Coming and Going

The presidential candidates are all over the map meeting up with America’s citizens to win their votes. The citizens themselves also find travel much more a part of their lives than any other time in history. Not very long ago, it was not unusual for someone to say when someone died that the person had always lived in a certain locale and had never been further than the nearest city. After the Depression, many young men and a few young women served overseas during World War II. As that Greatest Generation dies off and leaves us, we read in their obituaries of the foreign soils they traveled to.

With the cheap gas of the last decades, Americans have enjoyed and become habituated to going and coming often more limited by time than expense. People have to commute to work in places miles away. Many folk travel to shopping in larger cities without much thought. Then as our local stores went out of business, we began to find out we didn’t have anywhere else to shop but at larger communities in our regions.

Gerald and I were so tied down by livestock on the farm that we couldn’t travel for years and looked forward to that opportunity in retirement. In fact, as soon as Gerald retired from farming, his first project was buying a new truck and modifying it to haul efficiently. For the next three years, he worked as a trucker—whenever he chose to take a trip or whenever he could get a load. He loved going all over and seeing the industries back in the mountains or learning to navigate in a new city. When he travels in the same territory today, he still likes recalling those trips, and he is constantly aware of other truckers and can get envious in a hurry when he sees a beautiful truck.

Gerald left for Columbus, GA, yesterday in order to see Geri Ann’s Oconee High School softball team in the state tourney this afternoon. His plans were to stop in Nashville for a dinner date with Leslie, his blond granddaughter at Belmont University.

This is also the weekend that Erin is using some flier miles to come from Texas into Nashville. She and Les will also be having dinner together. Erin will meet a fellow Johnston City friend there and they’re driving home to Johnston City for another friend’s wedding.

I don’t even know where all Gerry’s work has taken him during the past two weeks. I do know he was able to see his grandson Aidan briefly last weekend while in Chicago. And he and Vickie like the other softball parents will be in Columbus motels right now. Tara wanted in the worst way to go with Gerald to see her little sis in the state tourney, but she knew she needed to stay in Aurora. Her December due date is taking its toll on her traveling comfort. But Mary Ellen’s family is excited that she is to be coaching in Lake Saint Louis next weekend for a Southern Force tourney. I’m excited that Jeannie’s family will be spending Halloween night here (briefly) as they arrive from Freeport on their way to spend weekend with Leslie in Nashville.

I was planning on going to the Georgia tourney also, but my doctor on Monday felt it was a risk with me still healing from the blood clot in my leg that had caused the lung clots. So I am at Woodsong instead of on a trip, but I have had a variation in my life style.

Son-in-law David is working in California this week, so I’ve been going into town to spend nights with Katherine and Sam. I come back home during the day. Katherine had a tysabri infusion yesterday and her morning aide was able to drive her to the hospital. Suddenly Tuesday night she realized she needed a ride home and both David and her dad would both be out of town. Fortunately, the evening aide came to get her instead of coming later in the evening.

Gerald believed I could drive the van, which has a lift for Katherine’s chair, but I never have and I was fearful of trying with no one to back me up if I failed. The only time I tried to drive the van, I did not get out of Katherine’s driveway. I quit to avoid hitting Sam’s basketball goal with the projecting side mirror as I backed. I also don’t understand the lift’s operation. The van certainly takes enormously more gas than the wise choice David has for travel to his work place, but we’ve come to expect that those in chairs should no longer have to live their lives confined to their homes.

Our other sons-in-law and our next-door neighbor are also often away from home for coaching events, conventions, or meetings. Our only other near neighbor travels nightly from her farm to her job in a plant over an hour away. This time of year we pray for her safety from the deer dashing across the highways, and soon we will once again fear the icy roads for her.

While the increase in travel is partly pleasure gratification, travel has been built into our work lives. We can never go back to living in insulated geographic bubbles with little contact with the outside world no matter how attractive that nostalgic pull feels. I have always loved reading about village life and also loved experiencing it. How people connect and interact is fascinating and when people can’t easily go elsewhere, there is no question their local community connections are more vigorous and often more life enhancing. One of my all-time favorite books was poet Elizabeth Bishop’s translation of The Diary of Helena Morley, the actual diary of a young teenage girl who told of her life in her village of Diamantina in Brazil in 1893-1895,

The same sort of village or community life is created within cities as people connect with those of common interests. When two of our daughters lived in the same city, we had to laugh at the interconnectedness that made it just as indiscreet to talk negatively about someone there as in it was when my mother moved to Dad’s hometown of Goreville, where everyone was either our family’s relations or relations of relations.

Now we have farm friends and city friends who are hurting while trying to keep gas in their cars to get to work. We have friends who have had to cut out attending functions they really want to attend in order to save gas. We have wise friends with no economic problems who, nevertheless, have cut gas consumption because it is astute to do so and because it is patriotic to do so.

How our nation will come out of this dependence on foreign oil and our present economic crisis will be interesting to observe. I have a feeling that we are going to find out what we are made of in the next few years. Will we be as strong as our grandparents who survived the Depression with much suffering and ingenuity? Will we be as self-sacrificing and as tough as the Greatest Generation who helped us survive World War II?

Going to Lake Saint Louis

As soon as we eat a bowl of soup and sandwich, we will be packing to go to our daughter Mary Ellen's in Lake Saint Louis. We have been wanting to go up to visit with her and Brian, Trent, and Brianna, and this worked out well.

We have our annual reunion of the 1940's, 50's, and 60's Baptist Student Union members from Southern Illinois University Carbondale at Meadow Heights Baptist Church in Collinsville on Thursday and Friday. We have 94 registered thus far. Gerald has been busy running to the bank to deposit everyone's checks.

In fact, Gerald is in his office right now trying to get the database to print out the way he wants for a register. I tried for an hour or so to see if I could figure it out. However, I have not been able to figure out how database stuff works since two computer crashes back. I was proud when I conquered the first computer we had. I tried when we got a new one because I liked having our snail mail addresses to print out for Christmas cards. My handwriting leaves a lot to be desired. But I could never learn the new computer.

Six months or so ago, Gerald's cardiologist suggested some routine check-up tests at his office in Saint Louis. We were perturbed when we realized recently that these conflicted with our BSU reunion. Gerald was able to change them a bit, however, so he has the stress test tomorrow morning and appointment on Friday afternoon. So with price of gas like it is, maybe this conflict is a good thing.

We plead guilty to being prodigal in our use of gas for many years. We used to try to limit out trips to town from the farm to once a week. With cheap gas and a little more affluence than in our younger days, we relaxed our standards. (We also have had a need to travel to town more often as we helped with our grandson's transportation to school for a few years and other needs when he was younger.)

Nevertheless, we need to reign in our wasteful use of gasoline wherever possible. To keep making ourselves dependent on foreign oil is the most unpatriotic thing any of us can do right now perhaps. Patriotism during WWII was not judged by waving flags and patriotic talk, but rather how people abided by the rationing rules of tires and sugar. Making do and doing without and saving resources for our war effort were the true tests of patriotism. Black market users were shameful traitors. Now is the time for us to cut back on gas usage whenever possible. We need to make heros of our motorcycle riders and car pool folks.

Touching Base with Tossie

Traveling north on highways through eastern Georgia, we stopped at a roadside stand of an orchard owner for directions, a bag of apples, and a jar of sugarless Muscatine jelly, which has added the sweet grape flavor to our breakfast toast here at Woodsong. I also couldn’t resist a paper bag of horehound candies, a treat my father used to bring home from Rixlebin Pharmacy in Jonesboro and our mother would have us cough to receive our piece.

We crossed the bridge at Ellijay and continued north into Tennessee, where we passed more villages reminding us of the Cherokee--Ducktown, Turtletown, and Tellico Plains. Somewhere along here we saw a sign pointing to White Path Springs, and I wished we had time to go I thought of the death and burial of the revered elder chief who at my age had to be left behind buried in the foreign soil of Hopkinsville, KY, with a make-shift wooden monument painted to look like marble. A tall pole with white linen flag was placed so the following detachments of displaced Cherokee could mourn his passing.

During this twilight drive, where out road ran through the southern part of the Cherokee National Forrest, I could certainly understand his people’s heartbreak at being forced to leave their homeland in these beautiful mountains. Soon it was dark and the winding road spiraled through the tall green trees. As the night darkened and the curving road was constant, we hoped we wouldn’t meet anyone. We begin to think about the need for a motel. Most of the time, there were no houses and no lodging in sight. Light rain started making the darkness lit by our headlights magically lovely but diminishing driving visibility. We passed the little town Mount Vernon with few houses, and once we enjoyed the delightful scene of small children playing outside in a lit church yard evidently after the evening service while their parents lingered and visited.

As the rain intensified, we were grateful we seldom met a car and were relieved when we found a motel in Madisonville and could pull off the road. After we secured a room by using the phone placed outside the locked office, we went next door for a sandwich before retiring. With the car backed up to our room, we unloaded our bags from the trunk under the cover of the large umbrella we had used for shade at the softball games. We were soon in bed and slept well until almost 6 the next morning.

On up the road, we called our friend Tossie from Shoneys, where we had a great breakfast and abundance of coffee. After driving through the rest of Tennessee, we passed Jellico and entered Kentucky and were soon at Williamsburg. This was our first visit with our long-time dear friend since she moved down from their mountain home and into town. That home on the mountain was one of my all-time favorite houses with two of my very favorite rooms—Chester’s large formal library where he studied and wrote and a dining room built to hold the antique table where wonderful meals and conversations took place. .

After Chester’s long illness and death, Tossie had donated Chester’s library to his alma mater Berea College. She had started giving away furniture before she went to American Samoa to work in a library there, but plans to sell came to a halt. She stayed on top of the mountain by herself for a few years after the Samoa adventure. We visited her there once more and enjoyed the new sunroom and watching the birds as well as eating with her friends at the dining room table. That visit on a drive around town, she even showed us the apartment she thought she might move into someday. However, we knew she had changed her plans. Instead she moved into a house next door to a friend, who had decided to completely redo a small house instead of tearing it down.

We found the yellow house without difficulty and Tossie was outside to greet us. She had once more moved her mother’s iris and mint to a bed in the front yard,. In the large back yard, she had beautiful trees. With plenty of privacy to play her piano as loud as she wants, the house seems just right for her: aesthetically pleasing, comfortable, practical, filled with antiques in use and mementoes of a life well lived. Soon we were hearing stories of how everything worked out perfectly as she gave away her furniture and sold the mountain home to a friend. I loved knowing the antique dining room table was still in place on top of the mountain.

Gerald showed his photo albums, and they reminisced about the Hawaiian children in the church where Chester served as pastor. Tossie was able to bring Gerald up-to-date news of the successes of some of the boys he had coached and driven around the island in the church van while the boys teasingly tried to get him lost. And, of course, we wanted updates on all her children and grandchildren, whose pictures were scattered around.

Since she had a long-scheduled check up with a doctor at Corbin that afternoon, we left behind the yellow house and had lunch in Corbin so we could use every minute talking until time for her appointment and our departure. She had the guest room ready in case we decided to accept her invitation to spend the night, but we were anxious to find if everything were okay after the 60-mile winds left-over from Ike had hit Southern Illinois the previous night.

Before we returned to Woodsong, we drove to the other farm to see if Brian’s corn crop was still standing and it was. Gerald was pleased that Bryce had done some more improvement on the ditch he and the highway people have been working on. Everything looked good there. As we drove up to our house and saw that our crop of sunflowers, which were still blooming beautifully when we left, were now all blown over and comically askew on the ground, we had to laugh. Unlike many homes in our area, our house’s electricity had not gone off, and we settled in for an evening of reading the accumulated newspapers.

A week ago we left Oklahoma City. I woke with a mild sore throat that vanished early in the morning, so I believed it was the drainage problem that I sometimes have. By the time we reached my sister Rosemary’s in Amarillo, I was a little stuffed up but was hoping it was just the continuation of allergies I had experienced in Oklahoma. By the time we retired in our motel that night, I knew I had a cold and was trying to stay away from people. But that is not easy to do when you are seeing loved ones you have not seen for months.

By Saturday night on the way home, I noticed Gerald sniffling a bit. Sure enough he woke up with a very sore throat the next morning. He has been coughing and choking ever since. I will feel better one day and worse the next, but I am counting on this being over soon. Gerald has pretty much stayed with his regular routine—working outside and coming inside to rest or work on photographs. Even today after his getting stung three times by a wasp that had decided to make a nest over our garage door into our kitchen, he managed to accomplish a lot including killing the angry wasp who did not understand that this was our home first.

When I called Rosemary yesterday, I heard my cold in her voice and knew that the one thing I did not want to give her had happened. And yes, when I asked, Phil had waked up yesterday morning with a very sore throat. I feel like a heel carrying a cold down there, and I am hoping that none of my three nieces and husbands picked it up.

Nevertheless, we had a wonderful relaxing time in Amarillo. I tried to sleep off the cold. (It didn’t work.) Gloria took me and Rosie shopping so I could see a store called Tuesday Morning conveniently located next door to Big Lots that we also had to wander through. And finally we stopped at Target although all I bought in any of the three stores was a big box of tissues.

Friday night is the night I want to be at Rosemary and Phil’s, and Gerald kindly allowed us to stay through that evening. Phil prepared his great brisket for the gang, and there was the usual variety of delicious side dishes Rosemary prepared followed with chocolate upside down cake and some more of the yummy frozen dessert recipe she had served Thursday evening. I think there were 14 of us there that night, which is a common number although sometimes there are more children as we only had Eric and Desi. Both had grown up a lot since last fall.

Jerry and Cyndi drove up from Hereford to see us Thursday night, but Herman and Gloria and Chuck and Candy showed up for the Friday meal. I especially appreciated Candy coming over as she was sick all week.

Because of conflicts, we missed seeing niece Heather and nephew Tydale and their families this time, but there was still a breakfast bar full of the young adults laughing and enjoying each other’s company. We especially appreciated seeing quite a bit of Shiloh this visit because he drops in after work to see if he can do anything for Rosie and Phil, and Rosemary loves having him at the supper table.

The next morning I woke us up coughing and we could not go back to sleep. The motel started serving breaking before the appointed 6 a.m. hour, and I was amazed at all the early morning diners. We were on the road to Illinois by 6.

We didn’t plan to make the trip in one day, but even though we stopped mid-morning and mid-afternoon for breaks as well as for lunch and supper, we were home by 9:30. No bed could have slept better than ours. When I am not coughing or blowing my nose, I am still trying to catch up on everything. Geri Ann was playing softball with a local team last night at Crab Orchard and Gerald ran over, but I was just not up to being in the heat.

Jeannie and daughters Leslie and Cecelie arrived late this afternoon as Leslie is making a required trip to Belmont. They are leaving at 3 or 4 in the morning to arrive in Nashville by 8 a.m. Cecelie is staying with us, and we are excited to have her. Brianna is coming down to join her when her dad comes down to farm on Friday. So things will be livelier here at Woodsong for awhile.

Posting Blog that Hasn't Appeared on Book Page

We got home from Amarillo Saturday night, and I posted on AmazonConnect last night about the tourney in Oklahoma City. The post appeared in the blog there, but oddly has never appeared on my book page. So since it has been so long since I have posted on Woodsong Notes, I am going to copy and post the blog here. Then I will try to post on schedule on Wednesday night on Woodsong Notes.


We Had Fun!
by Sue Glasco at 10:57 PM PDT, June 8, 2008

The NCAA World Series for women’s softball, as seen through Gerald’s camera lens, is now on display in the living room at Woodsong, which is temporarily serving as a gallery for the photographs. We had fun, and being second in the nation only to the fantastic Arizona State team was quite a thrill.

Despite the horrendous heat the first two days when we played afternoon games. Despite having our car vandalized for the GPS navigator we’d forgotten to hide when we went to the game in Mary Ellen’s vehicle. Despite the day and a half that it took Gerald to talk to police, insurance agents, and then find a glass shop that could get tempered glass to replace the broken window. Despite never really figuring out the roads in Oklahoma City with or without the help of navigators. Despite the disappointment of losing both games in the championship playoffs. Despite my waking up with a cold on Wednesday morning when we left for Amarillo to see my sister and family. Despite Gerald’s waking up this morning with my cold. Despite it all, we consider it a successful trip and we will always cherish those happy times.

Meeting the parents and grandparents of Virginia Tech’s Angela Tincher in the rest stop as we traveled before we arrived for the Thursday afternoon games started our softball pilgrimage. Angela had been chosen Player of the Year at the tourney banquet the night before. And though Virginia Tech quickly fell to the losers’ bracket in this double elimination setup, Angela was among those chosen for the all-tourney team for her phenomenal pitching.

By the time we had seen the first day’s games, we realized that every one of the eight teams who had advanced that far were capable of beating any other team under just the right circumstances. No game was going to be easy, and we were exhilarated as we remained in the winners’ bracket.


Yet although the teams in the losers’ bracket have a more difficult path, the possibility of their entering the championship playoffs remained real. So when we played Florida Sunday night after they had given us our first defeat that afternoon, we were thrilled to come back and give them their second loss in that nine-inning game, thus, knocking out the team many expected to win the tourney,

Texas A&M, who started the year with two All American pitchers, had what many thought would be a season destroyer when Amanda Scarborough had to have surgery on a fractured foot. She spent the season on crutches and on the bench. Amanda and Megan Gibson had grown up playing together on summer teams and would have been an amazing pitching and batting duo to have brought to the World Series if life had gone as expected.

Instead, Amanda proved her outstanding character as she worked hard in the dug out tracking statistics for calling pitches and helping her coaches and teammates in multiple ways. But sadly she could not alternate with Megan as in the past. So senior pitcher Megan Gibson dueled alone through exhausting inning after inning. To leave the tourney with the second-place trophy was a feat that reflected Texas A&M’s grit and determination. Indeed it was fun for the Aggie fans.

Adding to our fun was getting to be with Gerry and Vickie and Geri Ann, Bryan and Tara and Aidan, Mary Ellen and Brianna. We even had a couple meals with our favorite catcher Erin, although most of the time, team members were not available for family gatherings.
Fortunately Saturday, Aidan and his daddy Bryan’s common birthday, was a free day for our team. We celebrated the birthdays with lunch at the Cheesecake Factory and with supper at the team’s tailgate party. The Archibalds were able to stay through Sunday before Bryan’s job necessitated their leaving for the Chicago area.

By Monday, Brianna was sporting a manicure with maroon nails and Texas Aggie spelled out on ten fingers. Mary Ellen’s birthday supper that night was diluted by our first loss to Arizona State and all the difficulty we had finding a restaurant open that late after the game. But we still found some things to laugh about, and we were proud to just be in town after six other teams had left.

When Gerald phoned an Air Force buddy from over 50 years ago (whom he had only seen once since then), he found him in the hospital as a precautionary thing while a new med was being tried, and so John welcomed company there. After Gerald delivered the car to the glass shop, Mary Ellen dropped him off to visit his friend. And the next afternoon after we picked up the car and had all the glass fragments vacuumed out, we were able to return to the hospital for a second visit.

Although we would have been delighted to stay on to play two out of three games, that was not to be, so we took what pleasure we could from the early departure on Wednesday morning. The extra day would make our visit with my sister Rosemary and family more leisurely. Gerry, Vickie, and Geri Ann were already on the way to Johnston City when we left, and Mary Ellen and Brianna slept in before heading back to Missouri. It had been a fun week with memories for a life time.

Oklahoma Bound!

We were supposed to leave right before lunch, but Gerald and our neighbor are still working on a tractor problem caused when parts for two tractors did not work on both as the salesman, who looked the part numbers up on the computer , said they would . So they are still not back from Sikeston—where they were getting new wheels or something. I hate it that Gerald will be driving late tonight.

We are going to see Erin play at the World Series and we are excited. I think Gerry’s family has probably already left. Mary Ellen and Brianna will be driving out tomorrow. Tara, Bryan, and Aidan will be driving after he gets off work Thursday night. On Saturday we will celebrate Aidan’s second birthday. (And it is also Bryan’s birthday.) Monday is Mary Ellen’s birthday. So it is going to be an exciting time.

Then we are going to Amarillo to see my sister and husband. The only fly in the ointment is missing granddaughter Leslie’s graduation festivities in Freeport. We want to do more things than we can do. I remember years ago reading an article discussing the pros and cons of big families versus small families. The writer pointed out that those with larger families have both more joys and more sorrows. That has certainly proved to be true. I realize our family is not nearly as large as many, but I still keep fully scheduled, and sometimes want to be in two places at once.. I always wondered how my cousins Kathie and Dot did so well with their families. And they are still keeping up with all of them!

A Strange and Unscheduled Week

I have not meant to change my writing date from Wednesday to Saturday, even though it seems as if that has happened. Our lives have been in too much turmoil to keep any kind of schedule for several weeks now.

Gerald and I drove to the Crabb-Abbott Farm east of Vienna on Tuesday after stopping for a hamburger at Ned’s Shed. It was raining too hard to walk down to the creek where the Trail is most obvious, but 88 people braved the rain to come out for the unveiling of the sign marking the farm as one segment of the Cherokee’s Trail of Tears.

We stood in Joe and Ethel’s open garage for brief meetings before and after the unveiling. Our Trail of Tears Association president Sandy Boaz told us that when she checked the Daniel Butrick journal, she found it was also raining on January 8, 1839. Then we all headed over to the Dixon Springs State Park kitchen, where Joe and Ethel and their daughters served us all chili, white chili, hot dogs, and all kinds of other extras and goodies including a surprise birthday cake for Joe.

A special treat for me was being able to visit with the Jim and Maybelle Watkins family--who were my Jonesboro neighbors on Cook Avenue when I was growing up. Their son Jim and wife Nancy were also there. Jim had been in my mother’s classroom in the second grade and then again when she was moved to teach fourth grade to his class two years later.

That night we learned the sad news that the bone marrow test for Gerald’s brother Ken showed an abundance of leukemia cells again. We went up to the hospital the next day and intended to stay all night with our daughter’s family in Lake Saint Louis and come home Thursday morning.

Instead Gerald’s sister Ernestine flew in from Rock Springs, Wyoming, and we met her plane Thursday afternoon. Ken and Opal had been told by the doctor that morning that he would receive a transfusion and platelets and be sent home since the chemo had not worked and the doctor could do nothing more for Ken.

Unfortunately and weirdly in all our opinions, the transfusion and platelets did not arrive for Ken until almost midnight. His two daughters were able to take Ken and Opal from the hospital a little before 2 a.m. on Friday morning and they arrived at their Marion home at 4 a.m. It had been a long and exhausting time--over a day and a half for Ken and Opal when they were finally able to go to bed in their own bed Friday morning.

Since then Ken has been rejoicing at being home, and he and Opal have been holding open house to their children, grandchildren, and siblings. Today their son took Ken and Opal on the drive he wanted to Union County and visited with several of Opal’s family who brought him all Ken’s favorite treats they could think of. He went to bed early tired but happy I think.

We have been sharing Ernestine with her other brothers and wives. Consequently, we’ve been treated to dinner at Cracker Barrel last night and at Ryan’s tonight.

The downstairs Christmas tree is back in the closet where it belongs, but some of the ornaments are still spread out on the bed in that room. Upstairs, when we got home with Ernestine, I put away all the holiday accessories that were lying on the bed in the guest bedroom waiting to be put away. Yesterday I took the living room tree down and boxed up those ornaments, but I could not get one part of the tree pulled apart to fit in the box. I must call that to Gerald's attention to finish that job for me.

Yesteday I barely made it to a doctor's appointment made a year ago, and the office was all torn up and being painted. The woman at the desk explained that our answering machine had not worked when they tried to phone and cancel the appointment. Having been told my new glasses would be ready this week, I then fought the after-school traffic and went to get them assuming they too had been unable to leave the message on the non-working answering machine. There after a wait, the right person got off the phone to tell me that they had been mistaken--because of some problem my glasses had to be outsourced and maybe I would get them next week--although she wasn't sure.

As I said, the week has been filled with unscheduled activities as well as ones scheduled.

Blessings and Troubles Then and Now

Sadly Gerald lost another cousin--his second this year. So tonight we went to Anna for the visitation for his cousin Clarence Lee Glasco. We again saw many of his relatives, who had also been at the funeral for his cousin Charlene Givens. Cousin Wilma, who was so ill at her sister’s funeral, had recovered from her cancer surgery and looked great. She had been helping and sitting with Clarence during his illness, in fact.

A problematic fact of modern life is that we often only see relatives at funerals and weddings. Yet in the early part of the last century, people who lived as far away as Marion is from Anna would probably not have been able to make the trip to a cousin’s funeral visitation. Despite the high gas prices, most of today’s population can afford such trips now more than people could a century ago in Southern Illinois when travel was mostly by horse-drawn vehicles or trains. Trips to area towns often took the entire day if one did not go by train.

However, we should not forget that there remains too large a percentage of us who cannot travel freely today. Not just because of the price of gas, but because many cannot afford a car in the first place. When I worked with families in this area, one of the first problems I ran into was that single mothers usually did not have a car. Without a car, it often was impossible for them to find a job. Few jobs exist here within walking distance.

Often worse were the problems that owners of a car ran into when the car had problems. It seemed to me that an ancient-looking car with a tail light out invariably was stopped for a ticket. For a single mother on a tight budget, a ticket could spell total disaster for her family’s hope of getting out of crisis. I was never sure what could be done to lessen these problems, but certainly good public transportation, such as the trains that used to be available, would help.

When I drive through the cluster of houses that make up the village of New Dennison near our farm, I almost always think that here was once a railroad center. People caught rides from there to Marion and Carbondale. The late Marguerite Lashley, who had returned to live in her childhood home there, told me how her physician father would pick up the Presbyterian pastor who rode the train over from Carbondale to New Dennison. The doctor’s family in their horse and buggy would take the preacher on to Shed Church. Then the family would return for the Sunday dinner Marguerite‘s mother prepared, and the pastor would catch a train back to Carbondale.

Not only do we lack that convenient public transportation today, but we endure dangers these early citizens did not. On our way to Anna on Route 146, Gerald braked rapidly when a large buck started to cross in front of us. Fortunately, the buck turned. No one was behind us, and Gerald thought he could have missed him if he’d continued. We were glad we did have to find out. His cousin Barbara Houseman had just driven in from a meeting in Springfield and told me she left tire marks on Route 127 coming to the funeral home. Her deer was standing in the middle of the highway. Since November is the month that most highway deaths in Illinois are caused by the deer, two Glasco cousins were blessed with escapes tonight.

After the visitation, we went with Gerald’s brothers Keith and Garry and our sister-in-law Ginger along with nephew DuWayne and wife Vickie to the local restaurant we used to call Dino’s. There we all enjoyed supper together and had the opportunity to visit and still drive home for an early bedtime if I had chosen to go to bed instead of write this blog.

And though we were watching closely, we did not see a single deer coming back to the farm. I hope the hunters see them this weekend. Then their families will have venison for the winter stored in their freezers for hearty meals that few families could have enjoyed in 1907.

College Station, Texas

We’ve just returned from our Texas trip. We ate waffles in the shape of the state of Texas for breakfast at our motel, and we heard lots of football talk wherever we went. The weather was wonderful all week, and the many fluffy white clouds in the huge sky were magnificent.

We got off to a slow start from Illinois as someone ran into the back door of our car in the Kroger parking lot as Gerald was headed to the car wash after having the car serviced for the trip. The same replaced door that a pickup had jumped a curb and crushed while I was inside the mall last year was now banged up again!

Thus, we started a little later than planned and a little less calmly. Somewhere down in Arkansas, we got a warning light that a tire was low. A state policeman at the park where we’d stopped to check it recommended a place ahead. A couple of hours later we were back on the road with the tire aired up--but the tire people could not find a leak. Recently we had a tire that had to be replaced despite the fact that two local tire services could not find the tiny leak near the valve that our son-in-law finally located. So we left not feeling too comfortable about the tire. However, we were blessed with nary another trouble with that tire, so evidently the crash on the door had somehow caused that back tire to lose air.

We arrived at College Station the next day in plenty of time to find our motel and the stadium. We were there to see our granddaughter Erin catch that afternoon in two softball games against Navarro Community College. Wearing our hats to keep off the sun, we discovered a roofed stadium, which not only kept off the sun but protected us during the hard rain that fell before the game. Our worry that the games might be rained out was needless as all the brief rain did was cool the air and create a delightful temperature with a lovely breeze. Vickie and Geri Ann, Erin’s mother and sister, had also arrived; and after the games, all of us feasted at the deep-fried chicken dinner that Erin’s friend Matt had prepared for us at the house where Erin and two other softball players live with a fourth college student, whose parents had bought the house for her.

That night we fell instantly asleep and woke early enough the next morning for a leisurely breakfast and then a visit to the George Bush Memorial Library on the Texas A&M campus. Unfortunately, it was being renovated, but we saw the movie, some displays, and the miniature White House replica that has traveled throughout the country. Nearby was a small lake with many flowers and a rose garden, where the butterflies flitted everywhere. We kept walking back into the woods where George and Barbara Bush will someday be buried by their daughter Robin.

Meeting everyone for lunch, we ate Chinese and then had time to go back to the motel to rest up and prepare for the next two games against Blinn Community College, which had a very good team with four good pitchers and a coach with a fine reputation. Again we won both games and thoroughly enjoyed seeing Erin and teammates play and met a few more parents. After a late dinner with our party and sad farewell hugs, we fell into bed and another deep sleep in order to prepare for the next segment of our Texas adventure.