Month: July 2024

“Let’s Scare Grandma” is a major source of entertainment for the grandkids. If someone jumps out from behind the sofa or from inside the hall closet, I simultaneously scream and jump like a WNBA player going for three.

But lately, I’ve lost my bounce. I just don’t scare like I used to.

There was a time when kids spent the night and one of them, dressed like a pirate and brandishing a plastic sword, slithered onto the bed in the early morning dark, I would bolt upright and scream.

These days I open one eye, roll over and say, “Cereal is in the cupboard. Make your own breakfast.”

Another favorite has been waiting until I’m doing dishes at the kitchen sink. Someone creeps outside, climbs on top of the hose box below the kitchen window, jumps up and yells, “SURPRISE!”

On cue, I would shriek and send suds and dirty dishwater cascading down the window.

These days? Nothing. Nada. I just motion for the kid to get back inside and help clear the table.

I wonder out loud if maybe I’ve mellowed – to which the husband emphatically says, “No.”

I recently accompanied an 8-year-old to an old wooden trailer in the woods where she has been catching mice. She lowers a PVC pipe with food in it and when a mouse goes for the bait, she tips the other end of the PVC pipe into a cage.

I don’t do mice. I’ve never done mice. But there I was, standing beside her looking for mice, breathing normally, trying to think of an endearing name for a small disgusting rodent.

Maybe I should see a doctor.

The real fright was when all 11 of them recently spent the night.

There were kids everywhere—on beds, under beds, on the floor, the sofa bed, and maybe even one or two on top of the piano. I can’t remember. It was a long day. The house was finally quiet, the kids were all sleeping, or pretending to be sleeping.

I tiptoed into our bedroom using only the light from the hallway. I took a pillow sham from the bed and saw something in the shadows that looked like it might be a ribbon or long piece of lace.

I picked it up and gently pulled it through my fingers. It didn’t feel like ribbon or lace, so I turned on the lamp.

It was a 4-foot snakeskin that previously belonged to a black rat snake.

Here’s the scary part: I didn’t jump. I didn’t scream. I didn’t hyperventilate. I gently tossed the snakeskin into the corner, crawled into bed and slept like a baby.

I must be losing it.

The next morning, I cornered two boys and asked which one put the snakeskin on my pillow. They pleaded not guilty and said they had heard their 6-year-old sister say she was bringing something fun to Grandma’s.

I feel terrible. The poor little thing was so disappointed.

Some people are drawn to social media apps—I’m drawn to weather apps.

I check weather apps more frequently than I check news apps. Weather apps tend to be less alarming than the news apps. Especially during a presidential election year.

I don’t mean to brag, but I know the predicted highs, lows and percentage possibilities for rain for the next five days in three different states. It’s my version of low-cost travel.

Earlier this morning I was lingering along the rocky coast of Maine where it was 65 with partial sun. I refilled my coffee then dropped in on Charleston, S.C., sweltering by mid-afternoon. From there I scrolled on over to the boundary waters of northern Minnesota. Jacket weather.

I check the weather app every night before I go to bed. I like to know if a storm is coming so I can crack a window to hear the rain drumming, the wind blowing and the thunder rolling.

I check the weather app every morning to see what I should wear and what kind of hair day it will be.

If my husband wants to know our local three-day outlook, he consults me, not his phone. I can tell him what the temperature was, is, will be, and if he might want to water the garden.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to know about the weather, you called the bank. Almost every town had a bank with a recorded line that gave the time and temp. To my knowledge, nobody checked it 30 times a day.

Years ago, if someone in a family was serious about the weather, they had a large instrument called a barometer hanging on a wall, often above the television. Back in the day, talking about weather qualified as entertainment. It was before Netflix and Disney+.

A barometer was like a crystal ball. People who knew how to interpret it could tell a storm was coming even before the storm knew it was coming. Those people later got together and founded the Weather Channel.

One of the best things about summer is the colorful language used to describe it. You can sweat bullets, sweat buckets or sweat like a pig, even though pigs don’t sweat. You can also roast, fry, sizzle, melt, wilt and bake. Summer is a culinary wonder.

On extremely humid days, my father-in-law used to say, “It’s close today.”

Initially, I wondered what he felt was closing in on him. After spending a week one summer in the family’s 100-year-old home, with only window fans for cooling, I figured out what he meant.

It was his version of, “It’s not the heat—it’s the humidity.”

A phrase that should be banned for all time, on penalty of having your weather app disabled, is: “Is it hot enough for ya?”

If you have to ask the question, you already know the answer.

When it’s so sweltering outside that even your weather app is melting, remember this—winter will be back before you know it.

We’ve been trying to sell our nearly 20-year-old SUV. Like most sellers, there are things we say about a used vehicle and things we don’t say.

When an interested buyer asked about mileage, I said, “It has 221,500 miles on it.”

What I didn’t say was that I helped put a lot of those early miles on it with my dad when he bought the Ford Explorer, Eddie Bauer edition, two years after Mom died.

One fall, Dad and I drove Eddie to see his remaining brothers in Nebraska. Our last stop was Beaver City, a small bend in the road where his older brother had been town sheriff before retiring. After a good visit and a lot of strong coffee, we left early the next morning heading south on a two-lane that would lead us into Kansas on our way back to Missouri.

Dad was raised on a farm and forever loved open prairies, lone cottonwoods and hot summer days. There wasn’t another soul or vehicle in sight on that straight-line road. The sun inched over the horizon and spread a peach glow across endless fields.

It was so beautiful that neither of us spoke. We just soaked it in—the morning, the beauty and the silence.

“You’ve sure had this vehicle a long time,” the prospective buyer said.

“We have,” I said.

What I didn’t say is that we tried selling it a while back. We were on our way to a dealership to use it as a trade-in on a new car, but I got all weepy, so my better half turned around and we drove back home.

“How many owners?” the interested party asked.

“Just two. My dad and us,” I said. “He took good care of it and so did we.”

What I didn’t say is that when Dad was recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer, he mentioned he had started driving again. I said, “Dad, are you sure you’re strong enough to hit those brakes hard if you need to?”

“You should see the skid marks I laid yesterday!” he said with a roar of laughter. He didn’t really lay skid marks, but he thoroughly enjoyed saying he did.

“How’s the sound system?” our potential buyer asked.

“Good,” I said. “The radio works and so does the 6-slot CD player.”

What I didn’t say is that Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys are in slot No. 6 where Dad always kept them. I’ve never taken them out. Won’t somebody be surprised to hit play and hear a lot of whoopin’ and yee-hawin’ and “Bubbles in My Beer.”

The prospective buyer was growing increasingly interested, so I said, “It leaks oil.”

Silence.

Then I said, “Sometimes it sounds like it doesn’t want to shift out of first.”

More silence.

I said, “When it rains hard, water drips through the sunroof down into the beverage cup holders.”

The potential buyer needed time to think about it.

“No hurry,” I said. “We might not even sell it!”

Our son called that night. We’d offered him the vehicle a few days earlier. He said he and his wife would take it.

What our son didn’t say was that he couldn’t stand to see the last remnants of Grandpa disappear either.

“I assume it’s the standard model that comes with country CDs,” he said.

“Check slot No. 6,” I said.

 

I made my first loaf of sourdough last week. It took less time to give birth to our first child than it took to make that one loaf of bread.

Why did I make sourdough? Because I’m weak. I succumbed to peer pressure. We have granddaughters making sourdough. They nudged and prodded and threw flour in the air until I agreed to give it a try.

The first thing you do to make sourdough is spend hours and hours on the internet reading about why one method is superior to another. Eventually, your eyes cross, your head bobs for the fourth time, then crashes onto your computer keyboard.

Step two is making starter. This is a slurry of flour and water you mix in a bowl, (preferably in a rustic crock suitable for photographs) covered with a tea towel (also suitable for photographs).

You leave this on the counter for five or six days. When have you ever left food sitting at room temperature on the kitchen counter for days on end and trusted it was safe to eat?

Nevertheless, each day you check the mixture, talk nice to it, remove a portion of it and add a fresh measure of flour and water. This is called “feeding the starter.”

Put “feed the starter” on your to-do list or you will forget about it and be caught in an endless cycle of restarting the starter.

On perhaps the fifth or sixth day of feeding the starter, you give it a stir and bubbles appear. This is fermentation. Congratulations! You are now ready to make bread.

For beginners, the most common question is, “What time do I start making the bread?” People ask because the process can take anywhere from six or eight hours to two days.

To prep dough for baking, you mix, rest, fold, turn, fold, turn, circle left, clap, clap, shuffle, shuffle. It’s line dancing for people who love sourdough.

I’m not saying the process is time-consuming, but it’s been a week since I made a decent sit-down dinner for the two of us, days since I answered emails or texts, and now I hear they miss me at the gym and are tossing about words like slacker and uncommitted.

Who kneads them? I’ll roll with it. I’ll rise to the occasion.

The dough is finally ready and into the oven it goes—on approximately day 59, give or take a month.

I wait, worry, pace the floor and watch the clock. I monitor progress through the dirty oven glass. I send text updates to fellow bread makers.

The timer sounds. The bread is finished. I ooh and aah. I take pictures of the bread alone, me cradling the bread in my arms and the bowl and dish towel that made it all possible.

In the morning, I send out bread announcements.

Was it worth all the time? Ab-sh-loot-ley. Sorry, my mouth was full.

But should I ever again buy sourdough bread at a grocery or bakery, I will never, ever, ever, ever complain about the cost.