STORIES AND A GOOD NAP

I love stories. I love to listen to stories, to people telling me stories, listening to songs that tell a story. I really don't talk all that much. Most of my friends carry the conversation and I listen because it's like they are telling me a story. Guess it stems from when I was a little girl and at nap time my mom or dad laid down with me and my sister and they read or told us stories. My mom read from a very old book of ours wonderful poems like Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright, The Owl and the Pussycat, Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat, Lil' Orphant Annie...stories and poems like that. I read those to my kids too. My dad loved to tell us fables...like the one about the Crow and the Pitcher, The Wolf In Sheep's Clothing, and my favorite The Fox and the Grapes. He would lie back on the pillow with each of us beside him and put his arms behind his head and make up some fables too and we especially loved that~they always pertained to something that happened and it would make us think about doing better. I wish I could tell stories like my daddy could. Just had a thought~maybe that's why I like little short naps so well~ nap time was a very happy time when I was little.

Who Do We Think We Are?

Working on my genealogy again. I've been away from it for a while and realize now that I really made a lot of family connections while I was at it but now I am not remembering the connections as clearly. My, gosh, it really is addicting..causes you to stay up very late especially if you keep finding more and more information. I made a lot of progress on Michael's side this past weekend...found old pictures of grandparents and great grandparents from other unknown relatives' family trees on Ancestry.com. I am sure that I am discovering relatives and pictures that our ancestors never knew existed. I can't emphasize how great that website is and what a boon it is to those of us who are on the road to know who we are and who we are from. The new television show.."Who Do You Think You Are?" is really getting people revved up. And besides it is so much fun solving mysteries in your family that relatives older than us never really talked about. I discovered wills and land owner documents...all kinds of interesting little tidbits to help define who we came from. It is helpful to track illness tendencies within families and we've discovered that many of our relatives lived to very old ages~kind of blows the life expectancy numbers out of the water. Well, back to more discoveries!

Braved the Madding Shopping Crowd

Went shopping yesterday for clothes..just some shoes and a couple jackets. I have not been shopping, seriously, for clothes for 2 years, I'll bet. My friend Suzanne feels sad about that...not me, though! Like Tish from A Femme d'Uncertain Age I have so many clothes I just reinvent outfits from my tiny closet. I went to Stein Mart since it was such a pretty day and I had not been out for a couple days. They had the big 12 hour sale. Oh my gosh! There was not a parking slot and when I finally got parked very far away and entered the building I was not expecting what I saw. There were people everywhere! Throngs of people were entering the building just like a television commercial and I could hardly get in the door. Once in I was amazed that there were 5 check out lines and they all snaked back to the very back of the building. "Wow, do I really want to get involved in this mad house? Well Yeah~ I urged my stubborn lazy self, I need to get out of MY closet and look around at what's new in OTHER'S closets."
I found the couple of jackets and two pair of shoes (need comfortable yet stylish shoes with out high heels these days) Mission accomplished~and by then the lines were much shorter and moved very quickly..My, that was refreshing and not so painful~now I can blend more outfits together.

Springy Morning in the Wildlife Habitat Backyard

Remember Ollie the cat with the secret? He has found a new home at a nice farm with children and several young cats. So the neighbors and I feel very happy about this decision. Here is the next critter to take his place in the wildlife habitat backyard. These pictures were taken between 11am and 12:30pm. His name is Low&Slow. He is really ugly but he loves it here...even if it is in the daytime and he is somewhat mixed up with this daylight savings time. He loves the sunflower seeds that the birds knock out of the bird feeders. I wonder what the squirrels and birds thought..usually Opossums are nocturnal. Wonder if they'd ever seen one before. I took a picture of his feet..euwwww they are really not pretty; ugly as a matter of fact~but he can't help it that we think he is ugly. He thinks he is pretty. I had the fleeting urge to paint his toenails! hahaha Such lovely creatures in our back yard of course...a good place to eat and hang out I guess! Spring is sprung~

West Baden Springs, Indiana

Note*you can enlarge these photos by clicking on them and then they will enlarge again to read the fine print of the angel pictures*

I got to get my annual fix of West Baden Springs on Tuesday. It was a beautiful day~blue sky, no coat needed. A leisurely drive from Aunt Margie's house. It takes my breath away every time. We go every year~I need to go more often~we toured the hotel again and walked the grounds. Trees were just waking up from their winter slumber~birds were singing their spring song~hawks were gliding in pairs and landing on their nests. The sunlight was perfect for picture taking~just enough people visiting to make it festive but still just few enough to make it feel like we were the only ones. I had to take a photo of one of the restrooms~cloth hand towels, fresh parrot tulips in gorgeous jars and beaded purses and shoes framed in gilded shadow boxes. The pillared pavilion had the smell of the sulfur spring when you stepped inside. The Jesuit cemetery is peaceful and is up a winding stone stair~all of the headstones are engraved with the birth and ingress and death of each priest~all the first names ended in a US such as Josephus, Hermannus, Paulus etc. There is a building at the bottom of the cemetery..it says Billiards- Bowling-Pavilion and it is reputed that a lot of gangsters at the turn of the century used to hang out and hide out here. The building is empty ~supposedly but our photos showed otherwise...looked like spiritual activity to me. Are the priests perhaps playing billiards? There was a secret about West Baden Springs that I had never known before. On the top of the dome~a room 700 ft. above the dome that can only be entered by a ladder from the exterior of the dome ~houses paintings of cherubs painted in the style of 15th and 16th century Italian painters. It is thought they were painted there as a spiritual blessing on the hotel. I could just be happy lying on the top of that dome forever!

Dance Three Times A Week

We drove the familiar favorite trek to visit Michael's beloved Aunt Margie on Monday and Tuesday at her clean as a whistle little house full of pink in southern Indiana. She is so cheerful and full of fun; I haven't laughed that hard in such a long time. She will be 88 next month and when we are all together it is like we are all 16. We were laughing at ourselves so hard that our feet were up in the air! We were trying to call her son who is an Elvis Impersonator and singer and published song writer who is very famous in southern Indiana and neither one of us could get our cell phones to work properly. We called every one we knew to no avail. I don't know if it was the reception or that we couldn't get the phones dialed properly with all the laughing. We looked liked texting teenagers! Well, you just had to be there but it was really funny. Her forgetfulness started rubbing off on me! It is so good to laugh till you scream and can't understand each other 'cause you're laughin' and squealin' so much, ya know!
Aunt Margie has a boyfriend and they go to a dance 3 times a week! Sometimes they go on the "senior party bus"! Believe me we were waiting for her to arrive home one night and the party bus pulled up and you'd have thought it was a bus full of teenagers! There was so much "carrying on" I'd love to be on there to see if anything inappropriate was going on! haha She says no matter how you feel when you get older once you start dancing every ache and pain and stiffness goes away.
"Junior" takes her everywhere for pleasure and errands and they never eat at home. He drives one of the shuttles between French Lick Hotel and West Baden Springs Hotel during the day and has for 27 years. He knows every body and every body knows him. It "aggravates" Aunt Margie, as she puts it in her sweet southern Indiana twang, that when ever they call him to work he goes no matter if he planned to take her to church or whatever. They are so cute. She told me the dances they go to are always crowded with Seniors..women looking for men and men looking for women. When one of the women gets a boyfriend the other women gather around her and interrogate her..."Does he have money? No, he doesn't have much money. Well, is he good looking? Well, no he's not that good a lookin', but he can DRIVE at night!" We laughed even harder when she told me that story! Aunt Margie attracts a lot of men but she has decided to stick with the one she has; he's awful good to her she says and always is particular about how he dresses. That's important to her..every woman wants a sharp dressed man! Even though he likes the attention the other women give him, he must have decided to stick with Aunt Margie as evidenced by the framed pictures of himself when he was in World War II that he brought over and placed around her house; especially next to her bed!

My Favorite Women

My favorite women in my circle of friends are the 70-90+ year olds. They really have interesting views on life and love and still know how to dress up and they love jewels on their shoes. I love their sense of humor too. When I asked Aunt Margie if she was still going with the guy she was seeing last time I saw her which was about 3 years ago, she said..As of last night I was...she cracked me up! Not only great senses of humor but also style. Maybe this love stems from when I was a little girl and I spent a lot of time with my mom and aunts..having coffee and cookies and listening to their talk about hair, and makeup and nails and clothes and cooking and cleaning...women's topics of conversation~however what I found interesting at an early age was not so much their conversations as their mannerisms. I watched every move they made and watched how they applied their lipstick, put their jeweled eyeglasses on and off, how they used their hands to gesture during their conversation or pursed their lips to sip their drinks. They had their almond shaped fingernails painted with rosy iridescent color, their hair fixed just right, wearing sundresses and cork heeled wedge shoes with fruit on the top and always purses to match in the summer months. The winter brought out the mink stoles or little joined foxes around their shoulders~again with a purse to match. Oh my how good they smelled too. I could always tell my aunts had been to grandma's house because their expensive perfume lingered in the air. My Aunt Pauline served the best coffee(they put a splash of coffee in my milk in a tea cup) and those cookies that were vanilla wafers with pink marshmallow puffs on top sprinkled with coconut. I thought those were so elegant. These she served under a crystal chandelier that I would lie on the chair and stair up at..getting lost in the sparkly crystals. Aunt Pauline also had a huge diamond ring that I thought was a big at the chandelier crystals...probably not far from it, now that I think of it. There was a mural on the dining room wall of a far away place...I wanted to just go into the wall and follow the lane, maybe there would be houses filled with crystals just like on the chandelier. I hope I can live as long as my friends and be as humorous and stylish as they are at this age.