Kim Janine Ligon

Bring the Sunshine

James M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, said, “Those who bring Sunshine to the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.” He never met my Aunt Judy, but she would have invoked those words.

She became Aunt Judy in 1971 when she married my father’s almost thirty-one year old baby brother. Judy had what it took to settle him down back in his hometown after a life of flying helicopters and commercial airliners. It was a package deal that not only yielded a new Aunt but a new cousin, Dodd.

Usually she had a smile, unless someone was vexing her. Then she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes and said their name. Usually it was “JOOOHN!” But Daddy could get a rise out of her without trying too hard. Then it was “RUSSELLL!” She was easy to tease, but didn’t stay aggravated long.

Her artist’s soul showed itself in many ways. In her salon on the bottom floor of the tri-level house, she cut, curled and dyed lots of hair and was always experimenting with wigs and hairpieces.

Aunt Judy did everyone’s hair for my wedding party, except for my sister, Ann. She wouldn’t be put in curlers and under a dryer after helping at the bachelor party the night before. Aunt Judy gently washed Ann’s long hair, then cut it into a cute bob that looked lovely under the hat she wore down the aisle. Disaster averted much to this nervous bride’s relief.

For many years she was the chief photographer at our family reunions putting up picture boards and making collages of family fun for all to enjoy. She was a prolific talented painter of flowers, landscapes, children and grandchildren.

Judy gave freely of her time and talents. With John she grew her church’s Outreach Meal program over thirty times its original size to deliver meals to 1,000 at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My sisters and I were in town to help one Christmas. What an amazing production! She proudly took us around to introduce her nieces to the other workers, then put us to work!

You rarely saw her sit down without a little fur ball or two curled up in her lap. A little dog nuzzling up against her perfectly content.

Smiling. Creative. Generous. Talented. Loving. All those describe my Aunt Judy, but the word that comes to mind for me is Feisty. She was a lot like the little dogs she loved – affectionate, but ready to fight if necessary. She’s been in a battle for years that has taken every bit of her feistiness, every ounce of fight, and every ray of faith. This week she was called home to bask in the love and the joy she freely shared with us to so long. Sadly, due to COVID, I’ll be basking in memories of her rather than be there in person to celebrate her life. We love you Aunt Judy. Rest in well-deserved peace.

By the Numbers

I have wished, hoped and prayed that by now we would only be remembering when COVID was a bad dream we had awakened from. I want to see fewer cases so I can go to visit family and friends in other states without risking their or my safety.

These days we get up each morning and check the number of new cases in the state and in our county. A local TV station shows the breakdown on their crawl. When the trend is down we are always thankful.

Then I usually weigh myself and write that number down before I make coffee.

Not that writing them down changes anything about either of those numbers. But I check them every day.

Earlier this week, I read that 70% of the people this medical website surveyed said the pandemic is causing them to make changes to be more healthy – to eat better, exercise more, drink less. Really? No one surveyed me.

I knew long before this strange year that the medical answer to improving almost every health issue is lose weight. Sometimes I have and sometimes I have not. But I haven’t the mental fortitude to forgo comfort foods (you know what they are) or a well made bourbon drink in the midst of this stressful mess.

Sometimes I do my exercises and more often, my yoga breathing, but if I don’t I am not going to add the stress of feeling guilty about it.

I’d really like to join Bill Murray’s Meatballs campers and begin chanting “It just doesn’t matter!” but I know it does.

The key is to remember that worrying about the virus or the number on the scale or your cholesterol does absolutely nothing to change them. You need to take action to create the change or chose not to. The only thing you should never do is to worry. It is a time sucking, gut wrenching waste of time and it keeps you from sleeping. And we all need to sleep!

The Bill Collector

Today would have been my mother’s eighty-fifth birthday. I have been thinking about her quite a bit lately. I believe that any organizational skills and business sense I have probably came from her.

For a long time, Mother did all the books for Daddy’s veterinary practice – all the posting of every day’s receipts onto the ledger card for each client, recalculating the running balance and refiling them.

Once a month, statements were sent out. This involved making a copy of each ledger card – not on today’s plain paper copiers, but using a device that had a single sheet feeder to send through each ledger card and it spit out a waxy feeling, smelly copy from the roll of paper in the machine. By the end of the roll, you had to work hard to keep the paper flat enough to fold and slide into the window envelopes.

Daddy rarely collected his fees while out on calls, so the monthly statements were critical for family cash flow. If no payment had been made the month before, Mother would put a PLEASE note on the bottom of the statement. When no payments were made again she switched to a note in red crayon and added underlines and exclamation points. One of the clients was a cattle rancher and rodeo supplier, he received the red crayon messages so frequently that one time when he came into the office to pay his bill, he told Mother she should be ashamed of herself for taking her poor children’s crayons. He gave me a dollar on the way out of the office and told me to buy some new crayons and hide them from Mother!

When crayon messages didn’t work, Mother made phone calls to the farmer’s wives appealing person to person and for harder cases to the farmer when he was just sitting down to dinner. She always seemed to know who really could pay but didn’t make it a priority and who to let ride because their circumstances didn’t allow any extra right now to pay the veterinary bill.

The ultimate bill collection effort she hit upon one day when she was aggravated that all options had resulted in no money from her nemesis, the red crayon shamer. One evening, we came in from playing to find no dinner in the works. Instead Mother loaded us all in the family station wagon – dirty faced and bare footed from a day outside – and drove us out to this client’s house. She got us out of the car, marched us up to the house, and pounded on the back door. The man came to the door looking puzzled. When he opened the door, Mother said, “They’re here for supper. I’ll pick them up in an hour.” Then she turned to leave.

“Whoa. Bev I can’t feed all those kids.” The client stood blocking the doorway.

“Neither can I because you haven’t paid your bill in six months!” Mother fired back.

He began laughing. “Just a minute.” He went back in the house and returned a few minutes later with a check that he handed to Mother.

“This is fifty dollars too much.” Mother said.

“Maybe now I can stay ahead. Goodnight!”

I don’t think he stayed ahead too long, but it was the only expedition we ever made to his house at dinner time.

Happy birthday Mother with love.

One Thing They Can Never Take Away

“I always wanted to experience everything and go down swinging…And there’s one thing they can never take away: Nobody had more fun than I did.” – Burt Reynolds

I’m afraid I have to challenge Burt’s claim. My father would have given him a run for the “Most Fun Living” championship. He was definitely from the Experience Everything School of Life and he never stepped away from the plate until he’d given it his all.

I loved riding on farm calls with Daddy. We had lots of time to talk. He’d regale me with tales of mischief growing up on the farm – like threading a horse tail hair into an egg to be boiled to take to the church picnic and watching the results without giving away that you and your brother were the crime perpetrators. He fondly remembered the excitement of going off to college at age sixteen, but cautioned me that enjoying too many extra curricular activities could get you flunked out. He enjoyed reminiscing about his military experience as an aide to a general who became the governor of Illinois. He strongly believed that with hard work persistently done you could achieve your dreams. He modeled that philosophy. Throughout college and veterinary school he worked multiple jobs simultaneously – milkman, lab tech, cutlery door to door sales, manufacturing line work, paper route manager – got married and graduated with his DVM with three and a half children.

Daddy dealt with setbacks that would have knocked most people on their keisters where they would have stayed licking their wounds before curling up in a fetal position. When I was twelve, the sheriff came to our house to seize the assets of his veterinary clinic which operated out of our basement. The results of an epic financial planning failure that ended in filing bankruptcy. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry – not for himself, but because he said he’d let his wife and kids down. But the next morning, at the crack of dawn, driving the family station wagon because his truck had been taken, he was back out on calls helping farmers who needed him. He was over feeling bad. He would work at what he knew. Tomorrow would be better.

I was glad he followed through on his dream of getting a pilot’s license when he flew to Champaign to pick up his homesick oldest child who had only been at college for six weeks.

When one of his cattle buyer clients needed a veterinarian to accompany a shipment of Holstein cows to Iraq, Daddy leapt at the chance to see something he’d never seen. He came home with tales of watching the Iran-Iraq battles from the Baghdad Sheraton rooftop as Scud missiles lit up the night skies.

Later in life he travelled the world extensively, not just for leisure, but as an international expert on raising veal calves. Even after chemo and other treatments and hospitalizations, when the cell phone in his shirt pocket rang he was in full business mode answering, ” Schnepper International, What can I do for you?” He simply kept working hard his whole life.

Yes, I’m sure he gave Burt a run for the prize. Do you think it’s something about dark eyes and a mustache?

Happy Father’s Day Daddy. Thanks for all the life lessons, but most of all for the love!

The Grand Adventure

This month we are celebrating our forty-fifth anniversary of the day we began our officially licensed Grand Adventure. I’d like to think I’ve learned in all this time what makes marriage work – at least ours.

Selection is the key factor that outweighs all others to improve the odds of having a thriving marriage. You are not only in love with, in lust with, and want to ride into the sunset with your spouse – you must like them. A lot! Duh, you say, of course you like them, you’re getting married. Once the blush is off the bride and real life sets in, the liking will make them be interesting and pique your curiosity, to help maintain your affection for the next fifty, sixty, seventy years.

Grow up together. As college students, psuedo-adults, we weren’t completely formed when we married. We had lots of opportunities to grow up together – bending in the same direction – towards the light showing us the way.

It takes two to tangle. The first time that I threw a hissy fit worthy of my mother, my newly minted husband looked at me and began laughing. The harder I pitched that fit, the more he laughed. At first, it made me angrier. Then I realized how totally silly I must look. The crisis du jour passed. I’m not claiming we never fight, but I don’t throw fits. No point.

Other people’s marital advice is irrelevant. No one except the two people in a marriage truly understand what makes it click. What works for us may not work for you. I sometimes look at a couple and wonder what they see in one another. It’s really none of my business. The important thing is they see something that works for them. Except for a very brief period of time, we have been just us against the world – no family nearby. We had to talk to each other to solve our problems. There was no where to run. No one else’s shoulders to cry on. So we tried harder to find solutions from our wedded hearts.

Dont save your good manners for company. Isn’t it funny that the person who means the most to us is the one we sometimes treat the worst. When we were on the second week of a three week trip in Europe – an “if it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” motor coach tour – we had two women who had been college roommates sitting near us. One day they announced, ” We’ve decided you’re on your honeymoon.” We started laughing and asked why they thought that. They said because we were so nice and polite to one another and held hands a lot. When we told them we’d celebrated our twenty-third wedding anniversary the week before – they were floored. We still use the magic words of Please and Thank You to one another and hold hands often.

Make time for one another. When you’re working a stressful job or getting tenure or just doing all the things daily life requires – it seems easy to give up time together, to postpone it or not do it purposefully – in order to squeeze everything else in. I’ve learned that staying in tune with each other is every bit as important – no – it’s more important – than anything else. Without one another – what have you got?

Decide who is to navigate and who is to steer. Jim has a great sense of direction and is a map reader without parallel. Put a sack on his head and dump him out somewhere and he’d find his way home (No, I have never done that!) My sense of direction is lousy, but I can usually steer around obstacles and have endurance for the drive. We won back-to-back road rallies (think scavenger hunt from your car) with me driving and Jim reading the clues and navigating. A yoked team can only go in one direction at a time and both sides must pull equally. It may change directions – even multiple times – but it can never go in two directions at the same time.

So far, it has been a glorious adventure! We have been truly blessed. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Finding Our Way Back

Ten days ago Alabama moved into the “Safer at Home” mode which meant restaurants could open their dining rooms with the appropriate social distancing and other precautions. Very, very, very s l o w l y things are opening up. You have to do a lot of checking before going out. Just because they can be open doesn’t mean they are.

Last Friday we decided to act as if things were almost normal, although we were prepared to be disappointed, but we had to get out and, as my sweet father-in-law would say “blow the stink off”. We went to Office Depot, which has never closed,and Hobby Lobby, which just reopened. And we drove around town checking to see what was and was not open.

Then we went to lunch in a sit down restaurant where we were served delicious food on real plates! The Olive Garden was doing a great job. Tables with signs saying “Social distancing is temporary, Family is forever, We are family” blocked the social distancing tables. Staff wore masks and gloves. They weren’t very busy. In our dining room there was only a mom with a six year old enjoying the escape.

We were almost giddy. It felt like we were doing something illicit, like someone was going to come over to stop us from enjoying our meal. It only added to the excitement of the adventure.

Then we found our brand of toilet paper in the grocery store AFTER NOON! Could the worm be turning?

The only indication things were post virus was that there weren’t many people out and they were masked. My husband has abandoned his mask for a red bandana. He says it makes him look less like a scared old man and more like a desperado!

And yesterday my diamond engagement ring that had been sent off to get new prongs before all this started, came back incorrectly changed, and was returned to Kentucky for a redo, finally came back again – and it was right! A seven week adventure instead of ten days. I wondered if I would ever see it again.

And my humming birds have found their way back!

My nursing doctorate sister, Lisa, warned me that we really shouldn’t go out yet just because we can. We should wait at least three more weeks. Instead we’re following her original advice and not touching our faces, eyes, and mouths when out and about and carrying our handy spray bottle of alcohol to use when we do have to touch something outside of our house!

We will never find our way back if we don’t start down the path to normal. If Dorothy hadn’t started down the Yellow Brick Road, she never would have gotten to Oz. If she hadn’t found Oz, she wouldn’t have gotten back home. Back to normal.

Searching for Normal

I shudder every time a broadcaster says we’re all getting used to our NEW normal. There is very little resembling normal these days. Not when:

We’re rationing toilet paper as if the little Italian nonna from outside the Tower of Pisa restrooms is handing us our two square limit each trip.
My sister, Ann, made us face masks which the guy in the post office said were “plumb cheerful”. The downside is that your glasses can steam up when you wear them and if you stop quickly to avoid a man in the aisle in front of you, your ankles pay the price when your cart-steering husband can’t see the stop.

* Going to the post office was like being in The Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld. A long line of people six feet apart moving forward to the next x on the floor when the space clears. Step up to the counter and put the packages there then immediately step back until the lone masked postal worker asks you the necessary questions. We were trying to pretend it was a normal year because we even mailed our tax payment!

*We tried to pretend it was the before time by cleaning the pine pollen off the deck and steam cleaning the ceiling and walls to remove the black residue from an exceptionally wet winter. Then we moved the plants from the kitchen outside to their homes in the deck – like we do every year. When you sit out there you can pretend all is right in the world.

*Then came Easter Sunday without sun rise services, Easter egg hunts or choirs joyfully singing “Up from the Grave He Arose” – in truth it looked a lot more like a Good Friday with its dark and stormy weather. Then we did a truly normal thing for April in Tuscaloosa Alabama. We tuned into James Spann the local meteorology legend in time to see him say we should go to our place of safety. Then the lights went out.

That night an EF1 tornado passed two blocks from our house uprooting trees, peeling back roofs and causing havoc. The golf course in our neighborhood lost 250 trees and a lot of fence. Luckily, no one lost their lives here and at our house we only lost a refrigerator full of food that wasn’t good when the power came back on 26 hours later. When we left the house the next day and saw its path, I knew our angels had been working overtime to keep us safe!

I am truly thankful for all the people still working every day to keep stores stocked, fix our carry out food, keep us healthy and safe, grow our food, make the products we need and keep our utilities on – or to restore them. I’m sending you a big fat virtual hug!

So wash your hands, wear your mask, social distance, don’t touch your face and pray unceasingly for a return to true normal where everyone who wants to work can and we can shop for things essential or not from any store we want and eat dinner from real plates in a sit down restaurant across the table from friends!

Normal will find its way back. It simply must!

Find the Joy

I have been depressed about the blasted virus. It isn’t like I had to adjust to working from home – I do that every day. I am used to being here all day with my husband, no adjusting there. I didn’t have to make arrangements for my kids and grandkids who have been freed from their scholarly pursuits for the rest of the year. My prayer list has been growing exponentially to cover family and friends and family of friends in healthcare, servers and bartenders not needed for carry-out, people who are having to shutter their shops after being deemed non-essential and all those who have been simply told to go home.

But this morning we woke up very early and braved the chilly morning to go stand in the growing line at 6:55 a.m. at Publix, the shopping time exclusively for old farts! There were already twelve shoppers in front of us waiting (a social distancing space apart) for the magic door to open. When it did, everyone made a beeline to the golden aisle and I experienced my first moment of joy of the morning when I found this!

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After a month of a barren paper products aisle we were rewarded!!!!! And there was milk in gallons, hamburger, and eggs. If that wasn’t enough, chocolate ice cream pie was half price!!!!! And every checkout aisle was open to ensure people weren’t standing close together, they could keep that even after this is all over! Joy washed over me!

I know my prayer list will keep growing and I worry about trying to get along in a world that doesn’t like huggers – since I am a major one! I guess, like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow! For today, I found a little joy in the neighborhood Publix! No fooling! Enjoy!

Little Cat Days

Today after nearly six weeks of almost constant rain and grayness, we woke to what my husband called “a strange glow in the sky.” Finally, a day of exquisite sunshine!

It’s a fooler though. The sunshine draws you out so the cold air can smack you in the face and really wake you up!

When we lived in central Illinois, I called these Little Cat Days and the title applies equally today in Alabama. If I were a little cat today, I’d find a nice sunny window seat and stretch out in the sun to lick my paws and wipe my whiskers with them to remove all trace of my bowl of cream. Then I’d raise up on all four paws, arch my back with a little yowl and scratch at the cushions with my clawless feet to make them just right to lie back down again – this time with the other side facing the window – to bask in the sun. Soon, I would be purring like a contented little motor, eyes shut, having – what else – a little sunny cat nap!

A day like this makes you want to soak up all the vitamin D laden sunshine that you can. Enjoy every minute of it!

The New Decade

I was not ready for the new year, much less a new decade. I felt a little heartsick because I have family members battling the ravages of time in far away hospitals and friends who I love so much I consider them my extended family that are experiencing illnesses and loss. I couldn’t seem to shake it, not even when my favorite January centerpiece of camellias and Holly berries was on the kitchen counter.

Then it was time for our trip to Florida. We visited Anna Maria Island for the first (and hopefully, not last) time. We stayed at the Bungalow Beach Resort, a not to be missed Old Florida gem. It helped that this was the view off our back porch less than ten feet away….

But, believe it or not, that wasn’t the best part, although the sound of waves and smell of salt water always lifts my spirits. It was that six out of my nine siblings were there too! My sisters who live farther north than Alabama don’t take much arm twisting to go to Florida in January and our baby brother lives near by with his beautiful wife and two precocious sons.

It was just what I needed. Since we had a beach front bungalow as did sister Lori, we could bebop back and forth and visit. As one of my sisters noted, as long as at least one of us was on the beach, we all could be! Good restaurants were within walking distance and there was a free trolley for further jaunts. Lest I start sounding like the Anna Maria Chamber of Commerce, the most important thing was being together.

Saturday night we descended upon my brother’s house, by invitation from he and his wife, and had a taco party. Whoever said you shouldn’t have too many cooks in the kitchen was simply wrong! I’d say instead that many hands make short work….. and terrific tacos!

I returned home refreshed and with a renewed spirit. Bad things are still happening to the people I love, but somehow my heart is better prepared for them. Seeing the amazing people my siblings have become makes me recognize once again how important family is to the core of my being…and always will be.

We pulled in the driveway to see two daffodils in full bloom almost three weeks early…. that can only do a heart good.