Skittles and All Her Kittens

March 2006

In the spring of 2003, Isaac and I went to a little house north of Hopkinsville. A lady was giving away kittens from a litter of five. The kittens were in a big box in her living room. We wanted a female kitten so Happy, our old tom, wouldn't feel obligated to fight with it. 

There were two little females. One trembled in fear when touched, and the other reached her paw to Isaac and then bit him. Isaac decided that the little biter had personality, so we brought her home and named her Skittles. 

Skittles is spayed now, but she had two litters of kittens when she was a mere adolescent.  During one of the kitten episodes, the babies had grown too large for their box in the house. The weather was warm, so I moved them to a large wooden box on the carport. 

 I glanced into the box one afternoon, and I was shocked to see a fuzzy little alien in there. The kittens were nursing, and a baby rabbit was huddled against them. Obviously, Skittles had acquired the rabbit, and she didn't seem interested in eating it, so I left it there. I didn't know if it would survive if I released it, and I hoped that maybe it would accept Skittles as its mother. 

I looked in the box the next morning, and I was shocked to see that now there were two little rabbits. I surmise that in her condition of activated maternal hormones, Skittles decided the little wild rabbits were actually kittens who needed a home. Never mind that their ears were a bit long; obviously they needed her care.

 I still wasn't sure what to do with the rabbits. They were so young that I was afraid they'd die if I turned them loose. Still, I wondered about leaving them with Skittles. She groomed them enthusiastically, just as she did her feline children but I didn't ever see the rabbits nursing. She wouldn't have minded, but they didn't seem interested. 

After much pondering of the situation, I sought out a recipe for homemade milk-replacer for rabbits on the internet and bought some pet bottles so we could feed the little rabbits by hand. They were flighty, slippery little creatures, but they were hungry. Keely named them Abbot and Costello, and developed a method of wrapping them gently in a towel for feeding. That way, they could shrink into the towel rather than darting forward if they were startled. 

Unfortunately, Abbot died, and then we had just Costello to nurse along. I read that rabbits have fragile bones and I became concerned about the kittens hurting him. They were much larger and they played roughly. We decided to move Costello to a nest of dry grass clippings in the bottom of a large round garbage can in the house. 

Costello was terribly nervous whenever we handled him. He couldn't help it; that's the way little wild rabbits are. I think he became about as tame as a little wild rabbit can be. Sometimes as he drank his bottle, he closed his little eyes and seemed to enjoy it and maybe even dozed a little as I sat very still and held him, bundled in his little feeding towel. 

Soon Costello developed sharp teeth that could sever a pet bottle nipple with a single chomp. I started giving his milk to him in a drinking bottle designed for hamster and rat cages. It had a long metal tube with a metal marble in the end of it. Costello quickly learned to push the marble up just enough that a trickle of milk flowed out of the tube into his mouth. He grew rapidly. 

Soon our little rabbit developed a hearty appetite for clover picked from the lawn for him, and I knew that he could probably survive on his own. One sunny day, I took him out to the hedgerow along the back fence where there was a thick cover of unmowed vegetation, and I said goodby to the little guy. After I released him, he sat still for a moment and then crept away into the tall grass. I couldn't help worrying about him! 

Meanwhile, the kittens had grown too large for the wooden box, so we had moved them to a 6-foot round cattle tank that the kids had used as a pool when they were little. One day, I saw Skittles jump into the tank with a baby squirrel struggling in her mouth. Apparently she had an idea of adopting it like she had done with the rabbits. 

The little squirrel was trying so hard to escape that Skittles was excited by it. She seemed a bit uncertain -- was it a baby or was it a game animal after all? I snatched the wild little thing away from her. It leaped from my hands in a flash, ran into the shrubbery and was never seen again. Skittles was momentarily puzzled where the strange baby had gone -- and then she nursed the kittens. 

Last summer, when Costello would have been one year old, an unusually tame rabbit lived in our yard. He didn't come close to us, but he never ran away or froze in position like rabbits do when frightened. He was quite comfortable even at a 15-foot distance. The lawn mower didn't disturb him much; he just moved out of its way and enjoyed the freshly mowed greens. 

We saw him all summer long, placidly grazing on the clover in one spot or another. Of course we think it was Costello.

Hoping for a Snow Day

 March 2006

As I took Isaac to school this morning, he was hoping for enough snow that school would be cancelled. It brought to mind a silly little thing I said when I was in 2nd or 3rd grade, about this time of the year.

School had been let out for the day, and we students (all seven or eight of us) spilled out of the little schoolhouse with our lunchboxes in hand. It was windy and chilly, and the sky was almost colorless. I announced to the Horner girls in a voice of authority, "Look at that sky! It looks like we'll be getting some snow tonight."

In truth, I wasn't sure what the sky looked like when snow was imminent, but I had heard my dad say things like that, and it sounded good when I said it.

It sounded good because we children liked snow and plenty of it! We hoped for heavy snow so our teacher would cancel school for the day. The snow had to be deep because if the teacher thought she could even get close to the school, she'd call someone on the school board to meet her with a tractor and get her through the drifts to the schoolhouse.

Every chore in ranch life was made a hundred times more difficult when there was heavy snow, so our parents always hoped that it wouldn't snow just as hard as we hoped that it would.

Struggles of an Amateur Pianist

March 2006

God in His wisdom has planned that we don't have many musicians in our church. We do have a very good organist who serves faithfully. When he can't be there, our pastor usually can get a substitute organist, a lady from Clarksville who plays beautifully. But if this lady can't come, Pastor calls me and asks if I will play the piano.

I am not a good pianist by any stretch of the imagination. I had piano lessons when I was growing up, but my talent was never more than mediocre. I have no inborn gift for reading music. It has always been hard labor for me. Similarly, I am not particularly good at reading time -- dotted notes, rests, and such. I struggle terribly with unfamiliar music! Sometimes I even photocopy music and use white-out to remove notes that confuse me.

When I have to play for a church service, I often have trouble with one or two of the hymns. I practice dilligently, but when it's time to play them in public, sometimes I do OK and sometimes I make mistakes. But whatever notes I hit, right or wrong, I play on, the congregation sings on, and soon enough we come to the end. 

Over time, I've had a couple of insights about playing for church. I have learned that several other ladies in our church play the piano a little. I would be happy to let any of them play in my stead, but no one else has ever volunteered. That must mean that they would rather endure my efforts than try it themselves.

More importantly, I realized a while back that nervousness is a self-centered emotion. The piano is part of the music, and the music is part of all the worship that is offered to God during the church service. Obsessing about my fears and imperfections is wrong; I should play the best I can, and God will bless the music. I try to keep that in mind.

Tonight I have to play for the Lenten service. Pastor called me yesterday afternoon and since then, I've been practicing. The hymns are "Jesus, Thy Boundless Love To Me" with the Vater Unser melody, "O Dearest Jesus", "There is a Green Hill Far Away", and "Go My Children With My Blessing".

In our hymnal, the first two hymns are one difficult minor chord after another, but I found easier arrangements in another hymnal. If I concentrate on reading the notes, I should do all right on them. The other two are easy enough. A short prelude, the four hymns, the offertory, and a short postlude, and I'll be done. Yes, I feel a little nervous, but I'll be OK.

This is the Way We Wash The Clothes

 March 2006

Oh, the virtue of it all. The laundry is washed, dried, folded, and put away. I'm free from that drudgery for a few days until it piles up again. But at least, I have a washer and a dryer. I'm grateful for them! 

We bought our first washer and dryer shortly before Keely was born. A fellow who was moving sold us the set cheap. It was apartment-sized --the washer hooked up to the sink faucet, and both the washer and the dryer could be plugged into ordinary wall outlets. It was wonderful not to have to drag the laundry to the laundromat anymore.

Then we went to Germany for five years and our washer and dryer went into storage. When we came to Kentucky, the little washer refused to wake from its long hibernation. It wasn't worth fixing, so we went to Sears and bought a Kenmore washing machine which served us faithfully for 15 years with only a couple of visits by the repairman. 

Though its mate died, the apartment-sized dryer still worked when we came back to Kentucky. We used it for about a year, until one day I put too much heavy wet clothing into it and burned up its motor and the wall outlet it was plugged into. 

I had already rigged a clothesline between a couple of trees, so I dried the laundry outside for the next five years. Money was tight and a dryer wasn't an absolute necessity. I soon became well acquainted with the joys and frustrations of depending on a clothesline.

Clothing dried outside usually has a wonderful fresh-air scent. However, there were times when our neighbor spread manure in his field, and any clothing hung out to dry picked up the stench. And while laundry dried quickly on a warm, breezy day, it didn't dry at all in rainy weather.

Hanging the clothes was a pleasant outdoor diversion on a warm day, but on a winter day, even with gloves, my hands ached with cold before a full basket of wet laundry was pinned to the line. 

Dennis decided that the clothesline between the trees looked tacky, so he fixed a proper clothesline with metal poles, on the south side of the house where the north wind wouldn't be so bitter in cold weather. That turned out to be a bad idea. We have a wood stove that we use in the winter, and in the clothesline's new location, the laundry picked up a strong smoke smell all winter.

We eventually got a dryer (a Kenmore.) I'm grateful for it, but I still hang clothing outside sometimes when the weather is nice. I don't have a clothesline anymore, but I do have a chain that I use for clothing on hangers -- one hanger per link in the chain. The hangers can't slide together and the wind can't blow them off the chain. If I put the clothing on hangers as soon as the washer stops, most of it dries nearly as wrinkle-free as if it had gone through the dryer. 

My Mennonite neighbor, Kathryn, is dedicated to hanging her laundry outside on the clothesline year-round, though she has a dryer for emergencies and long rainy spells. Her clothesline is a long loop strung around a pulley on each end. One pulley is on the porch and the other is mounted high on a tall pole far across the yard. She stands on her porch to pin on the clothes, then pulls the line through the pulleys to move the clothing out into the air high above the yard.

Last year, the Kenmore washer started having some problems and we decided to get a new washer. I researched washing machines in the $500 range, and finally decided on a General Electric with a stainless steel basket. I am satisfied with it; my only complaint is that it is noisier than the Kenmore. 

My conclusions about all this? A washer and a clothesline are better than going to the laundromat, and a washer, a dryer and a clothesline are as good as doing your own laundry can be. But a laundry maid would be the best of all.

Ink Bottles and Fountain Pens

 

I attended Duff Valley District 4 in Rock County, Nebraska in the late 50s and early 60s. It was a one-room elementary school with a pitcher pump, a flagpole, a swing set, outhouses, an old barn from the days when the students rode horses to school, and of course, the schoolhouse itself.

The desks in our schoolhouse were old enough that most of them had inkwells built into the upper right corner of the desk top. An inkwell is a cup that holds a bottle of ink and keep it from spilling while a writer is using it. 

Ball point pens had been invented by then, but writing with real ink wasn't  completely obsolete. Stores still sold little bottles of ink and the necessary ink pens. One variety of pen had an inner rubber bladder that held a supply of ink.  This was an innovation that allowed the pen to write for a while before it needed refilling.  The user filled the bladder by dunking the pen in the ink bottle and operating a little lever on the side of the pen. The filling procedure made a small interesting gurgle. 

I was never able to keep my hands clean while messing around with an ink bottle and pen. Sometimes there were spills. I made a big black ink mess on a page in my Social Studies book during my ownership of one manually loaded ink pen. I accomplished this behind the privacy shield of my raised desk lid because my teacher had already told me to stop playing with my pen and ink. 

I enjoyed fountain pens, too. A fountain pen got its ink from a plastic cartridge that was a little smaller in size than a triple-A battery. An ink cartridge was installed by pressing the pointed top end of the pen's nib into one end of it and loading the cartridge-with-nib into the body of the pen. 

The ink cartridges almost always leaked at the puncture point. The ink oozed onto the grip of the pen, and soon my writing fingers had black, red, blue, or green stains, depending on the color of ink in the cartridge.  

If I accidentally let the pen rest against the paper when I wasn't writing, an ink spot quickly developed. If I shook the pen, little drops of ink flew from it.  If I thoughtlessly rested my hand or arm on the wet ink, it smeared, and if I folded the paper before the ink was dry, it made mirror images of any wet letters. These things happened with both types of ink pens.

We students made plenty of messes with ink, but Duff Valley's teachers had a long history of ink accidents that they couldn't deny. The bottoms of the wooden drawers in the teacher's desk had dozens of blots and stains from decades of leaky ink pens and tipped-over ink bottles. 

Isaac's Strep Dream

March 2006

Isaac was home from school yesterday because he has strep throat. Last night in his medicated and somewhat feverish condition, he had a nightmare. In his dream, he had invited his friends to a party in our yard, and a crowd was gathering. 

Meanwhile, everything inside the house was terribly wrong. Dennis was sitting at the table in his underwear drinking beer. Keely and I were dressed in the ragged old clothes that we save for painting. The house was a total wreck, nothing was ready for the party, and no one but Isaac seemed to care. 

People were showing up that I had invited without consulting Isaac, and they were people he didn't like. He didn't even know some of the people I had invited, including the goth-looking teenage couple we saw at the library yesterday afternoon (in real life.) 

Isaac was frantically trying to fix everything, but there were too many things that were very badly wrong and he knew he was going to be terribly, terribly embarrassed at any moment when his friends came inside.

 The classic nightmare with the "Darn, I forgot to wear my clothes!" moment seems almost mild compared to the kind of humiliation that the family was inflicting on Isaac in this dream.

I have wild dreams at times, but I rarely remember them long enough to tell anyone about them or even think about them. But Dennis, Keely, and Isaac dream vividly and often entertain me with the curious plots their minds create.

Wintery Night

February 2006

The rain of yesterday afternoon changed to snow when night fell. The ground was still warm enough to melt most of the flakes as they fell, so the snow didn't accumulate much. Isaac was hoping that the roads would be icy or that we'd get enough snow for school to be cancelled. But school in Christian County was "in session and on time" this morning.

Dennis went to work in the wee hours of the morning. He called me at 6:30 AM to say, "Careful!" He said that he came across some slick spots while driving to Fort Campbell.

South of Pembroke, he met a man walking toward him on the highway. He thought that was odd, but he didn't stop because he was going in the opposite direction of the walker.

Down the road a little farther, he saw blipping lights that turned out to be a volunteer fireman's pickup truck, stopped along the road. The good fireman (God bless him and all his kind!) was checking a car that had gone in the ditch.

Dennis stopped and told the fireman that he had met a man walking and that the man did not appear to be hurt. The fireman got out his cell phone to call the highway patrol, and Dennis went on to work.

All of that happened in the middle of the night while most of us were asleep. I didn't even have a bad dream, but that guy who was walking down the road probably thought he was having a nightmare.