Christmas past (but in a good way)

My mother-in-law’s estate sale was this weekend—not that she’s dead, far from it. But since she’s moved into the assisted living/nursing home, there’s no point in keeping rooms full of stuff or a house she no longer needs. So we needed to dispose of  all those belongings, and then get the house sold.

The estate sale industry is pretty weird, at least to me. Getting the sale scheduled was a chore. I don’t know if that’s because the people who do this have other jobs or if that’s just the norm for this line of work, but everything was hard to pin down.

As a side note, the woman we bought our house from used an estate sale company before she moved out. Her parents had lived here for over 30 years, and she’d lived here with them through their illnesses and eventual death, and this place was packed with stuff (including a casket in the basement—isn’t that strange?).

They do a lot of the work, though. They sort and label everything, publicize the sale, and provide staff to work at the sale. Afterwards, they box and donate everything that’s left. In the case of the company we used, they prefer that the family not hang around during the sale. That sort of bothered Kent (what are they hiding?) but it also made sense. I can well believe that people get a little weird watching their possessions or their parents’ possessions going for a song, and get emotionally worked up.

One thing my mother-in-law has always loved is decorating for Christmas. When I first met her in 2002, she was still putting up three or four fully decorated trees along with lots of other Christmas decorations (her Santa collection is impressive). She made a lot of her decorations, and really enjoyed getting everything set up just so. Even as recently as five years ago, she put up two trees. In this last house, she only had room for one and of course now she'll need to display a couple of small items since there's no room for a tree.

Kent was in Tulsa as the estate sale people were organizing everything into categories, and he told me they’d put all the Christmas items into one room. He said it was pretty cool to see all those things together, so I asked him to take a photo. Here it is:

Anchors in time

These songs are so firmly intertwined with specific points in my life that when I hear any of them, I’m immediately immersed in the past.

Christopher Cross—any song from his first album but especially Sailing. I was married, pregnant and living in another country and my husband had moved out. I pretty much can’t listen to this album any more because when I hear it, I'm 20 and alone and scared to death.




Michael Jackson—Billy Jean. I was 23, pregnant with my second child and seriously wondered if I was too old to be liking this song and album the way I did. Yeah, at 23.




Supertramp—Breakfast in America. I played this album on auto-repeat all summer that year. I was stationed in New Jersey near the shore, and went there every chance I got. I still know all the words to all the songs.




Andy Hunter—Exodus, especially this song, Go. I got into Andy’s music through Pandora the summer of 2009. Fortunately, his music isn’t tied to us being flooded; instead I found his songs comforting and uplifting without being at all preachy. That’s a hard line to walk.




Fleetwood Mac—Rumors, specifically You Make Loving Fun. My sisters loved the opening bars of this song and that’s what I think of every time I hear it.




Achy Breaky Heart. I know, I know. But I learned to line dance in 1993 to this song, and I had a blast line dancing. I still don’t care for country music though.



Debby Boone—You Light Up My Life. This is a two-fer. I played this song as part of my prepared audition piece when I auditioned for the Army band. Yeah well I was 17, so that explains that. The other reason this one sticks in my head is that I had to sing it at a dear friend’s wedding in the mid-1980s. I’m not sure why my friend wanted that song so much, but she did and so I sang it.




And one final look back. This one is from Atlanta Rhythm Section and I adored this song in high school. Also it's a good palate cleanser after Debby.

Whatever happened to Leslie Lilian anyway?

I’ve been doing workouts at home for decades. I first started when I was pregnant with my younger son—I faithfully followed exercises from Jane Fonda’s Workout Book for Pregnancy, Birth & Recovery. We didn’t have a VHS machine then (they were really pricy back in the day) so the book was my only option. I’d been in the Army with my first pregnancy and per Army regulations, I did the normal PT until I was 20 weeks pregnant. At the point, I was allowed to drop to my knees for push-ups, and the distance I had to run was reduced to—if I recall correctly—a mile. So I’d stayed in shape for my first pregnancy and wanted to do the same for my second one.

Within a few years, as I mentioned here, I started getting my own workout videos (by that time, my folks had given us a VHS player). I did those workouts on a very regular basis, probably four to five times a week.

It’s funny, when you hear something over and over, you’ll end up knowing the lines by heart. I’ve done that with my workouts and Kent has too. Sometimes he’ll holler the next line in the workout all the way from another room. It’s comical, especially when we both do it at the same time.

But I didn’t think I’d remember the lines from those long ago workouts. Let’s face it, we’re talking about 30 years ago and memories do fade. But I did! In Jane Fonda’s New Workout, there’s an opening song that one of the people doing the exercises sings at the beginning and the end. Jane tells you to sing along since that’s a good way to make sure you don’t get too out of breath. Even though I didn’t remember all the steps in the aerobic section, I remembered all the lyrics to the song
.
Then I got curious about the singer/exerciser. Her name was Leslie Lilian (all these years I thought Jane said Leslie Williams—oops), and she was a tiny thing with beautiful hair and also a decent voice. I Googled her and found the skimpiest of entries in IMDb. I also found a couple of YouTube videos of that portion of the workout and an article by Rebecca Harrington from last year reviewing the workouts (and realizing she knew all the lyrics to that song from having heard it as a small child* while her mother worked out). But that’s it.

I guess I was hoping for some sort of fairy tale ending for Leslie, that maybe the song opened the door for her to have a vocal career, or that maybe she went on to open her own studio or become a personal trainer or something. But I couldn’t find anything—even Jane Fonda herself said they’d lost touch long ago. I hope things turned out well for her.

*I do wonder if either of my kids would remember those lyrics. They sure heard them often enough.

Here's the song for your viewing pleasure:

And another one

October has always been an odd month for me; I’ve had some of the best things in my life happen in October (married Kent for example) and some not so good (flooded in Boston). Hands down for worst is my son getting diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

This week on FaceBook, a friend of mine posted something about her car and boom—I remembered that day in October.

My son was 12 and just entering those awkward teen years. He’d grown more modest and so always wore a baggy T-shirt and baggy shorts; that’s why I hadn’t noticed his weight loss. Well I did notice it but I didn’t realize he’d lost 20 pounds. After all, he was also growing like a weed so between the baggy clothes and his increased height, it was no wonder he looked thinner.

The night before, he’d had his best friend spend the night. They pigged out on candy and soda (what can I say? Sometimes I was a nice mom!), but he woke up in the middle of the night throwing up. And that’s when I realized that he had lost so much weight—I was helping him in the bathroom and he wasn’t wearing anything but his tighty whiteys. You could count his ribs on the front and the back, he was so thin. I was appalled, so the next morning I called and got a late afternoon appointment that day with his doctor.

Once we got there—and I don’t know how I knew this with certainty, maybe I’d finally pieced together his symptoms—but I knew what the doctor was going to say even before he came back with a glucometer to check my son’s glucose level (which was 456, I’ll probably never forget that number).  He was sick enough that we needed to go to a hospital right away, and we agreed that Children’s Mercy in Kansas City was the best place for him to go, rather than Lawrence Memorial (we lived in Lawrence). Because of how high his blood sugar was, he needed to go by ambulance and that meant I would need to follow by car.

But I didn’t have any cash, my husband at the time was out of town on business and my car was out of gas. I reached out to my friend, the one I mentioned earlier, and she came by while I was still at the doctor’s office, and put gas in my car. Only I drove a Honda Civic and she drove some great big honking van that had like a 30 gallon gas tank and she overfilled my car by a lot. She told me later that she couldn’t believe the car was full already because she’d only put like eight gallons in there!

My friend had also reached out to some of our other friends who swung into action. One came and got my younger son, another brought me some cash so I could get something to eat at the hospital. That cash ended up being hilariously unusable. He only had a $100 bill, which obviously couldn’t be used in any vending machines and nothing else was open so for a while I felt rich if hungry.

But yeah, October is a mixed bag for me.

So five years ago yesterday

Yes, that’s when the water main burst. Yes, I’m writing about it again. Yes, for the fifth year in a row.

I deliberately didn’t post yesterday but that day still hangs over me. No one died, and we came out OK in the end. Yet there was so much loss that day, and in the weeks afterward—loss that had nothing to do with water damage but piled on top of our soggy messes, well it was a lot to endure.

I mostly don’t miss the possessions we lost. We were able to restore the four pieces of furniture that did matter to us and we’re using them to this day. I don’t miss the clothing either, with the exception of a couple of items. I had the best winter running shirt and haven’t found anything like it since. Fashions change and today’s running gear tends to be form fitting to the skin plastering degree. My ruined winter running shirt wasn’t a tent but neither was it skin tight. I do miss that.

Occasionally I miss my high school yearbooks. Sure, high school was ages ago, but I still miss them. Plus I think my grandkids would have gotten a kick out of seeing me at that age and I don’t really have many pictures.

I’m very glad to say that I no longer flinch at the tiniest sounds of unexpected water. It’s hard for me to describe how loud and unexpected the sound of rushing water was that afternoon. The cats alerted to it first, but I heard it before it started pouring under our patio fence. At first it almost sounded like a whole lot of rushing feet. Then of course I saw it and then it filled our patio and well you know the rest of that story.

If I never ever hear the sound of those gigantic industrial blowers used to dry out flooded areas, that will be OK by me. And I’m fine with never having dry wall dust from reconstruction clogging my lungs again.

The restoration company assured us the first, second and third times we had severe water damage that fire is worse than water. I hope I never find out first hand.

School daze

A friend recently posted about one of her favorite teachers from 3rd grade, and said that she didn’t remember teachers before that year. That got me thinking about the teachers I remember, and why I remember them.

In preschool, I went to West Nashville Kindergarten (think that was the name although a quick Google search turns up nothing—then again that was *cough* nearly half a century ago so it’s not surprising). My preschool teachers were Miss May and Mr. Gordon. They seemed quite old to me, but not nearly so old as my kindergarten teacher the next year, Miss Sullivan. She had to have been in her 60s, maybe early 70s. Or then again, maybe that’s just how she seemed through the eyes of a five year old.

In first grade, I went to Eakin Elementary School, also in Nashville and it’s still there. I got to see it in 2009 on a visit to my older son and his wife. My teacher was Miss Floyd and I just absolutely adored her. I was beyond ecstatic when she stayed with my class to be our second grade teacher.

In 3rd and 4th grades, I attended Tates Creek Elementary School in Lexington, KY. I couldn’t tell you anything about my teachers, although I do remember attending anti-drug classes as well as getting tested for TB, taking gymnastic for two years (I was horrible at it but boy I sure wanted to be a gymnast) and having a massive crush on Landon King.

Fifth grade was pretty wretched for me. I went to an elementary school in Derby, KS and my teacher’s name was Mrs. Warren. She flat out hated me, and I couldn’t tell you why. But the mean things she said and her obvious dislike and utter reluctance to have anything to do with me are things I’ve never forgotten. About 2/3 of the way through the year, we moved into base housing and I thankfully switched schools. I remember Mr. Amerine being nice, not great but at least nice which was a pleasant change.

In 6th grade, I went to Coopertown Elementary School in Bryn Mawr. Mr. Schultz was my teacher for all but reading and math—he was really nice and well liked. I had Mr. Folmer for reading, and he probably never realized what a huge positive impact he had on me, and how badly I needed the lifeline he offered. I wish I could find him and tell him how much he helped me and what a positive impact he had on me.

After that, I remember specific teachers for some specific classes, but not all of them. The ones who stick out do so for good reasons: At Beaumont Junior High School in Lexington again, I had Mr. Connolly (band teacher in 7th grade), then in Cape Girardeau I had Mrs. Sharpe who taught me several liberal arts classes in high school and was also the speech and debate coach. She was just incredible. My band teacher there, Mr. Ewing, was also good—oh and I remember Miss Myers, my Spanish teacher in 9th grade. She was the one with a wandering eye so I was never sure which eye actually saw me!

Who do you remember, and why?

Preschool, I'm top row, far right side by Mr. Gordon. 

Ballroom blitz

In high school, my mother made some of my dresses for our various formal dances. She always did a great job and they never looked homespun or somehow less than good enough. But she also had four kids, a husband who worked very long hours and so it wasn’t always possible for her to sew my formal dresses.

I think we got this dress pattern intending to make it for the senior prom in my sophomore year. Normally, I wouldn’t have gone to the senior prom – you had to be a senior. But I’d been invited by a boy in his senior year, so I needed a dress. Looking at it now, it’s clearly a child of the 70s, but gosh I thought it was just so gorgeous. My mom and I had picked out some coral-pink satin stuff for the bottom and a sheer, lighter shade of the same color for the top, plus the required trim.

Life intervened, though, and the dress never got made (I don't remember what I wore, I didn't really know the boy very well and honestly never went out with him except for his prom). The fabric and pattern languished in my mother’s sewing closet for years and even got lugged from Missouri to Idaho. She finally gave it to me but I got rid of it in a purging frenzy sometime before we moved to Boston. It’s just as well, otherwise it would almost certainly have been ruined by water in our first flood.

I always loved that pattern and last week, God knows why but I went looking online to see if it were as wonderful as I remembered. And wouldn’t you know it – one copy and one copy only was for sale, and it was even in my size, in someone’s Etsy shop. I dithered for a day or so because (a) it’s not a dress that suits my lifestyle and (b) seriously? When am I going to wear a skirt that takes seven yards of fabric to make? But I wanted it, oh how I wanted it.

In the past, I would never have gotten this pattern. I would have thought it was silly to buy something I probably would never use. I don't keep things around that aren't useful to me now and I generally never have keepsakes, either mentally or physically. I don’t really want keepsakes now but I did buy the pattern. I may never ever make it, but I could if I wanted to.

Four years ago

We had what ended up being more than a little excitement what with a 31 inch water main breaking. Every year, the memories are just a bit less . . . I don't know, raw maybe? Some things haven't changed all that much though. The kitties are still very skittish around strangers (they weren't before all the reconstruction, and the unexplained sound of running water makes both Kent and me horribly nervous and uptight.

And we'll never willingly choose to live in a basement apartment or a house in a flood plain (even a 500 year one) if we can possibly avoid it. Honestly, I doubt we ever choose to live in a condo again. You're just too much at the mercy of your potentially insane neighbors.

Here are some pictures of our street the day we flooded. I thought I'd posted them before but couldn't find them in my blog so here you go.

That tiny bubble you see is where the water main broke

Pieces of paper

Usually I end up with bits of ticket stubs in my purse or suitcase from our trips. Then I'll pull one out at a random moment and ask Kent if he wants to go to wherever the ticket is from. For several months, I'd ask him if he wanted to go back to the Sistine Chapel but finally I cleaned out my purse and tossed that ticket.

So what you have here is a collection of the tickets and receipts we got while in Barcelona, along with the explanations for each of them.

Click the image to enlarge

Christmas decorations

If you celebrate Christmas, do you decorate your house? Put up a tree? Maybe use different plates?

I’ve written about this before, I know. But for someone who usually decorates, I haven’t done much in the last six years.

• In 2007, we’d put our house up for sale so no decorations were allowed.
• We spent our first Christmas in Boston in 2008, and did manage to find a ceramic tree that ended up getting knocked off the table and breaking. That’s cats for you.
• 2009 was a challenge all the way around because we’d recently flooded and were living in a temporary place while our home underwent extensive renovations. Kent convinced me we should spend money we didn't really have to get a little tree made of Christmas decorations. 
• In 2010, we went to Oklahoma for Christmas, I was traveling pretty much 100% and didn’t see any point to put up things only the cats would see and probably destroy. And apparently I was so swamped, I didn’t even write a blog post about Christmas that year, except my not-very-subtle hint to Kent about Despicable Me.
• Last year, Kent surprised me with a tiny live tree which had little colored lights and teeny tiny decorations. That was pretty cool. We put up other decorations too but couldn’t hang our ornaments on the tiny tree (it was about 18 inches tall).
• This year, we figured we wouldn’t put up the tree we bought after Christmas last year.* We’re moving in the middle of January and thought we’d save ourselves the hassle. We also feared  that Wally and Eddie would either eat the tree (remember, Wally loves plastic) or knock it over or both.

But after the events of last week in Connecticut and China, I realized I really truly did want to celebrate almost as a way of defying such evil events. I asked around about cat deterrents, found the recommended product and sprayed the snot out of the lower third of the tree. We strategically hung decorations no lower than about 18 inches off the floor and used soft ornaments at the lower levels. So far, Eddie’s tried to eat a branch just once, and both have stayed out of it.  

And now we have a place to put our presents. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

*Yes, I like live trees too, but I'm also aware of my own limitations. I remember to give the cats fresh water every day but they are quite vocal in their reminders. Trees don't really have that ability.

Our house

Thanks to Harriet’s blog post today, I’ve been taking a trip of my own down memory lane. I’d never thought in terms of floor plans the way she writes in her post. I think of the rooms and the floor plans as tied to specific memories. So in no particular order, here are a few:

My earliest memory is from before I was three. It’s more like a series of snapshot only there’s no picture of this in any photo album. My parents had not yet divorced, and I’m pretty sure we lived in Nashville. I still took naps in a crib but was entirely mobile. I don’t know if they knew I could climb out of my crib, but I could. My brother and I shared a room, and on this day he was asleep in his crib. I think my parents were napping too, or at least they were in their room with the door closed. I got out of the crib and headed toward their room. I looked under their door, and could see the sun reflecting off the wood floors. Then I saw what looked like slippered feet walking toward me. I knew it was a Very Bad Thing to be caught out of my crib so I scampered as fast as I could back to our room and climbed back in my crib and that’s all I remember.

My next home was an upstairs/downstairs duplex, also in Nashville. My parents were divorced by then and I was probably around four. I don’t have any pictures from that house, but we had a swing set out back and I fell off the teeter totter a couple of time and man, that hurt my head. I hated the wallpaper in my room, some sort of yucky elaborate floral thing but I liked the nice lady who lived upstairs. One of my favorite toys was my Raggedy Ann doll and I liked to twirl around and around while holding on to one of her arms. Well, the stitching between her arm and body gave way during one particularly vigorous twirling session, and she flew out the open window (we had no screens). I was horrified and ran out to find the rest of her. Fortunately I found her under a bush and no worse for the wear.

Then we lived in another sort of duplex that had the weirdest floor plan. We had half of the downstairs and all of the upstairs, which had a dormer roof. Looking back with my adult eyes, I think maybe the upstairs bath was added after the fact and actually the whole place may have been a single family dwelling originally. But it was very near Peabody, where my mother went to college, and I’m sure even then housing was in short supply, so it got divided up.

I learned how to roller skate on the concrete porch you see behind me in this picture, which I’m sure was really loud and annoying to our neighbor. I also made a lot of mud pies. Once I stuck the hose, which was still running, into a convenient chink in the bricks. It was the perfect spot to hold the hose while I was busy with the pies, until my mother came roaring out of the house because the water had come straight into the living room.

The bathtub in the downstairs bath was enormous. If you were a child, it was as good as a swimming pool. The upstairs bath was more normal sized, although scarier to my brother (he found a mouse swimming frantically in the toilet up there once). I wanted to love sleeping in the little alcove that was on the second floor. It had an exterior door but no stairs to the ground. Even so, I was always so terrified a burglar would get in and hurt me.

From L to R: me, my step-sister Cindy, 

my brother Doug & I think the stuffed

animal is mine. 

The house in Bryn Mawr is where I spent a lot of summers after my bio father remarried. That was actually a really cool house, although stuffed to the gills between them, her four children and the two of us. It was a Cape Cod and although the house you can see in the background of this picture isn’t that house, all the houses were the same in our neighborhood so you see what it looked like.

The house had two bedrooms on the first floor, along with a living room, formal (tiny) dining room, bathroom and eat in kitchen. The second floor had two more bedrooms, one was gigantic and they divided it in two, and a second bathroom. When they bought the place, the basement was unfinished. Within a couple of years, they’d made a family room, an office, a bedroom, laundry room and workshop down there. I was bummed by the changes that summer because we used to roller skate in that basement—you could get some good velocity going and then grab a metal pole to whip around and go even faster.

(Edited to add, I just really looked at the picture from Bryn Mawr and I totally missed that my wonderful stuffed animal, the Siamese cat, is in this picture. Do you see it? It's between the dog and whatever is on the left. I LOVED that cat.)

Plus the stairs from the second floor to the first floor had a sort of cut away with four decorative wooden poles—think mid-century wood poles and you’ll get the idea. All six of us would thunder down those stairs and grab a pole to whip around and land in the living room. You’d have to see it to really picture it, but it was a lot of fun.

The stairs were also my nemesis. They were wood and very, very slippery. I cannot count how many times I tumbled down those stairs. Sometimes it would be head over heels, other times I’d end up bumping down on my butt and making my jaw clack together and usually biting my tongue or lips, and sometimes I wasn’t quite sure how I landed at the bottom but I learned to be cautious on those damn stairs.

So thanks for taking this trip with me. If you haven't read Harriet's post today, you really should. You may end up on a trip of your own.