Reflections on the Sixth Week of Fall – Halloween Transformed

    Halloween has changed.  

   When we'd lived in Cleveland Heights, I'd hung decorations in windows and set glowing jack-'o-lanterns on the front steps. Inside, we chuckled at one-liners from the Ghostbusters movie. Outside the patter of footsteps, swish of customs, and laughter of children echoed under glowing street lights. The doorbell rang, our cats peered from a safe distance, and Spence welcomed children. “Who do we have here? A ghost? A princess?” He dropped Reese's peanut butter cups and Scooby-Doo graham crackers into their bags. “Watch yourselves on the steps,” he said, and a sigh rose from the moms and dads hovering at the bottom of the driveway.

    Moving to rural Western Pennsylvania ended those traditions. Instead of carving pumpkins, we set out intact honey boat squashes and Jack Be Little pumpkins with plans to cook them later.

    I did buy Reese's peanut butter cups . . . but not for children.

    With houses spaced a quarter mile or more apart, no children traipsed down West Creek Road. Instead they attended Trunk or Treat. Families drove their cars to church parking lots, opened decorated trunks, and passed out treats to giggling, costumed youngsters.

    How could I celebrate without a ringing doorbell and “Trick or treat” shouts?

    Last year, Spence and I ambled through the Milledgeville graveyard and read headstones in day light. This year I invited neighbors Kathy and Tammy to the Homespun Treasurers Quilt Shoppe Halloween party and sale.

    Through a dark tunnel of trees, Kathy drove slowly to watch for running deer. We deposited the Reese's peanut butter cups in a plastic jack-'o-lantern by the door for 35% discount tickets on our purchases. Dressed in pajamas, slippers, and hair rollers, Joy, a friend from the quilt guild and volunteer at the quilt shoppe that night, helped me select fabrics. We matched the triangles I'd cut from my late mom's house coats with blue-green fabric for sashing to sew around quilt blocks formed with the triangles and dark green fabric for the back of Mom's memorial quilt. I sipped fresh apple cider and watched Tammy then Kathy win door prizes by stepping on the lucky number when a bell rang in the store. Girl-chatter filled the car on our drive home.

    Adjusting to their own new traditions, the cats assumed the role of trick-or-treaters.

    George played the Halloween prank. He padded through the corn starch Spence had accidentally spilled on the kitchen floor, walked out into the rain, and scratched on the sliding glass door to signal he wanted to come inside. His paws had streaked the glass as if defacing it with soap.

    Emma preferred treats. Because she had a dry cough, we'd driven her to the vet Tuesday afternoon. He gave her shots and two kinds of pills to take over the next eighteen days. I hid the medicine in Pill Pockets which she considered treats. For five days, she's swallowed the medicine inside the Pill Pockets, reared back on her hind legs, and mewed for more.

    One change I don't want this Halloween is for Emma to discover I'm giving her a trick not a treat.

 

Reflections on the Fifth Week of Fall – Garbage Deliberations

 

    After forty-eight years and five months of marriage, Spence and I sat in the great room to solve a new problem. Garbage.

    Tuesday the sale of our old house closed and ended Spence's routine of hauling garbage and recycling to the Cleveland Heights tree lawn.

    In rural communities, taxes don't include garbage removal. We had researched landfills within forty miles. None accepted occasional loads of garbage. For prices neighbors complained were exorbitant, landfills gave us two choices. First, buy pickup service which Spence vetoed because of their twice-the-speed-limit reckless driving and their habit of leaving animal-ripped messes on the berm. Second, rent a dumpster which made no sense since we only had a plastic grocery bag of garbage a week.

    Staring at Spence staring at me across the coffee table, I said, “We need to check what we can recycle.”

    He fetched the empty container bag, I grabbed the paper recycling, and the truck bounced us to Cochranton. In the high school parking lot, we studied the labels on recycle bins large enough to hold an ATV. Spence whipped out his note pad and wrote: Bottles, jugs, jars, cans, aluminum, tin, steel, and #1 & 2 plastics. Newspaper, magazines, and corrugated cardboard.

    I gently set glass bottles and rinsed food cans inside a bin. All the glossy junk mail and cardboard seltzer water cartons rode home with us.

    “Burnables,” Spence said.

    Our township allowed burning. After researching on line, I chose BurnRight's large, stainless steel, hi-temp burn barrel,  the most eco-friendly available. Off and on during the week Spence assembled the barrel and mumbled about inadequate directions. We'd burn the paper Cleveland Heights would have recycled.

    That left non-recyclable plastics and Styrofoam. Since the butcher shop closed in Sandy Lake, we'd bought meat at Giant Eagle in Meadville. Cuts came wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic–not paper.

    “Change to Malady's Meat Market?” I asked.

    Spence shook his head. “Their meat is pricey and just average. Maybe there's a meat market in Erie.”

    A two hour round trip to buy meat in paper wrappings? Not my first choice. “Does Giant Eagle recycle Styrofoam like Heinen's in Cleveland?”

    “No, and Heinen's stopped recycling,” he said. “I suspect no one takes Styrofoam anymore.”

“Giant Eagle has a garbage can outside. Why don't we take the meat trays back to them?”

    Basics decided, we reorganized garbage into seven containers.

1) compost

2) scrap paper fire starters

3) aluminum recycling

4) glass, metal, and plastic #1 and #2 recycling

5) newspaper, magazines, and corrugated cardboard recycling

6) glossy junk mail and food carton burnables

7) garbage

    The rest of the week, with a Styrofoam tray or an empty tooth paste tube in my hand, I'd open the old garbage container which now held burnables. Sigh. Besides the hide-and-seek-game of finding the right bin out of seven, using the new system generated questions. Are floor sweepings compost? I pulled out a sliver of plastic and emptied the dust into the compost bin. Are food scraps burnable? Duh. I'd burnt plenty meals. I dried the scraps and dumped them into burnables.

    I asked Spence harder questions. “What do I do with toe nail clippings?”

    “Compost, burnables, or garbage,” he said. “Only they'll take a long time to compost.

    One question I didn't have to ask. When quests say, “What can I bring,” I'll answer, “Nothing, but there is something you can take.”

Reflections on the Fourth Week of Fall – Unexpected

    “I wasn't ready for fall,” Spence said and bent to finger a frost-blackened winter squash leaf. “Time to put the garden to bed for the winter.”

    The calendar, a week of nippy mornings, and several weeks of leaves changing color had acclimated me, but I hadn't done my fall garden chores either. The last time I'd picked blueberries was September first. Since berries wouldn't form till next summer, now was the time to remove the blueberry tents we'd constructed in June.

    We had built frames with PVC pipes. Spence wound three foot high chicken wire around the bottom of the frames to discourage raccoons and to give pollinators access. I covered the top with reemay, agricultural cloth that lets in sunlight and water but keeps out bugs and birds. With bull clips and cable ties (strips of grooved plastic that feed through cubed knuckles to hold bunches of electrical cables together), I attached the cloth to the frames. All summer the blueberry tents adorned the garden like ghostly sentries.

    Monday, under a the sunny, October-blue sk, I hung a plastic grocery store bag on my belt and carried aviation snips to the blueberry tent in the north garden. Squeezing rusted levers, I freed bull clips and dropped them into the bag. Clink. I snipped cable ties and stuffed them into my pocket. Because I'd pulled many ties too tight last June, I couldn't slip the blades under the plastic. Regretting I wasn't a raccoon to shred the cloth with claws, I angled the snips around the plastic fastener knuckles. Teeth gritting and two hands pressing, I cut. Reemay flapped.

    Bugs had entered through the chicken wire. Many tried to exit through the reemay. Spiders took advantage of the bugged-brained critters and built webs. I met these hungry spiders and the trapped bugs while I snipped. A grape sized, red-with-white-dotted orb-weaver spider hung from the northwest corner of the tent. I tiptoed past and freed the other sides of the cloth. Wind blew the spider away. When I pulled the cloth off the PVC frame, dead earwigs  fell onto my head. I shook them off me and the cloth. Then I folded the cloth for next year.

    More bugs waited in south garden tents. A black spider, the size of a black widow, landed on my sleeve. Preferring to call it a black house spider, I brushed it off and kept working.

    Spence said, “I could use the cloths to protect my peppers.”

    “Fine with me.” Without shaking or folding, I dumped the cloths in a pile.

    He gathered the buggy fabric in his arms and walked to the pepper patch.

    I uncovered a Late Blue bush and shouted, “Ripe berries!” Late Blue bushes usually fruit from the beginning of July through the first week of August. I picked a dark blue, firm globe. A ripe berry indeed. With a handful of berries, I hustled to show Spence.

    “Who'd have thought?” He bent to spread a cover cloth over his Hungarian Hot Wax peppers. It blew off. He grabbed it and placed it over the peppers again. “Better check your beans.”

    I unfastened my belt and handed him the plastic bag. Maybe the bull clips would weigh down the cloth to keep it over the peppers.

    Heading to the house for my picking bucket, I ate half the berries. Super sweet–not the sweet-tart of the earlier blueberries. At the waste basket I emptied my bulging pocket. Cable ties flowed like a string of never ending scarves from clown's sleeve. Back in the garden, I picked straggling purple beans and three cups of strawberries.

    Blueberries, purple beans, and strawberries weren't ready for fall either.

 

Reflections on the Third Week of Fall - Puzzled

    Three Thursdays ago, a smiling curly headed fifth grader at Learning Center asked, “Would you like to try our math puzzle, Janet?”

    “Yes,” I said. “I like puzzles.”

    The youngster and two of his friends had created a number table containing six rows of five boxes. Each box had an addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division sign and a number. Holding the paper in his left hand he said, “Start at one of the three arrows on top.” He waved his thin, right pinkie finger horizontally then vertically. “Move this way or that–no diagonals. Exit with fifty. That means you'll be at forty-five when you get to the plus five box at the bottom.”

    I took the paper. “Thanks. I'll work on it at home.” How hard could it be? To solve the puzzle I just had to calculate along a path.

    Three different afternoons I made trial and error runs through the maze, doodled numbers on scratch paper, and decided to ask for more clues when I volunteered again. Two Thursdays ago, I checked with the curly haired youngster to see if the path could go up as well as down.

    He held his chin with his hand for a moment then said, “I guess so, but you can't go through any square twice.”

    I also asked the teacher, “Are negative numbers or fractions involved?”

    She shook her head. “But you go over fifty. It took me an hour and a half to solve Sunday night.”

    I'd already spent more time than that. Maybe I needed help. Spence doesn't like puzzles or games so I wouldn't ask him. His high school friend Eric and Eric's wife Kay would be arriving the next day. Eric, a retired electrical engineer, was a whiz at math. Kay had trained teachers and liked games. I could ask them–after they'd had time to settle in.

    Friday afternoon, Kay and I prepared home grown vegetables–honey boat squash, purple beans, and zucchini. Spence cooked pork and chicken. After a leisurely dinner, we watched jazz videos on the large flat screen TV. The puzzle could wait.

    Saturday I baked a pie with Wells Wood apples and blueberries. Kay cooked swiss steak with Wells Wood tomatoes. We played Banana Grams and Dutch Blitz. The fellas took a walk in the dark and drizzle. At bed time I casually mentioned, “I got a math puzzle from the children at the school where I volunteer. Maybe you could help me solve it?”

    Kay shrugged.

    Eric chuckled. “Sure.”

    Sunday after breakfast, I pushed away the breakfast dishes and placed the puzzle on the kitchen table between Kay and me. She studied the puzzle. “You have to do this by trial and error,” she said. “There are millions of combinations.”

    “The students probably wrote their sequence of numbers then just filled in the spaces around them,” I said.

    We worked top down, bottom up, and top down again. Six scribbled pages of figures later, we still didn't have the solution.

    “Eric,” Kay called. “Will you help us?”

    He chuckled, put down his electronic book, and stared at the puzzle.

    Kay and I roasted two home grown pie pumpkins and made pumpkin soup for lunch.

    Eric calculated, drew circles connected by arrows, and wrote numbers. After forty-seven scattered circles, he didn't have the solution either.

    We put the puzzle aside, ate the soup, and packed for a late afternoon/evening Erie outing. We walked through a tunnel of trees on the Sidewalk Trail from the Presque Isle Lighthouse to Misery Bay then drove under a rainbow to the Bayfront Grille for a gourmet dinner. On the way home, Kay told us about playing in a Dixieland jazz band at Geauga Lake amusement park, and we listened to The Bad Plus on a CD.

    This past Monday, the day Eric and Kay would leave, I was desperate. When Eric took his second sip of coffee, I shoved the puzzle at him. He chuckled. We munched breakfast and figured. “We've got to try every possible path,” I said. I drew a copy of the puzzle and jumped up to fetch my colored pencils.

    “That's a dead end,” Eric said when a path proved false.

We'd try another direction. Six colors later on three marked charts, we had tried every whole number combination from top to bottom and bottom to top. None worked.

   “We must have made an calculating error,” I said and chose the path that started plus eleven, minus one, divided by five. Lucky guess. We'd made an error on the tenth step in the sequence. That path worked.

    Kay walked into the kitchen, yawned, and held out her hand for the paper. She studied our numbers. “You made a mistake . . . no that's right.” She handed the paper back. “Fun.”

  This past Thursday, I took the completed puzzle to the curly haired fifth grader. “I finished,” I said and handed it to him.

    He grinned and pumped his fist.

 

Reflection on the Second Week of Fall – No Worries?

    After months of scrubbing and painting the Cleveland Heights house, months of keeping it viewer-visiting clean, and weeks of negotiating with a buyer, we signed the contract to sell the brick house where we'd raised our children. Relief. Time to relax. I could let the stress of maintaining two houses evaporate. We only had to wait for the buyer to get his mortgage, remove our last few possessions, and sign the closing papers.

   Or so I thought.

   This past Monday morning, Kate, office manager for our Realtor Paul Blumberg, emailed to say the appraiser would be at the house Thursday morning. “All utilities need to be on. Turn the furnace on too.” Spence had already left for a day in Cleveland. I sent him an email in hopes he'd get it at a coffee shop, since we'd already canceled Internet at the house, and left a voice message on his cell phone. Success. He got both messages and turned on the furnace.

   No worries. I relaxed.

   Late Wednesday afternoon. Sharon, from the Competitive Title Agency, called to say we had to clear the lien on the house.

   “We paid off the mortgage years ago,” I said.

   “Key Bank says there's a open mortgage on the house. They won't tell me the balance,” Sharon insisted.

   Did Sharon mean the home equity line we took out when we built the log house in Pennsylvania? We payed off that loan too. The bank had sent several notices saying the home equity line would expire if we didn't renew.

   We didn't renew and let the loan expire.

   I called Key Bank. In a polite, methodical tone, Vivian explained we had a zero balance but needed to “pay a twenty-eight dollar fee for closing the account.”

   Sheesh. Expired didn't mean closed? Was this a variation of a Wells Fargo banking technique?

   Spence had spent Wednesday at meetings in Cleveland. Sharon's call came too late for him to close the account at a Key Bank office. That meant Thursday, armed with the letter, account number, and routing number, we had to drive half an hour to the Huntington Bank in Greenville. We sat with Sandra, the personal banker who had let me use her bank computer to pay bills when our Wells Wood Internet went down for a week. She walked us through the procedure for wiring money then shook her head. “Are you sure you want to do this for twenty-eight dollars? The fee is another twenty-five dollars.”

   “We're sure, and could you fax the letter to the bank too? We must submit a written request for closing the account and releasing the zero balance to the title agency.”

   Sandra looked over her shoulder toward the glass enclosed office. “If SHE weren't here, I'd do it gladly. But, I can't today.”

   No worries. Spence had to drive to Meadville to get groceries.

   We drove home. He drove another half hour to Meadville. Letter faxed, medicine ordered, and groceries bought, Spence called me on his cell phone. “I'm stuck in the parking lot of Giant Eagle. The truck won't start.”

   “I'll come get you,” I said.

   “No need. I called AAA for a jump.” He called back ten minutes later. “The truck started so I canceled the AAA request.”

   Though not as easy as turning on the furnace Monday, the problem was solved. Time to relax.

   But Friday morning, Kate, the office manage, emailed with an addendum to the contract about the point of sale inspection being extended. I signed electronically, replied with a note summarizing what we'd done about the lien, and asked if there were anything else I needed to do.

   Kate emailed back. “Please call me.”

   Drat.

   Now what.

   “There's the matter of the easement,” Kate said.

   “The six inches our driveway curb overlaps the neighbor's yard so our cars don't slide onto their property on icy days? The driveway was already there when we bought the house in 1975. We gave Paul the easement papers last April.”

   “I know. It's just a technicality. But the buyer made the sale contingent on resolving the easement. You can't move the driveway. There's nothing to do except explain it. The title agency lawyer can handle that.”

   Now I'm waiting for the next phone call or email request to jump another house-sale hurdle.

   No relief.

   I can't relax.

   Not yet.