August Wrap Up

               I can’t believe this month is nearly over!  It turned out to be fairly eventful what with one thing and another happening. Hillary started back to her day program in the beginning of the month and she couldn’t be happier about being able to spend time with the staff, even though they are new to her and she to them and her peers for a few hours every day.  Of course, there had to be paperwork to be filled out by her doctor before she could go so I was busy with making the appointment and filling out forms and making phone calls but all was accomplished in less than 2 weeks so I thought that was good, all things considered.  For now I am her transportation which keeps me on somewhat of a schedule so that’s not a bad thing.  The down side is that if my van is out of commission she can’t go which is the case today.  Hopefully it will be repaired and we’ll have it back before Monday.  Fingers crossed!  We took a little road trip to stay with my husband’s family for a reunion weekend.  It turned out nice, but the drive up was not.  First the traffic came to a sudden stop on a highway and we were in the left most lane when I saw an 18 wheeler passing us on the median very close to all the vehicles.  My husband was driving and he said the truck had been about 6 cars back and was going too fast to stop so thank goodness the driver had the sense to use the median to avoid hitting anyone in what would surely have been a tragic accident!  Shortly after that, traffic resumed and we saw that the reason it had stopped was because someone broke down on the right shoulder and a tow truck was there with blinking lights which I suppose caused people to want to look.  I never understand why traffic comes to a screeching halt when something is happening on the shoulder but I guess that’s just the way we humans are—curious!  So a couple miles after that there was suddenly the deafening sound of 20 motorcycles except there were not motorcycles or trucks near us.  It was us!  Something to do with the muffler/exhaust system broke, and we were miles from an exit.  Frantically I googled car repair shops in the area where we were, and after asking at a rest stop and then at an information center at the end of an exit ramp we wound our way through a village or two   (sounding like a jet plane by now) to a muffler repair chain.  There we spent 6 hours, on arguably one of the hottest, most oppressive days of the year in their little waiting/office area with 2 local gentlemen who had their cars in for service, and an assortment of other locals there for inspection, and one for a flat tire.  As our van was up on the lift in a service bay, we had no access to the snacks or drinks we brought for the 4 hour drive we expected, so my husband walked to a little shop maybe ½ mile away and brought back cheese doodles and bottled water.  It was the most delicious bag of doodles and water I ever had!  We were thankful that we had an air-conditioned place to wait and a clean restroom to use. The people were very nice, the girl running the office was very nice and adept at calming people upset about not having any appointments available that day or because their service was taking too long.  The most interesting patron was a gray haired hippie and his companion, a well behaved little dog who he said belonged to his granddaughter originally.  The counter girl gave the dog a bowl of water, and the man made small talk with everyone there while he waited.  We were thankful that we had such pleasant company and not someone talking loudly on a cell phone the whole time.  Once we were back on the road, with the van patched enough to drive, the gps took us not back to the superhighway, but along roads through the countryside which was pleasant.  By the time we stopped for dinner there were thunder clouds overhead and the rain began while we were wolfing down our fish sandwiches in the car.  About an hour later we were safe in the arms of family and they helped bring in our things.  It was still stifling hot and oppressive despite it being 9:00 pm and in the mountains, but the weather broke during the night and it was more bearable the next day, which was the day the cousins were coming for a cookout. It was a sunny and breezy day marked by hugs, laughter and chatter, rides on an ATV to see the property, (the host lives on 74+ acres of forest), my husband played the bagpipes and those who didn’t leave after that stayed for a campfire and some fireworks shot off by members of the family.  It was a fun but exhausting long weekend away.  Sprinkled in among the rest of the days this month there were breakfasts and lunches out with my friends and family, a game day, and various projects I’ve kept busy with.  Yesterday the van decided it was time to have the permanent repair made and suddenly on my way home from a trip to Target I sounded like a jet plane again!  Thus the van is in the shop to be repaired and we are staying home for today.  It’s still oppressively hot and humid, but supposed to be better by the middle of next week, which is when September begins!

               If you looked at my calendar it doesn’t look like it was a busy month, but the calendar doesn’t tell the whole story.  At least it went fast—time flies when you’re busy! 

                                                            clematis

                                                            busy bee!

                                         ready for sunset and campfire!

Campfire!
  

July Days

 

                July flew by, and it was more eventful than I expected and am used to.  Last July not much was going on, no indoor or large gatherings and staying home to avoid catching the virus made for a string of lazy summer days spent blowing bubbles, reading, and keeping in touch via texts except for a few times friends or family stopped over to visit on the patio sharing coffee.  This year was different, the weather has not been as pleasant, and more days were spent inside with the air conditioning than out in the hot humid air.  With my family all being vaccinated we are able to gather inside, and we have.  Our most notable time together was my Christmas in July cookie exchange.

               It was arguably the hottest, muggiest week of the summer leading up to the big day, and it may sound crazy, but I baked 2 kinds of cookies, as did my sister in law and niece together.  It’s challenging getting my dough right in such weather conditions because even though I have the air conditioning, it affected the texture of my dough.  Lemon cookie cutouts became lemon drop cookies because in spite of refrigerating the dough for 24 hours it remained too soft and sticky to work with.  So I still decorated them with red and green sugar and they were just as tasty, unexpectedly puffy and crisper than I expected.  They were delicious with iced tea and had a very light lemony flavor.  My other batch was eggnog walnut oatmeal cookies.  They are a drop cookie but again the dough was very sticky despite refrigerating it for a few hours.  They were crispy and flat, and very tasty with a slight spicy flavor reminiscent of eggnog and delicious with iced coffee.  We also did a Christmas craft making fans with last year’s Christmas cards.  It was simple to do, (my guests dubbed it a Kindergarten craft), but fun and useful if one is too warm.  They can be hung on the Christmas tree as an ornament or be used to embellish a gift.  Then we did Christmas Mad Libs for a while before ordering pizza to munch.  While we ladies were busy tasting all the cookies and drinking iced coffee and iced tea and making our fans, my husband and brother went shopping at a new hardware store they’d been dying to check out.  We saved them some cookies, of course!  All in all it was a really fun day and we ended it by donning our Santa or elf hats for a group photo.  I think this will be my favorite memory of the summer.

               Although we’re not really back to “normal”, (whatever THAT is), we’re doing more than we did last summer with others and it feels good.  I don’t think things, at least for me, will ever be the way they were before everything shut down but it can still be good.  Maybe better in some ways, and different, which isn’t a bad thing.  It just might take some getting used to.

Of course there had to be a Christmas tree and some gifts!

                             The fans we made and the Mad Libs.  So much fun!

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Here are the two cookie recipes I used, in case now you feel like baking cookies!

 

Lemon Christmas Tree Cookies (5 dozen small)

1/3 cup soft butter           1 cup sugar

1 egg                                   2 cups sifted flour

½ teaspoon soda              ¼ teaspoon salt

1 Tablespoon lemon peel              3 Tablespoons lemon juice

Cream butter thoroughly.  Add sugar gradually, beating until fluffy.  Beat in egg, then add lemon peel. Sift together flour, soda, and salt. Add to creamed mixture alternately with lemon juice, mixing until smooth.  Divide dough in half and wrap in waxed paper. On lightly floured surface, roll out ½ of dough at a time to 1/8 inch thickness.  With floured cookie cutter, cut into desired shapes (I usually use a tiny Christmas tree cutter) and decorate with colored sugar, if desired. Place on lightly greased cookie sheet. Bake at 375* F for 10 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove from pan and cool on wire rack.

**When I made them drop cookies they were bigger and took a couple minutes longer to bake.  I got only about 2 ½ dozen.**

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Egg Nog Oatmeal Walnut Drop Cookies

1 cup all purpose flour          ½ teaspoon baking powder      ½ teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cinnamon           ½ teaspoon nutmeg                   ¼ cup shortening

¼ cup softened butter          ½ cup granulated sugar             1/3 cup packed brown sugar

1 egg                                        2 Tablespoons milk                    ½ teaspoon vanilla

1 cup quick cooking rolled oats                   ¼ cup chopped walnuts

Stir together flour, baking powder, baking soda, ¼ teaspoon salt and spices.  In mixer bowl beat shortening and butter for 30 seconds; add sugars and beat till fluffy.  Add egg, milk, and vanilla; beat well.  Add dry ingredients to beaten mixture, beating till well combined.  Stir in oats and walnuts.  Chill dough 2 hours; form 1 inch balls.  Dip tops of balls in additional granulated sugar or cinnamon sugar, if desired.  Place on an ungreased cookie sheet.  Bake in a  375*F oven for 10-12 minutes. Makes 36

Purple and White Clover

 

            One recent day I was out walking Hillary up and down the driveway, just to do something besides sit in the house, as our van was in for repairs so we couldn’t go anywhere.  It was a hot day, this being July, and I noticed that we have a lot of white clover growing wild all over the yard.  It reminded me of those slower paced days when my first daughter was nearly a year old and our summer days were spent with the little kiddie pool in the grass where she played and discovered the world, as toddlers do.  I remember watching the honeybees in the bright sun flying from clover to clover, collecting pollen while small white and yellow butterflies floated from flower to flower drinking the nectar they contained.  It’s a lovely memory of easier, happy days when my whole world was right there in my view, no matter what else may have been happening in the world at large. That was a serene time of life.

               When I was a kid our yard had white clover growing in it, too, and I remember making little chains from it, braiding the stems together to make bracelets and garlands to wear like a crown.  My mother said that you can eat clover, but it’s better to have the larger purple kind as it’s easier to pull the petals off and taste the sweet nectar inside them.  She was right!  They used to grow along a dirt road by our house that we always referred to (and still do) as the new road.  That road connected our street with the next one up a hill and was blocked off by phone poles lying across both ends as it wasn’t open for vehicles until the town paved it many years later.  On the sides of that road grew not just the purple clover, but Queen Anne’s lace, black eyed Susan, daisies and corn flower along with other weeds I can’t name.  We’d walk along that short stretch of road with the sun hot on our backs; gravel crunching under our feet whenever we walked to the grocery store or the post office.  Picking the Queen Anne’s lace on our way home and then putting them in little glasses with colored water was one of the best things to do, and exciting to check on them periodically all afternoon while the white flowers lined up on the kitchen windowsill changed to the color in the glass. I’m glad I had a mother who taught me about flowers and growing things.  Our yard had flower beds and a small vegetable patch where we grew radishes, carrots, scallions and leaf lettuce. It’s a nice feeling to grow some of your own food, we spent time together weeding and caring for the flowers and vegetables.  One year we planted marigold seeds in a sunny spot and that year we had monarch butterflies by the dozens, drawn there by the heady yellow blooms.

               It’s amazing how just noticing what is right in front of me can evoke so many pleasant memories.  It’s a little like time travel going back in my mind to things I have forgotten about.  I think it makes for a little bit of serenity in what is a stressful time for all.

The months of this year just seem to be flying by.  Each month brings a new beginning.

         I have no trellis for the clematis, it's just growing among the pachysandra.  Things got a little out of control this year!

Oh Summer!

 

               June is almost over and summer is in full swing.  We’ve had Father’s Day and my older daughter’s birthday and now we’re bearing down on the July 4<sup>th</sup> weekend which will likely be noisy with folks lighting off fireworks in the street and in their yards.  Lawn mowers, blowers, power washers and the sounds of road equipment mingle with the voices of children splashing in backyard pools and riding bikes in the heat of the day.  With the daily birdsong, chittering of squirrels and humming of insects flying busily from flower to flower and person to person, these are the elements of the song of summer.  Even the nights are full of sounds with peepers and tree toads, the soft swish of traffic on the highway, crunch of gravel under tires on the side street, and voices floating from patios and open windows as people relax after the heat of the day.

               When I was a kid summer meant days spent mostly outside from morning until bedtime.  Swinging, riding bikes, walking to a friend’s house or to the store with my mother, running through the sprinkler, or reading books for hours laying on a blanket in the shade are all things that filled the hot sunny days.  After dinner was for playing tag or hide and seek with my brothers and cousins, and sipping lemonade on the porch with my family as bugs swarmed around the yellow bulb in the porch light.  I remember one time when a huge bug landed right in the middle of my brother Dan’s belly and my mother said it was June bug, which is a type of very large beetle.  It was brown with shiny hard looking wings and was as large as my father’s thumbnail.  My brother screamed (as did I) and quickly brushed it off his yellow t-shirt.  We used to catch lightning bugs and put them in mayonnaise jars we had punched holes in the lid with nails and filled with some blades of grass and watch them light up the darkness like tiny lanterns later in our rooms.  Of course, if you made the air holes in the lid too big the bugs ended up on your ceiling or window screen because they just crawled out.  I don’t imagine my mother liked it very much when that happened, but I don’t remember her ever mentioning it.  I guess it just came with the territory of raising 4 kids, 3 of whom were boys and teaching them about nature.  Summer nights were filled with the sounds of my father watching TV, the whirring of the window fan, and the peepers’ high pitched singing broken up occasionally by the fire siren and howling dogs.  Our neighbor 2 doors down kept 3 or 4 hunting dogs and boy did they howl when the fire siren went off.  It was an eerie sound in the middle of the night that always gave me a hollow feeling inside.  It seems the summer is never quiet.

               As we move into July and then into August the sounds of summer change, acorns begin to fall from our oak tree onto the driveway and roof in July, crickets begin to sing and locusts and grasshoppers make themselves heard with their nonstop noise that sounds like thousands of tiny wooden beads being shaken together.  I marvel at the songs that nature sings, especially in summer.

Nature Calms

                                  Just a little bunny in the yard. So cute!

 

When I was a teenager I had a poster on the wall in my room of a beautiful woodland waterfall  that said “You will never be lonely if nature is with you”.  The picture reminded me of the time we spent as a family at Tillman’s Ravine exploring the forest on steamy summer weekend afternoons when I was younger.  It was a place my mother loved, with waterfalls, wood plank footbridges over streams, and little pools where lily pads grew and water bugs skittered across the top of the water.  The water was so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom and minnows swimming near the edge.  It was a cool and inviting place on a summer afternoon.  I still love being in a natural environment, and when I’m feeling stressed I often step outside for a few moments and listen to the birds chirping and the wind moving the trees, and gaze at the sky for an instant dose of calm.

               When I think about nature, I am amazed at how it all works.  Somehow it all fits together, and while it can be frightening at times, it’s never boring.  One of the more interesting things to see is the creatures that live around us.  There are plenty of birds and squirrels, there’s groundhogs and chipmunks, and rabbits.  Now and then there are deer in our yard and I’m pretty sure they are the reason I don’t get too many blooming lilies as they find them as well as the lily-like flowers on the hosta to be tasty.  One very early morning my husband went out the door to go to work and came face to face with a huge deer who was probably snacking on the nearby hosta flowers.  Even though he was on the deck   and the deer was in the yard, it was quite a heart stopping way for him to start his day. Encounters with animals are not limited to deer.  Besides the squirrel that tried to take up residence in our attic a number of years ago, there was one who laid on the deck rail shaking his tail in a threatening manner and hissing at my daughter as she tried to leave for a flute lesson.  She had to go out the back door because that critter just wasn’t going to stop.  There were times when I would be sitting in the living room with the door open and look up to find the squirrel sitting on the deck rail looking in at me. We’ve also had birds sitting there looking in, and one of the neighborhood cats used to do the same thing.  There have been times when we were on the deck in the evening and seen raccoons meander along the driveway, and one time a bear came crashing through some bushes between us and the neighbor’s house.  Foxes used to fight outside my daughter’s bedroom window at night and she said the sound they make is awful not to mention frightening in the middle of the night.  There was the carpenter bee who acted as a sentry by hovering in your face as you approached the door and then flew away after a second or two, we’ve had the occasional praying mantis, and of course my arch nemesis icky Vicky the spider and her descendants.  Yes, nature is never boring.

               The weather is another aspect of nature that fascinates us.  We talk about it, have channels devoted to it, complain about it, and celebrate it.  It seems to defy explanation at times, like how it can be pouring rain from dark clouds at my house, yet I can see that just about a half mile away there is a beautiful sunset over the lake.  Rainbows are always amazing and social media lights up with pictures everyone takes of them after a big rainstorm.  Likewise if there is hail on a hot summer day you can see many videos and pictures in your newsfeed.  When it snows in places that usually don’t get it, or someplace gets snow measured in feet instead of inches it is newsworthy, as well as ice storms which are terrifyingly dangerous yet beautiful in the sun when they finish.  Who can resist a picture of fog as it lifts off a body of water, or a deep blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds highlighted by sunbeams? We can hear the rumble and roll of thunder in the summer or even in the winter during a snow storm. Weather and nature continually changes and keeps us on our toes.

               I find time spent contemplating my immediate outdoor surroundings to be a good way to take a little mental break from the stresses and worries of life.  Wondering how it is birds can fly, butterflies and bees know where flowers full of nectar are, and squirrels remember where they have buried acorns they collected months before can take you out of yourself for a few minutes.  You might never get the answer, but that’s not really what’s important.  What’s important is to get a little vacation for your brain, feel a part of something bigger, and find momentary peace.