Mrs. Patrick, Miss Donna, heat, losing our fishing hole

Our very dear friend in Amarillo, Mrs. Patrick went home to be with the Lord last week. Her funeral is today. Mama and I debated going over for the funeral but in the end, we decided not to. It would have been an over and back trip – five hours each direction with the funeral sandwiched in. The motivation for the one-day trip to attend the funeral was that I have a class to teach tomorrow, and I wanted to honor that obligation. It is not a difficult drive, and we could have done it, but it was not the trip itself that caused us to make our decision not to go, it was the commitment we had made to the Wycoff’s to care for Noreen’s mom, while the family traveled to Georgia to attend the funeral of Daniel’s dad.

Miss Donna, now 92 years old, came to stay with Mama and me Thursday evening as the family made the necessary arrangements to travel over to meet with Daniel who had already flown to Georgia to help with the final plans for the funeral of his father and to help settle the family accounts. Daniel’s mother is still living but will require constant care because of her failing health. Fortunately, Daniel’s twin brother is close by to provide that care. The death of his father was expected. He had been in the hospital for several weeks and was not expected to leave the hospital. So, Miss Donna came to stay with us. She is not a difficult person to provide care to. She gets around mostly on her own, but she requires a lot of help when it comes to meals and showering. She maintains a busy schedule of word search puzzles, knitting, reading, and napping. She also needed Mama to take her to her swimming classes several times during her stay. She does that for exercise. I think Mama likes that idea. But today her family should be back in town, and she will go home to sleep in her own bed. Overall, she has enjoyed her stay with us, Mama mostly, but there really is no place like home.

Our normal summer heat has finally arrived. For the next weeks the temperature will hover near 100° F. We have had a few days where the temperature topped out at 103° F, but for the most part we have been slightly below. There has been no rain for a couple weeks now and none is in the forecast for the next ten days, so I have had to begin watering every night I am available just to keep the plants and trees alive through the heat. At the moment, I am trying to keep a couple pumpkin plants alive in the garden. They are all that is left of the vegetables we tried to grow this year and I am not sure if I can water them often enough to survive through the heat. Time will tell, but Mama wants to see if the pumpkins we have on those plants will grow into full sized fruit.

Working outside has been miserable. I generally wear one shirt per time out working in the heat. In other words, I will put on one shirt and work for a couple hours on a task and when I got into the house to rest, I will change to a dry shirt. It is far too cold inside the house to wear a wet shirt for the time it would take to dry in the airconditioned environment, so I change. When I go back outside, the dry shirt I changed to will get totally soaked and upon returning to the house to rest for a bit, I will take it off and put back on the shirt, now dried in the sun, that I sweated up earlier. It works out well enough to allow me to dirty only two shirts through the day. Of course, my pants are partially soaked but that does not chill me as much as standing inside in a soaked shirt.

As Mama was contacting Ricky late last week, the owner of the property next to us where we go fishing, he let Mama know that we may be losing our access to the lakes. He told Mama that he is leasing the property starting the first of next month. It will be up to the person or group leasing the property whether or not we will have fishing privileges at the quarry lakes. We are praying that we do not lose that fishing hole, but such is life. Our pastor is really sad at losing those fishing privileges, but all we can do at this point is pray. As we are waiting to find out what we need to do to contact the lease holder Chester called. He is a friend who helps Ricky run the cattle on the property in question. He told us that he knows nothing about Ricky leasing the land. So, we will wait and take as many opportunities as possible to fish while we do have access. For now, it is way too hot to go fishing, but we may have to go anyway.

I will be teaching a class tomorrow and Friday. Busy week.