Golf cart? You're getting older

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

Rock festivals aren't what they used to be. I spent Friday night at Harmony Park Music Garden near Geneva. The atmosphere was very relaxed and many people were camping with their families for three days of music. Many of the people that attended the event chose not to walk around the 12-acre park, but drove around on utility vehicles or golf carts. The musical event was called Project for Planet Earth, but I didn't see many people getting in touch with Mother Earth by taking a walk.

My husband Tom helps out at Harmony Park as a bartender and he had borrowed a souped-up golf cart with a dump box and spent the night riding around in the cart when he wasn't working. Just to travel 100 yards, people would drive their golf carts and say a few words to another person and drive off. I mentioned to the owner that it seemed like many of the attendees looked like they belonged to a retirement community, the way they spent all their times driving around on golf carts. When musicians were performing on the stage, drivers of golf carts and their passengers would drive up by the stage and sit in their carts and listen to the music. When a golf cart driver would want to get something to eat or drink, he or she would drive over to a food vendor to purchase refreshments. So much with getting back to nature, it made me wonder 'Do all old hippies ride around in golf carts now?' I'm sure the definition of what a hippie is has changed from what it used to be considered.

When I lived in Ireland in the 1970s, my neighbor, Denny, asked me what I thought of the Happies.

"Who are the Happies?" I asked.

"Ah sure, you must be knowing the Happies, as they originated in America," Denny said.

"No, I don't know the Happies. Why do you ask? How would I know them? Do some of them live around here?" I asked.

"I'm sure ye know who the Happies are," Denny said.

"No, I really have never heard of the Happies," I said.

"Ye know the Happies. The men and women have long hair, they all live together and their children run around naked and they smoke that funny smelling stuff," Denny said.

"Oh, the hippies! Yes I know what hippies are," I said.

"Yes, that's what I have been saying the happies," Denny said.

That was Denny's definition of a hippie or as he called them, the happies.

Tie-dye T-shirts and music by the Grateful Dead are not just for hippies anymore, but Denny's description of hippies fits the stereotype image of hippies in the 1960s and 70s. The music at Harmony Park Music Garden might have a tendency to sound like Grateful Dead music but the talk among the drivers on Friday night was not so much about the music but about each other's golf carts.

How much power a cart had, how large the tires were or what type of covering was on the cart to keep the sun and rain off. I didn't hear or see any mention of getting back to nature by taking a walk on Mother Earth, as the name Festival for Project Earth implied. I know golf carts don't use much gas and I know that they are fun to ride around in, but what is wrong with walking? Tom wants to buy a golf cart and I said I want my kitchen finished first and he argued that my kitchen is sitting in the granary in the form of my new cabinets. I argued back that they are not in my house and until I have my kitchen fixed up he had better not purchase anything major. I think this is one argument that will be continued.

Brother loved raising chickens

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

A year ago today my brother John was buried. My sister Kate and I commemorated his death day on July 11 by putting flowers on his grave and we ate raspberry and cherry pie with our children. We ate pie because one of last things John could eat before he died was a strawberry rhubarb pie that my sister Mary, who lives in California, had sent to his house in Washington, D.C.

John died of pancreatic cancer. He owned his own law practice in Washington, D.C. His specialty was immigration law. Even though he lived in Washington, D.C. and loved his work, he missed Minnesota every day. His favorite place to walk was at the Antiedam Battlefield site in Pennsylvania. He liked its wide-open spaces and the wild flowers that bloomed along the river's edge, which reminded him of Minnesota.

Besides the wide-open spaces of the Midwest, John missed raising his own chickens for meat. He enjoyed eating home-grown free-range chicken. He went to graduate school at the School of International Living in Brattleboro, Vt. At the school he had to do a project and keep documentation on it. The project had to benefit the group that he was attending school with and the project also had to evolve and have transition.

John decided that for his project he would raise 100 baby chicks and then butcher them when they were 6 weeks old. He documented the growth of the chickens, kept track of his costs, how often he fed and watered them and at the end of the six weeks, his classmates helped him butcher the chickens. They grilled the chickens and celebrated eating them with beer, potato salad and baked beans. John's project of raising chickens met all the requirements for his project.

John would brag about how he was good at raising chickens. After he graduated from the School of International Living he moved to Alaska to teach. He brought along 200 baby chickens from a hatchery in New Ulm that he flew along with him when he went to Anchorage. I don't know what he taught in Alaska, but his students raised and butchered the chickens and he somehow graded them on it.

John didn't marry until he was 40 years old. When he and his wife, Judy brought a house in the D.C. area, one of the first things he did was convert his garage into a chicken coop to raise chickens. One of his neighbors heard roosters crowing and she called the police. John was issued a warning that there was an ordinance in the neighborhood against raising farm animals.

John was upset that he couldn't raise chickens anymore. He tried to make a deal with the neighbor that he would give her 10 chickens if she wouldn't make such a fuss, but she was convinced that chickens attracted rats and he couldn't persuade her to think differently.

That was the end of his raising chickens. My sister-in-law Mamik raised chickens for him one fall and she shipped them to him all butchered and frozen by Federal Express. She shipped so many chickens that John gave some of them out to his clients. I'm pretty sure that no other law office in the D.C. area gave out chickens to their clients when they came in for a consultation.

Besides chickens and wide-open spaces, John liked anything Western. He wore cowboy boots, though he never rode a horse, read Louis L'mour books, and he had a large collection of Western movies. His favorite actor was John Wayne.

John was a romantic, extremely opinionated, quick with quips and knew something about almost every subject. I miss his phone calls at 8 a.m. asking me how business is for Tom, and if Tom is burying anyone that John knew.

His son Juan Carlos, 13, and daughter Xiamara, 11, are coming to visit this late summer from Washington, D.C. I will feed them fresh chicken and we will take walks on the prairie so they can enjoy the view of the wide-open spaces of the Midwest that their dad loved so much.

Ireland will always be a part of me

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

Next Monday, March 17 is St. Patrick's Day. My family has always celebrated this Wearin' of the Green day. My maiden name is O'Leary and my mother's maiden name is Callahan. My dad bragged every St. Patrick's Day that his children were full-blooded Irish. One of the first places that I wanted to visit when I graduated from Albert Lea High School was Ireland.

First I went to Boston, where I met my husband, Tom. We met at a natural foods cooking school. I thought that Tom looked just like a little leprechaun when I met him, and, by the way, he still does. Tom went through all the cooking levels at the school in Boston and was certified as a natural foods chef. I learned how to chop vegetables, make salads and salad dressings, the first cooking level. We both wanted to travel and we decided we would go to Ireland and open our own natural foods restaurant. We found cheap tickets through Icelandic Airlines and flew to Luxembourg. From there we went to Belgium. It was late February and as we had limited funds, we got work in a natural food's restaurant in Gent, Belgium. I worked in the restaurant and cleaned houses. I picked up the language, Flemish, fairly quickly but Tom felt out of his element and wanted to get out of there.

After four months we had saved up enough money to head to Ireland. We took a ferry across the English Channel and spent a week in London. We then hitchhiked across England to Liverpool. Tom wanted to take the ferry from Liverpool, as he was born on an air force base in Burtonwood, a town near Liverpool. It was a long tiresome, noisy all night ride across the Irish Sea with lots of drinking and singing. But I immediately felt a surge of energy and familiarity when my feet stepped on Irish soil for the first time.

Tom and I married a month and a half after we came to Ireland. We started serving natural foods meals out of a flat we rented in Dublin. The flat was on the top floor of a Georgian house and the other tenants didn't like all the customers that showed up for lunch and supper. Our landlady kicked us out after three weeks. We moved to a basement flat and started serving meals out of there. We did well, though we were not great with the business side of the restaurant.

I became pregnant shortly after we married. A month before our baby was born, we quit serving meals and moved to the mountains of Donegal where our son Danny was born.

For the next six months we had the Irish experience of living in a 400-year-old thatched roofed cottage, cooking with turf, shearing sheep by hand and going to the top of the mountain to cut and stack turf. Turf is peat and what we used to heat our house with.

We left Ireland when I became homesick for my family.

We lived in the cottage that was the highest and last one on the mountain. Unemployment was high in the area and we didn't have a car. It was a three-mile walk to town and the only people I had to visit with were our landlord Denny, his wife, Bridie and Denny's oldest brother Francie.

They were very kind, but I could see no future for us on that lonely mountain. It was so beautiful and it was hard to leave, but you can't eat or wear scenery.

I cried the day the hired car from the village drove us out of the mountains. I loved Donegal so much, but at the same time I was relieved to be leaving that desolate area.

I was always called a Yank when I lived in Ireland and now in southern Minnesota, people ask me if I am Irish. I am an American whose ancestors came from Ireland. I'm an American that is proud of my heritage and Ireland will always be a part of who I am.

Home improvement is a chore

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

Last week when I came home from Dallas, my kitchen was torn apart and my decrepit cupboards were tossed out onto the lawn. I knew the construction workers were coming the day I was arriving home. Still, I was numb to see the area where I had been cooking, doing dishes and serving meals the last 23 years gone.

My son, Timmy, had spent two nights at a friend's house while I was away and he went into a deep fog when he saw the house so torn up. He couldn't find his hat, didn't know where dishes were and he had no clean socks. The zipper on his winter coat had broken so he had to wear an old parka of his dad's to school. The parka had been hanging in the basement and was dusty and Timmy started to sneeze when he put it on. The hood is made of rabbit fur and Timmy said the fur shed all over him. My neighbor, Carol, put a new zipper on his coat, as she has an industrial sewing machine. Timmy was feeling better emotionally on Friday when he had his own coat to wear, but we still have not found his hat. On top of all this, he has had a constant cough all week.

It hasn't been fun to hear him hacking away day and night.

One good thing about having part of my kitchen torn up is the house is now warmer with the drafty addition gone. Our house was built in the 1890s and the part of the kitchen we tore up was added on 50 years ago when the indoor plumbing was installed. Whoever installed the additions for the kitchen sink and the bathroom did the job as cheaply as possible. The roofs above the kitchen sink and the bathroom are flat and this has caused water leakage in the house. The house was so full of holes that when the construction workers removed the walls, we saw why we always had wasps in the house every summer. My kitchen supplies are in boxes and I am doing the dishes in a plastic kitchen sink. I can still cook on my gas stove.

My daughter, Theresa is having a hard time being around here with all the construction going on. Her sister, Molly, came home from college last week and promptly left to stay with a friend, as staying here is no vacation.

There is so much junk in this house. I have to start purging and cleansing this house with the new energy and space that the construction workers will be creating. I am having a hard time knowing where to start to have order in this chaos. I am not very organized anyway, so it is doubly hard for me with everything in boxes. I can see why my parents never did any remodeling on their old farmhouse. People had warned us that once we began to tear things up we would find out how badly the house needed work. We sure have.

My sister, Joann hired my brother, Steve, to repair a porch on her house a couple years back. Steve tore apart the porch and called her at work and told Joann, "You know when a doctor goes in for exploratory surgery to find out how bad the symptoms are? Well, your diagnosis is that your porch has cancer and I have to remove the cancer. I will have to do reconstructive surgery and then the porch will be free of the cancer."

That pretty much sums up my kitchen. We are removing the cancer.

Now if only I can find Timmy's hat.

Women are treated differently

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

I read and see in the news that it is becoming more common for men to stay at home and be the main caretaker for their children. I don't know if this is true or not, but I do see more men with their children at the grocery store and out and about in public. The kids are usually dressed nice and look well-fed. It is very different from the way I was raised or the way I raised my children. I am skeptical that men and women are considered equal in the workforce and day-to-day life, because I see and hear stories from friends that prove otherwise.

For myself, I have had to fight and argue to be treated fairly. My own mother thought more of her sons than her daughters. I went on several trips with her and she would tell fellow passengers about her six sons and that she gave them all such wonderful names. She would not introduce or acknowledge that I was her daughter or mention my four sisters.

She did introduce me once because I brought her a cup of coffee when she was talking to someone and said, "Oh, this is my daughter, Sheila. All she's ever done is have children. Her oldest is a son and her youngest is a son." She didn't mentioned my four daughters.

My dad never asked me once how I was. When I would visit my parents he always asked me, "How's Tom? What's he doing today."

I really got tired of that and told him one day that Tom had left me and run off with another woman and I was stranded with six kids."

My dad had dementia and he was aghast when I told him that.

"No! No! That can't be true," dad said.

"Yes it is. Now you can't ask me anymore how he is or what he is doing," I said.

My dad shook his head and then asked me five minutes later,

"What's Tom doing? How is he?"

I knew that even if Tom ever did leave me, my dad would continue to ask me what he was doing the rest of his life because whatever I did was not important. My dad is dead now but my mother lives in Minneapolis and whenever she calls me she asks, "What's Tom doing?"

I don't see much equality of men and women out where I live. One day, just a couple years ago, a neighbor drove up in his large truck and honked the horn.

I stepped out of the house and he said, "Is the boss home?"

"I can be a boss," I answered.

"Well I wanted your husband," my neighbor said. "I want him to vote for me for the town board."

"Oh," I said.

Suddenly his face lit up and he said, "Hey, you can vote too."

"Yes," I said. "Since 1921."

"Well, you can vote for me for town board," he beamed.

"Not now I won't," I said as I walked away.

He looked bewildered as he drove out of the driveway.

The other day, a man Tom buys hay from called four times asking me when Tom would be coming to buy hay. I kept telling him Tom wasn't around. The final call he was miffed because I didn't know where he was.

"Look," I said. "I'm just his wife and you know that wives never know what their husbands are doing."

I finally got through to him with that line and he laughed and said, "Yeah, he's probably out having fun."

Animals, others will miss Shirley

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

My second batch of 100 chicks arrived on Monday. Tom and I argued about the pen we put them in. I told him I wanted the door tighter and he said he would be putting new hinges on it so we can get in and out of the pen easier and the dog can't get in.

He said, "I know what to do. Don't tell me what to do."

I have backed off with the advice, but I will be checking on these new chicks constantly and also checking the whereabouts of Scout, the rat terrier, who killed my last batch of chicks.

I have been taking care of animals a lot lately. My neighbor, Shirley, died last Thursday and she has left a variety of chicks, pigeons, ducks, geese, bunnies, cats, 14 goats, a dog, named Domino and a horse, named Butterscotch. Shirley died in her sleep on her couch Wednesday night.

She had come home from surgery on Tuesday. I had been doing her chores while she was in the hospital, and she had phoned me on Tuesday to say that she could do the chores herself. I told her I thought it was too soon, but she said that she could handle them. Wednesday evening she phoned me and said she wasn't feeling right and asked if I would I do the chores on Thursday.

My son Timmy and I went over to her acreage on Thursday morning and we felt something wasn't right when Shirley didn't answer the door after we knocked several times. The door was locked so we couldn't get in and I had the thought that maybe she had gone back to the hospital. We did the chores and we went over on Friday morning and did the chores again, as we hadn't heard not to do them. We knew that someone had been to the house, as her shoes were moved to the other side of the porch and her dog, Domino, let out a mournful howl when we got out of the car. That afternoon we got a call that Shirley had passed away and her son hadn't found her until late Thursday night. She had always talked about her irregular heartbeat and this is what she died from. Tom is digging her grave with her son this week.

Shirley lived very simply. She enjoyed the company of animals more than people. She told me that she had a pet gopher when she was growing up and she raised an orphan raccoon when a car had killed the mother. She kept a turtle in her basement one winter and it hibernated there. The turtle woke up now and then and ate dog food that Shirley kept in a dish for it. One time I went over to her house in late fall and she had a duck in the basement that was living in a cereal box. She kept him in there to keep warm and it seemed happy. The duck would stick its head out and quack when he wanted to be fed. Another time she was raising hamsters in her bathtub as she didn't have a proper cage for them.

Her animals have been under stress since she isn't around and I don't know what will happen to all of them. She has beautiful multi-colored chickens and every time I am there, I discover a new set of chicks with a mother hen peeping away in another corner of her barn.

I am sorry that Shirley died alone, but she died peacefully in her sleep in her house, surrounded by her animals and that is probably the way she wanted to go. Her acreage is so alive with animal life it has been hard to fathom that she is gone. I am sure that she is in heaven with the many animals she raised, petting and talking with them as she did when she was alive.

Tastes can vary between us all

By Sheila Donnelly/Austin Daily Herald

Having the Fourth of July fall on a Friday made for a nice long weekend, but by Sunday I was ready to get back to more normal activities. I had to do more cooking with extra people around and I got really tired of doing dishes. My kitchen is still torn up from last winter and nothing has been done. The contractor we hired wanted to do the work on the house during the winter, but so much work had to be done, and the ground was frozen so we opted to wait.

And now we are waiting and waiting.

I have a large hard plastic industrial-sized sink to do the dishes in and it always seems to be filled with dirty pots and pans, even though we are using paper plates. I have no counter space so when I cook, I use the top of the freezer to prepare the food. It isn't convenient when someone needs to get something out of the freezer with my bowls and other cooking utensils and ingredients on top to the freezer.

The really bad part is right now I have fruit that is ready to be taken care of. I have a cherry tree that is loaded this year and I am going to make jelly. My kitchen is so crowded, cramped and dark. A false wall was put up where the rest of the kitchen used to be. No breeze comes through the kitchen anymore and I don't look forward to processing the cherries.

Usually the birds eat all the cherries before I can pick them, but not this year. I was hoping the birds would eat the cherries so I wouldn't have to deal with them, but no such luck. They are delicious cherries so I can't allow them to go to waste. Besides the cherries, raspberries and wild black berries are ripening quickly with our warm humid days. My son, Timmy and I take bowls to the raspberry patch and pick our breakfast fresh each morning. They are so delicious. I keep telling myself that all the work with the fresh fruit will pay off this winter when I am really stuck in the house.

Besides processing fruit, I made elder flower wine last week with my friend Heidi. I picked the elder flowers on my farm and we mixed up the wine at Heidi's house. She added the yeast to the fermented flowers after it set three days. Heidi said the liquid from the flowers is the color of sunshine.

The elder flower wine won't be ready for six months after we bottle it.

We want to make raspberry wine next. We feel like alchemists mixing our potions from wild flowers and berries that we can get free for the picking. This is my first attempt at making wine. I hope it turns out OK. My brother Tim tried to make homemade beer one time. He must not have bottled the brew at the right time, as all the caps popped off and the bottles broke.

Fortunately the bottles were in the garage so the mess wasn't too bad to clean up.

When we lived in Ireland, our neighbors made homemade stout. Tom didn't like the taste of their homemade stout and he got sick every time he drank it. I, being a woman, wasn't expected to drink stout, but Tom was expected to drink the stout and he knew he would be considered rude if he didn't partake in the neighbor's new batch of homemade brew. Tom figured out how to drink the stout one night without actually drinking it. He would take a few sips of his stout and as the night wore on and the men were drinking away, he would switch his glass when someone would set their glass down. The person always seemed a bit perplexed when he would pick his glass up and the glass was fuller than he thought it should be. Tom would be holding their almost empty glass and taking sips and smiling so the person would smile, and think he must be confused and then he would down Tom's full glass. Tom would do this switching of the glasses several times over the course of the night, but he said it saved his stomach from the rot gut he would have gotten if he had drunk the home brew.