Our family has five birthdays, plus Mother’s Day in a 23-day period, so we often celebrate our birthday “season” with group events. This time, we celebrated three birthdays at Kari’s house.
The custom is to open gifts in the calendar order of the birthdays, so Dean was first. One of his gifts was a bag of his favorite candy.
Theo received a sketch pad so that he can continue to amaze us with his artistic pencil drawings.
Kari has been wanting to make her own vanilla, so my gift to her was a jar, vanilla beans, and rum. She’s so happy, it looks like she’s already enjoying the rum instead of saving it to make vanilla!
Theo made the birthday dessert: a chocolate cake with mousse and ganache. “Delicious” doesn’t begin to describe it. It was a chocolate lovers’ dream–and Theo and his Grandpa Ted have always been choc-o-holics.
I love it when I accidentally run across photos and other things I’ve forgotten about. Those items give my spirits a lift with the memories they bring to my mind.
I recently found this photo of Kari and Dean, leaving to celebrate MORP–the opposite of PROM and, technically, an anti-prom culture activity. I don’t remember where they went that evening, but it wasn’t to the prom.
On another day, I found a picture of Jeff and La, taken at their wedding reception. They look so young! It’s hard to believe they are now expecting their second grandchild.
Author’s note: This is one of the few pictures in which Jeff resembles me. Face-on, he’s such an image of his dad that, at his son’s wedding, another wedding guest introduced himself to Ted and remarked, “You must be Jeff’s dad. He’s the spitting image of you.”
Finally, I found this object in the back of a drawer. My uncle Gibby was a typesetter. When I was a child, he set type and made print blocks for his children and his nieces and nephews. If I press mine onto an inkpad, it still “prints” my name.
My surprise finds are unpredictable. I wonder when and what the next one will be.
I think it’s been five years since Kathy and I spent a day together in Columbia. We’ve been together regularly during the intervening years, including some meetings in Columbia, but always with other family members. In May, Kathy invited me for a mother-daughter day in Columbia again, and it was wonderful to have nearly 11 hours of each other’s exclusive company. Including family members is a good thing, but so is one-on-one time.
Over the years of our “Columbia Days,” we’ve established a routine for our get-togethers. Columbia is a halfway point for each of us, and we meet at the intersection of our routes–US 63 and I-70. There’s a Bob Evans restaurant at the intersection, where we begin our time together with lunch. The restaurant is not usually crowded, so we eat and talk for about two hours before heading to downtown Columbia.
The next part of the routine is to walk Broadway, the main street through the downtown area, stopping at our three favorite stores: Blue Stem, Peace Nook, and The Candy Factory. Blue Stem offers a variety of unique and beautiful artistic creations made by Missouri artists. Peace Nook is an eclectic store that reminds me of the 1960s and 70s, describing itself as “a non-profit store . . . with all proceeds supporting our educational work to promote peace, social justice, sustainability, and a liveable climate.” The Candy Factory crafts gourmet chocolates and other candies. We sometimes buy something at Blue Stem; we always buy something at Peace Nook; and we always buy our specific chocolate favorites (and sometimes others) at The Candy Factory.
After our time downtown (usually late afternoon), we head for the mall food court where we purchase beverages and eat some of our chocolates while we talk for several hours. Then it’s time for a late dinner at Shakespeare’s Pizza, where we eat and talk for a few more hours before going home.
The real purpose (and my treasure) of our mother-daughter day is our personal conversations. It’s always hard to leave for home after our Columbia Day, knowing that this special day is over, but we each face a 90-minute drive, so we reluctantly go back to Bob Evans (where we’ve left one car for the day), get into our cars, and go home. Until next time, . . . .
Ted and I have greatly enjoyed the friendship that has developed over the past seven months with our friends, Mike and Mary Jane, and the feeling is mutual. It was bittersweet to share our last get-together in early May during the final days of their mission in St. Louis as they prepared to return to their home in Utah. As always, we had a great time together.
For our farewell evening, Ted and I invited Mike and Mary Jane to dinner at our house. On a previous visit, the four of us had talked about the wonderful things you can make with rhubarb: sauce, pie, jam, etc. I asked if they’d ever had rhubarb kuchen, and they said, “No, what is it?” I know a lot of people who don’t like rhubarb (or have never eaten it), but the four of us all admitted to growing up with and liking rhubarb. Early May is rhubarb season so, as long as I was freezing rhubarb, I set some aside to make a rhubarb kuchen for our final group dessert.
Mike’s reaction was totally unexpected. I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anyone’s eyes light up like Mike’s did when he saw the kuchen. “Is that rhubarb?!” he asked, in a tone of disbelief. It was extremely flattering to the person who baked it for Mike. (Ahem. Me.) Mike ate two pieces and smiled through every bite. Mary Jane asked for the recipe so she could make it in the future.
Our evening together stretched out a little longer than usual because none of us wanted to say good-bye. When it was finally time for Mike and Mary Jane to leave, there were hugs and then repeated hugs. We’ll keep in touch and we hope to see each other again in the future, but it won’t be regularly like it’s been over the past seven months. Bittersweet is real: wonderfully happy friendships with emotionally difficult partings.
P.S. My rhubarb kuchen recipe is from my grandmother. Our son, Thom, liked it so much, he always ordered it for his birthday cake. Luckily for him, his birthday falls in rhubarb season.
Fall 2024 was so warm that our daffodils sprouted in November. They grew to almost 4 inches tall before it became cold enough to discourage them from getting taller. At the time, I assumed they were a lost cause for spring blooms. “If the bulb has sprouted and then the weather becomes too cold for it to keep growing,” I reasoned, “it probably won’t re-sprout in the spring.” I resigned myself to missing our cheerful row of daffodils in Spring 2025. Happily, I was wrong. When the weather warmed up, the daffodil leaves started growing where they left off in November and produced full-sized plants with full-sized blooms. Conclusion: Daffodils are extremely hardy!
While we always look forward to the daffodil blooms, Ted and I are tired of deadheading and pruning the many roses a 2010 landscaper planted around our property. Last fall and this spring, Ted dug out all but four of those rose bushes, ran them through his wood chipper, and replaced most of them with annuals. The remaining roseless area was a large. empty bed at the garage corner of the house. We had curbing and landscape rock put into that bed several years ago, and we didn’t want to remove it, so we needed to replace those prickly roses with something big to fill that space. We chose a lilac bush. It won’t need nearly as much care as roses did, and the blooms smell wonderful when we walk near them. You can see in the photo that it has lots of room to grow before it will need pruning.
The redbud tree we planted a few years ago started dying late last summer and gave up the fight over the winter. The nursery folks were greatly surprised to hear that a redbud tree didn’t survive, since redbud trees are indigenous to Missouri. We like seeing the redbud blooms in the spring, so we decided to try another one. We had a few blooms from it this spring and we look forward to lots more in the coming years. The new redbud is the little one behind the landscaper on the right. It has some growing to do to catch up with its dead predecessor.
As I was talking my daily walk on May 5, I saw this pretty cloud. Someplace east of us, thunderstorms were forming.
On May 15, I was driving to the mall to do some shopping and saw this huge cloud. I stopped to take a picture of it and to call Ted, telling him it would be worth his time to go to the top of the hill behind our house (less than a half-mile away) to give his meteorological heart a thrill.
From near our house, the above cloud looked pretty amazing but when I got to the mall, which is on high ground with a big parking lot and no trees to block the view, I was awestruck. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! This cloud extended 180 degrees from north to south on the eastern horizon. I have never seen a cloud that covered half of the horizon! Obviously, a line of thunderstorms was developing–probably in Illinois.
About an hour later, when I finished shopping, the sun was setting and it cast a rosy glow on the same cloud formation. The cloud still covered 180 degrees of the horizon and the thunderstorms were still developing. When I got home, Ted and I checked the radar and saw a solid line of severe thunderstorms stretching from just southeast of St. Louis to Chicago. Wow!
The next day, May 16, I needed to do some shopping at the Galleria in the Central West End area of St. Louis. There were some weather watches posted, but the storms were not expected to reach our area for another two hours–more than enough time for me make the trip and to be home before the storms hit. When I finished shopping, I checked the radar again to see if I should run some errands in our home area or if I should go straight home. It looked iffy, so I decided to make the call when I was closer to home.
The skies were gray when I left the Galleria, indicating an impending storm, but the weather didn’t look dangerous. As I drove farther west, the sky became very dark for a while but then became lighter when my route turned to the north. About halfway home, the rain hit. It was pretty heavy, so my wipers were working rapidly. I made the call to go straight home and to finish my errands after the storm. When I was about two miles from home, the wind hit, blowing sheets of rain across the roads. About a half mile from home, the hail started falling. It was pretty small hail–about 1/4-1/2 inch in size–but I didn’t want hail damage on my new car. With no other cars in sight, I admit that I exceeded the speed limit for the half mile from that point to our garage, where I could put my car under a roof, safe from the hail. It was a good call to skip my home-area errands!
Here’s how the hail looked in our pool. It fell hard enough that some pieces of hail bounced when they hit the surface of the water, then fell back down into the water. It looked like white jumping beans. Our largest hail was 1.5 inches, in flat pieces. Hail covered our lawn, but not completely.
After the storm, I went to Target (I had a lot of errands to do that day) and I overheard a lady and her husband telling a salesperson that they lived only a few miles south of Target and had an 18 to 24-inch accumulation of hail on the ground! The lady said she had gardening buckets outside that were filled and then covered with hail! Their 5- or 6-year-old daughter piped up and said, “It was really deep!” Their largest hail was baseball-sized.
When the hail stopped falling, the wind became apparent. Fortunately, we live in a valley between two hills–one behind our house and one across the street from the front of our house, so we tend to be sheltered from wind. Today, however, the wind blew the pool water surface as if it were a lake (without the whitecaps).
Meanwhile, east of us, a tornado struck very close to the Galleria Mall, where I had been shopping 30 minutes earlier. Looking at the radar when I got home, I saw that I basically drove around the tornado development area (where the skies became very dark) and, thankfully, didn’t need to take cover during my drive home. These are photos of the wedge tornado that struck St. Louis, taken by a camera in the Gateway Arch. The lower photo is darker because the tornado is closer and the air is filled with more debris. The red arc-shaped structure in the lower left corner of the photo is Busch Stadium.
A wedge tornado has a width equal to its height. This one was an EF3 tornado a mile wide, moving at 55 mph, with winds of 152 mph. It traveled 8 miles through the Central West End of the St. Louis area, destroying a 20-block area and damaging roughly 5,000 buildings. It struck along the north side of Forest Park and caused extensive damage to the St. Louis Zoo, which is temporarily closed as a result. The tornado initially touched down in Clayton, then tracked 23 miles to the northeast into Illinois. Sadly, there were 5 fatalities in St. Louis due to the tornado.
An EF4 tornado struck Lambert Airport in April 2011, and the damage in that area was visible for years. This tornado struck a more commercial and more densely populated area, so I suspect the recovery will, again, be a lengthy process. A few weeks ago, Jeff wrote a mission letter suggesting that we all look for the small miracles that occur in our lives each day. Today, my pretty big miracle was leaving the Galleria Mall when I did and arriving safely at home.
