SISTER HEAD

People living in Wickepin. How's this for a town project?
August 13, 2011 Saturday

SISTER HEAD

Late this afternoon we decided to visit some inactives. The first one had a note on the door, “Please don’t knock, I’m sleeping.” We decided they really were inactive. Next we went to find Lillian Head. Her house looked quite run down and nobody answered when we knocked. So we went back out to the car to write her a note. Orson took the note and headed back to the door when he saw her down the driveway at the back of the house. She had us come in the front door and wall down a narrow hallway all the way to the room at the back. She had a small room with a table and chairs in the middle and around the sides a dresser (broken drawers), a piano, a sofa, a wood stove, a china closet and two or three other things that I can’t remember. There was barely walking room around the table. She had us sit there.
Lillian joined the church back in the 60’s or early 70’s; she can’t remember. She is 85 and, bless her heart, has all the wrinkles to show it. She grew up in the area we worked in last and moved down to Narrogin 20 years ago after she retired to be near her son. But her son has a daughter at a Catholic School somewhere out of town, so now he rents a flat there to be close to here. We got the impression Ken doesn’t visit his mother often. But she was cheerful and didn’t seem to mind how she was living. She has a car, cats, a dog, and some chickens. She says the foxes keep the number of chickens (chooks, as they call them here) low. She was watching television when we got there but turned it off so we could visit. She says she hasn’t been to church since she moved to Narrogin, but she knows where it is. She didn’t mention home or visiting teachers so we figure she doesn’t get them.
We hope we can work with her to get her to come to church. We got talking about dogs and she mentioned that she’d had both Australian sheep dogs and kelpies which are also used with sheep. The question came up if the herding abilities they have are instinctive or trained so she told us about a kelpie (hope that is spelled correctly) pup she had. With no encouragement from anyone, this pup would round up all the chickens in the yard and get them back into their pen. Then he would lie there in case any tried to escape. That dog was definitely born with the instinct.