The relatives came

Is that puppy real?

Looking at animal web cam sites

    Before and after our week at Manzanita, the relatives came to  our house.  Late Friday night we had three little grandsons sleeping on air mattresses on the floor of my study.  What happiness to have their  presence in the house!
      The next morning I set Paul and Tina to the task of figuring out which of Paul's school photos came from which grade. Judy picked up the cousins at the train station.  After  basketball and tacos and lots of arranging luggage in trunks, everybody drove off to the beach.   Judy and I re-made the beds for David and family, who came in on Sunday.

Vonnie meets Arnie

Simone's special spot on the hearth

Cole and Bianca

Cousin Andy

     After our glorious beach week, we had another happy  coming- and- going Saturday.  Courtney and the girls were staying here.  Paul and family made a cameo appearance before we dropped them off at the airport.  Judy retrieved the cousins from the rental car place, and we sent them on their sightseeing way in our white car.  We took Maxine and Simone to the local aquarium, where  Simone fed sharks and Maxine stood very still while a parrot perched on her shoulder.

Paul

Dulcimer lesson

   The next day, Vonnie and Ernie and Cole and Bianca came in.  The Armstrong cousins joined us for dinner, along with the neighbors, who brought good dog Arnie. Vonnnie's family left early Monday morning.
     The Armstrongs came to dinner Monday afternoon.

Puzzle meister

 Judy taught Mary Ellen how to play the dulcimer.  Cousin Peter, who loves cars, began a detail job on the Prius.  Andy and Glen moved the armchairs back into my study.  That night,  I dropped the cousins off at the airport.  I returned to a house of just the two of us, and started missing everybody.
     Not for long.  The last relatives left on Monday night .  On Wednesday we drove  to the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle for Judy to consult with one of the top pulmonology researchers in the country.   The doctors in Portland hoped that Dr. Ragu would recommend  drug or management trials that might make Judy feel better and prolong her life. The options Dr. Ragu talked about are not appealing:

John off to the marmot count

1.  A drug trial sponsored by a pharmaceutical company in which you inject yourself with a mystery drug every week for three years, in order to discover if the drug is safe for humans.
2.  A study sponsored by NIH at the University of Washington, where you travel to Seattle in twice  a week for three months to inhale a small amount of carbon monoxide.  (Judy says, "I could just hook myself up to a tailpipe.")  It is a double blind study, so you could be driving to Seattle twice a week  to inhale air.

Kate and son Josh

    After Judy's appointment we took the ferry across Puget Sound to Rose and John's house in Sequim  for an evening with old friends.  John's brother Chas and Kris were there, talking jigsaw puzzles.  Kate, friend since high school days, was visiting from the east coast.  The next morning the house was filled with John's hiking buddies, as they prepared for four days of counting marmots in the Olympic Mountains.
     We came home and began packing up the toys and picture books to store them in the garage. I deflated the air mattresses and put them away.   I kept on my dresser top the puzzle Maxine and I had put together the night before she left.  She was singing the whole time.
    
  

Chariots of Fire

Racing against time

Lots of creatures

Wonders

     The morning low tides at Manzanita revealed hundreds of starfish, mussels, and sand dollars in the tide pools at the rocky end of the sandy beach.    Our crowd trooped up there in the early mornings, carefully timing their viewing for the lowest tide.   They came  back to the cottages with tales and photos of fabulous sights.

     A long walk across soft sand was beyond Judy's  ability, but we still  tried to figure out how to get her to the tide pools.  The evening before our last morning at the coast, we discovered that the town of Manzanita has wheelchairs available that have fat tires for using on the beach.  The wheelchairs are lent through the local bike shop, which opens at 9AM. Low tide that morning was predicted  at  9:11 AM.

Setting off

    The race against the turn of the tide began.  If we got to the tide pools too late, the water would come in and cover the creatures.  If it came in too  fast, it could  trap us amid the rocks and make it difficult to climb above the tide line.

Starfish sun

    John found the bike shop owner, who handed him a beach wheelchair at exactly 9 o'clock.  John stuffed it in his car and drove back to the beach in front of the cottage, where Judy and David and Paul were waiting. Paul pushed Judy at a run, with David navigating, up the sandy beach to the tide pools.

Judy at the tide pools

Tide pool jewels

     The starfish looked like soft jewels, covering rock after rock as far as we could see.  Mussels and barnacles made a crust on other rocks.  We didn't have long to glory in the animals before the tide turned and waves began to splash over the amazing sights.

Happy

 Judy scrambled back to the beach wheelchair, and  David pushed her  along the sandy beach to the cottage.

Mission accomplished

Beach LIfe

Nap time on porch

     I was sitting on the porch of the library cottage, rocking Simone through her long afternoon nap.  My sisters Rose and Vonnie came over to visit.   Down on the beach  I could see Jack flying his kite, Megan riding her skim board, and the little ones digging in the sand.   I  looked through the open door  into the cottage living room and saw the sunlight through Judy's silver hair. Beyond her, through the front windows, there was the  shining tide  running out to meet the clouds.  I was as close to heaven as I could imagine.

Megan on skim board

    My family has gathered at the shore in Delaware for over thirty years.  This summer, for the first time, Rose and I lured them to Manzanita on  the Oregon Coast.  They came from Boston, Chicago, Maryland, and Texas.  Four cousins came by train from Gettysburg and Baltimore. We rented five houses, three of them adjacent and two nearby.  The compound made it possible for the children to go from house to house on their own recognizance.   "You told Sam and Charlie that had to wait until 7:15 to come over?'"  I  said to brother-in-law John,  "I make them wait until 9."

Cousins 2013

Cousins 1983

     The chess board and ping pong table saw regular use.  Lucy and Jamie made an art gallery, complete with captions like "Put a bird on it."  Maxine and Sammy spent days pretending to be hunters. Judy gave Lucy ukulele lessons.  Lucy and Maxine sang songs in the hammock for hours, with Jamie rocking them.  Jack proved that he could stand on his head in the water.  Charlie, who loves babies, made Simone laugh.

Singing and swinging

Ukulele lesson

     There was a small  creek running hidden in the woods  behind Vonnie's house.  Lucy and Megan made fairy boats out of large leaves.  Jack led the  project of clearing a new path and building a bridge across the stream.
    We ate and drank well, of course, thanks to the next generation.  Jess made spaghetti, Tina cooked pork, David used a pound of bacon in his beef stew, and Cole simmered chicken in tomatoes and spices and served it over noodles. There was a fish and crab lunch al fresco that reminded me of European movies.

What's a good clue?

     Games went on all the time, but especially after dinner.  One night, there were 11 around the table playing Taboo.  Maxine kept score. Sam made buzzing sounds as the timer, and Taboo novices like Jack and Megan held their own against the mighty Jess.
     Bianca and Tina whizzed through several 1000- piece jigsaw puzzles.  Chas sent a wooden puzzle he created from a photo of the library cottage.  It is difficult, with no picture to follow and interlocking triangular pieces forming the edges.  We timed Bianca, who completed it in 52 minutes, 45  minutes faster than Chas himself had taken to do it.

Puzzzle ace

   John led a hike to the top of Neahkahnie Mountain.  Being a careful mountaineer, he made the four-mile climb in the morning before leading the very mixed group up in the afternoon. David, Maxine, and friend Christopher did the same hike the next day.  Later Maxine looked out the window at the mountain and said, "I walked to the top of that."

Mountaintop

Beach bike cousins

        One late afternoon the group congregated  at waters' edge, taking turns  racing around on beach bicycles. There were a few overturns.  Josh,  who cycled  450  miles across Iowa this summer, had no trouble on the beach.

Pretty happy

     On the last night of our week at the coast Paul and Tina built a campfire on the beach.  They made S'mores with marshmallows so large that they required special strategies to cook and eat them.

    Whenever I greet John with, "How are you?"  he replies, "Pretty happy."  We were all pretty happy in Manzanita.
  
  
  
  
    

  
  

Sisters outdoor quilt show

Quilted car

Hugo Cabret quilt

     The tiny high desert town of Sisters, Oregon stages an outdoor quilt show every July.  They close the main street, and volunteer  firefighters hang  quilts from walls and balconies throughout  the town.   Quilt lovers from all over the US and Canada swarm in, oohing and aahing and buying fabric.   Judy and I have longed to go to the show, but even the handicapped parking lot is a distance from the quilts, and Central Oregon can get very hot in summer.  This year the temperatures were due to remain in the 80s, and friends alerted us to a charter bus that would drop us off in the center of town.  So off we went.

My favorite

Fire lookout on Black Butte

    When Judy was a young surgical nurse in her thirties, she spent a lot of time in the Sisters area.   During the bus  ride, while the forests  we were passing through changed from Douglas fir to Ponderosa pine, she told me stories of her adventures.  It was a treat for me to get a few glimpses of Judy's life before we met. Here is one story:   Once Judy climbed Black Butte.  She was almost to the fire lookout at the summit of the mountain when a ranger told her to run.   She  had to race down the mountain just ahead of of a thunderstorm.
    There were over 1300 quilts displayed this year  in Sisters, and we wanted to see them all.   There were old- fashioned quilts and contemporary quilts and an Elvis quilt. There was giant quilted sphere and a quilted minivan.   There was a whole set of pieces inspired by the children's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret.  The coffee shop sponsored quilts from a women's co-operative in the coffee-growing region of Uganda. My favorite of all was a  traditional pieced quilt that hung outside of the Stitchin' Post fabric shop.  My mother would have loved that one.

Judy with equipment and mascot

Detail

    For this 38th annual festival,  the town was well set up to accommodate thousands of tourists, almost all of them middle -aged women.  There were water refill stations, folding chairs set up in every inch of shade, and plenty of bathrooms.  The Lutheran church sponsored a buffet lunch, and enterprising boys bicycled down the center of the street puling a  cooler with  bottled water for sale.  The easy chairs in  the quiet Paulina Springs bookstore provided us a respite when the sun and the crowds got to be too much.

Becky

    Judy brought three tanks of oxygen on the trip, and rolled them around the town on a walker.  A few weeks ago  our friend Roxy made two puppets to keep  Judy company when she is tethered to oxygen.  The puppets went along with us to Sisters.  Sweet Becky sipped iced tea with Judy, and read some picture books, and petted a few dogs.  But it is fierce fighter Bo, named for Queen Boudica the warrior queen, who has become  Judy's constant companion.
     We were quiet on the bus going back to Portland.  There was a woman with a strong Texas accent  sitting two rows ahead of us.  She talked non- stop during the three hour trip to Sisters.  By the time she had talked non-stop for the three hours back, I felt like I knew her life story.  I was no longer annoyed by her, but grateful for the entertainment during the long ride home.

Bo

  
  
  

New car

New car

    One car at a time is my limit.  I don't want to research, shop for, bargain for, finance, register, repair or maintain more than one car at a time.  I held to this boundary  even long ago in my mean- mother phase of life.  When Paul was sixteen and eager for wheels,  I told him to put the wish out to the world.  Sure enough, my mother's neighbor Mrs. Ozur offered to give her old Chevette to Paul instead of to the Salvation Army.  Paul gave it new brakes and made some minor repairs, and reimbursed me sometimes for his insurance premiums.  He made jokes about  his "'Vette" to his friends who were given fancy cars for their birthdays, but he took care of it and drove it safely.    I only  dealt with one car at a time.

It served us well

Signs of age

     In our life today, we have a Prius, which I researched, shopped for, financed, registered, and insured 7 years ago.  We also have a 1996 Mercury Mercoux that we inherited.  It has been time to put the Mercury out of its misery for several years now.
     We thought that a minivan might be useful for getting oxygen into and out of the back seat.   Later on, we might need to transport a scooter or a wheelchair. I brought home the Consumer Reports auto issue, got advice and recommendations from my car- loving son David, and began a mental dithering dance about choosing a replacement for the Mercury.  This went on for about a year.
   Fortunately, Judy has a different approach to acquiring cars than I do.  One Saturday, after a late breakfast at a nearby restaurant, Judy said, "Let's just look at a few vans."  We drove two Toyota Siennas that seemed much too big.  The young saleswoman, who hates selling and really want to be a mechanic in civilian life as she was in the Army, suggested a Prius V. We drove one, and  Judy said, "This would be fine." Nothing about the whole universe of possible cars, nothing about shopping or bargaining, nothing about the dimensions of oxygen concentrator or scooters, just "This would be fine."

Mission accomplished

    The next afternoon, Judy took good neighbor Robert with her for moral support, and they went back to the Toyota dealer.  Four hours later, they came home with our new red Prius V.  It really is fine.
     Nowadays, just as  we have a gaggle of geese stopping traffic when they cross our roads, and a murder of crows cawing in our woods, we have a smug of Priuses in our driveway.
    The first day that Judy drove to the coffee shop in her new car, she came home raving about how wonderful  it is to hear music while driving again. (The radio in the Mercury has been defunct for years.) "How did the oxygen fit?"  I asked.
"I forgot to take it," she said.
A new red car beats oxygen any day.
  

Music makes us happy

Picking and grinning

  It was 98 degrees outside, but that did not stop us from driving out to the country for a picker's party at Sally's house.  Judy played the autoharp along with a roomful of dulcimer players.   Most of them had their sheet music on iPads, allowing them to avoid dealing with  heavy 3-ring binders.  One woman even used a foot pedal that changed the pages on her iPad.  Sally taught the group to play the ukulele.  I sat outside under a  maple tree, singing along with people playing old hymns on  fiddles and guitars and accordions and dulcimers.

Fuey with Blue Hawaiians

 Sally's Ukulele lesson

    Judy and her ukulele group provided background music for a luau to celebrate Ruth's and Ed's 80th birthdays.  They had a grand time rehearsing at our house, and then  sat in the gazebo in Ed's glorious garden, strumming and singing and laughing.  Fuey served drinks dressed in  her authentic muumuu.
    Sharon and I went to the opening of  show by an artist she has bought a large piece from, and from there to.  The artist's wife introduced herself as "Elizabeth the Third."   I tried to ignore the salmon knife she was using as a belt ornament.  The artist expounded on why he calls his show "The Brothel" and made lots of references to Picasso and Zeus and ancient and modern Mayan history.  It was the kind of mental adventure that  I would have loved a few years ago.  That evening, it made me more than tired.  I kept thinking about Laurie Anderson's song "Difficult Listening" and realizing that I was no longer up to Difficult Looking.

Rehearsal

Ed's garden

    From the artist's opening, we went directly to  a musical performance  by my friend Chuck Barnes and his banjo, who promised "mellifluous, and occasionally superfluous, genre-bending banjo interpretations of favorite songs." As we went in,  I was feeling old and set aside from life by gloom .  But as Chuck with his banjo  and the lovely Dr. Lois Leveen with her accordion played through their list of "toe-tappers, heartbreakers, and rabble-rousers," I felt happier and happier.  Chuck is  a native of Newfoundland. By the time he  got to the promised Canadian content, which included Leonard Cohen's Halleluja, I felt joy.

Chuck