Echoes from the Loafers’ Club Meeting
Do you have mosquitoes around here?
Big ones. See that eagle over there?
I do.
Well, that’s no eagle.
Driving by Bruce's drive
I have a wonderful neighbor named Bruce. Whenever I pass his drive, thoughts occur to me. Everything was nearly copacetic except the treads of my sandals tend to pick up pebbles when I walk our driveway. They remain lodged in the treads until I get in the house. Then they seek freedom on the floor. Gary Hanson, who was our coach/banker/city clerk, had Little League players remove rocks from a rocky ballfield before each practice. I plucked a pebble from the treads of my sandal and chucked it outside. It will be back. It might beat me into the house.
The father of one of my classmates was the city constable in Hartland during my formative years. He was a nice man who had lost a leg to cancer. He later owned a resort in Hackensack. Because he had only one leg, it should have been easy for any mischievous kid to outrun him, and it was, but it didn’t matter. It was a small town. He recognized each miscreant and the boy’s yellow dog.
Bless you, whether or not you sneeze
We ate at a customer appreciation event and talked about movies, mostly Barbenheimer, when one of the Loafer’s hands covered his mouth.
I sprang into action and said, “Bless you.”
I thought he was going to sneeze. He yawned instead. I told him he could keep the “Bless you.”
I’ll miss her welcoming ways
I attended the funeral of LaVaun Ausen at West Freeborn Lutheran Church. LaVaun was of Irish and Danish descent but loved being a member of the Sons of Norway and embroidering Norwegian Hardanger. An example of her Hardanger, finished in 1982, was draped over her casket. Her sons wore shirts she’d made. The hymn “In the Garden” caused me to tear up and “I’ll Fly Away” made me smile. I visited for as long as I dared before having to worry about being handed a broom. A sign outside the church showing a leaning gravestone read, “Do your relatives look a little crooked? With a donation to the cemetery fund, we will straighten them up.” I become keenly aware of the currency of time after attending a funeral and drove away from the church so slowly, insects crashed into the back window of my car.
I’ve learned
No one wants to hear a story about something we know is true because a friend’s friend’s cousin’s neighbor’s employer’s dentist knew it was true.
We want life to be like it used to be even if it never had been.
When I’m in a grocery store, it’s common for someone to ask me to grab an item from the top shelf. I’m happy to oblige, thereby keeping an unfortunate from having a diet made up of foodstuffs from the lower shelves.
We all make mistakes. Some tattoos advertise that fact.
Nature notes
The Carolina grasshopper is a banded-winged grasshopper with black hindwings and could be mistaken for a mourning cloak butterfly when fluttering. It’s also called the Carolina locust or butterfly grasshopper and is commonly seen on the bare ground of school playgrounds, ballfields, dirt roads, gravel driveways and vacant lots where its coloration allows it to blend in. It crepitates, making a crackling sound as it flies.
The yard’s feeders were busy. In the movie “Field of Dreams,” Iowa farmer Ray (Kevin Costner) hears a mysterious voice in his cornfield saying, "If you build it, he will come." Despite taunts of lunacy, Ray builds a baseball diamond on his land, supported by his wife, Annie (Amy Madigan). The ghosts of great players came from the field to play ball, led by Shoeless Joe Jackson. When it comes to birds, if you feed and water them, they will come.
Opossums gather twigs, leaves, grass and trash with their mouths and pass the items through their front legs and pack them into their curled tail for transport to their dens.
In September, Minnesota's adult loons travel to their winter homes along the Atlantic coast from North Carolina to Florida, or on the Gulf of Mexico. The parents leave before the chicks can fly and the young loons follow about a month later. Mid-October marks the peak of migration. The bones of most birds are hollow and light, but loons have solid bones and the extra weight helps them dive as deep as 250 feet for food. They can stay underwater for five minutes. Because their bodies are heavy relative to their wing size, loons need a long runway to take flight from a lake. Minnesota supports the largest U.S. breeding population south of Alaska.
Meeting adjourned
“Treat everyone with politeness and kindness, not because they are nice, but because you are.”–Roy T. Bennett.