Among quite a few goals for January, three of them seemed lofty.
One was getting the carpet crew in to remove and replace two rooms’ full of the stuff. The hardest part was that Brian and I signed on to do all the heavy lifting of our Stonehenge-like furnishings. Moving things like a glass-front secretary, marble-top table, sectional sofa, two library tables, two TVs, a small entertainment center, bedroom suite, roll-top desk (again!) and several chairs might put us both in traction for a month and run up a hospital bill but we sure would save a few bucks on the installation. Shrewd, we are. The second was getting my mathematical ducks in a row and paying the 2015 Indiana sales tax on my book biz. Last year that task took a ridiculous amount of time due to my inexperience with retail merchant certification, deadlines, and my own bookkeeping – all summed up in a composition notebook – while the tax filing and paying part of the job was all done online. The third, and perhaps most daunting because it has been put on the household back burner for years now, was loading up all of Ben’s childhood and teen years’ relics from the closet in the room he had at home and hauling it all to the attic. Oh, I can hear the critics now: “Why don’t you make him do it?” Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because at 24, he’s too old to care about any of that stuff right now, and too young to realize that one day he will. In the meantime, we’re the ones who will likely help him move heaven only knows how many times and we don’t want to haul around the dozen or so containers full of his vintage things. That’s why we’ve kept the closet doors shut tight and ignored the trophies, photos, baseball cards, prom sashes, college notebooks, and texts. If Brian had his way we’d just keep it all tucked away in that closet but I have developed a strong hankering for the active use of that closet. I want to move all my book-related stuff in there and spread out rather than it all sharing space with the Christmas tubs in Sam’s former closet. Well, what a week! On Tuesday night and Wednesday day and night, we hauled furniture, got the new carpeting put down and put everything back into place before we hit the hay hard Wednesday night. The new carpeting is plush and soft and feels like walking on a warm, cozy blanket. Yes, it's brown, which seems to be our color of choice. Call us dull if you must. But it seems exactly right. We love it! No traction yet from Stonehenge, but sometimes back spasms take a few days to materialize. Holding out hope here. This morning I got up and filed the state sales taxes. I had someone from the state hold my hand, cyber-style. But the tax is filed. And this afternoon, I loaded Ben’s closet belongings and Brian hauled them to the attic. I have to hand it to him in that while it wasn’t a task on his list of new year’s hopes and dreams, he knew it was on mine, and so he did the heavy lifting with me in mind and very little complaining. I haven’t gotten around yet to filling that closet but it will be a beautiful thing: an organized closet devoted to the current book and the next one too without wreaths and angels falling into the fold. Oh, yes. I can’t say I’m the least bit excited about Sunday and Monday’s plans. Yes, I have to prep and proceed with my first routine colonoscopy. I’ve put it off for a long time. But I know others who have a few or more years on me who haven’t had theirs, either. It’s a dreary thing, and I’m missing two meetings I hate to miss and a day of work in the process. But come Monday night, I will have another learning experience (ba-boom) behind me.
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I have a stack of old postcards that date from around 1900 to 1910. They are in about perfect condition, as though mailed yesterday, and they are all addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Robert McDougal, R.R. # 6, Box 55, Liberty, Ind., or sometimes, curiously, just to them at Brownsville, Ind. I think they lived between the two towns and I suppose postal staff at either town made sure they got their mail. The McDougals were my great-great-grandparents on my father’s side. Donna McDougal was their daughter and became Donna Jobe – the mother of my grandfather. I was named for her. The McDougals were entombed in an above-ground vault "up on the hill” in Brownsville. My brother, Tim, even has the key to the vault but found that the key only opens the exterior gate. The cards were written by Donna’s sister, Grace. From what I gather from reading the cards, Grace lived in Indianapolis during the early 1900s and sent this flurry of cards to her family back home in Union County during over the course of a decade. There are seasonal cards, birthday cards, cards for holidays and my favorite ones – scenes from Indianapolis. There's one picturing the U.S. President from Ohio, William Howard Taft, one of people boating in Glen Miller Park, and one from 1909 of BOnd's Department Store in Liberty. There are cards with flowers and pastures and two featuring herds of sheep from Melbourne, Australia. The McDougals came to Union County in the 1830s from Scotland. I wonder if some of their kin settled in Australia. Just a guess. There are several cards featuring sites from inside Indianapolis. I wonder if these points of interest still exist. Obviously, Union Station and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument do, but what about some of the other parks and landmarks? Have a look. Who knows? Some of the sites may resonate with you and if they do, please leave a comment. This is it in the blogosphere for 2015. But I’ll be back at it in 2016 as I share random thoughts on the writing life – and life in general – with you. Please join me then. So make a resolution or two – or not. Have a toast – or not. Stay up until midnight – or go to bed early and get an early start on New Year’s morning. However you choose to see in 2016, be safe and see you next year. I guess you know you are a farm girl at heart when you look forward to a barn festival and tour of southern-Indiana barns. And all the better when you get to take the tour with a van load of like-minded gal pals.
That's the plan for Saturday, Oct. 3, and I thought if you are a farm-geek like me, you might want to know about the doings. A bunch of interesting barns are on tour in Madison and Switzerland counties from 9-5 tomorrow. Some are drive bys, and others, I think you can go inside. Then at 5, just outside of Madison, there's the grand finale, farm style, it's a Barn Fest, with food, music and more. I wonder what they mean by "and more?" A hoe-down? A shindig? Guess we'll find out. Yee-haw. Check out the Indiana Barn Foundation on Facebook for details about the festival. (Scroll down; they curiously don't have it as the lead post). Basically, you'll need to slip by the Switzerland County or Madison (city, not county) tourism bureaus to pay a small fee for directions and addresses and you are off. As for the photo with this post, it's my late grandfather, Roscoe Jobe, with his draft horses. This is one of, if not my very favorite old family photo. For one thing, Roscoe looks exactly like my own father, and for another, the photo is taken in front of the barn that was on our farm all of my growing up years. It's still there today. I never knew Roscoe -- he passed on before I was born -- but Dad spent countless hours in that barn. It was, I suppose, his office, so to speak. I always found something comforting about seeing the barn lights aglow at night, spreading yellow light across the barnyard evenings when he was working late welding something that broke or doing whatever it was he did in his special domain. When I think of Dad, I see him in his barn. In this barn. I came along when we had tractors, not work horses. I would have loved to have seen and known them. But now, it's all part of Indiana farm history, not the way things are today. But tomorrow, we'll take a tour of the way things were. Can't think of a better way to spend an October Saturday. Maybe if you don't have anything else on your plate, you'll join us; we'll offer up a friendly howdy-do wave as we pass you on the back roads. It's a rural thing, you know. |
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