family | Playing for Time

Memorial Weekend…again

30 May 2016 2 Comments

Went back to my 2014 remembrance post this morning, knowing that for too many people every weekend is memorial weekend.

It’s a typically perfect Memorial Day morning here, like so many from my childhood, when every year we could count on it to be raining or blistering hot and windstill, or freezing cold, or all of the above, in gusts, or maybe cool and clear after one of those rains. In Lawrence this morning it’s 79º headed for 82, sunny, blue skies, humidity has dropped from 89% when I went out at 7am to 60% five hours later, and it’s exquisitely beautiful out.

But life holds more than beauty – especially for those who will never see any of it again – and cloudy skies take over sometimes. By 2pm we’re supposed to be mostly under cloud cover here, which seems altogether fitting for the day.

In 2016 I reshare my family’s story out of gratefulness, and out of reverence for, and abhorrence of, unspeakable loss on all sides throughout the generations.

First posted Memorial Weekend 2014 (with edits 5/30/2016 – a personalized haiku for anyone who’s bored enough to find them all – link provided below.)

My grandpa enlisted in the Army at the age of 17 and served at the front as an infantryman during WWI. His six sons were all military men, Army, Navy, and Marines. The three Marines, 18, 19, and 21 were in the Korean Conflict at the same time, in the same general location, under miserable conditions. All seven Reese military personnel returned home intact in body and went on to raise thriving families of their own. Many of my cousins have also served with honor in the military. The only family member I’m aware of, without digging into the archives, who was directly lost to war, was my Aunt Bette’s husband, making her a teenage widow with a baby. The baby, my cousin Vickie, is standing in front of her mother and between our grandparents in the family portrait. My mama is top right in both the portrait and the thumbnail pics, somehow descriptive of her position in my life for all time. And kudos today to my Baby Aunt Barbara, lower right in both, who put this collage together.

So thankful to have four of the original Reese Dynasty kids – Vic, Jerry, Barbara, and Roger – present and accounted for, on this Memorial Remembrance in the year 2016. Hugs and kisses all around, beloved.

Ongoing family is priceless. Feeling deeply thankful right about now.

Reese Family

Okay, Constant Reader, the edits took on a life of their own, so don’t even try. If, however, you’d originally thought you might, for the haiku, throw me a subject and I’ll do it anyway!

Image by Judy Smith

Remembering a writing mentor who probably never knew it…

09 May 2016 Leave a comment

This is wonderful. My friend Ned Hickson wrote it and I stole it to share with you.

A mentor every writer should’ve been lucky enough to have.

Anyone who follows my weekly Nickel’s Worth on Writing knows Publisher’s Digest and The Master of Horror® Stephen King are frequently among those offering accolades touting the value an…

Source: Remembering a writing mentor who probably never knew it

Image by Judy Smith

Longevity rocks …

07 Sep 2015 2 Comments

Yesterday was nice. I slept through sunrise, thereby assuring myself that it still functions well without my supervision. Kim made ranch-bean omelets and we shared massive quantities of coffee and a soak in the spa tub. We gave Madison a bath and watched her turn into a fluff-ball again while she careened zoomie-dog-style through the house. Laundry was done and favorite pieces made ready to wear in mere seconds on the balcony — it was one of those hot windy days that signal a change of seasons, which will add to our appreciation for cooler temps later in the week.

And it was my birthday! Not a five- or ten-year milestone, but it means more to me than any since my 30th, which I nearly missed thanks to an inconvenient cerebral hemorrhage at 29. Far too many people I loved left this life far too soon, including my brother at 29, my first husband at 58, and so many others. I was born when my mom was just short of 20, and sharing a birth month with her I always felt there was a ribbon that connected us in some indestructible way. When she died suddenly at 67 a little trapdoor clicked open inside me and closed just as quickly. Shut up in there for the past twenty years was the unanswerable question of whether I would outlive her. Yesterday I celebrated 68 — and now we know.

Both of my grandmothers lived past 95 and kept their minds intact, so that’s my goal, free and clear, now that I’ve crossed the Rubicon. Not that I actively contribute much — walking our tiny dog three times a day is the extent of my exercise program and most of the time I eat what I want, although a recent not-good metabolic workup is forcing me to rethink that approach. Basically, in lieu of hard work on my part, I’m banking on great genes and a positive outlook. Happiness determines about 99% of life, so a Zen attitude and an abundance of good juju are my weapons of choice. And all these numbers … ages, blood pressures, cholesterol counts, calories … are just that — numbers. It takes so much more to measure the weight of a life, and our control over any of it is mostly imaginary .

Okay, I have to go, my husband’s running the spa tub full of hot water and therapeutic salts again for heading into another year of doing it right and seeing what happens.

P.S. The greatest of ironies would be if I’d gotten fried in my tracks on any one of my trips out to the balcony tonight to watch the lightning. Hitting the mark is no sort of guarantee, but I’m optimistic.

Image by Judy Smith

Getting Schooled

28 Jul 2015 6 Comments

Once upon a time there was a little red schoolhouse that was in fact a biggish red-brick edifice. Until it was built sometime before 1920, at considerable cost for the times, the children of the local farming community attended classes in a drafty wood-frame building that kept the mothers stewing over its shortcomings. Farming was booming, there was a homestead on nearly every quarter-section of land, and families were still moving into the area. A bigger, safer, warmer, more forward-looking school was needed, and my grandmother, a teacher — although not in this building, which was three-quarters of a mile from our farm — was one of the motivating forces behind the cause.

The funds were raised and the school built. Double-walled, with both facing and interior brick; a kitchen; wood flooring; full cement basement with a stage. My siblings and I, in one of its later iterations, roller-skated in the basement, daring each other to take artistic leaps from the stage to the smooth cement floor three feet below. My brain still knows whether or not anyone did, but the database is unfortunately down at present.

My dad went from first through eighth grades here before attending high school in the small town six miles southwest. My grandma took him, via horse and buggy, to his first day of first grade, and turned around a couple of hours later to find him standing in her kitchen. The teacher had let the kids out for recess and my dad, having all he wanted of this “school stuff,” simply made a break for home. He was bitterly disappointed to learn that attendance wasn’t optional, and despite being a thoroughly intelligent guy, formal education never became a favorite.

As Murphy’s Law #11 states, “You get the most of what you need the least.” So about the time the beautiful schoolhouse was nearing completion, the farming boom was starting to go bust. The air was turning to dust, Wall Street was headed for instability, to put it lightly, and families stopped streaming into the neighborhood while others gave up the struggle and packed it in. By the time the little six-year-old up there finished eighth grade in 1935, the student population had thinned considerably, finally making it impractical to keep the doors open, at which point the building became a community center, a polling place, the location for township meetings, and an ongoing setting for the Grange’s poetry readings, plays, and other literary endeavors, which sounds so quaint and genteel I can hardly stand it.

In my lifetime it was the site of community Thanksgivings … mostly in the late 1950s, which were nearly as devastating as the Dirty ’30s and left people feeling tapped out at holiday time so they pooled their resources. We also held big carry-in dinners for extended family, where all the old men brought fiddles and harmonicas and assorted other instruments for Frontier Karaoke while my grandma “chorded along” on the old upright piano.

I haven’t seen that corner for a while so I don’t know what if anything is still standing. Those few acres became part of the family farm, and my dad told the friends and neighbors who inquired that they could have what they needed. He and my brother had started taking the building apart and cleaning all the brick, a project that came to an end following my brother’s unfortunate death, and after that I’m pretty sure my dad didn’t care who did what with any of it. He did, with tears in his eyes, bring me a load of brick my brother had cleaned so that I could have a cozy hearth built in my newly-remodeled farmhouse … meaning we still don’t know the end of the story. An entirely different family, in another county, will keep it going forward.

It’s clear that bricks know the secret to longevity.

Image by Judy Smith

The Birth of a Dynasty

21 Jul 2015 8 Comments

It began with a fifteen-year-old, working at the local Mercantile, and a young soldier home from the WWI battle front.

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It steadily grew to nine children and a grandchild … and my grandmother was just 36 years old when she reached that status.

My mom is at the far right.

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The siblings in reverse order of birth, starting in the lower left-hand corner: Roger, Barbara, Jerry, Ron. Back row: Sterling, Victor, Virginia (my mother), Bette, Bob, and their mama, Jennie Marie.

With Grandpa now gone, my grandmother got to see all of her children together in one place for the last time. Several would precede her in dying, which should never happen. But no dynasty knows when the end begins, so they go right on …

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A fraction of the progeny brought forth upon the earth by the Reese Siblings. We’re as fun, entertaining, intelligent, smart-mouthed, certifiable, damaged, and independent as any group you want to assemble. Seriously … don’t mess with us, especially in light of the fact that I didn’t even try to list all of our stellar qualities. Except for the old codger front row third from right, I’m the eldest of all the cousins, middle of the middle row. And I’m clinging to that status for as long as possible while we watch the never-ending arrival of new babies. Every once in a while, you start something you can’t finish …

Image by Judy Smith

Still savoring stories …

13 Jul 2015 3 Comments

Remember this photo from the other day? My Great-aunt Nora, my grandmother, and my Great-aunt Ruth in the middle dressed in white. Christmas 1917.

Now we have this — taken same day, same location, when Ruth’s daughter Myrl was around two years old and my Uncle Ed maybe seven or eight and already missing his right eye. Until my dad came along several years later, they would be the only children of their family generation. There were eleven years between the two brothers, so they didn’t become friends until they were adults.

Ruth’s life took twists and turns from early on, and at no time did she adopt the quiet lifestyle of her two sisters. She instead embraced the 1920s, transitioning quickly from the chaste white dress to flapper gear more suited to The Party, wherever it happened to be. A happy Ruth …

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My grandma, who lived past 95, told me endless stories about life in the late 1800s and on, but I don’t remember her going into detail about why Myrl was raised by her Aunt Nora instead of her mother. There are bits and pieces we could combine in formulating answers, but as in all things there are nuances to be taken into account. Fortunately I have an inside track and a fact or two at my disposal. 1) As far as I could discern, not having really known them until they were what I thought of as old, my grandma and Great-aunt Nora, having been raised in challenging circumstances brought about primarily by their alcoholic father, were straight-laced to the max. 2) I heard mention of drinking when Grandma did talk about Aunt Ruth’s life, which would probably have required the equivalent of endless come-to-Jesus talks, but their objections to her lifestyle tell us nothing about Ruth’s feelings or her capacity for maternalism. My guess is that Grandma and Aunt Nora offered to keep Myrl at every opportunity and gradually made that a permanent arrangement, Nora thus getting the child she never had despite two marriages (more stories, kids), and Ruth getting what she, maybe, wanted in the first place, which was simply the freedom to be. That’s the trouble with photographs … they can tell us only so much. Ruth was the baby, spoiled and indulged by her older sisters, and she came along just as social mores were evolving ahead of the more devil-may-care attitudes of the Roaring 20s. The comparative drudgery and boredom of her growing-up years no doubt quickly lost out and fell away in the face of NEW, FUN, HAPPY, EXCITING! By the time I was conscious that I had a Great-aunt Ruth, she was older, ill, married to the last of a series of hard-drinking men, although Uncle Erv did treat her like she was made of glass. Her laugh, which she never lost, sounded like that same glass breaking, and I instinctively loved her. Life ended up costing her dearly … but that’s a story for another day.

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Mesa, Arizona, in the late 1990s. Me holding Merle’s dog Su-Ming, my dad, and feisty Merle, who at some point shed the old Myrl and moved on under her own terms. She was a party girl like her mama, but smarter about it, turning the discovery that her husband was a serial cheater into a flush retirement. By this time Uncle Ed had passed away, so Daddy and Merle were the only remaining direct connections to my grandparents and their era. Merle loved to laugh, she loved people, she loved family, she loved her little dog … and everything was “Oh, kid!” followed by delighted laughter. My favorite story was about the times a neighbor would pick her up from Aunt Nora’s house and then go get her mother. As Aunt Ruth was walking to the car, dark-haired little Myrl would giggle and shout at her “You tan’t fit, Roofie, you got too big a BUTT!!”

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There are a million ways to make life work and it’s a bonus to come from hardy people who knew about some of those ways. I’m in their debt but that isn’t how they saw it — they were simply surviving, in the end doing as well as anybody at that and hanging onto a healthy sense of humor through it all. They’d be genuinely happy to know they left a mark.

Image by Judy Smith

Family Portrait

10 Jul 2015 1 Comment

My paternal grandparents, John & Clara Dierking Wagner, and their two sons, Edmund and Daniel (my dad).

This would have been in the later 1920s. There may have been a smiling shot but we didn’t find it and the sober expressions in this one are striking to me. My grandpa’s eyes look resigned but determined, my grandma’s merely resigned. Life was a challenge every day and nobody emerged unscathed. My Uncle Ed lost his right eye very young, the result of a misguided attempt to cut through an old inner tube with a pocket knife, thus the inadvertent leer. I would guess my dad’s age at somewhere between five and seven — he still has that baby-soft aura. Uncle Ed left the farm at seventeen and made his own way ever after, retiring from the U.S. Military after a career that could have involved spying for all I know, and I totally hope that’s the case. My dad stayed and farmed with Grandpa … you’ve heard some of those stories, Faithful Reader. There are others …

You know who my heroes are right now? The people who invented and developed photography.

Image by Judy Smith

Well, HERE’s something interesting …

10 Jul 2015 Leave a comment

In my grandmother’s handwriting: “Aunt Mary & Aunt Kate Miller, maybe 1883 or so, Atchison, KS.”

Okay, NOW what? What does this mean for our Celia? What was her relationship to Mary and Kate, and how will this change her story? Answers must be found! Stay TUNED!

Image by Judy Smith

Old women are merely little girls with wrinkles …

09 Jul 2015 2 Comments

The recent photo sorting with my sisters has yielded much treasure, all of which I appreciate infinitely more than the first time I saw those pictures. Some I’d never laid eyes on before, and I do a little dance over each one. We’ve tossed bags full of bad pics — exceptionally bad pics of blurry armpits and floors and the back end of a cat — that nobody ever bothered to weed out, but we’ve glommed onto anything of interest, everything that sparks memories and smiles. Today’s little collection has been making me smile all morning, so I’m sharing …

My great-grandmother, Caroline Fuhrman Dierking (looking outward), and her sister Emma.

On the back, in my grandmother’s handwriting: “Caroline Fuhrman, my mother, was born in Germany. The family emigrated to America in 1872, with eight sons and two daughters, my mother being one of them. Aunt Emma was born in Atchison County, Kansas after they came to America. My mother and her sister loved each other very much. This is at Aunt Emma’s Camp Creek home in Atchison County, sometime around 1920.”

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Caroline Fuhrman married Louis Dierking and after living northeast of Emporia for a time, they moved to this dugout northwest of Bushong in 1894. Several sons were lost at birth or in childhood, but daughters Nora and Clara (my grandmother) survived, and after the move to the dugout, Ruth was born in 1896.

This photo was taken when my dad, brother and grandmother went to a Camp Creek family reunion in 1966, and shows the house my great-grandfather Louis Dierking built onto the front of the dugout. Pretty sure the horses, and whatever other livestock they had, lived in the lower part made from rock.

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The daughters of Louis & Caroline Dierking, Nora, Ruth & Clara, Christmas, 1917

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Ruth Dierking Cox in 1920 — clearly things had changed a bit in three years’ time,

although my grandmother’s comment was

“I believe her car was a Studebaker. Always breaking down or out of fix.”

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And now we’re back to sweet Great-Great-Aunt Emma, with pretty little Colleen, who was in some way my cousin, and 2-year-old me with my naked doll and a scowl. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1949. Life is both long and unbelievably short.

Image by Judy Smith

Rainy days and holidays …

05 Jul 2015 Leave a comment

The rain … on the plain … leads cruelly to pain … (think Bob Dylan) … but I’m fatally attracted, I’ll never not love rain. We’ve had buckets of it this spring and summer and our rivers are flowing full and beyond. The trees are glorious! Everything’s green and blooming and couldn’t feel more conducive to smiling and laughing and cavorting outside and taking naps. What is it about an accidental, or entirely on purpose, nap on a soft sunny day that tells us we’ve been kind to ourselves and it’s more than okay?

Yesterday was full of family, food, and fireworks. Oh, yours too? And did you have the feeling all day that you could easily nod off and not miss a thing because it would all go right on swirling around you and soaking into your DNA for yet another year? Yeah, works every time. All that rain did its thing and produced a perfect day here — blue skies, quiet beauty, and peace, other than the astounding amount of ordnance being detonated all around us especially after dark. Like true American warriors, we assimilated the audio into our psyches and marched on … through a mountain of burgers and brats, potato salad, baked beans, pasta salad, deviled eggs, guac & chips, an array of cold liquids, and homemade Butterfinger ice cream. (Not a complete list.)

Little girls lighting pastel-colored smoke bombs with Papa, sets of sisters in three generations being goofy together, bros bro-ing, beer chilling before swilling, everything easy-going and sweet-feeling. Turns out the America we grew up in … and were pretty sure we remembered … still exists and is way worth saving. The friends who friend us, the family who love us, the times spent just being together, are still the real stuff, and there are days when you know you’d lay down your life for it.

Happy July 4th, America. Thank you for your patience and long-suffering while we try to solve the puzzle of being human. You’re a Good Girl.

Image by Judy Smith

Forget throwbacks …

29 May 2015 1 Comment

Throwback Thursday offends my sense of independence so here’s one for Friday — the house where my paternal grandpa was born, near Corydon, Indiana. In the picture are my great-grandparents George and Salome (Sally) Wagner, my grandpa John, his sister Annie and brother Otto, and their half-sister Teena (always called Teenie, although she never was). I’d heard stories about the house “all my life,” and when I was in college I drove my grandma there as part of a road trip to visit relatives in several states. Grandpa had died several years earlier, and on her own after more than 60 years married, Grandma was in want of an adventure. On the Indiana leg of our trip we took our time locating the house, and found it beautifully cared for by its current owners, much to my grandma’s relief. The descriptions and tales from my relatives made the yard and outbuildings feel sweetly familiar to me, and the cistern at the bottom of the slope out front where my Wagner kindred stored their perishables was still being fed by the same ice-cold spring.

We humans are so connected to our roots. Whether we understand it or not, there’s a longing for where and what we came from. Other than not having Grandpa in the car with us, the trip with my grandma was a full-circle experience. And driving her cross-country broadened my knowledge of her, her life, and her family relationships. This was highly beneficial for a college girl who didn’t know quite everything yet.

Image by Judy Smith

This is getting ridiculous …

13 May 2015 4 Comments

I can’t write, I might as well face it and move on.

It isn’t that I can’t write, I know how, but the words have all gone somewhere else. Things come to me but I don’t make it to the end of the first sentence and the orphaned drafts are starting to rack up bandwidth. I have pressure behind my eyes from needing to write something that doesn’t suck, but I sit here every day and do nothing but procrastinate.

Yes, I would like some brie with that whine, be right back …

Wrote that a week ago, walked away from it, looked through some old photos that same afternoon and wrote this. On Facebook. Just like that, shazott. Learned something about myself that’s been knocking around in my head all week, and when it settles into a shape and forms sentences, I’ll share.

So from a week ago …

Did you get the memo saying PLEASE, NO THROWBACK HUMPDAY PHOTOS?? Neither did I.

This one has layers. Start with where the truck is parked. The blue spruce snuggled up to the passenger side was brought from Colorado, by my grandparents, as a seedling back in ought-whenever because that was perfectly legal then. It grew to many, many feet tall and almost as many feet wide at the base until one day in a storm it simply came out of the ground and assumed a horizontal position, landing on and against the house but wreaking minimal havoc. (Back-story: My grandparents’ house is to the right, where we see part of a roof.)

Then there’s the truck, a fixture of my childhood. It was gray and pretty wonderful, and when my dad drove it to town with the first cutting of wheat to test for moisture content, the gray-dust-covered elevator guys motioned him to drive the front wheels onto the lift, because of course there were no hydraulics under the bed … and then they raised the front of the truck high enough for the wheat to pour out the open tailgate in the back. Which was pretty freaking high to a seven-year-old and he only let me stay in the cab with him once, but not because I cried. I’m pretty sure he decided Mother wouldn’t approve.

Which brings us to the watermelons. Big, dark green, full of luscious red fruit, and juice that ran down our chins and made everything stick to our hands. Every summer, a truckload like this and far more came from my grandpa’s big patch in the middle of a section, next to an irrigation engine. The melon patch was raided one night by a couple of carloads of high school kids — the four girls dropped the four guys off and drove around the section (a square mile), stopping to let their boyfriends stash gunny sacks full of melons in the car trunks. My dad, Grandpa, and a couple of the neighbors, alerted by the sudden rash of traffic in the middle of nowhere, ambushed them in mid-haul, blinded them with spotlights, and panic ensued. The girls drove off, the boys lost their shoes in a field covered in Texas Tacks, and the whole thing ended up in court. My grandpa didn’t mind a melon going missing once in a while, but he held a big feed for the whole township every year and it made him mad that these guys had stolen more than thirty of his prize watermelons and deliberately destroyed a goodly number of the rest just for the hell of it. But it infuriated him even more when he asked the ringleader’s name and the kid said “John Wagner.” That was my grandpa’s name and he thought he had a bona fide smart-ass in front of him. True story, though, and Big Daddy was an attorney — with the same name. I understand it got fairly comical during the hearing but my grandpa never cracked a smile. Fun and games. Told you. Layers.

Image by Judy Smith

It’s throw-back Thursday, let’s throw pictures …

12 Mar 2015 2 Comments

Don’t ask about the migrating pile of paperwork, I don’t want to talk about it. Spoiler alert: today’s list doesn’t look discernibly different from yesterday’s, subject closed. And if it mattered I’d feel guilty or something, but as the boss of me I’m shockingly indulgent — all the hurry has leaked away and it’s heaven.

I found a little slice of Throw-Back-Thursday heaven … my mom’s cousin Chet … in the Philippines … WWII era. Enjoy while I think of something to do with this mix of have-to-keep and need-to-toss that won’t go away.

Image by Judy Smith

Feels like a HumpDay …

25 Feb 2015 4 Comments

4:00pm. Good news and bad news so far today. Rewind to …

10:45am. Kim returns from his annual cardiology exam/report full of great news — the sonogram shows no sign of muscle damage, his blood pressure read 116/63 in the office, and he is, in clinical terms, healthy as a horse. Everybody hugs and does the happy dance and the house feels warm, and safer than it did at 9:45 before his doctor said to him “You should be around for a very long time.”

11:45am. My surgeon’s assistant calls to remind me about tomorrow morning’s appointment, which I think is for finishing the graft and freeing my eyelid again but is simply a check-up, at which time Dr. Khan will determine how much longer the graft has to “bake.” I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.

11:46am. A meltdown may or may not take place, after which Kim takes me to Hog Wild BBQ for a loaded baked potato bigger than my head. Carb therapy.

2:00pm to present. Lying prone in a darkened room does wonders for temporary insanity, and by darkened room I mean Facebook and WordPress. By *lying prone* I mean I’ve intentionally flat-lined for a while, and by *temporary insanity* I mean batshit crazy.

4:15pm. It’s all good news, of course. A delay in ditching an irritant does not a tragedy make, the graft looks like it’s healing perfectly, and my well-worn face has not been further marred — the scar is going to fade beautifully and who really cares!

Staying cozy tonight with Kim and Madison and feeling grateful. Another HumpDay conquered.

Image by Judy Smith

Really? Are you kidding me?

04 Feb 2015 4 Comments

See the post before this one? Okay … GUESS. WHAT. DAY. IT. IS!! Yes. Again.

So it may or may not have been a somewhat challenging week in which whimpering, bitching, and one hugh-jass meltdown happened. Pretty sure there was an afternoon where somebody cried for two or three hours and totally freaked out her husband and fluffy little dog. The upside is that the eye — the sumbish in our story — actually felt better afterward, so there’s that.

The days have slipped by and the weather outside has gone from cold to warm to cold again. We’re hibernating … but ready to be sociable. Not today so much, because it’s snowy and wet and feels like 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and what you hear me saying is that unless you’re coming to our house we won’t be seeing you yet, because the fireplace is just too nice, and Maddie and I are snuggled at my desk with the divine little radiant heater Kim got us today, the same Kim who’s adorably zoned out “watching” TV … and we’re just not leaving, you can’t make us leave.

It’s gray here, and cold. I’m glad that never lasts. Grass and leaves and sunshine always feel slow coming back, just like health and well-being, but it all gets here, and mostly on time.

Coming back. Might even be back again tomorrow …

Image by Judy Smith

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Playing for Time

Memorial Weekend…again

Remembering a writing mentor who probably never knew it…

Longevity rocks …

Getting Schooled

The Birth of a Dynasty

Still savoring stories …

Family Portrait

Well, HERE’s something interesting …

Old women are merely little girls with wrinkles …

Rainy days and holidays …

Forget throwbacks …

This is getting ridiculous …

It’s throw-back Thursday, let’s throw pictures …

Feels like a HumpDay …

Really? Are you kidding me?

Judy Smith

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Follow Blog via Email

ALL the stuff …

Top Posts & Pages

These people know better but they read my blog anyway.

Join the conversation …

Categories

Were you looking for …

I choose favorites …

The Nitty-Gritty

COPYRIGHT

Winnowing the Chaff

Search My Site