Scout Moves

I thought about posting my column here in full, but if I didn't direct you toward my local newspaper's online version of it, then you'd miss out on the delicious comments. So, here is what I've written in today's edition of Small Town Newspaper .

I spent about five days with my family in Georgia helpings my mother move out of her house and into my sister's. My mother is 85, but she is not frail—that woman can climb stairs and haul off and belt you, if she wanted, but she's showing signs of dementia, and she's lonely in her house all by herself. So, she now lives with my sister and her husband. We started on Thursday by packing up some clothes to take back to my mother's new bedroom, and we emptied the buffet that was part of her dining room set. The big thing has small drawers on the bottom that held candles that I swear were there when I was a little girl, and they haven't been lit in 30 years. We threw those away, and we sorted through 40 years of table clothes and cloth napkins and these little crocheted things. I could never figure out what those things were, but it turns out their glass cozies. You slip them on the bottom of glasses filled with sweet tea, and the glasses won't sweat on the fine furn...

I am back from Georgia with plenty of stories to tell and plenty of pictures to show, but not just yet. I'm completely worn out, and I have other tasks to perform before I can sit down and write a real blog post—my poor lot in Blogville has no more than 25 or 30 visitors a day lately, and I have only myself to blame. I haven't been very hospitable, but I'll set out the welcome mat soon and invite you all over for tea. In the mean time, go make a word cloud. After I saw a word cloud of President Obama's State of the Union 2011 address, I found this site online. It's called Wordle, and it generates the things from just about anything—a presidential speech, a newspaper article or a blog. I ran the sagging Just Sayin' through it, and this is what happened:

As I've mentioned to you before, my mother is going to move in with one of my sisters, and she has begun the process. Atlanta (and a good bit of the South) was frozen over in a storm recently, and she moved in the day the snow began falling. Now it's time to go get the stuff she didn't pack that day, to pack up some things for storage and to throw out things that can be pitched. We're going to start doing that this weekend, so I'm going to fly to Atlanta to help out. Everyone involved has a busy schedule—except for me, obviously—so we'll make Saturday the main work day, and I'm hoping I can do some preliminary packing beforehand. On Friday, though, my mother will be going to a ladies' luncheon (and no, you cannot translate that as a women's lunch in this case), and she would like me to go with her. It will be hosted by her friend, Marge, who she introduced me to when I was visiting there in November. Marge is a wonderful woman, a widow like most of t...

If you've been nosing around Just Sayin' for any length of time, you've seen this photo before. It's of my father as a soldier during World War II. We don't know much about it—exactly when it was taken or where or under what circumstances. I've heard it was taken in some kind of photo booth with an artificial background, and I'm sure it wasn't official because I assume the cigarette would not have been part of the uniform. I have always loved this picture because it is so clearly from another era. As a child of the '70s, with The Brady Bunch setting the tone and "Women's Lib" and space travel in the news, I would go home from school every day to parents anchored in the 1940s. That's not to say they weren't in tune with current events, but they were different from all the other parents I knew. Once when I was in eighth grade, my social studies teacher asked for a show of hands of all the kids with grandfathers who fought in World...

I used that phrase the other day with my sister, and she asked if she was one of the birds I had set out to kill. She was, but today, I have different birds to shoot. First bird: at the advice of my kids, I downloaded an app to my iPhone, Hipstamatic. It turns your phone into a camera that shoots nostalgic looking photos, with red casts or yellow casts to them like the pictures of your childhood. For example, here is No. 1's cat Nickolas looking like he's from 1967: And here's a scene I spotted while in Sonoma for New Year's looking yellowish with torn edges like a 1980s magazine shoot: I used this app to document a cooking experiment I recently did, and thus the second bird. I have been cooking a good deal since I've been home after the holidays. I made some great cream of mushroom soup and some really great butternut squash soup with cider cream. I've made beef fillets with a smoked cheese sauce, sauteed lamb chops and other stuff I can't remember at the m...

Let’s catch up a little bit. Since I last popped in here—checking in with a blog is sort of like stepping into a room, isn’t it?—a few things have happened. • In yesterday's edition of Small Town Newspaper, I wrote about my experience with full-body scanners at airports . The commentators make good points, and I suspect these Naked Machines might not be effective, but they're what we've got for now. And I'm not going to stop flying, and I'm certainly not going to opt for a pat down instead. What do you think? • I’ve begun knitting socks for the first time. No. 1 gave me sock yarn and needles for Christmas, and she wrote out a pattern for me to follow. As I read through the instructions, nothing makes sense, but as I knit, it all seems to fall into place. What I’m making so far has the general appearance of a sock, but it’s hardly something I’d give to another person and expect her to wear it on her feet. Let’s consider this a test run. • Eustacia came home from Roma...

When I was a kid, I only dreamed of a trip to California. I sat in my little TV-room in northwest Indiana, watching old movies and imagining Hollywood—that, to me, was what California was all about, that and Disney Land, which I only knew from watching The Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday evening. Then, after Husband and I had been married for about a year, we went to California to visit his family—his parents were living in Pasadena at the time, and they hosted a long-overdue reunion. I was 23 or so, but in an instant, I turned 10 and could hardly contain myself for all of the excitement. I'm pretty sure I literally skipped when we went places because the circumstances seemed to warrant something more festive than mere walking. Since then, I've been to California so many times, I stopped counting, and most of the shine has worn off. But trips to San Francisco and to Berkeley to spend time with No. 1 remain a highlight. For New Years, we flew to San Francisco with the kid...

As I may have mentioned, my mother will be moving in with one of my sisters soon, and she'll be leaving behind a house full of stuff. She isn't in a position of having to clear out immediately because we have a plan—we'll leave her house largely intact, and my sister's church will rent it occasionally for missionaries who are home on leave. When missionary families come back to the States after living in another country, they need a place to live for a few months or even a year, and people rent them their furnished houses. Anyway, we're not scrambling to close the place down right away, but my mother is in the process of choosing what she'll take to fill the rooms at my sister's house. She'll have a bedroom and a sitting room where she can hide out and watch TV or just take a nap, if she wants to get away from the common rooms, and she wants to make those private spaces as much like home s she can. Here is today's column in Small Town Newspaper in r...