UPDATE
by Kristi Indermark

We have a new addition to our family. Jim and I must have looked at a thousand new and used vehicles and test drove a hundred. Finally we found a great deal 60 miles away. We test drove it on Saturday and bought it on Monday. Jim is thrilled because now, instead of driving his 1994 Buick with no air conditioning, he drives my old Jeep and I get to drive the new Dodge Grand Caravan. There is so much room. Space everywhere!!! I am a first time mini-van owner and I love it. We are taking our new addition on its first road trip, to Disney World, this weekend. I will be able to pack so much more. I think I can bring all my shoes!

Our new Dodge Grand Caravan

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UPDATE
Silly L key! on Computer
by Leona Anderson (Eric's wife)

Hi Everybody,

As some of you know, my "L" key has been bothering me for a while on this silly laptop of mine. It especially isn't helpful that my name begins with the letter L. I get to ship my laptop back to the good folks at Dell, and they are going to fix it for me... I hope. But I won't be able to access this email account on Eric's computer, so if you want to keep in touch, please email me at my U of M email address: sene0019@umn.edu

Leona

This photo was taken during a two-day vaccination campaign in the remote country an hour or two outside of Morochata. After eating more potatoes than I care to recall (refusing would have been gravely rude), we took pictures! The students were fascinated by my digital camera.

       I woke up in the car, my head full of half dissolved dreams and ambiguous anxieties. I was sure I was missing something, but I didn't know what. I had been dreaming that I was back in school and class was being held in a mountain meadow, a refreshing change from the standard classroom I was accustomed to. In my dream, no one seemed to notice this pleasant absurdity but me, which is standard in dreams of this type.
       I was glad to be safe in the back seat of our trusted El Dorado and far from school, even if it was being held by a babbling brook. Our automobile tour of the Great Western States was drawing to its close and we had just bid farewell to our Grandmother and Aunt Delores and set out to complete what had been a thrilling and exhaustive chapter of our lives. We released our great whale of a car back to its asphalt ocean, diminished, but determined to finish what we had started.
        Then we saw it.
        My sister Patty saw it first, actually.
        "Hey look, Rummage Sale!"
       I capitalize Rummage Sale to demonstrate the reverence in which we held the concept of people selling used merchandise from their homes. We could not endorse this practice enough and regarded missing an invitation to rifle through a stranger's belongings akin to sacrilege. You probably know this concept as garage sale, which is only a matter of regional idiolect and not important to this story. What was really exciting to us was the opportunity to sample the exotic junk of people who lived in other states. The experience was as foreign to us as haggling with a camel salesman in Marrakech.
       Naturally, I headed straight for the magazines and records. I thumbed through the pile with mounting disdain. What do girls see in these comics? I mused to myself. Anyone can see that Betty and Veronica are the same girl with different hair color, and Casper is obviously Rich Rich's ghost. I then leveled my laser-like adolescent derision at our hosts' record collection. Beethoven, what a hack. Pavarotti, Mozart, Debussy, charlatans all. Where do they keep the good records? I sneered to myself.
        Then I spied something interesting.
        Thrown in with the assorted broken children's toys were two pair of genuine Everlast boxing gloves. They were as beautiful to my twelve year old soul as cut diamonds could have ever been to a Borneo savage. I snatched them up, pronto, as my western cousins might have said, and started the inevitable process of getting them past the scrutiny department.
        "Will you really use them?" Mom asked.
        "Yes, I will, I promise."
        "Well, no hitting each other in the head!"
        "Sure, Mom, no hitting each other in the head." Free and clear.
       The gloves sat in my closet for one entire school year, a monument to my Mother's intuition. Who would I box with? I was the new kid at a strange school and subsequently at the very bottom of the junior high feeding chain, a virtual social untouchable. As I floundered through the tenuous beginnings of my junior high school career, the boxing gloves gathered dust, forgotten as the Lindy Hop.
        Then came the inevitable boredom of our first summer in a strange town. We were transformed from country kids to city kids instantly and the culture shock was staggering. Enter: The Boxing Gloves.
       Our new fixation started as free form sparring matches, but fast became organized fighting championships. That is, as organized as it could be, with only two contestants and a part-time referee. Sister Patty didn't seem interested in the whole concept of pummeling each other about the back and shoulders, so she opted for the referee position, so long as something more entertaining didn't come up first. Sister Marlene, on the other hand, was very keen on the idea of beating the stuffing out of her younger brother and therefore became my boxing nemesis. She would prove to be a very worthy one, indeed.
       We remained true to my Mother's vision of interfamily boxing etiquette, for the most part, barring the odd accidental ricochet shot to the head. We viewed the accidental rabbit punch as a necessary evil which didn't hurt very much, so we forgave each other promptly and set all things right with the obligatory "Oops, Sorry."
        The summer raged on.
       One particularly humid August night, the boxing match got a little out of hand, as boxing matches tend to when tempers escalate due to excessive heat or repressed social hostility of the kind one associates with peer group rejection, but that is another story. I was bobbing and ducking, as usual, while Marlene was raining a relentless storm of dog paddle style kangaroo punches, some found, some not. Sister Patty had long grown bored with our bloodless and over-polite fighting contests and had gone off to write in her diary or some other such junior high mush along that line.
       Unsupervised, our backyard prizefight grew slightly more vicious with each successfully landed blow.
        "You meant to do that." I said, alluding to Marlene's most recent "accidental" ear shot.
        "Don't be a baby," she said, grinning like a rabid Timber Wolf.
        "Where's Patty?" I asked, backing slowly away towards the safety of the "corner," which was the trunk of our knotty front yard elm tree.
        "She went to Tom Thumb. Now put up your gloves and fight like a man."
        "I really think there should be a referee."
       "Referee..." She turned the word in her mouth and spit it out. "You and your fancy Chinese words. Stop stalling around and get back in the ring."
        I backed further into the tree trunk, pressing myself against it.
       "You know what I'm looking at?" she asked, arching an eyebrow behind her "gloves up" defense stance.
        "What?" I asked, stupidly.
        "I am looking at..." She paused for effect: "The world's biggest sissy."
       Where I come from, those are most definitely fighting words. I launched a barrage of poorly planned and executed alternating jabs, most likely supplying proof positive that her most recent assessment of my character had been accurate. My sister, a full foot taller than me, was not very impressed or intimidated by my assault. She held her gloves in front of her, deflecting most of my misguided blows and began to laugh. This only served to incense me further. I began to flail harder and more spastically, my face turning the color of a blanched Roma tomato.
        "How's this?" I raged, between gasps. "Want some more?"
        "Stop, you're tickling me." Marlene said.
        "Oh, what's the point?" I concluded at last, pulling off my gloves and letting them fall to the ground. "Boxing is stupid. We're not even doing it properly." I collapsed under the elm tree.
        "Paddle pool is more of a man's sport." I said, my voice drifting off into the summer night like a poplar seed.

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Homespun Memories H

Hats off to the crew who cleaned the Ice House and the Cat Shack ... two historic structures at the Johnson Farm. Donald B. Johnson (father of Beaver and Richard, Kathlyn, Mitzi and me) wrote these recollections of the Ice House in his memory book, published after his death in 1982. ~ Jerrianne

"One of the first years, (Pa) built an ice house on the farm. It's still called that, but has only held bolts and junk for a long time, now. The door faced north when it was an ice house, making it easier to fill. We could back the sleigh loads of ice to the door, by going a little past and then angling downhill. There was no foundation under it, but we later dug away some on the west side and made a sort of lean-to pole shed for the Model T. Later, we put a foundation between the posts, which is the west foundation of the ice house now.

"One of the hardest jobs of the whole year was sawing the ice out in the middle of Christina Lake to fill the ice house: cutting blocks by hand with a big six or seven foot ice saw, hauling them home with horses and sliding them on skids into the ice house. I think Sam Schram helped (Pa) the first years, until I left school at 14; after that, I was the helper."

"The first years Pa sawed (ice) both ways in place, out on the lake, to form blocks, when the lake ice was 18 to 24 inches thick. That was a lot of sawing. In later years, we got Earl Anderson to bring out an 'ice plow,' which was a long row of chisels fastened to the bottom of a beam like a breaking plow beam. We pulled it with horses and later with his Model T truck. It didn't plow all the way, but the blocks would break off with a chisel when you got a hole opened along one side."

"I never did last very long sawing, but from then on, I had the job of cleaning all the sawdust out of the ice house and putting it back in, over and around the ice. There was a lot of it, and if I left it too long in the ice house it would all be frozen solid, because it was always wet, and have to be picked loose. If I did it too early in the winter, it would all freeze solid in the pile outside and have to be picked loose out there.

"The sawdust would rot and more would have to be added every other year or so. Pa could usually get a big wagon boxful or two from Sivert Guldseth, who had a small lumber saw on his farm, a couple of miles northeast of town."

"When the ice was 'in' and the sawdust back in again, then we could take a deep breath and enjoy the winter."

This and That
6
by Elaine Wold
Wahpeton, ND

Modern Grandmas
anonymous

In the dim and distant past,
When life's tempo wasn't fast,
Grandma used to rock and knit,
Crochet, tat and baby sit.

When the kids were in a jam,
They could always count on "Gram."
In that day of gracious living,
Grandma was the gal for giving.

BUT TODAY she's at the gym,
Exercising to keep slim,
She's off touring with the bunch,
Or taking clients out to lunch.

Going north to ski or curl
All her days are in a whirl,
Nothing seems to stop or block her,
Now that Grandma's off her rocker!

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Celebrations & Observances
From the Files of 5
Hetty Hooper

This Week's Birthdays:

More June Birthdays:
'
June 4---Merna Hellevang

June 18---Caity Chap
June 21---Ary Ommert
June 25---Ben Henderson

More June Anniversaries:
Z
June 3---Ginny and Larry McCorkell's Wedding Anniversary (32nd)

June 19---Curt and Patty Henderson's Wedding Anniversary (22nd)
June 20---Rich and Marlene Johnson's Wedding Anniversary (23rd)

June Graduations
®
(Surely there must be some!)

June Holidays & Observances
O
June 4---Old Maid's Day
June 14---Flag Day
June 20---Father's Day
June 20---Summer Solstice (First Day of Summer)

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Keep Us Posted!

Please drop Miss Hetty a line and tell us who, and what, we've missed. And how about a report (photos welcome) of YOUR special celebration?

'Many Thankse
Everyone!

Miss Hetty

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