Women Over Fifty

On the last few days of December, I have a compulsion.  I have a compulsion to put my life in order for the New Year.  I guess it’s kind of a reverse New Year’s resolution.

Today is the last day of 2008.  I’m far behind in putting my life in order, but I tried.  Isn’t that true also of a New Year’s resolution?  Yesterday I sorted through the junk laying around the Great Room.  It’s mostly mail that I didn’t throw away when I first got it.  The bills are paid, the mail read, except for magazines, it’s just stuff.  Some of it needs to be filed away, but most of it was trivia like coupons and casino promises that are out of date.

Today’s target for cleanup is what I want to call my Study, but in truth we call it the Computer Room.  It also doubles as a guest room (trundle bed), a sewing room, an ironing room, and storage for my square dance dresses, which take up a lot of room in the closet.

Whatever gets done today will be a vast improvement I assure you.  This is also a project room where dreams are dreamed, begun, and left to be finished later. 

Does any of this strike at home for you, or am I the only one who lives in the middle of a mess that I created for myself by not dealing with it at the time?  You could say I’d rather be blogging. 

Today, I’ll be cleaning.

Marilynne

Today I want to salute the people who provide a never-ending supply of reading material for me:

• authors
  
• publishers
• indie book sellers

I want to salute the authors who tell their stories in hopes that I’ll read them and enjoy them.  It’s hard work to write a book.  Sure, sometimes the stories just flow from their brains to their fingers, but that first draft of a story is only the beginning.  The author must deal with plot, editorial concerns, agents, publishers, and then, with greatest pleasure, their reading public.

Some publishers are struggling; struggling because they need to change and they’ve always been successful the way they do it now.  Some publishers are on the leading edge, bringing us print on demand (POD) books and eBooks (those you can read on a eBook reader or a computer). 

Hooray for those publishers who are successful in managing this change.  We simply can’t go on publishing huge runs of books and then storing them until they are distributed and sold to the booksellers.  It’s so wasteful, not to mention what it does to the profits.  Do you realize that any book not sold goes back to the publisher?  With luck, the publisher can re-sell them, but they don’t sell many of the returned books because they’re set up to destroy them, not to repurpose them.  

Hooray for print on demand books (POD).  They may cost you a little more, but they are printed in small runs, only what the market demands.  They may print just the order requested by a book store, or they may print just one book, just because you want to read it.  That means you have so much more choice.  Smaller print runs, no storage problems, makes greater profits.  I predict the POD printers will survive.

Hooray for eBooks.  eBooks exist in cyberspace.  Once the book is converted to an eBook it can be stored indefinitely.  Buy an eBook and you can leave it on your computer to read.  Buy an eReader, like Kindle, and you can read your eBook almost like reading a paper book. Store the eBook on a CD or DVD and read it again later.  Can you imagine how many books you can put on your bookshelf in CD format?  If your eBooks are on a Kindle, you can store a huge number of books in this small hand-held device.  My computer stores several eBooks for reading when we travel.  I take my laptop anyway.  The eBooks are always there to entertain me and they’re cheaper for the most part.

Hooray for the Indie Bookstores!  Independent book stores care so much about their customers.  They are always looking for a new book to delight us.  They order fewer copies, but they rarely have to return them because they are focused on their customer base.  They know what their customers will like.  They don’t try to have a little of everything.  They try to have a lot of the books they know their customers will enjoy.

Indie booksellers also bring the authors and the readers together in book signing parties. Mysterious Galaxy, near my home has several book signings every week.  Sometimes there’s coffee and cookies.  Sometimes you can tell your favorite author how much you like their books.

When we travel I try to visit independent booksellers and see what they’ve got.  I’m not a regular customer of theirs and so there are surprises waiting for me.  I love surprises.

I’m being a little rough on the big publishers and the big box-store booksellers.  I don’t mean to be.  It’s just that I think their business model is a bit out dated.  For them, change is like an elephant trying to turn around in a narrow hallway.  It isn’t easy.  Some will make it and some will not.  A lot depends on what they do today.

Marilynne

I have some real problems with today’s banking systems.  They are all about charging the customer and not at all concerned about solving the customer’s problems or making the customer happy.  Didn’t the government just do a bank bailout?  Am I wrong to think that I will be taxed to support this?  I do think that will happen, don’t you?

I shopped around for a new bank when Wells Fargo seemed to be all about “how much can we charge her this time?”.  It took me quite a while before I settled on a Credit Union that did seem to be willing to take a reasonable fee while at the same time at least making an effort to keep me happy.

I have a granddaughter in Scandinavia.  She lives there with her new husband.  Like most new couples they don’t have a lot of money, so I like to send her a check for her birthday and Christmas.  Doesn’t that sound like something grandparents like to do?  Well, this loving kindness is causing me problems.

My granddaughter tells me she can’t cash a check in her country.  Money has to be wired to her bank.  Not only that, but the check I sent her in her married name (I thought) cannot be cashed.  Because of the problems involved in changing her name to her married name, she hasn’t done it.  She has good reasons.  She also tells me her new country doesn’t use checks so she can’t cash the one I sent her.

This is beginning to sound to me like she hasn’t figured it out yet.  However, the banks have figured out that they have me right where they want me - with their hands in my wallet.  I wanted to send her $100.00 for Christmas, which I increased to $125 to cover the fees her bank will charge her.

My bank tells me they do not wire money abroad.  That leaves me stuck.  So today I opened a savings account with a well known bank, one in which I also have stock.  Then, having stocked it well with money, I wired some to my granddaughter. I am still in shock! They charged me 36% of the amount I wanted to send as a banking fee.  This is to cover the little incidentals, I suppose.  Things like banking over the internet and processing the one sheet of paper I gave them with all the information on it.  That’s $45.00!  It’s outrageous!  It’s not substantiated by the amount of trouble it causes them to send it.

So, when her birthday rolls around again next December she isn’t getting cash unless she can come up with a cost-effective way for me to get it to her.   I can mail her the cash in a postal box for less money than that.  Of course, then she’d have to pay conversion fees at her bank.

I have an idea.  I’ll have to talk to the bank again to see if it will fly.  If not, and if I don’t get any other glorious ideas, I may just put some money in an account stateside for her to use when she visits here.  There has got to be a better way to do this.

Marilynne 

We’ve just come from Oceanside Harbor, about 12 miles from home.  We went there looking for a good buffet.  Too bad we had just finished eating.

Usually we just eat somewhere on the line of Maine-harbor-looking little shops and restaurants on the south side of the harbor.  They have some good eating there and when the weather is nice, you can eat outside.  I’ve sat outside many times watching the boats in the harbor bob up and down, the sea gulls screaming for goodies, people strolling around.

Today, we’d been at Sizzlers for their buffet.  I like that they do omelettes to order and you can also take from the salad bar.  That means I’m not stuck with an omelette, toast, and coffee.  Today, besides the omelette, I had a bit of crab salad, some canned pears, some sausage (not counting the bacon in my omelette) and a taste of the cheese toast.

Sunday brunch has become a tradition.  It was easier getting it started than I thought.  My husband had been taking me out for breakfast when he thought about it, which was nice,  but I told him I’d like to be able to look forward to it.  We decided on every Sunday after church.

In truth, this sets me up for lunch.  I get up earlier on Sunday morning and by time church is out I’m ready to eat.  However, my husband, a non-church goer, is just up and wants breakfast.  Our part of California has a lot of places to eat.  It’s a challenge to just remember which ones we like.

Well, what we investigated AFTER lunch was the brunch at the Monterrey Fish Company on Oceanside Harbor.  We liked what we saw: crab legs, oysters, mussels, freshly made omelettes, ham and bacon, and lots of bread and cake goodies.  You could have it with champagne if you liked.  It was much nicer than what we had at Sizzler and about twice the price.  For that extra sum, you not only got a grand selection of food, but champagne and tables and chairs outside where you could sit in the sun and watch the boats and such.

While we were there, we also checked the brunch at the Jolly Roger.  The Jolly Roger is nearly at the end of the road that curves around the north end of the harbor.  We’d been there several years earlier and wondered if the food had improved.  At that time, the buffet was a half-hearted attempt at doing brunch and we’d quit going.  However, years pass and cooks and managers change.  It’s time we checked them out again.

We saw a lot of people riding bicycles and walking on the path.  The path goes around most of the harbor.

Leaving Oceanside Harbor by the new bridge we drove past all the expensive condos (on the ocean, or with ocean views, or both), past the Oceanside pier and headed west for home.  I think we’ll go back soon for brunch, especially when we have guests.

Marilynne

I was exercising at Curves today.  We’re a bunch of older women whose bodies look it.  We’d like to look and feel better.  That’s the point of exercise, isn’t it?

Today there was a 17-year-old exchange student from Russia exercising with us.  She is everything we wish we were.  But she isn’t everything she wants to be.  She wants to be strong.  To us it was amazing.  Here is this delightful young woman who  totally looked like an American teen and she thinks she needs to improve her body?

Actually, wanting to be strong is a good goal.  She recognizes in herself the need to be stronger and she’s doing something about it.  That’s a good  thing for the rest of her life.  She seems to embrace adventure.  She needs to be strong so she can do that.  Eventually she will get married and have children.  She needs to be strong to do that.  And eventually she will be older like us, and being strong is an excellent thing to take with us into our over fifty years.

I was really impressed with this young woman.  She spoke English well.  She had read a number of American and English classics and knew the authors and could discuss the books.  She mentioned a book by Jane Austen called “On being Jane.”  It’s autobiographical and had been made into a movie in England.  I would like to see that movie, based on her description.

We were very taken with her.  I’m sure her parents, her friends, her sponsors are too.  I hope she goes home with a good feeling for the United States.

Marilynne

For a time we lived in Philadelphia on the East Coast.  I had two brothers, no sisters, and a Mom and Dad.  Mom stayed home with the kids and Dad worked.  That was typical for the time.

With the rest of us growing up, Mom began to miss having a baby around the house.  First she took in a foster child, a teenage girl, but, as she told me later, I was learning too much from her.  So she began to take in babies.  These babies were those who would soon be adopted, but who had been released from the hospital.  Now there was always a crib in my parents bedroom and the babies came and went.

Then the agency asked Mom if she would take a baby girl for a longer period.  This child had parents, but the mother was in shock!  The baby’s father had left them at the hospital because the baby wasn’t a boy - or maybe it was something else, but this is what I remember.  So, this is how we happened to have little Adelaide Helen (aka Snooky) in our home for the next two years.

We began to think of her as our little sister.  We knew she had a mother because the mother visited our house frequently.  Still Snooky was always with us.  She belonged with us too.  Personally, I was glad to have a sister.  Mom was happy.  She had another baby.

When Snooky was two, my Dad took a position on the west coast in Washington State.  He’d been born and raised in the west and looked forward to returning.  Frankly, Mom didn’t like to move.  At all.  But she was the kind of a wife who willingly followed her husband wherever he went.

There was a complication with this move.  Mom knew she’d have to give Snooky back to her mother one day, but she always thought she would be close by and they would continue to visit us.  She and Snooky’s Mom had become friends.  It would be an easy transition, she thought.

It didn’t work that way.  When Snooky was two years old, Mom returned her to her mother and we moved west.  There wasn’t much of a transition.  No time for Mom to release her heart strings.  Dad didn’t seem to comprehend the depth of her pain.  He said, “You’ll get letters and pictures from them.  It’s not like you’ll never hear from her again.”

On the way west we stopped in Columbus, Ohio, to spend a week with Mom’s parents before continuing west.  For we children, this was a great adventure.  For Dad, he was returning home.  For Mom, this was a tough time.  She never liked to move and she’d never been out west.  She was a city girl and we were moving to a little town in the country.  We moved from a row house in Philly to a big drafty house in Washington with a big lawn and room for a garden.  Dad was looking forward to growing things, maybe even raising some chickens.

We stopped part way in a big lonesome state and our weary father said.  “Out!”  He turned us to face away from the car, the insisted that we yell until we were tired of it.  I remember that our voices didn’t carry there like they had in the city where they echoed off all the walls.  It frightened me.

After a visit to Dad’s grandmother, our great-grandmother, and meeting some cousins, we finally arrived in Washington State.  We had a shiny black car we were really proud of.  We arrived in this dusty little wheat town in the midst of a dust storm.  Mom was in shock.  When Dad stopped to get the key to our new home, she made him park around the corner.  Then she sat and cried.  It just finally all came out.

The house was big and drafty, but in spite of the size, it had only two bedrooms and one bath.  After a while, the porch over the entrance to the root cellar was fixed up to be my bedroom.

For three city kids, this town was heaven.  In the city our parents had taken us to parks to play.  Here we seemed to be living in a park.  We loved it and were soon all over the town and in to everything.

But Mom wasn’t taking it well.  It was a huge adjustment for her.  She missed Snooky and nothing seemed to help.  I would find her laying on the bed crying.  “I thought I heard Snooky crying,” she’d say.  “But when I looked she wasn’t there.”  She tried to hide it, and maybe she was partly successful.

When I was thirteen we had been in this house for about three years.  Mom was doing better.  The day I found out she was expecting she wasn’t aware that I was in the house.  Her sisters, maybe her mother too, were visiting her from Ohio and they were having a good chat.  I was listening, of course.  She told them that it was still a secret but she was pregnant and would have the baby in November.

My Mom pregnant!  My teen age heart rebelled.  No way!  Still I didn’t say anything about it until I began hearing the news from other people.

It seemed like no time at all and we were being told to be quiet, Mom was napping.  Dad was so protective of her.  I think she was having a weepy pregnancy because I remember being told many times that if we made her cry we were going to hear it from him.  We all survived it.

Your brothers and I always tease you about when you were born.  I realized  today that we didn’t joke a lot in our family, but we were always teasing you - and probably still do.  Dad took Mom to the hospital in Odessa for your birth, and when she was settled came home to watch us kids.  I remember that one time coming home from visiting Mom, Dad nearly missed his turn, and nearly ran into a fence post.  I guess it was a hard time for him as well.

So, Mom and Dad brought you home one day and our world changed.  We felt pretty grown up compared to you.  I was thirteen when you were born. Rich was eleven and Fred/Bill was eight. We had no one close to you in age.  

Mom was so happy!  She told me once “No one is going to take this baby away from me.  Never.”  I knew she was talking about having to leave Snooky behind. 

As an experienced mother, she didn’t have a lot of doubts about raising you except for your crooked little legs.  She looked at you standing one day and realized your little legs looked like they were growing around a barrel.  You rocked when you walked, but lots of babies walk like that when they’re just learning.  She ran you to the doctor to find out you had rickets.  Was she ever insulted.  She knew she was raising you well.  You ate well.  You got plenty of exercise.  Why should you have rickets?  Well, they traced it down to her putting your cod liver oil in your hot cereal.  They felt that diminished the effect of the vitamins.

So, they gave you spoonfuls of straight cod liver oil for a while.  I don’t know how long, but I remember that you craved it and would ask for it even if it wasn’t time for more.  Your legs straightened out and everything was fine.

So, I write this because you’ve sometimes been teased about being an Oops! - a child who wasn’t planned for.  I know this isn’t true and I want you to know this deep down in your heart.  I think Mom wanted you even more than she wanted the rest of us.

Love, Marilynne 

By now most of us have participated in the flurry of unwrapping packages.  As an adult do you enjoy this?  Another question arises when I ask this?  Is it more fun if there are kids in your house?

Every year on Christmas Eve we are invited to a large family Christmas party.  It’s not a big house and there are people everywhere.   People settle into zones.  The cousins and like-a-cousins separate into little clumps of mutual interest, the sisters gather around the table catching up on the news, the men (mostly) cluster around the outdoor bar.  Even in LA, it’s pretty cold this Christmas to be outside, so the home owner had hung big tarps around the patio to close it in and another guest had brought a big space heater.

People are everywhere.  This year the food was mostly Mexican (the guests are mostly Mexican).  I always look forward to the home made tamales (this year purchased as home made).  I had a treat in store for me.  I had my tamales covered in chile verde.  That’s good!

The Christmas Tree was hung with hundreds of lights and ornaments.  The number of gifts around the tree represents a major impediment to movement.  Baby Jesus was in his cradle and two little girls played mommie next to it.

Every year the grownups draw names for gift giving.  The kids seem to get gifts from everyone.  It’s a rowdy wonderful Christmas.   Most of the gifts are small, but the kids delight in them anyway.  

This is how I spend Christmas Eve.  I hope yours was happy, that your Christmas is great.

Marilynne 

I’ve told so many people Merry Christmas and I truly hope you do have a good day.  Even if you don’t celebrate the Christian Christmas you have the time together with friends and family and maybe even the impossible to be believed Santa Claus.

I didn’t grow up with Santa Claus.  I was told there was no such thing.  I was told exactly who gave me gifts and I was expected to write a note or say thank you  the next time we met.  Did I lack anything?  I did not.

Our children grew up believing in Santa at the request of their father.  He thought it had been a fun time in his life and wanted them to enjoy it as well.  I put him in charge of the Santa legend.  I told him I didn’t know the right lies to tell.

Still, it often fell to me to tell the lie.  You see, that’s how I thought of it.  I wasn’t keeping up the legend, I was lying to my kids.  Me, the mother who tried to tell the children the truth in all things. 

Q:   What’s the matter with this bird Mommy?

A:  It’s dead.  Let’s wrap it in a piece of comics and give it a burial. 

And we did just that, complete with digging a grave and putting flowers on it.  When something was dead, my kids knew what to do - bury it.  It wasn’t a cold thing.  It was done with kindness and respect.

When it came to Christmas I often found myself answering the questions.  When Santa acted inappropriately, I also handled that.  One child has a birthday on Dec. 21.  When she happily told Santa that not only was it going to be Christmas, but also her birthday, he made a date to buy her lunch at McDonald’s.  This was a real thing, complete with Mommy being invited.  

I debated about this for so long.  Soon it was her birthday and also her date with Santa.  On her plate that morning was a note from Santa (written by me).  It said something like “Dear Cindy.  I’m sorry I can’t be with you on your birthday.  Rudolph has come down with a stomach ache and I have to take care of him.  Use these coupons to go to lunch with your family.”

I had called him earlier and canceled the lunch. 

Whew!  But in getting out of Santa taking us to lunch I had told a whopper.  She showed that note all over school.  I was also saddled with taking the family out to McDonald’s for lunch.  Fortunately it wasn’t an expensive place and she liked it, but money was tight and this hadn’t been planned for.

 So, now she’s grown.  I think her boys believe in Santa Claus.  She loved the legend and everything connected with it.  I shouldn’t feel guilty, but I do.

Marilynne 

Those little birds you northern types send me from northern climes are doing well.  I just want you to know that.  Outside my window, as I type, they are chattering away and fighting each other for the right to sit on the feeder and eat.  They are so much like people. 

Sometimes they do a funny thing.  They try to sit on the sloped edge of the window and look in.  This window has no ledge for them to sit on, just a slope where it meets the wall.  They have a hard time staying there, but they are undeterred.  Sometimes they even tap on the window.  Are you there?  I’m positive they aren’t looking for the cat.

Out in back, near the window where we sit to eat, there are two feeders and a tray where I sometimes dump goodies.  All is squirrel proof.  One feeder has black Niger seeds.  The little birds love that, especially the finches.  The other feeder has black sunflower seeds mixed with various other seeds.  We love to watch them squabble for the food.  There’s plenty there.  They just want to eat theirs first.

Today they’re getting pretty rowdy.  It must be because they suspect I’m out of seeds.  I am.  When it’s time to fill the feeders there’s not a bird in site, but I hear little positive sounding chirps in the trees and bushes.  I think they’re trying to encourage me to keep it up.

Remember the little wild things this Christmas.  They’re hungry and need shelter just like the rest of us.

Marilynne 

By time you’re fifty (or older) you have lots of memories of Christmas.  I have a picture of my two brothers and I in front of the Christmas Tree.  We are dressed in Sunday clothes.  I have long fat curls instead of the usual pigtails and a ribbon in my hair.  I’m holding a doll I got Christmas - by one hand.  To me, that’s what my early Christmases were like.

When my family was newly arrived in California, I was 16 - a great age for me.  We lived in Marysville which is in Northern California north of Sacramento.  We had just moved from the snow country of Washington State.  Yet I remember that first winter as one of the coldest of my life.  It rained and rained and the cold wind blew right through your bones.  I felt like I’d never get warm again.

Near Christmas time that rain began to accumulate.  We calculated later that we had had the 40 days and nights of rain that Noah told about.  Water was in puddles everywhere.  We never felt totally dry.  The water began to rise behind the levees.

Those levees were a source of amusement when we arrived that summer.  There was maybe two miles of river bottom between the levees.  The river itself was so low you could walk across it - though we were advised not to do it.  Now, in the winter, the water rose.  The river overflowed its banks.  The slow lazy thin river of summer became a fast running fat river.   About the time the water reached the bottom of the levees, people started to tell us flood stories.  We tended not to believe them.

However, as it got near to Christmas, people began to pile sandbags on the top of the levees.  When we went to look, the water was bank to bank and only a few feet from the top.

People began talking about evacuating Marysville, and two days before Christmas they did evacuate us.  Our family had no knowledge of how this was done.  However, my Dad attached our long skinny row boat to the back of the car and filled it with prized possessions and supplies.  A friend called and offered their home in Yuba City.  They were going to be gone for Christmas and we might as well use the house.

I was an embarrassed teen as I rode in the family car over the big bridge to the friend’s house, pulling our boat trailer behind us.  I was hoping no one was watching.   We settled in to the friends home to sleep.  However, my Dad was beginning to think this through and told us to sleep in our clothing.  He and my mother stayed up to listen to the news.

About midnight on the day of Christmas Eve the order came to evacuate Yuba City where we were.  We were new to town and didn’t really know the streets they were talking about.  However, once we were on the highway and inching our way down the road with other evacuees, something was happening.

We were listening to a radio station that was near the levee in Yuba City.  He was telling us not to delay.  The levee had broken on the Yuba City side and we needed to leave.  NOW!  For hours he told us to get out, becoming ever more excited, and we inched forward a few feet and stopped.  We began to worry about where the water was.

No sooner did we have the thought than the radio station told us that flood water was coming down the street where the radio station was.  He said he’d stay on the air, but they were in the process of moving the radio equipment upstairs and there might be a gap when they finally made the move.  We inched along listening.  Water had reached the door of the station.  Most of the equipment was upstairs now.  He gave us news of flooded streets and the directions the flood was traveling as people phoned it in.  And we inched along.

We weren’t positive, but we thought the break was south of us and the water was coming our way. Three lanes of traffic were leaving the city and one coming in.  We worried about being caught in the flood.  Dad fretted that he’d been stupid to think Yuba City was safer than Marysville.  They were just on opposite sides of the river.  However, Marysville was surrounded by levees they said, like a cup floating in the midst of water.  If the levees broke there it would be hard to find any place to go.

So we inched along through the night listening to the news.  The radio continued to tell us how high the water was on the lower floor and to speculate that they might need to abandon the radio station.  Finally we reached safety in Colusa and were met by the Red Cross and volunteers and directed to a refugee camp - a Boy Scout meeting place.

Cots were lined up in rows.  Each family took what space they needed in consecutive rows.  We were six by then and with our stuff piled around us we made a recognizable heap.  The Scouts had a Christmas Tree up and we sat and reflected what a strange Christmas this would be.  We wondered what was happening at home.  If our friends were safe.  How long we’d be there.  I remember it was cold inside.  The heater just couldn’t catch up.

It was Christmas Eve.  There was a knock on the door and Santa arrived.  He told the delighted children that he’d heard they weren’t at home and thought he might find them here.  He had packages!  My mother whispered to us to let the little children go for the gifts.  “Little children” included my brother Bob who was maybe 6.  I felt very grown up as I sat back and watched the children have their fun.  They were so relieved.  Bob, who didn’t believe in Santa (none of us did) did believe in getting gifts.  I think he got a metal fire truck.

Dad told us quietly that the people of the town had gone quietly from door to door and collected gifts from under the family’s trees.  Every gift we got was given by another child (or his parents).

In the morning a school bus picked us up and took us to a school for breakfast.  I was old enough to ask who had paid for this.  I had never been on the receiving end of charity before.  I had to think on it because we weren’t poor - not wealthy, but not poor.  Why then did we need charity?  Because it was an uncertain time in our life and we needed the help and kindness of strangers to help us through it.

Floods happen quickly.  When the levee broke, the water spread into the low-lying farm land and through the town of Yuba City.  The damage you suffered kind of mattered where you were when it happened.

Marysville, it turned out, had been saved by the levee breaking below river from the town and we were allowed to go home in the late afternoon.  To do so, we had to go back through Yuba City where you could see where the water had been - and where it still was.

Marysville looked just the same.  Our tree was there with all the wrapped packages.  We were warm and dry.  But we were changed.

That evening we went to church for Christmas Eve services.  My Dad, being the Pastor, thought he should be there in case anyone came.  So there was our family bravely singing Christmas carols.  People began to trickle in, not a lot of people, but some.  They too had been drawn to church.  I remember that Christmas Eve.

Later as things came into perspective, our church became a place where you could come to get clothing and extra food.  Most needed were baby diapers.  The home church had diverted some barrels of clothing meant for China to our church.  We got to see what it looked like when you opened the barrels of gifts.  Hats, high heels, dress gloves, lots of silly things.  But also clothing, especially baby clothing, blankets and towels.  I think we gave away clothing for two weeks or more.

People had died in that flood and my Dad was busy helping the survivors.  I went with him sometimes to look at homes that had been flooded and were now being aired out and allowed to dry.  Because the flood had come and gone fairly quickly, most of the buildings could be repaired.  It STUNK!  There is nothing like the smell of a flooded house.  It smells sooo bad.

I was in the area a few months ago.  It looks a lot the way it did when our family lived there.  Farm towns tend not to change a lot.  The land and the people have healed.

But I remember that Christmas.

Marilynne