Blacksheep Speaks

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I know this thumbnail is small. I can’t stand looking at it full size. What you are looking at is a copy of the latest xray done on my daughter’s spine. That’s an 86 degree curve. She spent a year under the treatment of a chiropractor for this. So, all of you Palmer fanatics out there, FYI… chiropractics doesn’t always work.

How did it get this bad? I don’t know. My daughter wears baggy shirts to hide it, has since it became noticeable. I was dumb enough to think that the chiropractics was taking care of the problem.

She saw a surgeon for the first time this week. You know, it’s one thing to take a child to a doctor… another to be told that if the child doesn’t have what amounts to emergency surgery, she could wind up in a wheelchair within a year. The surgeon isn’t even willing to wait till summer, it’s so bad. She will miss around four weeks of school this semester.

Two rods are going to be inserted into her back. They didn’t sugar coat anything… they said that this is one of the most painful procedures out there and that recovery will be very difficult. As a parent, how do you deal with this? I thought I knew what it felt like to watch a child in trouble. One of my other daughters was born prematurely and spent the first six months of her life on machines. But this is different. This is a fifteen year old girl. A soccer player/ Band student. Great kid.

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Given my daughter’s pending appointment, I had to find her insurance card. Have you looked lately at all the different coverage you have to have these days? The file containing our insurance info is a mile thick. The one thing we don’t have is term life insurance. Given recent events, that probably isn’t too smart. But any time we ever even almost looked into it, we were too young for some, too old for others, or they were just too darned expensive. I think I am probably going to look around again though. It’s been a while, and I am beginning to see that life insurance is something we don’t want to be without.

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Life goes on, and it seems that with it parades a neverending line of doctors and specialists. This time, it’s a specialist… for my fifteen year old, who has severe scoliosis. It took us six months to even GET this appointment, so this guy better be good. He costs an awful lot in long distance charges, too. He’s in Little Rock, at Children’s Hospital. What ever happened to toll free numbers, anyway? For a while, everyone and everywhere had them. These days, no one seems to. Ah, well, at least we are finally getting her in to have something done. It seems like this has taken forever.

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That’s pretty much it for the old trunk, I think. There were a couple other things in there, what appear to be a small pile of old clothes, but they fell apart when we tried to pick them up. An old empty purse thing. And what appears to be a membership card that is too old and smeared and faded to read. It has been a very fascinating trip through someone’s memories, though, and I am beginning to wonder just what else that old shed has to offer. Finding out may take a while. The weekend is over, and it’s back to real life as we know it. Ah, well, next weekend is coming!

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Those old skeleton keys really got my interest. According to my mother, most houses used them, and there weren’t really all THAT many variations. I looked it up, and she is right. Apparently, security systems back then weren’t all that. From what I can tell, these locks were incredibly easy to pick. It’s amazing to me that there really wasn’t all that much crime, comparitivly speaking. My father used to say that locks were for honest people, because the crooks were going to get in anyway, and I guess he was more or less right about it.

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Going through this old splintered trunk has been more than interesting. I have no idea to whom the trunk originally belonged, and there aren’t a whole lot of clues, given that none of the pictures have any names, but the pictures aren’t the only thing in it, either. There is also an etiquette pamphlet advising what the proper thing to do in several situations might be… and boy, have things changed in the last hundred and fifty years. There are also a couple paintings. I can’t say for sure, but one of them looks like a scene from somewhere near Westgate. The bridge in it looks familiar. There is also an impressive collection of skeleton keys. Now, the house I grew up in used those, but I haven’t seen any since I was a little girl. Those locks were all changed out before the place got sold. Brings back memories. I just wish we knew WHOSE memories these were!

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Right next to the box of old films, we found an old steamer trunk. The trunk probably would have been worth an awful lot if it hadn’t been in a storage shed, unprotected, for all this time. Anyway, the lock on it was irrelevant because the wood was rotting, but inside it, we found a whole collection of old tintypes and daguereotypes. We actually have no idea who these people are, but it is a pretty sure bet that they are members of our family, and we will be trying to figure them out and put names to the faces. One thing is certain… these women never heard of Fentraphen. They look like they didn’t miss a meal at any given hour. I guess the fitness craze wasn’t really all that big in the eighteen hundreds!

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And the cleanup continues. We came across box after box of old super 8 film reels… remember those? These all belonged to my Uncle Mac. He loved shooting home movies. Unfortunately, he never actually learned to hold the camera steady. So, here we have reel after reel of old family vacations… Walla Walla, Outer Banks, Tampa. The thing is, he’s been dead now for quite some time, and it doesn’t seem to matter so much that the film makes us car sick. There are a lot of great movies in that old film!

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You know, this cleanout has been rather informative, at least when it comes to people’s character. You see, we have stuff stored here that at one time belonged to every member of the family… for at least five generations. My grandfather liked books, and there are literally crates of books there. Contrast that with the threadbare suitcase left by my sister’s ex-husband, which proved to be full of magazines featuring females in cheap lingerie… and out of it. I am glad my kids weren’t there when THAT came out! I think this has been an eye opening experience, for sure.

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When someone dies, life actually does go on for those of us left behind, no matter how much it can hurt for a while. After my sister died most of us here just tried to stay busy and not think too much. We decided to get some cleaning done, actually… we decided to clean out the storage barn and sheds. You wouldn’t believe what kind of stuff can accumulate over just a few decades. Have you ever even SEEN what safety equipment from the fifties looks like? Neither had I until a couple days ago. And there is a whole section dedicated to my old horse raising days. By the way, rotten leather stinks. Especially when it burns. I’ll let you know what else we find!

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