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The bright, cardinal red barn, white house and windmill set against the lushness of rolling farmland makes this Amish farm look picturesque and welcoming. Also, note the thin tire marks in the lane showing it is traveled more often by horse and buggy than by cars. We visited the family who lives there to take books and school supplies for the new Amish school that was started this year. We also took some small cakes for the family, cakes given to Jerry by one of his Taiwanese students. The parents were as eager to eat one as the three young children; they were fascinated by the way the cakes were packaged individually into tiny boxes.
Unfortunately, the mother, while helping the father plane some lumber a couple of weeks ago, had an accident with the planer and cut off the two middle fingers on her right hand. She stoically commented she was just glad to still have the index and little fingers plus the thumb! Luckily, the day it happened, there was a woman at the house whose large poodles they've been keeping. She was able to take them to a hand specialist in Louisville. I shudder to think what would have happened if she hadn't been there. Her main concern with us is that she hadn't finished a quilt top she is quilting for us. Some of the other Amish women came to their farm to help but they just didn't have time to get it done. Wilma had even tried doing some quilting after the accident but said it hurt too much. That makes me sad.
When we unloaded the books and supplies, they started pulling things out to look at them saying they might take a couple of things -- pack of paper, maybe some markers -- for themselves. John spotted an accordion binder and asked what it was. Jerry took the cellophane off and opened it up; John was very interested in how it would be used. He also commented on a box of varied colored file folders, suggesting that each color could be used for different classes.
We were looking at all the materials in their basement so Jerry and I had a chance to look around a bit and noticed a separate room lined with hundreds of jars of canned goods, everything from peaches and peas to green beans and tomatoes. John explained that was their food supply for the rest of the year until they harvested again next summer and fall. He got into a cooler, the kind you'd take on a picnic, to pull out a head of cabbage/celery they grew in order to "pay" us since we certainly didn't want any money. He commented they still had ice from last winter. They wait until the pond freezes to about 4 inches thick, hack it out into large slabs, then store the blocks in an ice house lined with straw; it was protected that way well enough to last throughout the whole summer! The whole time we were looking at the canned goods and talking, a couple of peacocks were strolling around right by the basement window, looking in at us. :-) Maybe they were as interested in us as I was in them.
After leaving their farm, we spent the night at French Lick then, the next day, drove from there to Jasper, a small town originally settled by Germans. The road between French Lick and Jasper is, as Jerry puts it, "like a fairy tale". It winds up, down, and around rolling hills where corn stalks were being cut down and bundled into fodder stocks. The day was picture perfect; even the clouds looked like they'd been laid onto the canvas of the cerulean sky with a palette knife. Our reason for the trip was the Schnitzelbank Restaurant in Jasper where we ate wiener schnitzel, goulash, saurkraut, red cabbage and drank double bock beer! Yum.
Donna and I decided these trees look like they're doing something naughty. :-) They are in the little park at High Bridge. There is a metal porch-type swing hanging from another tree just beyond these two. We sat in that and swung, talked for a while. Neal had wandered off on his own; Toots was "taking care of bidness".
Donna, Toots, and Neal at the High Bridge lookout. When I accidentally looked down through the grid, I actually got dizzy!
Hooray!! The theatre season has started. And it started with a bang. Lookingglass Alice showed Alice progressing from being a pawn on a chessboard to becoming a queen at the end. Along the way she met interestingly done Lewis Carroll characters. Following dozens of shoes plummeting from the ceiling, the caterpillar appeared, representing the toddler stage of life. "He" was portrayed by three guys doing everything in synchronization: flaying arms, leap-frogging, stepping in rhythm. Tweedledee and Tweedledum acted like preadolescents with Alice, refusing to shake her hand. The Mad Hatter had his "adult" tea party but only after he and his other guests snatched folding chairs out of the air as they fly up from below stage and THROUGH a large basket. As an "adult", Alice was crowned queen and met Humpty Dumpty. He was sitting on a very tall ladder and when he tried to maneuver his way down to shake hands with Alice, the ladder tipped over and he fell backwards through a trap door. The audience gasped at that because it happened so suddenly and finally.
Acrobatics was an integral part of the play. Trapeze feats such walking on stilts, hopping around on springy shoes that looked like feet from a Star Wars character, tumbling, somersaulting, standing on others' heads or shoulders, riding a trick bicycle and unicycle were included.
My favorite character was the Red Queen. "She" (played by a guy) was hilarious. After Alice drank the shrinking potion, the Red Queen -- who was about12-15 feet tall, drifted on stage. You could see the top of her body staying stationary but obviously female feet wearing bright red, glittery shoes kept poking out from underneath the hem of the dress. Later in the play while she was floating in an umbrella on water (created by guys billowing long, wide sheets of turquoise fabric so it looked like waves), the real person was actually clad in black pants from the waist down. The umbrella was secured around his waist and his teeny legs and feet wearing the shiny red shoes stuck out in front of him on the umbrella.
I'm having a hard time describing this play because so much of it involved the circus acts, they physicality of the actors. It was an excellent play.
Does anybody read these or am I just sending x's and o's out into cyber space?
A fairly new restaurant in New Albany, Jackson's Seafood, got a good review in Saturday's paper. The day was picture perfect so we put the top down on the car and headed across the river (against Jerry's better judgment -- He knew the place would be crowded after reading the review). The place was PACKED but we gave our order quickly and found an empty table. It was only then we started looking around and realized there were more tables without food than those with it. So, we waited, and waited, and waited. We could almost feel the impatient rumblings rolling through the place when finally a couple of old women spoke up: "I know good and well it doesn't take an hour to fry a piece of fish!" One of them got her money back, warned "I'll never come back in here again", and stormed out. We-e-e-el, she left her sweater hanging on the back of the chair. A few minutes later she sort of sneaked back in to get it. One of the young men who worked there handed it to her and remarked, "I knew you'd be back, one way or another." That eased the tension and about half the restaurant howled with laughter. One woman even jumped up and started helping the staff clean off tables.
The poor guys who own the place were "caught with their pants down" and had to turn away customers and close for a couple of hours to regroup. They even returned everybody's money who had ordered but not received food. We will go back when things settle down because it was delicious.
I promise this is my last photo from our trip. I'm singling it out because it's one of my favorites.
Our niece Cindy and her husband, Donald, own a gorgeous home in Destin, Florida. She has generously offered to let us use it any time they don't plan a trip there themselves. We took advantage of the offer and spent a little over a week there with two of our friends, Susan and Paul. We ate fish until I began to sprout gills, went shopping, walked on the beach, played cards, read, watched TV, drove to Biloxi, Mississippi and spent the night, rode the ferry across Mobile Bay. The pictures should tell the story.
