I'm back at my computer keys after taking a few days to redecorate my study. It took one false start (wrong color), a painting re-do, laying a new carpet, a little cussing at each other, and now it's done and I'm good to go. Mary works hard at these projects, and when she consented to helping me, she really dug in. I, of course, would not be able to do many of these things without her, but I do have to put in my two cents worth, although I mostly kept my mouth shut except to say, "Yes, ma'am."
This morning we hung pictures, one of them is a poster depicting our local national sports hero, the famous bucking bull Little Yellow Jacket. I admire him for being the accomplished sports champion that he is, besides the colors work well in here. The second picture up is my favorite of all time, "Found." In it a Collie dog howls for his master to come after he found a lost lamb in a snowstorm. I've always liked that picture for as long as I can remember. The folks had that scene hanging up when I was a small boy and still do. Familiar things feel good to me.
I've had a collection of black and white pictures grouped together that we hung up again, too. Four of them are of family members standing with teams of horses. Grandpa Bueling, a young man, stands in Plum City, Wisconsin in the early 1900's at the head of a large, strong team that he holds by their bridal straps. Dad's always said that he was a good horseman and broke a lot of them to work. Grandpa Sandvig, in another picture, sits on the seat of a hay mower hooked up to his team. He poses thoughtfully while giving the animals a rest. My mother and her brother, Marion, are young kinds, but in another frame, there they stand holding a mismatched team hitched to a hayrack. They look too young to have done much heavy lifting, but they probably were put to work doing something. One more horse scene shows my dad holding in one hand the reins of his team, Chub and Queen, and, in the other, my hand, a young toddler. I remember that team because they were still around as I grew older, and, under close supervision, got to drive them.
Two more pictures went into my grouping: one, a scene of Sheldon's main street taken sometime in the early 1900's, and the other, a picture of a man standing in a suspended wool sack who is packing the fleeces in it. He is a relative of Mary's, and it is the only picture I have ever seen taken of that kind of activity. It is meaningful to me because I used to do that and have always remembered how my shoes became soaked with the lanolin oil from the wool.
