Author: admin

Heraclitus, the 500 B.C. philosopher, observed, “A man never steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

I’m sure that quote applies to 21st century females, too. It led to the title of my blog, lolita-s-bigtoe.com, aimed at older women. Our society is rapidly progressing. We are constantly dipping a big toe to test the stream of change. When I look back at how my mother did things while I was growing up compared to how I’m doing things now, I marvel at the differences. I almost feel guilty when I dump a load of clothes into my automatic washer and dryer, fold them and put them away. I remember Mom’s Monday wash day. It was a grueling job to clean the clothes in a wringer washer, rinse them and hand them outside on the wire line to dry. Tuesday, a basket of ironing followed.

I know writers who continue to compose their manuscripts in longhand. I enjoy using the computer. It’s so easy to move words or paragraphs around and move them back again if I decide I had it right before. It also checks my spelling. If I have trouble with my machine, I’ll try turning it off and on again. If that doesn’t solve the problem, I call our ‘techie’ son. It’s the same way I’ve always driven a car. When it runs the way it’s supposed to, I’m fine. If it makes a funny noise or a warning light appears on the dash, I quickly find someone who knows how to fix the problem. I don’t embrace all of the latest fads. As far as I’m concerned, Ken’s navy tattoo is enough for this family. I make calls and text with my smart phone, but it’s not my lifeline.

How do you decide to adopt the new trend or stick with your tried-and-true method?

Next Tuesday is Valentine’s Day. I’m thinking about ‘puppy love’ that clumsy, short-lived, romantic affection felt by children or adolescents. I remember the night before our first-grade Valentine party at Rockton Grade School. I was addressing cards for my classmates. I selected a special one and told Mom, “This one’s for Bing.”

She said a firm, “No.”

I didn’t ask why and finished.

Bing, my first boyfriend, was a blond, second grader. I’d met him while riding a yellow bus with the other farm kids who lived along Highway 75 west of the village. During the morning and afternoon trips, we sat together on a bench seat. Our classrooms, which each contained about thirty pupils, were across the hall from one another. Our teachers often brought their students together. March first, I left Bing behind when our family moved to a farm southeast of Durand.

I continued at Dobson country school with a total enrollment of ten students in various grades. Frankie became my new boyfriend. The ‘big girls’, including his twin sisters, teased us about our romance. Soon they filled recess times by planning and executing our ‘wedding’.

When I was in fourth grade, we moved to a farm northwest of Durand. I increased the enrollment at Putnam country school to nine. I continued to find new boyfriends in different places.

For junior high and high school, I rode a yellow bus to Durand. During the summer when I was a fourteen, schoolmate Kenny asked me to ride on a Ferris wheel. That encounter turned into real love with an actual wedding.

Eight years ago, I saw in the news that the fellow that was nicknamed Bing fell into a bin of shelled corn. His grandson and an emergency crew saved his life. Seventy years later, he was still farming in the same area. I wonder if he remembers me.

Who was your first puppy love?

Next Monday, February 7, would be my parents’ anniversary. On a Thursday afternoon in 1935, they stood with two attendants for a private ceremony in the church parsonage. The following Saturday night, they hired a hall for a dance attended by friends and relatives from surrounding communities.

For years, I thought the professional photo taken of the three of us when I was six weeks old was their wedding picture. I couldn’t imagine them without me and Mom said they were wearing the same clothes.

When I was planning my wedding, I asked Mom, “Why were you and Dad married in February when the weather was so iffy?”

She replied, “A lot of us were married in February to be ready to move onto a farm when landlords changed tenants the first of March.” Those young people had guts to marry, start farming and have babies in the midst of The Great Depression.

Before Alex and Edith became Dad and Mom, each of them had grown up on a family farm with child-sized tasks for boys and girls. He attended a country school for eight years and learned to farm from his dad. She was raised by her father after her mother died when she was seven. She went to a country school for eight years and then rode a horse to town every day to graduate from high school.

They rented a family-sized farm on shares. The young couple furnished the labor, team and horse-drawn equipment. Edith donned pants and worked alongside Alex instead of wearing a dress and remaining in the house. The milk cows and hogs were owned jointly by the landlord and the tenant. Expenses and income were split 50/50.

My folks worked together for thirty-six years. At the beginning of 1971, they retired and moved to their new house in the village. He became a janitor at the school and she was a housewife.

Have you ever taken an objective look at your parents’ early years?

During the winter, I whistle when I walk. Corduroy jeans were on my Christmas list a few years ago. When I first wore them, my husband said I reminded him of the rich kids that went to grade school with him. The well-to-do boys wore corduroy pants, which were warmer than the overalls he wore. He remembered the noise they made walking down the aisles.

Rich was a relative term in our community. We had a few professional men who wore suits to work. They were better off than the farmers and factory workers who wore blue collar duds and made up the majority of the community.

Most of us who never will join the ranks of the affluent have something in mind that signifies rich to us. Lorna, one of my friends, admired the redwood lawn furniture that she saw in news photos of the rich and famous. She flaunted her purchase when she placed what was certainly a cheaper version on her patio.

In the fifties before I was married, I worked in an office in downtown Rockford. Every afternoon, I walked past the elite department stores on my way to catch my ride home. After the Christmas holidays, their windows were filled with beachwear for those who could afford a winter vacation in a sunny climate. I often thought it would be a real treat to be shopping for a bathing suit in January. My dream came true thirty years later. My cousin and her husband invited Ken and me to spend a week at their time-share condo in Mexico. I didn’t swim but I needed a new bathing suit to work on my tan to show I’d been in the tropics instead of the snow. Once in a while, it’s fun to act rich even when I’m not.

What have you bought or done to feel rich?

Ken was getting low on Bryl Creem. He has used it on his hair since the ’50s when its tag line was, “A little dab’ll do ya.” The next time I went shopping, I looked in Walgreens and Target but neither had it. When I returned home, I checked the internet to see if it was still manufactured. It was available at the Walmart Supercenter on Riverside in Rockford. I’m not a regular Walmart shopped so I hadn’t stopped there.

Ken prefers to shop in Monroe, so he went to the Walmart there. They didn’t stock Bryl Creem and the young clerk he asked had never heard of it. He bought a substitute. After a few days, he told me he didn’t like what he’d purchased.

The next morning, I used the internet to contact the store on Riverside and learned the styling cream was available for pick-up. I ordered it on line, paid with a credit card and was given an order number for pick-up after 1:30 p.m. They advised me to email before I left home. After lunch, I checked with the store and was assured it was waiting for me. I printed out the order and headed for Rockford.

In less than a half-hour, I arrived at the the store closest to us, parked in their designated area and phoned the number posted. Soon a young man was at my car window. I showed him my name and order number. He went into the store and soon returned with my bag. I was ready to go home.

It was so easy. I didn’t have to hunt for a place to park in their busy lot, walk to the store from a distant spot or wander around inside looking for one item. I didn’t have to wait in a checkout line or check my self out.

Since COVID-19, a lot of stores offer the service–I recommend it.

Have you used a store’s pick-up?

I’m one of the millions of people who rely on data centers every day for business and pleasure. I ask Google for any fact I need to include in an article I’m writing. If I have something I want our whole family to know, I use an email address that includes everyone. On a recent Saturday, the GPS in my smart phone directed me to a friend’s new home in an Elgin subdivision. When I can’t find an item I want in area stores, I order it on line. I didn’t realize each of these actions uses water until I read an article in the Rockford Register Star.

I was amazed to learn that a single data center can churn through millions of gallons of water per day to keep hot-running equipment cool. Google is planning to add two more to their three cavernous facilities located in The Dalles, a city on the Columbia River in north-central Oregon. The placement of these water-guzzlers in drought-prone areas is an increasing concern around the globe.

I can’t imagine a million gallons of water. When I was growing up, our farm home didn’t have indoor plumbing. Dad carried in five-gallon pailfuls of fresh water pumped from the well in our backyard. Later, he carried out five-gallon pailfuls of used water.

The three of us used water sparingly. On Mondays, wash day, he filled a copper boiler, set it on the cook stove to heat and dumped it into Mom’s wringer washer. She cleaned all of our dirty clothes in the same soapy water beginning with a load of underwear and ending with Dad’s overalls. Saturday evenings, bath night, the water heated on the stove made about four inches in our portable, rubber tub. I stepped in first, Mom was second and Dad was last.

With hot and cold water coming out of our faucets, Ken and I don’t think about how much we’re using. Last month, the village billed us for a little over three thousand gallons. That figures out to about one hundred gallons per day flowing in through the meter and out through the sewer.

We each inhabit our own little world. We turn to the media to learn what’s happening in other spheres. In this day and age of 24-hour news, we are inundated with reports and must sift through what we see, hear and read to find the facts provided by journalists.

What are your sources for news?

When I entered adulthood, my social calendar was filled with friends’ weddings. Baby showers soon followed. As I waited for my sailor to finish his four-year hitch in the navy, I felt like everyone’s ‘old maid aunt’. Ken and I were the last of our group to marry and start our family. We are now octogenarians who finished 2021 with a month of mourning the passing of loved ones.

It’s fitting that the gatherings to honor these people are called celebrations of life. Our generation raised kids, watched grandchildren grow up and held great-grandbabies. We enhanced communities, accomplished career goals and retired. Our influence continues.

I am thankful for the friends who have been there for us during the good and the bad of our lives. Some I have known for a brief span; others have been around since high school days. It’s surprising what brings a thought to mind and I take a few moments to relive an event we shared. I am sad that our times have ended, but I appreciate what we had.

I’m reminded of the poem, “The Dash,” penned by Linda Ellis in 1996. She noted that a tombstone contains the date of birth and the date of death with a dash in between. The dash represents the individual’s time on earth. The final verse sums it up: “For it matters not how much we own: The cars, the house, the cash, What matters is how we live and love And how we spend our dash.”

What will your dash symbolize?

This is the week between the holidays. As a kid, I didn’t have school and could play with my Christmas presents. I think of the year I was seven and Santa made his last visit.

We celebrated on Christmas Eve with Uncle Hookie, Aunt Frannie, Doris and Sis coming for supper and gifts. Mom was busy preparing the festive meal so I took her place helping Dad do the evening milking. While I was in the barn, our house was one of St. Nick’s first stops.

The ‘big kids’ at school had been telling me Santa Claus was my folks. I didn’t want to believe them, but late that afternoon, I had no choice. While I was crawling around my parents’ bedroom floor hunting for my left shoe so I could go with Dad, I glimpsed a sled under their bed. I found my shoe, kept quiet about what I saw and hurried outside.

When I returned to the house, Santa had stashed the sled under the Christmas tree. The wooden surface atop the shiny, metal runners was painted bright red with DODGER in black letters down the middle and a tow rope fastened to the front. I loved sliding down the hill behind the barn, but not the trek pulling my sled back to the top.

One morning, I was in the barn with Dad while he did chores. He shoveled the manure from the gutter into the spreader that was hooked behind the tractor and parked beside the doorway to the cow yard. When he finished, he pulled away and stopped in front of the barn’s walk-in door. He hollered, “Hook your sled rope to the back of the spreader and you can ride along behind.” As we went down a small hill, I dragged my feet so I didn’t slide too close to the smelly spreader. He stopped in the corner of last year’s oat field. I disconnected my sled and waited by the fence line. He unloaded the spreader to fertilize next year’s alfalfa crop. He then stopped so I could reattach and ride back to the house. It was a treat because I could ride and not have to climb the hill.

While I was growing up, I never thought I was in peril and I don’t think my parents did either. In 1966, when Ken climbed down off a tractor and into a
Winnebago County squad car, we were surprised to learn statistics show that farming is more dangerous than policing. Looking back, many of the things we routinely did on the farm were probably unsafe.

What did you do while growing up that would now be considered dangerous?

Christmas brings its own special music–a time to enjoy the sacred and the silly. We’ll hear “Jingle Bells” although people traveling in a horse-drawn sleigh happened many years ago. Children’s songs including “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and “Grandma Got Runover By a Reindeer” will be broadcast on the radio. In stores, they’ll play the ‘late, great’ popular singers from the forties and fifties such as Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Gene Autry’s “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer.” I’ll take advantage of the internet to find Yogi Yorgesson’s “I Yust Go Nuts at Christmas.” I laugh at the way he describes how he gives up trying to buy a personal gift for his wife and his family’s gathering.

Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas” brings back memories of how lonely I was when the tune came out in 1957. My sailor boyfriend was aboard the aircraft carrier, U.S.S. Bennington, on the other side side of the world. Although the song is about lost love and I expected him to return to me, it captured my feelings. I was working at the Winnebago County ASC Office in Rockford. During our morning and afternoon breaks at the nearby coffee shop, I took advantage of the ‘3 plays for a quarter’ on the juke box. The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll lamenting over and over probably drove my co-workers crazy, but I didn’t care. I wallowed in my misery.

Singing the traditional carols during the Christmas Eve service at church is inspiring. The organ accompaniment brings the words to mind of my favorites, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Closing the evening with “Silent Night,” lighting individual candles and silently leaving the building makes it Christmas.

What’s your favorite Christmas music?

The first decoration I get out for the Christmas season is the Nativity Set that Aunt Frannie painted and gave to me before I was married. The plaster of Paris figures include Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus in a manger, an angel, a man and his camel, a shepherd with his sheep, plus the three magi. Later, I constructed a stable using some of our kids’ Lincoln Logs with straw from my parents’ farm glued to its cardboard roof. Three children and the years have left the scene slightly battered, but it holds too many memories to be replaced.

A pine wreath sold each year by the local Boy Scouts has hung on our front door since our son was a Cub Scout.

In the seventies, doing ceramics was the rage among housewives. The hobby didn’t appeal to me but my friend and neighbor, Alyce, made several, small, lighted trees and gave one to me. In remembrance of her, it sits on a wooden stand in a corner of the living room.

About two weeks before the holiday, Ken puts up the tree and decorates it. When our three were toddlers, we cut our own at a nearby tree farm. Grandma and Grandpa went along for the big event. We decided that was too much work. For several years on the Sunday afternoon before Christmas, we joined two other families choosing our pre-cut trees at the farm. Then, we all ate a chili supper together. When jobs took the others to faraway cities, we continued visiting the farm to choose our tree.

A few years ago, Ken got tired of sweeping up the needles that fell off as he carried the dry tree through the house and out the back door after Christmas. We purchased an artificial tree. It’s a good imitation but I still miss the real thing.

How do you decorate for Christmas?