I was looking through my library in iphoto and came across a string of pictures of the LaGrange County place. As I passed by this one, I noticed a white area to the left of the gate. It was Sydney. I think if you click on the picture, you will be able to see that it our little sweetheart, keeping watch. He says he hates it when I call him our little sweetheart, but, deep inside, he’s okay with it.

Hey, here’s another picture.

I have sat down with men who came ashore at Normandy June 6, 1994. It has been an honor. Here are two of the articles I have written.

Bob Harding

Around ten in the morning.
June sixth.
1944.
Omaha Beach. Normandy.

Bob Harding, age 19, of the 5th Engineer Brigade, 56th Engineers, stepped out of a LCI – Landing Craft, Infantry – and took his place in the second wave of soldiers to land in France on what historian Cornelius Ryan would call “The Longest Day.”

Fifty-eight years later Bob Harding sits in his Avilla home and remembers it wasn’t really a surprise that they were on this boat that had left Plymouth, England while the sky was still dark to cross the Channel.

Just five months earlier– between Christmas and New Year’s Day – they had disembarked from another ship, the Queen Elizabeth, in Glasgow, Scotland. They were then sent to England where they “practiced blowing things up.”

Scuttlebutt had it that there was something up. Harding says, “Oh, yeah, we had one guy that every time we’d be getting ready to do something, he say there was a rumor that we were going to really do SOMETHING. Then he would add that it was just a rumor.”

Harding smiles and says, “When we got on the boat there in Plymouth, the fellow said, ‘I think they’re carrying this rumor too far’” That was the last piece of humor in Bob Harding’s story for quite awhile.

He talks about General Eisenhower’s message that was read to all troops involved in the invasion: “In that speech I think it said there will be no turning back. When the last guy hit the water, I saw why there would be no turning back because they raised the ramps on that ship and they were gone. So you had one way to go. 90 pound pack and trying to keep rifle dry.
“Toward a mound . . .”

The mound was a pile of sand that they men called a dike and on top of it were guns. Continue reading D-Day Articles: Bob Harding, Gene Cogan →

It is somewhere between 4 and 4:30 am – and I would know if I only looked up to the right top of the screen – and thunder woke me up. You see, Summer’s trip to Cedar Point is today. Tomorrow, the weather in the park is supposed to be sunny; today isolated thunderstorms are predicted to continue . . . along with rain, rain and rain. I have no idea how today will turn out for her, with all this wetness and potential lightning. I suspect a lot of the rides will be suspended for long periods and she will be soaked. But she is not yet 12 and is healthy and it will be an adventure. I wonder if she is looking at it that way?

Something got me thinking about contact lenses today and, quite frankly, I am still mildly surprised when I hear someone is getting them. They are so common, it really shouldn’t register on me. But it does. Maybe because I have worn glasses since I was a little girl and can’t understand why someone would want to put something in their eyes, then take it out, then put it in, they take it out . . . then look for it on the floor.

I know contacts have evolved since people starting wearing them when I was in high school, but I don’t follow the progress and I have never sought out new information. Some people are amazed that I have no desire to get them. I should qualify my opinion by stating that if I found them necessary to see while performing an essential task, I would be fitted for them. I don’t need them. My glasses are on my face almost all the time; they are tough lenses and serve as goggles as well. They can get super smudgy and I don’t have to worry about infection in my eyes. I very seldom misplace them since if I find them not on my face, I merely have to reach out to the places within arm’s length. A lot of the time, I fall asleep with them on.

I don’t even think about them, but after writing this I wonder if people question why I am wearing clunky glasses and not cool contacts. There is the possibility that they serve as a disguise for what Der Bingle and his crowd refer to – when they are being polite – as my close-set eyes. Cyclops nose might be another phrase they use . . .

I don’t care. I like my glasses. In fact I think I need a really individualized pair that make a statement; I just need to think of a statement to make.

Hey, one more thing: It’s customary when a person wears glasses for the funeral director to remove them when the casket is closed and place them in a gentleman’s breast pocket or put them in a lady’s hands. Maybe I’ll leave instructions for them to stay on my face. I’m not sure, though, and will probably give it some thought tonight . . . maybe experiment lying here first with them on my face and then taking them off.

Yes, kids are home . . . for 70+ days – Summer counted them and made a point of telling me. She is going to Cedar Point in Sandusky with the “been on the Honor Roll all year” middle school kids. All A’s. Won the science award for the 6th grade for 2007-2008. They go tomorrow.

And tomorrow, her brother starts some three weeks of intensive freshman biology because, well, he flunked the class. I am proud of him: His first term in high school and we had major illnesses in the family . . . and then we find out his grandpa was potentially deathly ill and I took off and left. And he hated labs and was shy and wouldn’t ask for help and got depressed himself and, well, got behind an 8 ball so big it probably was a 100 ball – bowling ball size.

You know what he did? He hitched up his pants, made sure his bootstraps were strong and pulled himself up. At a pivotal point in his life when he could have decided he was a total loser and gone into a funk – sort of like his grandma would have done – he went on and got lots and lots of A’s.

I told him this may be the best thing that ever happened to him. He’ll go in there and come to terms with hands-on science and it will help him will all his science and lab courses. And maybe he won’t blow up the chemistry lab in the next two years. Okay, you know how I am . . . nothing is sacred from a joke.

So think of him tomorrow, please. While his sister is zooming on a roller coaster, he’ll be starting out on a long trek, probably one without exciting thrills – probably one that starts out as a daunting uphill climb and hopefully, somewhere along the path, starts a downward slope toward the finish line.

He can put his hands in the air as he goes across that line, because he will have worked for it . . . he wasn’t just along for the ride.

The backyard, which was getting close to needing mowing, looks this morning like a jungle for feet. You see, the dog – Oh, rats, I’ve done it again . . . referred to his majesty as “the dog” – goes out there and we do not want him to be sickened by chemicals. We spray nothing back there. If you want weeds removed, you need to pull them and I have to admit after fighting for a few minutes with roots and realizing the sheer magnitude of the task, I find myself thinking something about live and let live.

I could put a bounty on weeds – give my grandkids money for each little weed pelt they toss into a bucket but I have serious doubts it would work. And they are too old now to fall for the “We are going into battle against the enemy of flowers and grass; we will smite our enemies” scenario. I am not, however, and will probably wind up getting myself some tool about the length of a golf club which I can use to pop the invaders out.

Or I could put a cannister on my back with weed killer and spray each one individually with a personal vengeance. Yes, yes, I stand at Armageddon and I do battle for the Lord. Oh, the spray thing? Okay, we can keep the dog (drat, did it again) out of that part of the yard for a day or so.

I can see me – green cannister on my back . . . little metal wand with spray head in my hand. Maybe in the future, the moments spent in fighting the weeds will be immortalized in a statue of me standing steadfast against the creeping charlie.

Of course, a main consideration is that the yard is almost entirely weeds . . .