collage

Collage Card Caption Contest

Sally2 Comments

Last night I showed Sam my latest collage card —

He laughed at it.  “Donna and I were talking,” he said though, “and we love your cards, but they’re usually pretty dark.”

Mary agreed. “We tend to have a dark sense of humor.”

“Oh dear,” I said.

I’m working on memorizing verse about light. I’m attempting to memorize Isaiah 60 (Arise, shine, for your light has come…), but it isn’t coming easily. I think my head is crammed so full of new Croatian words that the Bible verses are struggling for a foothold.

“Get your elbows up! Push your way through!” I tell Isaiah, but God tends not to force Himself. I need to make the room.

But I digress.

Dark sense of humor. Dark cards. Yes, Sam, Donna, and Mary are right. Looking back over my collages, some do seem a little foreboding.

Maybe it’s my way of dealing with the darkness. Poke fun at it. Laugh at it. It’s better than becoming fearful or bitter.

Mary looked at the new card and said, “Between a rock and a hard place — that cat has a tough choice.”

“Between soap suds and a snake,” I said, agreeing.

So… in the spirit of snail mail and sharing and pushing back the darkness, I thought I’d have a little contest.

Do you have a caption for this picture?  If you do, submit it in the comments.

If you’re the only submission — you win!!

If I get multiple submissions, I’ll choose my favorite.

If I get no submissions, Sam wins!

The winner gets ….. drumroll, please …..  the card in the mail.

I’ll announce the winner on Friday, get an address, and pop it in the mail on Saturday morning.

Just comment below and I’ll figure out a way to get in touch with you. 🙂

Snake from The Mapmaker’s Daughter by M. C. Helldorfer, illustrated by Jonathan Hunt.

Cat from Owls from Mother Goose Treasury, 2009 Publications International — it has a long list of illustrators and I don’t know who drew The Kilkenny Cat.

Window — I don’t know.

Origami wallpaper.

If you win and are expecting perfection, trust me, you’ll be sorely disappointed.

If you win and simply love the thrill of receiving snail mail, you’ll be happy.

collage

Mail a Smile

Sally1 Comment

This morning I stared at the screen. I had zero inspiration.

Inspiration is such a funny thing — feast or famine.

But I haven’t missed a day this year. At least, I don’t think I have.

Then, I saw Eva’s post on Hawwa’s Mail Adventures — a collage that was her submission to “Mail a Smile,” a project  whose aim is to send artistically decorated envelopes and letters to cheer people up around the world.

The 2017 theme is endangered animals. I scoured my children’s books for something on the endangered list.

Unfortunately, rabbits don’t make the cut. I have an abundance of bunnies.

Neither do farm animals, dogs, cats, fish, or frogs.

Finally I found some endangered animals — a tiger and a gorilla — that I could stick on a collage card.

There are multiple tigers on the WWF list: the Sumatran Tiger, South China Tiger, Amur Tiger, Bengal Tiger, Indochinese Tiger, and the average garden-variety tiger. I’m not sure what kind mine is.

There are also several gorillas: Cross River Gorilla, Eastern Lowland Gorilla, Western Lowland Gorilla, and the Mountain Gorilla. The children’s book I used didn’t specify.

If you want to send a postcard or card (and a smile) with an endangered animal featured, send it to:

Mail a smile
Budapest
Pf.:20
1554 – Hungary

Here’s my pic — it’s going out in tomorrow’s mail!

The gorilla profile (on the left hand side) is from The Gorilla Did It by Barbara Shook Hazen, illustrated by Ray Cruz.

The tiger is from Little Polar Bear, Take Me Home! written and illustrated by Hans de Beer.

The background is from The Mapmaker’s Daughter by M. C. Helldorfer, illustrated by Jonathan Hunt.

The decidedly unendangered bunny is from Richard Scarry’s Bunny Book.

Life

Manure

Sally10 Comments

You city folks may not understand this
But I love the days when I step outside, and
With one breath I know they’re
Spreading manure down the road

The smell is rich and rank
Honest
No pretense about manure
That’s fer sure

City smells bother me
Exhaust and exhaustion
Mingled with too many people
And not enough sky

Rain on concrete
Smells like waste
But rain on manure
Smells like hope

Daily prompt: lifestyle

elderly · family

Wandering Words on Travel and Life

Sally4 Comments

This was a picture I thought about posting yesterday. Same trip — to Greece and Macedonia — but the look is one I recognize from later years.

As Alzheimer’s slowly took her from us, her face became less and less expressive.

We could still coax a smile out of her, but it wasn’t the same.

When she first held her great-grandson, she stared and stared. I didn’t think she would ever smile.

He was sleeping when we placed him in her arms. His mother and father hovered, hands ready to catch the precious cargo should she forget what she was doing.

We watched.

We told her over and over that this was her great-grandson.

Other women residents in the nursing home moved closer, wanting to see, wanting to touch this new life. Perhaps some youth would rub off on them.

But we tried to keep this as her moment. It was, after all, her lineage. Her family.

Finally, the baby squirmed — parent hands moved in closer to avert potential disaster — and turned his head toward her breast.

She smiled a real smile that reached her eyes.

So I look at that travel picture of my mother sitting on a bench, alone, slightly lost — and I know that trip was a milestone, but not in the good sense.

It’s almost like we were at the base of Heartbreak Hill — and we were about to tackle the toughest part of the course. But we didn’t fully comprehend it at the time.

And that’s the trouble. I DO comprehend it now. I’m not ready to do it again.

But my father forgot someone yesterday, a person that he had known well for many years but yesterday he had no recollection of her at all.

So, if I feel a little panicked about this trip to Normandy, it’s because I’m thinking of this other journey that I’m on.

What’s that cheesy saying?  “Each day is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.” Sometimes cheesy is good and true.

I need to remember that.

family · Travel

Travel

Sally21 Comments

I suppose this doesn’t look like a terribly dangerous picture, but I still get that squeezy feeling in my stomach when I look at it.

This was from the last overseas trip my parents took together. Nine years ago they went on a tour of Greece and Macedonia — I think it was called something like, “Footsteps of Paul.”

My father had been so excited about this trip. He had ordered all the books and done the recommended reading.

My mother, however, was declining in her mental capacity.  At first, my father was in denial about that. Little things are easy to excuse. As the trip grew closer, it became more and more undeniable. I wrote a post several years ago about that trip and called it “Scary Travels With Alzheimer’s.”

But there she is, in the picture above, smiling, because she has no clue how close she will come to being lost in Greece. (She wandered out of the hotel room without my father but was seen by other members of the tour and kept safe.)

After that trip, my father said their traveling days were over.

Now we’re preparing to take him on a trip. For years he has talked about wanting to go to Normandy to see the beaches of the D-Day invasion. Every time one of his friends came back from Normandy, he would smile and shake his head sadly, saying, “I’d really like to get there someday.”

When my mother was still alive, he wouldn’t leave her. Then his own health issues overlapped with her final days. It’s been a tough go.

So we (my siblings and I) decided it was now or never. We’re going to Normandy. We’ve arranged for a private guide so everything can be done at my father’s pace. We’ll see the beaches and hear the stories, then we’ll spend a few days in Paris.

Yes, danger — on so many levels and so many fronts.

I’m praying it all goes well.

A to Z Blogging Challenge

A-to-Z Retrospective

Sally10 Comments

This was my third year participating in April’s A-to-Z Challenge.

In 2015, I posted mostly about a trip to Laity Lodge in Texas, and, in 2016, I wrote mostly about caring for my aging parents. I say “mostly” for both of those because I wandered on a few posts. Despite that, I survived and succeeded in posting through the whole alphabet.

For 2017, I decided to share a little of my “art” — collages I make from worn-out children’s books.

I didn’t post this picture during the challenge, but it sort of shows how I was feeling about tackling the challenge using my collages.

Sharing art is risky and scary.

It’s like dealing with bees. What if they sting? What if I get hurt?

But it’s also like bees, in that the rewards can be sweet. Affirmations can be like honey.

So, first, I’d like to thank all the good people who stopped by and said a few kind words, or even just hit the “like” button. You’re wonderful. You’ve been good for my soul.

Second, I did find it significantly harder this year to connect with other A-to-Z-ers. I felt like I was trying to post my link in a bunch of different places and it became cumbersome. Cumbersome to link, cumbersome to look.

Some blogs that I did discover (and love) were Finding Eliza (about research and family history), Hawwa’s Mail Adventures (featuring real, honest-to-goodness snail mail), Miss Pelican’s Perch (who used the challenge to overcome writer’s block), I Just Have to Say (who wrote about her favorite things, many of which were also MY favorite things), and, my favorite, Iain Kelly (who wrote an action-packed serial murder mystery using a children’s puzzle for inspiration). Some I had already been following who did the challenge were Vanessence and Manee Trautz. There were others that I stumbled through and can’t recall their names — someone sharing drawings every day of Disney characters, someone writing about spirituality. Forgive me if I’ve forgotten.

Third, to the organizers of this mad affair, thank you. Yes, it was different this year — but if I hadn’t done it previous years, I wouldn’t know the difference.  And the bottom line is a bunch of people blogged regularly for the month of April. You encouraged that. You facilitated that. You deserve a round of applause. Thank you.

Background from Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by E. B. Lewis

Woman from My Dad’s Job by Peter Glassman, illustrated by Timothy Bush

Boy from Meet My Staff by Patricia Marx, illustrated by Roz Chast

Little girl from The Silly Sheepdog by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright

Bee ??

elderly · family

The Cookie Rule

Sally13 Comments

One of my brothers attended Cornell  — ever heard of it? While he was there, my uncle visited to adjudicate at the law school’s moot court competition. My brother snuck up to the bench where my uncle would be hearing the arguments and left a little note at his spot on the dais —

The following case may be relevant to today’s proceedings —

P— vs State of New Jersey (1937) in which the “cookie rule” was established.

The Cookie Rule clearly states that cookies must be consumed in the following proportion:  two plain cookies for every filled one.

I remember my uncle telling my father the story and roaring with laughter. My grandfather, my father, my uncle — they all love to laugh.

And I love to hear it.

But the cookie rule was new to me at that point. My mother never instituted it, although my father had grown up with it. His mother had come up with a way to control cookie consumption — two plain cookies for every filled.

All this flashed through my mind yesterday when I brought my father his “sweet” to eat after lunch.

My father definitely has a sweet tooth, and every meal (except breakfast) is followed by something sweet. After lunch, it’s usually a cookie, and after dinner, it’s usually ice cream.

I had picked up a package of Oreos at the store because they were on sale. I know, I know — Oreos are basically death between two wafers — but he likes them so I buy them occasionally.

Okay, I confess — I like them, too.

So, I brought this brand-new package of Oreos to him and said, “Dad, would you like a cookie?”

His eyes lit up. “I think I would,” he said.

I peeled back the flap to reveal the treasure, and he reached in to take one.

“Could I have two?” he asked — and suddenly, I saw in front of me a little boy asking permission to break a rule. His eyes sparkled as he looked up at me hopefully.

“Yes, you can have two,” I said.

He smiled and pulled two cookies out of the package.

Douglas MacArthur said, “You are remembered for the rules you break.”

I’m sure my father will be remembered for much more than this, but I’ll treasure that look he had as he took two filled cookies.

 

family · photography

Looking Across the Valley

Sally14 Comments

My parents’ house used to have a large front porch. I can remember my mom and dad sitting out there after dinner during the summer, drinking coffee and watching the sun set.

Last night, from another room, I watched my father get up and push his walker to the front window. He peered out for a few minutes and then hobbled back to his chair.

When I came in, he said, “Just take a look at that out there.”

I walked over to the window and stood where he had stood. The sun was low on the horizon.

“Isn’t that lovely?” he asked. “The sun is… is…” He struggled to find the words.

“It’s setting in the west,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right. The sun is setting in the west, and it’s beautiful,” he said.

One of the best things about this old farmhouse is it’s view across the valley. No one can put a price on that.

This picture was taken one of those first years we lived in the house. (Ignore the kids in front — my hair still doesn’t want to curl the way it’s supposed to, my sister no longer wears cat-eye glasses, my little brother is considerably taller, my oldest brother has passed away, and my middle brother smiles for the camera now.)

 

1968?

The farm across the valley is still there, just a different color. But our fence is long gone. It’s still a lovely view.

A to Z Blogging Challenge · family

Z is for Zaengle

Sally6 Comments

At Christmas I made place-cards for everyone. They stood on little easels at the table. They were place-cards without names, just funny little pictures that made me think of each person.

Each member of the family is unique — just like everyone else.

I wish I had taken a better picture of the collection, but here’s who each one represents.

Row 1 (left to right): Mary — a little Richard Scarry bunny writing at a desk. Bud had just painted her walls of her bedroom lavender, the very color I had wanted the walls of my bedroom when I was a child (but it didn’t happen).

“Fred” — he’s the photographer at family events, so I found a little man taking pictures. He’s snapping a shot of a dwarf crossing a bridge.

Philip — an army man at a Sandra Boynton nativity. Philip played with those green plastic army men at my parents’ house as a little boy.  Years later, we would find a sniper hiding in a plant, or a radio guy behind a lamp.

Owen — a Richard Scarry cat catching a fish from Tikki-Tikki-Tembo water. Owen loves to fish. A dog would have been more appropriate for him because he loves dogs too — but Richard Scarry didn’t have a dog fishing picture.

My brother, Jim — he raised sheep, and may even still have a few.

Row 2: Karl — Grumpy Santa (Sandra Boynton)  standing on the porch of a house. It just made me laugh. Karl does that.

Henry, my grandson — loves Curious George.

Emily, Owen’s wife — the only one with a name on it. I knew she had to have it.

Sharon, Jim’s wife — a dragonfly because I know she likes them.

Laurel — Pooh and Piglet and a goose. Laurel wanted Winnie the Pooh in hers. I liked the way they were leaning back to look up at the goose.

Row 3: Donna, Sam’s wife — I read somewhere that a cardinal represents lost loved ones. Her mother passed away while she and Sam were dating. Plus snow because British Columbia and snow.

Bud — Bud loves building fires and sitting and staring into them. It’s a Zaengle thing. Zaengle gatherings with his siblings almost always include bonfires and just sitting around the fire talking.

My dad — he was a doctor so I found a little doctor for him.

Helen — she has always loved the beach. I even sprinkled a little sand and put some real tiny shells on hers.

Amanda, Philip’s wife — She’s Henry’s mother, and it seemed appropriate to give her a mother and child.

Row 4: My brother, Peter — he teaches science. I’ve gone with him several times in the summer when he takes kids to the biological field station on the lake where the kids look at all sorts of life under microscopes.

My nephew, Ben — he’s very musical and had just starred in his school’s middle school musical.

Sam — like hiking, works at an outdoorsy store, and the boots made me think of him.

Me — the only one I didn’t make. Mary made mine for me. I love how she put a little rabbit comforting/encouraging the tired housewife. This is my life.

Diana, Peter’s wife — two literary rabbits. She’s an English teacher and loves books as much as I do. I thought she would appreciate these two classic characters meeting each other.

And to finish it off, here’s a family photo of my family taken this Christmas. I am incredibly blessed with a wonderful family.

Bud said to me, as we were driving home from the Albany bus station after dropping Sam and Donna off so they could fly back west, “We did a good job, didn’t we?”

So far, so good.

Christmas 2016
Starting on the top step — Amanda and Philip
Owen and Emily
Sam and Donna
Me and Bud
“Fred”, Helen, and Laurel
Karl, Henry, and Mary

I love these people.