There were slap fights on the playground, and sometimes we guys would have a “Slap Off” tournament, which involved speed much more than force. These could be fun (if you were winning) until you got down to the end and realized you had to face Todd, the slap champ, who never lost. I carried my brown paper sack lunch to school and would open it to find a note on top. It was from my mother, usually just telling me how much she loved me, sometimes giving commentary about something we had recently seen on TV or read or talked about. My two favorite teachers at the end of elementary school were one who was pregnant that we threw a surprise baby shower for, Mrs Mitchel, and one who told Italian ghetto stories at the beginning of history class, or longer and better ones at the end of class if we were good, Mr Bonanno. A black girl named Patty one time told me I was good looking for a white boy, which I did not really understand, but appreciated anyway. We had to suffer through trying to learn both New Math and the metric system, both subjects that were eventually done away with. One year we were presented with a little boy dressed up as George Washington, and the adults told us he was a distant relative of the first president. He didn’t do anything but stand at attention and look at the class. I attended Monroe from kindergarten through sixth grade, but actually made my first visit as a baby, when my older sister took me to school as her show and tell display. Thanks Ann!
Here in Iowa, like most of the rest of the country, we are currently locked into a polar vortex that is producing low temperatures of double digits below zero and highs of single digits above zero, sometimes not even reaching above zero. There has been steady snow to go with the cold out here on the acreage, along with the accompanying winds that turn a couple inches of snowfall into two foot high drifts around the outbuildings and across the driveway. Both the house and shop propane tanks were filled at the end of December and are now at 50%. I worry about how often the furnace keeps kicking on, day and night, if it is wearing out. Thankfully our tractor, outfitted with a snow thrower, continues to start and keep us dug out. It is an old John Deere 420 that I encourage before trying to start it, pleading with it, “Come on old girl,” then praising it when we are done and back in the machine shed and I am brushing the snow off of it, “Good job old girl.” The dogs always come out with me, to look for bunnies in the shed when I open the door, then to run around the yard and on top of the hard packed snow drifts while I am clearing the snow. When the job is done they are ready to come back in with me, all three of us cold and snowy, looking for warmth and comfort. Today, Valentines Day, the high temperature here was -7.
Once a month I highlight a piece of art I have created and posted on my Fine Art America site. This one is titled It Throws A Fit from the Collage Collection.
I love reading year end and new year lists. For the first time I kept track of all the books I read during a year. I read both fiction and nonfiction, and the subject matter was all over the place, which I expect to happen again this year as I continue to downsize my library.
Contemporary American Novelists 1900-1920 By Carl Van Doren
In The Wake Of The Plague By Norman F. Canter
Thurber Country By James Thurber
The Apostle, A Life Of Paul By John Pollock
American Heritage, June 1966
Great Events of the 20th Century By the Editors of TIME
The Troll Garden By Willa Cather
What A Way To Go By Adele Q. Brown
The Medieval Establishment By Geoffrey Hindley
A Journal of the Plague Year By Daniel Defoe
A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains By Isabella L. Bird
Five Chimneys By Olga Lengyel
Sweet Thursday By John Steinbeck
Profiles Of Modern American Authors By Bernard Dekle
In Dubious Battle By John Steinbeck
Trout Fishing In America By Richard Brautigan
Bend Sinister By Vladimir Nabokov
The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony And Other Stories By Franz Kafka
Laughing Space Edited By Isaac Asimov and J.O. Jepson
Smiling Through the Apocalypse Edited by Harold Hayes
The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Earth, My Friend By Peter Townsend
The Steamboat Bertrand By Jerome E. Petsche
Making and Using Dried Foods By Phyllis Hobson
A Pictorial History Of Westerns By Michael Parkinson and Clyde Jeavons
Black Elk Speaks By John G. Neihardt
Founding Brothers By Joseph J. Ellis
How To Live On Almost Nothing And Have Plenty By Janet Chadwick
The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846-1890 By Robert M. Utley
Off The Back Porch 