72 Hours

 

About the middle of the week, I became aware of the forecast of an impending snow and ice event for my area of Middle Tennessee.  Such forecasts come along a couple of times every winter and more often than not, they don’t happen or turn into minor events.  But this one seemed a little more certain than most and people began stockpiling bread, milk and toilet paper.  I’ve never quite understood this obsession with toilet paper – I’ve been snowbound a few times in my life and never used all that much toilet paper.  I don’t drink milk, so that doesn’t enter into my plans, and I don’t really use that much bread either.  I did stock up on Dr. Pepper and snacks and at the last minute decided to buy some sandwich makings in case the electricity went off and I couldn’t cook.  I made a pot of potato soup and a cake.  Turns out, the potato soup was pretty useless, but I’ve eaten over half the cake.

I bought extra dog food and a new stock tank heater for my horses’ water trough, and I made sure we filled up the water, unhooked the hoses and put some buckets over the hydrants to keep the ice off the handles.  That was about the extent of my storm prep.

I woke up Saturday morning to snowfall and an already white landscape.  The dogs loved it – Scout especially is happiest outside when it’s in the 30’s.  He never gets the memo about bringing your pets inside when it’s cold.  Saturday was uneventful, although we did call off church for the next day.  That was okay and I had soup and cake to eat for lunch.  Or so I thought.

When I woke up Sunday morning, it was to the peculiar silence that means the power is off broken only by the hiss of sleet hitting the roof.  When I stumbled to the door, the trees were coated in ice.  I am only three miles from the center of town, but due to an oddity in how the electric lines run to our road, when the power goes off, sometimes it stays off for quite a while.  The predicted temperatures for Sunday and Monday nights were in single digits.  Serious stuff.  I have a fireplace with gas logs so I knew I wouldn’t freeze, but I was worried a little about the horses and the water.  I got down the kerosene lamp from the mantle, glad that it was almost full of oil and had a wick.  I retrieved blankets and a quilt from my bedroom, closed off the living room from the rest of the house, settled in with a book, and ate more cake.

That night, I sat in front of the fire, wondering just how long the power would be out.  The fire was burning steadily, doing its best to keep the room bearable.  I thought about fire and what a miracle it is.  Besides air, water and food, I suppose it is the most important thing for life over the centuries.  I have been reading Hal Borland lately and I thought about an essay he wrote on trees and how the trees store up heat from the sun and how that warmth lives again with the burning of its branches in the winter.  No wonder people over the centuries have gathered around a fire, its warmth welcoming friends and making friends of strangers.  My fireplace is usually a comfortable extra, adding to the coziness of the big living room, but in this situation, it became an essential. 

For the next three nights, I slept on the couch in front of that fire, under two blankets, two fuzzy throws, a quilt and my winter coat, dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt, a fuzzy robe and socks.  Trips to the bathroom were like treks to the Arctic with only a flashlight to guide me.  It occurred to me that all those quilts displayed in an old glass front cabinet once warmed members of my family – no wonder that are so many of them, and that same fireplace used to be the only heat in these rooms.  When I was a little girl, we burned wood in the fireplace and I remember running into the living room every morning to stand in front of the fire before getting dressed.    Often there was an animal of some kind by the fire – a baby lamb, newborn calf or pig that needed some extra attention to survive.  I’m not sure why animals pick the coldest nights to give birth, but that seems to be the way it is.  The dogs were happy to have me in their domain – pressing cold noses to my face occasionally to make sure I was okay.  Joey was the only one willing to burrow into the small space on the couch with me, but Sophie slept right beside the couch.  Scout guarded the door and Carli slept at the other end of the couch. 

After the first night, I learned a couple of things.  One was to light the kerosene lamp before it got dark.  Another was to arrange my bedding on the couch while it was still daylight.  And always make sure you know where the flashlight is before you go to bed.

The sun came out the next morning and transformed the landscape into a sparkling jewelry box.  Even though I hated it for the people working out in the ice to clear road and restore power, it was breathtakingly beautiful, trees draped in diamonds reflecting every color of the rainbow.  I used a few bars of battery to snap a few pictures with my phone, but it didn’t capture the effect.  Birds swarmed the feeders, breaking the silence with their chirps and arguments. 

I read two books, worked three jigsaw puzzles, ate cake and snack crackers, wished for a battery operated cd player so I could have music, took everything out of set of cabinets and began sorting through stacks of old photo albums, played with the dogs, and filled bird feeders several times a day. 

In the love/hate relationship I have with social media and news, I realized how valuable it can be to bring people together.  The only means of charging my phone was to plug in to my running car periodically and that meant braving the icy driveway.  The bright side was that it was the only time I was truly warm unless I was under my layers of cover.  As much as I hate the news, not knowing what was happening outside my little corner of the world was worrying at times and I was eager to hear from friends about how they were doing.  We really are too addicted to our phones.  Missing the contact for a few days made me realize the aloneness our ancestors must have felt with no instant communication or easy travel.  Not only were lines down, but roads were blocked so many people couldn’t get in or out if they needed to.

We are not as self sufficient as we used to be.  My dad and granddaddy would have taken the tractor and the chain saw and cut the trees out of the road.  I don’t have a chain saw (although I have always wished for one), couldn’t use it if I had it and it would probably have been out of gas or out of order anyway.  My neighbors got the road cleared on Tuesday but I knew my car would not make it out of my own driveway so I stayed put.

I did discover that I could make do pretty well for a seventy-year-old, with a lot of help from my young neighbor and her grandfather.  I learned that I could live on peanut butter, cold sandwiches and cake.  I also discovered the joy of putting words on paper using an actual pencil instead of typing them out on the computer.  But I was surely happy when I saw the big truck from the electric company on my road on Wednesday morning.  And when the lights and heat suddenly came on at noon, I said a little prayer of thanks, along with a heap of prayers for all the people still without electricity.  I was one of the lucky ones.

 

Memories for Christmas

 

Here we are, almost Christmas Eve, and once again, I didn’t get everything done I meant to do this year.  I finally got my tree and my house decorated, but I didn’t get any cookies and candy made.  I had planned to make little treat boxes for my friends, but that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.  I haven’t even taken the time to drive around and view Christmas lights, although that may still happen.  I spent way too much time playing with the dogs, sold a puppy along the way, and managed to plan and implement our church Christmas program.  Someone asked me why I bother will all the decorations when it’s just me.  The fact that it’s just me is exactly why I bother.  Over seventy years of memories is why I bother, not counting the memories from the years before I was even born.  I said the other day that it’s obscene how many decorations I have, but then I thought about how long I have been accumulating, not to mention all the stuff my mom and grandmother and great-grandmother accumulated and it’s actually surprising that the house can hold all of it!  And just about everything holds a memory.

There is my collection of Christmas dogs, beginning with a little white terrier in a Santa hat  I bought not long after Robert and I were married.
 There are the things my mom and I made when we were all into sewing and crafts – a braided fabric wreath and stuffed Christmas wreath and a stuffed bear my aunt made for me.  There is my old Christmas stocking and a wooden sleigh from my childhood that may have also been my daddy’s.

 
There are the ornaments that my friends made for me, or gave me, and ornaments my family gave me.  Some of the ornaments on my tree came from my great grandmother’s trees, and my grandparent’s trees, then the trees my parents decorated when I was just a baby, and the trees my husband and I decorated.  There are some tarnished bells that I still use every year because, as discolored as they are, they remind me of those childhood Christmases with my Colley relatives, when they would drive down from Nashville and Franklin, calling out “Christmas Gift” as they walked in the door and bringing what I thought were exotic dishes like mincemeat pie and scalloped oysters and gifts from places like Castner Knott and Cain Sloan. 

And books, always a new book, usually about horses.  I have dozens of inscribed books, beginning with little Golden Books my family gave me all the way through my childhood to teenaged novels I received.

 My family were all great readers.  Growing up, there were shelves and shelves of books in our house with names of people I never even knew in person, but knew through the pages of the books they left.  Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden, the works of Charles Dickens, Black Beauty, Peter Pan – I was introduced to books like those, not in school, but during lazy summers in the porch swing. The first time I read A Christmas Carol was from a maroon covered set of Dickens that belonged to my great grandfather Tom Colley.  The print was so small, it's a wonder I was able to do it!

I remember listening wide-eyed to stories of my grandmother and her sisters remembering Christmases when they were children in the big house their father built in town when he brought his new wife from Franklin to the wilds of small-town Centerville. 

That house, with its window seats, wide front porch and gabled windows became a source of fascination to me.  They made it sound like something from a book, with stories of church on Christmas Eve and Christmas mornings when their father would get up early to build a fire in the library fireplace so they could open their gifts under the tree.  Sometimes I wish that house was still there, but then sometimes I think that it might be better that the house just lives on in my imagination.  It would be disturbing if it had been altered and modernized, or worse still, fallen into disrepair and decay.  And I have the piano, a dining room buffet and a bookcase that came from that house to remind me of that past, along with those little tarnished Christmas bells that I still love, not because of their beauty but because of the memories they hold.

More recent memories involve my mom and houseful of kids she “kept” after she retired from public work.  I can still hear echoes of squeals of laughter as they opened the presents they exchanged in a sea of wrapping paper and ribbons.  I can still see them all, sitting around the big dining room table, and arguing over the last piece of cornbread or that last spoonful of corn.  They were family too, and I hope they hold good memories of those days.  They read some of the same books I read, Little Golden books from my childhood and books like Little House on the Prairie that had been read by three generations of our family. 

I have pictures of so many of the kids in my daddy’s lap with books, and I remember the days when I would visit and hear small voices begging “read to me.”  I hope they read to their own children now and I hope they tell them about their memories of times on the farm when they were growing up.  This house holds a lot of good memories and if there are ghosts, they are peaceful and mild-mannered ghosts.  I feel them at my elbow sometimes as I sit by the fire with the dogs, watching the Christmas lights twinkle and holding fast to good memories.  Those memories are the only Christmas gift I need.

 

 

 

 

Christmas Photo Shoot

 

I’m pretty sure I know why I never get anything done.  It is two weeks before Christmas Day and I don’t have even half my decorations up, much less a tree.  I never put my tree up until around the 15^th anyway, but that date is approaching rapidly and I’m nowhere close to being ready to do that.

I do have several excellent excuses.  It’s been a frantically busy couple of months, with a lot of articles to write and deadlines to meet.  There was Thanksgiving, with 20 people at my house for dinner. For some reason, I thought the week before Thanksgiving was a good time buy a new mattress and couch and paint a bedroom. The new couch is calling for a console to place behind it, and heaven help me, I found just what I need in town while waiting to watch the Christmas parade. 

I turned in my final article last Saturday, started packing up fall decorations and had my helpers start bringing out boxes of Christmas stuff.  I have way too much Christmas stuff and I keep adding more.  There are a couple of stores in my hometown that are evil places.  Every time I go in there, they have something on display that I cannot resist.  I went in to buy a t shirt and came out almost $100 poorer.  Then I went in for some pecans and bought a vintage tin sleigh and a handful of wooden Christmas ornaments to go on my already overloaded tree. 

The dogs are another reason I am behind on decorating.  I have seven collies right now, four permanent and three leftover puppies from Sophie’s last litter that still are waiting for a new family.  Since they are almost a year old now, that possibility is growing dim.   I decided yesterday that, instead of cleaning house or decorating, I needed to take pictures of all the dogs in their Christmas hats and scarves.  My idea was to get all seven in one photo.  An overly ambitious goal, but I like to aim high.

Scout, Sophie and Carli know the drill.  I’ve done this with them for several years.  Scout loves to dress up in his reindeer antlers and pose for the camera.  I think he would wear them all during Christmas if he didn’t knock them off going through the dog door. Sophie doesn’t mind her elf hat but does tend to knock it off before I can get all the pictures.  Carli will wear her antlers but she makes it very clear that she is totally embarrassed.  I even gave her the fancy white and silver antlers this time, but she wasn’t impressed.  The four puppies were an unknown adventure.  I didn’t know if they would cooperate at all. 

Much to my surprise, Jimbo acted like it was an everyday thing to wear an elf hat and was agreeable to posing.  Joey liked his hat okay, but he really preferred grabbing everyone else’s hat to chew on.  Jax was a little wary but he finally kept his on as long as Joey stayed away.  Jace refused to play at all and went behind the couch.  Jace does not enjoy new adventures as much as the other boys do.  When I finally got the hat on him, he turned his head and wouldn’t look at me until I bribed him with a crunchy bone.  Even then, he looked like he was being tortured and wouldn’t join the rest of the group.  In fact, he wouldn’t move from his spot near the door. 

One of the problems in taking pictures of my dogs is that I can’t get far enough away from them to get a good shot.  Using treats to convince them to sit and look at me makes it even worse because they keep shifting position to get a better spot in the line.  Then there is the issue of keeping them still.  Sophie wanted to growl at anyone who got too close, Jace kept going back behind the couch and Carli refused to stand up.  I used about two pounds of crunchy bones and spent over an hour on this endeavor. 

The best I could do was three or four in one picture and then my camera battery gave out.  So, we will have to try again another day.  Maybe after I get the tree up; then I can try to get a picture of all the dogs wearing their hats in front of the tree.  I will have to buy a couple more hats though.  The morning after, I found a pair of red antlers and some little puffs of fuzz on the living room floor.  I don’t know who the guilty party is, but I suspect Joey.  I haven’t found the rest of the hat yet.  Jace may have bribed him to hide it.