Category: In the Backyard

Falling into Rhythms: Noticing

One day I heard an acquaintance say, “If one more person talks to me about ‘seasons of life’, I am going to…(insert desperate reaction here).” Well, this is me, talking about it, but I thought I might give it a slightly different angle. I took her point to be the way I used to feel when I was up to my eyeballs in charming, sticky, little needy children and someone would chirp helpfully, “Enjoy every minute! They grow up so fast.” At that point it might have felt more validating to hear, “Yup, this is intense, but you’ll make it. Let me hold the baby while you (insert desperate action to keep up with toddler here).”

I am looking at rhythms these days. We used to start every school day with read-aloud time. It was the way we did it. That has changed, and I don’t love it, but life is very different now. In this era, one girl gets up early to study, then dashes off to her part time job two mornings a week. The students are mostly self-motivated, and my main responsibility is to make assignments and ensure that they get done. I check work, keep records, and only occasionally read aloud. This morning I read a chapter to Addy to convince her that she really does want to do a book report on this book, and I was reminded that this is a timeless activity. When winter comes, I hope to pick it back up, even if it is just the two of us.

I am typing this while I babysit the pressure canner. Our Giant Eagle had a meat sale, and I decided to can a bunch instead of putting it in the freezer. The recent power outages that our siblings experienced in NC has me thinking it might be prudent to be a bit more prepared. I look at our shaky economy and our divided country, and I wonder how long it will be until it all falls apart. We are here for such a time as this, obviously, because here we are. I’ll make large pots of soup to share when that happens. Actually, I’ll make large pots of soup anyway. I love making soup, simmering the broth, chopping the vegetables, frying the meat, sprinkling the seasonings and tasting, adding more salt until it’s just right. It’s such a wonderfully satisfying way to make a meal.

Speaking of soup, I have a hankering for a large tureen that holds about a gallon. When I looked them up on Amazon, I found the perfect ones, but the price made me step away quietly. Unless I find one at a thrift store, I do not want to have a tureen that cannot be used because it might get broken. Meanwhile I am attempting to make one. The struggle bus is being ridden on a bumpy dirt road, let me tell you. I am not skilled enough to throw large amounts of clay so I threw two sections and connected them in the middle. It developed a bit of a wobble, but I trimmed it into a respectable semblance of a tureen. Then I made two lids to see which style I like best. The one fit perfectly. I know because I set it onto the tureen to check, and then it stuck as if I had glued it there. I called Rita to help me separate the two, an operation that ruined the lid and warped the rim of the bowl. I went ahead and attached handles, just in case it comes out semi-OK. It will likely be a flower pot. Oh well, shake it off and try another day.

Today started out chilly. I wore a bulky chenille sweater for a few hours, but it got too hot so I switched it for a yellow-green one I bought 13 years ago for our family photo. I still feel affection for this sweater and periodically shave off its pills so that I can keep wearing it. I can’t locate the photo with the whole family, but below is our couple’s photo. Not only did we have five babies, we were babies ourselves, even though we were in our thirties. Someday we will look back at this very time in our lives and talk about how young we look. This idea always fills me with cheer.

Recently I switched out the linens and lightweight cottons in my closet for the heavier knits and sweaters. I have a number of short-sleeved sweaters, which are the smartest thing ever, likely the design of a desperate peri-menopausal woman. (It’s tricky, at my age, to know how to dress, because I am sometimes plenty warm. Clears throat meaningfully.)

I planted my garlic last week, at least a hundred bulbs. I want a bigger harvest next year than I had this year. We have been having lingering coughs, and I have been advised repeatedly by people who know that I should ingest garlic fermented in honey. This is not my favorite thing, but I have become desperate enough to try it. The first time I tried to swallow a clove, I thoughtlessly chewed it and nearly choked. Today’s clove got cut into pieces the size of largish pills, and swallowed, which worked much better. I have also made a garlic salve with coconut oil which I slather on at night because that’s when the cough is worse. Have you noticed that when you’re sleep-deprived, it’s hard to deal heal? I have had over three weeks to try different remedies. From this vast platform of experience, I am here to say that the garlic has been more successful for this particular attack of bronchitis than Vicks or cough drops or Mucinex or prescription cough meds from the doc. At this point you might as well stick me in a baking dish and call me Lasagna.

The last fall ritual that marks the end of the garden work for me is digging up the dahlias, hosing them off, dividing the tubers, and storing them for winter. That is not my favorite chore, but I waited for an unseasonably warm day, which made it feel more like a privilege. All that is left to do is mulching the beds for winter. We have been carrying the leaves from our neighbor’s maple tree over to our garden. Bill does not like mess of any kind, so he diligently mows in circles and blows his leaves into piles every day. If we don’t get them picked up that day, he tarps the pile so they don’t blow around. The girls haul them in an old sheet and dump them on the garden. Everybody wins. Well, the girls feel like they get the short end of the stick, but I remind them that for ten minutes of minimal effort, they can bless the socks off an elderly neighbor, and that matters.

We still have hickory and oak leaves sifting down. I don’t like these tough ones for mulch because they don’t break down much over winter. We resort to blowing them to the edge of the woods. There is a long caterpillar of leaves all along the periphery of the lawn.

Recently the rugosa rose has put out a final push of fresh pink blooms amongst the fat orange hips that have already ripened all over the bush. A few honeybees hadn’t gotten the memo that the nectar season is over and were rolling around in the blooms. There is a humongous kale plant in the garden, and I will be able to harvest from that until Christmas. This is the third year for this particular kale. It was only a little stump this spring, but I didn’t pull it out, and sure enough, it revived and thrived. I also have a lovely row of parsley and beside it are carrots in the ground, where they continue to get sweeter and bigger. We like to walk out there and just casually pull a few carrots when we need them. It’s a lot easier than trying to store them, and with the mulch on the garden, they don’t freeze unless it gets super cold.

Gardening is a rhythm that hums in my blood. Right now it is at a minimum, but it is always there, my therapy. All the houseplants are inside, their summer green still glad and strong. I’m happy, and it’s fall, and that is a small miracle.

Last year I asked the Lord to do a work in my heart because I have a history of collapsing a bit when my flowers die and the long dark sets in. This was an exceptionally gorgeous, breathtakingly amazing fall, and I was here for it. This surprised me as much as anyone. All I can say is that God is kind, opened my eyes to the beauty that is this season.

I suppose it’s never too late to develop healthier rhythms. (I just had to tie that little moralizing bow at the end. Bless.)

Ways to Get Hurt

I was challenged to make a list of the hazards we encountered in our free-range country childhood. How fun! Of course, it wasn’t all glowing, cookies-floating on top of water. Are you prepared to be appalled?

We got poison ivy every summer. Even though we knew what to avoid, there was so much of it, it was inevitable. In second grade I had such a bad case that my eyes swelled shut and I couldn’t go to school. I was still a bit funny-looking when I did go back, so I stood with my eyes very close to the blackboard to draw. I was trying to put off the moment when the other children would see my face. In my peripheral vision, I saw JR checking me out with astonishment. He always spoke the truth with vigor, but this time he was speechless for a bit. Then he simply asked the obvious, “DO you have poison ivy?”

Speaking of school- we walked to school- a whole herd of us from our neighborhood, swinging our lunchboxes and black bonnets, braving heat and dust and neighborhood dogs. There was a bus for the people who lived further away, but we only had about a mile. If it really rained, the bus would come pick us up.

We picked treasure out of a trash pile. It was a gleeful high point of any Saturday to be allowed to meet our neighbors at the spot where trash got dumped, sift through it for treasures. I never found anything special, and I can’t remember what the thrill was, actually.

We got torn by blackberry thorns. Blackberries are ready to pick in the hottest part of the summer, so you can imagine thin cotton clothes, flip flops, and buckets tied around our waists with strips of cloth. Blackberries have vicious thorns, but the fruit was worth hacking through thickets to get it.

Sometimes we felt edgy and ate a few berries we weren’t sure were edible. The test rabbit would nibble a berry, and we would stand around and watch to see if they would topple over. Nobody ever did, but most poisonous berries taste too vile to enjoy anyway.

But chiggers! Have you ever experienced the misery of chiggers on hot skin?

None of us kids ever broke a bone, despite our best efforts. That bed sheet parachute for jumping out of the hay loft – that should have been something broken at least. What can I say? We were built sturdily.

We had bike wrecks, and toboggan crashes, and skating smash-ups. I have three shiny parallel lines on my wrist from the figures on a friend’s skate. One of my friends hit her head so hard while skating, she couldn’t remember who the president was, and had to go for a cat scan. Now THAT was an injury in our world. The emergency room? Gasp!

Once I fell off a horse at full gallop, so I have a patch of funny looking skin on my leg as a result. I think we got all the gravel out that time.

My left hand has a scar from a gash I got when I wiped out on the school playground. It didn’t heal for the longest time, and then one day a little piece of rock surfaced, and it could finally heal shut. The up-side was that I had a scar for quick reference when I couldn’t remember which hand was left or right.

When I was about ten, I decided to learn to swim by jumping into a little pool in the creek. It wasn’t a deep hole, and I had heard that’s the way to do it. I took off my life jacket and jumped in, swallowing about a quart of water before hauling myself out to the edge to consider my options. We hit on a better method, wading out chest deep, then turning around and swimming to the edge. Eventually we got strong enough to swim across. Would I recommend this method to my children? No, no I would not. My Mom, in her defense, would always tell us to take our life jackets along, and we did. We just floated them instead of wearing them.

Swimming in creeks and ponds meant encountering snakes, snapping turtles, leeches, and crayfish. The bluegills were always nibbling on our toes when we held still. Our swimming clothes became stained an earthy shade of mud. That may have been because we routinely sat in the squelchy hot mud to warm up.

We got snagged by fishhooks, and stung by the catfish we caught. We ate bitter sheep sorrel and chewed rye grass and cheeses, all completely free of washing, in their native dusty habitat.

Going barefooted all the time was great, until we developed toe crack sores (I don’t know what to call them. In Dutch they were “kee gretzlies”) from walking on the baked clay soil of Kentucky. We’d tie yarn around our toes to keep dirt from collecting in the cracks. Of course, we had bandaids, but they didn’t stick on the undersides of toes.

There was a time when I accidentally stepped barefooted on a toad. Never will I ever forget that feeling. I have worn flip flops ever since.

We slept outside, under the stars, every unprotected skin surface fair game for mosquitoes, spiders, and ants.  These camping occasions usually resulted in campfire smoke in our eyes and lungs, poorly cooked proteins for our supper. We were usually grumpy the next day, a bit hung over from less than optimum rest, scratching our welts and looking for the Cortisone tube that was always empty.

We hiked without cell phones or GPS, wearing sneakers without proper grip. My brothers went spelunking in a cave that went nobody knew where. We were glad when they all came out again, following their ropes.

As I was writing this, I kept thinking that we weren’t complete idiots. We had boundaries, however loose. We used common sense, solved problems, found our way, dressed our wounds ourselves.

We probably tighten the boundaries a bit for our children. For one thing, we have better access to protective gear, helmets and such. We go to the ER for stitches, and we are very conscious of water safety.

It’s a tough one for parents in this safety-first world, where one could be reported if a little boy carries a pocket knife.

We do really want our children to have stamina, not wither at every adversity.  We want them to appreciate the enormous world out there, to be survivors, able to think on their feet and figure out which way to go. It can’t happen in an armchair.

I guess that’s why we look back at our childhood with such fondness. It seems uncomplicated and just wonderful. Even with chiggers.

June is Like That

On Sunday night we got home from a week with the brothers and their families in North Carolina. It was a grand time of connecting and catching up and letting the youngens go to coffee shops and make bamboo huts and play pickleball and swim in an icy mountain creek and sleep on the trampoline.

Gabe and his brother Wayne took 14 of our collective offspring (my brothers’ children too) on a rigorous 6.5 mile (almost 7 miles!) hike up the profile trail on Grandfather Mountain. We ladies stayed behind and picked them up about five hours after they started their adventure. I drove a Suburban up the mountain, and that is as close as I got to hiking on this trip to the beautiful Smokies. I did cross the Mile High Bridge and nearly blew off the mountain in one of those gusts they kept warning us about.

When I was catching up in my diary, I found myself mapping the days by the fabulous food we were served: Becca’s seafood paella, Carma’s homemade pasta with Alfredo sauce, Hilda’s carne asada, the trout BLT at the Live Oak Gastropub. All the food was a wonderful adventure!

We actually planned an extra day on this trip to catch up with old friends who are not family. It was a time that was rich with connections, and by the time we drove into our own lane, we felt that we would need a few days to recover from all the excitement.

I don’t know why we ever go away in June, though. It is so beautiful here this time of year! I almost missed the tiny Asiatic lilies that never bloomed before. Every morning we are serenaded with the triumphant birdsongs that signal a successful hatch. (Let’s just pretend we don’t also have starlings croaking in glee about their babies.) If we slow down on the salads, the lettuce will bolt. I don’t ever eat store-bought lettuce, undressed, just for fun, but garden lettuce is that good, I can stand out there and just eat it like a rabbit. It is advisable to watch for slugs and earwigs though.

Speaking of rabbits: tonight when I was checking on the garden (I do that every day) I noticed that I no longer have a promising row of broccolis. I now have a pitiful row of stalks stripped of any identifying leaves. Then I saw that the sugar snap peas have also been chomped. And as charming as Peter Rabbit is, I feel such an affinity for Mr. McGregor. Apparently the garden fence is not shocking. I checked it by bravely grabbing hold of it. Nothing. No wonder I have pests.

Gabriel has our patio/pavilion finished, except for metal on the roof and a small matter of a pizza oven he wants to build in one corner. We are loving that outdoor space, and spend a lot of time out there. I potted up a bunch of perennials and set them around to soften the edges. The whole thing is delightful, except for the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes we have always with us.

This evening I have the back door open, with just a screen door to keep out the bugs and the night. The girls’ voices are carrying up from their campfire in the woods. They have friends here and just sent an emissary in for food to roast. I sent sausages, a few hotdogs, and a loaf of bread for toast with fresh jam. They have been in and out of the creek all afternoon, which, as I recall from childhood, makes one roaring hungry. My mom used to let us take a Tupperware container of cookies out to share. It was great, because we could float the container on the water and sail the cookies to each other. I do remember the damp from wet hands reaching in to the container, but none of us died from the bacteria we consumed so glibly.

Both Gabe and I were raised with freedom to roam and build fires and cook dubious things outside. We went barefooted and wore practical, sometimes downright ugly clothes. It didn’t matter very much if we tore them or stained them, and we cut our sleeves off short for the hot weather. We star-gazed on the porch roof and climbed silos to gain heady views in the daytime. We rarely sat around in the house in the summertime, and we did kind of a lot of things that were not strictly safe. Guess what? I wouldn’t trade my childhood for any safe armchair experience. We sure as anything send our kids outside now that we are parents. In the world we live in, it feels more important than ever to teach our children how to be grounded to realities. Real dirt loaded with bacteria, water with crayfish in it instead of chlorine, sunburns and freckles, bandaids on blisters, and the collapse into bed at night, completely knackered by the day’s work and play. I could talk about this for a long time, so I will just shut up now, and hope some of you agree with me.

Oh, one more thing… we had ZERO screens in our childhood lives, and we lived to tell the tale. We didn’t even listen to radio. Yet we grew up to be fairly normal people, probably with overactive imaginations, but that’s not the worst that could happen. Our children do have some screen time most days. They use apps to study languages and practice instruments and play Minecraft. They listen to audiobooks and ask to watch movies. It would seem so simple if we could time-travel back to the ’80’s. But we can’t. We are here, now, in this era. It is a tricky one. We listened to Stolen Focus on our trip, and I felt a little panicked for our digital society. Then we got Plough Publication’s latest issue titled “The Good of Tech.” This is the tension we find ourselves in. Lord, help us!

I have to keep looking at the calendar to keep track of where we are going, which day it is, and should the garbage go out tonight, or did we miss it last night? Our homeschool evaluations are done, and we really should be making plans for next year, but I don’t want to! Not yet! It’s June, and it goes by much too fast!

Is anything brilliant happening in your summer? (The perfect watermelon is brilliant, in my opinion.)

Now that April’s here…

…and almost gone, I thought it might be appropriate to send out a bit of an update. It’s a little silly. I pay for this web domain, and I don’t even use it much anymore. I find myself at a loss as to how to close up this sort of chapter, but I do feel like the world has moved along since I started blogging and I am hopelessly out of touch. I asked a computer nerd recently if he has any advice for monetizing a blog, outside of plastering it with ads, and he said no, he doesn’t know any other way. I am thinking about moving to Sub-stack, but that is all. Thinking is a far cry from doing.

Mondays are my days to catch up with the stuff I pushed off for a week. I had to spend some time to find an actual person to cancel my monthly Chat-books subscription today, since the app literally did not have a button to finalize the cancellation. I know this, because I tried to cancel in the end of March and didn’t follow through with the last step, which is one option only, “A team member will credit your account $10 and give you any assistance. Stay subscribed.” That’s a little shifty, I think. Anyway. I wanted to see what the minis are like, and they are cute, but I hardly take 60 photos in a month, and certainly not all worthy of printing into a booklet. I should have done these while the children were little. My best advice is this: if you try Chat-books, don’t bother with captions. They are very time consuming to put into the app, and the photos are much smaller. You can easily use a fine point Sharpie and write your captions on the white margins after you get the booklet.

I had to handle 20 mugs that have been waiting over the weekend, and then I mowed the yard until I got a flat tire. I know how to run an air compressor, but taking out a tube and fixing a leak… not so much. The grass got out of hand with the recent rain, so Olivia finished with the push mower. The girls ate leftovers from the weekend, and I did a bunch of messaging that I have been neglecting. I have caught up with my clerical duties, even posting receipts in the budget. Hallelujah!

So here I am, thinking about April and that Gabe will get back from work tomorrow, after five days, and then we will feast and be merry because he will be home for a week.

I kept feeling an urge to pinch myself while I was mowing. “We made it,” I thought, “all the way through winter. I am actually smelling cut grass and feeling hot sunshine on my face and my feet and my arms where I rolled up my sleeves. We are pale as potato sprouts, but we made it!” Speaking of potato sprouts, we planted our wrinkly leftover potatoes last week. There was a bit of smugness in the air, because for the first time ever I grew a potato crop that lasted longer than the winter. I also planted pea seeds that I saved, and lettuces. I have a lot to learn yet in the seed saving department, but it is a start.

The ornamental trees we planted two years ago are blooming, and so are the tiny fruit trees we set out last spring. (It’s a thing Peights do: plant trees. We planted over 50 at our first property over the course of 18 years. We’re at 25 here, in 4 years, but we also cut down about 10 or 12 trees, so it’s all going to even out.)

I drove past our former orchard a few weeks ago, and was astonished at how big the trees were, how prolific the blooms. The year we moved (2020) was the first that there were going to be apples. So someone else gets to harvest what we planted. That’s the thing about planting a tree. It is very possible that you are planting for others, and that is a compelling reason to plant them, I think.

Who does more tree planting for the next generation than parents? Metaphorically speaking, I have entire food forests that have been planted for me, and I am so grateful.

Last weekend my parents came up and we got to celebrate my dad’s 71st birthday on Sunday. Rachel’s family sneaked in while he was napping that afternoon and surprised him mid-snore. Good times!

The girls are finishing up their last school projects. Rita is earnestly wishing she had not chosen Ghengis Khan and the Mongol Empire for her history report, but here we are, too deep into the research to about-face now. “It’s character building to push through hard things,” I say. She wants character, so what can she say? Addy did final exams today, and we are so close to packing away the textbooks and just rounding out the portfolios with projects. I don’t recall ever getting done in April, but they did not take many holidays, and now it feels really great!

Sometimes I wake at night and can’t fall back asleep. Anybody else have that happen to them? Weird, isn’t it? It seems such an unnecessary problem to have. I keep earbuds on my nightstand, and I set my audiobook timer to 30 minutes. I usually fall asleep before the time is up, unless it is a very riveting listen. Then the next time, I go back about ten minutes and find the spot where I lost consciousness. It’s a two steps forward, one step back situation, but it works. Currently I am listening to Surprised by Joy, (It happens to be an Audible free listen if you have prime membership. You’re welcome.) and have gotten to the teen years of my friend Clive Staples, the era where he lost his faith. I store in my heart these testaments to the grace of God pursuing and wooing his children, and I know that He is still the same God today, full of love and kindness; full of pity, like a father, ready to help every one of us.

Occasionally listening to the audiobook doesn’t appeal to me. I have another prop. I lie in bed and put on the whole armor of God, from the helmet to the shoes, piece by piece. By the time I get to the end, I find that there isn’t much of a crack for the intrusive thoughts of the enemy to get inside my mind.

If the armor feels cumbersome at 3 AM, which is prime time for worst-case-scenarios, have you noticed?.. I visualize the secret place of the Most High, and I creep in and lay my head down in that quiet safety. Jesus never did get to be middle-aged, but I am sure He understands sleeplessness and 3 o’clock in the morning messes that we cannot carry anyway. So He offers rest. Sleep is wonderful, but rest is amazing.

And yes, there is melatonin, but it is faulty. So is chamomile tea, because while it may lull you to sleep at bedtime, it will urgently awaken you a few hours later. It is kind of funny, the more you think about it. As with so many other minor ailments in life, humor just might be the best medicine.

I’ll close with a smattering of photos of the trees and the double tulips that have given me joy this week. Blessings and a happy spring to you!

Noticing

I took my coffee out the door this morning, slipped into my gardening clogs, and watched the sun blaze over the horizon, lighting the clouds with pink and orange. It’s all waking up out there, filled with birdsong, buds ready to burst into leaves, tiny creek rushing to drain the land. Every day I check on the daffodils, urge them to hurry up and open. I feel like I need to plant things, but when I expressed that thought to my husband, he got a kindly, pitying look, “It’s much too early.” Never mind; I will not let the late, rogue frosts we get here freeze my delight in the benevolence of these warm days.

We have a row of milk jugs that we split in half to winter sow some flowers and lettuces. The tops fit over the bottoms full of soil and make mini cold frames. I have never tried this method before, so we shall see. It was easier than rigging up grow lights in a space that isn’t big enough to accommodate all the things I want to grow. I have also decided that the Amish ladies who have greenhouses around here deserve my support when it is safe to plant tomatoes and peppers. It is a lot better to pay them than to babysit plants in our unpredictable spring. One unwise choice to leave them in the sunporch at night instead of bringing them into the living room or basement can kill off weeks of work. To date I have found six greenhouses within twenty minutes of our house. None of them have websites, so it’s a word-of-mouth delight trail we follow, one after the other. I can hardly wait!

The forsythia bush that is clinging to the creek bank is still showing only cracks of color at the buds, but I have been bringing in branches to the warmth and they open right up. We have a steady supply of brilliant yellow blooms in the house. It begins! The fresh cut florals that delight my heart, even if it’s just a few tiny crocuses at first.

There’s a mosquito flying around me, an opportunist who slipped in the door when I left it open while I was making chicken scampi last night. Across the road from our house is a shallow swamp that is a breeding ground for these pests, but it is also a swamp that is alive with spring peepers that trill their hearts out every warm evening.

Every beautiful thing has its price. If you want to enjoy the sunrise, you have to wake up and get out of bed. You place more value on the things you make sacrifices for, and certainly you are more grateful when you wait a long time and then it comes, it is here, you can have it!

Addy and I cleaned the sunporch yesterday. Somehow it is the place that collects everything we don’t know what to do with over the winter. It is like a gigantic utility drawer for excess furniture, recyclable trash, cardboard boxes, and boots. We put the cardboard in the shed for gardening layers, boxed up the donations for Salvation Army, put the boots in bins in the basement (I know, we’ll be getting them out again),and washed the floor. Addy was enthused, “I could live out here!” She’s always the one who loves to rearrange and domesticate wild places.

I noticed that our elderly neighbor was out picking up sticks in her vast yard yesterday, and walked over to chat. She is a spry little octogenarian who wears sparkly lip gloss and plays pickle-ball to stay nimble, but it was a big job, so I sent the girls over to help her. It was the task of a half hour, with them all helping, and she was relieved to have it done. She rewarded them each with a can of ginger ale, after being assured and reassured that their mom won’t mind. Possibly by the time you are in your eighties, you think of teenagers sort of in the same rank as toddlers who might not be able to handle fizzy sugar.

I cleared a space on the desk in the office to write this noticing post this morning. It is in a state of becoming, an exciting state! We planned floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in this room when we bought the house, and last week Gabriel built them. I have been painting and scheming, finally giving this room the love it needs. Hopefully today I can finish it and take care of the piles and boxes on the floor. There are still boxes of books in the attic that we have’t had space to put out, and there is a growing pile of culls.

Addy was helping me with this project, and kept mentioning books she never read. I was appalled! How can you be almost thirteen and never have read Little Women? Or the Little House books? The Wheel on the School? I guess what happened was that about the time she was into Henry and Ribsy the older children were into The Hobbit or The Bronze Bow, and she skipped along with them, leaving a whole delightful section of Elizabeth Enright and Eleanor Estes books unread. I tend to pick our read-alouds for the more advanced listeners, so there we are. She is making up for lost time, and happily, the books are right there at eye level for her.

Gabe took Rita to orthopedics this morning to have them look at her swollen knee. It started acting up during volleyball, so we kind of assumed it’s a minor sports injury. X-rays showed nothing, but the knee remains swollen four months later. We had a child with Lyme disease that manifested in a badly swollen knee years ago, so possibly it’s that. Our doctor mentioned sending her to ortho to have it drained, and I chickened out on the spot. Gabe takes the children to any appointments with the potential to make their mother faint. This is one of those. I do not do needles, tubes, and fluids collecting slowly in clear containers. I have accepted that no matter how sturdy and practical I might be, this is not a mere mind-over-matter situation. I have fainted an embarrassing number of times, including at appointments for my children. How wonderful that my husband loves needles and blood draws!

Well, I have noticed long enough, and it appears that this room will not paint itself. When it is all done, I will show you a picture, and that will be hallelujah!

I hope your day is happy and warm, and contains something precious.

February Recap

In contrast to January, which is a long month that can’t quite quit, February has been a very speedy month. We hunkered down and survived, if you can call smearing cream cheese on a toasted bagel a “survival challenge”. We feel the sap rising at the end of February, as we lift dry, trembly limbs to the stronger rays of sunshine. Our children think it was the Lamest Winter Ever, Worse Than Last Year. (Interpreted to mean not enough snow and ice.) We had a few gloriously pristine snows, but not many, so it was a slate grey world, full of mud. It was about as bleak as it can get. For a person who struggles every winter to stay grounded and out of the pits, I am wondering why I am feeling so cheerful this year?

There was a matter of a conversation with God last fall, “Honestly, why do I live somewhere so bleak for so much of the year? Is there something You are trying to teach me?” (I know, duh.)

I love Pennsylvania. I just don’t love November through April in Pennsylvania. That’s half the year, and when I thought about it, it seemed like kind of a lot. I am a cheerful person, in general, but I realized that I am giving myself a pass on complaining about the weather.

“You know, it isn’t My will that you fuss about the overcast sky and the brown and the ugliness.” Oof. It wasn’t a long conversation, but it was pointed. I am not saying I had a transformation just then, and embraced mud season, but I made a commitment to stop letting my mouth complain. Sometimes the words just slipped right out without me even thinking, and then I would have to reframe. “Isn’t is interesting how we live under a mushroom cloud? Look, you can see the edges of it on the horizon when we drive south. I wonder what wind currents are causing that?” Sounds a little whiny still, I know. When the you have an agreement with the Lord, He is very kind in reminding you when you forget it.

Anyway, that’s point 1 for my flourishing in less than ideal situations. Don’t be a fuss pot. C.S. Lewis learned to love rough and stormy weather so much, he considered people who complained and stayed holed up to be missing an elemental gusto. (Get it?) Note to self: Be like Clive Staples.

Point 2 is Take Your Supplements. I did not skip the vitamin D and B. This year I bought a seven-day pill organizer for A.M and P.M. and now I am officially weirdly old.

Point 3 is a luxury that I have not always had: Sleep. I did not set my alarm unless we had an appointment somewhere in the morning. Homeschooling requires a lot of effort and investment, but we have hit the sweet spot where I realize that not everything is lost if we don’t start at the crack of dawn same time every morning.

Point 4 is related to calming down. Avoid Caffeine. It occurred to me that there is something wrong with a lifestyle where I cannot survive without caffeine. So I kicked the habit. I drink decaf coffee, and now I sleep better and now I am weirdly old. Oh, maybe I mentioned that before. In the interest of transparency, there were a few diet Coke days. What a gross way to get a boot in the rear, but it does work.

Those are the four things that come to mind for what has changed in my life that may have helped me cope with the seasonal depression that normally afflicts me. I have a bonus for you, a word that is new to me. Fika, which in Sweden is the term for sitting down with family or friends to have a hot drink, often with something sweet on the side. You can use it as a verb or a noun. We fika a lot at our house! Come, join us!

We’ve been finishing a bedroom in the basement. The guys installed large windows, rewired it, drywalled the ceiling, put in can lights, and trimmed it. I painted it, and Greg and I went to Gabes to look for a rug, bedding, etc. He moved his stuff down there last week, so I filled about 20 nail holes and re-caulked the cracks in the paneling and trim in his old room. I love repainting and furnishing a room when there isn’t a time crunch. (The haste around our remodel/move still gives me the post-move willies, just remembering how we put our furniture in the centers of the rooms so that I could finish the painting.) For this room, I chose a color called lullaby. My family thought it would look like a nursery, but it doesn’t. It looks restful in a blue-grey sort of way. With the white chalk-painted furniture I am working on, it will be even better. I don’t overthink the colors I choose for my walls. I just pick what I like, and then it makes me happy. There you have it, home interiors by Dorcas. It’s a very uncomplicated recipe, but I stand by it.

I made a dress -coral colored with little white flowers- for Addy a few weeks ago. The first time around I made it with her outgrown pattern, size 10/12. It was pretty unbelievable for a while, but there was nothing to do except cut and sew another bodice, size 14. For once I had bought extra fabric, a great mercy. Addy has gotten so many hand-me-downs in her life that she is excessively grateful for new dresses, and it is a pleasure to provide them. She prefers brighter colors than the other girls. Her recipe is uncomplicated too.

We went to Hobby Lobby this week, our favorite store in the world. We needed cotton yarn, felt, and some paint. We came home with fabric for hoodies and throw pillows, cute containers for beads, gold calligraphy ink, and some picture frames. I teased Rita about having a hard time with self-control, and she said, “You have no idea how hard I was holding back!” Me too, girl, me too.

The girls slept in their camper last night, despite the chill. I bribed Rita so that I could share a paragraph she wrote about it.

    “If you go down the trail on the left-hand side of our shop you will come to a cute little camper with a wooden porch and flower boxes. The outside is white and green. If you decide to peep in you will be confronted by a door that sticks like glue. Pull like a mule and it might open. Reluctantly. If you get the door open, step in quickly. (So as not to let any heat escape from the lazy little heater.) Don’t forget to wipe your feet! To the left is our reddish-purple couch\bed. On each side small windows look out to the woods beyond. On the wall straight in front of the door are my spice shelves. Woven carpets cover the ancient linoleum floor. To the right are shelves. One has the cooking appliances; hot plate, electric water boiler, waffle maker, and popcorn popper. The others hold anything from plates and cups to pans and mouse poo. Everything is artfully arranged to take up as little of the limited space as possible. If you ask politely I might make you a cup of tea.”

This is the view off the back deck this morning. It was a little crisp out there, but they danced in through the snow in high spirits.

That was the view off the deck yesterday. I stood out there in bare feet, not even shivering, and listening to the roaring of the creek after our night’s thunderstorms. Isn’t weather interesting?

Winterizing

October was a magical month, all but the week I spent either being sick or feebly trying to get strong again. That week did bear some fruit in the list I compiled of Things To Do Before Winter. It was long, detailed, and discouraging, according to my offspring. It also included something really fun that I have been hankering to do ever since we moved.

My view from the chair in the living room included this wall, with outlet covers, of course. I decided the time had come, and my eyes hurt too much to read or watch something, but they were fine for scrolling on Etsy. Gabriel was working, so I sent him screenshots of various wallpapers and we agreed on a whimsical one that was on sale. (Clinched the deal, that did. Have you looked at wallpaper prices since it has come trending back onto the scene? :O)

I admit, my choice was influenced by the colors and patterns that will spark joy in the dark of winter. However, it is just as I envisioned it with the antique sideboard I bought at Salvation Army and cleaned up with much sanding and washing. Comments have been varied and polite: One son walked right past after work and didn’t notice the wallpaper. The other son said it was nice, but might look dated in a few years. My husband and the girls are solid fans, so that’s a win.

I have a few observations about peel and stick wallpaper. I’ve hung murals before, and it wasn’t that bad, but this was a lot trickier. For starters, it was Very Sticky. Removeable, yes, but the first strip had to be pulled off and repositioned a few times to get the edges perfectly straight. It pulled a bit of paint off in the process, therefore we also had a few spots that were no longer sticky. Once that was up, it was easier, but the wall has a slight bulge in the middle, due to a cast iron plumbing pipe that the dry-waller had to bend his work around. The fourth strip was impossible. It matched on the top and on the bottom, but not in the middle where the bulge was, and there is no stretching or repositioning peel and stick. Olivia and I sweated it until we both were hot and bothered and needing chocolate to soothe our feelings of outrage. Unfortunately, the only chocolate in the house was a bent-and-dent store gamble, and it was white and crumbly. We had to soldier on without reinforcement, but we got it done. There were a few small bubbles that we just pricked with a pin and smoothed out. My conclusion: peel and stick is best saved for small spaces. I much prefer working with pasted wallpaper sheets that can be pushed and moved a bit on the wall as I apply it.

Was it worth it? Yes, it was.

The winterizing list included things like “dig the last potatoes”. Check. I had a row that I hilled in the traditional manner of gardeners, and the rest were Ruth Stout’s (tiny little lie alert) “no work” method of mulching. The idea was to see which method produced better/more potatoes. The mulched ones should have gotten more mulch, for sure, which may have produced better results, but the hilled ones were bigger and more plentiful, no question about it. So maybe next year I will try hilling first, then mulch so that we can avoid the weeds that were a problem this year. At any rate, this is the first time I have gotten bushels of potatoes for my efforts and I like the feeling. Do your worst, winter. We are set for carbs to stave off starvation.

Another project was cleaning up the leaves that didn’t fall for a long time due to a late frost. I lived in a shagbark hickory grove as a child, and I Know What I Know about raking leaves. Hickories are not heavy until they get wet. My children did not understand my urgency, but we did shifts with the leaf blower for hours. For days. Our trees are impressive and tall. Some of the leaves were chopped with the lawnmower and went on the garden. Some were blown into the edge of the woods where the multifloras hold them like a rounded caterpillar. Finally we just burned some. We also burned our hickory leaves when I was a child, and it brought back memories of pyrotechnics created with a metal rake dug into the burning pile, the last little smoldering nuts at the end. We finished up the bulk of the leaf cleanup on October 31, and the next day it snowed. Sometimes it feels so good to be right.

The biggest item on the winterizing list is ongoing. I took down the moveable electric chicken fence and scooped up the rich compost with the tractor bucket, spreading it on the garden. Then Gabriel began his work of cutting down the rotting cherry trees that leaned over the chicken yard and the privacy fence. Last year a huge tree fell onto the shop, bashing in the roof where Gregory’s forge is. It split off of a clump of trees and revealed that the entire interior was decayed and full of bugs. There are about five of these trees behind the shop, and they bother us with their air of disaster waiting to happen. One of them leans over the neighbor’s trailer, and we will need professional help with that one. The rest require skill and ingenuity to take down ourselves. Gabe is very good at felling trees, but I get nervous when I am the one asked to position the tractor bucket or tow a rope attached to the tree on one end and the Suburban with the other. It’s simple. No pressure, or anything. Just watch the branches and ease it forward when it starts to fall.

We have a humongous pile of firewood to burn in the fireplace, and a lot still to clean up. This spring we got a small DeWalt chainsaw that runs on a battery, and it is my pet. It cuts small limbs like a breeze and has made it so much easier for me to help with outdoor messes without yanking my shoulder out of the socket to start a saw. I helped cut up the trees, not paying attention to the vines that twined all the way to the top. The trees were covered in grape vines, but with the leaves off, I didn’t notice that some of the vines were hairy and lethal. It has been years since I had such a miserable case of poison ivy. Last night during cell group I had to keep excusing myself to go apply cortisone lotion. The alternative was to sit there and scratch shamelessly, which I couldn’t do.

We did fun things in October, too. We celebrated our twenty-second anniversary with a few days in a sweet cabin in a small town nearby. We have fought for our marriage in many ways over the years, not just fought against the marriage destroyers, but also for the marriage builders. It is possible to be twenty-two years in and enjoy each other more than ever. There have been times when anniversaries were a taking stock and feeling like we’re not getting the mileage out of our relationship that we want to, and the catching up is as painful as it is necessary. If we have learned anything, it is to keep short accounts. Life is just better when you have fun together, that’s what I say.

We celebrated Gregory’s nineteenth birthday and got the glad results of zero seizure activity on his most recent EEG. We surprised Gabriel’s dad for his sixty-fifth birthday and had a short time with loved ones. Alex was here twice on his way to and fro a harvest job in Wisconsin. Like my friend Tina says, “You just need to lay eyes on your adult children every once in a while.” The girls did first quarter exams and finished up their volleyball season. Olivia decided that she wants to learn about sourdough and produced a first loaf that was swoon-worthy. Occasionally we even took off and just soaked in the clear blue air, shuffling the leaves on the trail with our feet.

I did not get the whole house cleaned thoroughly, but that part of the list was a little far-fetched anyway. So, do you get winterizing urges? Or do you get to live somewhere without cold and dark?

I Am Waiting…

…To eat the first ripe tomato in my garden. One that is bigger than a cherry so I can slice it for my sourdough toast. I do not remember ever waiting this long, and if checking on them could produce results, I would have had slices of vine-ripened tomato weeks ago. They are large and green, very green, but apparently we have not had enough hot sunshine yet. Even the dog who loves tomatoes has become impatient. Yesterday she picked an enormous slicer, very green, and brought it guiltily to me.

…For Greg’s car to sell so I don’t have to move it to a different spot in the yard every time we mow. There have been many interested parties, but when they hear that it needs a new exhaust system, they turn sadly away. Or they turn away, sadly.

…For my neighbor to notice that we are perfectly capable of mowing our own grass. He is a good neighbor, especially because he has a personal vendetta against chicken-stealing raccoons, of which there are many in this area. He simply cannot resist mowing a stripe along the front of our lawn as he passes to mow the other neighbor’s lawn, with his deck set much lower than we do. It may be a picayune thing to be bothered about, but it does bother me. It has just occurred to me that Gregory parked his for-sale car on that side of the lane yesterday, straddling the stripe. Maybe we have solved the problem without any hard feelings, because surely he will not attempt to mow around a car…? Stay tuned for further bulletins on this country drama.

…For the guy who said he could come fix our driveway in mid-July. Now that it is mid-August, I am guessing a suitable amount of time has elapsed. I am curious why contractors of services do this? Are they ever early? Is it so that people are duly impressed by how busy they are and extra happy to pay them for the work that they didn’t do in the time they said they would? I just wonder about these things. Would it really be so hard to put a buffer into your calendar so that you can show up when you said you would?

…To use the bagged mulch I bought on clearance and stacked under the sunporch awning. It has an assignment: the borders along the lane, but I can’t use them until the guy who fixes driveways comes.

…For inspiration to braid the garlic that is drying in the shed, and to make more pickles with the accumulation of cucumbers in the fridge. Unlike the tomatoes, the cucumbers are having a heyday of a summer.

…For my probiotics to do all the amazing things that they said they will do. It would also be nice for my body to figure out how it’s going to behave for the rest of my life. Does anybody know how long that wait will be?

…For a slightly slower pace of life where we can pick up our morning read-aloud tradition before we do lessons. When Addy confided in me with shining eyes, “I think this school year is going to be really fun,” she was thinking about extra stories, tea and poetry, and fun supplies from Walmart. She was not thinking so much about getting in some serious progress in the math books in August so that we can travel without math books in September, but here we are.

…For our Walmart to get its act together and stop remodeling and just have things where they are supposed to be so that I can find matches and toilet paper without hunting through half the store. My sympathies are with the elderly gentleman who grumped to me, “They are just doing this on purpose so I have to walk all over the place and see more stuff to buy.”

…For a good place to sell some of my extra chickens, but not the sale barn, because I took five of my prized pullets there, almost old enough to start laying olive-colored eggs. The pullets I babied and hand-raised after their mother got eaten by a raccoon, and I got two bucks apiece for them. It appears they kept half as a fee so that my check in the mail was five dollars. Hilarious.  

…For my dahlias to bloom. They are really underachieving this year, and the only reason I can think of is that they are planted closer to the other perennials because I didn’t want them to get destroyed when the driveway gets fixed, only they would have been fine in the normal place. Maybe like the tomatoes, they have not had enough brilliant sunshine in this summer of overcast skies from wildfires and abundant rain. Normally I take in cuttings all through August, but they are only just starting to bud a little bit.

…To taste the blackberry kefir to see if it is as special as the raspberry was.

**********

In which both the potential glories of dahlias and tomatoes are captured in one photo.

I learned about making “I am waiting” lists in the writing course I took this spring. It is an interesting way to explore what is going on inside. This list happens to be a trivial one of everyday waits. They have their merit; they shape character, as anyone who has waited for their first taste of a vine-ripened tomato knows. They are not like the earnest yearnings/waitings of the soul: for slaves set free, for tears wiped away, for peace on earth, for equality, for all Creation to be redeemed. There are things I am one hundred percent convinced God will do in His time. I keep faith, and I wait.

(Maybe the longer we wait for the desire to be fulfilled, the greater the glory.)

What are you waiting for?

Pinky Purple Days

I sat outside on the deck until the last light faded out of the bits of sky I could see through the towering hickory trees to the west. It was the longest day of the year; there should have been some sort of solemn ceremony as it passed. But the mosquitoes were biting me in the evening chill. I did the prosaic thing and came inside. It is difficult to realize that we are already heading toward the tedium of winter darkness: ugh.

Right now we are in the blessed noonday and it is glorious. This is what we waited for all through the dreary months. The garden is silvery, pink, and purple, with one scarlet Oriental poppy lifting its showy head. The sort of flowers I like to plant are cottage garden flowers, kind of shy and old fashioned, but I cannot resist a poppy, even though it is a bit of a braggart. My neighbor gave me red hot poker roots and I dutifully planted them. They looked so out of their element in my purple coneflower and Russian sage border that I took a dislike to them and tossed them to the chickens.

We are deep into the spindly, ethereal florals, some with scents so cloying you cannot really bring them inside. The bees are not wasting a minute of it, and its a good thing too, because it’s only a matter of days until the Japanese beetles crawl out of the ground to ravage the sweetest blossoms. Rita brought in my favorite sort of bouquet today, and I love how it looks with that white valerian in it, but it is so powerfully scented I will have to banish those.

Our hummingbird feeder broke in storage over the winter, so we decided to plant hummingbird feeders instead. We looked for trumpet-shaped flowers and I have seen hummingbirds at every one of these. It’s the best reason for planting the ubiquitous petunia. I don’t even know what some of these blooms are. They just sort of slid into my wagon at the greenhouse and I didn’t argue with them.

Today I noticed that the first baby yellow tomato was ripe, and I ate it without even showing it to anybody else. I paid a foolish fifteen dollars for a large plant that was blooming already back in the chill of spring because I do weird things like that when I am fed up with cold weather. It would be premature to say that it was worth the money, but if it continues to produce such sweet orbs of tomato-ness, the summer is looking promising.

Last year I bought strawberry plants at the local hardware store and I wish I could remember what they were called so that I could warn you not to bother with them. After all the watering, weeding, mulching, fertilizing the plants, covering them when it frosted, I am picking the weirdest, smooshiest berries I have ever grown. (There aren’t many, because of the late freeze I didn’t see coming.) A day in the fridge leaves them looking so tired and wilted I am not even tempted to eat them. The best way is to stand in the garden and eat them immediately. “If you don’t expect them to be strawberries, they are good,” Rita concluded. I do not quite know how to do that. Shut my eyes? Hold my nose? Because they are perfect, red, seedy, and smell right. It’s a texture thing. This week I showed Little Bee and her brother where the strawberries are and they obliged me by eating them all that day, foraging up and down the row and experiencing no difficulty with unmet expectations.

Speaking of expectations, there is a small fruit stand a few miles west of us, run by an Amish family. On Saturdays they sell donuts and I have seen the sign often, but never happened to pass on a Saturday until last week. I took a look at the donuts and promptly bought a half dozen. They were enormous, glistening things, with hardened glaze drips at the edges, and I could hardly wait to give everybody one when I got home. My first bite revealed a sorry truth: they were obviously fried in rancid lard. I took another bite and weighed the question, “Are these worth the calories?” But surely, so I took another bite. I got some milk, and I ate the donut. Almost it was not worth the disappointment that was every bite, but I had paid for an experience that I was reluctant to give up. In retrospect, I paid for a lesson but it isn’t clear what it is. Maybe it will come to me the next time I am picking the strawberries I don’t like.

This spring I needed a strong new stick teepee for my cucumbers. Gabriel and I started with bigger saplings and screwed them together instead of tying them with twine. It took longer this way, but I hope it holds up. He also made a beautiful new arbor for the hardy kiwi vine after I had started it on my own when he was working. My arbor panels were pitifully lacking in structural integrity. When I asked for help to assemble the lot, he was kind enough to lay aside his work in the shop and spent hours finding some stronger supports. We cut down most of the sycamore saplings down by the creek for this project, and I pulled wild grapevines out of the woods for the finishing touches. I am really liking the homegrown look of these supports.

It’s early days in the garden, but things are flourishing and by the time the dahlias do their thing, it will be full to bursting. Every day I walk around and marvel at what is happening, how the leaves unfurl and buds form, some puffy like marshmallows and some spiky like chestnuts, but all brilliant.

When I was a child I had a startling thought one day, “If God had made everything brown, would we even know it wasn’t pretty?” I can’t say for sure when my lifelong yearning for color started, but I was too little to even know what it was. ( I just knew that I hated my grey double-knit dress that made me feel ugly.)

God walked in the garden too, you know. It’s a great time to lay down my smallness and offer to join my work to His great work. I’ll just keep planting the pink and purple things in my bit of earth.

Trying to Keep it Together

I have a soft spot in my heart for older gentlemen who wear both suspenders and a belt. Whatever else may be falling apart, they will endeavor to keep their trousers up, and I appreciate that code of honor.

This week the girls are finishing up all their school lessons. When I made their last fifteen assignments, they got a gleam in their eyes and started working like mad to finish up long before the three weeks in which they were assigned. I didn’t care at all, but found myself caught short with the customary celebrations. We have been homeschooling for fifteen years, and I have never before forgotten to order books for each child to unwrap at our end-of-school party, but this year somebody hinted and I looked foolish for a minute before I admitted that I forgot the party too.

The girls were chill about it, but a little disappointed, so I quickly opened Amazon and got on the ball. Addy wanted a detailed coloring book, and she actually got to choose her own. Olivia wanted books to read, of course. Rita was more desirous of a new hot plate for her cooking experiments in the playhouse. I worry about what this world of two-day shipping gratification will do to our children, but I also appreciate it. The ease and endless resources on the internets fuel a constant tension: help or hindrance?

I read an article this morning called “Social Media is Attention Alcohol” and it gave me lots of food for thought and a prick of conscience about wasted time. I kissed Facebook good-bye years ago, although I haven’t closed out my account because I want to be able to look back at my timeline for reference and photos. I am sure there are many who use this platform for good, but it no longer blessed me, so it wasn’t that hard.

However, I love Instagram. I unfollow any accounts that start to smell fake, although realistically we probably all put our best foot forward on this platform. I refuse filters and try hard to keep myself sternly real. And I sell my pottery mostly to my Instagram following (Black Oak Ceramics (speaking of which: I promised to let you all know when I do an Etsy shop update and I plan to do that this weekend, in time for Mother’s Day) ). So Instagram is a free and simple marketing tool for me. Not only that, but I get a lot of creative ideas from following others. For a self-taught potter, inspiration often comes from seeing what is possible if I work long and hard, but it can also plunge me into despair because of how little I know.

I ask myself if this is an attention hog in my life, and yes, it is on some days. It feels exactly the same as falling into story grip with a book, not all bad until the undisciplined ways catch up with me and interfere with healthy life and relationships.

I have hinted at the wacky hormonal issues of mid-life that nobody really wants to know about, but these issues have a way of bossing me around that was unfathomable to my young and well-regulated self. (There, was that ambiguous enough?) Anyway, I found myself at the beginning of the year with a quality of life that really cramped my style. I was lethargic, anemic, sleeping poorly, and not able to take a flight of stairs without feeling short of breath. I wasn’t sure I would be able to garden or take hikes, etc. come summertime, and I needed help! The doctor had nothing for me except, “It’s to be expected and it will probably last for years.” Cold comfort. “Maybe take iron or eat organ meats, and go on birth control to regulate your hormones.” Eww. I always hated how iron upset my stomach when I was pregnant, and so I started drinking spinach smoothies and trying to summon the strength to eat liver and onions.

About this time my sister told me about a product she saw on social media. (Imagine that!) It’s a freeze-dried beef liver supplement that is much easier on the queasy than the fried version. I was desperate, and hopeful and skeptical all at the same time. If you read reviews, you know how confusing that can be. Well, I have been taking these little liver bits in capsules daily for three months, and it seems to have been exactly what I needed. I am so very grateful to have energy and stamina again, and a normal life. I wouldn’t have heard about this or had any idea where to buy beef liver capsules without the internet. Nor could I have shared with you out of the love in my heart to spread good things. If I read the delicate references in the comments correctly, I am not alone in my quest for equilibrium in this season. 😉

Meanwhile, if you feel a bit beleaguered by the ordinary troubles that beset you despite your best efforts, consider this cardinal mother-to-be. She built her nest in the lilac bush, snugly under the awning. In the last week the leaves have opened and in the days and days of rain, they weigh down the branch enough to swing it out into the weather, just where the rain drips off the awning without relief. I feel so sorry for her, but she is steadfast, unmovable, abounding in the work the Lord has given her. The nest is tipped at an awkward angle, but her 21 days are almost up and there will be babies soon. I wish I could tell her that tomorrow the sun is supposed to shine.

I am letting nature preach to me, loud and clear. This is what she says:

Keep on with the good work. Get that party planned for your children. Pull on your suspenders or take your beef liver capsules, whatever it takes. The world won’t stop turning if you cop out, but there will be glory missing that is supposed to be there.