Post-Op, Alice Leonard, “Scruples & Drams.”

I am now a bit over 3 weeks post-op from knee replacement.  It has been an adventure I never expected to have.  I was so ignorant of the pain I’d endure.  Yet, if I’d have known, I’d have postponed surgery again. Instead, because they had to keep an eye on my blood and oxygen levels post-op because of a previous pulmonary embolism as well as the pain levels, I stayed in the hospital nearly four days and was transferred to Country Manor Rehab.

My nurses and PT and OT people at the “Home” Rehab unit, said I was healing remarkably so they let me go with my insistence after 2 weeks.  I am now going to my regular PT 3x a week.  I use my walkers yet, but hope to be using a cane this week.  My brain, post anesthesia is something else, LOL!  I can stare at a project, activity, or sentence before anything clicks.  I’ve talked to others about this and they admit for awhile they were a bit slow in the noggin for awhile.  I haven’t attempted much concentration on my writing or posting because of this.  I guess all my brain activity has gone into healing.

Before surgery, sister Becky and I went to the Tamarack Swamp to video part of Irish Town or Lynden Township were Alice Leonard lived her last days and where she was murdered, as written about in Scruples & Drams.  Unfortunately, the audio is bad because of the wind.  I sent the manuscript of the first video of where she was murdered due to this problem  I am doing the same for the 2nd because audio is not any better.  We will get this figured out before we continue with other Clearwater landmarks.

Watch the youtube video about Alice Leonard’s home with at the Hayes’s place.  Here about a half mile from the swamp where she was murdered, she lived with her grandmother, Grandma Hayes, her aunt Bridget Hayes Smith, and her young cousins,   Nelly and Tom.  Mike Larkin, another character in the book and who was accused of murdering the young girl,  often stayed over in the tiny cabin to help with the chores.

https://youtu.be/hbDCe6eEg_E

 

Short blog

Hello and happy May.  I am taking a couple weeks off to have knee replacement surgery.  But we made our first YOUTUBE production.  It is outdoors and sometimes hard for you to hear me.  I’ve included a transcript of what I am saying.

In May, 1893, a young Irish girl, Alice Leonard, was murdered.  The inquest showed that she had been “violated” and bludgeoned to death near the Tamarack Swamp in Lynden Township, Irish Town, Stearns County, Minnesota.  Some people who lived near the swamp  heard a child crying and believed it was the ghost of Alice Leonard.

Jennie Phillips, an apprenticing druggist in Clearwater, Minnesota, is delivering a prescription in Lynden Township.  She stops to pick some wild flowers and soon hears a menacing cry. It frightens her.  She soon learns that others believe she has heard the sobbing cries of Alice’s ghost.

My sister and I went out to video-tape me at the Tamarack Swamp. Unfortunately, the wind was blowing and nature was singing, so you can’t hear much of what I am saying. This is the area a group of people found Alice on an early Sunday evening in 1893.  She was a pretty girl, but small for her near sixteen years.  What a carriage driver thought was some clothes on the road was the bruised and bloody body of the girl covered with a blanket.

Read more in “Scruples and Drams,” the first novel in the Minnesota Main Street Women series.

You can buy from me directly, books@cynthiafrankstupnik.com, go to my paypal link on cynthiafrankstupnik.com,  amazon.com, or https://www.barnesandnoble.com/.