It is July and if ….
It is July and if the weather forecast was correct, back on the day I wrote this, it should be a hot one. That should be making everything grow good, if it hasn’t already. Corn is tall enough so the leaves are touching and there is just a big sea of green.
On one of my days of just driving around and looking at stuff, I found a number of fields of oats south on Highway 10 that are all headed out and ready to change color to a golden brown, meaning it is time to cut it and put the bundles into shocks.
My gardening has gone by the wayside this summer, but thanks to my new sit down garden, I seem to have a nice crop of tomatoes coming. I’m not having any luck with radishes or kohlrabis.
However my efforts on the front porch are really doing great. When I got it, it was just a tiny petunia in a paper cup. It just happened to be my May Flower gift so I carefully transplanted it in a flower pot. When the single bloom fell off, just like magic, eight more blooms showed up and greet me every day when I look out.
ÓÓÓÓÓ
One of my old sportswriters and Granton native, Doug Zaleski recently had hip surgery. If my Facebook message is correct, he is doing well in recovery. He wanted to know the other day what the farmer said to his cows one night. “It is pasture bedtime!”
ÓÓÓÓÓ
Those of you who know our daughter Shelly real well, know she had a talent I have never seen in another person. She can remember birthdays and other occasions without batting an eye. Just last year she was scolding me that I hadn’t remembered that the day was Florence’s Dad’s birthday. Well, actually I did, but after some 30 years since he passed away, I hardly thought it was necessary to still pay special attention to it.
Daughter Sue was laughing the other day just after she finished talking to Shelly. She had called Shelly just to check on her and was telling Shelly that was her wedding anniversary.
Shelly thought it was the next day and Sue told her again it was the 22nd. To which Shelly asked, “Are you sure?”
ÓÓÓÓÓ
The other day someone posted a picture of an old pop machine on Facebook, the kind you put your coin in which releases the bottle and when you pull it out another one slides into place.
Oh yes, I thought, it looked just like the one we had in our army day room. For some reason in California we all got a craving for Coke. Then they came in the little seven ounce size and I think were just a nickel. This was 1951 so it was some time ago.
On weekends it was especially tough as it seems like we drank a ton of it as we played cards or carried on with other day room activities. Some weekends we ran out and had to put up without any Coke. I don’t know what there was about it that everyone rushed to the machine the minute they walked into the room. The funny part is I never found Coke any place else that tasted quite like it. Maybe it was the water.
ÓÓÓÓÓ
Speaking of tasting, have you ever eaten birch syrup? I haven’t either but on the way down to see Sue I drive by a couple of Amish homes just out of Blair.
I’ve thought about it a number of times and finally decided to look it up on the Internet. Sure enough, there is a whole section on it. The article mentioned that most people don’t eat it on pancakes or ice cream like maple syrup, but use it instead for baking.
The article said it is made just like maple syrup, but I really never looked around to see how many birch trees are in the area. Good excuse to go down to see Sue and Mark.
ÓÓÓÓÓ
A group of us were sitting around the other night at a meeting waiting for it to get started. First thing you know we were talking about the federal government and how one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing.
I was telling how Shelly got a check for $1,200 called the stimulas check. Now since she is on a program which provides her health care, and I would assume, part of her rent, she is limited to only $2,000 in assets. By the way, that was the limit back in the days when she was just 21 and getting started on programs for the needy. She was 55 in February, but the limit stays the same.
Thankfully, the agency that handles all her affairs found an address for me to return the check. I never have heard if they got it or not.
Someone else mentioned his dad had passed away three years before, but he also got a check. The news the next morning told that the amount paid out to people who are already deceased amounts to $1.4 billion.
The sad part about all this, the money sent to them and, well, and you and I, was not really money the government had on hand. It is simply part of the federal budget, which now has increased to over $21 trillion. By the way, that is just three trillion more than it was when our current president took office.
Then another story came out telling about all the money sent to people in prison and the question now is, how is the government going to get that back?
ÓÓÓÓÓ
With all the commotion about the police killing black people by illegal methods, we found ourselves with another program. That is the destruction and defacing of many statues which were put in place after the end of the Civil War.
While the north was the war and President Lincoln decreed the blacks were free, no one bothered to see that actually happen. No plan was put in place to make sure they all got an equal education and were ever allowed into what would have been called, the white work force.
It is so sad so many joined the Armed Forces in World War II, but once the war was over they had to go back to the same old living conditions they had before the war. Separate waiting rooms in the bus and train depots, separate rest rooms and always made to ride in the back of buses.
I checked this out one day with my old friend Otto Becker who had been stationed in Florida during the Korean War. He told of how he and some of his buddies got on a bus one day and went to the back of the bus to sit. The driver announced that the bus wasn’t going anywhere if they didn’t move up front where they belonged.
I won’t try to say things were different up north. As I told someone the other day, the town of Johnstown where our farm was, certainly was one of the better ones in the area. Yet the place someone picked for the Indian Reservation made sure it was some of the worst cut over and swampy land in the town. Still is today.
