We took a quick week and drove to Minnesota for a family reunion. It was a good excuse to replace the old digital camera, and Anna and I spent a lot of time trying out our new gadget.


You no doubt need a new camera when you have Grandma Alice cradling her first great-grandchild. Baby Emma was one of our favorite attractions.


On the Sunday after the reunion, Richard and his siblings moved their folks into a senior citizen's apartment. Anna and I went to the Quarry Park, on the site of an old granite quarry. The water was cool and clear; the rock walls went straight down forever. It was quite a social scene, though. I was easily the oldest person swimming; Anna was probably the youngest. The daredevils jumping off the cliffs were making me nervous and bringing out my old lifeguard instincts. I was glad when Anna decided that we should go.

Aunt Brenda always has a litter of kittens in her garage. Anna spent a lot of time taming and naming them.

Labels: cars, family

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That's Richard, with one of the biggest walleyes he has ever caught. He got up early this morning and went down to the dock as the sun was just rising. He nailed this one on the first cast, then struggled to land it as it was surely going to break the line if he tried to haul it up conventionally. It weighed in over 6 pounds and yielded some beautiful fillets.

I woke up early (by my standards, but hours after Richard) to drive Anna to her dog sitting job. I was able to snap that picture because over the weekend I took my old broken camera to work and spent my breaks disassembling it and trying to figure out why the batteries drained within ten seconds of turning it on. I was looking for bad contacts or a short, but once I took the case off and tested it, it started working almost fine again. I say almost fine because it makes a strange new noise when the lens extends. Before I took the case off, the lens was totally stuck and the camera was wasting all of the battery energy trying to move the lens. Once it started working, I put it all back together, testing it at each step, and now I have a working camera again.

The camera is going on four years old, which is ancient in the world of digital cameras. Richard has his eyes shut in the picture, just like he had his eyes shut in Shelagh's graduation picture. I'm still wishing I had a camera with a screen that I could see without my glasses. But my wishes and my budget just don't coincide. It's good to have any camera again.

I spent all Friday baking bread for a bake sale to help Leland's Odyssey of the Mind teams go to world competition. Anna didn't do OM this year, but her old team members still have their teeth sunk into structure problems. Her old teammates now are split among two bound-for-worlds teams, and it's going to take the whole community to raise enough money to get them there. I contributed 20 loaves of bread, one of many bakers, and I hear the Saturday morning bake sale raised over $600. Their next fundraiser is dinner at the Steak Haus by Sugarloaf on Thursday May 15th from 5-8 pm. . All tickets are $15.00. You have a choice of either a steak dinner, battered shrimp dinner or a veggie alfredo dinner. Team members are selling tickets and they are also available at Northwoods Kitchens.

I keep getting interrupted by people who saw the rhubarb sign. I take them out to cut some rhubarb, chat a little, and take their dollars. Eggs are selling, too, faster than my hens can lay. I've started giving away my tomato plants, using them to encourage the many people who are starting new gardens this year.

Labels: family, fishing, gardening, Leland Public School, Odyssey of the Mind

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Liz sent along an article from the NY Times A Line in the Yard: The Battle Over the Right to Dry Outside :

Tumble dryers, like sport utility vehicles, are verging on an image problem: once symbols of economic success, they have morphed into icons of environmental disregard. The gas guzzlers of household appliances, electric dryers use about as much energy as a refrigerator — consuming more than 6 percent of household energy — even though they are used only intermittently.

And there is a cheap and easy, carbon-free alternative. “A clothesline is not a solar panel or a Prius — it’s something that everyone can afford,” said Alexander Lee, founder of Project Laundry List, which promotes sustainable technology in the home.

At issue are subdivision covenants that prohibit outdoor clotheslines. Some people hang their clothes anyway, as a sort of civil disobedience. It's a nice way of starting the conversation to say "I used to love my dryer, but now I can't load it without thinking about how it's wasting energy and accelerating climate change." Others are taking a more systemic approach, petitioning states and provinces to outlaw clothesline bans.

Project Laundry List combines tips on clothesline advocacy with tips on how to do laundry and save energy. I tried their technique for drying towels hung bag style on a windy day and found that it did produce towels almost as soft as machine dried.

I keep thinking of Brother Tim's account of his recent visit to Shanghai, where he saw lots of spanking new high rise buildings and clotheslines everywhere. Here in the US, we seem to be split between "technology will save us" and "technology is evil". Sometimes old fashioned technology, like clotheslines, is just the right fit.

Labels: climate change, clothesline, family

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This is a photo that Jerry Hawes brought over last summer, part of a large box of Hawes/Ivey family photos that he inherited recently. Jerry, my mom, and I spent the afternoon working on old pictures and family trees, trying to put the pieces together. This was a tantalizing picture; we figured out the identities of three of the ladies quite easily, but the one on the left is a stranger to us. She might actually be a stranger -- something about her reminds me of a neighbor lady who butts into the picture at the last minute as the shutter clicks. Or this might be the only image of someone that we've only ever known as a name on paper.

Jerry's links back to this group go like this:

Son of: Clarence Charles Hawes and Ruth Mary Riopelle Hawes – Ishpeming and Marquette
Grand son of: Herbert Stanley Hawes and Avis Willey Hawes – Cornwall/Ishpeming/Marquette
Great Grand Son of: William Francis Hawes and Sara Drew Peters Hawes – Cornwall/Ishpeming

SO the lady second from the left is his great grandmother and my great great grandmother, Sarah Drew Peters Hawes. We have a few other photos of her, like this one with her husband, William Frances Hawes.

Below is a picture of my great grandmother, Sarah Louisa Hawes, daughter of Sarah and William Frances.



The lady third from the left in the top photo is also Sarah Louisa Hawes, but younger. My mom recognized the lady on the far right from the characteristic tilt of her head. She is Margaret Ann Hawes Ivey, or "Aunt Maggie" as my mom knew her.

But what of the lady on the left? We speculated that it might be Emma Jane Peters Matthews, the younger sister of Sarah Drew Peters Hawes, who married and moved out west with her husband. Could she have come back to visit on the occasion of this photo? But that was only speculation, and I've done enough jigsaw puzzles to know that you're never sure until you have placed the last piece:

My great great grandmother, behind the mystery lady.

Labels: family, Upper pennisula

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I've been watching for news about Vetal Elementary, in the Detroit Public School system, for the past two years, ever since daughter Shelagh joined the America Reads program and started tutoring Vetal second graders in reading. Twice a week, she would join four other students in a University of Michigan car and drive to the school on the west side of Detroit to work with kindersgarteners and third graders. The program helped her find her place at UM and connected her to kids and adults, connections that had been lacking her experience of big classes and dorm living.

But her accounts of life at Vetal were uneven. She said the school had "spirit" despite the surroundings. She was loved the murals in the halls, not so much the locked doors and metal detectors. Many kids came to school dressed, fed and ready to learn, but many others didn't show up for days or weeks at a time, and when they did come back their excuses were things like "My mom didn't feel like getting up." Most of the kids were being raised by single mothers, most were poor, some had firsthand stories of shootings and murders. At one point, the school had no more pencils for the kids to use; the University of Michigan students took up a collection and brought a slew of pencils with them.

Shelagh described teachers who were "awesome," who were making sense and establishing order and teaching despite the neighborhood's chaos and poverty. Her favorite third grade teacher, Mr. Mullane, impressed her in the way he never raised his voice, "He didn't need to," she said, "but he wasn't a softy, he always kept order." He treated all of the kids respectfully, and did whatever it took to make learning happen. He played the guitar and sang to his class, composed songs about history, recorded them on his own time, and all the kids learned their history when they learned the songs.

She also described teachers who were barely there, who spent class time talking on the phone, and hollered at the kids who dared interrupt her conversations. There was a mean kindergarten teacher, hated by her students, who didn't show up and didn't even call on more than one occasion, leaving the class in the care of an aide who was only authorized to let the kids watch TV.

I wanted to write and share these stories as soon as I heard them, as they are an important part of my ongoing look at Michigan school funding. But I didn't tell those stories because I didn't want to give the Detroit bashers or public school bashers any more to work with. I was hoping that other Detroit schools were better than Vetal, but what if they weren't? I was rooting for Vetal Elementary, a school I've never visited, throughout it all.

Today's Detroit Free Press reports that Vetal Elementary, and four high schools, will be "restructured:"

Current administrators will be reassigned to different buildings -- they will not return to their current school. Teachers being transferred away from the schools will have the opportunity to reapply to return.

Principals' contracts end at the end of the school year. If the district wants to keep them, then officials will offer them another contract.

The Turn Around School plan coincides with the governor's small schools initiative. Gov. Jennifer Granholm has asked the Legislature to endorse a plan to create the 21st Century Schools Fund, which would allow schools that enroll more than 800 students and miss federal standards for two years or more to create small high schools of about 400 students.

Shelagh didn't qualify for work study this year, but she is still following the situation at Vetal. "I wish I was graduating this year, I'd apply for a job there." We will be watching to see what happens next.

I wrote a piece on small schools a while back. Here is a Free Press article about the governor's initiative, and the Governor's web page on the Small Schools initiative.

Labels: family, school funding

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There was a nice review of Brother Tim's new book, Far From Home in the Wall Street Journal today:

This book broadly portrays the various Latino waves in Major League Baseball and contains many brief historical sketches, including a page about an early Washington Senators super-scout, "Papa" Joe Cambria. He worked the Latin America beat in the late 1930s through the 1940s, signed numerous Latinos, and possibly even scouted Fidel Castro.

"Far From Home" contains over 100 photographs, including a poignant photo-essay by co-author José Luis Villegas. His subject, from a series of photos taken in 1996: two Oakland A's prospects, Dominicans Miguel Tejada and Mario Encarnacion. Mr. Tejada, the lesser-regarded of the two prospects, morphed quickly into a star for Oakland and now plays for the Houston Astros. Mr. Encarnacion kicked around various second-tier leagues and died in 2005 at the age of 30 from a congenital heart condition.

The final pages of the book include a portrait gallery of a dozen-plus Latino stars, including pitchers Fernando Valenzuela, the first player to win rookie of the year and Cy Young awards in the same year, and Juan Marichal, who wrote this book's introduction. These portraits are an appropriate homage, as it is these and dozens of other Latino all-stars who have boosted Major League Baseball.

Tim has three books coming out this year, at least by my count. You can read about them on Tim's home page.

Labels: baseball, books, family

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I know at least one of my readers shows up in the early morning, and is a baseball fan. Two back to back 12 hour shifts have wiped me out, so I'll post a link to Brother Tim's recent article at ESPN MLB about how Cuba's political shift might affect baseball. These paragraphs are something Tim has been saying for years, and they are as true for 5th grade chess players at Leland as they are for Cuban baseball players, and the rest of the world:

We think such stars come simply for the fame and fortune, the lure of a big league contract. Certainly, those are major factors in a player's willingness to make the leap and perhaps even risk his life. But in my discussions with Cuban ballplayers, another reason has been apparent. In our world, we're fortunate enough to compete against the best. Want to pen the next Oscar-winning screenplay? Go to Hollywood. Eager to go toe-to-toe with the best in the business world? Wall Street beckons. That thinking applies to baseball, too.

"That's what some don't understand," Omar Linares, the best Cuban ballplayer of this generation, said during the landmark home-and-away series between Team Cuba and the Baltimore Orioles in 1999. "You're hungry to play against the best."

You can read more on the ESPN website: Castro's Departure Could Create Brave New Baseball World.

Labels: baseball, family

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When I first started writing this blog, one of the tasks I set out for myself was to chronicle the lives of my grandparents, since I had been lucky enough to know them throughout most of my adult life. I wrote about my Grandpa Gord's early years in the Upper Peninsula here, but got diverted from continuing the story as I tried to understand the Prohibition years. I still don't understand Prohibition, or some of the influences that the prohibition years had on my family, but I ended up needing to tell Grandpa's story anyway.

What got me going was a inadvertant insult to my grandpa over at No Impact Man. The proprietor there got in a rant about changing fashions and how they drive over-consumption. That's all well and good, but the example he picked was the auto industry in the 1920's, when GM overtook Ford in sales and hired some fashion consultants from Dupont:

The newly-arrived executives at GM turned to sleek styling to make their new models of cars more desirable. Henry Ford had built his Model T market on product reliability, but the ability to last was now out. The ability of a product to make its owners look fashionable was in. GM finally beat Ford out of its market dominance.

This struck a chord with me, because I had heard this story many times, from the engineer's point of view. That engineer was my Grandpa Gord. This is how I heard it:

In the 1920's, my Grandpa Gordon Harry was a young engineer at GM, fresh out of University of Michigan. Now, Model T's may have seemed reliable in their day, but like all cars of that era, their fuel systems were gravity-fed. You couldn't run unless the fuel tank (usually mounted on top of the rear of the car) was higher than the engine. If you needed to climb a hill, the standard maneuver was to turn the car around and drive up backwards.

My grandfather was given the task of solving this problem. He had a university education, but he also had the backwoods improviser's mindset. He often told me how, when he was growing up, his family was pretty much cut off through the winter, at least as far as acquiring material goods was concerned. If something broke, they fixed it, made a new one, or did without. In his final year of high school, WW I broke out and he was rapidly promoted from the master mechanic's student helper to taking over the master' mechanic's job when his boss was called to war. I suspect that these sort of experiences blinded my grandfather to conventional ideas of what was "possible" and made him a much better inventor than he could have been had he had a more conventional upbringing.

The solution to the gravity-fed fuel system was the camshaft driven fuel pump. We used to have a replica of his first design, presented to him at his retirement party, painted red and with an ashtray mounted on top, even though he didn't smoke, because that's what they did in the 1950's. It was an elegant design, looking like a miniature of something you'd find in a mine. I'm not sure when Grandpa's fuel pump went into mass-production, but soon the camshaft driven fuel pump was in every car made, up until electric fuel pumps and fuel injection took over.

Did GM come to dominate the auto industry because of "sleek styling" and fashion? Or was it because their cars went up hills?

According to my grandparents, not many cars were being sold after the stock market crash of 1929. Grandpa, and the smart guys he worked with, were lucky because they still had jobs. their pay was cut in half, then cut in half again, but they still had jobs. My grandparents subsisted, and fed the extended family, on their garden, their chickens, and on what game Grandpa could shoot.
At work, the guys were still solving problems and inventing, and fine tuning their creations. My uncle tells of the experimental cars Grandpa used to drive home. There was just a driver's seat; the rest was filled with gauges and dials measuring every aspect of the car's performance.

Grandpa kept the patent papers for his first fuel pump in a file cabinet, but he didn't talk about that stuff in his later years. The stories he did tell were about his work at the GM Proving Grounds in California, in World War II. It seems that General Patton was having trouble with his tanks in the deserts of northern Africa, because the sand, wind, and heat would clog the carburetors of his tanks. Grandpa was sent out to California to solve this problem, spending months in the desert driving the tank version of those test cars he used to drive home at night. They did solve the the desert carburetor problem, and Patton went on to victory in North Africa.

When my grandparents retired, they bought a place on Lake Leelanau and their friends, Alfred and Jackie Candelise, bought a place next door. When I was young, it never dawned on me that Alfred, with his beautiful flower gardens and old-world accent, was one of the engineers that had worked with my Grandfather at GM. By that time, guys who worked at GM were a uniform bunch, your standard clean-cut, hearty handshake types who were exceptionally good at fitting in to a rigid corporate structure. I simply could not reconcile the yesman culture of the GM I knew in the 1970's with an eccentric intelligence like Alfred's.

I remember Liz's Physics teacher, Jon Kiessel, talking about how much he had learned from the two students in his graduating class who grew up "off the grid", getting all of their power from wind and solar. In the near future we are going to have to solve some big problems and we need to be looking for inovative thinkers from all corners of our communities.

Labels: cars, family

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Labels: Christmas, family

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Every year we hold out as long as we can before we turn the furnace on. It's usually a damp, cold day during the 3rd week of September when we cave the first time and turn it on for a day or two. This fall has been unusually warm, hot even, and sunny. If the house is 50 degrees in the morning, it will warm up to 56 when I open the curtains on the south side and cook a little bit. If I work outside for a while in 50 degree weather, then 56 seems quite warm when I come back in.

We finally caved and turned the heat on November 4th this year. I did it because we were going to visit Liz in Chicago for a few days, and I was too grateful to my brother for agreeing to live here and care for our menagerie to make him play our furnace game. As it turned out, that weekend ushered in the other kind of late fall weather: dark, damp, windy and cold. No more warming the rooms up with sunshine; we have been lucky these past few weeks if we can see to read a recipe at noon without turning on a light.

Still, the thermostat is rarely above 60, or 55 if there is only one person home. At night we turn it down to 50. I'm annoyed by the sound of the furnace kicking in all night long, and we have plenty of blankets. We close the doors to upstairs and heat up there only minimally. Anna must be turning into a teenager, because she rarely begs to turn the heat up anymore and she hangs out alone in her room regardless of the temperature.

Labels: energy, family

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We took a short trip down to Chicago to see Liz, now in her sophomore year at Northwestern University. It is that November time of year -- on the way down, on Sunday morning, the trees still sported many colors of leaves. On the way home, Tuesday night, it was snowing and the trees were bare.

Liz looks well. Last spring she had a an episode of Bell's Palsy that hit during her final exams. She woke up one morning feeling like her mouth was Novacained and during the course of the day her face became paralyzed. She went to the emergency room that night. picked up some medications, and then wrote her physics final the next day with her left eye swollen shut. Everyone automatically attributed the disease to "stress" because it came during finals, but she doesn't think that the exams were all that stressful, as she was prepared for the exams and was already doing well in her courses. We picked her up in Chicago after her exams, as planned, and brought her home with her half-sagged face. The paralysis made her look perpetually sardonic, which was kind of funny since she had been practsing that look through her teenage years. It brought to mind those wild threats of "If you keep making that face, you're going to freeze that way!"

She recovered quickly and stood as a bridesmaid at her sister's wedding three weeks later, looking fine in person but still a bit odd in photos. Now I find myself searching her face for signs of health, so it means something when I say she looks well. She shrank her meal plan this year and used the savings to afford herself a single room at the quiet end of the hall. She has always been an "early to bed and early to rise" sort and is enjoying the peace and privacy. She is taking five classes, working a work study job and also tutoring in the calculus lab. She is busy but she likes helping other students and with the calculus money she feels flush.

We hung out with Liz on Sunday, taking her grocery shopping at Target and then heading downtown on the train and showing Anna the large sculptures at Millennium Park. We were left to our own devices for most of Monday. Anna wanted to see the Shedd Aquarium, and we took advantage of the Monday discount day, when admission to the main building is free. Then we stopped by the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is free all the time, if you can avoid the $14 parking fee. We parked a ways off and hiked in, heading for the Large Cat house, always Anna's favorite. It was cold and there were very few people, but the animals seemed invigorated.

Liz's environmental science course this quarter is focused on transportation issues. She thinks about transportation a good deal anyway, since she likes to come home, go visit Shelagh in Ann Arbor, and is taking advantage of Chicago's mass transit options. She is planning to take a Scottish bus service, the Megabus, to Ann Arbor for Thanksgiving, and then ride home with Shelagh and Jordan. Students often run out of time to keep up with current events, I will send her this column about the US Senate's recent decision to fund Amtrak for the next while.

In the county, we are working to fund public transportation, as well. We made it home in time to continue on to Leland and vote in the election for which our only decision was whether to continue funding the Bay Area Transit Authority. The election workers were all talking about the awful weather. Now that I'm home, I'm reading the Thistledown Yarn' Shoppe's new blog and find out that two of Kathy's coworkers were stuck in their car half the morning with a live wires draped over their car.

Labels: energy, family, politics

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Fall has been so late. I was starting to think that the leaves were going to just color and fall off instantaneously, or fall off while still green. After last week's wild thunderstorms with tornadoes, we had a rainy Friday and then on Saturday, on the way to work, the rain cleared from my windshield enough to see that we had colors, lots of them.

One of my blackjack players claimed that the storms "scared the colors into those trees." It works for me. The newlyweds were home this weekend, and Shelagh took this one on the way to Pyramid Point.

Labels: family, weather

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We are in Ann Arbor this morning, on a quick trip to visit Shelagh and Jordan, and to have dinner last night with brother Tim and nephew Christopher.

I have recently noticed how many "global warming doubt" websites have been constructed and how much money they are spending on advertising. Hopefully, I will find time to write about the process of manufacturing this doubt, but for today I will invite my readers to explore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change website. They, along with Al Gore, won the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday.

Labels: climate change, family

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Anna's first day of sixth grade was yesterday. I was in Leland at the end of the school day, so I stopped by to pick her up. I watched each kid exit Mrs. Lisuk's classroom, waiting for Anna. They sure have grown! But the kids looked oddly self conscious as the exited the classroom one by one.

I had forgotten about Mrs. Lisuk's exit rituals. Sh had stationed herself by the door and would only release each kid when they had told her "Goodbye" using the ritual of the day. On the first day of school it was a simple "Hasta Manana!" Some kids were fine with it, but others clutched when asked to utter the unfamiliar words. On the board were the rituals for the rest of this week. My favorite was "May the force be with you," answered by "And also with you."

In Sixth Grade, although students are still physically in the Elementary wing, they are starting the middle school curriculum. They will spend the year learning about learning. They will each be issued a laptop computer to use at school and at home. They will study learning styles and identify themselves as visual, auditory or kinetic learners. They will learn study strategies for all styles, and then practice by doing a lot of work in groups.

Later on in 7th grade they will investigate possible careers and do job shadowing with volunteers from the community. They will learn how to do internet research and business correspondence by researching and writing to colleges and trade schools that fit with the careers that they are considering. We want them to have enter high school with some idea of what they will do after graduation, and a realistic idea of what they will have to achieve in high school in order to make their plans happen.

In 8th grade they will learn to write resumes, fill out job applications, and how to conduct oneself in a job interview. At the end of the year, every student will go to an actual job interview, walking alone to a business in the village. Our business community graciously participates in this program, but many of the seasonal places snag good summer help this way.

Anna spent last week trying on possible "first day of school" outfits but then finally opted to wear the same plain shorts and tank top she had worn the day before. Mrs. Lisuk's room was filled with monarch butterfly items, including a tank of milkweed with caterpillars and chrysalises destined to become butterflies. Our K-12 school is all one building, but we house 7th and 8th grades upstairs by themselves, the chrysalis, where they can grow into confident, self-directed high school students.

Labels: family, Leland Public School

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Labels: family

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Our new family. From left to right: Liz, Anna, Jordan, Shelagh, me, Richard

Labels: family

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June 23rd is a rough time to find wedding flowers. It was a hot spring, hot enough to rush the spring and early summer flowers through their paces. I watched the lilacs, spirea, peonies, even the irises, bloom and fade overnight, while the annuals seemed to just plod along. In the end the white zinnias that I started from seed gave me just a few blossoms and the white sweet peas are still just thinking about it.

So I decorated the hall with centerpieces made from ferns from Grandpa Gord's garden, wormwood and wild pink sweet peas from our yard, and a few buckets of flowers from Omena Cut Flowers. But I made Shelagh's bouquet from the best things in our yard: some white snapdragons that overwintered, sweet william that I got years ago from Gord, a lone sprig of blue lupine that persisted in Richard's beds, two sprigs of rosemary that curved to suggest a heart. The bridesmaids each got a few stems tied with asparagus leaves. Richard patiently pulled all the berries off of them while I was arranging Shelagh's bouquet.

I sent the flowers to the church with the Anna, sprinkling them with water, slipping them into plastic grocery bags, and telling Anna to put them in the fridge at the church. It was time for the parents to get ready. My girls and I all wear the same shoe size, so I really shouldn't have been all that surprised when I grabbed the black pumps from the shoe rack and they turned out to have a broken heel. I found another pair of shoes, in the dress up box, brushed my hair, and we were off.



At church, everything looked great. The girls had prepared for many choir concerts in those same Sunday school classrooms; they were on time and relaxed. Laurie Glass, the photographer, was getting a kick out of seeing Ellen (always the tomboy) with her hair out of the pony tail and getting curled. Jon and Christa Kiessel were dressing the three flower children and trying to keep them corralled. We posed for some pictures with the groom and then I went back downstairs to check on the girls. They looked great. Guests were starting to trickle downstairs to use the ladies' room so I packed up the makeup and hangers and went upstairs to wait for my cue.

The grandparents were already seated and Jordan's folks were ready to start down the aisle when word came that there was "a problem". I couldn't imagine what it was, but I didn't have much time to wonder, as the word was soon "problem solved". The moms came in and lit candles. The ring bearer gave the rings to the best man and after some whispered negotiations the best man talked the ring bearer into sitting down. The flower children scattered flowers, milled around a little, then found their parents and sat down.

Shelagh looked great. Both Shelagh and Jordan smiled broadly, happy to be there on their day.

But I smelled roses. I hadn't used any roses in their bouquets. Shelagh's bouquet had a rose in the middle. Did someone else buy flowers? Wasn't anything I did good enough for that kid? It was like our whole life together was replaying in my mind, where I provided simple and homemade, while Shelagh wanted to go shopping for something fancy. Of well, just let it go. They're only flowers.

I hadn't used any yellow flowers, either, as they clashed with the ribbons on the bridesmaids' dresses, but Liz was carrying yellow flowers. I was still telling myself "Oh well, they're only flowers as I watched two yellow petals fall from Liz's bouquet and hit the floor. At least my flowers were fresh! I got up at 5:30 am to pick them with the dew still on!

It must have been about then that Laurie, the photographer, whispered in my ear: "Anna put your bouquets in the freezer!" I started to quietly chuckle. My mom glanced sideways. I whispered in her ear "Anna put the bouquets in the freezer." Mom started to chuckle, too.

After the ceremony, Laurie told me how they had gone to the church kitchen to get the flowers. Shelagh asked Anna, "Why are you looking in the freezer?" and that's when they realized what had happened. All of the flowers were frozen solid. Anna was willing to carry the sorriest bouquet. Shelagh was willing to just walk down the aisle without flowers.

Laurie and Christa (mother of the flower children) walked out the front door of the church, looked down the street and saw a yard with a flower garden. They knocked on the front door of the house and told the man "This is an emergency. We need your flowers."

The man of the house said "Sure!" The lady across the street was working in her yard; she volunteered some of her flowers. Laurie and Christa grabbed what they could, tied them up with the ribbon from the frozen bouquets, and off went the bride!

Years ago, Shelagh and Liz, just 19 months apart, used to play four handed piano duets. Or at least they attempted to play four handed piano duets. Although they were each accomplished pianists in their own right, the wheels would eventually fall off the wagon when they tried to play together. They started off sweetly enough, and it was lovely, watching the two of them moving so well together. After a while, someone would hit a wrong note, or bungle the tempo a bit. I couldn't hear it, but I could tell from the "stink eye" look that would be exchanged. Pretty soon it would happen again, and the sideways glance would be more pronounced. Eventually the performance would dissolve into a chorus of accusations and shrieks, just short of heaving each other off of the piano bench.

There was none of that at the wedding. Anna made a mistake. Shelagh forgave, focused on the important stuff, and carried on. I can't think of a better way to start a marriage.

Labels: family

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Labels: family

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I am up early this morning sewing seafoam green ribbon on black bridesmaids dresses. I still have to make the final plan for flowers and find a suit for my husband. I'll post wedding pictures in a few days.

Labels: family

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Anna left me a note on the backdoor Wednesday night to tell me she had seen an oriole. Thursday morning, Richard looked out the window by the coffee maker and saw an indigo bunting on the bird feeder. A few hours later I was hanging laundry when a hummingbird came over and hovered a few inches in front of my face. I was on a tight schedule, but I took time to boil up some syrup and fill and hang the hummingbird feeder.

As it turned out, work was slow. It was a beautiful day and when they offered me the option of a day off, I took it. I went home and cleaned the kitchen and made enchiladas for dinner, which inspired Shelagh and Jordan to ditch their plans and eat dinner with us.

By then there were two hummingbirds sparring for places on the feeder. Shelagh and Jordan made a rhubarb cake for dessert and then Shelagh played piano while it baked. I listened while planting in the garden. It was a nice night.

Labels: family, weather, wildlife

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