Summer

I’m trying to write outside in the screen house here by the river on this beautiful cool pre-fall summer day. But of course a lawn mower starts up. It’s also a perfect day for mowing at the end of this rainy summer here in Minnesota. The river is still full as it heads south which is, of course, the direction that we are beginning to think of going…after we take a sideways route across Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. This is our last weekend here at Mississippi Riverwood.

Full moon over the river

Not much is planned for this weekend except for Niece Aleatha’s wedding reception which is being held at the same location as the wedding was last April. She has had a busy summer and baby Marjorie Helen is getting chubby and strong already. I haven’t seen her since July but FB pictures tell me how much she has grown.

 It is good to have a fairly quiet weekend as we have not had one for quite a while. Two weeks ago we packed up the camper and headed up north to the Minnesota Blue Grass and Old Time Music Festival at El Rancho Manana. Brothers Ludwig and Doug were there as usual and Greg, Peggy and Edie joined us. Great music, good food,

Breakfast at the festival

good company and late nights are the typical experiences, only made better these last 2 years because with Edie I can go and hang out in the family area and enjoy watching her string beads and paint or walk through the magnificent mud on the road up to Old Wash Machine Field where my brothers camp. We can’t camp there anymore unless we leave the camper behind.

At Deb's houe

Then last weekend we headed up to Duluth with Greg’s family to see the Tall Ships Festival. Niece Deb and her family are on vacation out west and let us stay at her house. She has a wonderful old two-story house in the city. It is filled with the comfortable feeling of their lives, books and plants and a basket of rocks, with 2 cats we took care of while we were there. Her 2 teenage children let us use their rooms. They had found some toys that Edie enjoyed.

This weekend we just have the reception and we will have dinner with Greg and Peggy Sunday night at their home. Edie starts pre-school on Monday so they are moving to the school schedule. Greg will be 40 next week. So we better celebrate that. Don’s gift to Greg this year was in the form of labor. They painted on Kelly’s house and Greg got the money for both their work and purchased the supplies to move his fence. Then the two of them spent a couple of days getting that done. They also spent a day putting a slide topper on the big slide-out on our camper.

The Unicorn

The winner (I was the judge)

Baby

Of course, I just babysat while they were doing all of that. That includes camping in the living room. I don’t fit in the tent along with all the luggage so I slept with my head in the tent. I competed in a beauty contest with a unicorn, Barbie and Baby. Edie won the contest of course. She was hands down the most beautiful.

Barbie

Grandma

Brother Jake was discharged from the hospital to the Forensic Nursing Home in St. Peter. His condition is somewhat better. He is fed through a feeding tube and gets oxygen. He still has pneumonia and is very weak and bedridden. The bright side is that the nursing home is state funded and has adequate resources to provide good nursing care and it is a comfortable, clean and well lit. Overall a very nice facility. He may actually recover. Kay and I met with the social worker and she seemed to genuinely care about him. We should all get such good care if we find ourselves in that situation.

Our cousin, Jimmy Dunlap died last weekend. He is not the first in our generation to die. We have other  cousins who have died from cancer in their 50’s. Those were just not right. But Jimmy was 70. He was a few months younger than brother Bob. They were the first 2 children in our generation back in 1945. Jim was the personification of tall, dark and handsome. He was also big enough to take me by the hands and swing me around until I was dizzy back when I was 8 or 9. He and his sister Kathy spent days at our farm and we spent days up north at Camp Deer where they lived. But there is no funeral now. They will have a memorial event next spring. I hope we are back in the state for that. The week after Labor Day we will be up at Camp Deer for the Jug Band Boogie where we can give our condolences to Em (Jim’s wife) and Norman (his little brother).

Labor Day weekend we are planning a family reunion by Brainerd. You wouldn’t think we would need a reunion a week after a wedding reception but that is just how things work out. After the Jug Band Boogie, we will head out east and then south and west to visit friends in Illinois and Missouri before going back to Texas.

Here’s some poetry or something

Running in Flip Flops

I wear flip flops most of the time now and

Often I have to run

A foot race with barefoot Edie, laughing all the way

Catching that girl when she trys to get away…

Yes, I can still outrun her.

To get to the other end of the camper to check for obstacles

To the driver’s window to consult with my driver

Then back to the other side to check the branches of the tree

Then to the back so he doesn’t go too far.

No, we are not yelling at each other.

Just trying to communicate.

Yes, I run in flip-flops even though it is not recommended.

Writing prompts:

Running in flip flops

Leaving Minnesota

My son is 40

2 funerals and a wedding followed by a family reunion?

An Existential Crisis

A long time ago before I did much of anything as an adult I was a French major at the University of Minnesota so I made these associations.

My brother Jake is about 2 ½ years older than me. My sister Jean is between us so we weren’t all that close in age. I started out to write a humorous post here but in order to put the humor in context, I have to write about Jake and that is a sad story. The summer I turned 18 and was about to head off to the University to major in French, Jake was discharged from the Navy because he was disabled. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which I knew about at the time because I had just completed a 1 semester high school class in psychology. When I read the letter my mother showed me even I could diagnose him and it was like I lost him then. That was 49 years ago. Fast forward to today. His life took a turn for the worse this year when he was transferred from the VA hospital in St. Cloud, MN where he has spent much of his life, to the Security Hospital in St. Peter, MN. He has not done well there and developed pneumonia and was hospitalized in Mankato, MN about an hour’s drive south of Minneapolis. They managed to save his life and after several days on a respirator in ICU he was transferred to another room where he is being maintained with oxygen, a feeding tube, fluids by IV, a catheter and is completely bedridden. He is conscious and can communicate and knows what’s going on.  

So this is the sad situation that brought my sister Kay and me to go to Mankato to see him and find out what he wants for his life. Not surprisingly, it turns out that he just wants to get out of it, life that is. He has a court appointed guardian and can’t make his own health care decisions so one of our goals was to find out what he wants so we could communicate that to his guardian. We did that and we spent several hours there with him because you see I didn’t lose him 49 years ago and even though many of my experiences growing up with him were pretty negative as is the case with just about all of my 12 brothers and sisters he was one of the first people that I knew in my life. It made me very sad and I wished that I could at least help him be more comfortable.

When Kay and I arrived at his room, we found him as I’ve described above. A young man sitting in the corner of the room is a staff person from St. Peter Security Hospital. He has someone with him 24/7. I guess because they think because of his past behavior that he might pose a threat to hospital personnel. Anyway, both this young man and the one who came to relieve him were both kind and respectful towards Jake and us. It’s probably good for Jake to have someone with him so I won’t complain about them being there. They are also helpful and know what’s going on. When Jake said that he wanted to sit in a chair, the nice young man informed us that physical therapy would be there within the hour and they would get Jake up and sit him in a chair. We tried to make small talk but Jake wasn’t interested in much of anything except sitting up so we just waited for the thinking he might do better once he was sitting up. So we waited. Jake dozed off and Kay went back to the car to get the crossword puzzle we had been working on. When she came back she said that she took the stairs down and that she was worried because there was a sign on door at each landing that said “NO EXIT”. We waited. Jake began asking for Ashley whose name was on the white board as his nurse. We paged her and Heidi (the second name on the board) showed up. She said that Ashley was at lunch and would be back in an hour. Jake told her that he wanted to sit in a chair. She said that PT was going to be there soon to help him sit up. So we waited some more. Jake continued to tell us to get Ashley or Heidi from time to time and we told him that someone would be there soon. Eventually I went to the nurse’s station and asked. They said that they were trying to locate a chair he could sit in so I went back and reported that to Jake. And we waited. These things happened repeatedly over the course of the 3 hours we were there. PT never did show up and we never did get to meet Ashley. The St. Peter’s staff shift changed and eventually we left because it was getting late. As we walked down the stairs and I saw the NO EXIT sign on every door down 4 flights of stairs it appeared there was no way out. I said to Kay, “Oh my God, we’ve been trapped in an existential play!” And I remembered being a French major in college reading existential plays, “No Exit” by Jean Paul Sartre, and “Waiting for Godot” by Albert Camus   Samuel Beckett. Google up the plays and read the Cliff Notes or the whole play to understand what we went through that day.

Rivers

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago... just now getting posted. Pictures to be added later.)

This has been the summer of rivers….

The Mississippi from our back yard

Here at Mississippi Riverwood, the Mississippi is high and flowing fast – for the Mississippi, that is. Most of the time it is in no hurry. It has 1230 miles to drop about 1000 feet to the Gulf of Mexico.

Unlike the rivers from where it originates in Yellowstone Park. Those rivers are in a hurry. As we were driving along somewhere near the Idaho/Montana border, I realized we had left the Snake River

The Snake coming out of the Tetons

behind and were following the Madison and I thought, “Wow! This water is headed to the Mississippi.” And I pondered the scale of the watershed that drains into that river, from where I was over to the other side of Ohio or somewhere. I’m not sure where that divide is but maybe as far as the Appalachians. Those mountain streams we were near, formed from recently melted snow are racing, tumbling down hill

The Yellowstone in Yellowstone NP

The Yellowstone following I94

sometimes dropping 1000 feet in ¼ mile. The Madison, Jefferson and Gallatin join up to form the Missouri River which takes it’s time to cross the Great Plains and the prairies to join the Mississippi in St. Louis. The Yellowstone
passes through Columbus, Laurel and Billings and joins up with the Missouri downstream near the Montana/North Dakota border. Highway 94 follows the Yellowstone to the edge of Montana.

Then we moved Down the Missouri to Pierre, South Dakota where we ate Walleye harvested from that river on its way to St. Louis.

The Colorado at Glen Canyon

The Rio Grand in the RGV

But we started the year in the Rio Grande Valley, just a few miles from where it finds its way into the Gulf. That place doesn’t look like a valley. There are no great hills or bluffs going down to the river. The land is flat there. We found the Rio Grande again in Albuquerque where it looks more like a normal river. Somewhere through Arizona or Southern Utah, we came into the Colorado River watershed. The Colorado and its tributaries have carved out amazing and beautiful canyons and waterfalls in its hurry to get to Mexico and the Gulf of California. It needs to move a lot of water to take care of so many thirsty people and their bountiful crops as it travels along the California-Arizona border. We saw that last year. This year we spent time near the Green River before it joins the Colorado in Canyonlands National Park in Utah and the Virgin River in Zion National Park. In those places they warn of flash floods where a river can rise 20 feet suddenly and if you’re in a canyon, you have nowhere to go so the river will do whatever it wants with you and you’ll probably never get to tell about the experience.

Salt Lake City has the Jordan River which goes to the Great Salt Lake which goes nowhere. Kind of a landlocked watershed, I guess.

As we traveled over the Wasatch Mountains into Idaho, we came into the Snake River Plain. The Snake and its aquifer feed Idaho. If you’ve eaten potatoes from Idaho, you probably got a little bit of the Snake River. It comes out of the Tetons and snakes its way through central Idaho where it provides abundant water to make Idaho a bread basket or potato basket, field upon field of potatoes, wheat and some hay for the many cattle. In June green as far as the eye can see. We were in Pocatello on June 5 which is the 40^th anniversary of the Teton Dam failure. That was the news headline. On that day in 1976, the Teton Dam collapsed and the reservoir emptied into the Snake River at a rate of 2 million gallons per second. Only 11 people died but the town of Rexburg now has a flood museum which was closed on the Saturday afternoon we were there. All of the towns along the river that we visited (Pocatello, Idaho Falls and Rexburg) have their flood story to tell. The Snake joins the Columbia River in Oregon when it leaves Idaho and heads over to the Pacific Ocean. We traveled along that River on our way out of Oregon last summer.

Where we’re parked on the Mississippi now, we are about 180 miles from Lake Itasca where the river starts and already here, north of Minneapolis, it is a big river.

I last posted on this blog from Fort Pierre, South Dakota. Here’s where we’ve been since then.

July 9 – Finstead’s Oak Haven Campground, New Ulm, Minnesota

July 10-13 – Dakotah Meadows RV Park by Mystic Lake Casino in Prior Lake, Minnesota

July 14 – Reunion with college friends Jerry and Colleen Bahma, Jim and Lisa Fallencheck and Larry and Marge Teig at the Bahmas in Spicer, Minnesota

July 15 – present at Mississippi Riverwoods RV Park in Otsego, Minnesota. We plan to stay here until September 1 and begin moving north before heading south again. We will take the rig up to the MBOTMA festival in a couple of weeks and then return here. 

It’s nice to be staying in one place for a while. Here we are a 45 minute drive from Greg’s place if the traffic is cooperating. Since we are on the route “up north” on Friday and Sunday afternoons it can take longer. But on a week day, Greg can make the trip pretty easily or we can go in to the city. We have a screen house on a patio in which we have set up our table and chairs. The table adjusts to a low height making it ideal for art projects (Edie is into water colors) or now writing on the computer. It’s a little bright but I’m making it work. I get to watch the river and enjoy the breeze in the shade.

I feel some pressure to try to get to see her as often as possible since it seems our time in Minnesota is so short. I’ve agreed to head out right after the Jug Band Boogie the week after Labor Day again this year. We’ll be going east through Wisconsin to the Upper Peninsula and then down through Michigan to Illinois. We have our obligatory trip through Illinois and Missouri to visit friends every fall before we head to Texas.