I Spent a Month in Missouri One Week

April 2, 2015

We arrived in Marionville, Missouri to find Alice sitting in her chair on her back porch, surprised we were there already.  Her birthday being the day before, she had just turned 95.  She looks her age, and is acting her age.  Her eyesight is going, she cannot hear much, but she knows this place where she was born.  We don't need to worry she will trip on a rug, nothing has been moved (or been cleaned) in a long, long time.    She does just fine, She wouldn't have it any other way.  She would like to have us there all the time, but then she tires of having us around.  She is just waiting.  We love her very much, We want to take care of her, but she won't have any of it.  "What are you cleaning that for.  It's just going to get dirty again."  "Jerry, what were you doing in the basement for so long?"  "I don't need a bath,"  "I think the fire went out." (It's 80 degrees outside and 100 degrees inside.)

On March 30th, the day we left Brush Prairie to come here, Uncle Willard Meadows died.  He was 87, and had gone outside to cut up a tree with his chain saw.  He evidently suffered a heart attack.  He lived on his farm in Jenkins, Missouri.  His neighbor could hear the chain saw going, then heard it idle and then realized it had been idling for a long while.  He went over to check it out and found Willard.  His wife Margaret had passed a couple of years ago, he missed her very much.  He was like a man lost at sea.  Now he is anchored again.

April 3, 2015

Jerry's birthday!  He likes to celebrate with Alice when he can.  She baked him a cake more than a month ago and kept calling him about it.  It has been sitting in the cupboard, uncovered.  It's very hard and the strawberry frosting smells like strawberry barf.  He is not going to eat it.   We have been squirreling pieces of it outside into the pasture under the pretense we are eating it.  She can't see what we are doing or hear it.  We are evil brats.  But we want to live instead of get sick.

We stayed until April 9th leaving Alice so we could take care of some business in Florida and see some of our great country, too.