LOCAL HISTORY
Modern inventions have helped families keep in touch BY BETTY OBENDORF Curator, Polo Historical Society
LEFT: Great Grandpa Kenny Obendorf holds Anna Fay on his lap. RIGHT: Grandson Kyle Obendorf, Betty Obendorf, and Anna Fay. Photos supplied I had been hearing those confounded little insects singing for some time and I laughed in the heat. Well, two days before the wedding this cold front moved in and on the evening of the 22nd while we were having the rehearsal, you could see your breath. That night we had a very unusual major freeze and all those lovely four o’clocks were gone. White petunias and white snapdragons managed to survive. The day of the wedding we added a very popular hot chocolate bar and a little fur wrap for me. I even car-
ried a baked potato wrapped in foil to keep my hands warm during the reception. I remember someone saying they had the best prime rib with the coldest of feet!! We never forgot how weather could change so quickly and we were lucky to have a very sunny day for the actual wedding. So when the locusts start singing I know what is ahead in just a very few weeks. This week part of our family gathered on the patio to welcome Kyle, Rebecca, and Anna Fay Obendorf to
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Two weeks ago I was sitting on our patio in the evening and I suddenly heard the locusts singing. Now if you pay any attention to the old sayings, you would realize that six weeks from the time the locusts start to sing, will be the first frost! I looked around my patio at all the lovely flowers blooming that Stephanie at the high school had picked out for me and realized I am not ready for fall and the thought of frost. And yet that old saying had made a believer out of me 25 years ago when we planned for Susan and Tim’s wedding. The wedding was to be Sept. 23 and it was a hot, hot summer. It was the end of August and I had been working in flowers beds since the wedding was to be in our yard.
Polo. Kyle is Steve and Cheri’s oldest boy from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is a physician assistant and has been busy with this virus. We had not seen Anna Fay since Christmas and she was one year old on June 4. Kyle carried her out to the patio and put her down. I leaned over and said, “Hi, Anna Fay. What a sweet little gal you are!” She threw open her arms as if to say, “Pick me up and give me a big hug!” I picked her up with Kyle’s help and we sat on the bench. We talked about her new pink shoes and sang “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” What a darling and not the least bit afraid. Those times of facetiming with her certainly did pay off. All these modern inventions really do keep family in touch with each other at a time when families cannot be together. Who would have thought 20 years ago that we would sit on our davenport in Polo and watch her play and talk to her when she lived many, many miles away. I always think, what does the future hold for us.
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Locusts had the last laugh on weather forecast!
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