Month: January 2021

Wind frightens me.  It’s one in the morning, and the wind is blowing.  It is REALLY blowing.  Alexa (a Christmas gift from Bryan) says to expect winds at ten mph with gusts to almost thirty mph.  I know that March is supposed to be the month of wind, but here we get a lot of wind in January.

I remember when I was a kid, living in Southern Colorado.  My family of five girls and a mom and dad lived in what we would today call a Denver Square. No central heading.  No inside plumbing.  Electricity was a drop cord light hanging from the center of each room.

Sister Clara and I slept upstairs beneath heavy quilts made by mom from our father’s overalls and old jackets.  And, the wind blew.  The wind blew so hard that I was sure, as a child, it shook the bed in which we slept.  I’ve remembered that fear for my entire life.  At a point, I thought that it could not be true.  Wind blowing into and through a house, shaking the bed where two little girls slept.

 Remember that I said, “Every day, I make mistakes – sometimes more and sometimes fewer than the day before.”  And, remember that I said, my house often has unusual animals living here? My #3 daughter reminded me that we also had prairie dogs and that we babysat (OWLSAT?) an owl that belonged to a friend. This is part two of last week’s blog.  The second BIG mistake of the year about two years ago.

MISTAKE # 2:  Beth (my geologist friend), and her friend found some ancient turtle tracks somewhere in the hills west of the metro area.  After many discussions about the tracks, as well as preservation activities by interested parties and directed by Beth, she wondered what would turtle tracks look like from today’s animals.  “No problem,” I assured her.  “I’ll just get a turtle, and I’ll ask a photographer friend Marjie to photograph the turtle’s tracks.”

Every day, I make mistakes – sometimes more and sometimes fewer than the day before.  It was about two years ago when I made a couple of HUGE mistakes.

MISTAKE # 1:  The first was the day the boys next door said, “Mrs. B., would you like to have our geckos?”

My house is known for having unusual animals living here.  And, I don’t mean the people.  Rather, my house has, at one time or another, housed eastern corn snakes, a green iguana, guinea pigs, hamsters, spiders in cages, and ant lions (we used to call them doodle bugs), also in cages.  Then, there was the pheasant (incubated and hatched in my classroom) and Percy, the nine-lined ground squirrel brought home by my daughter from the day care playground where she worked and fed milk with an eye dropper every two hours until he could eat solid food.

It’s been almost a year that we’ve known this pandemic was alive and destructive to this world.  Longer if some reports are to be believed – I believe them.  I’ve made an attempt to pay attention to what I’ve been learning during this time.  Was it the teaching of the pandemic that presented these things for my edification?  Or would I have learned them during these past months in my normal life?  Here’s what I’ve learned.