We have pictures taped up in nooks and crannies:

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.

Eight years ago we built one of those big wooden swing set with clubhouse play areas in the backyard. It was me, my mother, Quentin and Mr. Feller from across the street. He was 87 at the time and looked about 60. His job was to tell us what to do and show up tricks on how to do it. I call them tricks but really they were clever techniques that left Quentin and I smacking our foreheads with something close to awe. As if turned out, we couldn’t keep him from the saw and hammer and drill and so forth. Mother bailed by the time we got to the clubhouse because she and I and Quentin didn’t work real well together. Not that she got mad; she was a worrywart.

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 was a cocker spaniel, and, I suppose, in the heaven that dogs just have to go to, I guess she still is – a cocker spaniel angel. We loved her dearly; she loved my husband to bits, was fond of Quentin and tolerated me. She was, however, a free spirit.

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 . . . “

So, do you remember I was taking note of the ornaments on my special sitting room tree? Well, I didn’t forget; I just wandered off in other areas for awhile. This little embroidered material is from many decades ago. I did it while sitting on the enclosed front porch of our house in LaGrange County – in the little village of Scott – with my grandmother sitting beside me doing her own piece, something with French knots, I think.

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.