Dogs

Dogs and I are not the best of friends. I do have a very real memory of being chased by a huge dog when I was walking home from school. I am learning that not all dogs will chase me. My son had a dog once that I was willing to consider part of my family and let him bring her here and even into the house. (She did pee on my new rug but was so quiet I have even forgiven her.) My daughter has  a dog that jumps on me and she has learned to put the dog out of sight when I visit.

We have a visiting dog with the Otterbees. Gracie comes sometimes when her owner doesn’t want to leave her alone. Sue asked permission first. One member of the Otterbees feels the same as I do about dogs, but we have both learned to acknowledge Gracie’s presence with a “hello”  and the dog usually settles down in the middle of the rug and ignores us. That’s OK with us. (I have suggested Sue might teach her to quilt or knit.)

There are service dogs at the pool but no one is supposed to greet, pet or even talk to them and they are always very well trained.

Thus when I came across this high school writing  of mine, I was reminded of the dog that lived in our home growing up that I tried to avoid but was never afraid of.

If I Had a Dog; or No trouble At all
written by Frances Morse Upper III Dec, 12, 1949

“ If I get a dog I’ll take care of it all by myself. You won’t have any trouble at all.” This was the solemn promise of my sister, Mary, to my father.

“And who will pay for it?” was the typical reply coming from my father, even if he did know quite well who would.

“I’ll train her and teach her to sit, stay, and all the other things she should do.” Mary ignored his remark. Of course it never occurred to her that she would be away at school all winter, and that training a dog long distance is a little difficult but she got his consent.

It was in June that this was discussed, but it wasn’t until August that we finally began looking for a puppy. Now, Mary loves dogs. There’s no denying it. Whenever she sees a dog, she falls in love with it. That’s about the only trouble with her. We went to the kennel in Falmouth, and she fell in love with all the pups. If we hadn’t been there I think she would have taken all of them, but after much discussion she decided on a black and white cocker. So now we have a dog, Penny by name. Even I think she’s cute, and ordinarily I don’t like dogs.

Now I sit here and think over her first remark: “If I get a dog, I’ll take care of it all by myself. You won’t have any trouble at all.” Then I wake myself from my day dreaming with a sudden thought, the time. I’m supposed to feed the dog at nine. As I look at the clock, Penny gets up from her favorite stool, stretches, and walks to the door. Patiently, I get up, grab my coat and flash light and let her out. After much coaxing, calling, and three dog biscuits, she comes in and I feed her her milk. Oh no, no trouble at all, if only Mary would come home. (she was away at boarding school)

My sister is alone now. Her husband died a year ago. She now has a dog to keep her company. I have seen pictures. She’s a nice looking dog.  “Hello Lady”….

a day of conversations

It’s been a day of talking to strangers. At the book store I popped into the elevator to go to the second floor. A lady was in there ready to push 2. “Me too”, says I. “I don’t mind walking down stairs but I don’t like to walk up.” I learned in our short ride, that she had a knee replacement five months ago. I had both replaced at the same time eleven years ago so we had that in common I guess..

“It was the most painful surgery I ever had,” says she. “I had hoped to be back to normal by now.”

“Give it a year,” I said, in all my “wisdom” and the chatter went on about doctors and physical therapists. I almost couldn’t get away from her as she was anxious to tell me all of it. I pointed to my new hearing aids and said, “This comes next.” (And they take getting used to. I am giving that a year too.)

I chuckled to myself when she told me she came from the east. I was about to ask where since I am a certified Maniac, (I guess they say Mainer but “Maniac” gives me the excuse to be zany). Then she mentioned Iowa, which isn’t east in my mind but it is certainly east of Washington.

From the book store I traveled on to the fabric shop where they were having a huge sale. I would have had trouble parking, but I have what my husband calls my “get out of jail free card” otherwise known as a handicap sticker. So I sailed into my special slot and viewed the quiet mob wandering among the rows holding bolts of fabric and then lining up for the cutting. Whew… should I even stay? Why not.

I found my fabric and plopped it onto a waiting card table with signs saying “still shopping” placed on top of selected bolts of fabric and stood in line with the others. One lady kept piling more and more bolts onto her stack. I hoped my place in line was ahead of hers. It was, but in the mean time we chatted. I told her she had great selection and she told me she was taking a class… and the conversation continued.

As I was driving home in terrible rain and too much traffic, I mused at the fact that people in the west talk to total strangers when they are waiting. When we moved from the east coast to the west, I could almost guess who was an easterner or a westerner from looking at the people waiting at an airport. It isn’t just me. It is just a friendly place out here….and as for Iowa, which is east from here, I have no idea where they fit into this chatting with strangers but the lady in the elevator was very chatty.

Now to actually finish a quilt. (I did)
And think about what to do with my new fabric.

the braided rug

The braided rug. Oh the tale that accompanies the braided rug.

Some time in the great past my mother thought she would make a braided rug. There were some new tools she had found. If you cut the wool strips about two inches wide, then strung them into these metal tools, it folded the wool on itself and then you could braid the strips into a rug. No problem.  It would be a great activity to do in the summer. Need I say she was also the chief cook for the multitude of people who showed up over the summer weeks. But the braided rug looked like fun.

From somewhere, I know not where, she acquired a large box of wool scraps. Surely this would make a huge rug. My memory of this box rates it about  24  x  18 and 10 inches high. Now that is a huge box of wool.   Momie set about cutting the wool into strips and the braided rug began. In no time the scrap box was empty, and the rug was a nice size to set by a tub, a bath mat size, hardly big enough for the living room at the big house.

So the plea began. Do you have any wool scraps, old wool skirts, shirts, anything Momie could cut up to make the rug. It became the summer experience to ask and beg and get packages of wool from guests who had gone home after their visit and sent old wool items.

One such item even rated a poem. Mr Allen sent his old bathrobe with a poem called “Ode to a departed bathrobe.”

ODE TO A DEPARTED BATHROBE
The nights are cool, blue is my face
When through the house the pup I chase.
It’s not her fault I’ve caught a bug
My bathrobe’s now a braided rug.
I’ve chills and aches, my nose is red.
If it gets worse I’ll go to bed
And dream about that shifty thug
Who snitched my robe to make a rug.
The doctor’s been here twice today.
He gave me pills and made me pay.
“Keep warm” he said, with voice so smug,
He knew my bathrobe’s now a rug.
When I rise from my bed of pain,
And walk around the house again,
I’ll take with me a steaming mug
To stop the chill. Dad-rat that rug.        Donald Taylor Allen            August 1954

When the rug became large enough to leave on the living room floor, every guest was told you could not walk on the rug if you had not worked on the rug. Mary and Judy and I had all helped in the braiding. Marg and Peanut and probably Lucy and Bobbi, (my aunts,) had helped in one way or another. Over along the unfinished edge would lie the braided bits waiting for new strips to be added and braided and then sewn to the growing oval.

Sea, sitting on floor to right of piano

It was about this time Sea came into my life. It was the summer of 1954. I was working in Nantucket as a waitress in Siasconset. Sea was at summer school at MIT. He came to visit me arriving in Hyannis by bus, and missed the ferry to Nantucket. He called me wondering what he should do. I gave him the Cotuit number and said, call them. They will pick you up, house you for the night and get you on the ferry tomorrow. Now mind you, Sea had not met my family. We had only met in June.

My dad drove to Hyannis and brought poor Sea to the Big House. He was greeted at the door by my mother with a pair of scissors in her hand. “Cut here,” she says, and Sea cut where she said. “Good, “ she said, “Now you can walk on the rug.”

There was a house full of guests that week. My father’s roommate from college, Dudley Bell, was there with his wife and four kids, all about the same age I was, young college to aged high school kids. I am not sure how Sea managed that evening. He was put on the ferry the next morning and we visited in Nantucket. It was my last weekend of work and I returned to Cotuit with him on the ferry. I assume someone met us and brought us to the
Big House. So there we were with the Bell family, the usual family members, Marg, Judy, Jeff, Mary… I would have to check the photo to identify others, and the Bells had this great game we loved to play when they were there.

The game was “Categories.” It was explained to Sea. You pick a category and, to the rhythm of snapping your fingers, you’d say, for example, if the category was cars, Ford- Lincoln, and next person would say Lincoln- Buick… and so it would go around the room as fast as the beat could go until someone could not think of another car. Lots of laughs and fun… except for one thing. Sea was incapable of snapping his fingers. The wonderful click the rest of us could produce, was nothing in his hands. Here he was in his new girlfriend’s home, and could not snap his fingers and keep to the beat of the game. On top of that this maniac mother had greeted him with a pair of scissors and told him to “cut here.”

The rest is history.

sisters

I have one sister who is two years older than I am. Her birthday is in July, mine is in September. With Easter and Christmas it made for four nicely divided events for my grandmother on Momie’s side to send gifts to both of us. For a number of years we were the same size, so often two dresses would come and the birthday girl got to choose. At Christmas a huge box would arrive. My sister and I would see this box under the tree. We were not allowed to open or pick it up, but we could sniff and guess. We would sniff the box like puppy dogs to guess what it might be.

These grandparents died when I was quite young so the sniffing game did not last forever. But with just two of us so close together, it was not surprising that we often got gifts on one anothers birthday and were given similar gifts at Christmas and Easter. My parents apparently tried to keep things even. Long after I was married and living on my own, my dad once showed me his list of “gifts” (money spent.)  My sister was widowed when her children were young, so their help for her made sense. I did have to chuckle when the cost of a parental visit to see me in the west was his idea of making things even.

I had four kids of my own. There was no way to keep things even and they did not expect it. If one child needed new shoes, it made very little sense to buy four pair. The one son got new clothes; the younger of the girls got “hand me downs”. I found that if I stashed them in the basement for a year, by the time the next one needed them, they were sort of new, or at least forgotten.

Two sets of the older grandchildren consist of a boy and a girl per family. Two similar outfits doesn’t work. But my two youngest grand-kids are two girls two years apart, just like my sister and I. They are very different little girls, but then my sister and I were very different as well, and when I find the perfect something for one, I am often tempted to get two. Keeping things even really isn’t a great idea. My sister and I did laugh about it long after our parents were gone.

Lucy wanted a poncho. I had no idea ponchos were in style. I found a pattern on line and bought a giant, multi-colored ball of yarn and knit it for her. She tried it on and loved it. I saw the look on Phoebe’s face.
“What color would you like yours?” I could tell I would be knitting another one.

Phoebe picked hers up today. The same color. The same size. I hope they find a way of telling them apart, if it matters. I guess two little girls, two years apart do like the same things when they are 6 and 8. Dare I knit a poncho for the American girl dolls? times two? I suppose so. There is yarn left over.

taking charge

I did go to the quilt meeting. Since Mary had specifically invited me and another former member, she made us sit in the front row. I would have preferred the back row and had planned to sit with my neighbor who was new to the group. It turned out she did know some people there and took a back row seat with a friend. I sat down in front and piled my two favorite (at the moment) quilts on the floor in front of me. Mary greeted everyone and, starting with the back row, had members bring their quilts to the front and tell about them. And there I was, close enough to help. The first quilt could not be shown by one person. I jumped up to hold a corner as the owner told her story. I sat down, and the next came. It was a slow process, refolding a quilt and waiting for the next person to come. I kept getting up and sitting down again.

It was then that the teacher in me spoke up. “If you are the next person, why don’t you be ready to come as soon as this person is done?” Chuckle from the group. Some of them knew me. I’ve been known to  “take charge” before:

I worked with a group of fourth graders after I retired. The teacher invited me to do a quilt project with them. They were reading about the Underground Railroad and had seen the quilts that were used as a guide for the slaves to move to the north. It was a wonderful chance to add hand work to the project.

Several of my quilting friends joined me with sewing machines ready. We talked to the kids and helped them cut and sew the fabric for the blocks. They were wonderful and the fun of watching kids working on those machines was wonderful too. We had four little old Singer Featherweight machines there. It was the boys who were the most intrigued by those machines, peering at them, trying to see how they worked and then putting their foot on the peddle and sewing. Wow… The machines we had were all black and very antique looking. They have become a machine of choice for many quilters taking classes because they are easy to lug around. I owned two and finally gave one to my little granddaughter a while ago.

I was in a large quilt guild at the time, some 200 members. In fact, this shy young person that I used to be, was now the president of that guild holding a microphone in front of me, “like an ice cream cone” I was told and leading the meetings. I decided these fourth graders needed a chance I never had as a kid. They were proud of their work. They needed to tell someone and who better than 200 old ladies who quilt.

The children arrived by bus and lined up along the side of the room, blocks in hand. When the time came each walked to the front and, with me placing the microphone in front of them, told the group their name and information about their block. Needless to say, they all got a standing ovation.

What a wonderful thing. I wonder today if they remember, if they have ever sewn again and what they are doing now. They are all finished with school by now, though they might be in college. I have moved away from there and yet, now, once again, I “take charge” even though I haven’t been invited to. Oh well.

tale of a quest and a quote

It was a catalog that started our thinking. Travelsmith had a picture on the cover of The Blue Mosque in Istanbul Turkey. “We’ve been there, haven’t we?” I asked Sea. I tend to remember different things from our trips. The picture looked familiar.

Sea trudged to our basement and retrieved the album of our trip on the Black Sea. The pictures were on a CD which was included in my writing of the trip. There was also a DVD a fellow passenger sent us after the trip. We watched it on my Mac and began remembering what we had seen of the Black Sea. We had been to that mosque but there was another trip that remained stronger in our memories.

I must explain my “writing” of our travels. We were headed to Antartica one winter when Amelia’s kids were still in grade school. She sent me this stuffed kitty and told me it was Kirby the Cat and she wanted me to take Kirby with us and write of our trip through Kirby. It was a great idea. Since then Kirby has been on many trips and when she disappeared, I found other stuffed animals to accompany us.

On this trip it was Taffy, a tiny caramel colored kitten who took up very little space in my luggage and wrote diligently on my computer as we traveled. Thus my memories are written.

Taffy wrote: We went to the monastery high on a hill overlooking the city in Georgia. The highlight of this place was the music coming from the small chapel. We assumed it was a recording but several people told us to join the service. Three women sang the refrain several times and an ancient looking priest in ornate yellow robes and a white beard mumbled the service, like Moses himself. There were no more than a dozen local participants and the tourist crowd. It was only the three women who were singing, holding babies in their arms. It was the acoustics in the chapel that made them sound like a choir.

While reading the rest of Taffy’s writing, I read of our guest lecturer from MIT who shared how  his students were designing robots to do underwater archeology research  in the very deep waters of the Black Sea. I wrote down a quote said by him:
“Education is two things: making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar.
David Mindell, MIT

how to go back again

The phone rang. It was Mary, program chairman for the quilt guild.
Bring your favorite two quilts.
Come to the meeting.
We want to see you again.
We will have show and tell and lunch.

How can I resist when an old friend begs me to rejoin the quilt guild?  I joined this guild when I moved back to Bellingham 11 years ago. I had been a member of a guild in Florida and another when we lived on Cape Cod.  In fact, I was so involved in that one, I acted as president for a year.

I knew when I returned to Washington, I would not find my friends from when I lived here before.  I could not pick up where I left off. I had been teaching first grade and left in the middle of the school year. Now I was retired and many of the people I knew had moved on to other things, or they, too had retired. I had been gone for almost 20 years.  I knew this from my experience as a child.  During WW ll we moved from a town in Mass. to Penn. for the years my dad was in the Navy. Three years later we returned to Mass., the same house, the same neighbors but new schools and a new routines.  I guess, my mother thought we would return to where we left off but I can recall my mother saying, “you can never move back” . You cannot pick up where you left off.

So here we were returning to the same town we had lived in before. My mother’s comment rang through my mind as we packed up and prepared to go back to Bellingham. It would be a different house in another part of town. My kids were grown and we would be near two of them and their families. But I needed more that that. I found another quilt guild.

I walked into the meeting one morning… cold turkey. I did not know one person there. I sat down in a chair and Hazel came to greet me. She welcomed me, asked my name, how I found out about the group and then introduced me to the people there. I had never been greeted with such open arms. I joined that day and went to their meetings for a number of years until health issues made me stop. Now I was being asked to come again.

I thought about which quilt was my favorite. What would I take? Would I remember people’s names? I had stopped by several weeks ago and found out I had forgotten the names of so many, and I saw a lot of new people. (But I had my new ears. What a great place to test them!)

Yes, Mary. I will show up and maybe even take my neighbor and fellow quilter.

I told you to stay tuned…