When John’s nieces were little they would spend many of their days with their grandmother, dressing as fairies dancing through her garden. Their grandmother would be so delighted she would run out with on old fashioned film containing camera and snap pictures.
I’d receive packets of photos in the mail with captions on the back like, “Patty dancing,” or “Chelsie dressed in my old night gown”. It was what was on the front that I found so delightful; not only did I see granddaughters in action but I saw the picture taker LAUGHING! One photograph contained SOMEONE’S forehead and flying hair, another showed two children’s feet in mid jump off the ground. In another I saw part of a pink dress someones shoulder but only to the to elbow.
I always wondered if Mon keep the “good” shots or sent them home with Patty and Chelsie and then always sent ME the truly superb photos.
I used Mom as a model in my book Gracie’s Grandfather Makes Trouble, where the GRAND person kept snakes and decorated most every inch of her house with fake ones.  nancymauerman.com

When I think of my Quilting Group I think of presents. At this time of year we are bringing gift ideas we can all take home and duplicate into craft gifts for friends, family and neighbors, but I can’t think of any ideas.
I asked John if he had any. “Oh yes, I suggest they all steam the labels from all of their canned goods and glue them all back on incorrect cans. In this way their giving season lasts all year. All year they can hear their loved ones calling from the kitchen, ‘There’s canned okra in here instead of chicken soup.’ See I’m crafty. Or another craft idea is to show the ladies they can wrap up a quarter and a small tube of super glue.”             “What?” I said.                                                                                                                      “Oh yes, everybody knows to glue the quarter to the sidewalk. Just outside the living room window is always the ideal location then just sit back and enjoy. See I’m crafty.”
Last Christmas at the quilting group’s gift exchange I wrapped up a life sized naked rubber chicken. I was sure no one would want it so expected to bring it home and I had all kinds of ideas and ways of using it with my cats. But one of the Annettes formed an intense attachment to it.
By way of explanation we have four Annettes, and five Kathys and two Susans in our group. Sometimes one of the men puts his head in the room and asks for an Annette just to hear half the room answer, “Yes?”  nancymauerman.com

Nelly, as a younger woman, promised herself she would never drive a junker. But what she was kind enough to drive me home in Sunday has been interiorly decorated by pros; her nieces and nephew! Evidently they found a tear in the ceiling fabric and decided to extend the rip in all directions, tear off much of the foam they found underneath it and then something mysterious has happened to most of the plastic interior molding, but at least there aren’t holes in the floors.  She very much dislikes her car.
My best friend in high school, Paulette, had been given a Morris Minor by her Dad that did contain a glorious hole. We had to be careful were we put our purses and books, not to mention our feet. But it was fun to watch the black blops of gum whiz by between the floor boards.
John had an air cooled car also. “Didn’t you push things through the floor hole when you were driving?” he asked me. ” Every car I’ve owned since has been so cluttered but not the one I owned with the floor hole.  And if you’re stopped you could say, “Sorry officer, it wasn’t me. I must have just run over some litter. I think all cars should come with disposal holes!” I don’t see John drilling holes in his Precious though; his Toyota truck!
Nelly told me she recently took her mess of a car in to have an old part changed out and  hoped for a negative verdict. She asked her mechanic if fixing the car was even worth the price. “Oh, yes.” he said, “You could replace everything and this good car would be worth the effort and cost.” Nelly disappointingly had the work done.
Maybe girls put more value on looks than the functioning parts of a car. But looking odd doesn’t  slow down my little squirrel buddy. All the hair is gone from the end of his tail!. Quite a bit more than half is completely bare and looks like a very THIN bent wire sticking out of a short pom pom, but it doesn’t stop him from tail talking to the girls!  nancymauerman.com

I go to a church that has no paid clergy so we take turns teaching each other from the pulpit including my friend with special needs. When she spoke earlier this year her insights about Jesus Christ changed me deeply.
I especially like to sing beside or in front of her because we both sing low and she’s a little flat. So if I modify my voice a bit we blend then we start singing louder then often others around to us do too. They modify and blend their sounds and we all create wondrous music, and sing louder.
Some of my friends have taken her on trips, and to plays, and out to eat. Because of her, and the way she sees life, many people in my neighborhood have grown greatly. It occurs to me that if the government tries to do everything and if the government paid someone to take her on trips, to plays, and to dinner those people would have grown a little but my friends that gave grew a lot. We’d have a bigger government and smaller people.
Today she was wearing one of those classic “little black dresses”. When I turned around in my seat to tell her how elegant she looked she beamed and said,”Yea I know. I look like Elvis Presley!” Our side of the room paused as we switched mental gears then laughed.Good insight.  nancymauerman.com

My friend, Jillian, told me about a birthday party she threw for her chicken with balloons, a cake, and gifts.  As she talked I stopped listening for a minute imagining what I’d receive if I’d been Twani Alice the Birthday Bird.  Earrings with a piece of seed corn hanging from each side of a tiny hair net, because most birds don’t have pierced ears, and a dyed corn necklace and I was designing home made boots with four pointy toes before I tuned back into what Jillian was saying and had to ask her to repeat her tale.

At our house we have a gift exchange with birds every day.  John feeds crows bits of chicken and bread heels and in return they give him what he’s always wanted; a camouflage paint job for his truck. Tuesday I noticed other crows in our neighborhood spoke the same body language because as we parked on a residential street I could see they’d splattered on each and every driveway. Their heavy decor reached a few inches on either side but not much more than that. It’s obvious they had planned, calculated carefully, and practiced as they waited for their cars to enter the poop zone.
As we entered our perfectly clean driveway I saw our crows were waiting and called out a hello to us. “I think they missed you'” I told John.
“No.” he said, “It’s more like they telling me, ‘It’s about time you got home. We can’t hold it any longer!’
I’m writing and painting pictures for a children’s book about a chicken’s birthday party and the four birds in this story are passive aggressive poopers. see Amazon for ‘Chickens In Birthday Suits’. nancymauerman.com

John’s reaction to T. V.; “I can’t believe they can just sit there with their own mouths!”  nancymauerman.com

A neighbor gave me four post holes.  The wooden posts had rotted out fifty years ago and only the two and a half foot towers of stone and cement conglomerate were left.  These John and I heaved across the street and paced open side up in our garden.  Immortalized post holes.

I also buy holes in second hand clothes but in this case it’s the garment , not the holes, that interest me. I sew the holes closed sewing the mending spot in the shape of snakes or bugs.

The snakes on my ceiling remind me of Moses in the wilderness at a time when God told him to fashion snakes of bronze and attach them to a big stick. Many of the people following Moses were bitten by flying fiery serpents. They died unless they looked at the snakes on the stick, representing Christ to be hung on another big stick. Some said, “That’s too simple. It won’t work.”  Those people didn’t look to Christ and they died.  Others did look and lived. I’ve been bitten by bad snakes so I’m looking to Christ now and I painted the image of snakes flying away from me on my ceiling.   nancymauerman.com

Through out the first half of my adulthood I thought I’d outgrown children’s toys and replaced them with adult fun; finding fault with goodness.  Then I found God, although He’d never been hiding, and I started sewing snakes on sweaters.

John had a play date today. Matthew, three, and John, sixty- two, played with poppers; those heavy soft plastic domes that John turned inside out on the floor. The two of them waited for the bright pink and transparent green toys to pop into the air as they reverted to their original shape. John’s back was getting pretty tired so he reached for my step stool, but it being Matthew’s size, it was barely in place when the little fella planted himself on it and John had to continue bending.
I’d taken a few hours break from making big books to cut pretty pictures from magazines and advertizing ads. I pasted them together into tiny picture books, some to keep, some to give to young friends on Sunday at church.
I agree with the little girl, in the picture book Bearos, when she tells us that her mother got mad because newspaper pictures got glued inside her favorite book. Then she tells her mother, “I agree with the bearos; pictures look so much better than words.”

Accepting God and toys has made me realize I’m worth being alive and I’ll show you snakes on my sweaters and ceiling tomorrow.  nancymauerman.com

I think I see a pattern here: Do something wise, like clean up a bad habit, and solving that one problem also solves several others, but do something unwise and that one action CREATES more problems.
This happens in my series of four Leafman books, where in book two, A Plethora Of Monsters, a grandmother enters a contest and wins a big box full of caterpillars as a second prize. She’s not at all happy when one fuzzy little fella gets out of his box and heads for her favorite plant, that she’s named Jimmy and has dressed in a derby and striped vest. The little chomper eats Jimmy down to the ground. Grandmother tells her granddaughter Anna, “There’s no way I’m going to believe the Princess Pricilla Bulb Company would make those evil little creatures a second prize but the man on the phone said they were.”
So here’s where Grandmother becomes unwise and she says to Anna, “So… Tuesday…I called the man…and I explained to him….in a slow…and in…. an extremely nice voice…how stupid he was… and he became so RUDE! The next day,” she continues, “I received one hundred more boxes! You should have seen the mailman; he was all wore out, and he looked at me with suspicion and asked me what I was doing here, and I told him I was living, but I don’t think he believed me.”
Grandmother, not only has a box of caterpillars that will soon starve to death and stink, but as a result of her unwise action the inside of her house is so full of boxes she can hardly move, the stink will be much, much worse and the mailman is suspicious.
John reminds me, as I’m writing this, that at one time I could look at a cake and say, “One piece was good therefore the whole cake will be better.” and I could eat the rest in five minutes.
Then he remembered last week, when a few spoonfuls of pinto beans were good, so he immediately finished off the entire can! I will not mention the various repercussions of that action! Beans, beans, the magical fruit.  nancymauerman.com

John told me the other day, “When I was young we didn’t have virtual reality we had dirt!”
To which I replied, “When I was growing up we didn’t have virtual reality we had Don.” My brother, Don, was far beyond being a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I’d say he was a living vortex being pushed toward a square dent in play dough made by the educational system’s tooth pick!! They thought he was retarded, they had him tested, and found he was a off the chart smart. The kid was reading Scientific American and UNDERSTANDING it before his teens and then his mind took what he knew and began inventing.
He used facts and information as a spring board into new realities to such an extent that by the time he was in second grade he’d say things about, for instance, me. When I’d enter the school building in the morning kids from his class, and even others classes, would instantly huddle huddle together and I’d over hear them whisper, THERE’S DON HICKS’S SISTER!” then they’d mutter the latest Don invention, which I never did hear. The busy hallway would part like the Red Sea for me to pass through. I never knew if that parting was out of respect or fear but I didn’t like it.
When I write about Anna in the Leafman Attacks series and my book Dragon’s Tale (all found at Amazon.com) I use Don’s fluid story telling as a model, although my daughter Anna was also a master at weaving reality and into confections of imagination.
nancymauerman.com