Busy in the slow lane

     Judy is playing Ashokan Farewell on the dulcimer, a hummingbird is thrumming at the edge of the deck, and the little boys in the corner house are giggling and laughing in their swimming pool.  Welcome to  to summer in the slow lane at our house.

Grandmother's rug

     I arrived home from Rehoboth with three small  rugs that my grandmother  designed an had made in China in the 1930s. The beige ovals with bamboo leaves had covered the living room floor of the house I grew up in.  They lived in my houses in McLean and Falls Church until I moved west, when I gave them back to my mother.  This summer my sister Eileen was ready to get them out of her ironing room, and I was eager to have them back home. But how to get them from Maryland to Oregon? The five Sullivan sisters went into action.  Vonnie and Eileen talked about shipping, but Rose suggested that maybe I could check them as luggage on the plane.  Three different pieces of luggage?  No, Rose the geometry teacher figured that we could roll them together and still conform to Delta Airlines' luggage guidelines. "If they give you a hard time," declared Florrie," tell them it's your prayer rug." We all trooped over to the Fed Ex store, where  I got to see Florrie in action.  She charmed the clerk into packaging the roll securely for under $10.  Delta accepted the  rugs without question, and they arrived safely in Portland. When I took them to be cleaned I was  lamenting the worn spots on them.   The nice man at Atiyeh Brothers said, "In our world, that makes them interesting."

Judy and autoharp buddy Holly

     Judy was unable to go to the annual Willamette Valley autoharp weekend because navigating the physical plant  would have been too strenuous in the summer heat.  I drove one of the performers out to the camp, and was flooded with the outpouring of love and be-well messages to take back to Judy.  One fine player is dedicating her performance of The Happy Wanderer to Judy.  Judy still got to see some of her good friends; they  came in from Forest Grove for an evening to have dinner with her and to jam.

Lisha and Kathe

    Kathe and Lisha came to visit from their sheep farm in Colorado. We stayed pretty close to home during the four days they were here, eating the Trader Joe's food that they introduced me to.  We planned to have another day with them when they returned to Portland from a wedding in Ashland, but Kathe had caught a cold that she didn't want Judy exposed to.  So we visited briefly in the driveway, and they went on to a motel.  Judy gave Lisha a drum she had made years ago.
     Judy has long made a practice of finding the right person to whom to give a thing that she is ready to give up.  Nowadays, though, she is doing more of that. "I'm giving things away so you wasn't have to," she says. The drum went to Lisha,  the satin blouse to Donna, the silver flute to Midori, the quilting squares to Roxie. The framing hammer with which she had built a house went into the bag for the church rummage sale, but I pulled it out.  The right person for the hammer will appear.

Judy with her framing hammer

This year at Rehoboth

Vonnie and Ernie's new porch

Vonnie

     This year, Judy couldn't make the trip back east to Rehoboth.  David and his girls and Paul, Tina and their boys had other plans. This summer at Rehoboth was different:  I was at the beach without my partner or sons or grandchildren.
      I hung out with my sisters.  What a good time!  Vonnie and Ernie have bought a house inland in Lewes, a rich and peaceful place where they will retire in a few years.  We christened their large screened porch with its first family gathering and its first card game.  Jamie did an experiment to see what trees from the lawn that the bunnies in the back yard preferred.

Hermit crabs (Bridget's photo)

      At Rehoboth I stayed with Rose and her family, 12 of us in the house.  The little girls formed a band, and we all played games.   Jamie challenged me to matches of Booby Trap; Lucy hooted with laughter during Attack Uno.  Florrie took each girl on a  shopping shopping trip.  Jamie chose a book of a hundred folk tales, and read almost all of them to Lucy. We  all watched the progress of the hermits crabs, Ned and Ted. My roommate was niece Angela, a newly minted lawyer who ran every day in the Delaware heat.

With Amanda and Alana

    Relatives and friends flowed in and out of the house. Vonnie and Ernie and Eileen came in from Lewes every day.  Amanda and Alana showed us the photos from their commitment ceremony.   John pressed on me the amazing book he has been telling me about: John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, a love story told by a teen with terminal cancer. Megan, at thirteen, read it first. Tommy introduced me to the hard-boiled crime fiction of D.C writer George Pelecanos. Florrie, the intrepid driver and shopper, took Rose and me for surgical strikes at our favorite stores on Rehoboth Avenue. Eileen and I worked with my cousin's son-in-law Stephen to fill the some of the blanks on the family genealogy.  Rose and I walked out for ice cream every night.  Florrie, Liz and Abby kept bringing leftover treats from the wedding shower.  Of course we ate corn and tomatoes and cantaloupe and crab.

Girls'  breakfast out

Happy family

   The sisters and cousin and cousins' wives continued our longstanding tradition of a girls' breakfast out, this year without Judy. We went to the same place and  sat at the same table that we have done for many years.  Even the lurking photography visit  from the paparazzo husband, Deke, was the same.  Different was the way we had to make the space accommodate our aging bodies: we turned the light off so that the spinning fan wouldn't make  flashes and trigger migraines for me.  For Shirley, we hunted up something soft to cushion the hard wooden chair.  Even our phrasing must have sounded outdated to the young waitress's Amelia Bedelia ears: when Rose asked  for hot chocolate with skim milk, she was served a mug of hot chocolate and a glass of skim milk.
    I caught up with old friends.  Carol and Deanna are joyfully exhausted, raising their 3 year old great granddaughter.  Mary drove down from Pennsylvania for a visit.

Eastern Shore food

    When it came time to drive back to Maryland, John and Rose and I  started from Vonnie's house.  That enabled us to skip the heavily traveled roads and drive mostly through  farmland in the  part of the state that the natives call Lower Slower Delaware.  Somehow we neglected to eat lunch, and by 2:30 Rose was scanning the GPS for  places to eat.  The small roadside Burma-Shave style signs gave some hints, like Volunteer Fire Department Chicken Barbecue Ahead.  But our hopes were dashed when that event, when we finally passed it, looked sketchy. We stopped at a fruit stand, and John asked  the local people for the inside scoop.  That led us to the big find of the trip:  Jimmy's Grill in Bridgeville.   Oh, Eastern Shore food!  We ate lima bean soup with corn and tomatoes in a ham stock, corn pudding, and crab soup.  We will have to wait for our next trip to try  the fried chicken with oysters, or fried chicken with roast beef, or fried chicken with crab, and the peach pie.
   

High Summer

Hummingbird at feeder

Baby hummingbird on nest

  In  high summer life feels full and rich.  We celebrate at barbecues  and garden parties and at our cul-de-sac's annual 4th of July fireworks extravaganza. This year, it is also time for hummers and gummers.  Judy installed a hummingbird feeder just beyond our deck.  The hummers found it almost immediately, and Judy began reporting on the territorial struggles around it.  First one hummer prevailed over the others, then all of them chased away the bees that had discovered the sugar water.

Mutt Leigh's bliss face

     Next door, Janet and Robert discovered a hummingbird nest in one of  their outdoor chandeliers.The mother bird sat on the nest just outside the back door, with humans  talking and eating  just a few feet below her.  Robert found an angled mirror, like a dental mirror only larger, and stood with it on a ladder.  That allowed us to see into the nest.  The eggs looked like two white jelly beans.  After three weeks, we are  seeing the fledgelings at our feeder.

Lucy before the shower: Bridget's photo

     Mutt Leigh, our resident gummer, is having no trouble eating despite  missing five teeth. We have learned how to scratch her head and back so she gets her bliss face on.

Sisters and cousin

    It is hard to leave Oregon in high summer, but  Judy and Rose persuaded me to join the rest of my sisters at the beach in Delaware   There was a wedding shower planned for my niece Abby, who will be married in November.  I was stumped about what to give her for a present.  She's had her own household for years.  Her mother, my sister Florrie, asked, "Do you have anything of Mom's?  Abby was so close to Mom."  I remembered that Abby likes to bake.  I emptied the two glass jars that I have used to hold flour and sugar for the last 46 years.  My mother had used them before me.  I cleaned up the old jars and shipped them east, to the tune of $43. I enclosed a note that said, "My mother used these jars for flour and sugar.  May her spirit be with you whenever you bake."

Hit or green stamps?

Abby opens presents

Auntie Ellen 1968

    Oh, brother, I fretted to my sisters, what a present!  It will either be a hit, or it will be a green stamp moment.  Back in the sixties, when there was a wedding shower for me, my Auntie Ellen gave me her collection of S&H green stamps.  I even had to lick them and put them in the book.  Auntie Ellen was a teacher when I was little and my mother was put on bed rest. Auntie Ellen took me to school with her.  When my first child was born and I needed help in my house of stairs, Auntie Ellen and my mother stayed with me. I can't remember what I used the S&H green stamps for,  but I know they helped my tight newlywed  budget.

    At the shower, I marveled at Abby's friends.  "Did we ever look like that?"  I asked Rose.  "Nah.  they are more put together," she replied.  Little Lucy hovered, squirming with anticipation, as she handed Abby her gifts to open. Abby followed the family tradition of reading cards aloud.  ( That tradition has prompted us to buy the most sentimental, flowery and wordy cards we could find.)  Abby got tears in her eyes when she opened the jars and read my note.

Auntie Ellen's sampler

   

Being tourists in Oregon

   

Nick and Les fly the Spruce Goose

Betsy and Marie

A good photo?

    Les shook his head.  "Isn't it something," he said, "how we don't go to these places  until we have visitors." Marie and Nick were here from Virginia for three days. They stayed in an apartment in Betsy and Les' s downtown building.  In the evenings, we ate dinner looking out at sparkling views of downtown Portland.  During the day, we wanted to hit some Oregon highlights. Les drove us in his van.  He and Nick sat in front, solving the problems of the world. Betsy, Marie and I sat in back and built on forty years of friendship.
     At Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, Marie had the same reaction I had the first time I visited a mountain in the Northwest.    There's snow on the ground, in late June!  And people are wearing shorts!
   
    At the coast, we ate pastries
at a bakery that Betsy and Les had discovered,  and walked through tall grasses to the beach.  It was my first time in Gearhart.  At Ecola State Park (  Ebola?  Ecoli?  we kept stumbling on the name) Nick took photos which will grace his walls back in Virginia.

Marie and Nick at Gearhart

   On the third day, we attempted to get past the notorious traffic light at Dundee.  Even in mid -day in mid -week, there was a four mile backup.  We took a long short cut through the wine country of Yamhill. We ended up at the Evergreen air museum, home of Howard Hughes' enormous airplane, the Spruce Goose.  Nick and Les explored the cockpit while the rest of us ate minestrone soup and ice cream  in a cafe overlooking lots of shiny old airplanes

Girls dancing to Judy's music

and cars.
   Everyone came to dinner at our house  that evening.   Marie and Nick left early the next morning.  Marie said the visit was like perfume--just a little bit, but strong, and it has to last a long time.

Judy at Vista House

    Judy had stayed home while we were sightseeing,  saving her energy for her performance on Saturday with  the Upriver Dulcimer Group.  The group plays old- time music on autoharps, dulcimers, guitars, and washboards.  They have a regular gig at Vista House, a domed marble  observatory overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.  As the musicians played, tourists wandered through, smiling with delight.  Some sang along: a woman from Thailand and another from Pakistan danced, their hands moving  in graceful expressions.  A group of five girls stood at the edge of the crowd, joking and urging each other forward.  They looked to be just at the age when girls can become crippled with self-consciousness.  But these girls danced with great energy and enthusiasm, laughing and changing steps until the music ended.

Church lady squared

Atkinson Memorial Church

     My beloved church community, Atkinson Memorial Unitarian Universalist in Oregon City, is searching for a new minister.  The search is a long, 18-month process, during which the membership reflects on its identity, mission, and hopes for the future. Meanwhile, a carefully elected and selected committee goes through the long process of selecting the new minister. I agreed to be  on the search committee.
    It's big job.  Our nine- member committee has a good distribution

Scott Silver's photo: Long may she wave

of strengths  and we are willing and able for the work. Even though there are about three times as many Unitarian ministers seeking congregations as there are congregations seeking ministers, we are anxious about getting the best person for our pulpit.  As the old joke goes, the odds are good, but the goods are odd.

Search committee

      We will fashion surveys, hold small group meetings and book studies to help discern the needs and hopes of the church.  We will file descriptive and statistical documents with the denominational office (including membership and financial information dating from 1975--do you think that's easy to find?) We will create a great online packet for ministerial candidates to peruse. I will be doing a lot of the writing. In February and March, we will invite three or four pre-candidates to interview and preach. Finally,  we hope to select a great candidate whom the congregation will then vote to call.   After next April, I hope my time as a church lady on steroids will be done.

Mutt Leigh meets Eddy

Eddy found this cartoon

     Last weekend Judy and I hosted Eddy Carroll from Denver, who conducted a workshop called Beyond Categorical Thinking for the congregation.  The weekend was great success.  Our church has 165 members: 53 people showed up for the three -hour session on Saturday.  Eddy also preached on Sunday morning.  One member told him his sermon was the best he had heard in 47 years of attending Atkinson.
     At our house, Eddy and Mutt Leigh had a good old time.  Eddy and I sat at the kitchen  table and traded stories of growing up in a large Irish Catholic family.  Even though we had not met before, I felt like I was talking to  someone I'd gone  to grade school with.

Little dog's new world

Standoff with a squirrel

Mutt Leigh meets Roxy

     Mutt Leigh is  adjusting to her new world.  At first, she barked at every car passing by, even the ones three blocks away.  Our neighborhood German Shepherds  howl in symphonic mode along with every siren within their hearing distance.  At first, Mutt Leigh would try to howl along with them.  Now she disdains announcing  cars unless they are pulling into our driveway, and ignores the local doggy hootenanny.
      She has met many of our friends, and has made her peace with Handsome Dave, who will be staying with us next week.
     There wasn't much wildlife where Mutt Leigh lived before, so every bird and insect who visited our back yard was challenged by our new gatekeeper.  The resident squirrels initiated her by teasing her  from their perches on tree trunks just above her head.  Arnold, the big dog  next door, bided his time quietly while Mutt Leigh barked challenges to him through the gate.  These days, Mutt Leigh gives a ritual half-bark when she goes out back, and then settles into a chair on the deck.  Now that she has her world under her voice command, she can relax.

 Dave will co-exist with Mutt Leigh

Mutt Leigh meets Kelli

    Mutt Leigh has had a rough three weeks.  Although, according to the vet, she is healthy and sturdy, her teeth have been neglected.  She had two teeth pulled three weeks ago.  At the follow-up appointment, we noticed that the sore on her left cheek was more tender to the touch than it had been.  Two days later, the sore opened and began to bleed and drain.  X-rays revealed that a molar, one whose roots extend almost to the dog's cheekbone, was infected, along with the tooth before and behind it.  She had to have three more teeth pulled.  (All right, my Sullivan readers, that is the end of dental descriptions.)
     We are coddling her, of course, and hovering.  She is getting better.  It's a good thing, because she is so much a part of us already that Judy and I have not once shaken our heads and wondered what on earth we have gotten into.
 

Our new dog

Mutt Leigh Mae

        Judy has been scouring the animal adoption and Craigslist web sites for months, looking for the right dog for us.  Last week, we brought home a small honey blonde dog named  Mutt Leigh Mae.  She is  part Shih Tzu, part Lhasa Apso, and
 probably a little bit terrier.  She's 8 years old, calm and amenable.
     Her previous owner took good care of her but had no money to spend on grooming or dental work.  Mutt Leigh's hair is choppy, and falls into her eyes and mouth.  Judy is slowly working to clean up her face.  The dog is afraid of the clicking sound of scissors,  so Judy clips only  a little bit at a time.The vet declared Miss M healthy and well-formed, but in need of dentistry.  Dr. Bruno cleaned her teeth  and removed two  infected teeth.

Judy and Mutt Leigh 

     Mutt Leigh seems to be settling in with us more and more every day.  Her previous owner gave us a large wicker dog bed, with two big cushions, and said that all she would have to do was point to the bed and the little dog would go to it.  When we got home, it was obvious that Mutt Leigh had never seen the bed before.  She took her rightful place on the foot of our bed.  It's also obvious that she has been fed scraps from the table, but we do not do that.  We try to ignore her eager face when we are eating.
   Lance, the guy who delivers oxygen, is a dog lover.  Mutt Leigh charmed him.

Lance meeting Mutt Leigh

   Lisa was here today working in the garden, going in and out the open gate to her truck.  Mutt Leigh was on the deck, basking in the sun.  In her first days here, we were careful to keep doors and gates closed, afraid that she would run.  No she stays close by us.  As Lisa says, "She knows which side her bread is buttered on.  She has it good here.  Why would she leave?"

Mutt Leigh and her toy enjoying the  music