Visiting Granny

Our family converged in the panhandle of Oklahoma to visit my grandmother at her farm in Shattuck, near the border of north Texas. John and mom drove nearly cross-country in their pickup truck (retrieving me at the airport in OKC), Den and Julie arrived from St. Louis driving lovely William, the Mini, and I flew in from 36 hours of traveling from Victoria BC.

The front of granny's house...





...and her amazing flock of tomato plants!

My granny is 86 and has the greenest thumb of anyone I've ever met. Her grapes are so thick that netting holds them up...



Mom and the beanstalk...



Granny's bumper crop of apples...



Getting down to earth with the peppers (which made a great salsa)...



The only thing more abundant than the fruits and vegetables is the wildlife. We spotted deer and a diversity of birds on the farm. This is a hummingbird moth that visited us one evening, delighting all the little cousins, who shrieked at its long proboscis.



Granny's devoted dog Ace got a haircut, ate a rabbit, and generally stole the show...





One of the fun things to do on the farm is to get granny to show me her tricks in canning, preserves, and old-fashioned cooking. This is us in the utility room off of main kitchen, where she is patiently letting me "help."



Dennis and I wandered down amnesia lane with memories of gathering eggs from the chicken house, which this building used to be...



We took a drive out to Lake Vincent, which is being drained and restored. As the lake shoreline drops, these skeletal car bodies appear.



My uncle gave us a tour of the gas rig on his property and described the process of "fracking" the earth (hydraulic fracturing) to get the gas to flow.





Looking toward the creek where my uncle has planted cattle feed. The foreground area serves as our soccer field each year. I got to play one brief but high-stepping, heart-pumping game in the dark with my little cousins.



Other events included visiting with other relatives, fixing the septic, trapping a rat, picking vegetables, making pickles, touring granny's amazing quilt collection, listening to granny's stories of her grandparents coming over from Russia on the ship Kaiser Wilhelm in 1902, remembering the Dust Bowl of the 1930s when she was a child, and talking about her own family.



A century later, our family stands on nearly the same ground where our relatives settled.



Not bad for my summer vacation...