Notes from the Farm Today

          Just a few notes from the farm today. we picked two bags of apples and two bags of pears from the orchard today. I tried the pears and they are great! The only two ways I like fruit are either right off the tree or baked in pies. 

          Today I just realized I have lived four days longer than my father did. That is something that has bothered me for more than a month, wondering if I would live longer than he did. 

          For those of you Littonites, I just saw today that Ronnie Walker in now teaching at OTC. So if y'all want to larn sompthin about quality or ISO sign up today.

Roots

           We moved so much in our early married life with me being in the navy that we never set down any roots. Even after my navy time we still moved after three years, then after six months, then a year and a half, then after four years, again after four years then after two years. Now, finally we have roots after twenty-six years here, living here longer than anywhere, more than a third of our lives.

          There are so many memories here in the Wyrick House. My parents lived here with us for weeks after my father had a massive stroke. My brothers and sisters stayed here when dad was in the hospital for several weeks. My parents loved this place and visited it often when we first moved in. This house reminded them of their first home after they were married. Joyce’s mother lived here for several years before she passed away.

          We have had so many friends visit here and stay here through the last years. These things are what establish roots.

When a Tree Falls

I wonder about a tree that has been standing in the woods for a hundred years and is finally knocked down by a big storm. Does the tree think, "finally I am off my feet? Man my roots are tired and sore."

Do the other trees think, "wow that old retired tree is finally gone and now I get some of that good sunshine?" 

Do the squirrels using their highway in the sky ever run, leap and cry, "oh damn there should be a limb here and now I am falling to the ground?" 

I am just wondering.

Living in the Moment

          I do not know why this thought came into my head today, "living in the moment." I could just as well say, "being in focus." I remember being a child and being totally engrossed in whatever I was doing. There was nothing else in the world but that moment in time. I did not hear outside noises, did not think about anything else. I have watched our granddaughter and daughter grow up and noticed they too have experienced that as children. I have seen other kids at our granddaughter's birthday parties and they are oblivious to anything but that one moment in time when they are running around and laughing and having fun.

          That focus seemed to fade as I grew up. It could have started when I was in first grade. Suddenly there were other things to think about, going to school, being able to answer questions and not look stupid, taking tests, avoiding getting on the bad side of cruel, vicious, frustrated nuns, the list went on from there.

          By the eighth grade things were more complicated. Girls were involved, trying to get into the right high school, answering the unavoidable question, what are you going to be when you grow up? I suppose there are kids who have that answer, but I did not have an inkling until three years later. 

          High school just added more things to consume my thoughts, moving me further away from living in the moment. Girls were growing in all the right places, report cards were ever more important to worry about, college was on the horizon for 90% of my class and that question about what am I going to be kept coming up. It seemed to consume any adult in my life and others I had just met. 

          I got a job working in a gas station at 16 and thought maybe I would be a mechanic in the future and that got me wondering whether or not I could make a living as a mechanic? I was making $40 a week and figured I would need 100 a week to fulfill my dreams. I was already living in the future instead of the moment. The radio in my car quit working so I had to take it to a small radio shop to get it repaired. Walking into that little shop all the bells, whistles and lights went off. I could see my future, but how would I get there from here? Again, I was back to the future, not in the moment. 

          I took the navy placement test at 17 and found I was eligible for any technical training in the aviation field. That set the hook and a month after my 18th birthday I was off to boot camp and electronics training after that. My fate was sealed unless I failed training and ended up loading cargo on navy ships headed for the Pacific ocean. 

          Through the years in the navy, at Burroughs and at Litton I have had days when that living in the moment, that total focus, that being in the groove have descended upon me. Those days are the shining light in my life. When those days happened I was happy as a clam. I did great work, accomplished tasks that evaded others and reveled in those moments and hours. It has been a challenge to live in the moment all of the time, though I wish it was all of the time, but the monkey mind takes over and thoughts and worries and old memories keep going off like flashbulbs at a Hollywood red carpet event. Some things that put me in the moment these days are the odd, mundane chores around here, like mowing the grass or working on the lawn mower or chain saw. I am not sure why they keep me focused, but they do and I enjoy them. 

          Living in the moment is for me, the best thing in life. I wish you too the joys of living in the moment.

The Rain

Here I am very depressed

After many days working on the roof

With very little rest

I feel as though this rain filled moment is a test

Will I make it through?

And someday look back and think this was just a jest

Perhaps it was just a rough spot in my life’s quest

I am getting so I despise the rain

I know into every life a little rain must fall

But why do I have to get it all?

I know I am whining to be sure

But what may I ask you is the cure?

I know I can think and hope the rain will go away

But I just want another sunny day

Is that too much to ask

May I give the lord above another task?

It may seem selfish in my own way

But may I please have another sunny day?

Life

          We have only been here 28 years, but today is the coolest August day I can ever remember! We have had no sunshine and the high temp is 65 degrees. So far this year is the wettest June, July and August I remember. I know there is what the scientists call global warming, but I just have a difficult time with that situation. Oops, the sun just came out at 4 PM, yea! All in all, life is good as long as I do not think too hard about the negative side of life which seems to be everywhere on the news. I suppose bad news is more sensational than good news, but I would like to see what happens if everyone heard about the good things in life. Joyce and I have had a lot of rough times in our life, but we have survived and will continue hopefully. Oops, the sun just disappeared.

Rain with no roof

           I waited until August to put the new roof on because August is so very dry. Well in any other year of the 28 we have been in this area, that would have been a good plan, but not this year. It has rained so much since we stripped the roof it is unbelievable! We are now on the 17th day and still have a long way to go. Last afternoon a storm popped up and took a whole section of tar paper flooding the interior of the house for a second time. I just can not seem to catch a break. 

Crossing Paths

          I was at the library this morning looking for a movie to check out. The librarian there at the time is a very nice woman whom I visit with whenever she is there. She has helped me get books from outlying areas that I would never see in the regular catalog. We were chatting and in the conversation she mentioned she was living in South Carolina in 1984. I replied I was in San Diego then and how wonderful it is that we are both here in Missouri together some 31 years later.

          This is to me another example of how lives join an extraordinary way. One would think the odds of being 3000 miles apart that we would likely never meet, but it happens a lot. Joyce and I lived just 2 miles away growing up, went to the same places and did not meet until we were near 18. We visit with people at the Oklahoma casino and find there are many people who have lived or were born in California and yet there we are chatting in Oklahoma.

          Two of my best friends of more than 30 years are still in California and two others I met in the navy are, one in New Hampshire and one in Maine, but we still keep in touch over 50 years later. There is a saying I have seen on the internet that goes something like this; some people you meet in life are there for just passing moments, while others are there for a very long time. Each has something to add to your life. I believe that. I thank each of you that has come into my life. It would not be the same without you.

Life Changing Event

           After reading my post of the tenth of August I got to thinking about the landfill and that reminded me of something I think about frequently. There are many times in a person's life when one step, one miscue, perhaps one word can change that person's life. I wonder how many times can a single circumstance change a life dramatically and maybe the person never knows it? This story has that theme. 

          My father was living in Camdenton Missouri in 1973. In those days there was no trash service there, so one had to carry trash to an open landfill and just dump it. He was working up in Sunrise Beach Missouri at the time. He rented a house in Camdenton. The landfill was just three blocks away in Camdenton, but he did not like to go there, preferring to go up to Sunrise Beach and dump trash there on his way to work. On the fateful day of his head-on crash on the highway, he was going to work with bags of trash in his van, ready to dump in Sunrise Beach. Had he stopped to dump his trash in Camdenton near the house, he would not have been at the spot on the highway, at the time, where the accident occurred, when a negligent driver passed a car going the opposite way on a curve and nearly killed my father. 

          He nearly died in 1973 and had health problems the rest of his life. His leg was mangled in that accident and he had circulation problems the remainder of his life. The bad circulation led to his losing half of his leg later in life. He died less than a month after his 70th birthday. Had it not been for a bag of trash to dump or heading for the wrong landfill he may have lived an additional decade or more.

Roofing and Rainfall

          You may have noticed that I have not posted on the blog for 8 days now. The house needs a new roof. It has needed one for more than a year now, but I spent last summer and fall trying to patch some smaller leaks and thought I had them fixed. Over the winter I found I was wrong. We have had a very wet spring, too wet, which is unusual for this area. July was one of the rainiest July's in our history. I waited for August to begin so the weather would be nice and dry as it has always been. My son in law Rhett and I prepared to tackle the huge job starting on August second. It turned out as of this moment we have been rained out two times in one week, with a total of over four inches of rain, an unheard of amount of rain in this short time for August. 

          Last Thursday the weather prediction was for some scattered showers overnight. It turned out we had severe thunderstorms with high winds that lifted and twisted the tarps on the roof and instead of keeping the rain out, funneled rain in over the kitchen and had Joyce and I up at five AM emptying buckets until seven. Saturday Rhett and I got up on the roof and just got started working after checking the weather forecast and seeing zero chance of rain, when another storm rolled in and sent us scrambling to recover the tarps and get off the roof. That cost us another few hours of delay. 

          We made two trips to the landfill this week dumping 1900 pounds of shingles on one and 1700 on the second. The landfill was a horrid place; it just reeks in its own special way. The bulldozers were busy shoving trash up into ever larger piles as new things were added. They were passing by so close to me that I thought I might get swept up and over with the trash. 

          Sunday morning I was so exhausted I could not function on a physical or mental level. I usually work between 3.5 to 4.5 hours a day on my farm chores and then rest, but this last week I have worked with Rhett 10 or so hours a day and apparently not slept very well. Rhett worked for a few hours on Sunday, but the heat was excessive and the shingles were so stuck together he was afraid he would tear them rather than separate them, so he quit for the day. 

          This morning another storm rolled in at three AM, with high winds and non-stop lightening. It woke both Joyce and I up. She went back to bed at four, while I was up until five-thirty before sleeping until eight-thirty. While there is not much funny about this, it is not the worst thing we have experienced. In 1975 we tore a roof off 85 miles north of here in August and brought in rain like we had never seen before. One night rain poured in all over the house. I slept under a shower curtain as rain poured into the bedroom. Now I am so jumpy I find it difficult to sleep whenever there is rain coming down. 

          We are still not half way done, but someday, sometime the roof will be done and we can proudly say, "We did it!"

Angels on Earth

          It was just a few years ago when I fell in the bathroom on November 1 and by Christmas Eve I could not even control a spoon to have my evening soup. I had a subdural hematoma, a condition where there is excessive bleeding in the cranial cavity. In January I ended up in the emergency room and on a surgical table where doctor Mace (excellent surgeon) drilled two 5/8 inch holes in my skull to drain the excess blood from my head. He did a great job and I have survived, but this is not about the surgeon, rather about the nurses in Cox South hospital intensive care unit.

          The nurses were absolute angels in their care of me for however many days I was in the unit. I did not know when I went into surgery if I would live or not. The first nurse I saw afterwards looked like an angel to me. She was so kind and concerned I thought she was an angel. She was also very kind to Joyce when she came into the unit to see me after the surgery.

          I am sure that there are nurses that are not very good, but the ones I had were wonderful. I got to thinking about this today after my rather solemn 70th birthday. The celebration with the kids, grandchild and Rhett's lovely mother was very nice, but the thought of being 70 somehow disturbed me greatly. I am over that today and even though I had thought about my inevitable death at some point, I thought about how close I came just a few years back and came through it well. 

          I do believe in angels on Earth and I can only think they will take care of me for a while longer.