The leaves will bow down

I love a good thunderstorm. It's a love that was fostered by my dad when I was a small child. He would set me on his lap on the front porch of the old farmhouse. There were two huge maples, probably more than a hundred years old, in the front yard not twenty feet from the house. I remember squealing with fear and delight when an ear-splitting crack of thunder and the following lightning would be so close you could almost feel the electrical charge and smell the sulphur in the air. Daddy would hold me tight and tell me to not be afraid...that it was only noise.

One day we were enjoying the unleashed forces, when the inevitable happened. The maple tree to the left of us was struck by a huge bolt of lightning and crrrrackkkk half of the tree was gone...split right down the middle. Lucky for us, the falling half of the tree fell away from the house. Daddy rushed inside with me, fearful that the rest of it could go any second. It didn't and all was well, except for a power outage that seemed to last for days in a little girl's mind, but in reality was probably only five or six hours. Daddy cut down the rest of the tree, and that was the last time we sat on the porch to watch a storm. Oh, we still liked watching them, but from the relative safety through the window.

When my children were little, we would kneel on the couch in front of the big windows and watch the trees thrash and the rain blow hard against the panes. Hail always made it extra exciting. They never feared storms and always looked forward to the show. If the power went out (which it often did because our electricity was from a rural co-op), we played word games and read by candlelight. One of my favorite games was to name all the states and their capitols. I'm still pretty good at it.

I can think of only two times when I was really frightened by a storm. The first was when Aimee and I were home alone and a storm came up that was so fast and furious, it made me a little nervous. When lightning struck the deck after a thunderclap so loud it hurt our ears, we both clung to each other until it was over. That storm gave me a lot more respect for them, especially as a mother protecting her children.

The second time was on our famous trip out west in the camper. We were camping in a private campground on the edge of Glacier National Park. In the summer, the sun doesn't set until ten or later. After supper, David wanted to take another short hike, but I was pooped and decided to stay in camp. He took the kids and was gone and gone and gone some more. You are warned when you're in the mountains that storms can come up very quickly and it can get freezing cold just as quickly, but when they left, the sky had been completely clear with no sign of impending weather and they hadn't taken any rain gear or jackets to keep warm.

Of course, a vicious thunderstorm blew up around 9:00. I was huddled in the camper, hoping for a sign that they had arrived safely back at the site. At ten o'clock, the storm had blown over, but they still weren't back and it was nearly dark and I was getting hysterical, so I headed to the camp office to have them call a park ranger to get a search party together. About the time the campground manager located the ranger and was explaining the details, I saw our mini-van come rolling into the parking lot. I didn't know whether to cry with relief or to give David a good tongue lashing about endangering the kids' lives and his own. I think I did both. He explained that it hadn't even rained where they were and had no idea I would be so worried. This was long before cell phones, and they probably wouldn't have worked there, if we had owned one.

We could use a good thunderstorm in our area. The weather has been nearly unbearable and everything is drying up. We did get a little break when one danced all around us a couple of days ago which made it a little cooler. We heard some thunder off in the distance, but we only got a quarter-inch of rain and I'm having to water the garden. So, hats off to thunderstorms...may they bring you entertainment, relief from the heat and a thirst-quenching rain, but not any harm to you and your loved ones.

This song reminds me of my dad and me.

http://new.music.yahoo.com/peter-paul-mary/tracks/for-baby-for-bobbie--23428798

May you always

When I was a little girl and into my young teen years, I always knew where I would be on Saturday evenings. In front of our black and white television with a bowl of popcorn watching the Lawrence Welk Show. Yes, I was quite the nerd. I loved watching Bobby and Cissy dance their little hearts out in front of the orchestra and my mom loved Joanne Castle and her ragtime honky-tonk piano. But my favorite act was the The Lennon Sisters. 

I wanted to be a Lennon Sister. My sisters and I sang all the time, and in harmony, while my sister Jane played the piano. Mostly we sang gospel hymns, but Jane loved to play pop tunes from the fifties; such as, "Sincerely" by the McGuire Sisters and "On a Slow Boat to China" and "You, You, You" and "Deep Purple". I think I would have fit right in as the youngest Lennon Sister. Cute smile, dimples, ponytail. Unfortunately, no one in my family ever thought to contact them to see if they would take me on, darn it!

Here are the girls when they were first starting on Mr. Welk's show. They always called him Mr. Welk, you know. They were good girls with good manners and very respectful toward their elders. That's little Janet in front, Kathy on the left, Diane in back and Peggy on the right.



The girls in later years singing my favorite of their songs. Notice their dresses are disguising at least one pregnancy, Peggy's (second from left). Peggy was alway pregnant, after she married, of course.

I love that tight four-part harmony that is usually only achieved with family members. Diane and Peggy are now retired from the stage, but Kathy and Janet, along with their (other, not me!) younger sister, Mimi, perform regularly at The Welk Champagne Theatre in Branson, Missouri.

Random thoughts from my childhood

We were pretty poor when I was a child. My dad was 63 when I was born in 1953 and had a sixth-grade education. He wasn't able to find much work at his age and hauled coal to supplement what my mother could make by cleaning houses and taking in laundry. We didn't have an indoor bathroom, although we did have running cold water in the house. Water had to be heated on the stove. The house was the one that my great-grandfather built in 1887 and has always been and still remains in our family. My brother has owned it since 1961.

Mom had a wringer washer and a big rinse tub. And, of course, all the clothes were hung outside to dry, summer or winter. I can remember her starching all those white shirts and nurses uniforms and caps in that blue liquid starch. It was my job to stir it up. I had the easy part. Oh, and she would let me iron the handkerchiefs. The men's were boring white, but I loved the ladies' hankies. No two were the same, and I thought we must be rich, because Mom had hankies just like those rich ladies. They weren't really rich, just a little better off than we were, but it seemed as if they were to me. I still iron shirts in the same order that Mom taught me.
1. Right sleeve, cuff first and spread out.
2. Left sleeve.
3. Yoke.
4. Back.
5. Collar.
6. Left front.
7. Right front.

We had beans every day for supper, except for Sunday when we would have fried or baked chicken. Mom put up vegetables in the summer. She made lots of sauerkraut, pickles, pickled beans and corn. We were of German ancestry, after all. There were also jellies. My favorite was the wild plum. I've always liked jelly and jam that is a little tart.

We had our own milk when the cow was fresh and Mom made her own butter, cottage cheese and buttermilk. I always begged to churn the butter, but she would say, No, you're too little. I couldn't get the rhythm just right. You sang a little rhyme...Come, butter, come. I can't remember the rest. Then she would gather the butter out of the liquid and form it into a ball, making sure to get as much of the whey out as possible. The best part of butter-making day was slathering a fresh slice of bread with the freshly made butter and eating it very slowly to savor each mouthful.

Every Spring, my dad would go to the post office and come home with a box full of baby chicks. Usually a couple hundred. They had to stay in the kitchen by the coal stove to keep warm. So exciting for a little girl!

The brooder house wasn't heated, but when they got too big, Dad would move them all out there and sleep with them on cold nights so they wouldn't freeze to death. All he had to keep the brooder warm was a dim light bulb and his body heat. Can you imagine doing that now? Of course, most of the chicks were destined at eight weeks of age to become meat for the deep freeze. On butchering day, my Aunt Ruth would come over and help with the scalding and plucking after Daddy chopped off their heads. Then she and Mom would dress them. I have no idea what they put them in after that, because there sure were no Ziploc bags back then. She always gave Aunt Ruth some dressed chickens to take home as pay for helping out. The rest became our Sunday dinners for the rest of the year.

Of course, they always kept hens for eggs and we had them every morning for breakfast along with biscuits. They were always fried soft and I would beg Mom to mash them up for me. Sometimes she liked to soft-boil her eggs and I still eat them that way occasionally. Mom made biscuits every day of her life with Dad. When he passed away at 73, she hardly ever made biscuits again. I wonder if she was just tired of making them or they reminded her too much of Dad.

An addendum: I found this churning song from Eastern Kentucky. It isn't the one my mother sang, but I like it.

Churning Song
(as collected in Eastern Kentucky)

Sing to the tune of “Farmer in the Dell”

Churn churn churn, this is churning day,
Til the golden butter comes the dasher must not stay.
Pat pat pat, make it smooth and round,
Now the golden butter’s done won’t you buy a pound.

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This hand-painted Delft ornament was brought to me by my dear husband from Amsterdam when he was there on business.