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We had a good-size crowd together this week. Three out-of-town grands and six grands who live in town, met up for three consecutive days. We rotated from house to house to house so that no one house would be singled out as a disaster area.

Due to the size, volume and rapid movement of the group, my intelligence gathering was limited to random conversations bits floating above the crowd or one-on-one exchanges in the car.

In the car: “Grandma, it’s easier to leave your house faster than ours because you don’t have to put up the dogs. If we don’t put them up, they eat all the food.”

“You mean they eat all the dog food?”

“No, they eat apples, avocados and bananas. Our lab can peel a banana!”

(Note to self: remember that the next time you’re at their house and they offer you a banana.)

Overheard: Nine cousins are about to eat lunch, then go to a neighborhood pool. A seven-year-old prays before lunch: “Dear God, thank you for this day and this food and please let us be the only kids at the pool.”

In the car: “Grandma, what does ‘occupado’ mean?”

“It’s Spanish for occupied. Sometimes you see it in English and Spanish on restroom doors like on planes. Why?”

“It’s what my dad says when he’s in the bathroom and the door is closed.”

Overheard: Three of the nine kids heading to a creek stomp did not bring boots. One of the kids yells, “Well, you can go barefoot in the creek, can’t you?”

“Mom says we’re not allowed to,” comes the answer.

Then another says, “Yeah, but Dad lets us!”

Overheard at the creek: A country cousin says to a city cousin, “I can bring frog eggs next time I come so you can catch frogs.”

Two of the older cousins, not present because they are at a church camp in Louisiana, send a text: “We took a boat ride on a river and saw an alligator. Did you know if you take a selfie with an alligator, you only have a 50% chance of survival?”

Nobody wants to ask which side of 50 they think they are in.

Early morning in the kitchen: Standing in front of the freezer compartment of the refrigerator, juggling ice cream bars, fruit pops and ice cream sandwiches to get at some ice, a small voice behind me says, “If you’re trying to clear that out, I can help by eating some for you.”

They’re all gone now — the kids, the dirt, the crud on the countertops, the wet swimsuits, water blasters, flip flops, soggy towels, butterfly nets and every last grass clipping stuck to the bathtub.

Like summer itself, the time passed all too quickly.

By the way, there were no other kids at the pool that day.

 

Hydration has officially become the cure for whatever ails us.

Feeling sluggish? Hydrate! Dry skin? Hydrate! Joints hurt? Hydrate! High blood pressure? Hydrate? Ingrown toenail? Hydrate! Don’t know what to make for dinner? Hydrate!

To join the wave of adequate hydration, one of our daughters thoughtfully gifted me with a pink XXL insulated water tumbler with an 18-inch straw. It’s like a sippy cup for giants.

My water bottle is so enormous it looks like something I would carry to do a triathlon. So far, my greatest distance has been from the kitchen to the garage.

When my XXL water tumbler is wedged into the cupholder in our car’s console, there’s no room for the husband’s coffee. Poor guy. With hot coffee in hand, he now makes left and right turns very slowly.

Not only does it take more time to turn, it takes more time to get anywhere. It now takes us three and a half-hours for a three-hour drive, due to more frequent stops.

For the record, the number of public restrooms has not increased in proportion to the number of giant water containers in use. Go ahead and drink more but prepare to stand in line longer. I now regret every family trip we ever took when I told one of the kids to “just hold it!”

The real debate in the water craze is not whether to drink, but how much to drink. Recommendations range from one-third of your body weight in fluid ounces to your full body weight in fluid ounces.

A Harvard website floats the idea of 4-6 cups a day, while a UK medical website treads water suggesting 6-8 cups a day. Will Americans rise to the challenge?

The ones who go pro in the name of hydration are the folks carrying gallon-size water bottles. Talk about a win-win. You can hydrate and tone your arms all at the same time.

At this rate, water tumblers will soon be the size of 32-gallon trash cans and require PVC pipes for a straw.

I do drink more with my new XXL tumbler, but it’s so big and clunky it often stays anchored to the kitchen counter. It doesn’t go with me, I go to it.

The real question in the matter of healthy hydration is not how much I should drink, but how much can I drink before I explode?

The man of the house is tall, lean, and so bald that his head shines almost as much as his smile. He worked law enforcement all his career. As a state trooper, he once rescued the Beatles from crazed fans after a St. Louis concert.

He worked for the federal government as well, something to do with organized crime and exploding body parts. I don’t ask for details; I just nod. He served with the Secret Service under Presidents Ford, Clinton, “Daddy Bush” and Vice-President Dan Quayle. Barbara Bush was his favorite even though she wasn’t a president.

He’s retired now, mastering the art of gardening and the go-to guy if you have concerns about a tree. Rabbits eating the bark off your dogwood? Call him.

Writing is his chief enjoyment. He’s written 29 books, none of them published. That doesn’t diminish his enthusiasm one semi-colon, nor should it. A lot of good writers are never published, and some published writers aren’t all that good. He prints out his manuscripts, tucks them in three-ring binders and passes them among friends who receive his creations with delight.

At the center of his writing room sits a stately desk with a brass lamp, a desk pad, a pencil holder and a day calendar. The desk sits in front of windows that frame lush greenery and channel oceans of soft, natural light.

The center desk drawer is organized with precision. A divided tray holds a solar calculator, Post-it notes, mechanical pencil refills, scissors, a pink highlighter, a magnifying glass and a small compartment in the middle containing 40 brightly colored paper clips: turquoise, sky blue, hot pink, lime green, white and neon yellow.

Nobody touches the paper clips. He says that with a smile, probably the same smile he wore when he yelled, “MOVE IT!” at the Beatles.

Not even he uses the paper clips. “Those are special,” he says. “I won’t use them. I’m still emotional.”

The paper clips were a gift when he was diagnosed with advanced cancer and underwent 40 radiation treatments. The clips were linked together and hung on the kitchen wall. After each radiation treatment, he and his wife would return home and, because he was so utterly exhausted, she would remove a paper clip.

Each blast of radiation was followed by one less paper clip.

It didn’t look like progress at first. Slowly, gradually the chain began to shrink.

They monitored it when they sat down for a meal, skipped a meal because he was too sick to eat, or when they walked to the garage to head out for another treatment.

One of my most beloved theologians, Ray Stedman, once wrote, “Suffering is part of the program.” Who was better acquainted with suffering than Christ? It was the path to resurrection and life after death.

Most of us subconsciously acknowledge that suffering is part of the program—particularly for others. Then we are shocked when we find ourselves in that equation.

Nobody escapes this life unscathed. Everybody goes through something.

When darkness falls, your steps falter and the path ahead is frightening, keep inching forward, keep believing, keep praying.

The path through suffering is one paper clip at a time.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have air conditioning until we moved from Nebraska to Missouri. People in Nebraska used open windows and fans to cool a house back in the day.

My Aunt Adeline, a resourceful woman, cooled a big house, a husband and six kids, with nothing but a bowl of ice in front of a window fan. That was the Cornhusker version of air conditioning.

There were pitiful looks when people learned we were moving to Missouri, a place many considered Deep South. It was only 200 miles south, but south is south.

From all the talk, it sounded as though the heat down South was so bad that people melted like butter in the summer. They could be sitting in their cars, at the kitchen table, going for the mail or picking tomatoes when—bam!—they melted into a large puddle of clarified butter.

We moved south in August and, as predicted, each day was red hot wrapped in a suffocating blanket of humidity. At night, we slept (more like drifted in and out of consciousness) with a very old and very large oscillating floor fan humming at the end of the hallway by the bedrooms.

That big fan went wherever we went. If we were in the kitchen, the fan was in the kitchen. If we moved to the living room, the fan moved to the living room. The fan was a constant and welcome presence.

The next summer, Mom and Dad bought a window air conditioner and the large oscillating fan quietly moved to the basement. We gave the old fan a friendly nod whenever we went down to do laundry or retrieve something from the freezer, but it was largely ignored and soon forgotten.

The new AC window unit shot arctic air directly at the kitchen table. We ate every meal with our winter coats on. To get cold air back to the bedrooms, it ran full blast at night, which meant there were often icicles hanging from the kitchen appliances in the mornings.

A few years later, Mom and Dad had central air installed. Life would never be the same. There was no hum of the fan or roar of the window AC. The entire house stayed comfortably cool without constant background noise. What’s more, we could eat meals without coats on.

Our kids have never known life without air conditioning, nor have their kids. When one of our daughters and her family moved to a different house, a friend brought lunch for the entire crew on moving day. She also brought an oscillating stand fan, knowing all the traipsing in and out would heat the house.

“It’s an oscillated what?” shrieked one of the kids. The woman lugged the fan into the kitchen, set it upright, raised the pole and plugged it in.

The kids immediately put their red-cheeked sweaty faces directly in front of the blowing fan. As they talked, they realized the fan warped and amplified their voices.

They sang and screeched using all the weird voices they could muster. For the rest of the day, not one of the passed the fan without stopping to cool off and singing a few bars.

“Hey, Grandma!” one of them shouted, “Did you know about these fans?”

“I did know about them,” I said. “That’s how your grandma became cool.”

Parents are giving credit cards to children so young that some of them aren’t able to make their own beds or cross the street alone. These newly minted cardholders are buckled into car seats whenever they travel and wear water wings at the pool but have credit cards linked to their parents’ account.

One mother said she and her husband added their 2-year-old and 1-year-old as authorized users on their bank card in hopes of teaching the children about money at an early age and establishing a good credit history. Their toddlers purchase snacks once a week at the grocery store and pay with their credit card.

I can see it on the college application: “Able to tap plastic at age 2.”

The article did not say how such young children pay for their purchases when the statement comes due. Perhaps parents garnish the kids’ tooth fairy money.

Where do credit card holders not yet potty trained keep their credit cards? In the dresser drawer with their jammies? Under their pillows? Maybe they keep them in a magnetic wallet attached to their cell phones.

This new trend alters the benchmarks of child development.

Year One: Waves bye-bye, can say “Mama” and “Dada,” able to grasp credit cards between thumb and pointer finger.

Year Two: Kicks a ball, eats with a spoon, knows how to tap, swipe or insert the chip.

Year Three: Learns colors — silver is for Citibank, red is for Macy’s and blue is for Lowe’s.

Year Four: Strings beads, dresses self, joins Amazon Prime for free shipping and Prime days.

Year Five: Speaks clearly, uses all parts of speech, can tell a simple story using full sentences about getting a $200 year-end rebate on the Costco card.

We gave our youngest a credit card when she was 18 and went to college. We can’t remember why we never gave her older sister or brother a credit card. Perhaps we were still in the tough love phase of parenting.

If I’d had a credit card as a young child, I would have bought the Barbie Dream House, the pink convertible, and multiple Ken dolls so Barbie had choices.

Who am I kidding? I had a wild streak and would have been the five-year-old buying boxes and boxes of candy cigarettes.

Let’s hope these young users learn how to spend within their means. Credit card debt can weigh you down faster than a soggy diaper.

 

 

The last time we sold a house was 40 years ago, so we were unfamiliar with the current concept of “staging a house” before selling it. When our youngest daughter and husband mentioned staging their house, we thought live music and refreshments might be involved. Wrong again.

Staging a house means you declutter, deep clean and enter all your earthly goods into the Witness Protection Program. A second option is to rent a large storage unit.

Staging a house involves removing family pictures, personal mementos, wall décor and all 400 magnets plastering children’s artwork to the refrigerator door.

Bedside tables are cleared, leaving only carefully curated hardback books that make the owners look like tech wizards or movie buffs.

Bathrooms must look unused and sterile.

The washer and dryer can stay in the laundry room, but no dirty clothes are allowed. Some suggest hiding empty laundry baskets so as not to remind potential buyers of unpleasant chores.

Kitchen counters are to be virtually bare. One staging expert claims that visible cords to coffeemakers, toasters and mixers on a counter look uninviting. I don’t know how we live with ourselves.

To keep the house looking neat, clean and unlived-in, our daughter, her husband and three kids moved out of their house and into ours.

Fortunately, our house is not for sale, which means people are free to use the bathrooms, leave sand and dirt in the bottom of the tub, kick off your shoes anywhere, run up and down the stairs while dragging your hands on the walls and weave all the electrical cords on the kitchen counter into macrame plant holders.

Which reminds me of another “must have” for staging a home: a live plant in every room. Who decides these things?

After four days on the market, multiple showings and no offers, our daughter felt we should stop by the house and freshen things up. Perhaps prospective buyers had messed with the staging.

She was correct—a chair had been moved 10 inches from the dining table. The aging carpet in a hallway had a small visible wrinkle in it. The two of us were on our hands and knees pushing the excess carpet into a bedroom, under the bed and up against the wall.

Perhaps the house wasn’t selling because a sofa was on the wrong wall. Careful not to scratch the floor, we picked up the sofa and moved it to an adjacent wall.

Thirty seconds later, we picked it up and moved it back.

Perhaps the bedrooms needed vacuuming. No-line vacuuming is preferred for staging, but if the vacuum does leave lines, they need to be straight. Despite her apprehension about my initial vacuum lines, I soon got the hang of it.

Three days later an offer came through and they moved back home that weekend. The ‘fridge was once again plastered with artwork and handprints, tennis shoes and flip flops blocked the entryway, the dog lounged on the sofa, pots and pans sat on the stove and dirty dishes stood in the sink.

Home sweet home.

Turquoise colors the early morning sky as a granddaughter and I leave the house for a donut run. We turn out of the neighborhood, zip past the strip mall, clear two stop lights, lean into a roundabout and begin cruising a lovely stretch of road bordered by magnificent estate homes with manicured lawns and swimming pools.

My backseat passenger asks how long it will be before we get to the store and comments she has never been on this road. The implication is clear: These are not Grandma’s neighbors. Grandma could be lost. Donuts could be at risk.

“I know exactly where we are. Look to your left up ahead,” I say. “There’s a house under construction that is so big you can’t tell where the front door is. Sometimes there are as many as 20 work trucks there at a time.”

She sits up tall, cranes her neck and says, “Whoa!” which is what most people say when they pass the house.

“Looks like they’re building a wall around the property,” I say. “They could be worried about people trying to break into their house. If I had that much money, I might be worried, too.”

“I’m worried,” comes a soft reply.

“Why are you worried?”

“Because I have a lot of money.”

“How much?”

“I have 40 dollars at home and 100 dollars in the bank.”

“That’s a lot of money, for a girl who just finished kindergarten. I’m sure your money is very, very safe. You don’t need to worry.”

“OK. But I still worry.”

“About what?”

“I worry about my dog. I worry she might run away.”

“Your dog is never going to run away. She loves living with you and your family. She loves her dog bed, all the cuddles you give her, the tricks you’ve taught her and the bell she jostles to go outside. She would never run away. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Silence. She’s thinking.

“Want to hear me spell picnic?” she asks. “P-i-k-n-k.”

“It’s actually p-i-c-n-i-c,” I say.

“It’s the c,” she says with a sigh. “Sometimes it sounds like k and sometimes it sounds like s. Aren’t there some rules about c?”

Now I’m worried. Who knew worry was contagious? There are rules about c, something to do with the vowels that follow it, but even for $140 dollars I can’t remember them well enough to guarantee accuracy.

I spell picnic a couple of times; she spells it a couple of times and the language arts crisis passes. Another worry left in the dust.

“Look at us!” I say. “We are taking an early morning ride in the car together under blue skies and puffy marshmallow clouds, and you’re about to pick out a donut. Today is a good day. We don’t have a worry in the world.”

Silence.

“Strawberry frosted with sprinkles!” she says.

 

 

 

I may be only one bag of Miracle-Gro away from going officially overboard on the whole garden thing this year.  I blame it all on a long, hard winter. My survival kit during snowbound months with no sun and sub-zero temps consisted of chocolate and mail-order seeds.

Starting seeds indoors was how I convinced myself winter would one day pass and spring would again return. I threw myself into the project with such passion that I even bought a grow light.

Grow lights are small but mighty purplish UV lights on flexible arms that can illuminate an entire room. The lights were so bright that, from the outside, the upstairs of the house looked like a cannabis farm.

Not wanting to be awakened at 2 a.m. by a SWAT team, I cut the grow lights and started moving seed trays to follow the sunlight each day. Morning sun poured in by the fireplace, noonday sun filled the family room and the days ended with seedling trays perched on cookbooks, catching late afternoon rays in the kitchen.

The things we do for love—and garden-fresh vegetables.

On a visit to Monticello, we saw the fantastic greenhouse room where Thomas Jefferson cultivated seeds and kept detailed notes. My maternal instinct prompted me to begin keeping notations on seed development as well.

March 20th: Roma tomato beginning to crown. Soil dilated to 2.

April 1st: Shocker! Twin peppers birthed over night!

When we went out of town for a long weekend, I asked if the plants could stay with one of our girls. She gave me the look. “We watch your kids,” I said. “Surely, you can watch my babies.”

I wasn’t so far gone as to leave page after page of written instructions, however, I did call a few times. I had separation-vegetation anxiety.

And I may have asked her to send pictures.

And I may have texted: “Tell the herbs Momma will be back in no thyme and let the basil know I’m rooting for him.”

No response. I think she blocked me.

What I didn’t plan on was such a hearty crop. We now have a small vegetable garden overflowing with cucumbers, pole beans, tomatoes, peppers, herbs and red potatoes.

They are so robust that they all scored in the 95^th percentile at their last well check.

Get a group of women together and chances are they will talk about relationships. And shoes. More specifically, relationships with shoes.

The conversations are about shoes somebody loves, shoes somebody used to love (but broke up with due to plantar fasciitis), and shoes somebody dreams of meeting in the future.

These are women in crisis grappling with the reality that they can no longer live in fashionable heels but need to wear comfortable shoes. Transitioning to comfortable shoes is a major life change that aging experts fail to mention.

My closet is a melancholy walk down memory lane. It cradles shoes that I shouldn’t wear, and can’t wear, but can’t let go of. This is known as shoe separation anxiety.

Yesterday, I pulled a dusty box from under the bed to feast my eyes on a beloved pair of boots I can no longer wear. It was sole food.

Sadly, my most comfortable shoes are a pair of well-worn hiking boots. That’s a hard one to pull off at weddings and funerals.

The last shoe convo I had in a group of women went like this:

“I love Hoka. They’re like wearing clouds,” said one.

“I can’t do clouds,” countered another. “I need support.”

“The On tennis shoes are good,” chirped another. “They have so much cushioning on the bottom you could use them for a flotation device.”

If you happen upon a comfortable-shoe conversation, think twice before sticking your toe in the water.

I first noticed my shoes were unbearable at a wedding two years ago. Silver heels. You should see them. You still can—they’re on the closet shelf. I kicked them off under the table during the reception and, when the wedding was over, walked barefoot on gravel to get to the car.

Two weeks later I was in a podiatrist’s office. He said I needed orthotic inserts. I questioned that. He explained in detail how they would help. I said, “OK, I stand corrected.”

Orthotic inserts are so expensive that I keep them in the safe deposit box at night. Comfort comes with a cost.

Costly as they are, comfortable shoes are such a relief to hurting feet that they quickly become both necessity and obsession. The search history on my computer sadly reveals 98 percent of my searches are for shoes with arch support. I toe the line.

I now know why Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz” kept saying “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home,” while clicking her ruby slippers together. Home was where her comfortable shoes were.

The morning after a storm that snapped tree branches, sent people scurrying to their basements and trash cans blowing to the curbs, I was sitting in a line of traffic adjacent to a small family-owned garden store.

A woman out front of the garden shop struggled to untangle flagpole ropes twisted in the storm. Hunched over in an awkward position, she couldn’t seem to get a grip on them. I wondered why she wasn’t using both hands when a swatch of red and white peeked out from under her arm. She was holding a folded flag beneath her elbow pressed tightly to her side.

With the flagpole lines finally free, she attached the flag, taking care that it didn’t touch the ground. Old Glory was halfway up the pole when the traffic resumed moving.

The woman who raised the flag has probably done that hundreds of times, but I was glad to be there at that particular time, to see her respectful handling of Old Glory and to watch the stars and stripes reach for the sky.

My dad fought under that flag, as did two of his brothers, one who was killed in combat. I have a total of six uncles who served under that flag. Two made the military their careers. My mother-in-law, brother-in-law and our son-in-law all served under that flag.

“Served” sounds so easy. Bombs, gunfire, tanks, makeshift hospitals, sleeping in tents, land mines, Agent Orange, suicide bombers and open burn pits.

Nobody ever comes home the same.

Some never come home.

The lives of those who serve are upended just like the lives of everyone who loves them, prays for them and waits for them.

June 14th is National Flag Day. We fly the flag from our front porch almost every day. To us, it is a reminder of the long and bloody road to freedom and a nod of gratitude to all who have served.

There is power in that flag. Those red and white stripes, and stars on a field of blue are so powerful they can temporarily unite opposing teams on football fields, baseball fields, soccer fields and basketball courts. That flag can trigger the roar of the crowd at the Indy 500 and NASCAR races.

In rare moments, that flag can even quiet warring political factions at our nation’s capital.

Old Glory represents our shared history as well as our shared hope for the future.

I called the garden shop and told the man who answered the phone that I’d watched someone raise the flag in front of their business that morning and appreciated it.

“You know why we have that done every day?” he asked. “My dad served in World War II.”