Truck repairs, rats, travel challenges, limited shopping

Funny things happen at the farm every time I am away. Monday night everything seemed to be fairly normal. Mama was home for the day because she was still not feeling well. She got the call from Roger about our truck. The repairs are not excessive but for a diesel the parts are always expensive. A filter and sensor inside the valve cover, a sensor on the exhaust and the labor to make the repairs totals about $500. I have no problem with the price. The truck is paid for so making a payment for repairs that is less than the monthly payments some of my friends are making on their new trucks seems like a very good deal. The repairs are just in time according to Roger. I can live with that also. According to what he told Mama, the truck should be ready this afternoon.

Tuesday, she was advised to stay home for an additional day because she had not been twenty-four hours without fever. Tuesday night, during the evening feeding, is when Mama and Victoria found a large rat trapped in a closed barrel where we normally store feed. How the rat had gotten into the barrel – the lid was closed and weighted down – and how long it had been in the barrel is unknown. By the time I got home Wednesday night and put the starving rodent out of his misery he had been without food or water for at least three days. He looked pretty pitiful but got no sympathy other than to quickly dispatch him. Mama and Victoria were hesitant to touch the barrel even thought there was no possible way for the rat to get to them. In their defense, the barrel did stink badly from the rat being confined for whatever time he had been there.

Also on Tuesday, the company that installed our windows came to replace the one window that had been improperly installed. It is the only window in the house that has grids in it; other than the sidelights for the picture window – and those are correct. Mama was thrilled to have the repair scheduled before Thanksgiving so we can get her a tree and get it set up in position in front of that window. However, the window they brought to replace the incorrect one was ¼’ too large to fit. Mama was very unhappy – and very vocal about it to the service technicians. There was nothing they could do except endure Mama’s aggravation and shamefacedly head back to their office about an hour away, leaving the originally installed incorrect window in place at our house. When they will be back is still up in the air, but it better be very soon. Mama is going to want her tree up soon.

I stopped by the school on my way through town to give Mama a kiss. She was less than fifteen minutes from getting off, but she had to run some errands before going home. I think Bro Zack gets a kick out of me and Mama and our tenderness toward each other – our open expressions of love toward each other. Maybe a little of the romance will rub off on him and his wife. The stiffness and restraint imposed on them at the Christian college where they met – not necessarily a bad thing – has followed them into their marriage; also, not a bad thing, but it sure makes me and Mama seem excessive by comparison. Again, not a bad thing.

As of last night, Mama is still feeling less than 100%. She is desperate to recover so she can enjoy the trip we are planning to take next week to visit with Brittany and Andrew and the twins for Thanksgiving. Mama has more angst about now feeling well enough to go shopping for Black Friday than she does about the overall visit. She and I have talked about spending limits for the nationally acclaimed sales event – they will be very low limits for this year. That is not necessarily a bad thing. I asked that this Christmas we concentrate on family and not on presents. For that reason, we will focus on getting gifts for the grandchildren and only incidentally for our grown children or each other.

We had one Christmas when we first moved to West Virginia when we literally had nothing to give each other or the children. We scraped together as much money as we could for a proper Christmas dinner and enjoyed the very cold day preparing the meal and then eating it together. It was one of the bests Christmas’s we have shared over the years.

It is time to try that again.