Sweetness.

I've spent an hour or so tonight updating this blog, removing old links, cleaning up posts and changing the template and style a little bit. Insomnia really helps one get meaningless tasks done.

I haven't blogged regularly in more than five years, mostly using my blog as a photo hosting site for various projects. Lately I've been feeling a desire to journal or write my thoughts down somewhere; I've looked at journals to buy and wondered if I was ready to actually write again. Coming here to my blog to get it ready for this year's Journal Your Christmas entries, it seems obvious that this is the place to do that once again.

The past three years have had a great many pains for me and for some of the people that I love. I've been wondering if this is the middle-aged turning point, where your friends begin to get ill, where you start going to more funerals, where your body makes creaks and pains it didn't before, where change seems to happen far more quickly than you're prepared for. I turned 46 a month ago. I was 34 when I started this blog. I've become a different person in many ways, sanded down at the edges, softer and more loving, and a little more hopeless sometimes, too.

I'm hoping that the thoughts will begin to flow again and that I can start capturing more moments that I want to remember. I have lost a lot to forgetfulness in the past couple of years and I can't afford to do that.

We spent Thanksgiving in Ohio with Todd's family, and did our Christmas celebrating at the same time. My niece Gianna mentioned that  she had never baked and decorated cutout sugar cookies before (despite being an eager baker), so we gave that a try on Friday night.

I didn't have my tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe with me; it only exists in a printout in my recipe binder, nowhere online. So we used a well-rated recipe from Allrecipes, which I can't find or I would link it. It was pretty good. We rolled the cookies out using powdered sugar instead of flour, since the dough was not very sweet. I think that helped the taste. Gianna made a big batch of royal icing, which I had never used before, and we made a bunch of colors and squeezed them out of ziploc bags. The icing was hard to control, but the end effect was pretty amazing. (I usually use a powdered sugar + milk frosting which doesn't give the polished look of royal icing.)

Gianna and Evelyn mastered it almost immediately and made really creative cookies, using toothpicks to create feathered and swirled effects. Anna, who is a bit of a perfectionist, got frustrated early on and went to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie with Grammy. I just love baking with these girls and seeing how their skills grow. When we were together for the Fourth of July we made our traditional Flag Cake, and I hardly had to help them at all--a far cry from the first year we did it, when they were young grade-schoolers, and I was running ragged trying to divide up the tasks evenly and help them each step of the way! That was in 2009. Gianna told me this weekend that Flag Cake is one of her great childhood memories (at the ripe old age of 15) and that made me happy.

Here's my tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe:

Eva's Sugar Cookies

2 cups unsalted butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp almond extract
6 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat in eggs, vanilla and almond extract until light and fluffy. In another bowl, combine flour and baking soda and add gradually to butter and sugar mixture until combined, Bake in preheated 350-degree oven on parchment-lined sheets for 8-10 minutes until light brown at the edges.

This makes 12 dozen cookies, a ridiculous amount, so I usually halve the recipe. I use one extra-large egg as "half" of the three eggs. And I put a few drops of almond extract in the icing, too.

The calm after the storm.

So it's been five weeks since I was blithely making grilled cheese sandwiches for supper and got a call from my sister that our dad was being life-flighted to Aultman Hospital in Canton, with bleeding in his brain.

The bleeding turned out to be a growth, one that was wrapped around a ventricle in the base of his brain, one that was too dangerous to biopsy, and which required testing virtually every other system of his body in order to try to find other cancerous areas that could be biopsied.

I was able to catch a ride to Ohio with my aunt Kathy and uncle Bill, who had been vacationing in the Outer Banks, and I got home in time to sort of "trade off" with my brother who had been there for two days and was leaving to head for a belated vacation with his family. My sister lives down the road from my folks, so she'd been dealing with everything from the start. She and I went together with Mom to the hospital the first day I was home, and she showed me where the coffee machine was, the lounge, the cafeteria--I felt like an employee on the first day of a new job.

The next three days, I took Mom to the hospital by myself and it was then that I rather rapidly started to fall apart. Well, the falling apart started on the first day I was home, but when it was just me and my mom driving to that hospital an hour away and sitting with my dad...that was when I started to crash.

We weren't even alone that much--we had some visitors, and my sister came out in the afternoons after work, and there were always doctors, nurses and other staff in and out. But for me, it was the first time I had ever had to "be there" for my parents, and I felt like a child in dress-up clothes who has just been told to do some impossibly grown-up task, like drive a car or cook a gourmet meal. It seems ridiculous to feel that way at 40 years old, but I did.

From the time I got home, I couldn't eat or sleep, and finally crashed on Monday night, went to the ER, got some anxiety medication--which I couldn't take till the next night, since I had to be able to drive Mom to the hospital. My anxiety was about more than just Dad's health, it was about Dad's attitude and my response to it. In a nutshell, he had a very bad, very irrational response when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer seven years ago, and I couldn't face it happening again.

I have a good relationship with my dad, but it's complex, too, and there are things about him that really push my emotional buttons. So I just had this boiling stew of worry and anger and dread and fear and grief and anything else you'd care to name churning around inside me, and...let's just say that it was a blessing beyond measure when I was able to take that first Ativan on Tuesday night and feel some of that churning drop down to a lower level. It was still there, but I wasn't drowning in it.

From that point on, things got better. Wednesday, Dad was released. They still didn't know what was wrong with him, but it boosted all of us to have him back at home. I went out to pick up his meds that afternoon, and came back to find him and Mom in the kitchen, cooking up a stir-fry for supper, just basking in the normalcy and joy of it, and I was so glad.

At the end of the week, I caught another ride back to Virginia with my cousin Alan, who had come up for our annual family reunion (which I hadn't planned to attend, but was able to because of all this.) Six hours of conversation with Alan in the car about wonderful normal things helped me decompress from my week at home.

In fact, when I got home, I terribly missed all the people I'd been talking to, and all the talking I'd been doing. The whole week, I was on my cell phone talking, talking, talking to my sister, my brother, my sister-in-law, my aunts, my mother-in-law...and talking in person to my aunt Molly and my mom. That and the Ativan was what kept me going.

My aunts Carol and Kathy both gave me a safe place to vent and say what I needed to say, and Kathy and my sister-in-law Tracy really helped me come to an emotional place that I needed to come to, a place of true compassion for my dad. My aunt Molly was a rock for me that whole week--she fed me, hugged me, listened to me, counseled me, gave me a safe place to just sit and be. My mother-in-law prayed for me over the phone and I was able to instantly see the results of her prayers. I had so many people holding me up that week and I am so grateful.

And I was able to have a couple of very honest moments with my dad. I felt like I was finally able to give him the understanding that he needed. It helped me a lot, and he told me it helped him, too.

So I came home and walked around in a fog for a couple of weeks, wondering what had happened and what would happen and what path would I personally take from there. It was surreal to be plunged into a terrible crisis and then drive right out of it and come home to my regular life, where nothing had changed except me. I'm still processing all of that.

Most people who might be reading this know the happy twist at the end. Dad has been feeling good since he came home from the hospital. He was medicated for his dizziness and also for his depression, and both the meds, and I think, just getting back to his daily life, made him feel tremendously positive and good. And of course, we've all been delighted that he's feeling so good.

Last Monday, he had another MRI, to check the growth, and on Thursday he met with his oncologist. The oncologist told him that the growth--or whatever it was--is GONE. Whatever it was that was showing up in those scans--and through this whole thing, the oncologist has been very careful not to use the word "cancer"--but whatever it was, it isn't there any more.

To say we're all relieved, thrilled, humbled, grateful, doesn't even begin to express it. Five weeks ago, I was very afraid that my dad was going to die. Just last Monday I sent him a card for his 63rd birthday and wondered deep down if I would be sending him a card for his 64th.

Dad is still dizzy, though he says it's not as bad as it was earlier this summer. But he can function normally, he can drive, and he can go back to work. Some of the scans showed tremendous arthritis in his neck and shoulders, and that may be what is causing--and has caused (?)--his dizziness. I would certainly like to know what the meaning was of the thing that showed up on all those CAT scans and MRIs...but if it stays away forever, then I am content not to know.

Dad will, of course, have another follow-up MRI in six weeks, and I'm hoping something can be done to address his remaining dizziness. There is still more to this journey, though it doesn't look bleak now. When Dad was in the hospital having test after test with no real answers, I told Mom that it was like we were in a car with the gear in neutral, looking at a whole array of roads in front of us, and we were just waiting for someone to put the car in gear and move us down a road. So now we've finally done it, we've started down a road and the view is better than we dared to hope for.

When my mom called me with the good news on Thursday, I had been spending the day preparing for a different kind of storm, Hurricane Irene. She blew into town on Saturday morning and sent a tree limb through the roof of our woodshed just like a spear, but that woodshed is the ugliest thing in the world and slated to come down someday, anyway. We were without power for just under 48 hours, and that was that--for us, anyway. It's been a different story for lots of other people. A little boy here in our town was crushed in his own home by a falling tree on Saturday morning...that's the kind of tragedy you just can't understand.

Some people feel like Hurricane Irene was hyped too much, but I appreciated the hype! I appreciated knowing what was coming at me and if it was getting stronger or weaker. As it turned out, it was weaker than predicted at the beginning of the week, but it was still bad enough.

So...a storm comes at you. You try to prepare, but you know there's no way to prepare if it really turns out to be a horrible one. It blows through your life, churns things around, and leaves you a little battered but deeply grateful that it wasn't worse--and deeply mindful that it is worse for many, many other people, every day. That's been the theme of the month of August. Here's hoping September is storm-free!

Tuesday morning update.

I feel like I could write a book about the past ten days of our lives, and the story is still not over yet!

Dad was able to leave the hospital last Wednesday and come home, which made him thrilled as well as the rest of us. He plunged right in to working in his garden and starting the summer canning and freezing process that was interrupted by his sickness and hospital stay. He's able to compensate for his dizziness, and the various medications he's taking are helping with that, too and with the headaches.

Dad went back for an appointment with his oncologist yesterday and the verdict was that lymphoma has definitely been ruled out, just as cancer has been ruled out in all of Dad's other system: lungs, stomach, spine, etc.. Dr. Friedman at Duke University seems to be as stymied by Dad's scans as the doctors at home are, but he feels that Dad should get on with his normal life and have regular scans and monitoring. Perhaps at some point the growth in his brain will be able to be biopsied and treated, we don't know.

Still so many unanswered questions, but for right now this is a great outcome. Dad is not a person to be patient with spending large amounts of time in hospitals. He is not a person to be patient with a long, drawn-out treatment program. The best thing in the world for him is to be able to just live his everyday life, and if that's what the doctors want him to do right now, so much the better.

Right now Dad can work in his garden, put up his summer produce, putter in his garage, enjoy the company of his grandkids, and most of all, be with my mom, who loves him so very much. A week ago--two weeks ago--we didn't know if any of those things would ever happen again. He is feeling positive and energetic (hopefully that will last as they lessen his steroid dose) and I say more power to him!

We still don't know where this path we're all on will lead us, but God has been faithful to us these past weeks, and I can't help but believe that he will continue to be faithful and provide for us as he has been doing all along. We are so grateful. Thank you to all of you who have prayed and who will continue to pray--your prayers have been an almost physical presence to us, an army standing right at our backs in support, and we have seen their results in so many ways, both large and small.

Wednesday morning update

Yesterday we were able to find out the results of a spinal tap Dad had on Monday. The white blood cell count in his spinal fluid is up a little--not a lot, but enough to be a flag. The oncologist said this could indicate lymphoma. He thought he would have more information for us later in the day from some of the other tests, but though we waited all day, nothing had come through by the end of the day. This was very hard.

Mom and I are heading out this morning and meeting with the oncologist at 9 AM. I'm not expecting that he'll have much more to tell us, but we are expecting to be able to bring Dad home today. It seems like the tests are pretty much done, and now it's just waiting for the information to slowly--so slowly--trickle in. Then we can go on from there.

Again, we are just surrounded with angels in human form who are helping us in every way that they can. We are so grateful.

Update on Dad.

Dad was life-flighted to Aultman Hospital in Canton last Wednesday afternoon, with what appeared to be bleeding in his brain. The next day we were told that he has a mass in his brain. That feels like five weeks ago instead of five days ago.

As of Monday morning, this is where we stand. The doctors are frankly puzzled. The mass in Dad's brain is not presenting like a typical tumor. It's in a spot that's too dangerous even to biopsy. So on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Dad's been having a series of MRIs and MRAs to try to find places elsewhere in his body that can be biopsied--cancer in other spots. A few odd spots have turned up, but nothing that's even large enough to biopsy, and as far as I can tell, nothing that appears to be cancerous.

Yesterday afternoon we met with the oncologist. He is going to send Dad's scans to a top neurosurgeon at Duke University to see what he thinks. It was a little discouraging, because that was really the only option he presented at this point. I think Dad has them stumped.

None of the doctors has said the word "cancer" yet. They are still not 100% positive that that's what it is. They've also found that there is no bleeding in Dad's brain. With every new tidbit of information, we don't know whether to feel hopeful or more fearful.

Dad is ready to get out of the hospital and come home. He's hanging on, but he's having a very hard time staying patient and keeping it together. Honestly, we all are.

Dad is getting excellent care from the nurses and doctors at Aultmen, and we have all been just blanketed with love and help from our extended family and our friends. I have felt literally surrounded with prayers and it is helping me to cope. I feel completely inadequate to deal with this situation and to provide the right help to my parents...but I can feel myself being held up by invisible arms. Please, keep praying.

Mom is doing okay, my sister and brother are doing okay. We've fallen apart a few times, but we are doing okay. Please hold us all in your prayers, and also my brother-in-law and my niece and nephew, my sister-in-law and my two nieces, and Todd. Thank you all so much.

Normal.

I do love that first "normal" day after the holidays are over, when life settles back down into its routine. We've had a little bit of weirdness to go along with the holiday whirl, too. Our "new" car went into the shop on the 22nd to have some things worked on (nothing unexpected--we'd planned for the maintenance work to be done.) We took the other car home to Ohio on the 23rd and stayed there till the 27th. Had a really, really nice Christmas. Just very laid-back and enjoyable.

We came home to about eight inches of snow that had fallen while we were gone (VERY unusual for this area) so there was some shoveling that had to be done, and Todd got two unexpected days off work as NASA closed for the weather.

Our car still wasn't done, so I hung out on Tuesday and Wednesday, getting Christmas presents put away, cleaning and (insert ominous music here) doing laundry. It was while bringing my last load of laundry downstairs on Wednesday afternoon that I slipped and fell at the bottom of the stairs, jamming my foot under the open front door and re-breaking my left middle toe that I broke on a dresser leg in the wee hours several years ago.

On Thursday morning Todd woke up with a major recurrence of the eye pain that had been bothering him off and on for the past week. He went to the optometrist that afternoon, who sent him straight to the ophthalmologist, informing him that he had a torn cornea in his left eye. The ophthalmologist also informed him that his right cornea was badly abraded and that it would have been just a matter of time before that one was torn, too. She said his corneas looked like knees when you fall and scrape and tear them up on a sidewalk.

We're not quite sure what caused the tearing--the assumption is that it's a combination of dry heat and dry cold weather, plus his contact lenses (which allowed the abrasions to heal and then re-tear when he took them out and went to sleep) and maybe also his blood pressure medicine which is diuretic and may be drying out his poor eyeballs.

So the past few days have been very focused on getting the proper drops into Todd's eyes at frequent intervals. My toe has been buddy-taped to the toe next to it, and I have been alternately limping around and sitting with my foot up on pillows.

My brother and his family came on Friday for New Year's and we had a great time with them, with eye drops and limping mixed in just for fun. Oh, and I finally got my car back on Friday. Saturday and Sunday we hung out, played games, ate garbage, and just relaxed. Well, the grown-ups relaxed...my nieces are very much into playing "kitten and puppy," which is just as energetic and full of scratches and rough-housing (and crying when the scratching and rough-housing reaches its inevitable conclusion) as it sounds.

I'm still not at full walking capacity yet, but Todd's eye is healing beautifully, although his days of wearing contact lenses may be over, at least for a while. Today Todd is back at work, and I'm back into my routine, too, with time taken out for the occasional foot-raising on pillows, with an Advil chaser.

Hope everybody had a fun Thanksgiving! We weren't up for doing any major traveling this year, so we just made a run up to Washington D.C. and cruised through a few museums, and then ate Thanksgiving dinner at Old Country Buffet (we managed to get there right before the stuffing pan got cleaned out, so, whew! Crisis averted! It wouldn't have been pretty if I'd had to eat Thanksgiving dinner with no stuffing.)

My sister and I were talking on the phone today and realized that we both have high expectations of holidays, which often leads us to feel sad or let down. I was feeling sad on Wednesday hearing people talk about what they were going to cook, who was coming to their house, etc., knowing I'd be eating dinner in a restaurant. But most years it's just not feasible or desirable to sit in a car or on a plane for hours for every single major holiday. So Todd and I have spent more holidays alone than I would like.

My theory is that since my sister and I grew up with lots of extended family around, it just doesn't seem like a holiday to us unless there are a lot of people crammed into a house all talking at the same time and drinking coffee and playing games and teasing each other. When it's just you and your husband staring at each other across the table (or in my sister's case this year, her and her husband staring at each other while the kids played games on their phones) something feels wrong.

On the other hand, when you see people sitting and eating their restaurant turkey dinner absolutely alone--and she and I both saw people who were all alone--then you realize how much you have to be grateful for, even when things don't turn out exactly the way you pictured they would when you were a kid and thought every holiday would always be the same forever and ever.

Speaking of family, I ran across something today that took me back across the decades in a flash. April Winchell runs a site called Regretsy, which spotlights some of the worst arts and crafts from the crafters' sales site Etsy. She and her readers regularly make me snort or choke on whatever I'm drinking...they are seriously funny people.

April linked to her list of horrible holiday mp3s the other day and I just discovered a little gem on the list called "I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas" by a guy named Yogi Yorgesson, who was the alter ego of a comedian and radio personality named Harry Stewart in the 1940s and 50s.

When I was a kid, my grandpa Martin would make 8-track tapes for me and my siblings. Sometimes he would tape records for us, but other times I think he'd just tape whatever he found on the radio. I can't remember much of what was on the tapes, except for "I Yust Go Nuts" and some Italian song that I actually heard at an Italian restaurant a few months ago--the first time I'd heard it in 30+ years.

"I Yust Go Nuts" is like a brain worm, or it was for a kid who memorized a lot of random things, which I did whether I wanted to or not, because my brain just latched onto stuff. To this day, every now and then I'll think "And just at that moment someone slugs Uncle Ben" or "I step on a skate and fall over a tricycle."

If you listen to the song--and why wouldn't you want to listen to such a gem?--at the bit where he sings about stepping outside for a cold glass of beer, that's where Grandpa faded the song out and skipped over the part where the guy drinks eleven "Tom and Yerrys." So in my memory, the song goes "I think I'll step out for a cold glahh uhh bbb..." and then picks up again when the kids are jumping on his belly. I guess Grandpa didn't want us little kids to hear about some Swedish guy getting hammered on Christmas Eve, although he didn't have any problem with us hearing about the ensuing hangover on Christmas morning. What a funny little memory. Thanks for letting me hear the whole song, April!

Memories of Grandma.

As I did after the passing of my grandpa and my Grandma Clark last year, I've jotted down some thoughts and memories about my sweet Grandma, Martha Martin.

My grandma was born on her mother's birthday in May 1920 in rural Mahoning County, Ohio. She was the youngest of four children. She told me once that her mother suffered from poor health for the rest of her life after Grandma's birth, and that she always felt responsible for that. Grandma's aunt Mary lived with the family and helped out with the children and the chores to take some of the burden off Great-Grandma, who passed away when Grandma was 18 years old.

Grandma grew up on a farm, and her father sold produce and milk to help support the family. She liked to read her father's old McGuffey readers, and one of her favorite teachers gave her a book of Bible stories and a copy of Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates. She loved to read and play house in the corncrib when it was empty in the spring.

Grandma attended a country school until eighth grade, and wanted to go to high school very much. She loved school, especially spelling and history, and couldn't understand why all her friends moaned about school starting every fall. She was the first person in her family to graduate from high school, and she was the class valedictorian.

She married my grandpa when she was twenty-two, and they moved into a house right up the road from the house Grandma grew up in. She lived in that house for the next 65 years (and lived on the same road all her life!) Over the next 17 years, from 1943 to 1960, she gave birth to three sons and five daughters.

Grandma took care of children all her life--first her own kids, and then all the grandkids who ran in and out of her house over the years. My family lived in Missouri till I was six, and I remember coming to Ohio on visits and staying at Grandma's house. She made me pancakes in the mornings, and I played in her vegetable garden. I remember running in and out of the staked pea plants that towered over my head.

Grandma was a devoted gardener--out of necessity for many years, of course, when the family depended on everything they could grow and can and freeze themselves. But even into her eighties, she was still putting in a garden in the spring and putting up the produce all summer long. The apricot jam she made from the trees in their orchard was my very favorite.

She quilted and sewed all her life, both for her family and for the church relief organizations. Her stitches were in quilts and comforters that warmed her own family, and that were sent all over the world to warm others in need. She made most of her own clothes for many years.

I remember her making me handkerchief babies in church when I was little, which I'm sure was something she did for her own children, and probably something her mother did for her. She always had a flowered hanky in her purse. She would roll the hanky on one side and then on the other and turn it around somehow and then there were two tiny babies in a hammock.

She wrote poetry--some serious, thoughtful verses about her faith and family, and some quietly funny poems about dead dogs, prowling skunks, old age, and other quirky topics. She had a self-deprecating sense of humor, always quick to laugh at her own idiosyncrasies. She was frugal from years of pinching pennies, and she knew how to live on just what she needed and no more.

Grandma was a truly good person through and through. She had limitless patience. (At least, in the years I knew her...as a young mother her patience may have been in shorter supply!) I never heard her say a bad word about another person. She always seemed to look for the good in people. She cared about doing the right thing and making the right choices. She had empathy for others and treated others according to the Golden Rule. I have often thought to myself over the years that if my conscience had a voice, it would be Grandma's voice.

In the past few years, Grandma slowly slipped away, a little at a time. She had a couple of bad falls and used first a walker and then a wheelchair. Her memory started to fade--she still knew her children, but the names of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren became more elusive. It broke my heart a little bit the first time I visited her and had to remind her who I was. But the sweetness of her personality never faded at all. She never complained, never put up a fuss about the difficulties of life in a nursing home.

Grandma loved God with all her heart and soul and mind. She prayed for everyone in her family all her life. She read her Bible every night before bed. She was sitting in her chair reading her Bible when she passed away, as appropriate a death for Grandma as any of us could have imagined.

My cousin Pam and I were talking at Grandma's grave, about how challenging it will be to live up to the example Grandma set for us. I have a very different personality from Grandma...I have always been a cranky, cynical person and I probably always will be. But she and I were both deep thinkers. We both loved to write and read. I inherited her empathic nature, which she passed to my mother, who passed it to me. I inherited her wonder about the ways of God and the spiritual world. I can only hope to be as truly good and truly loving as she was all her life.

Here is a link to Grandma's obituary. I'm flying out very early tomorrow morning and coming back Sunday evening. It will be sad, but I'm looking forward to seeing all the family again. It will be good to all be together and remember Grandma. She was precious to us all.

Strange to think I have no grandparents living now. I feel so blessed to have had them in my lives for as long as I did, especially both my grandmothers, who were extraordinary women, each in her own way. It has been nice to think about Grandma this week and remember all the little moments I had with her, and it will be nice to hear more about her from some of the other people who loved her. I listened to a bit of an interview I did with her ten or twelve years ago, and it was lovely to hear her voice and remember her as she was.

What I did on my summer vacation.

Ah, the long summer hiatus. Think of me as a TV show returning to my regularly scheduled night and time. (Hopefully.)

I had such big plans for my late summer, but the big kitchen re-do never materialized. Todd is still in search of wood to make new doors, and we had a flood of company in August that made a torn-up kitchen undesirable anyway.

My brother and his family came down the first weekend in August and we headed to the "real" beach, the ocean beach. In previous years, we've taken them to the "river" beach in Yorktown, which is much better for small children, but the girls are big kids now and they loved the ocean.

Here Marissa pretends to be a sea turtle. She was so covered with sand she looked like a breaded cutlet:

My brother and I and the girls, waiting for the next big wave:

Todd's sister Lisa and her family also stopped by for a night/morning on their way to the Outer Banks, but it was such a quick trip I didn't get any pictures. It was fun to get to see them, though.

The second weekend in August, we made a quick trip home to Ohio for a family reunion. Here's me and my sister, she must have just said something funny:

I helped my cousin Janine's son Isaac take a little stroll. He turned one year old a couple weeks after this and I believe is walking on his own now:

Some of us were eating and chatting...my dad and my cousin Alan:

Me and my mom and my aunt Carol:

...and others were kayaking and fishing in the small lake my aunt and uncle have on their property. My nephew Tanner:

My cousin-in-law Rich (Isaac's dad):

These two little cuties, Isaac and my cousin David's son Lucas, are the youngest members of the family, at one year old and two years old, respectively.

The oldest member of the family is Grandma, at 90, who was able to put in a brief appearance thanks to the terrific shuttle service her nursing home provides. Todd (my official photographer) was eating and fishing most of the time she was there, so he didn't get a good picture of her; I hope someone else did.

There are a lot of us when we all get together--and this wasn't nearly the whole family!

Missing were my cousins Jarrod and Mike (away in the Air Force and Coast Guard); my cousins Darrel and Dennis and their families; my brother and his family; my cousin Pam and her husband; and my cousins Dan and Derek, who had just gone back to college after the summer. You can imagine what a crowd it would be if we were ever all able to be together in one spot. I love my big family, they are all very special to me.

When we came home from Ohio, we brought my nine-year-old niece Kylie back with us. She stayed for five days and then flew home--her first time on a plane. We had a great week with her, going to the beach:

Todd took her crabbing several times, which she loved:


Todd also showed her how to kayak:

She and I took a dolphin cruise, too:

Then she hopped on a plane and flew away and I collapsed for a couple of days! I am not used to having a kid around full time! We had such a great time, though.

In the three weeks since Kylie left, I've been laying pretty low. I worked on a stitchery project that I'll share later...I read a bunch of not-so-great books (seriously, I'm really in a slump!)...I watched all ten episodes of Ken Burns' Jazz...I got back into my walking and diet routine that was sadly neglected during the first two weeks of August. Plus all the boring day-to-day stuff, of course.

Hurricane Earl was all set to plow into us here on the East Coast, but decided to just stroll on past and leave us mostly alone, which was just fine with me. We had a windy, rainy morning on Friday and that was it. And in his wake some slightly cooler, drier weather has come along, which is a blessing. I have the windows open tonight--I couldn't tell you the last time it's been cool and dry enough for that!

This fall we are looking forward to having some company and doing a little traveling here and there. We're also really hoping to get some exterior work done on the house. The kitchen re-do is still on the table, but won't get going until Todd finds some poplar for the doors and we get a nice big chunk of time to work on it. And I am just looking forward to (please God!) some cooler weather. This summer has been pretty bad and I am ready to wear jeans and long-sleeves again, although that won't be happening any time soon.

That's all from here!

Obsolete.

Tonight I'm finally getting around to something I've been wanting to do for ages. I have several cassette tapes here with interviews I did with both of my grandmothers and my great-aunt Helen 10-12 years ago. Every so often I think about them and think that I've got to get them digitized and saved on my computer against the day when the tapes fall apart. Todd got me set up tonight and I'm playing them through and recording them right now.

I'm listening to an interview that I did with my grandma Clark over the phone in May 1998. It gives me a little lump in my throat to hear her voice with the Missouri twang in it. And I sound ridiculously young--I was 27.

You always wish you had done more, don't you? I have 45 minutes of Grandma Martin, about 90 minutes of Aunt Helen, maybe two hours of Grandma Clark. It's not enough.

I remember interviewing Grandma Martin, and some of the memories of her parents made her a little emotional, and I felt intrusive. So I didn't interview her again. Now I wish I had talked to her about her life as a young mother and about her kids and about how she managed to make ends meet. Grandma is still alive but at age 90, her memory is very patchy.

Remembering the face-to-face interview I did with Grandma Clark in 2001 never fails to make my blood boil--we talked for an entire side of a tape, she told me about meeting and marrying my grandpa--and at the end of the tape I took it out and it had not recorded any of it. I've never forgiven Radio Shack for their shoddy merchandise!

When I interviewed Aunt Helen, she sat in her rocking chair and rocked like a little girl, just as hard as she could. Six weeks later, she passed away. I was so glad I had gone to see her.

It is odd to fumble with cassette tapes and stick them in the little player. You realize how obsolete a technology is when you can't remember which way it goes into the player!

Now I'm sitting here thinking about all the other people I should get on tape while I can. I understood, logically, that my grandparents would not be around forever. Now they're gone into death and dementia and I'm looking around in surprise thinking "How did that happen?"

So if I give you a call and ask you to talk into my obsolete technology, you'll understand why, right?

Summerhouse.

In honor of my aunt Molly who has a big birthday today, here are some pictures of her latest creative triumph.

I mentioned last year how Molly had moved the old summerhouse, which stood next to my grandparent's' home for decades, to her own yard after their property was sold.

Here's what it looked like at Grandpa and Grandma's house:

Here's what it looked like when Molly first had it moved to her yard:

And here's what she's transformed it into:

I wish I had a really good shot of the exterior, but my memory card was brim-full and I had to snap selectively. This is my Aunt Molly, my Uncle John, and my nieces Kylie and Natalie. (I took these while I was at home a couple of weeks ago.)

Inside Molly has filled the little house with old things:

Kylie, Natalie and Marissa loved the little house and immediately started playing "Boxcar Children." And a few days later my aunt hostessed my mom, my sister and I for tea and scones in the summerhouse, which was just lovely.

But why save an old falling-down shed and move it at considerable expense and inconvenience? A quick glance through the family photo album will tell you why. The summerhouse lurks in the background of lots of photos. Here are my grandparents with my Uncle Lowell, my Aunt Naomi (Molly) and my mom is the baby--but not for long.:

Two more brothers, my uncles Larry and Ron, with my mom and Molly:

And then two little sisters, Kathy and Charlotte:

An almost-complete family...

...till my aunt Carol came along to make eight kids total.

Then there were grandkids (my brother, my cousin Krista, myself (the oldest) and my cousins Darrel and Dennis):

We all had fun at Grandpa and Grandma's house. (Grandpa, my cousins Michael and Alan.)

The younger ones didn't get to spend as many years there as we older ones did, but they'll remember it, too. (Grandma and my cousin Daniel.)

Before you know it, you've got a BIG family (and there were more grandkids, grandkids-in-law, and great-grandkids in the years to come.)

And then there was just the two of them again.

And then they had a big sale and a couple of the great-grandkids came to help. (My niece Kylie and my nephew Tanner.)

But this is the way it used to be in front of the summerhouse:

I'm happy this little slice of family history was saved.