Puzzles and Books

We attend a small church, usually thirty people make it a large group, and I like it that way; good, old fashioned hymns, and no power point screen hanging down in front of us. The majority of us range in age from mid-forties to mid-eighties, with only one little boy. Really this is sad that young people are not as active in church as in days gone by.

I guess you could say I have taken one woman, widowed and living alone, under my wing. I have known of her all my life but still, never really knew her. She is eighty six years old, still able to drive her car and work some in her yard. One Sunday she mentioned that she was working a jigsaw puzzle; of course that got my attention for that's a favorite thing I like to do when I have the time. We have several pretty puzzles, so I asked her if she would like for me to bring her a different one and she said, "Yes, if you want to." Well, that led to taking a new puzzle every week; she had plenty of time to spend on them. This summer she had a blood clot in her leg and when that was resolved, she felt she was spending too much time sitting down and told me she shouldn't be working on the puzzles for a while. Then later she felt like working them again, until I took one that was really difficult and she brought it back to me. But I wasn't willing to let her sit idle. "Do you like to read?" I asked, and she said, "Yes", so I took her Laura Ingalls Wilder's first book, Little House in the Big Woods; she read it in one week, brought it back, and I handed her the next one, Little House on the Prairie.

We had to miss church last Sunday, but I had another in the series for her. Now I'm wondering, did she have anything to keep her busy this week while the weather is so cold? I guess I'm just putting myself in her place, for it's not that many years until I'm her age and may need someone to bring entertainment to me.

The Long Winter, Southern-Style

We had a couple of REALLY cold days last week, which happened to coincide with the time when my husband was away on a business trip. That meant I had the responsibility of caring for his livestock (notice I said his livestock!). The main concern was keeping water for them, since the temperature was well below freezing both days. I wasn't so worried about most of the cattle, since they get their water from a running source, which is less likely to freeze. However, the sheep's water was covered with a layer of ice about an inch thick, and the hens' water was frozen solid. The pond the bull drinks from also had some ice, but I don't think it was frozen over completely.

Anyway, I carried water to the hens and broke the ice on the sheep's tank with the splitting maul (like a sledge hammer with an axe edge on one side). That was a perfect tool for the task, and it didn't take much effort. As I was walking back to the house, I remembered reading in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Long Winter about the cattle whose heads were frozen to the ground after a blizzard. The temperatures were so cold that the moisture in their breath froze, trapping the cow in an icy muzzle. Laura's Pa had to go to each of the cattle and break their noses free of the ice. It made me glad to live in the South, where weather is the teens is considered "frigid," and we don't have to deal with blizzards and sub-zero temperatures, and any cold weather we do have is generally short-lived and followed by days in the 50s or 60s!