Yesterday, after going a summer or so without snake sightings at LaGrange, I saw a skinny, long black one hurrying away from the side of the mower – the RIDING mower, thank heavens. I had been concentrating on something, trying to figure it out when my peripheral vision started flashing ALERT ALERT ALERT ALERT!!!!!

Part of my mind concluded that a small, harmless snake had probably been startled by the mower; another part of my mind shut down after issuing a final command to my body: PANIC. I can feel a bit of the surge of adrenalin just remembering it.

What is it with things that don’t have legs and arms???

I believe I am going to have add an extension arm onto my weed-eater, and maybe duct tape a stun gun on the end with a remote trigger.

We are entering the downhill slide of another Norfolk Pine. I have always loved them, especially since my Chicago days. But they dry out and die, or they get sick and dry out and die. I stopped getting big ones because I felt guilty about buying one. At Christmas time, however, the grocery stores sell small ones with bows and stars on them for under $10 and they look really, really nice in the nursing home room.

I thought maybe this year’s candidate might beat the odds, but it is getting that stiff feeling on the ends of the branches. I’ll look up possible treatments on the Internet, but I don’t have much faith in my abilities. I don’t know, maybe if I water it with my tears, it will take heart and survive, if not thrive. That would make a good kid’s fairy tale, but I’m not betting the farm on it working. Although, it might be excellent pro-active therapy for me in stress containment.

Yes, that would be one-third of the life recipe provided by Jim Valvano in his last speech before his death:

If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.

I wonder about the thinking, though. Does it have to be top-notch philosophical musings, or can mundane thoughts qualify in a pinch? Probably not; I’m thinking C.S. Lewis would suggest prayer.

No more Okie Dokie to mowing at LaGrange today; I had to man this fort this morning and by the time I got gas – in my car and in my containers, it would be mid-afternoon before I actually began chugging. That’s if I don’t have to jump start the mower – not exactly a major time consuming task, but a sighing and eye-rolling one that doesn’t do much for morale.

Today I am using the “everything into boxes to be sorted later” method of housekeeping. I definitely have too much stuff out. Or, looking at it another way, I have too much stuff out and no housekeeper to keep everything just so. Actually, I have so much stuff that even a good housekeeper could only do a so-so job. Me? You don’t want to think about it.

But, tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and when I think of mowing, I hear an Okie Dokie. I’ll get up there early, putter around while the dew dries and then plop on my hat, spray my repellant and become tractor person. I think I may mow creatively, rather than efficiently – maybe I’ll even write my name. Were I younger, I would get a part-time job and put all my money toward bushwhacker equipment like the show on television – and maybe a wood-chipper. Maybe big ole Wellington boots, too.

These are my daydreams????? Holy Moses!! What happened to my expensive SUV with a sunroof and a house on the Pacific Ocean with an infinity pool?

Yes, Rose just cozied up to me and sasid, “AmeliaJake, I really can’t see myself with a professional grade weed-eater . . .” Ah, Rose, always the one with good sense.

AmeliaJake, who is me, or if you want to be grammatically correct – who is I, has one leg up on a coffee table, the other hanging from the sofa and is typing whatever comes into her mind.

She does not want to continually have to type the lengthy “AmeliaJake” and isn’t opting for “AJ” because really she doesn’t want to write in the third person at all. So, here you have “I”. And that’s a good fit for someone who is fairly self-centered.

Are you ready to begin? It doesn’t matter; I’m starting.

If I do not go to the nursing home today, I am going to not allow myself to read any book for a week. It is true that time is an issue, but I ought to be able to handle this. The lady I visit is quite hard of hearing and can’t see too well and doesn’t remember when I come and when I don’t. But she is aware when I am there. I try to go at four in the afternoon so I can be there with her before and during supper. They put her to bed right afterwards and I sit and read beside her while she dozes, just as if we were in her living room.

What has been the problem was first the weather this winter, making the trip slippery; and now with the long days, 4 pm. sneaks right up on me and I miss my window. I could, of course, go later in the evening and just sit and read while she dozed from 7 to 9 pm, but we’re not there yet when sensing a presence is the best to hope for. She still can appreciate the interaction of someone coming, and she still knows, at least for while I am there, that it is me.

Some rain today means no mowing, but it also means mowing tomorrow. I’ve been all over the mowing stories, including the gas cans that fell over and leaked in the trunk. I am ready for sheep and goats in the yard in LaGrange.

I had a tiring day yesterday, which led me to toss a wadded up soft blanket on the sofa and just flop down on my stomach. Not an especially unusual event, but this time I just stayed there, and then slipped my glasses off, thought to heck with my medicine and zoned out until about 45 minutes ago.

There is an advantage to this: I just had to put my glasses on and sit up and dose myself with a carbonated and caffeinated beverage and I’m ready for the Summer to School run. (I will slip on my moccasins.)

I am counting down the days until I make my last East Noble run; it has been a long haul with two generations involved.

When Quentin started there, my dad said they used to call the gym “The Big Blue Pit”. I don’t know if they call it anything now – school expansion and renovation have buried its looming presence deeper into the building and multiple channel cable tv, internet, electronic games, computers and the introduction of class basketball have moved the focus away from the days when “Hoosiers” was all pervasive.

Well, it’s about time for Summer to be down, asking for socks – she only wears non-matching pairs – and requests for the time. I am used to calling out “7:08”, “7:13” and so forth. She does not like me to say “a quarter after seven” because that is old-fashioned. Heaven help me if I call out “ten of”. Of course I did that until it got boring. Oh, by the way, she thinks watches with no numbers on them are ridiculous. Digital time . . . sometimes it is just too precise.

Yesterday was the Indianapolis 500. For almost forever, until modern times when holidays moved to Mondays to make three day weekends, the race was run on Memorial Day, unless Memorial Day fell on a Sunday. Now, they run the race on Sunday.

Things change.

I caught myself looking at the calendar on my laptop and thinking May 26th???? Has it malfunctioned? Oh, yeah, Memorial Day is no longer the 30th, it is whenever. I am old enough, though, that I can’t get the 30th out of my mind; yesterday I was thinking that in a couple of days, Subway would change to its June featured $5 sub.

Backtracking in time, Der Bingle and I took plants to two cemeteries Saturday morning. We had one minor problem when one pot fell over in Der Bingle’s trunk, but I had a bag of Miracle-Gro potting mix along and we got it fixed, although I think a small Dusty Miller might have gotten buried in the bottom of the pot. But I’m not sure.

Then we came back to the house and Der Bingle went to see Godzilla. That evening Summer managed to get me to agree to go to see X-Men with her and Cameron and Grandpa. She and I sat apart from those two Bozos, of course. Yes,for me Saturday ended as a sated popcorn day, but confused about just who are the good guys in X-Men. (It was the first one I’d seen in the series and that didn’t make it easier. I decided to just concentrate on the popcorn.)

Oh, for Heaven’s sake, I mis-typed geranium and then didn’t notice it in the previous post – even though it was in big print in the title slot. Well, I guess my peanut butter level was a little low.

I want to have a party; no, I want to go to a party where everyone else does the work and I get to sit, eat, and talk. After being down in Fountain County with my cousins, it feels really flat to be in my daily life.

They’re waiting for me to spill my guts about it, so why keep them waiting? I am going to talk about the trend in conversation as people get older. The four of us were driving around, sitting a lunch table, just doing anything and BAM!, someone would ask if an acquaintance were still alive. It would start off innocently enough – one person asking if anyone remembered who had lived in a house we had just passed, for instance, and the next thing you know, someone else was inquiring if said person, or said person’s parents, or said person’s sister or brother or uncle who left home to join the French Foreign Legion is still alive.

All right, I made up the part about the French and their legion, but, basically, the gist of the paragraph is dead right. Oh, sorry, I punned. And sorry again because I punned badly. Let’s just forget it.

Finally, I had to ask: Don’t you guys know anyone who is alive? You need to expand your group. If I’m not careful, I may one of those folks who is the past tense.

Well, I started off in a rainstorm, drove in so-so skies for a while, then had rain come down in a torrent and finally got steamy hot all on the way to put flowers on my dad’s grave. The pot rode on the floor behind my seat down there and now sits at the Kingman Fraternal Cemetery.

But in between reaching Fountain County and actually arriving in Kingman, I linked up with my three cousins and we ate and then decorated my dad’s, our grandparents’ and their parents graves. The flowers are lovely; I don’t know why I didn’t take any pictures. Maybe it was because it was the first day of being hot and really humid; I guess that would make me a hothouse flower, which seems to be an oxymoronic reference to the situation, but I do not care.

It was humid and close and sticky . . . BECAUSE IT WAS GOING TO STORM LIKE THE DICKENS. We had a downpour of rain and hail and wind and spend about a half hour watching big blotches of RED move across the TV screen as they talked of what was happening in a line that cut through Indianapolis . . . and us.

This is maybe the third time I have gone down for Memorial Day and we have had heavy storms and, once, a tornado siren going off while we were at the cemetery. It may be a paranormal phenomenon; we’re going to have to experiment next year with the timing.

Google’s really good new GPS directions got me down there easily, but perhaps due to the storms, the service was out until I got through Lafayette, the home of Purdue, by aiming north and east – and there was a little guess-work about the north and east.

This is just the bare bones account of the past two days; I’m leaving details for later. Oh, things such as my cousins and I possibly being as kooky as our grandmother, who was once referred to as “A real piece of work.”

I guess I should give them aliases . . . Larry, Curly and Moe? Okay, I’m joking, but I’ll think of something so no one will suspect they are Ann, Glenda and Susie.

**********

And because this IS Indiana and basketball is a big thing, I just have to mention that my dad’s sister Mary married Glen Woodrow and their great-grandson got his name in the paper in a big, memorable way.

From the Lafayette Journal & Courier:
Woodrow carries Fountain Central to sectional championship
Barry Lewis 10:23 p.m. EST March 8, 2014

VEEDERSBURG – Fountain Central junior Ethan Woodrow was a man on a mission Saturday night to make sure his basketball season end did not this weekend.

Mission accomplished.

Woodrow scored 21 of the Mustangs’ 26 points in the first half and ended with a game-high 30 points in Fountain Central’s 53-47 win over Southmont in the Class 2A Fountain Central Sectional championship game.

“Ethan pretty much put us on his shoulders and carried us, especially in the first half,” said Fountain Central coach Jason Good, who celebrated a sectional title and his 100th areer victory. “He was a bit disappointed in his play on Tuesday and he played better last night — and tonight, he played like someone who was not going to let his team lose. He played like a senior, and he is not a senior.”