Waiting

 

Any livestock owner will tell you that the biggest mistake you can ever make is to turn the water on at a water trough and walk away.  It never fails.  You have a thousand things to do and you think that you can just leave the water on long enough to fill the trough, go and take care of another small chore, then you will come back and turn it off.  Not going to happen.  There is something about turning on water that brings on amnesia.

If you are lucky, you will only forget for an hour or so, resulting in a small lake around the trough.  If you are like me, you will forget for several hours, resulting in a large lake and a very large water bill.

I have two big water tanks for my pastured horses.  It takes about 20 or 30 minutes to fill them completely to the top.  Waiting has never been something I am good at.  One of the vivid memories I have from my early childhood is waiting on my daddy.  Daddy loved to talk to people and he never got in much of a hurry.  So, of course, he was frequently late and my mom and I had to wait for him.  Mama worked at a department store in our small town.  She didn’t drive, so someone had to pick her up after work every day.  Saturdays were the big shopping day, and the store stayed open until 9:00.  Everyone came to the town square on Saturday night, filling up almost every parking space.  The women shopped while the men got haircuts, then loitered around the courthouse discussing farm prices and weather.  Daddy and I would eat at the Dairy Dip, then I would visit the dime store and get my week’s supply of candy (Do you remember that you could at one time get enough candy to last all week for just $1?) before waiting at the store where my mama worked, sometimes playing in the stockroom or wandering the aisles inspecting the merchandise.  At 9:00, we made our way to the car and waited.

“When is Daddy coming?” I would ask.  “Oh, he’ll be here in a little while,” Mama would sigh.  I think that’s when my impatience with waiting was developed.  Waiting in traffic, waiting in line at the store, waiting for a concert to begin, waiting for an appointment, waiting for a water tank to fill up – they all drive me crazy. 

I was reminded of this last weekend when our local theatre group put on a play.  One of the other actors said with a sigh, “The worst part of this is waiting after house opens until the lights go down and the action begins.”  He is right - it’s one of the longest thirty minutes I know of.  The other is the time it takes to fill up those water tanks.  And there is no way to hurry.

So, in the relative cool of the early morning on Friday, I made my way to the pasture.  It was comfortable under the shade tree where the water hydrant is, so I perched on the edge of one of the tanks and prepared to wait. 

Bear went off across the pasture on an errand of his own; Sophie and Scout sniffed half-heartedly at a few patches of weeds but decided it was too hot to chase rabbits.  Sophie came over and leaned against my knee – her version of a hug.  I watched a hawk making lazy circles in the sky, wondered why there are no pecans on the pecan tree by the garden fence this year, and was treated to the rare sound of a bob white.  It did occur to me momentarily that I could pass the time by walking briskly up and down the fence and get in some exercise, but I quickly got over that.  Meanwhile the water swirled and rippled as it rose and the leaves in the morning breeze made patterns on its surface.

  I don’t think I had any monumental thoughts during that period.  I certainly didn’t solve any of the world’s problems, or even any of my problems.  I just sat there, being still.  Maybe I can get used to this waiting thing, especially if it’s an early summer morning, with my dogs leaning on my knees and time slowing down, just for a little while.

 

The Phone Call

I guess it was only a matter of time.  Scout has figured out just about everything else around here and how it works.  Yesterday he made a phone call.

I don’t know who he meant to call, or what he was calling about.  Possibly it was supposed to be a call to someone to come and take all these puppies away.  Or it might have been an inquiry about the weather and when it’s going to get cool again.  His fur coat is not suitable for 98 degree weather.  But he called my friend Alice.

I was in the kitchen making supper when I heard a little thump.  “What are you doing, Scout?”  I called.  It’s always Scout, any time there is a thump anywhere in the house.  Then I heard a noise like a phone ringing from the caller’s side.  Before I could put two and two together, I heard Alice’s voice.  “Hello?” she was saying.  “Hello?”  I rushed into the living room where Scout was lying on the rug staring at the phone in amazement.  He had not only hit redial, but he had also turned on the speaker, all the better to hear whoever he meant to call.  Who knows what he would have said if I had not arrived to pick up the phone?

“It was Scout,” I said, when I picked up the phone.  “What do you mean?” Alice asked.  “Scout got the phone and called you,” I said.  She thought it was pretty funny.  Thank goodness it was someone who knew me and knew Scout.  I can only imagine if it had been some stranger who answered a call from my number and heard panting and hard breathing on the other end.  I might have to move away from here, and I can’t face packing up all the stuff in this house.

I had made him come inside with me because the puppies were outside with Sophie.  Scout likes the puppies, but he is not entirely convinced that, now that they are running around making noises, they are not some new type of squeaky toy for him to play with.  He would not deliberately try to hurt them, but he does have a tendency to pull the stuffing out of cuddly things and I’m not taking any chances.  The phone was not supposed to be on the table – I had already lost a TV remote to his busy mouth last week and had resolved to keep all such things in the drawer.   In fact, we have pretty much cleared everything off all the flat surfaces of my living room until Scout outgrows his puppy fun. 

The puppies still sleep inside, but they spend nice days (if you can call upper 90’s “nice”) out in a pen in the front yard.  I ordered the pen off Amazon when I came home from lunch and one of the puppies met me at the front door.  I really thought the wading pool would hold them a little longer than 3 weeks.  Amazingly enough, the pen was delivered within two days and was just as easy to put up as described.  I think it will hold puppies until they leave for new homes.  The pen is not popular with the puppies – they like having the entire big yard to roam in, but my nerves and Sophie’s nerves are calmer when they are enclosed in a more confined space. They have already found all the flower beds, learned to come up the steps, and one quickly learned to crawl up into a concrete planter amongst the flowers.  They are very athletic puppies, smart and adventurous. 

If Scout was trying to find new homes for the puppies, it could be that Sophie put him up to it.  She is beginning to have that long suffering expression that says, “How much longer are these going to be with me?”  If he had bothered to ask me, I could have told him Alice would not buy a puppy. 

 

The Other Me

 

Sometimes I think there are two of me.  One of me doesn’t cook much.  The other occasionally has these days when something comes over me and I am compelled to do things I have never done before, like cook a turkey or make my mama’s rolls.  This morning it was pickles.  I have never in my life made pickles of any kind.  Today I made pickles.  Whether they are edible pickles or not remains to be seen.

It started with the corn.  I picked a laundry basket full of sweet corn early this morning to “put up” in the freezer.  Thankfully, the hot dry June weather didn’t seem to hurt the corn, or the cucumbers either for that matter.  So I got up early to try to beat the heat and pulled off enough corn to make two batches, I hoped.  As I was pulling corn, I kept almost stepping on cucumbers that were planted right next to the corn.  I hated for them to go to waste, so I picked them, even though I’m not fond of cucumbers at all.  I do like pickles, however, and I think that’s where the other me took over and persuaded me that making pickles would be a worthy thing to do on a hot Fourth of July day. I am sure my mama, if she happened to look down from heaven, was astonished.

It was getting hot when I sat at the picnic table and shucked the corn, which filled two large dishpans I found in the basement. 

I put on my favorite John Prine music on the porch and went to work.  It took about one album worth of music to finish.  It took most of the rest of the day to cut off the corn, cook it and put it in the freezer. I was reminded of what a small amount of corn remains to actually be eaten after you cut it off the cob.  A large laundry basket makes one batch of four packages, in case anyone wonders.

 In between tasks, I hunted a recipe for refrigerator pickles, which seemed like the easiest pickles to make.  The instructions say that they have to sit in the refrigerator for three days before eating them.  So, it will be later in the week before I know if they are edible.  They were pretty simple to make; the hardest part was scrubbing off the sticky residue from heating the vinegar, sugar and salt that was poured over them.  Naturally, I spilled it down the sides of the jar and on the kitchen counter.  I also used up all my sugar and salt and almost all the vinegar.

By 5:30, I was too tired to go to the Fourth of July fireworks event in town.  And I still had to get rid of all those corn cobs, water the tomatoes (see my previous story about that!) and feed the horses.  So, I ate two ears of corn then ended up sitting on the front porch with Scout, Sophie and Bear, enjoying the fireworks in the distance, listening to Willie Nelson’s Picnic on the radio and wondering how much more corn I can pick and what to do with the rest of those cucumbers.  Sophie’s puppies slept through the fireworks and Willie Nelson.

I guess this is the same other me who used to make almost all my own clothes.  I also did crafts.  Today, I hardly recognize that person.  One Christmas, I made a couple of dozen Raggedy Ann dolls to sell for extra Christmas money.  I even made a quilt one time.  I think back on that now and wonder who that person was.  If someone told me now I had to make a Raggedy Ann doll, I would just say “shoot me now.”  I can’t even bring myself to hem up a pair of pants I bought a year ago and still haven’t worn.  I also have a pair of curtains that need to be hemmed before I can hang them.  I’m not sure that will ever happen.  I still have a big box somewhere full of leftover craft supplies.  I kept it because I always thought when I retired, I might take up crafting again.  Hah!  That’s not going to happen unless that other me returns.  If she does, please, someone come and check on me.