Penmanship

I learned how to handwrite in 1967 in third grade.  Mrs. Knutson was our teacher for that year, and I remember her as a competent, pleasant woman but one that you just felt inclined to pay attention to.  I became very engaged and fascinated with learning to write in longhand.

The class was called Penmanship, and the activity itself was called handwriting.  I never heard it referred to as cursive until my own children were in school many years later...

An actual example of my handwriting from 1967 that my mother kept...

And another thing, what is the deal with how kids nowadays hold pens and pencils? It looks downright awkward. No wonder that many of them can't write very well! I also can't help wondering if they're not even making excuses for it...

The End of a Childhood Friend

I lost a good friend recently - an old oak tree that was one of two that held up an iron bar, a set of rings, from which ropes hung that held a wooden seat. My grandfather put it up over a century ago. My mother and her siblings, my sisters and I and my nieces, nephews, and my children all swung on it.

But a recent bad storm broke the tree in half, at the point where the tree had grown around the iron bar many, many years ago. Slowly but surely, my childhood home is going back to nature.

The acorns, the oak leaves I collected and preserved in wax paper with an iron. The red squirrels that made it their home and ran through the branches chattering and chasing one another. I didn't even hear any squirrels or even birdsong in the little woods north of the old home I grew up in.

I feel incredibly sad but realize this is how things are, always have been, and always will be. Change is the only constant...

Running Away from Home

I was about 6 years old, and I was really mad at my mother.  I don't remember why I was mad, but I was so upset that I wanted her to be very worried about me.

I ran out of the house, grabbed my red tricycle, and started madly peddling down the gravel road towards Grandma's house. Halfway there, I realized that Mom would likely check for me there first thing.  So I thought I'd really outfox her, and went into the big ditch and hid in some trees.  It seemed like it took her a long time, but soon she walked past me on her way up town. 

I waited as she inevitably came back. As she walked past the area I hid within, I could hear her say, "I am so sad.  I hope Patricia comes home soon..."  I almost spoke up, but I was a very stubborn little girl,and held onto my anger.  After she left for home, I waited to make sure she was really gone.

I struggled to drag my trike back to the road, but I did it.  On to Grandma's house!  When I got there a couple of minutes later, I ran into the front porch, letting the wooden screen door slam behind me. Inside, Grandma was in the kitchen.  I don't really remember a lot after that, except that once there, I felt home-free.  I had accomplished my goals:  I ran away, and I worried my Mom.  I was satisfied.  I obviously got picked up at some point and brought home.  But in the meantime, I may have managed to wrangle an overnight at Grandma's house with homemade hot cocoa and brown sugar toast in the morning...

Old Friends

The author, with her teddy bear, circa 1961 - trees behind her...

Many of the trees of my childhood home are gone now. They were very large and old oak and elm, surrounding our home like giant sentinels. They guarded us, a canopy providing cooling shade in summer, and with endless entertainment - from racing squirrels who sometimes had ferocious, chattering quarrels - to choruses of bird song from morning to night.  There wasn't an upstairs' window you could look out, without seeing a branches of trees nearby, curling around towards the house like hugs.

The rustling of their leaves could be soft and comforting with a breeze, or loud and threatening during a windstorm.  Strong winds would cause them to creak and snap; once during a storm of my early childhood, one of the mightiest and oldest oaks snapped in two about 12 feet up, thankfully falling away from the house. It lay there for many years, only its outstretched branches taken away.  I used it to play on, climbing on it higher and higher as I gained confidence.  Finally one day I got to the top and looked down on my mother hanging out clothes, calling down to her in victory.  It has been thrilling and at the same time terrifying, climbing up so high, but something inside me pushed me on to do it.

In winter, their branches were so bare in stark contrast to their heavy summer foliage.  Like giant shado puppets, they seemed to be in constant silhouette against the white, white snow.  They stood guard around the house, while their brethren in the woods to the north stood at the ready.  When it would get very, very cold, the trees would crack and boom.  The first time I heard them do that, it scared me and I asked my mother what that was and she explained.

Trees are more expressive than many people realize if they don't live among them all the time.  Especially the older, larger trees. There were many days and nights I heard the wind and trees make the most forlorn moaning and creaking sounds together. With the shorter days, it made for much melancholy even for a child. Spring became that much more sweet and meaningful after months of cold and short days.

Simple, Hard Work

If only it was that simple.

I used to shell peas with my folks as well as Grandma. I miss that. 

I have tried growing a garden all my life and have never had much luck. I have found it to be a LOT of hard work and evidently Mother Nature has it in for me! But I have wonderful memories of our large family garden. 

Mom and Dad made it look so easy...

Sewing Machine Magic

I don't remember a time when someone in my home wasn't sewing either by hand or by machine. Needlework was integral to our daily lives - making new clothing or other useful household items, repairing them, or adorning them with embroidery.  Needlework extended towards crochet and knitting, as well as quilting.

Part of using a sewing machine was knowing your machine.  My mother taught me how to clean it, and (very importantly) how to oil the machine. Part of that meant knowing how to take the bobbin/shuttle assembly apart and back together again when thread became entangled in that mechanism.

The bobbin/shuttle assembly was always such a mysterious part of the machine, with several interlocking parts.  There is a special way you must thread it, so it will then be picked up by the top needle and brought through the feed, ready to begin sewing a new seam once again.  I had never seen a visual demonstration on how the assembly in action, actually worked...until now.

Fascinating.

Garrison Keillor: I Understand Completely

"Rhubarb is the secret to the good life."

I read every word of his essay, and understood it to the core of my being. I feel exactly that way when I am researching and writing about St. Vincent. I love St. Vincent and all the people from it and all the people around it that made up our communities, our lives, our sorrow, our joys.

When my mother was nearing the end of her 97 years, what was most vivid to her was her youth. She said, “There is so much I’d still like to know, and there’s nobody left to ask.” So she ventured into the shadows to commune with her dead, which was a comfort to her. Nobody was alive who knew her in girlhood, so memory became reality. Some call it dementia, I call it imagination. At 71 I sometimes forget last week, but I clearly remember the big house on Dupont Avenue North where Corinne lived one summer when we were 19, and I blew smoke on her African violets to kill aphids. She and I had this idea to form a commune of writers all working away in their rooms, doors open, and when we wrote something good, we could walk into someone’s room and tell them about it. A sort of long-term sleepover. It was a perfect idea, and we didn’t bother with details such as Who and Where and How much, and because it never became a reality, it never came crashing down. It still exists in my mind. If I reach 97, I may finally go live there.

- From Keillor Geography

St. Vincent is my Lake Wobegon...

More than One Way to Skin a Cat

It's a lovely thought, having "a liberal arts education". I personally LOVE the idea of having one - but the cost of college has gotten gigantic and out of many people's possibility even with best-case scenarios of scholarships, grants, working, etc. I personally advocate for the even "older school" of life-long self-education. The same individuals who are motivated to learn in a group environment can do it as individuals, via traditional libraries, museums, as well as online. And universities aren't the only way to get out and meet people of diverse backgrounds, interact, learn about different cultures, etc. I know, because I've done it. There is more than one way to skin a cat! I never got to go four years to college, only one. Another two years a few years later for a technical Associates Degree (for IT - computer programming and network administration) But I have never stopped learning. I am a ideas and learning junkie.

I learned to read before starting school, in part thanks to Dr. Seuss

I had two advantages getting started on my lifelong path of self-education - a mother who valued reading and started me very early, and both parents who valued discussion and questioning the status norm, and weren't afraid to talk about ANYTHING with us or around us. They were fearless examples. My Dad grew up on a farm and only went through 8th grade (but was an avid reader and debater all his life) and Mom was a high school graduate (no college), but also a life-long reader and sometimes writer. Her oral skills at passing down family history and stories had been passed down to her by her Irish-Canadian parents and I benefited from them all.

Embroidery

I was taught embroidery by my Grandma. I went on to embroider many dresser scarves, pillow cases, and dish towels. In high school, I embroidered hats, purses, shirts, and jean jackets. As a young mother, I embroidered a crib quilt and dresses for my little girl, Eva.


It's been a long time, but I am once again inspired to do needlework. With my limited dexterity nowadays, I'll be tackling this small project, near and dear to my heart...

A Depth of Grieving

I read this, and I think of my Mother. No person ever grieved more for the person they loved, than my Mother did for my Father. For six years, it was as raw each morning for her, as it was the day he died...

Dad & Technology

My Dad never went past the 8th grade.  Back in his day, especially if you were a farm boy, that was common.  You were needed on your parents' farm, you accepted it, it was the way it was.

Thus, Dad never learned things like typing in a business class.

After the war, he came home to a small homestead that sustained the family with pasture and livestock, as well as a large garden.  Soon he realized he'd have to return to education to make a better life.  Despite not having a high school diploma, he was still able to take advantage of the new G.I. Bill, and went away to a school called the Gale Institute in Minneapolis, MN.  He had to be away for the better part of nine months from Mom, but he stuck it out.  He wrote letters home, and looked ahead to making a better life for his young family.

His course was focused on teaching him skills he would need to be a telegrapher for the railroad.  I don't what the entire curriculum consisted of outside of telegraphy itself, but evidently typing was not included.  To the day he retired, he always typed using what he called the 'hunt and peck' method.

Ad in July 1949 Popular Mechanics for training at the Gale Institute in Minneapolis, Minn.,
for railroad jobs. It was one like this that my Dad and his brother Robert saw that eventually 
got them to attend Gale Institute in early 1951.  Both of them ended up getting good jobs 
with the Great Northern Railway (which became the Burlington Northern) for their entire 
careers - Dad in Minnesota, and Uncle Robert in Montana...

I learned that term from him one day when my mother took me to visit him at his office, in the depot at Noyes, MN.  I still remember well the first time I visited the depot.  I was just a little girl, only about 7 or 8 at most.  To me, it was a thrilling experience to see where my father worked.  Passengers were still part of the business then, and we entered via the waiting room with its beautiful long, wood benches.  There was a water machine, with its big glass container sitting on top.  I went to check it out, and found of all things, paper cups!  I had to try it.  As I put the cup under the spigot and pressed the button, I almost jumped as the machine made a huge "glug, glug, glug" sound and large bubbles drifted up inside the upside down glass bottle.  I tried it again with the same result.  I laughed and thought, what a fun way to get water to drink!

I then noticed the counters and men behind them sitting at desks or walked through with papers, my ears picking up an interesting staccato clicking, of varying speeds.  My Mom went to the counter and Dad came to greet her.  He saw me and I looked up at him and he smiled.  "Would you like to come inside and see where I work?"  I replied, "Yes!"

Trivial Me

I Grew up in the oldest village in my state - St. Vincent, Minnesota.

But I was born in Emerson, Manitoba.

I am only 4 degrees of separation away from the Hillside Strangler serial killers.

I learned to read at 3 years old (and yes, I am a voracious reader who likes nothing better than to lose myself in a good book, fiction or non-fiction...)

I have moved over 27 times (so far).

It took me 50 years to find the love of my life.

I once met Vincent Price at a baggage carousel in LAX.

I once went at midnight to observe the annual grunion run at Huntington Beach, sponsored by a local marine museum; we waited, and when the guides saw them, we were told to turn on our flashlights; males wrapped themselves around females, which in turn laid their eggs in the sand; as quickly as they came ashore, they were gone.

A friend and I once rode our horses along with a wagon train for 10 miles, during the American Bicentennial.

Speaking of horses, I have been lucky enough to have ridden in the Rocky Mountains, along the shore of the Pacific Ocean, in the deserts of New Mexico, as well as my own home prairies.

After leaving a bad marriage, I became a single parent at age 25, went back to school at 27, sought and obtained a good government job at 29, bought my first house at 31, and bought my first new car at 33.

I left that good job after 23 years to follow a new dream, which brought me full circle, back to a rural life on a small hobby farm like the one I grew up on.

I grew up in the house my grandparents built, that my mother grew up in, and later me and my children lived in for 18 months with my parents while I began getting back on my feet.

I have a deep love for my home village and its surrounding villages, which are really one, big extended family (and many are related to one another...)

I love writing as much as reading - in fact, I daresay I may like it more. It is like breathing to me, necessary to my life, the ability to document and express, to create and to share. 

I have a deep passion for animals, and for several years dedicated my life to the goal of becoming a veterinarian. Life had other plans.

My best friend growing up was a cat named Dusty. He was a great mouser, who worked part-time as my alarm clock during the school year.

I nearly drowned when I was 4 years old. My mother and her friend took me to a swimming pool one hot summer day. They had me go in to the wading pool while they visited nearby. I somehow sneaked away to the big pool which I evidently thought looked much more fun. I slipped in holding the side, not knowing how to swim. A wave pulled me away and before I knew it, I was sinking, looking up at the sun through the water, the world going dark. Next thing I knew, my mother's friend was giving me mouth to mouth, then I was choking up water. She had just saved my life.

I used to play the piano fairly well, as an accompanist at my school, church, and as a soloist, including in competitions. 

I once had a grand mal seizure. 

I survived an 18-month bout of clinical depression by walking, writing, and with the help of two people - a very special friend, and my daughter.

Dusty: Cat, Friend & Mouser Extraordinaire

Best friends - Dusty & I (circa 1970)

Dusty was a very special friend to me. He came into my life when I was 9 years old, born to a stray (who had adopted our family 2 years earlier) named Smoky. His mother had had 2 litters previous to his, but the tomcat got them all. This time, Dusty was the only one that escaped, because my father was able to hide him in the hayloft before it was too late.

Dusty was spoiled rotten by his mother Smoky, since she could devote herself solely to him. She was a great mother, and we watched with fascination as she eventually started to teach him all about the important hunt. She first brought home her catches and would eat it in front of him, allowing him to sniff and examine. Next, he would try nibbling on a mouse or shrew; he found he rather liked them. Once he got a taste of them, Smoky couldn't keep them coming fast enough! He literally stuffed himself, the little piggy! We would laugh, wondering how many today. I think the record was 5 mice she brought in, and all for her son. Eventually, she started bringing her prey home alive, and would present them to him and we'd see how he would play with them, and not know what to make of them, and then his mother would show him how it - the kill - was done. It was humane, really - cats take a mouse by the neck, make a quick bite, severing the spinal cord (or as my father would say when he witnessed it, the cat would do a coup de grâce...) It was an amazing process to watch over a short time as Dusty was growing up. It's another story, but during this critical time, he lost his mother. But she was there long enough to help him grow up. He never forgot his lessons, and was an amazing mouser the rest of his long life.

Dusty and I hung out a lot.  We slept together, we hunted together, we played together, we took walks together.  He wasn't sure what to make of my horses, but he sometimes played chicken with them!  He was pretty brave, sniffing noses with Sunny a few times, considering how much bigger Sunny was compared to him.  He loved to show off his kills, and would often come trotting out of the pasture or woods, proudly carrying a mouse, vole, shrew, gopher, or other feline delicacy, for us to crow over.  I swear, he looked so proud every time!  We'd pause whatever we were doing, Mom would even come out of the house, and we'd watch with fascination as he went through the cat ritual:  play, torture, play some more, let the prey think they were escaping, then viola, execution!  He would usually eat the head first, which he particularly seemed to enjoy (BRAINS!)  He invariably would leave nothing but...the tail.  Sometimes, even when we weren't there as an audience, we would come home later to find a tail or two on the steps.

Dusty in his (doll) bed, getting ready to go to sleep...

I was very fortunate to be at my parents' home when Dusty passed away.  One night he wanted to go to bed, but couldn't get down the stairs on his own.  He was 18 now, and his arthritis was catching up to him.  I took him downstairs in my arms, and tucked him into the doll bed, his bed for so many years.  In the morning, he wasn't up at the top step rattling the door like usual.  I wasn't immediately alarmed since he had had a hard time getting downstairs the night before, so I went down to help him get back upstairs.  When I got to his bed, he was curled up like he was still sleeping.  But he wasn't sleeping anymore.  His beautiful body was already cold and stiff.  Dusty was gone, having crossed over the Rainbow Bridge.  I cried and cried like a baby that day.  It was the middle of the winter, so he had to be put in the shed until spring to be buried.  Wrapping him up and saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.  But I'm so glad despite the pain, that I was there with him to the end.  Eighteen years is a long time to be a friend to a cat, and I felt privileged to have been a friend to one named Dusty...

Butchering Day

On the chopping block...

I remember the last time my family butchered chickens.  I was three years old.

I had spent the summer wandering around our yard, curious about the woods, but afraid to explore them yet.

The smell:  hot water mixed with chicken blood and feathers in the old copper boiler...

Running around the adults as they dispatched bird after bird, I stayed away, keeping a distance so I could see, but not so close at to get in the way.  I was told "don't get close" - sharp knives, hot water, blood and guts.

My grandmother and mother took them after their heads were cut off and they were hung up to bleed out. Grandma and Mom did the butchering in the yard right outside the kitchen, between the house and woods, just east of the big tree swing.  They worked on a table of planks over some saw horses; the birds were gutted, sliced open and bare hand reaching in, organs pulled out.  Smokey the cat milled around not far away, hoping for some fresh giblets.  Next they were put in the hot water, to help with removing the feathers. Final step was rinsing them inside and out.  In the end, they had went from feathered friend, to Sunday dinner, all in an afternoon...

I didn't know it then, but it was a sort of initiation.  I now knew what fewer people know nowadays: Where my food comes from.  My family didn't do it to save the earth, or eat healthier, but because they needed to, to get by. Our family was able to help themselves by having a garden, some livestock, and skills to process them into healthy delicious food on our table. What a blessing!

Talking to Myself

Soliloquy: The act or custom of talking to oneself or talking when alone.

When I was growing up, I would often overhear my grandmother and mother talking out loud to themselves. They'd count up something, make an oral mental note, mutter an exclamation or make a declaration, shoo away a pet, scold a child - and at other times, deal with a frustration by 'talking it out', out loud.  That doesn't even count all the singing, humming, Irish 'diddly-dee'ing', or whistling.  Some of it I suspect was just to deal with the continual work that never seemed to end, or the solitary nature of the majority of their long days. Whatever the reason, I grew up around hearing them vocalizing their thoughts, and felt it the most normal thing in the world to do.

Thus, I also talk to myself. I have done so all of my life, on an almost daily basis, about this and that.  It is like a method to clarify my thoughts, lay out problems, work through frustrations, or express deeply felt emotions.  I don't really think about it, and have even been caught doing it by other people around me, who find it very odd.

Spring Cleaning

When I was growing up, it was common practice for my mother and grandmother to do what was called spring cleaning.  Windows were opened up, curtains and quilts were washed and hung out, rugs were aired and beaten, walls and floors scrubbed.  And kitchen cupboards were emptied, and thoroughly cleaned out and washed down.

As a young wife 35 years ago, even I used to do this domestic ritual.  I liked how it connected me to my mother and grandmother, and how it made me feel like a successful homemaker.  Everything felt so wonderful, so fresh, renewed!

Over the years, I became a very busy single working mother, and spring cleaning was forgotten and abandoned.  Not because I stopped believing in it, but because there was never enough time.  Deep cleaning gave way to spot cleaning on-the-fly.  It seemed to suffice.

In recent weeks, Bill and I have noticed increasing sightings of a small, dark, and thin beetle on our counter tops.  Along with this tiny beetle we have seen nearly as many small 'worms'.  We cleaned the area and thought no more about it.  Until it kept happening.  Over and over.

As often is the case, we were in denial.  It became obvious that this was not isolated but ongoing, that no amount of wishful thinking was going to make them vanish.

We did some research.  We learned they were a type of grain beetle, of which there are many kinds.  The solution sounded suspiciously like...spring cleaning.  I had lucked out over the years;  sadly, time and statistics (and maybe domestic karma) has caught up with me.

So this week, I shall be slowly but surely unloading the corner cabinets top and bottom, doing an inventory on my supplies, throwing out anything that is old, open, and/or infested, and thoroughly cleaning the cabinets.

Grandma and Mom knew what they were doing...

Putting Up and Putting By

In our basement, which was just rough cement walls and floor, was a root cellar left from the days when there wasn't a proper basement under the house when my grandparents built it in 1906. Later in the 1950s came the basement. My parents continued to use the dark cellar for potatoes and carrots, and other root vegetables. But my mother also had many shelves, and they were very full when I was very little. Over the years she did less and less when it was only me and Dad, and my sisters had grown and left. She took her first full-time out-of-the-home job in 1974 to help attain some financial goals her and Dad had before he retired in 1987. She still canned even then, but only as little as possible. She began experimenting with freezing some vegetables. I will never forget the many meals we had during many long, dark winters with food she and Dad grew and then put up. That was the beginning of my 'pickiness' about food; if it wasn't as good as Mom's, it wasn't good enough...

Before Dick and Jane

"Fun with Dick and Jane"

Dick and Jane.

I remember using this series of books in elementary school. I breezed through them, finding them fun but a bit boring and silly. I had already learned to read before attending school, thanks to my Mom, who felt it was important to provide good books for me to look at and learn from, from a very early age.  She subscribed to the Dr. Seuss books for me, and each month we'd received a 'large' thin box in the mail, and I would know another book had come for me!

I cannot remember which one I got first.  It might have been CAT IN THE HAT, or GREEN EGGS AND HAM.  At any rate, I remember my favorite - HORTON HATCHES AN EGG.  I always loved Horton, and felt he did a very honorable thing.  I did not like the jealous mother bird at all, feeling she wanted to take all the credit for doing none of the work!  Even then, I really got caught up in my stories.  I literally learned to read from being read to, and looking at the words as much as the pictures.  I knew that words have power, that stories transport, and I wanted to know the secret.  I wanted to know how to read! I cannot remember the details, but I remember being told what a word meant, the sounds of words, and between those hints, my own deductions based on observation and context, I began to understand the mystery of the written word.

Before any of that, however, there was my father.  He told great stories to me at bedtime, stories that he would make up as he went along.  I never knew what the stories were going to be about, and that made it all the better.  I was very young at the time, so I can't remember any of them.  But that's not the important thing anyways.  They made a lasting impression of me of how powerful words are, and when they are used skillfully and tell incredible stories, the stories take you with them.  I was hooked!

Thus, when I started school, I had a head start.  I absorbed it all as fast as I could because I couldn't wait to read more.  And more.  And MORE!

Where I Came From

"It's a sad country, but it's the most beautiful God ever made. There's a wildness to it, a richness of colour, a sweetness on the wind you couldn't know unless you'd smelled it. It's a very old land where once heroes and saints and scholars lived and now the memory of those days aches in the colour of the earth, the standing stones, the trees against the sky, the sound of a storm." - Ann Perry

My ethnic background is a mixture of many cultures. My father's was Norwegian and German/Scot/English stock, from his mother and father respectively; my mother's was Irish/English (both parents).

While I did hear about the Norwegian side of things in passing conversation while growing up, my general sense of who I was, was of being Irish. My mother’s family was overwhelmingly Irish, with a wee bit of English thrown in just to keep it interesting.  I grew up with brown bread, strong Canadian tea, roast beef dinners, making do, passionate ‘discussions’, and knowing the value of hard work and faith. Family was important, and that included laying your cards on the table even if feelings got hurt; honesty was prized, and unkind words quickly forgotten. While you might feel like killing someone for a split second, you hugged them the next. Life went on.

While I eventually grew to appreciate my father’s family, learning there was more to my father's family history than I at first had realized, I’ll always think of myself as an Irish girl.

Bedwetter

One of my oldest memories is of being in a cold metallic crib, crying my eyes out.

I was in a room in the Emerson Hospital, and my Mom had to leave me for awhile.  Dr. Ferry was going to be performing a tonsillectomy on me in the morning.  I was just three years old.

The next day, I recall large people looming over me in a strange room.  I was lying down, and they were coming at me with something round, and telling me don’t be scared.  That just made me more alarmed.  I began breathing faster, through the thing, and it smelled strange.  It was the smell of rubber and ether.  I suddenly felt a huge lurch in my stomach, someone brings a metal pan to my mouth, and I vomit.  Evidently ether often had that effect on patients.  After that, I didn’t remember anything until I woke up later with a sore throat.  The good news was that I could have all the ice cream,  pudding, and popsicles I wanted.  

That was my first time, post-birth, that I was in the hospital as a child, but it wouldn’t be my last.

So many times, more times than I can remember, I had problems that required a doctor or hospitalization when I was growing up.  I had the normal things that many children did at the time - chicken pox, mumps - but I also had an unusual amount of upper and lower respiratory infections, sinus and ear infections, as well as kidney and bladder infections.  

The kidney and bladder infections were frequent and often severe.  My mother was told to cut me back on salt, to not allow me to sit on cold surfaces, to dress me warmly in winter, and to keep my head covered from cold and wind.  I was sometimes on several medicines, including antibiotics.  As my urinary tract problems increased, I had more and more catheterizations to obtain the most sterile urine samples possible to determine the cause and course of treatment.  I once had a dye injected into my bladder and told to not urinate for as long as possible as they observed my bladder when full, with the dye helping them to see it better.  To a child, those  procedures were extremely frightening as well as painful¹.

There were times I had long hospitalizations that caused me to be out of school for awhile².  I received cards wishing me well from my classmates, which cheered me up.  I don’t recall being particularly concerned, my Mom said the doctors kept saying that they didn’t think this was serious, that my organs were functioning well, but just that I was getting infections that caused significant pain.  I remember well the pain, the burning, the urgency, the fevers, and the bed rest.  And then, there was the bedwetting.

I don’t know if my bedwetting was connected in any way to my other problems.  My mother made allowances for it and may have thought so, at least at first.  I was not allowed to drink after supper, in hopes it would curtail the problem, but it didn’t.  As I grew older, however, there were many times, especially in the middle of the night when she was changing sheets, that she would mutter about me being lazy about getting up to use the pot³.  I would tell her that I wasn’t.  In my own mind, there was nothing more that I’d rather do than get up.  I hated it far worse than she believed I did.  

When I was growing up, all the way through high school, I slept very sound and very deep.  Nothing would wake me up.  I dreamt profusely, dreams-worthy-of-the-Twilight-Zone dreams.  The only thing that (sometimes) woke me was a cold, wet bed.  The routine went like this:  I’d wake up in a swamped bed, everything wet.  I’d call for Mom.  She would come and I couldn’t look at her, ashamed and wishing more than anything that I didn’t have to call her.  When I got old enough, I changed the sheets myself⁴, but I knew she was often woke up by me opening the old dresser drawers which squeaked at every pull.  The old house’s floors creaked, and every sound seemed magnified in the night.  

The doctors' predictions turned out to be right.  Some time when I was around 11 years old,  I stopped wetting the bed.  All my fears of never being able to go to camp, or stay over at a friend's house, went away, and I was excited to expand my universe, which I inevitably did.  But I never forgot the sicknesses of my childhood.  In a way, although there was a brief respite, they have followed me into adulthood.  But as I often say, that, that is another story.

__________________________

1 - No test or procedure, at any hospital, during all the years I was afflicted, ever could give my Mother a definitive reason for my multiple kidney and bladder infections.

² - At one point, when I was about 10 years old, my physician referred me to specialists at the Victoria Hospital in Winnipeg.   They had a whole floor just for children, a pediatric section.  There, I met the first black person I had seen - a girl my own age.  I felt strange meeting a person so different from myself, but at the same time excited.  This was the late 1960s, and I had been watching the news on TV, and knew that the civil rights movement was happening.  I believed in it, as young as I was, and wanted to learn more.  Thus, she and I became friends in the time I was there, and I was sad to part when the time came.  It was also during this time that my Mom tried to soften the separation by giving me a very special gift, a doll I named Sally. She and I became very good friends.

³ - “The Pot” was what our family called a chamber pot. We used took one upstairs every night to use, and it was my responsibility as a child to prepare it with a little water and bleach, and take it up when we went to bed, and dump it and rinse it every morning.

⁴ - My Mom used old rubber draw sheets from my Grandma Fitzpatrick’s old maternity home days.  On top of that she doubled up a white top sheet and covered that around the middle of the bed.  That way we didn’t have to change the bottom sheet itself.