spring flowers

Saturday Afternoon Chat: Is it spring or summer? My son’s life-saving walk around town and a library trip.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 17 Comments

I didn’t drink a cup of tea all week and I missed it.

This morning I poured myself a cup of peppermint tea (I’m a creature of habit) and sat down to write this post.

Maybe it was the chill in the air that made me crave the tea since the rest of the week the mornings have been warmer than normal for this time of year. It was like we went from a hint of spring and right into summer. Thankfully spring returns for a bit this next week as temperatures decrease.

I can’t believe I am admitting this, but I am going to miss colder weather. I know. What?! Me, the person who always rambles about hating winter is actually going to miss winter?! Well, yes, I am because I loved cuddling under a blanket in the mornings with a good book or my laptop to work on my books or blog posts.

I am less interested in sweating on my couch while I try to think about how to write the next chapter in my book.

We took advantage of the nice weather this week by having two Easter egg hunts on Sunday afternoon (one at our house and one at my parents), doing homeschool lessons on the porch later in the week, playing in the backyard some (but not much because Little Miss had allergy issues all week and fought me on taking her medicine), and visiting the library.

On Monday we headed to The Boy’s guitar lesson but unfortunately, he got sick from something he ate when we were almost there so we had to turn around.

He was better later that night, thankfully.

He has a job now so Thursday night he went to work. He’s a dishwasher for a few hours a couple a times a week at a local restaurant.

Thursday Little Miss and I headed to the library. She enjoyed playing with the Legos in the children’s room while I chose books for her and I to read together.

At one point it felt nice to sit on the carpet with all the little train tracks and crack open a book that caught my attention, but that I had never heard of – Mrs. Piggle Wiggles Treasury – while Little Miss played with Legos and a little kitchen set.

While I was there the library director showed me the library website and a link to a resource of online children’s books. I’m glad to know about that for days I want Little Miss something to read something for English. Like I told the librarian, though, I prefer to be able to hold real books as often as I can. I think Little Miss does as well. She wanted to pick out a couple of books on her own. This time we didn’t sign out our limit of books like the last time, but we did bring home a pretty good haul. I didn’t get any books for myself because I have enough to read already.

They had a poetry display up and a place where people could make their own poems with words that stuck to the board with magnets.

This was the poem that was there when we got there:

Then Little Miss wanted to make her own poem so while the librarian shared with me his interest in history, such as the history of Mark Twain, and history books he had read, she made this poem:

On Friday, The Boy had a doctor’s appointment. He had a tetanus shot so I wanted him to hang around me the rest of the afternoon in case his arm got sore or he got tired. An hour after the shot, though, he wanted to go for a walk so I let him, even though I was worried because, well, I’m a worrier. I talked to my neighbor for close to an hour and he still hadn’t returned, which made me a little nervous, so I called his cell phone. He was just going to walk around town and maybe visit the dollar store so I didn’t think it would take as long as it was taking. He called me back half an hour later and told me that while walking he’d found an elderly woman laying in her side yard, unable to get back up.

The sideyard was on a slope so he’d been trying to help her back up the hill to her house but her legs didn’t work well and she kept rolling back down. He tried to talk her into letting him call me, but she didn’t want to be a bother. He mentioned 911 but she didn’t want them to be called either. Finally, he convinced her to let him get her phone and call her children, but she really wasn’t happy about that either because she said they would come and “lecture her again.”

She tried to convince him to leave before they came but he said she kept sliding on the hill even while sitting so he stayed with her until they got there. While they were chatting he found out she was 88 and had been laying there all afternoon. She’d gone out to clean out her flower beds and hadn’t been able to get back up and then had sort of rolled down the hill.

When her family got there, they told The Boy that this isn’t the first time she’s done this and that they don’t mind if she goes in her backyard, which if flat, but the side yard is off limits because of the slope.

They thanked him and tried to pay him for his help but he wouldn’t take it.

When he told me how she’d just wanted to go clean out her flowerbeds because she wanted to be able to do what she’d used to be able to, I got choked up. I was already emotional thinking about how sweet my son had been to sit and wait with her and thinking about how he wouldn’t have found her if I had let my fear rule and made him stay home. It was also interesting that he was walking where he was because that isn’t a street he normally walks on. It’s on the other side of town, on a hill that overlooks our side of town.

He said she said to him while they were sitting there, “You pretty much saved my life, you know.”

I feel that he did save her life. It was 85 degrees out yesterday. If she had been in that sun much longer she may have been severely dehydrated or had a heart attack or something else awful might have happened to her.

He doesn’t remember her name but the daughter works at the tiny supermarket in town (the only supermarket in town). He said he wants to wander by her house on the way to work today to make sure she is okay and hasn’t gone in her side yard again.

Little Miss and The Husband are gone today on a mini-jaunt to pick up Chick-Fil-A. There is a small one at a college about 90 minutes from us. For a long time, it was the only one anywhere near us but recently they put a full-sized one in about 2 hours from us, in an area we don’t often visit. We wanted to treat Little Miss to waffle fries from there after her dental surgery but she was too miserable to enjoy it so we didn’t stop.

He has a week off work next week, so he picked today to take her to kick off his vacation,

The rest of the day I hope to work on my book, read some, and hopefully watch the first episode of season nine of Brokenwood Mysteries with The Husband.

Next week we have a fairly busy week in the beginning of the week. On Monday, the Boy has guitar lessons, Little Miss has gymnastics that night, and Tuesday we have an eye doctor appointment for both of them. After that, I think we are clear of planned events, other than The Boys’ job.

We are winding down with homeschooling and Spring Fever is in full force, but I’m trying to remind the kids there is still a month and a half left of school for them. I’m trying to make school more relaxed and interactive these last couple of months so it doesn’t feel too suffocating for them while it’s nice outside.

We meet with our evaluator (which is the person who has to sign off that I did what I was supposed to do this school year) on June 9.

As I am finishing up this post a rain storm has moved in to bring cooler temperatures in.

So how was your week this past week? I hope you had a good one?

What kind of tea or beverage are you drinking as you read this? Or maybe you aren’t while you are reading, but maybe you had a special one while relaxing one day.

I still like warm tea in the summer but don’t drink it as often as I do in the colder months. How about you? Do you still reach for a warm beverage even as the temperatures warm up?

A small family greenhouse in the middle of nowhere

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Around the beginning of May every year, the traffic on the dirt road in front of my parents triples when a small greenhouse in the middle of nowhere opens.  Doan’s Greenhouse is located through a grove of trees and at the bottom a hill a short distance from my parents. It’s been there, cradled between a couple of barns and a cute farmhouse, since 1973 when Bob and Shirley Doan opened it.

I remember many trips to the greenhouse with my dad, often in May, sometimes throughout the rest of the summer, to pick out flowers to plant around our house or vegetables to plant for the garden. We often went there right before Memorial Day to pick up flowers to put on the graves of family members buried in various cemeteries around the county, with the majority buried at the tiny cemetery behind the church down the road from my parents and at the county cemetery 25 miles north.

The sweet smell of flowers, plants, and fresh soil is inextricably tied to my childhood because of Doan’s and my dad’s gardening. I’m sure running a greenhouse was not easy, but I can’t remember one time when I visited the greenhouse that Bob and Shirley weren’t smiling.

(photo from the Doans Farm and Greenhouse website)


I told my kids Saturday that Shirley always had an amazing smile complete with red cheeks that they always draw on older, apron-wearing ladies in cartoons. Her cheeks really looked like round cherries on her cheeks, even though I don’t remember the rest of her being round.

We had to break out of the house this weekend and Doan’s was one of the first places I wanted to hit when the weather warmed up. I’d actually been counting down to their opening day for a couple of weeks. Old memories slammed into me as soon as we pulled into the small, dirt parking lot and looked out over a stream running under a handmade wooden bridge, the greenhouse it’s backdrop.

The greenhouse is now owned by Bob and Shirley’s daughter, Jeannie, and son-in-law, Tom. They live kitty-corner to the greenhouse. Bob and Shirley still live in the house next to the greenhouse but are retired. For various reasons they couldn’t come out to see their customers (many of which are longtime neighbors and friends) this year but their daughter Cindy and granddaughter Hannah, son Dan and other two grandsons (whose name I don’t actually remember!) were busy inside the greenhouse, putting out plants and helping customers. Bob and Shirley have four children, 19 grandchildren and 4 great-grandchildren (at least according to their website. That number of great-grandchildren could be a little higher now.)

I’ll admit it was hard not to see the familiar Doan’s smiles, with them being hidden behind facemasks mandated by our governor, but I knew they were there because just like Bob and Shirley, their eyes revealed their emotions.

I almost called my dad while I was there, to glean advice for what flowers or herbs I should buy, but Dad knows I kill most plants and I had a feeling he’d discourage me from buying anything when all was said and done.

So, instead, the kids and I picked out what we thought was pretty, deciding to choose floral therapy over planting practicality on this day. I even snatched up (okay, had to ask for it to be lifted down) a hanging basket for Mom for Mother’s Day (knowing I’d better grab it then or I’d forget to do it later this week).  I dropped the hanging basket off on my way back to our house and then tried to decide what to do with our flowers since I haven’t decided where to plant them yet and since a new neighbor reminded me this is Pennsylvania — we could still get another frost before the month is out.

For now I’ve set the flowers and the herbs I picked up in some containers I found in the garage and garden house (my husband calls it the out building. I’m calling it the Garden House.

It sounds more romantic that way, right? ) and placed them on our front porch. I’ll water them and try to keep them alive until I plant them, but I can’t promise anything since I’m a well-known plant killer. I should probably start speaking life over my plant-maintaining skills instead of death and removing my “plant killer” label. I’ll work on that this week.

(Click on the images below to see larger versions and a sliding gallery.)