Dresser Scarves

When I was growing up, this was called a dresser scarf. No good home was without them. This one is quite lovely - it is made from linen that has been crocheted over, then edged with. The embroidery is quite striking - a crewel using ribbons. I admire the maker, whoever she is.

I used to do a fair bit of embroidery myself, when a young girl and young woman. It was the one handiwork I truly enjoyed. I never wanted to learn to knit, did learn basic crochet but never was interested enough to develop it. But I can do a mean satin stitch.

My favorite linens to embroider were dish towel sets consisting of seven flour sack dish towels, one for each day of the week.  The old ways were nothing if not generous with the linens, which meant more laundry!  Other favorites of mine to enhance with thread and needle were dresser scarves, hankies, and pillowcases.  My Grandma Fitzpatrick taught me a lot about the different stitches, how they were done, how to properly separate your floss, tricks to threading needles, and how to tie off your thread.  The best needlework, it was said, looked as good from the back, as it did from the front.  Due to my never wanting to waste an inch of floss, I never did get that down; looking at the back of my needlework was like looking at a drunken spider's web!  But my fronts were splendid, if I do say so myself.

I still to this day, have dresser scarves, pillow cases, and towel sets that I have never used.  They were done by my grandmother, and I treasure them and the work of her hands so much, I do not want to use them and have them worn out.  They are to me, a heritage I wish to preserve.

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...

In the Backseat: Sunday Afternoon Drives

Anyone remember Sunday afternoon drives? No destination, just a drive. The idea of not knowing where you would be going was half the fun. Discovering new places, seeing new things.

The other half was arriving somewhere unplanned, just because you felt like it. No one called ahead. No one minded that you arrived unannounced. They were happy to see you. There was always food ready and a place at the table for you. Visiting was an art that everyone excelled at. You caught up with all the gossip and goings on. Goodbyes were drawn out, and callers and called-on were sorry to say farewell to one another.  And if you were lucky, the car would end the day driving up to an ice cream stand and you'd get a small cone, every lick of it treasured.  You got home after dark, and that night you slept like a baby.

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!

1966: A Very Bad Year

Family Photo: After the flood but before my seizure.  Dad is sitting due to his broken leg.

Sometimes Grand Mal - or as they are more commonly referred to now, Tonic-Clonic - seizures can be isolated. Thankfully mine was. At the time, my parents were fostering a classmate of mine. I was the youngest of three girls, my two older sisters being significantly older than me.  Since I had never had a sibling near my age, there was a learning curve on how to get along, and even how not to and then make up and go on.  One night at bed time, we were not settling down and Mom separated us. I felt angry that I was the one that had to leave 'my' bedroom. In my big sister's room, I purposely held my breath over and over, increasing the length of time I held each breath. At the same time I tightened my facial muscles until I felt my head was about to explode.  Then, it did.

It was 1966 and I was only 7 years old.  During the seizure - except when I came to for a few seconds where I was being carried and remember seeing the old telephone cubby between the kitchen and living room - I was unconscious.  I asked my sister Betty to share whatever she could remember...

I was at play practice - it was my Junior year in high school. When I got home, you were laying on Dad's bed downstairs.  They had a bed set up for him after he broke his leg. Mom was on the phone frantically getting ahold of Wim Surface to come help. You were starting to turn blue. I had just had CPR training in school and began giving you mouth to mouth.  Mom had carried you down stairs. Mom said: that every night her and Dad played cards and listened to music; but for some strange reason they DID NOT turn the music on that night. Mom said, she heard something and told Dad that is a weird sound coming through the ceiling vent. She ran upstairs and saw you in a Grand Mal seizure and carried you downstairs crying. Dad couldn't move off the bed. I can't imagine how he must have felt. Before we knew it, Wim was there. He carried you to the car and us three sat in the back, praying you would not die. Wim drove like 100 miles an hour. The ambulance meet us on this side of Humboldt. We were instructed to blink our lights at every car to know it was the ambulance. Mom went with you in the ambulance. Wim and I went to the hospital and I don't remember anything about that part, except they took you by ambulance to Grand Forks, and Wim took me home.

There are many reasons someone may have a seizure.  The only logical trigger of the many I've read about, in the case of my isolated event, is stress.  It had been a very stressful year for my entire family, including me.  My oldest sister had graduated high school, and in the fall had boarded a passenger train at the depot my father worked at, and the rest of us waved tearfully goodbye to her.  In the meantime, I had had more kidney and bladder infections involving many tests and procedures to try and determine what was going on.  It rattled me badly every time I had to go through them, plus nightly I was wetting the bed.  During the early spring, my father had been removing storm windows on the second story of our home when the old wooden ladder suddenly dropped from under him with no warning.  He fell straight down, his one leg compound-fracturing upon impact with the ground.  He was in a cast for months, and was still at the time of my seizure.  That same spring, we had one of the worst floods ever of the Red River of the North, after a historic blizzard.  Our town didn't have a dike yet, so much of the town flooded, including our home and outbuildings.  We had to move everything possible upstairs, only the piano staying downstairs up on bricks.  That still wasn't enough to keep it entirely out of the water.  In the fall, my parents felt led to bring a classmate of mine needing a foster home, into our home.  Unbeknownst to us at the time, it may have led to a level of stress that my mind and body just couldn't cope with...

Homestead for Sale

Me and my teddy bear out in the yard, circa 1961

I would buy it in a skinny minute, as a retreat for writing, and it would be close to the museum for research. If only I could...

The house I grew up in, the one my grandparents built, is up for sale again. If only I had a spare $100,000  available. It needs a lot of TLC and capital put into it, but I'd find a way to do it if I could. I love that house, I love the land it is on. I love the town it is in. It won't make sense to many others, but it's not just a place. It's my family, my roots, my neighbors, my friends, my history. It's love.

Several people have commented about it, including those that have connections back home, or still live there:

Cleo Bee Jones: I know how you feel, I always wanted to get the land my grandparents farm house had been and built a new house on it and made the rooms bigger and more of them, so all of us 39 grandchildren and families could use it any time...  

Margaret Dykhuis: I agree with you, Trisha. When I drive by the house my father built, I wish for a moment that I still lived there. 

ASMR: Auditory Orgasms

Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response or ASMR is a physical sensation characterized by a pleasurable tingling that typically begins in the head and scalp, and often moves down the spine and through the limbs.

COMMON TRIGGERS:  Slow speech patterns, accents, soft-speaking voices and whispers. Lip sounds/smacking/eating. Clicking sounds, brushing sounds, white noise, etc. Painting or drawing Instructional videos. Watching other people performing simple tasks. Getting close, personal attention from someone (eye-exam, make-over, etc.)

I first experienced an ASMR in the mid 1970's in my school library¹; another student, reading a newspaper, kept slowly turning pages.  The sound of the paper crinkling as the pages turned suddenly overwhelmed my brain with the auditory stimuli, and I felt a powerful physical sensation wash over me as described above.  The feeling is not unlike a sexual orgasm, except it's not centered in or originating from the genitals, but rather it seems to stem from the brain itself.  While it is often triggered by auditory stimuli, sometimes it can be by subtle physical contact.

Triggers for me are:

- hearing someone chew and pop gum
- listening to people slowly turning the pages of a newspaper
- having my hair washed by another, or getting a haircut
- soft whispery voices
- swelling, orchestral music
- someone barely touching me, just barely touching the hairs on my skin
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¹ - I remember ASMR-like experiences when several years younger, now that I think about it...