Aunt Hettie's Book

July 7th - Wednesday - Hot and Humid

With this extremely humid and hot weather, I have been working inside each afternoon. I am catching up on things I have put off in-order to get caught up outside.

Yesterday, my project was a scrapbook for Lou's Aunt Hettie, if you remember we visited her on our way back from Florida. She lives in a personal care home in Herferd, North Carolina. We had promised her we would stop on our way home and take her back to her home town of Gum Neck, NC. We did that and we had a wonderful day with her, hearing stories from she and Lou made the day very memorable. Unfortunately, Aunt Hettie has problems with short term memory, so I told her I would take all of the pictures that she wanted and would make a scrapbook of our day and send it to her.

I made the scrapbook and labeled each picture and wrote a story telling of our day and the memories Lou and I had of the day. She had told me that she loves to read and prefers her Bible for reading each night before she goes to sleep. Lou and I found a wonderful picture story book of Paul's footsteps through the Holy Land, so we added that to her box and got all of it into the mail this morning. We also sent along some extra pictures of our home and flowers so she can see where we live and what things look like here in Pennsylvania. It has been several years since she has been able to visit our state, so know she will enjoy seeing where we live now. She told me she had about worn out the pictures that I mailed her last year.

It has been a joy to do this for her knowing that she will receive many hours of enjoyed from them. I think we often forget our family members in their final days upon the earth.

Another family member that we have been visiting in a nursing home had the rare privilege of returning home last week. This is Brion's father and a gentleman that we certainly have enjoyed visiting with weekly at the Green Home. We pray that his health and strength will continue to improve and he and his wife will spend quality time in their home once again.

Lou's son-in-law had successful surgery yesterday to remove a kidney and of course, all are anxious to get the final biopsy report back on Friday. Seems like our prayer list continues to grow; however, we have seen several people dropped from our prayer list over the last few months. Praise God for his healing powers.

Tonight is square dancing, thankfully we have an air-conditioned place to dance. I often wonder how people survived prior to air-conditioning, the ladies in their many layers of clothing, baking and canning with wood stoves. The men working in the fields, loading hay by hand with their pitch forks, I don't remember hearing my parents complain, as kids we knew we had better have a cold drink for Daddy when he came in the driveway with a load of hay, and he always had a smile ready for us as we handed him a cool glass of ice-tea and mother would make his a mason jar of tea to take back on the hill with him. Grandma Gerow always made switchel when the men folks were haying and of course, being Grandma, she always made sure we had come also.

Lou and I have had two interesting evenings, Monday night when we came back from the fireworks, Estee stayed outside and sorta came and went all evening, finally at bedtime, I went out on the deck to see what she was doing and she was sitting at the base of the cherry tree and looking up, so I got the flashlight to see what was up in the tree, I didn't see anything, so I brought her back in, only to have her dash out again. I went back out and this time something growled at me. I came back in and got Lou out of bed, (he was reading), and told him something had growled at me. He took the gun and followed me out to the deck. I finally found what Estee was seeing, not one but three young raccoons munching on a suet cake and growling at each other... At this point, we closed the "doggie door" and went back to bed. While we were outside, I also heard the foxes down by the barn, Lou had taken his hearing aids out so he didn't get to hear them.

Last night, I was awakened by Estee barking, so once again, I went out and this time these three little rascals were at the top of our lattice work on the deck, all huddled together. I woke Lou up so he could see them up close, and he had to agree they were really cute, and we enjoyed watching them for a few minutes before we returned to bed. Once again, we brought Estee in and closed her door. After we got back into bed, we remembered several days ago, Krista had called and asked us if we had seen a mother raccoon around, perhaps, hit in the road, because she had three babies at her house. Perhaps these are the same little guys. Such is life in the country and we wouldn't trade it for the city.