a surprise and not. He’s been in the hospital since Memorial Day weekend, and was working at physical therapy and coming home. One morning he told Mark he was just going to take a nap.

“OK, Dad. See you this afternoon.” But Walt left before lunch. I think he went off looking for better advice on the model airplane wing he was drafting.

Above all we are proud of his sons, who cherished and cared for him. What better legacy than loving children?

From one old soldier to another;

Tom lowered the flag

to honor Walt.

We worked hard for this

The best thing about the front garden is how nice it looks from the street.

Our neighbor down the hill in the big house wondered if Emily and Laura might do yard work

That was good for a chuckle. 

Child labor still requires direct adult supervision.

One big garden is enough; there is plenty to do this summer.

Here's a look around at the last two weeks; not in chronological order.

Aunt Laura's iris. This little bed is past its prime, now.

Dad's oriental poppies and Jan's clematis. After two years I may have nursed the clematis back to life.

The peonies. 

Nina's pinks have doubled over these two summers. 

Stella de oro. This bed of bee and butterfly plants is just coming into its own this year.

Solomon's seal and more butterfly plants. The allium in the back is done, and this peony outdid itself this year. This fall it will move back and further down. Better balance.

I bought three very expensive bearded iris last fall. There was a bed of iris in the yard when I was very young and I liked them. These may grown on me. This light purple is too light.

The dark purple too dark. The third iris has no buds.

 The hanging basket I nailed!

The hanging basket I almost nailed. I do like the nasturtiums. 

The hanging basket I'm still fiddling with. I could have bought two ready made for the price of the bedding plants.

That August lily in the triangle just came from Mark's house. Jan spotted his beds of them when she took over some of Aunt Laura's iris to plant at his house.

We had a huge August lily at my childhood home that my dad's mother gave my parents. The cutting we took did not survive the drought of 1988, when we moved here.

And look! On my way back up the steps, the step daisy has new flowers coming. Yay!

One thing and another

When I was a young our house was cleaned every stinking Saturday.  I remember every Saturday of my childhood and know I scrubbed the upstairs floors and cleaned the bathroom every stinking Saturday.

Of course I grew up and eventually appreciated the value of organization over chaos.  My daughters and I cleaned every Saturday morning.  We could be done by noon and free to enjoy anything else planned for the day. 

We may have finished so quickly because the girls’ rooms were bypassed, except for vacuuming.  One time, while we were on vacation, our house was robbed.  The girls’ piggy banks were smashed on their bedroom floors.  The police remarked on the ransacking of their rooms. Except for piggy bank shards on the floor, that’s how they left them.

Cleaning this house has never come to the top of any list.  No excuses, but as if Mom, Jan and I were cleaned out.  We had Mark in the beginning, and he is a neat freak, so we could rely on him to sweep any particle up from any floor, and find an inconspicuous place for things he didn’t like to see. But he went off into the world to become a citizen and left us to dust bunnies of several cats and dogs.

We engaged cleaning people.  Some good, some not.  My friend Carol told me one is always looking for the next cleaning person.  She does know; she has twice the house and so many collections her cleaning ladies spend a day. We had cleaning ladies, too, right up to the time we decided we needed kids

.

I call them Child Help, Grandma’s Sole Proprietorship. They do a fine job.  Their rooms are never included in the schedule and the grown-ups take care of their rooms, so the job can’t be that onerous. Some weeks we give it a lick and a promise and some weeks we do a real job.

But, one thing and another, we have done nothing except keep the kitchen clean for several weeks.  And tomorrow is the big family Memorial Day picnic, before Hazel and Tony go home.  As soon as my proprietary cleaners come home from school we will tuck in and get it done.  We could be done before supper. 

There may be pictures of grandchildren scrubbing floors on hands and knees.  Nothing makes my seventy year old knees feel better.

Awaiting Hazel and Tony

Hazel and Tony are coming to visit next week.  They’ll be here nearly a month.  Hazel has visited several times since Bill’s death, but not since she and Tony married.  Not for want of trying.  Tony had some health setbacks shortly after he and Hazel married.  He’s finally cleared to travel.

None of us get any younger, either.  I wonder if Hazel’s hair is as white as Walt’s, my brother to whom she once was married.  It may still be black.  I’m getting excited.

We are out of beds at our house; they will be staying with her youngest, Mark.  Walt lives there, too.  Jan teased him she hoped Hazel could put up with him.  Walt retorted “Can she put up with me?”  We know which way it will be.

The traditional Memorial Day picnic, featuring shish kebob and lots of company will be held early, in honor of their visit.  That was Walt’s idea, resoundingly seconded by Hazel when Jan asked if Tony would enjoy it. 

 

Tony’s  two requests are to see a baseball game and go bowling. Tom and Mark will handle those details. Hazel will keep Tony busy, I’m sure. Hazel loves to shop.  She holds an international driver’s license and knows how to use it.

They arrive Tuesday afternoon and Hazel has us all lined up to go to her favorite smorgasbord restaurant for supper.  In spite of our recent troubles with air traffic controllers, I doubt Hazel’s plane will be late. 

Crossword competition

Aunt Laura worked the crossword puzzle every morning, after breakfast.  It took her one cup of coffee percolated on the stove top and two Lucky Strikes Monday through Wednesday.  The rest of the week took another cup of coffee and maybe another cigarette before she folded up the completed work and put her pen away.

Aunt Laura was the sister closest in age to our Dad, and his favorite.  She absorbed the same childhood knocks of abandonment as her two older brothers, and survived with the same tough spirit of getting on.  Unlike Dad’s other two sisters, Aunt Laura held our Mom at a slight distance.

 

Mom exuded a kind of family glue that kept all her sisters-in-law connected.  The others were more humble, and accepted everything about Mom.  But Aunt Laura was a little wary.  There was a kind of unspoken rivalry concerning everything they had in common, from quilting to crossword puzzles.

Each of them produced delicate, beautiful needlework; each pieced and quilted exquisite quilts.  But for Mom there was always an undercurrent of competition and nowhere more than the daily crossword puzzle.

Now, they lived twenty five miles apart, so it’s not like Mom could nip next door and see if Aunt Laura had finished the crossword.  But Mom visited around among her sisters-in-law often and two or three times a month she could see the folded paper on the corner of the table, the finished crossword exposed.  Well before lunch.

Back in her home Mom had the very same Akron Beacon Journal crossword to complete.  The puzzles were less difficult at the beginning of the week, but the difficulty ramped up as the days went on.  Mom had a dictionary to check her spelling, a thesaurus to find words and a couple of books that claimed to contain every crossword word in the universe. 

These well thumbed books found their home here when we set up housekeeping in 1988.  Mom still visited her sisters-in-law, and still fretted that Laura would be having no problem with the day’s puzzle.  It was her challenge to herself to keep up.  She was the sister-in-law still driving and travelling, still sewing, who had learned to weave, but who must still compete and hope to do the crossword as quickly, completely and accurately as her sister-in-law.

In the six years between Aunt Laura’s death in 1991 and Mom’s in ‘97, our mother never gave up her daily crossword puzzle.  Perhaps the competition would continue in the hereafter!  She certainly kept it alive in the here and now.  To celebrate Mom’s quiet competition, Jan, Beth and Mark completed the Sunday crossword and slipped it into the casket for Mom to show to Aunt Laura.  It took them all day.  They not only sent her off with the crossword; they gave her a pencil and her tea cup, too. She spent way too many minutes each day looking for the cup and they wanted her to know where it was.

Jan and Tom, Mom, Mark, Me

Christmas 1988

Beth, who must be the photographer above

The way back from Camp Fitch

Cousin Camp, as my daughters call our house in the summer, did not originate with us.  Just carrying on an old family tradition, as some song goes.  Mom had six grandchildren, three of whom lived across the street and dropped in for a drink of water at grandma’s as often as at home.  The other three, my two girls and my niece, came for summers. This pensione arrangement was punctuated by other activities closer to their homes for the three girls. 

Our Lake County Y was my other resource. The big diversion for a couple of years was a week at Camp Fitch, a Y camp in western Pennsylvania, and about an hour east from the house in Mentor, straight out Interstate 90, then a few back roads to the camp.  I dropped them at the lodge on a Sunday afternoon and retrieved them the following Saturday afternoon.

Mom,  my brother Walt and his three boys were visiting one Saturday when it was time to get the girls.  So we all piled into my car, the Dodge Colt wagon, to go to Camp Fitch.  It was possible to fit five children and three adults inside that car, in a configuration that would have all adults imprisoned today.  They were kids; they didn’t know they shouldn’t like sitting cross legged in the back, playing cards for an hour, and signaling passing semi’s to blow the horn.

When the girls were stowed and we were heading out the camp gates, Mom, the queen of alternate routes, told Walt, the driver, take this road and that, not that road and this. We could drive home a short part of the way along US Route 20, right along Lake Erie.

Of course she had an ulterior motive.  In Conneaut, all of five miles from the camp, she told Walt “Pull in at that Dairy Queen®.”  She treated to ice cream all around; five kids and three adults, with ice creams, settled back for the rest of the trip. Walt headed west again, down US 20.  He saw the Dairy Queen® in Ashtabula first, pulled right in and filled up on ice cream again. 

 Five kids hoped they really were in ice cream heaven as we continued down the road. Oh, the speculation.  As we approached Geneva ten eyes were scanning the horizon.  “There it is, Dad!” “It’s just at the next light, Uncle Walt!”  Another Dairy Queen®.  Another round of ice cream.

I’m sure the grown-ups dropped out, but those five kids were up for it.  They found the Dairy Queen® in Painesville, and of course my two knew exactly how to get Uncle Walt to the Dairy Queen® in their home town.

The Great Dairy Queen® run became legend in our family.  All those kids in the Dodge Colt thought Uncle Walt was the hero.  I wonder if they remember Grandma Lytle started it.

Here is most of the gang, a year or two before the JGreat Dairy QueenJ Run.  Walt’s boys, my girls.  Roy, Beth, Grandma Lytle, Shelly, John, and Mark on Mom’s lap. I know this is early; Mark is too young to eat that much ice cream.  I think.

Mom's brick fund

We bought this house in 1988, when Jan and I started a business and needed one studio.  We moved in stages; it’s a nice house that needed a total redo.  I moved here in June and lived in the construction dust. For a time I even climbed a ladder to the second floor bathroom.  Mom and Mark moved in September, in time for Mark to start school.  Jan and Tom came in October.

I had a deck built the length of the back of the house, with a door from the kitchen that had been a window.  The deck is fifteen feet wide and about forty five feet long.  It’s on the north side of the house, facing a little back lawn and the woods.  Very shady.

Mom and I had an exchange or two about the deck; she thought I was making it far too long.  She even countermanded my contractor; I came back one day to find he was building a twenty foot deck, on Mom’s instructions, as forty five was too expensive and far more than “she needs”.  I’m sure moms are moms the universe through and through.  I reminded the contractor who would be writing the all checks; end of problem. 

Not ready for prime time, spring 1989 on the deck.  Aunt Flo (married to Uncle Hank) concerned, Mom coughing, Beth smiling, me not, Jan hiding, Shelly blinking

Over its length the deck is five to eight feet above ground level, depending on the slope of the hill.  That fall mom told me the ground under the deck needed attention or it would become a mud pit, as the north side received little sunshine, not to mention all those trees.  “What do you think I should do?”

“Well, I’ve started saving to have it paved with bricks,” she said, with slightly tight lips, as she set about rescuing me.  “That will be nice,” I replied.

In the spring a load of brick was dumped in the front drive.  “You can start laying brick now.”

Neither Tom, Jan nor I knew a lick about brick.  “I’ll show you how to do it.”

We all trouped around back, Mom with her cane as she was only a few months from being sprung from a wheel chair for an injury involving telling Dutch, a young Doberman she had on a leash, “Let’s go home.”  Dutch took her down three stairs and over a motorcycle on the way. 

We started in the small section under the stairs, putting bricks wherever mom pointed her cane.  She was not pleased and dismissed us:  “I’ll teach Mark how to do this.”

So, an old lady taught her sixteen year old grandson to lay a basic basket weave pattern in brick.  They did a fine job and we had the best brick pavement under an overhead deck in all of Summit County.  Sadly, my brother and brother-in-law contrived to store every piece of manly junk they could hoard there, out of sight of the neighbors, until the bricks were inaccessible to any ray of sunshine.  Some ultimatums produced a dumpster this summer and it is now fairly cleared out.  It won’t look like it did twenty years ago, but maybe I can get some grandkids working on it next year.

Mom’s brick fund didn’t end there.  Over the nine years she was here we’d hear “We need new gravel in the drive.  There’s enough money in the brick fund.”  “Let me pay for (something we needed to buy).  There’s enough money in the brick fund.”   A year or two after she was gone Mark got into some wrong place, wrong time scrape and spent the night in jail.   In the morning I bailed him out with the last of Grandma’s brick fund.  She probably would have known a bail bondsman at midnight and had him out at 12:01, but I did the best I could.