For some reason, I have never had to re-light the pilot light under  a water heater. But yesterday I was faced with the task . . . because I am the resident patsy here. So I watched YouTube and I, the wonderful AmeliaJake, learned all about the access panel and how to do the little “you have to put this piece back starting with it upside down” maneuver. I lit the pilot light. I did it. And, I did it with only one viewing of the instructional video. I got the access panel back on also.

I went back upstairs where Spikey was broadcasting on her Mercury Radio News station that reports were coming in about alien water heaters landing in New Jersey. Because she had the On Air sign posted, I held up a poster that read:  SPIKEY, YOU ARE GOING TO BE IN HOT WATER and she said, “This just in from a trusted source . . . Never mind. Now back to our regular musical program.”

She then took off her foil hat and put it in the drawer for the next time it is needed . . . and as Spikey says, there will be a next time. You may want to send for her instructional booklet, titled Protecting Your Brain Through the Wonders of  Foil. Several different folding patterns are included. Spikey favors the one that resembles Sherlock Holmes’ hat, but it is just a matter of fashion taste.

HERE IS THE VIKING MODEL:

UPDATE: Uh, this isn’t a true update; I started out to talk about Summer and I having a competitive weight loss campaign but somehow it slipped to the back of my mind. So here it is: Summer and I are writing our weights down every morning for a month. She is waiting on me so I won’t expend any more calories than I absolutely have to. This could get interesting.

Nine years last year and it started to seem real.  He was gone; tears could fill my eyes just out of the blue. I talked to my mother about the coming February being a decade and how it was getting harder. She said she felt too nervous to go last year and sent me alone; I think the truth of the matter was that she was feeling too ill, but didn’t want to say anything. Because, as you know, she died in October.

I didn’t expect to be marking this tenth anniversary by myself. I didn’t expect to be selecting her monument. I didn’t expect being nudged to list my expenses so the lawyer can finish up  and close the estate.

But here I am.

That is probably there because of this description of an outing:

You just climbed to the top of a mountain.  You didn’t get there taking a hiker’s path, the slow rhythmic pace along a trail.  You got there cross-country chasing a dog that is chasing a bird.  Your steps fall downhill to get to the dog on point and hopefully the flush of a covey.  Your steps fall uphill racing to get above the feathered creatures you admire so much.  Once you are on top or even crest a high vantage to look down on the rolling ridges and water below you know what it is to have earned something.  It isn’t the bird in the bag you will think of at this very moment, it’s the view.  The stark beauty of the place you are in settles into you.  Once you feel this you have found another piece of the puzzle that is chukar hunting.

Karl DeHart
UplandIdaho.com

But getting back to chukars, when I first saw the word and that they were hunted, I thought it sounded like something you should do with a khyber knife. And when I checked a Cornell site to learn abou chukars, I exclaimed, “I knew it!” because the first thing I read was this: A native of southern Eurasia, the Chukar was introduced into the United States from Pakistan . . .

I then went to the shopping part of the site and found a new phrase: CHUCKING FUKAR! It was printed on hats.

By the hilt and the haft of the khyber knife, what in the heck does fukar mean? I looked it up. This proved a difficult task. Most results on the Google search engine referred me back to the place on Upland Idaho I had come from. When I put in “fukar definition” it asked me if I meant FUBAR – and we have been there before . . . Foo Bar and all that.

The best I could come up with was a reference to a post titled  Sand Merchants Baned in a blog titled Corax’al.

“Fukar” is the noun form of the verb (that we of Vra’Akar came up with) for the action by which mothers and fathers engender children. But in usage just as common, one might hear ‘jalla‘ used to mean ‘copulate’. Since it also means ‘to strike’ or ‘to beat’, it shares an etymology analogous to that of the infamous English F-word.))

So how this happened to get on hats, I don’t know, but next to the picture, they have noted this:

If you have chased chukar then you understand the meaning.

Well, at least if a tornado carries me, like Dorothy, far away – say to Peshawar -  I will know two words. I think I’d better just say “Chukar”.  Although, “Take me to the American Embassy” would probably be best.

Ack, some of the pheasant hunters here are gearing up for chukar . . .

Der Bingle when he had more hair and was 24 or 25 or 26 and overseas.

Back around 1988 – Robert, Miss Alice and Daddy. (Robert Grismore)

About 1985 or early 1986 -  Quentin and Daddy.

The money for the set was reasonable, considering its expanse and that today’s costs can be pretty good sums – but it was special money. The February before when my father passed away, my mother said, “Well, you know, your dad saved up his prescription receipts and mailed them in every now and then; we need to gather them up. She did that job and when she was done she asked me if I thought it would be a good idea to use the money to get the kids a swing set.

Before I could think, she said my father’s insurance company drug reimbursement check had come in and could we get something for the xxxx hundred plus dollars? Well, yes we could. She said he would like having that money finance something for the great-grandkids, especially the little three year old girl who had backed herself up to him repeatedly the Thanksgiving before so he could lift her up high enough to shoot a ball through a lowered hoop.

Less than three months later he was gone.

So we built this huge thing and somewhere I have a picture of Mr. Feller, Quentin and myself in front of it, in a pose reminiscent of the turn of the century – the 1900 one.

Swings and climbing platforms are quiet places now and only a stiff wind gets the swings moving. I think I am going to climb up and try to get those “super safe, super strong” swing connections undone and put up – oh, maybe a garden swing and a rope chair. Perhaps we’ll get vines climbing the stairs to the slide. Or not. Then there’s the section with the rope net . . .

The clubhouse, though, I think I’ll leave as it is for awhile. The kids get a kick out of their grandmother climbing up and settling down with a book and a glass of ice and a bottle of Lipton iced tea. I have been known to tire of reading and stretch out on the sun-warmed plank floor. The dog sleeps beneath me in what was the sandbox area.

I don’t know what I think when I am up there – my mind floats along on snippets of memories and maybe ideas for one of today’s problems.

I know in that picture I have, I was seated and wearing one of my floppy hats with the mesh between the brim and the top of the crown. Had Quentin cut his long hair by then? Yes, I think so. Mr. Feller was standing with his hand on the fire pole.

We were captured . . . in time.

Little Ann came from the Butler County, Ohio, animal shelter. She was about a year old and, by the way, had never had her tail docked. I think she was probably born and said, “I’m emancipating myself; I’m out of here.” Of course, she gave Quentin the smiling, happy look that said, “I know you’re going to take me home. I know it. I know it. I’m so happy. I love you. I love you. I love you.”

So we took her home. And she promptly took off. She had used us for her escape. Ah, but she did not know her new adversary. She wasn’t going to break my son’s heart. I kept tracking her down and she kept running away. She did that for 13 years. Of course, somewhere along the line, she would run away and I had learned to shout, “Fine, find your meals somewhere,” and she would be scratching to come in when she had wandered around enough. If you wanted her back right away, the trick was to take about five steps to chase her, and then turn your back and walk away. She would follow.

I remember taking her to the Fairgrounds. When it was time to leave, she would not get in the car. I would drive a few feet and she would run along behind. I’d stop and open the door and she would run off. Many is the time I drove the few blocks home with a dog following a car that stopped every half-block for her. I would get so furious. And I’d turn round and take her to the Fairgrounds the next day. We got another dog, Sally, and Little Ann would get Sally to run beside her and then she would run past a tree and Sally, watching Little Ann, would run into it.

One time, when Quentin was a senior, he got so incredibly upset with her that he bowled her in the porch door. She rolled over and over along the carpet to the other end and bounced off the wall. Did not faze her.

She would come for Cameron when he came to live with us. He was five or six and he would see her make an escape and run for the door, calling, “I’ll save you, Ann.” And she would look at him and come. He called her sweetums. We would get him up late at night to stand in the door and call, “Come here, Sweetums,” when she was being especially stubborn.

I took her to Mother’s a lot, although we just had to take it for granted she would show up when it was time to go home. She liked to make trips out at night and she would buffalo me into believing she had “to go”. She’d be off and I’d have to get Mother to demand, “Little Ann, you get in here right now.” A lot of folks are a bit cowed by Mother.

Anyway, one night, we were there and she went out and came in willingly. Thank you, Ann. She had been skunked, right on the forehead. At 2 am, we bathed her in tomato juice and vinegar and Dawn dishwashing liquid – which is supposed to work. We thought it had. I returned home the next day and everyone exclaimed, “WHAT is that stench?” More baths – nurse baths, the ones where my daughter-in-law scrubbed her with one of those net mesh things and then rinsed . . . and then did it again.

I don’t know if it was the actual skunking or the nurse baths, but Little Ann stayed clear of skunks from then on.

She got old and she got cancer. We did what we could but she got worse. Her spirit was so indomitable I knew she would never give up – I had her put to sleep.

Ah, Little Ann, I can hear St. Peter calling now: “Little Ann, you get back in here . . . Do you hear me? Don’t make me get the Big Guy . . . “

That would have been in the fifties; yes, I decided to go ahead and get graphic with the numbers. The porch is, for the most part, the same as it was then, and often my mother and I sit out there and read or do sudokus. I did a lot of embroidery over the years and then my fingers started to tingle when I would hold the needle and so I finished up the project I was on and didn’t do another.

I was going to say a few things about Grandma, but I got sidetracked again. She was born in 1881 in Lima, Indiana (now Howe) to Wesley Wisler and Martha Fowler Wisler. My mother wasn’t born until 1926, so I had a pretty direct link to the real horse and buggy days. I remember the way she smelled – clean and starched – and it does seem odd that someone I knew so well and loved so dearly is a complete stranger to those in my life now, with the exception of my mother.

Heavens, I didn’t mention her name. It was Jessie Ethel Wisler. I used to giggle at the the Ethel part. She was named after her father’s brother Jesse who moved to Mancelona, Michigan and started a business. She was first married to Harry Huff and had two children, Lucile Elizabeth and Stanley Malcolm. Harry died of Bright’s Disease and some years later she married my grandfather, John Michael Shimp.

Grandpa had been married before also and his wife had died following a miscarriage; she had been all right when he left the hospital, but when he got home, they called with the message she had bled to death. (I didn’t feel like spelling hemorrhaged, but then felt I was being a chicken so here it is.) It changed him, this event. They say he withdrew into himself. He died when I was 10 and they found he had one of my school pictures in his wallet. I remember hearing Grandma say, “He must have picked it up off the table.”

I have some pictures of him in his youth. In one he is sitting on a thresher, I think in a coat, tie and hat; I know that at one time he traveled out to the Dakotas with a crew, harvesting grain. I’ll have to scan them into my computer, along with my grandmother’s graduation photo.

But back to the embroidery. I don’t think we ever framed it; I think I just kept it folded up in some drawer or box or maybe both at one time or another. At any rate, I found it in my thirties, stuck it in a hoop and hung it on a nail. Then we moved and I stuck it in a drawer. When this tree went up and I was looking for stuff to put on it, I thought, “Why not.”

I close my eyes and I can be on that porch again in one of the summers when my age was still in the single digits. And it is a nice thing to have tucked away in my memory box.