The people vs. winter

I knew it was going to snow yesterday. My BFF was coming for our standing breakfast date at the local diner. But Monday I had a text, bad storm starting at 3 a.m. through noon. We rescheduled for Friday. We’ve talked about making Friday our standing day; Pam, the owner of the diner, makes cinnamon rolls that day. You must call ahead and reserve your rolls, but Carol will do that.

Pam keeps a saucepan of homemade caramel sauce if you want it. I don’t; too much sugar for me. However, soon she will be making hot cross buns, and those two lovely stripes will go down nicely. When I was very small, my grandmother and I would ride the trolley to Hough Bakery and come home with the box, tied with red and white string, of hot cross buns.

We had one minor snowstorm this season, and my road was not its usual pristine self when I went to work in the morning. I teased the new road super, when would he get to my road? He said he had salted twice, and when the snow eased on out he’d go back and plow them all. And he did. Not the sort of attention I was used to, but the road indeed was passable.

My drive begins half way up the last hill; it’s a sharp left onto the road. They never plow our apron onto the road because our apron is concrete, not asphalt as indicated in our zoning regulations. When we built that drive in 1988 we didn’t know zoning regulations. We just forged on. 

Municipal plows do not have pads under the blades to protect concrete, so our apron generally was not cleared. The last two winters the road super took pity on me and lowered the snow so I could get out. “Paycheck protection,” Tim called it. Perhaps I will mention it to the new guy, later on.

Tuesday morning was thickly white. I’m still armpit deep in all the details that will make the rest of my township year easy, so I needed get in. The drive was deep enough in snow to grab my tires, but I kept on, slow and easy through the stuff on the apron, slow and easy onto the road, slow and easy up the hill to the level. I am so glad I do not live at the bottom of my road. Every one down there knows when to go back in, and wait to be cleared.

The county road was no cleaner than mine, and Virginia Kendall, down into the valley, was most unkempt of all. I went straight on, to state route 303. Surely the state route into the valley would be pretty clean at nine a.m.; in spite of the fast falling snow.

And, it was not. In defense of snow plow teams, it was snowing heavily. On the other hand, clearing the roads is what we pay for. I made a slow and easy left turn, straightened up and began heading down. Not two hundred feet along, a police car was marking the descent of a car into the shallow ravine, burying itself completely in the bushes.

That’s one greenhorn driver, I mused, and kept on driving.

Interesting encounter

Before the federal government turned all grant seeking and giving over to the internet, there were actual federal employees involved. One of these was a ranger in my own national park, the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. My township once received grants to help maintain the roads that millions drive on. A lot of paperwork was involved, but I did it, and submitted it to Washington.

All went well until Washington began the big migration to internet platform. Now forms were submitted to regional offices where chaos reigned. I raged at the park super, “I cannot get these grants paid and my township has already put out the money!” Someone called me one day and said, “Hello, I’m Dee. John told me to help all the municipalities that get grants keep the money flowing while the process is changing.”

Dee had a deep voice; sometimes I wondered if she was really a man.  As in D. Not a question one asks. Dee indeed kept the wheels of government greased. We became phone friends. I knew her mother was not in good health, she knew about my granddaughters arriving. She was a good friend to Tim, the road super, too. Tim initiated a lot of the grants; I got them paid.

Tim had met Dee; she worked a couple miles down the road from us. Dee was a park ranger whose area of expertise was natural infrastructure; making sure streams ran downhill, I guess. She had been given this paperwork job in addition, and was very gracious in carrying out the assignment.

One day Tim came in my office, said “This is Dee,” and left. The tiniest elf of a woman, in a ranger uniform, ranger hat and hip holster, came in. Dee’s voice came right out of her mouth. We connected at once. She sat and chatted a bit, then went back to work; she had a project going over at Stumpy Basin.

We agreed it was nice to have put a face to the voice and the person, and so life went on. Then there was Hurricane Sandy that damaged the east coast so severely. I called her office and got a recording that she was gone to assist on the east coast. I called the park superintendent, “You can’t send her; she’s too little to do anything!” He laughed and said she would be fine.

I was waiting one Saturday morning for a gallery in town to open. Someone joined the line behind me; I glanced over my shoulder and saw Dee. I whirled around and almost hugged her, but grabbed her hands, instead. It was great to see her back, and all in one piece. Dee introduced me to the woman she was with. John, the park super, had told her I gave him heck for sending her to the coast, and I said all I could visualize was her dealing with looters, or giant waves.

Both women laughed, and Dee said she had gone to be a driver of people who needed to get around. Destruction or no, she’d enjoyed every minute. She drove people all over New York City, and even saw the Statue of Liberty for the first time. No looters, no waves, though plenty of destruction.

The next year was Dee’s last. She had worked for the park since high school; she was thirty years and out. We went to lunch fairly often over that last year. She had plans very like her Hurricane Sandy plans; she was applying for a federal job that would send her places that needed help with anything from paperwork to disasters. It was an on call job that would utilize her areas of expertise.

Dee lives within about five miles of me, in a darling little house with a picket fence. I believe she lives there with the woman she introduced me to. We agreed the friendship could not end; we would be in touch and catch up over lunches, as we had done for the last two years.

And, that was the end. I did see her on the sidewalk once; the conversation was short, she had to keep walking the dog. I called twice and left messages about lunch, but never heard back.  I pass her street three or four times a week, taxi service for my granddaughters. I see her car occasionally, and she knows mine, which she called the red bullet. She never waved back. The end.

I wrote this for Tom Stephenson, who mused this morning about expectation and friendship. I concluded from knowing Dee, it began as the same sort of friendship one makes at twenty or thirty; you share a lot of personal information. I think this one could not develop further because it might require examining more baggage, and people can have a cart of baggage when they are almost fifty and almost seventy, as we were then.

A U.S. Park Ranger, like Dee

A good day yesterday

I went to lunch with Beth and Ruth yesterday. We had a very nice server, who took good care of Ruth and me while we waited for Beth.  I screwed up my rudeness courage, told the server I liked her haircut and could I take a picture to show my granddaughter. She went down to camera level for the front, then the back, and told us in cosmetology terminology exactly how the cut is made. That was over my head.

She is growing out the same basic cut as Emily has, and this is its current iteration. After school I showed it to Emily, who needs a haircut. Emily would leave the long side a bit longer, but have the back cut identically. However, she is waiting for the teal to fade more so she can have it dyed purple (I think). I like the cut so much I’ll do it myself, next trip to the barber.

It’s only a week since the holidays ended, a week back to school and work. I try very hard to focus on the good and bright spots of being an old grandma in charge of two abandoned girls, and work on the hard spots in the background. Offstage. The second semester of the school year began Monday. It is going well for Emily; so well she has almost left us in spirit and is waiting for her body to transport to college, too.

I asked her jokingly if she has selected her roommate yet, and learned she is about to open that module of the Hiram website. I saw all this happening in my mind’s eye last fall. Band uniforms had to go to the cleaner after the last football game, and the dry cleaner receipt turned in. Seniors, however, had to turn in the uniform, too. I asked about the Memorial Day parade. “I won’t be marching in that!” replied the young woman who has lived and breathed marching band since I dropped her off for camp, four years ago.

But I can see the sadness index rising for Laura. She was ten when she landed here, a hardened little soul with no father, an absentee mother, the tail end of a string of siblings not much interested. I didn’t help a lot in the beginning. I treated Emily and Laura as a unit, sending them to the same summer and after school activities. Emily, of course, flourished and Laura tagged along. My great epiphany a couple of years ago sent Laura off on her own, to drama and art classes. She had the courage to try for and be accepted as a sixth grader to the jazz band.

Laura’s her own person now, with long hair of many colors, thanks to her art box of felt markers. She wears tall boots and denim jackets, and hasn’t resolved losing her first, false “boyfriend” last summer. Her father showed up for the first time in a year at Christmas and her sister is leaving in a few months. It’s tough to be fourteen. Her sad little face has come home no happier all week, and no changing it.

I climbed the many steps to Mrs. P’s art studio yesterday to fetch Laura, rounded the corner and heard peals of laughter from the studio. Mrs. P. hurried out. “I have to block you right here, while Laura finishes up. It’s a secret.” Mrs. P is half my size, and I laughed out loud. Laura came out laughing, and I got a hug. Next class is the big reveal of the fashion project they have worked on since summer. Emily and Aunt Janice are invited, too.

Laura’s Christmas blues are not banished, but they are lifting. Regular routine is a good thing, Mrs. P and her art class one of my salvations. We will work harder at happy these next several months; Emily will only be a phone call away, Laura will go to marching band camp in August and we’ll see what she thinks of being the only child.

There are no paper report cards during the year; the electronic cards were released yesterday. No matter the other issues in their lives, both these girls stay focused at school. Perhaps it’s the best constant in their lives. Each made the honor roll, with distinction. And Laura aces gym, now. It’s a long time since fifth grade, when she failed gym because she wouldn’t do push-ups.

Laura - A in gym

Emily

Working nine to five; what a way to make a living…

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Only three days into the first working week of the new year, and I’m exhausted. I have a self imposed goal of closing last year and opening this by week’s end. The alternative is to have two years open at once, and in twelve years I cannot bring myself to do it. Government accounting is too complex and my brain too fossilized. I make neat piles and dispose of them systematically and am done. I cannot worry about two years at once.

The program turns red X’s into green check marks as the close progresses. I was down to one red X yesterday, struggling through the warning on the screen that I was in in statutory violation of some important thing and could not continue until I cleared the refund I made to the road super of the health insurance I over deducted. 

I struggled with the fine print for an hour and by luck and tinkering found I could make a negative allocation of the amount back to the payroll account and hey, presto, the green light came on. Good enough for the government, as they say.

The clerk before me retired in his seventies, as I am now. I teased him he didn’t want to deal with CCR registration on-line. That’s Central Contractor Registration, not Credence Clearwater. CCR was the original platform for awarding government grants. It has morphed into the colossus that includes IPP and SAM, which I must use to obtain government funds.

I told a completely disinterested trustee recently that state government is pushing on us to file our accounting records in GASBE or GAAP format. It would mean mapping all our accounting records to look like, at year’s end, some general accounting formats prescribed by the National Accounting Standards Board. Still not the real thing, but on the road to uniform records from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

To that I say baloney; that’s why we pay the auditors, and we must pay them anyway. This year I had to pick whether I was filing one of the G’s, or my old friend, Regulatory. Next to Regulatory was a note, Not Recommended. Sez you; and I filed Regulatory. The year I don’t have a Regulatory choice will be my CCR year. End of my term or no, I’m outta there.

Add physical therapy and fetching children from appointments and I am beat. This afternoon I took a nap, waiting for Laura to come out from jazz band practice. Tomorrow she has art after school.

At lunch time today I rearranged the stock left at the gallery.  We changed the display to feature two right angle sections, and I think it all looks much more accessible.  I put everything on nice coat hangers today, put a scarf through one of the grids, and went back to work.

I need to weave this weekend!

Reverie

This morning I set myself the mind boggling task of filling in the 2016 township calendar on the website. Before I started on the calendar, I put up a picture of the road super, retired after thirty three years. I found the perfect picture, don’t you think. 

Trustee and zoning meetings on the calendar are fairly straightforward, but when I get to brush and leaf pick-up, I boggle, my mind and my eyes wander. I looked up at a picture that has been on my wall for twenty years. Everything in this house is old, me not the least among the detritus.

I love that picture, Stalking the Wild Yarn. My friend Nina presented it to me one winter, the seasons I set up shop in her antique gallery and waited for the spring to arrive.  Below that, exhibitor buttons I accumulated over the years at the big fall show in Louisville, St. James Court Art Show.

I loved that show, and never did it alone. I always took Ann or Beth, or both, who did more than help set up, tear down and sell. Both of them could keep the map of Louisville in their head and knew how to get to the restaurant and the motel, even if we were lost.

Did you wonder about the ostrich head? The speech bubble says “They’re how much?” Linda came across that, an ad for a long forgotten product. She presented it to me shortly after we both exhibited at the Letchworth Park fall show. It’s actually a fall color weekend event; the exhibitors are an afterthought; the sort of show where artists stand outside their booths and declare to the sky “God strike me dead if I ever do this show again.”

I was behind my booth on a smoke break and walked back to the front past one of the millions examining the jacket from hell and saying to the world, “They’re how much!?” “They're obviously made of solid gold, you fool,” I said on my way by. From the other side of the sidewalk Linda’s husband Dick looked up from their booth, crossed, patted my back and said “Take a break, Joanne.” So I went and looked at leaves for fifteen minutes.

The postcard came from Laura, in the mail, more than ten years ago. The front door picture—Nina, again. She set herself the project of photographing every front door in Boston. They are famous in the community, and displayed at most events. That’s Angus, the best Cairn terrier who ever lived, looking out the front door. The only Boston door with a dog, Nina said.

You all know Toby, the spoiled cat. Good lord, how much stuff can I accumulate? Back to the cat and the yarn and suddenly I saw the dust. All of it. I dusted down the wall and went back to work.