I seemed to have skipped these pages soo I'm putting in odds and ends.
Those were wild flowers I planted everywhere. I transplanted a lot from down in the swamp area. I got in trouble for having "weeds" in my yard that were higher than two feet.
I just thought of something. After we moved in here I was outside one day when the man across the street came over and "told" me that he hoped I wasn't going to put up red drapes because that wasn't allowed. I don't know where he got that idea from. I would never have put up red drapes in the first place. I used to wonder if he thought we had a whore house going on there. That was the only place I could think of that would have red drapes or maybe an old west saloon?
I was really into gardening. I tore up the grass on one side of the house and turned it all into a garden. I told them all not to walk anywhere but where the little bits of wood were. I had fabulous soil before I was done. I wrote all about it and it was published in a magazine.
I have forgotten her name already. This is why I have to put this all down before its all just a blur. She is Diane's daughter and her and Tommy thought of themselves as cousins. Erin Hand. Her brothers are Ed and Mike.
When Tommy was little, Grandpa Baker died. I think sometime before that either he or Mom had given Tommy this hat of Dads that he wore when he went fishing.
When Dad died I had one of those spooky things happen. I had slept upstairs on a mattress with Tommy at the time although I never slept well. You can blame this on the apnea if you chose but I was awakened in the night by something that told me I had to go downstairs.
I was almost on the last step when I looked at the door and I saw Dad standing there. He looked right at me and he sort of smiled. You rarely saw our Dad smile. Then he nodded his head and turned and disappeared through the closed door.
I was thinking what could be going on while I sat on the bottom stair and wondered what I should do when the phone rang. It was Sue and she said that the hospital had called moments ago and Dad had passed on.
He had been having something called a TIA. He'd had a few of them already. In one of them he fell into the toilet bowl when he was taking a leak and cut his head open. This may have been the one that got him to the hospital that last time.
He'd had another one that I knew about where he was at the wheel and drove into the ditch water. He probably had others that none of us knew about.
Dad had been in the hospital for a few days this last time. When he first went in they did a chest x-ray on him and said he had a spot on his lungs. They hitched him up to some kind of thing that was supposed to help him get the fluid out of his lungs. They gave him a second chest x-ray a few days later and the spot was gone.
In the mean time back in Argyle the chimney caught on fire. It was March and it was cold. The firemen came and put it out easily. It had happened before when soot built up in the chimney. I remember helping day to haul a heavy tow chain up there when the chimney had cooled. He would drop it down in the chimney and move it around to knock the soot free.
Mom had told Sue not to let Dad know about it.
Dad had other problems. He had been complaining that the nurses came in regularly and slapped his hands. He told Mom that if I was there, I wouldn't let them beat him up all the time.
The circulation in his legs was very bad. They told him they were going to have to cut off one of his legs.
That day, according to Mom, Millie and Allan came in to visit him and told him about the chimney fire.
I don't know what tipped him over the edge but in the night he went into a coma. There was a blizzard going on outside. The hospital called and told Mom not to come in because they could easily get killed on the way there. They told them that Dad was not going to make it and he wouldn't know them or know they were there if they did make it in to the hospital. Before morning Dad was gone.
Dad had left explicit instructions for Mom. There was to be no funeral, no calling hours and nothing in the paper. He said if folks didn't have the time to come see him when he was alive they needn't bother to come to see him in his grave. I remember him saying this a lot. Mom said the same thing.
Millie put a notice in the paper and had calling hours at her house. I read the notice. He really didn't want any or that but those things are more for the living than the dead.
Later in the spring, Tommy and I went out there to bury Dad's ashes or as Tommy called it "to bury Grandpa's soot." There was a small ceremony at the gravesite. He was first put in Grandma Russell's plot because Mom didn't have one. She knew he wouldn't want to stay there so she saved up and bought on time payments a small lot to bury his box. He is there now and some of his lifetime enemies are buried beside him. He would have hated knowing that.