Miss Nora showing us one of her many talents.
There has been a lot of activity within the household! Graduation was on May 14 and it’s already June 6.
Because the wheat harvest journey was next to happen, that’s what was focused on after the graduation party was cleaned up. And speaking of the graduation party, I’d like to thank everyone who came. Everything turned out nice, including the weather – just enough chilly to enjoy the awesome fire pit Jim and Mark built.
Callie and Kara have been best friends since kindergarten. They finished their school career off with a BANG! Callie was Valedictorian and Kara was Salutatorian. I asked Callie if there ever seemed to be competition between them and she said, “No, we helped each other”. Good job girls!! Please make sure to take that attribute with you the rest of your life! Eliminate competition and replace it with helping each other.
And just like that…it was over.
It started the fall of 1991. It ended on Saturday. The school schedule has controlled what we’ve done, where we we’ve gone, and has been a major piece of the game called life. I’ve been so focused on getting through each day that I never really thought about it being over. Oh, don’t get me wrong – I knew it would one day but that was so far into the future. Well, the future is here.
I’m not good at making New Year’s resolutions. I think they’re dumb. Mostly because when I used to follow the crowd and make a resolution, it was usually something that was next to impossible to keep. It was a good intention, though. So, rather than deal with the guilt of not living up to my end of the deal…I stopped making them. Well, now I’ve sort of made myself this pre-harvest resolution. I’ve been enough sedentary over the winter, I can see and feel a few of the extra inches that are a result of this lifestyle. I know it comes with age but until I can’t do something about it, maybe I should at least up the ante on the number of steps I take each day.
I got a bit obsessed with knowing the number of steps I was taking when I rode to New Orleans with Jenna to help her with her CLAAS booth at Commodity Classic. The facility was gigantic!!! It took many, many steps to get from point A to point B. Our biggest day of steps was 21,391 or nearly 10 miles. So, when I checked my phone the other day and the health app showed less than 1,000 steps, I decided I could do something about that. Either I needed to keep my phone in my pocket a little more OR I could just take off and go for a walk after Callie leaves for school. I opted for option #2.
This is a thank you but it’s not from me. It’s from a 26-year-old man sitting in a foreign land on July 27, 1945 – also his birthday.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because this young man is important to me. He was my father in law. Someone who left his family while still a kid to fight a fight that has provided the rest of us the freedoms we enjoy today. And he’s the one doing the thanking.
Dear Friends:
The least I can do is write a few lines to express my appreciation for the birthday card I received from you. I wish I knew the correct words to express just how much a message like that means from friends at home, when a fellow is away.
I think that a large percent of the fellows that are in the service would agree that too many of us didn’t fully realize the value of “home” and of “old friends”, before we entered the service. I don’t say that it was necessary for war to come along to wake us up, but that is the way it has happened, and I think by the time we get home we will have learned a lesson the hard way. We will come back equipped to be better Americans, due to the experience we are having now. We have seen the suffering and destruction a few power crazed individuals can cause. So now, we are thoroughly determined to set the “rising sun”.
You people at home are making it possible for us to do that job. You are sending us the equipment that is necessary for us to use in our fighting and you also provide for our enjoyment and entertainment during our short periods of relaxation in rest camps when we return from the front lines.
There are many fronts in the war and the home front is the most important of all. You are the people who are on that front and you are doing a wonderful job.
That is the reason it makes my heart swell and a lump come up in my throat when I realize that the people of the church at home, take the time and trouble to send their best wishes to me on my birthday. To me, it’s one of the nicest things that could happen.
God Bless you, and I hope in a very short time all of us may be reunited.
Sincerely yours,
Lloyd R. Zeorian, T Sgt Infantry (Co. F 130 Inf)
Happy Veterans Day to those who have served and to those who are on the home front! The sacrifices you have made are the reason me and my family can comfortably sleep tonight.
THANK YOU!
Throughout my many days of sitting behind the steering wheel of a combine, you see lots of “things” in the field…old machinery parts, oil buckets, seed bags, dead animals, deer antlers, swimming pools and even kids’ outdoor toys. Most of the machinery parts were lost during the working of the ground or planting of the crop. The rest can be attributed to the wind – except for the dead animals, of course.
I’ve seen a number of helium balloons. Some fields and locations within our harvest journey seem to collect more than usual. It’s almost as if those locations are on some sort of helium balloon jet stream. In my mind, I imagine that after balloons have been set free from the hands who have held them, they make their way into this helium balloon jet stream which carries them as far as it will allow. Then, the balloon that had been gracefully floating through the sky, hits some sort of cloud wall or turbulence, tumbles back to earth and lands in a field.
The fields we cut in Eastern Colorado must be in the direct balloons-falling-back-to-earth path. I used to get excited when I first saw a balloon here or there (I don’t know why). Sometimes I would stop to see what sort of celebration might have been happening at the time the balloon was allowed to enter the balloon jet stream. Birthdays and congratulations seem to make the top of the list.
On one particular September afternoon, while rolling through the millet field, a bouquet of red balloons caught my eye. “Interesting!”, I thought. “This is something you don’t see as often as the typical mylar balloon”. I kept going. Something entered my head, though, that made me back up, stop and get out of the Beast. I wanted to see what it was that made this find so different from the others.
Yep! You read that right. Just about as quickly as it began, it was over. Jim doesn’t agree with me when I said we’d only actually cut wheat for 3.5 weeks this summer. I didn’t write the dates down but I know it went awfully fast. It wasn’t supposed to be over this quickly. It happens, though, when the timing of jobs and weather come into play.
Normally, after we finish with our acres in Limon, we clean up, pack up, load up and head for Jordan, MT. (my most favorite place to be during the summer) Not this year. The weather dealt a rough hand for the Z Crew this year. The wheat in Limon was set back due to the late season freeze on Mother’s Day weekend. The wheat in Jordan was moved ahead of schedule because of heat and lack of rain. These two circumstances clashed and made our schedule unworkable.
Time to unload (in more ways than the obvious).
We’ve been married 33 years. I still haven’t mastered the art of reading his mind.
I’m certain I’m not the only wife that feels this way. It helps me to think that, anyways.
This is how my morning began. Frank is loaded from last night and is waiting to go to the elevator. Cap’n Combine announces that he’s not going to be able to unload it for me this morning because he really wants to get things started in the field earlier than usual. We’re on our last field and it’s a weedy mess. I tell him that’s fine, I can finish what I’m doing here at the trailer house (making lunches and book work) and dump it. I knew there was an empty truck sitting next to mine so I wasn’t in too big of a hurry.
So, here’s where things go wrong.
I will miss you…a statement I’ve heard a couple of times this week. Two different times. Two different reasons. Two different feelings.
Today was the last day of school for the kids in our school district. I had the afternoon bus route to do and was lucky enough to get to endure the it’s-the-last-day-of-school-and-we-don’t-care attitude. While I was waiting for the junior high students to get on the bus, I overheard one telling the other, “I will miss you”. In a day or so, they’ll probably have a ball game bringing them all together again but the day-to-day reason for bringing them together was over for three months. When I heard that statement, it made me think of the last time I heard that statement this week.
This was on Mother’s Day. Grandma wanted to see the flowers that I had given mom.
Grandma was 97 – she had just turned 94 when I wrote this post about celebrating her birthday. I knew she would have to leave us some day. It just happens. For the past several years, Grandma would tell me she wanted to go home, “I think God has forgotten me”. I would reassure her there was a reason she was still here. She would wonder what that could be since she was confined to a wheelchair after her hip surgery many years ago. I know she didn’t like being where she was and spending the days as she did. Every time I drove by the Care Center – in a hurry to get something picked up or done – I would wonder what she was doing. And, of course, feel guilty. Grandma was never one to MAKE you feel guilty (she knew how busy our lives were) I just felt guilty for driving past her and not stopping in to say hello.
“Grandma, it’s ok to go home”. That’s what I told her Monday night.
I knew she wasn’t good and the day had been long and it was already 6:30 pm when I went to see her. When I got to her room, my aunt was there. She’d been there all day. I walked up to her and bent low to her face and said, “Hi Grandma! The last time I saw you, you sure didn’t have all this stuff in the way”. She had an oxygen tube wrapped around her ears. The silly thing kept falling away from her nose. I don’t know if it was really doing her any good but I tried to adjust it a bit for her. “It’s choking me”. It really wasn’t but I loosened the band that was keeping it up under her chin – a lot like a child’s cowboy hat.
She grabbed my hand and told me they were cold (which they were). It’s been a rather chilly, rainy spring and this day was no different. I hadn’t even grabbed my coat on the way out the door when I left home. It had been a busy day and I just wanted to go see how Grandma was and I wasn’t thinking about the outside temperature. She held my hand – close to her heart – until it warmed up. We talked small talk. She wanted to know what the girls were doing and how Eli and Nora were. She was slipping but not enough that she still didn’t know what was going on! That’s the amazing thing. For being 97, she was sharp as a tack. “What was Jim up to”? I told her he had been busy for the last month trying to get stuff ready to head south. She wondered when we would be leaving. I gave her the same answer that I’ve been giving everyone – “I don’t know”.
“I hope I get there”. I reassured her she would.
Grandpa has been gone for nearly 30 years already. She learned how to live without him a long time ago. I know right after he passed away, it was very difficult for her. She knew nothing about finances. She hadn’t even learned how to drive a car. She did know how to make a grandchild happy, though, with cookies in the cookie drawer. Her fried chicken and macaroni salad were the BEST. The nurse brought in some soup and juice while I was there. She tried it but said she wasn’t hungry. That’s what made me think about her fried chicken and macaroni salad. We visited about that and all agreed even a beer would be good. Grandma gave a nod of her head in agreement.
“Grandma, when you get there, will you do me a favor”? She looked at me and said she would. I said, “when you get there, will you tell Grandpa I say hello? And will you hold those babies of mine (I had three miscarriages)?” She nodded her head.
Those miscarriages came at different times between the girls. There were two between Jenna and Taylor. And one more between Taylor and Callie. That’s why it’s like we have two families. I even had someone once ask me if the girls were all with the same dad. (couldn’t they tell they all look alike?) Silly, right? I know they’re waiting for me in heaven. But in the meantime, they’ve got some really wonderful Grandma’s who will be more than happy to hold them.
“I will miss you”. That’s when the tears began to flow. “Grandma, I will miss you too”. We hugged. It was the tightest hug I’d felt from her in a long time. It felt as though she didn’t want to let go.
She was tired. My aunt had told me she hadn’t slept very well the night before. She was struggling to catch her breath and couldn’t relax. Her eyes were closed now so I gently stroked her beautiful, white hair and rubbed her forehead. The whole while I was doing that, I remembered the many times as a young girl she would let me stand on her couch and fix her hair. She was always so patient. So many wonderful memories!
I knew she wouldn’t be as good the next day as she was tonight but she was exhausted. I had to let her rest. I continued to rub her head gently. When I decided I had better leave, she was in a deep sleep. I leaned down and kissed her one more time and quietly left her room. I knew I would never be able to talk to her again and this broke my heart.
I knew she was ready to go and as I walked out the door, I prayed that God would take her without having to endure much pain.
Tonight I drove by the Care Center. I caught myself wondering what Grandma was doing and quickly remembered she was no longer there. Grandma passed away very early yesterday morning. She was where she wanted to go – she was with Grandpa and she was holding those babies.
I will miss you…
That’s what my Twitter feed tells me. When I see that, I feel behind. It’s been that sort of winter!
Reader BEWARE – you are about to see a whole lot of pictures and not many words while I attempt to get you caught up on where I’ve been and what I’ve been up to. I’ve made a few trips since the first of the year. A couple of excursions to DC, a trip to Phoenix, to Billings and one more scheduled to Colby, KS before the beginning of the 2015 harvest. Of all these trips, the very best one was the trip to Phoenix. This took me away from home one day short of two weeks. But…it was two weeks with Jenna and I would do it all over again if I could. We left Omaha on a very COLD, windy day with anticipation of much warmer temps once we started heading south. The one thing I would change, if I could, would be that Jenna wouldn’t have been suffering from a miserable cold.
She’s done this ever since she was a little girl (and she’ll probably be mad at me after she sees this picture.
Proverbs 6:16-19
There are six things that the Lord hates, seven that are an abomination to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
We live in a world where answers to questions are found quickly and conveniently at our fingertips. If you’re ever wondering about something or have questions about something…Google it. I’ve been unknowingly playing a game that I’m not familiar with. I’ve probably been subjected to it many times throughout my life but haven’t been aware until recently there is a name to this game. It’s called bullying.
The personality of a bully is one that I don’t understand. Their game is one that my brain can’t seem to wrap itself around let alone know how to play because I don’t know the rules. You see, I don’t understand why or how someone can purposely hurt another. Why it feels so good to tear someone down or make them look like someone they’re not. I don’t understand a mind that wants to make themselves look bigger and more powerful at the expense of others. I don’t understand the mind of a bully.