Snap shot in my mind January 19, 2012

My grandparent's house in Torrington, 1960 ish. Grandma changes her house dress for her go-downtown-dress. Lisa and I each get to choose a giant purse, from Grandma's old purses, Granddad gives us each some change and we go shopping with Grandma.

Snap shot in my mind ---January 17, 2012

A boy, 20 years old, walks up the gangway at the Omaha airport. Wearing a white T shirt and jean jacket, he is broad shouldered, grisly looking, with a scruffy beard and dark hair, longish and curling beneath his cap.
I turn to my long time friend and say, "There he is, that's Kyle!" "No," she says. "That can't be him!"
Kyle, my son, gone for 6 months. Home again, and now a man.

Snap shot in my mind ---January 14, 2012

The upstairs of the ranch house.
The stairs carpeted with 2x4 carpet samples. The brown and black variegated tile down the hall and into the north bedroom. The middle room has white w/black tile.

Snap shot in my mind ---January 13, 2012

Hayloft. Haymow.
The wooden stairs that went from the tack room to the haymow, the towering straw bales and the sweet smelling huge piles of grass hay, all irresistible pulls to climb the ladder on the east wall with the rope and single stirrup over my shoulder. Even when I was in my 20's, it was a thrill to swing across the loft and try to land in the hay pile, missing the stair well and the hayholes.

Snap shot in my mind January 12, 2012

The record cold temperatures for Nebraska this date were in 1974.

I was a senior at St. Agnes Academy.

The picture in my mind is 1st period, Sister Emilia, French Lab. I am the only girl and only senior with 4 freshmen boys; Paul McCune, Larry Powell, Dan Murphy. I am late for school every day. I drive a 1968 Rambler, it gets stuck in the snow. Paul is Sister’s pet. He makes her laugh and she never turns me in for being late.

Koy-exploring career options

This video says so much---Andy has always been super sure of himself. He knows his good looks have nothing to do with actual good looks. If you can let a 3 year old buzz your head, you know that yours is inner beauty. Nothing done on the surface can mar Andy's confidence.

my hero--- my dad

Barney Applegarth---Old Time Cowboy and Knitter

My dad taught me to knit. He was not an artist, nor a designer, nor in the textile industry. My dad was a cowboy with calloused, gnarled hands and the knowledge to teach a 10 year old girl to knit.

Dad learned to knit in a one-room school house in the Nebraska Sandhills. The teacher insisted everyone take up the needles and yarn. “You never know when it might come in handy…”

Like when a little girl needed new doll sweaters and blankets. With 2 sharp pencils and some multi-colored package string, dad taught me the basics. The next time we went to town, mom, (who couldn't knit) took me to the dime store and bought me real knitting needles and yarn.

Yes, Dad admired the lopsided blankets, the different sized booties, the odd skirts and sweaters. He showed me how not to add stitches when I didn't want them, and how to add if I wanted.

Finally, with much practice and reading of instructions, my knitting surpassed my dad's. But I haven't forgotten where I got my start. My dad, old cowboy with knitting needles!

LISA AND I----HEMMING MOTHER'S SLACKS

Written in 2000, I never knew what direction I wanted this story to go so I never finished it. So it goes all directions, kind of like my feelings about the transitions in our lives at that time.

HEMMING MOTHER'S SLACKS

We are in the spare room of our parents’ home. Not the home where we grew up, but a house in town. Mom and Dad moved from the ranch almost 15 years ago.

I drag the sewing machine cabinet out of the closet, open it, and set up the old Singer. The ancient machine with the knee pedal and no zig-zag made the move from the ranch to the little house in town.

The spare room is miniscule, the double bed leaves 12 inches on one side, about a yard at the end, and 50 some inches on the other side; most of that is taken up by the closet and the cedar chest. The top of the sewing cabinet opens to the left, forming a sewing table, this juts out over the end of the bed. This same machine in the wood cabinet, didn’t seem to take up much room in the southeast corner of the dining room at the ranch. In that corner, Lisa and I learned to sew.

We sewed for 4-H, we both became accomplished seamstress’, however, for me it was a chore, for Lisa it was therapy. Lisa sits on the bed with the pile of slacks and jeans to be hemmed, she begins measuring and pinning. We have limited pins because Mother has not sewn for years. Lisa decides the blue slacks should be done by hand. The jeans can be machine hemmed. Lisa probes the pincushion and finally finds a needle with an eye so small neither of us can thread it. We laugh. We wonder why I am the one at the machine, Lisa is the better seamstress, but mom said it wasn’t working, and I am the best mechanic.

The house is full to overflowing, with sisters, brother, brothers-in-law, sister-in-law, husbands and our children and grown-up nieces and nephews with their spouses and children. Babies to toddlers to teenagers. It is 104 degrees outside, we are alone in the basement bedroom, it is cool. Pinning and creasing by folding and crimping with our fingers because we don’t want to leave our sanctuary to find the iron.

We have come for our yearly reunion, Lisa 9 hours from the south, and I, 6 hours from the east. Our parents were 30 and 22 when they married. Helen and Carol were born early in the marriage, 8 years later, Lisa and I came along in succession, and 6 years after me, Roger. We are 20 years from oldest to youngest. Mother and Daddy are 84 and 92 and remarkably healthy.

The ranch house where we grew up, had 4 bedrooms, a huge living room, and beds in the basement. Lisa, Roger and I were still kids at home when Helen and Carol would come with husbands and 7 kids between them. There was space enough for everyone. Besides plenty of places to sleep, there was a kitchen with a breakfast nook; a large square dining room, the table could seat 12 or more and with the table folded down and against the wall, more room for kids to play and tumble and rough-house.

We loved that house and the ranch where we learned to work and play; where we had houses in trees and imaginary villages down the back lane with stores in the post pile and a school in the iron pile. We cried for our lost memories when Mother and Daddy moved to the tiny, just-right, two-bedroom house in town.

The first night of our reunion all the girls want to swim in the motel pool and stay in one room. We have two 13 year-olds, an 18 year-old, a 5 year-old, Lisa and I in our room. Lisa’s husband and my 15 year-old son opt to go to my brother’s house in the country. Lisa and I laugh and talk most of the night, we outlast the teenagers.

If Mom and Dad still lived at the ranch, no one would have dreamed of staying in a motel. We would have to do our all night gabbing in whispers and muffled giggles. Mom has very sharp ears, she would have shushed us many times, reminding us we would have to get up in the morning and work.

Sometimes still, if just a few of us come home at the same time, we crowd into the little house. The kids sleep in sleeping bags in the 5 x 10 foot room mom has made into a library/office. Or Cara, Amanda and Jenny unfold the roll-a-way bed in mom’s basement workshop. The girls call it the ‘roll-together-bed’, in the mornings, they are piled in the middle like puppies.

It does not seem possible that 15 years have gone by, that my son has no memories of the ranch. Kyle, Amy, Kelly, Drew, Ellie and Lane have made their memories of ‘going to Grandma and Grandpa’s’ in this little house on the edge of town. Mom and Dad are officially retired, but not really…

The little kids will never see Grandpa sweaty, dusty and greasy from a day in in the hayfield, or Grandma with a towel to protect her hair-do, heading out to milk her 2 or 3 cows, separate the milk, and feed her chickens and little pigs. No, they will remember Grandpa joyfully taking care of his Thoroughbred mares, the baby colts and 1 or 2 horses in training on his little acreage in town; and Grandma tending her little garden, baking her buttermilk brownies, making a doll house or miniature barn in her wood-working shop and feeding the neighborhood cats.

Mother is a survivor of the 30’s, she is the epitome of frugality. Saving tin foil, string, paper plates, recycling anything that can be recycled, saving her dish water to pour on the trees and garden.

No matter if our lessons were learned on the ranch or at the little house in town, we have all been taught by example, that work makes a person happy, the environment matters and that waste is sinful.

We all try to emulate our parents, even though we are products of the lazy and squanderous ‘90’s. Often I fall into the ways of the ‘disposable’ generation, but with every zip-lock bag I don’t wash out, or tin foil I don’t straighten and use again, I have guilty feelings of extravagance.

None of us are rich, we all have jobs, we work hard for our livings, we enjoy great finds at thrift stores, auctions and garage sales. We have pride in our work, we try to be conservative with water, we recycle, we look forward to hand-me-down clothes.

Which is the very reason we are hemming mother’s slacks. Our cousin Sharon is the same size as Mom, though a bit taller. She has given Mom a great stack of pants, all too long. Mom’s only pair of slacks to wear to the picnic tomorrow are black, it will be another 104 degree day at the park tomorrow. The light blue seersucker will be perfect.

THE ACCIDENTAL NAMESAKE

The stories Grandma told, always began with her life when she married my granddad. She seldom talked about her life as a child. She was born in 1893, she was the youngest of 6 children, her parents were in their 40’s when she was born. The turn of the century was a struggle for the working class. Childhood was short-lived, Grandma’s brothers took jobs at 14 or 15, her eldest sister was married at 17. The tragedy Grandma experienced before she turned 13 might explain her reluctance to tell stories of her childhood.

THE ACCIDENTAL NAMESAKE

In the front row of the old Plainview cemetery, a stone marks the grave of a young woman. Born on Valentine’s Day 1890, Jennie Kamrar lived 16 years, 6 months and 2 days.

Jennie Viola Kamrar was born in Hartington, Nebraska, the fifth living child of David and Susanna Kamrar. David Kamrar was a railroad laborer. Beginning in Ohio in 1872, he kept moving Susanna and family west, building the railroad. For the next twenty-one years he picked up an ever growing family and moved on. Simon was born in Illinois; Mattie in Iowa; Elmer in Nebraska; zigzagging east for a job, Cushing, was born in Iowa, 6 and 9 years later Jennie and Helen were born in Nebraska.

Since they were only 3 years apart and the tag-along-children, Jennie and Helen were especially close. At 13 and 10, they made the move with their parents in 1903 to Oregon for a year and a half. By 1903, the 4 older Kamrar children had long been on their own.

Jennie became sick while they were in Oregon. Helen was her constant companion. The family returned to Plainview, Nebraska.

Jennie’s health was improved and she took a job at the Bloomfield post office just before her 16th birthday. She was a pretty girl, with lustrous, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and a quiet, intelligent demeanor. She worked at the post office for only 7 months.

Jennie’s illness returned in July and she underwent surgery in Sioux City for appendicitis, she returned to Plainview to convalesce and died of complications 5 weeks later.

It was 1906, uncertain diagnosis, surgery and medical care could not save Jennie Kamrar. A life cut short, a family left to grieve.

According to the obituary in the Bloomfield Monitor, “Jennie left behind many friends to mourn her loss… her family was inconsolable.”

The family moved away from the memories in Plainview and Bloomfield. David, Susanna and Helen moved to Wayne, where Helen went to high school through the 10th grade and took normal training to become a teacher. After completing school, Helen took a teaching job in Cherry County, Nebraska, where she met her husband, a rancher, Will Grouns.

Jennie Kamrar was my grandmother‘s sister. My grandma, Helen Kamrar Grouns, was 12 when Jennie died.

Grandma’s much older brothers and sister, had settled on the West Coast. They had passed on before I was born.

I was never interested in genealogy, I never knew the names of my grandma’s brothers and sisters.

In 1978 I had a baby, a beautiful dark haired girl. I chose the name, Jenny, because it sounded good with my last name and it is a beautiful name.

When I told Grandma my new baby’s name was Jenny, her eyes filled and with a catch in her voice she said, “That was my sister’s name. My dear, dear Jennie. My parents were so grief-stricken we were never allowed to speak her name after she died.” Grandma held her great-granddaughter in her arms, “Jennie, sweet little Jennie,” she turned to me, “How did you know?”

I hadn’t known.

Jenny had a special place in her great-grandma’s heart, even though being named after great-great Aunt Jennie was purely accidental. When Jenny was 11, her great-grandma, Helen Kamrar Grouns died at the age of 96. Although Jenny knew the story of being named after her great-great Aunt Jennie, it was nearly forgotten in the fast-paced adolescent years.

In 2001 Jenny graduated from college and got a laboratory job in an ethanol plant in Plainview, Nebraska. My mother told Jenny, “I think that is where my Aunt Jennie is buried.” So on a day off, Jenny Forbes walked the rows of the old Plainview cemetery til she came to the front corner, where the tombstone marking the resting place of Jennie Kamrar had been untended for nearly a century.

On most Memorial Days since, Jenny has placed flowers on the grave of her great-great aunt. I can imagine the Kamrar family smiling down on the dark haired young woman, with the simple vase of garden flowers, the accidental namesake of their Jennie.