Busy Days

Wintry air swept in fast and we've been hustling these days - it seems like Fall is the busiest time of the year. We had a ten day visit from Grandma Milli and it was fun and went by fast. I dug up the Impatiens, Begonias and Geraniums and brought them in for the winter - they'll go out again in the spring. We're picking the garden vegetables and the only ones left out there are the cabbages, beets, broccoli and carrots. Bing picked all the apples and it was a banner year. I'm canning tomatoes and will can some salsa because we have good tomatoes and peppers to spare. The camper is winterized and sitting near the A-frame instead of down the hill. We figure Bing can sit in it when he boils sap next spring and maybe we'll take it south somewhere during the winter - it'll be easier to dig it out of the snow and we won't have to bring it up our new hill road - that should be quite a slippery sliding hill and probably not navigable.

Joyful News

The word is out and we are rejoicing. Son, Dan's wife. Cori, is pregnant with their first child. The baby is due in May and we're so happy for them and for us and for Cori's family - another grandchild with which to fall in love! The picture attached is an image from Google but it looks just like our three sons at birth.

A Momentously Excellent Outstanding Day

Our kitchen saw red today. I pressure canned thirty six pints of tomatoes from the garden - our best tomato crop in years and there's more to come because we haven't frozen hard yet. But the outrageously happy exciting news came from out west where son number two and his lovely wife reside. Can't quite reveal it yet but Dad and I are smiling hard.

"Special Day" Today

About a dozen years ago, when our first grandchild, Michaela, moved to Rhinelander, we established "Special Day". One day a week. we'd drive to town and pick her up and spend the day doing fun things and bonding in a special seniors to toddler way. As four more grandchildren joined the brood, each was added to the fun and we've had the rare privilege to know and love the little ones and are now so proud to see them all blossom into very special people. Today we had the three younger ones and it was great. We planned halloween costumes, planted some perennials, picked some flowers that managed to avoid last week's frost, picked apples, watched some DVDs and played charades. The pictures show Grandpa and the kids picking Honey Crisp apples and the flower arrangements we made with the frost escaping flowers. Summer has transitioned to Fall and the joyful beat of the Earth's rhythm goes on. The dance goes on.

Freshening the Blog

Well, the old way of posting doesn't seem to motivate me to write so I thought I'd try more of a diary type - short and sweet and topical of the days here at Lakeside Gardens. Today it was a dark and blustery day but with the bluster came some much needed rain. The TV weatherman said that we just lived through the third dryest September ever up here and we're about a dozen inches of rain behind for the year. So it was joyful rain. I made my morning rounds of the grounds with a jaunty green umbrella and I could hear the vegetation slurping in the water and gasping long sighs as their thirst was finally quenched.

Underground Magic

My three sons write blogs. Their blogs are so much deeper than this epistle. They speak of gravity and timelessness and transmogrification and galaxies beyond ours and atoms, molecules and the wherefore, the why and the impossible when of existence. And today we will discuss the potato! I love the potato. It is a humble unlikely purveyor of life. It spends its days underground. It exists to bring life and carries within it a powerhouse of vitamins and minerals that provide our bodies with health and vitality. We had some leftover potatoes in our root cellar this late spring. They were shriveled and full of eyes that were sprouting. I planted them and soon forgot about them because they weren't in the garden but on the hillside and in the compost pile. Then one day I remembered to look for them and I was happy to see that they had grown to be nice plants but that the deer must have thought so too and they munched off their greenery. Then today as I went to aerate and water the compost heap, I decided to see if the potatoes had survived. Wow, it was fun digging them up and finding firm healthy food under the dirt! I see why potatoes helped the nation of Ireland survive the great famine. From a shriveled inch long piece of potato, comes a hundred times more food. In spite of weeds and neglect and lipsmacking deer, the stalwart veggie produced. I thank God for potatoes and all our forebears that have devised such delicious ways to partake of them. There are hashed browns and baked and parsley buttered and french fried, scalloped, au gratin and potato salad. Salut! P.S. that's a leprechaun I just happened to capture in the picture.

Reunion Time

This past weekend we attended the first gathering of the Mark and Agnes Scobey children and grandchildren. Mark and Agnes brought forth my two brothers, Mark, now 70, and Paul, now 69, and me, 67. Each of us have been married since the sixties and together we have ten children. Mark and Alice and all of their children live in Nebraska. Paul and Marianne and one of their two girls live near Milwaukee and the other daughter and family lives in Ohio. Bing and I are up here in the Northwoods where one son and his family live. Our oldest son and his two children live near Green Bay. And the middle son and his wife live in Portland, Or. When our neice put out the feeler e-mail early this Spring to see if anyone was interested in gathering at their house , every single one of the family units responded in the positive. Wow, I was really excited because that meant that the folks were willing to set aside the time and the money to travel from far and wide to meet and mingle and reacquaint. My giddy excitement stemmed from the deep deep family love that is forged by growing up with siblings. For better or for worse, you have started your life stories together. You've shared joys and sorrows, grandparents, aunts and uncles, the family home, values and personality traits. We three siblings last lived together in 1961, and have kept in touch through the last half century by snail mail, attending various weddings and funerals, sharing some holidays and vacations and more recently by the magic of computer communication and Facebook. We've raised our families as best we could, brought forth some kind, friendly, funny people and tried to live and love and learn. The reunion was great and it meant so much that the younger generation cared enough to be there. We shared old memories and made new ones. Thank you, God for family.