The Gas We Pass

Every Sunday night the Old Hens get together to play cards, Last Sunday night it was my turn to entertain them. The oldest lady is 91, the next is 89, the next 88. I am the baby and I am 85. During our card games we chat, snack, laugh and laugh some more. Somehow the topic that night was passing gas. Everyone does it you know. The 89 year old whom I am sure has never said
the word fart wanted to know more about the subject. I brought a book I have, called "The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts ( it is a children's book". She started reading it to the rest of us. I got the giggles as she looked like the Queen of England reading to her adoring public. She had to use the word fart several times and stumbled over the word but managed to finish the book. She announced it very educational. By this time everyone was hooting and hollering and bringing up stories probably best forgotten. I had 4 boys so I was an expert on what a stinker was. One lady told how her son would light a match if his buddy let one go. Evidently if you are close enough to his hinder you can see a small flame.
My friend the 88 year old announced they called it flatulence, another called them toot toots, a former daughter in law told me "girls never fart". I wish that were true. I believe I will call them trumps as they do in jolly old England. Apparently they know Donald Trump. Now there is a gas bag. Or maybe I will be an all American and call them FARTS.

Anonymous

Anonymous story from Rock Bend

I am the mother of three amazing girls, ages 7, 12, 14, and 19. The past three years have been the hardest and most challenging.

Three years ago in June, we had a house fire that completely burned our house to the ground. We lost everything. My girls were ok. My husband and I were on vacation (first vacation in years without kids)...San Francisco. We received a call from a police officer. My first thought was my girls. My kids had been at the zoo that day and while they were on their way home they saw smoke in the sky. They joked that it was their house, and it was. Amazingly, our cat was able to get out of the house safely. While in San Francisco, all I could think of was being home with my girls.

As devastating as the fire was, my girls have had a very positive attitude. We are all so grateful that nobody was hurt. This was a very tough time for my family but at the same time we grew closer together and hae learned not to be materialistic; stuff can be replaced, people cannot.

Our house was rebuilt but adversity was just around the corner again.

My husband was in the mortgage business and when the market crashed, investors lost homes and money and blame trickled down to all the little people in the business. My husband was part of an investment group and helped with loans and he was charged, along with realtors, mortgage loan officers, and title officers and was sentenced to two years in federal prison where he is now.

So for the past 20 months, I have been a single mother, We went from a two-person income to one. Raising strong and confident ladies has always been my goal. I am humbled by my daughters' resilience. I truly feel with all we have been through we could be negative and bitter but we have all learned to find the silver lining in bad situations.

To top off life events, our new house was broken into and all our electronics and tax information was stolen. The house was trashed but all we could do was laugh. I don't think anything could phase my girls and me.

I unfortunately now suffer from panic and anxiety attacks from all the trauma. I am looking forward to my husband being home with us soon and getting back to a normal life.

That is, until the next devastating event.

Three Sox

My name is Three Sox...and they say I am a greedy cat. My human, Charlie, and I are in the middle of a canoe trip down the Minnesota River from Redwood Falls to Mendota. He sits in a rocking chair all day with sweep-arm oars and a bicycle aboard to visit the historic 1862 Dakota -US war sites. I'm just in it for the bouillion- Mr. Lincoln's lost Indian gold. Watch for our book about the riches stolen from the Minnesota tribes..."guarded by money changers during the Civil War...about Alex Ramsey's brother Justus, who was in charge of the gold and shot himself at 67 in a St. Paul hotel. About the missing steamship, Julia, and the helicopters that cruise the local nite skies with ground penetrating radar and metal detectors to find, as the one-eyed taxi driver told us, "riches beyond belief and white man's dollars more numerous than the stars"!

B.W.

This is my story...written at Rock Bend

Born to two parents who criss-crossed the country to find themselves and find each other, I grew up in the middle of the Nevada desert, in a small town surrounded by friends and a conservative church family.

My formative years were defined by the open skies, purple mountains, and sagebrush- and the allergies that came with it. It's here where I discovered my love for space, an understanding of how the world should be, and my love for down-to-earth, grounded people.

Then I moved to Las Vegas. The big city. I hoped to flee, to escape everything I knew, everyone who helped define me. Four years in college and a mess of troubles later, I was far from that person, that kid in the small town. I moved again. This time, it was for a job and a new fresh start in life.

The plane touched won in Hartford on a cold November night. I remember thinking, "Here we go; this is "real" life." That real life took an unexpected turn when a met a blonde-haired, green-eyed, beautiful girl who stole my heart from the get-go. We were married three years later.

Now here was are; living in western Wisconsin, after moving again, lonely, unemployed, and still figuring out who we are. The one constant has been my faith, knowing that God has never- and will never- leave us.

This is my story: sojourning, searching, changing. Without it, I wouldn't be who I am today. And for that, I am grateful.

Ricky C.

Anonymous

I had my name announced over the school intercom. They actually asked that my sister and I go to the office. The never happened; and all my classmates laughed and said, "Oh, you are in trouble now!" I went to the school office and nobody would look at me. The school secretary asked me to go into the principal's office, which I did. I found not the principal, but my church pastor there. He too, wouldn't look at me. I instantly was nervous. I was only in tenth grade, but I could tell something was really wrong. The only thing he said was, "I have to wait for your sister." I sat in the chair stewing. I knew it was bad. Seconds felt like entire days. Finally my sister arrived and my church pastor started to cry. He couldn't talk. I started panicking. Finally I just yelled, "Tell me what happened!" He then told me that my dad had died in a car accident that morning. My life was never the same.

Anonymous

Great Expectations

Great Expectations

By Jane and Carol

In 1945, my mother graduated from Madison Normal Training. She began teaching Grades 1-4 in a two-room schoolhouse three miles west of Dawson. By the end of the year, my dad noticed that the girl he had gone to country school with was now a young lady and it was time for a new relationship. Mom, having grown up in a home where much sharing of meals with others was a daily occurrence, began preparing for that ritual by noting that in Dawson, Hanson Jewelry Store sold china and stemware. As her monthly paycheck permitted, a setting or two was purchased. The mother of a student began selling Easterling and that solved the silverware problem. A traveling salesman passing through the area selling tablecloths convinced Mom that he had a “one of a kind, foreign made, exotic, and not sold anywhere else” tablecloth. (Lesson for the teacher: Beware of traveling salesmen.”- No washing instructions- the starch came out, the thread frayed, lesson learned!) Tonight the table is set and family is “expected” to join one another for a time of dining and fellowship.

Damn that dog!

Don't be fooled by that innocent look. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that Bert, in his dotage, has caused us plenty of angst. He has some health issues; some of his medication gives him a powerful thirst and some of his medication gives him the need to pee at inappropriate times and in inappropriate places. (Remember the Christmas tree skirt story?) We thought we had the problem solved. We went to Pet Expo and bought a portable pet fence that is three feet high and can be stretched to about ten feet long. When we leave the house, we run it between the living room and kitchen and we shut the other doors so he's contained. We bought puppy training pads and he learned to pee on those. On our way back from Mankato today we were saying how nice it is to have found a solution to this problem and it's so good to not be mad at Bert all the time for peeing and how the dogs seem to have adjusted just fine. We pull in the drive-way and.....STOP....there he is looking out the living room window at us. I swear he had a smirk on his face. We are astounded. What in the hell happened? The gate is still in place. We didn't leave anything in the way that he could jump on. The only possibility is that Bert, in his decrepitude, completed a three-foot vertical leap from the slippery kitchen linoleum, levitated forward, and landed on the living room carpet. He's not likely to make this leap back into the kitchen when he feels the need to pee so that means we're back to square one. Regis is going to put a row of razor wire like they have at prisons on the top of the pet fence because I know, if we went back and bought the four-foot fence (another hundred dollars) Bert would have a heart attack and die, leaving us with 150 dollars’ worth of worthless pet fence. Damn that dog.