From Axer to Ziegler

She would show up for cameras.  If we showed up with a camera, she made sure she would glare, not smile, for it!  After all, she was Queen, and she wasn’t ready to have her picture taken quite yet!  There’s a void in our life and we surely miss our Katrinka Dinka Do!  After all she traveled across country with us, watching the landscape change as we did, sleeping when we wanted to and keeping us awake when we finally had a chance to sleep.  She was one of a kind and kept us on our toes!

Tinka, as we called her sometimes, always showed an interest in what we were doing.  If not, she made sure, we knew she wanted our attention by plopping herself where she knew we would see her.  Everyone knows I love my books, and she did, too!  She, as well as I, preferred the oldest ones she could find.  If she wasn’t reading, she was doing her needlework, and that entailed her from preventing me from doing mine!

She was a valuable cat to have around.  If we were missing anything, anything at all, she seemed to know where to search for it.  We had no idea we were missing a quarter until we lifted the rug under the kitchen table to see exactly what she was trying to retrieve!  Yup!  She knew somehow there was a quarter under the rug!  How it got there is anybody’s guess!

She was a beautiful Russian Blue and we miss her horribly!   The picture below is one of the last we have of her and shows her in her more “mature years.”  After 12 1/2 years in our home, she left us last September.  I can see her keeping everybody on their toes in Cat Heaven. 

We miss Katrinka Dinka Do so much, we are going to welcome Katrinka Dinka Two into our home.  She was born in March and will be ready to join us in the next couple of weeks.  Katrinka Dinka Two is another hypo-allergenic breed, a Tonkinese Blue point.  Isn’t she cute?

Stay tuned for the adventures of a child in a home occupied by set-in-their ways, old fogies!  I bet she’ll change things here!  

We’re looking forward to it!

Found in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal, 2 February 1914:

NEPHEW BY PARCEL POST

TWO YEAR OLD YOUNSTER SHIPPED BY MAIL FOR 18 CENTS

Wellington, Kas., Feb. 3 – Mrs. M.H. Staley, of this city, received her two year old nephew by parcel post to-day from his grandmother in Stratford, Oklahoma, where he had been left for a visit three weeks ago. The boy wore a tag about his neck, showing it had cost 18 cents to send him through the mails. He was transported 25 miles by rural route before reaching the railroad. He rode with the mail clerks, shared his lunch with them and arrived here in good condition.

I bet there are postal regulations in place against this today!

Our family, like many other families throughout the country, celebrated Easter with several traditions.

The last Easter the entire Sherman Family shared

Growing up in the 1950′s it was imperative that we each had new “Easter Outfits.”  These Church clothes were worn only on Sunday and only for Church through spring and into summer.  When school started the dress would become a school dress for the start of the school year and we would get a new “Church only dress.”  That was the important tradition and it involved Church.

One Easter in the early 1980's (Farrah Fawcett hairdo, anyone??)

The second tradition was THE Easter egg hunt.  The hunt was preceded by the Egg Coloring.  The three children would color the eggs in the most bizarre color combinations we could imagine and each one of us had “our special egg.”  

Now I know every family had Easter Egg Hunts, but our family put a sadistic twist on it!  After hunting the eggs our parents hid for us, we would hide eggs for them!  The egg hunt for the three kids was so complicated that my father actually drew a map so he wouldn’t forget where they were hidden!  This after one of us found an egg during the summer in a planter, under the mulch!

Finding the egg in the lighting fixture

We retaliated by planning their egg’s hiding places for days before the event.  Places we would hide the eggs?  How about in the flour canister in the middle of the flour?   or in the tennis shoe hanging on the clothes line?  or in my mother’s purse?  The best one was the year we removed the the clock workings from the stove, stuffed the egg in and replaced the clock.  We nixed the idea of hiding an egg in the cat’s potty box ~ we felt that was crossing the line ~ like there was a line!

We grew, married, and had children of our own and continued the tradition of THE Egg hunt.

Looking for the elusive last egg . . .

The year we rented a cabin in the San Bernardino Mountains with my brother’s family is one memory that stands out in my mind.  My sister in law and I had the task of hiding the eggs.  We decided to hid one of the eggs in the toilet tank in the water.  Never in our wildest dreams did it occur to us that the egg we hid in the toilet tank would end up in the bowl with the first flush!  The child that flushed that toilet, and I can’t remember which child it was, was thrilled to think the Easter Bunny had left an egg in the toilet for them!  

. . . and the grandchildren continue the traditon

Our children grew, married and children of their own. We continued the tradition of the egg coloring and egg hunt, but without the bizarre hiding places. We colored eggs with the grandchildren and hid their eggs in semi-obvious places.

After all, they hadn’t been broken into the bizarre traditions of a semi-dysfunctional household!