This week the first tulip opened in a patch of bulbs I planted last fall, a brilliant red with oval petals that spread completely flat in the hot sunshine. It looks like a crimson star floating above the bark mulch. I was sure that I planted pink tulips, but surprise! the first one was red.
Our grey world is springing into color, just tinges of it at the beginning, but promises for more all around. The daffodils at the edges of the woods are waving bits of sunshine, and there are twice as many as there were last year. I love that they multiply and naturalize, and critters don’t like them. When you drive the countryside, you can see marks of old homesteads long gone to ruin with saplings grown up in the foundations and drifts of daffodils where some homemaker dropped bulbs beside her doorstep years ago.
Last fall I donated to a kickstarter for a book titled A Little More Beautiful by Sarah Mackenzie. It came in the mail recently, and it is as charming as any illustrated children’s story I have seen. How can I make the world a little more beautiful each day? Hmmm. How about planting a bunch of flowers and sharing them?
I am not a die-hard spring cleaning lady, but I am in the mood to wash all the things in the house and hang them on the line to dry. As I type this, the rugs for the front door are swishing in the washer, and the living room curtains will be next. When the sun shines in such benevolence, I feel that the windows should sparkle and the curtains should be worthy.
Gabriel is using the chain saw and the tractor to clear the briars and trash accumulated in the back yard for many years. The girls are helping to collect the branches for burning, and I overheard a mild protest, “Can’t he pick another mid-life crisis, just anything else?” For some reason our children think ambitious clean-up projects are a sign of middle age, yet we have tackled these sorts of things many times in their lifetimes. Maybe it’s because they are now strong enough to be a real help, and it is sinking in that this is work, not just a bonfire for roasting hotdogs later.
I have been edging the three beds close to the house. The thing I never thought about when I was being so smart and unrolling old hay bales on top of my long rectangular gardens was that there would be miles of edges with grass borders. I don’t hate the job, but it takes a long time to clear the grasses and weeds that creep into the beds. It also requires a tape measure to get the lines straight, and it is my own problem that I cannot bear to look out the window and see a bulging border. I was trying to fix a few problem spots, and asked my husband, who is much better at free-handing this sort of thing, if it looked all right. “It looks perfect,” he said, and quickly escaped before I could request that he fix what was apparently perfect already. (If I could find a good edging material (that isn’t plastic) it would be worth installing. Please speak up if you have any advice for me on this matter.)
It is astonishing how much more motivated I feel when it is warm outside. Our heat is off this week, and the sunshine has been a daily grace. We had friends here for an outdoor supper around the fire with the whine of mosquitoes and the trilling of spring peepers serenading us. We have gone straight from winter to summer, is what it feels like, and nature is kicking up her heels. I don’t mind. I have no doubt that we will still get some hard frosts, but just for now we are basking.
I have a very broody hen that got a bad case of spring fever. She wanted chicks so badly that she just sat in the nesting box day in and day out, even though we took the eggs away from her every day. We moved her to an empty bunny hutch so that her intense longing for motherhood wouldn’t affect the rest of the flock. I found a source of fertilized eggs and stuck a dozen under her so that she can do her setting with some fruit for all her effort. She has four more days to go until they are due to hatch out. I will be so relieved for her, because she hardly eats or drinks anything, just sits and waits and waits. Rita feeds her worms and bugs that she finds, and watches over her solicitously.
With this season there has been an explosion of birdsong. All around they flirt, warble, and spill their sheer joy into the air. There is a phoebe building her mud and moss nest in the corner of the porch awning, a cardinal shaping a pretty twig nest in the lilac bush right outside the window, a robin once more making herself a home in the shrubbery beside our back deck, and there are sparrows in all the bluebird boxes.
I am reminded that God is the Creator of LIFE! New life springing out of barren, frozen wastelands. It is His delight to resurrect what has died, to bring fruit out of the seed that dies. If I would remember the utter faithfulness of His character when I feel panic because something dear to me is dying, it would save me a lot of flapping about. Every year this same truth hits me between the eyes, and I wonder why it is that I forget it every winter.
I made a list of as many hopes, dreams, ambitions, I could think of in my entire life that I have at some point given up, allowed to die. I was thrilled to see how many things He has brought back to life and better than I had hoped for. Not everything. There are seeds that lie buried in the the ground for a very long time. I can’t pretend that I understand God’s timing, but I believe that He knows what to do with the seeds that we bury.
Well, that concludes my springtime homily. I hope it’s a beautiful day where you are.
I am in the middle of doing a writing course by Rachel Devenish Ford called Writing From the Heart. Right now we are practicing noticing, and jotting it down. All those tiny sights and sounds around us, as well as the big ones. They all make up life, and I decided it might be fun to do it here. It’s not going to be profound, but it is a good thing for me to do in these days when my default mode is creeping about with a cup of tea, trying to look productive. Here’s yesterday’s twenty minutes of observing.
First thing I look at the forecast, and it is too dismal for my soul to bear. Ten solid days of clouds. I know in my head that it can change daily, but my heart is dismayed.
I arrange a bright quilt on the back of a chair, fill the teakettle, light candles all through the house, and sit down to write, far away from my phone.
A spoon scrapes a cereal bowl, and pages turn as the breakfast eater reads while she eats Life.
My son reads quotes from a Babylon Bee article and mutters that this leftover coffee tastes like old tires, but he drinks it anyway.
The parakeets chirp shrill good mornings as the first bit of light filters into the schoolroom upstairs.
Tires crunch on the lane as my son heads off to work; the tracks on the lane are frozen this morning, an improvement on the squelching mud of the past week.
I glance out the window, see the chickens in the slight glow of the light in their coop, scratching, scratching through the straw. I am hopeful that the fake daylight will urge them to greater egg production.
The world outside is lightening slowly, but monochrome. Trees hold their undressed limbs to the sky, and I can tell by their bones that this one is an oak and that one is a cherry, and the other one is a walnut.
Only the tin signs on my husband’s shop reflect any color: “Pepsi, the taste that beats the others cold,” and “Atlantic Motor Oil,” and the neon yellow “No Outlet.”
My candy cane tea is brewed just right. I pair it with a spiced raisin cookie, iced on top. I smell the cardamom that I ground in my daughter’s mortar and pestle. A morsel of sweet.
We started our married life with big ideas about living minimalist. Stuff just seemed so immaterial. It was quite trendy to be disdainful of the status quo in the circles we socialized with. We weren’t going to buy a lot of furniture, which was an easy resolution, because we couldn’t afford it. A card table and some folding chairs it would be. Then a family friend gave us with a round oak dining table and chairs that she was planning to get rid of, so there we were. They were a bit rickety, but they worked.
The living room furnishings were sourced from a paper called The Traders Guide, with actual print ads, imagine that! There was no Facebook Marketplace, imagine THAT! I remember meeting a guy at a storage locker in the evening. It was dark, so we looked at his couch with flashlights and took it home with us.
My parents were raised with the tradition that you provide a bedroom suite for your daughters. Since our first house was tiny, we didn’t have space for one, but they bought us a good mattress and an antique dresser at an estate auction.
Ideally, I thought, our belongings should fit into a Conestoga wagon U-haul trailer, or less. We were not going to have a lot of stuff because that’s what everybody did and stuff weighs you down.
Welp. Here I am, twenty some years later, with a bigger house and it’s full of stuff from the attic to the basement. I’m the lady with four bedrooms furnished, admittedly mismatched, but functional. We are on the third table since the round table days, each one bigger than the last, and we have cycled through a number of couches. You do have to sit somewhere, we found, and it’s nicer if you don’t need to use a pry bar to get out of a broken sofa.
I’m the one with shelves in the basement to store the five gallon water cooler, the thirty cup coffee maker, and all the huge bowls. I have four big baking sheets, and ten bread pans, what? I have a large variety of measuring cups, and I was only going to have one set because why would you ever need more than that? I’m the lady with stacks of plates from the thrift store and enough tea cups to serve a small crowd, and how did I grow into not-a-maximalist, but pretty far from the girl who didn’t want a bridal shower?
It may have had something to do with giving birth to children. I am grateful that our minimalist goals did not extend to excluding little people, but you can’t avoid getting stuff when you have children. Also they break things and they want bikes.
A lot of our ideas were noble and good for that newlywed season. We didn’t want a load of debt and we wanted to invest in the Kingdom of God, not the American dream. We had not yet had much experience in laying down our lives for others. Surely it would be more high and holy than being one of those wage-earning, tax-paying, load-bearing citizens who own property and invite people home for Sunday lunch and loan their vehicles to people whose cars are broken and host crowds at the missions retreats.
Well.
To my minimalist self I would like to say: You’re going to need some stuff. Not ten crock pots, but maybe three. Because there may come a time when you have rice in the instant pot, and taco meat in the one with the broken handle, and cheese sauce in the little one. Because you are serving guests.
I would like to pat that idealist on the shoulder and reassure her. You know what stuff is for, right? It’s for other people. It’s for you to use to bless other people. You don’t need 10 bread pans to bless other people, but if you happen to be the kind of person who likes to make bread, then it isn’t wrong to have them. And yes, of course you can serve tea in styrofoam cups and that is better than saying, “I can’t have people at my house because I don’t have enough dishes.” But it actually is nicer to serve tea in cups if you have them.
The same goes for your house. It’s not just for you. Hospitality is a big deal for the children of God. When you welcome someone into your living space, you touch them in a way that nothing else does. You are saying that you really do want to get to know them, and that you care about them. You are sharing your best stuff, and maybe you’re letting them see your worst stuff.
That’s what your stuff is for: to use and bless. Human nature being what it is, there seem to be plenty of ways to be selfish. If you find yourself hoarding your good things in the closets so you don’t need to feel obligated to share, saving the butter for yourself and serving margarine to others, so to speak, well, then give the old heart a check.
If you can’t bear the idea of feet on your new carpet, scuffs on your baseboards, or smudges on your towels, prepare the old heart for a lonely existence.
If you find yourself mourning the things that break more than caring about how sad the person feels who accidentally broke them, then give the old heart another check. Teach it to hold things with an open hand.
If you have all the things in your kitchen that you need to cook lovely things, but you are too busy drool-scrolling through other people’s gorgeous kitchens, then just lay the old phone down and go bake some cookies to give away.
You can own lots of things. Just make sure you live generously with your things! Don’t bury them in a museum where they look nice and stay unchipped and unstained and worthless.
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I had this in the drafts folder for a long time. Last week I took it out and dusted it, plumped it up and shined its face. That very day I had a conversation with a friend, and out of the blue she said many of the things I had just written, so I know there are at least two of us. Anybody else out there who can relate?
I thought about that word “grim” and decided that it encapsulates how it feels to die to myself, which was mostly what my Mother’s Day post was about. How about we hit a few of the high spots?
Children are born as little hope capsules. They are the best motivation for people to make the world a better place, to work to level the rough places, and to protect what is worth protecting in our world. In Sunday school we read Jeremiah 32, about a time when Jerusalem was besieged by the Babylonian army, and Jeremiah was confined in the royal palace. He heard a word from God that instructed him to buy a field and to make sure the deed was securely sealed in a clay pot so that it wouldn’t disintegrate. “For this is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Houses, fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land.” Jeremiah was showing his people that it was worth investing in the future, no matter how hopeless their current situation may look. It’s not always going to be this way, friends.
This is the reason we plant fruit trees and build homes and write books and donate to cancer research. Our children or maybe our grandchildren will reap the benefits, even if we don’t. Hope.
Children sense what is real and what is fake. “She is a spoiled brat,” they say frankly. “You’re not listening to me, Mom,” they insist. “He is kind to everybody,” they notice. We call it “having no filter,” but in a child it is usually just honesty. There is no point in pretending that you love a child, then spend your entire life reminding them that they aren’t good enough, quiet enough, clean enough, grown-up enough, etc. They know intuitively what real feels like, whether they can express it or not. Even if they submit to the browbeating, they will know, “Mom never let us have screen time, but she watched Netflix for hours in her room.”
What’s more, they have a built-in bologna detector that gets honed to razor sharpness by the time they are teens. When the children were little, I found out very quickly that I can’t pretend I’m eating carrots when it’s actually chocolate. They can smell it. Busted. Now that they are older, it’s on to higher stakes, bigger inconsistencies. You can’t tell your children that you should love your enemies, then in the next breath mutter road-ragey threats about the idiot who pulled in front of you. They hear and they will call you on it.
These are good things! Death to hypocrisy!
Children have grand ideas, often impractical, but exciting! They want to sleep in a treehouse, on the trampoline, in a hammock, on the sunporch… basically anywhere but in their own comfortable beds. They want to feed hummingbirds and orioles sugar water, plant ornamental gourds, grow strawberry popcorn. They see complicated patterns for colonial costumes and have very specific ideas for appropriate fabric to make them. They need a thousand feet of paracord to make bull whips and another thousand feet of cotton rope for all the macrame things. They assemble bug-out bags and spend their money on lighters and Life-straws from Amazon. And the fishing gear. Oh, Lord, preserve us from more fishing gear.
You know as well as I do that those are good and hopeful things. I’m guessing you also know about the resulting clutter. It has been one of the longest running, most sanctifying works of my life to stop being precious about a tidy house.
“Your place looks like the sort of place where things happen,” a friend said to me. It was meant as a compliment and I accepted it. A place where things happen is not a showplace with no dead leaves on the ferns or stains on the carpets. It’s more like a barn factory where important stuff is going on. You get out the pushbroom at the end of the shift, but you deal with it in its own time.
Our children teach me to laugh, good old belly-laughs. We have inside jokes and then they have inner, inside jokes that I don’t get because I can’t remember all the random stuff they quote. Sometimes they are irreverent and I get flash-backs to my childhood when the witty remarks were flying and my mother was protesting, “Where do you learn this stuff? Is nothing sacred anymore?” My standard advice in this situation? “You can talk like that at home, but it is not appropriate outside the family.” I’m probably not doing too well with this, because I have dubious tastes in what I find funny, and they know it.
I suppose one of the biggest lessons my children continue to teach me is that it’s not about me. That is sort of a circle back to the original “dying to self” motif, but it is also extremely liberating and helpful. Getting over my own self-importance is a life work that I welcome. (Wince.) I am still, as always, learning to offer my work to Jesus and letting it be His business what He does with the investment. So many of the pitfalls of parenting (and life) involve how it makes me look. It becomes impossible to have a pure and quiet heart when appearances become the important thing.
“God gives grace to the humble,” it says in James 4:6. This is a good word for parents to stand on. We don’t know everything, but we know who does.
And there they are, those beloved pieces of my heart, running around outside my body.
Nature held back and held back until hope had been deferred sufficiently, and then she said, “NOW.” Just like that, we get a week of brilliant sunshine after about 6 months of cold and wet (my family says I exaggerate about this) and the green explodes electrically. That may not be a thing where you live, but it is here. Every day I feel more alive, and just when you thought I wasn’t going to do one of those ecstatic spring posts, you’re getting it.
There’s a Carolina wren that hangs out just outside our bedroom door that opens to a smoker’s deck, only we don’t smoke there. I suppose we could call it our coffee deck, or our tea deck in the evening. This summer I am going to flood it with my house plants and pretty stuff to make it even more pleasant. It has a roof made of clear plastic sheets that need to have the moss pressure washed off them, and there is a persistent Virginia creeper that runs along the house wall. The wren seems to like this atmosphere, because she wants to nest somewhere right close by and sing her liquid song of pure joy. I have no objections.
She’s a little behind the robins who have already raised a brood in the bush that climbs up the railing. They regretted their choice of home site as soon as our children realized there was a nest at eye level, and checked on the babies quietly but with much diligence. Yesterday the babies flew away, and the robins are having to decide whether to risk a second brood in the same spot or to rebuild in a quieter neighborhood.
Gregory installed three nesting boxes for bluebirds when we started to notice them in the yard. I keep seeing them flitting about over the garden, their personal smorgasbord. Then they flit right over the privacy fence and go to the neighbor’s bluebird boxes to feed their babies. It seems a little disloyal, but one can forgive a bluebird almost anything.
There’s a Baltimore oriole who occasionally flaunts his brilliant feathers from the tops of the high oaks down to the arbor. He is so beautiful it takes my breath away. I keep scanning the high tree tops where they like to weave their swinging nests, and since the leaves are only starting to blossom out, I can see that he hasn’t built yet. I wouldn’t choose the shagbark hickory, though it’s so high and breezy, because those branches break off so easily and I have to pick them up all the time before I mow. I’m guessing he’ll try for the tallest cherry tree or maybe the oak once his shy wife shows up to show her approval.
Whenever I hear an especially beautiful bird song, I scan until I can find the artist. Last week I located the mockingbird pair, and I’m so glad they’re sticking around to serenade us while they rejoice over their babies.
(Just as an aside… Have you noticed the ecstacy and wonder of the birds rejoicing over their young, over their domestic triumph? When I see people doing the same, I know it’s right and good. There is glory in it, oh yes! Also a lot of insistent, persistent mouths to feed. But it goes with the glory. There’s your little homily for the day, if you’re an exhausted parent. )
When I was mowing with our z-turn mower that has two levers you have to keep level or you veer off course, I was taking a tight circle under a bush and instinctively reached up to free my hair from a branch. Of course, that instantly turned the circle tightly into the bush, and out fluttered an outraged mourning dove. Sorry friend, I won’t do it again. Go back quickly and give your squabs their pigeon milk.
The cardinals absolutely love all the prickly stuff around here. Because they can fly in such a tight, dipping pattern, they can nest in the most inaccessible places. We have enough multiflora roses for a colony of cardinals, and it’s one of the reasons we aren’t clearing them.
The hummingbirds are back and I really need to get some petunias planted for them. I would rather cultivate the flowers that give them their nectar then try to make sure that their feeder is clean and full all summer. But the girls are begging for a feeder, so we’ll probably do both.
Last but not least, the phoebe that has returned to her nest under the awning at the corner of the sun porch has raised another successful brood. Last year there was a lot of stuff piled in that corner, so that she had a decent sense of privacy right outside the window. I cleared all that stuff away this spring, and it was still very cold when she was sitting on her eggs. As soon as it got warm enough for us to start using the sun porch, she felt the intrusion. But she’s a diligent one and look at her! I haven’t noticed her trying to raise another brood yet, so I hope she’s having a little vacation. That was a lot of bugs being stuffed into mouths.
We have crows, and starlings, and lowly sparrows, and even occasional bald eagles floating on the thermals. There are red winged blackbirds and gold finches and so many more. All of them are just doing what they’re supposed to do day after day. To repeat my little homily, there is glory in that. Bless your heart, and go do what you’re supposed to do today.
Me? I’m supposed to clean my house today, get rid of some loose feathers and tuck in the sticks that aren’t settled quite right. I’m also supposed to make some food, and the nestlings need to learn to make some new recipes, so I’ll be doing a bit of coaching.
Ten years ago I prayed very short prayers, mostly in the form of an S.O.S. “Jesus, help me,” or “Your patience, Lord.” There simply wasn’t time for long, theologically impressive prayers.
One day I went to my bedroom, left the door open so nobody would think I was in there, lay behind the bed out of sight, and this is what I prayed: “Please, don’t let me hurt anybody, Jesus.”
I finally set up our desktop computer this week. Yes, a whole year after we packed it for our move. We can access our photo library now, an endless source of amusement.
This was our family on my husband’s thirtieth birthday. He was in nursing school, working part time to support us. Addy was one week old. Alex was eight. Rita was two, going on twelve. It was a sweaty eyeballs time, as Rachel Jankovic would say. It’s a good thing that breathing can be done without conscious effort, else we both would have gently expired for lack of oxygen at some point.
I thought back to this time last week when we went out to eat for Gabe’s fortieth birthday. We used a gift card Alex gave, and everybody had dressed themselves, including footgear. We ate at a steakhouse, and we didn’t have to clean up any spills, or take anybody to the potty, or even cut up their meat.
I thought about it again a few days ago when we ambitiously planned a full day of cooking for the freezer, seeing as the kitchen redo is coming right up and we will be limited in the kitchen for a while. Rita mixed up a triple batch of bread rolls for VBS, her lifelong fascination with patting and shaping yeast doughs having at last come to fruition. Then she mixed up four pounds of meatloaf, again digging in with no qualms because she loves to knead and stir. Addy made monster cookies, also for the upcoming VBS. For some reason those are always huge batches in the Amish cookbooks, but she nailed it perfectly. Olivia assembled beef and bean burritos for an easy future supper, and Gregory peeled 5 pounds of potatoes in less time than it takes to bake a pan full of tater tots. Then he lit the grill and cooked a bunch of pork, both chops and sausage. I floated on the periphery and did quality control. Olivia had been doing laundry all day, and about the time we put away the clean dishes, she was putting away the stacks of folded clothes.
This level of house help wasn’t even imaginable to me ten years ago. I had help: generous, constant help, and I was grateful for it. I just had to be careful not to trip over anybody, and that can be so, so trying. Many of those days felt like it was one step forward, two steps back.
“Don’t let me hurt anybody.” Somewhere in Elizabeth Elliot’s wise writings, I picked up the concept of communicating with short prayers and I continue the practice even now. They are kind of like texting a friend, not nearly as satisfying as a sit-down conversation, but still a way to stay connected.
These days the most frequent snippet is a simple, “Into Your hands.” I don’t even bother to name the concern/fear. I just verbalize the relinquishing and then I (try to) leave it. Sometimes multiple times in a day.
A friend on Instagram (@heartofthebison) has blessed me with her phrase, “I see You, God,” when her eyes light on a beautiful thing in creation. That perfectly tender cucumber I just picked. The folds and folds of a dahlia opening out of a tight bud. The soft edges of the clouds at sunrise. The coincidental arrival of a note in the mail on the very day I need to read it. “I see You, God, and You see me.”
Like many others, I enjoy a good reflective hour or two at the end of a year. This year, though, I can’t seem to process in my usual style. “Well, that happened and then that, and now it’s suddenly over and I will tie a bow neatly on it and get on with the next year.” Without a doubt we have been recipients of great mercy and kindness this year. We have not gotten what we deserved and we have gotten more than we deserved, and a few things we do not feel like we deserved at all. That’s normal enough. It simply feels more obvious when one is looking into a past that doesn’t make sense and a future that is hazy with unknowns. Again, this seems a silly way to try to explain the feel of the past year (isn’t it always this way?), but I am trying to express the vague hunger, the unease of a world that is shaken out of ordinary into unrelenting weirdness. It’s a sort of mourning for things we love that are dying, and a desperate hope that they will be restored to us at some point, but not having any certainty of it.
I wish I could say that I soared gracefully through the “impossible” situations of 2020, but it was more like slogging one foot in front of the other. The mud required hip waders this year, and it is still sucking on my boots, to be honest. Moving this year turned out to be shockingly hard. I can play a cheerful Pollyanna pretty well, especially when someone else is being annoyingly grumpy, but this summer I found a latent strain of wimpiness that I didn’t know was in me. The joy of the Lord is strength, and what do you know? — it has little to do with outward circumstances and depends more on pegging everything on what it actually true. I have a separate post on that for the year-end wrap-up.
I thought I might as well post my Christmas letter this year, written in November. To those of you who got a copy in the mail, please forgive the repetition and skip down to the photos, if you wish.
It’s a sunshiny day, a brilliant gift in November. I caught the little girls outside, barefooted, and quickly assured them that it isn’t that warm! In fact, we have had 2 snowfalls already here in northwest Pennsylvania. The children are thrilled with the prospect of more snow at our new house, and I too find it much more cheering than the mud-brown that our recent winters have been.
It has been a year, hasn’t it? When we say, “The Lord has sustained us,” it carries more meaning than it does when times are untroubled. The same goes for, “The Lord willing, we will do this or that…” It feels like a lovely bonus this year when plans do work out. Through all of the upheaval, we have Great Faithfulness to rely on utterly.
Our 2020 started with normal life on the farm, tending a few pigs and chickens, doing our daily schoolwork, crocheting endless reams of yarn into hats and scarves, and making as much pottery as I had heart for after the busy Christmas season. In February my brother Kenny and his family came to help us butcher our pigs. The guys slaughtered and skinned them, letting them hang for a day while they took all the older children skiing. The next day we made whole hog sausage, scrapple, and lard, all of which turned out exceptionally well and made us feel like good homesteaders.
Gabriel and Alex did ski patrol at Blue Knob whenever there was enough snow on the slopes to open them. They put in lots of effort to pass all the training requirements and Alex was thrilled to be able to assist on a few mountain rescues. He wrote an essay that won a scholarship to Young Adult Patroller camp in Vermont. This was going to be one of his graduation hurrahs.
Unfortunately, the weekend of the camp, Gabriel was in the hospital with a perforated bowel, and Alex had to catch a ride with an elderly patroller who drove extremely carefully for 12 hours. When they got to Vermont, they discovered that the event was cancelled that very day because of Covid lockdown. They had supper, slept there one night, and travelled home again the next day. Alex calls it “That Time I Went to Vermont for Supper.”
Gabriel healed up without any surgery or further problems and came home the day before lockdown. I had laid in a stock of bulk foods at the beginning of the year, and we had all that meat in our freezers. We hunkered down hard and ate a lot of sourdough.
In early March we had made an offer on a 1930’s era fixer-upper in northwestern Pennsylvania. Our choice of location was influenced by a school close to Erie with a nurse-anesthetist program that Gabriel is hoping to get into in the future. Our offer sat on the table while real estate stalled entirely. Meanwhile, our farm was listed on Zillow, and we showed it at least a dozen times. Lots of people were interested in a place with an established orchard, stocked pond, barn, etc, but seemed nervous about the economy, with good reason.
After two months, we got a closing date on the property in Conneaut Lake, and in the third week of May we took the family north in my dad’s old motorhome to start renovations. The house was structurally sound, but not configured like we needed it for our family. We opened up the main living area, reframed the interior walls, tore out floor coverings and drop ceilings, and removed two spiral staircases. We tried to salvage/repurpose as much as we could from the demolition. Fortunately, there is a large shop on the property where we could store our salvaged lumber, hardware, etc. After a week, we went back home to Bedford County so that Gabriel and Alex could work, and we could start packing up the house.
That was when my dad got sick and ended up in the hospital with Covid19 (June 1). It was a very serious illness, and we were not sure he was going to survive, but by the mercy of God, he came home from rehab the week before we had to move (August 1).
The summer remains a blur of stresses we would rather not face again. Gabriel’s work transferred him to the northwest PA hospitals in the end of June. We had planned for the children and I to carry on with the remodel while he put in his three shifts a week. In the end, I decided to stay in Bedford County, try to support Mom as best I could, and focus on packing. Needless to say, the house was far from ready by our August 1 deadline when the new owners wanted to move to our farm. We simply unloaded our household stuff in the shop and kept right on with the camping, air mattresses, folding chairs, incomplete bathroom situation. As we finished rooms, we rooted through our stack of belongings and brought in the appropriate furnishings. Some of us did better with this set-up than others. I can give some good tips for how not to move, if anyone is interested.
We have lived here almost four months now, and the house feels like home. We ran out of steam and quit before we did the kitchen, having left the biggest project until last. It is functional, and for now that is good enough. We have hit our stride with school again, and last week we celebrated finishing first quarter in the books.
In October we took a week to travel to North Carolina, see family, (so many cousins in one place!) and celebrate our 19th anniversary at Myrtle Beach. It was just the sort of trip we needed, and a few days after we got home, my brother Nate and his family came to our house for a few days, so we got to host guests and show them our favorite places around here.
Next week our firstborn turns 18! At some point during the mad rush this summer, Alex finished his school credits and got his diploma. We managed a graduation celebration with friends two days before we moved, and it poured rain the whole evening. It has been a hard year for him, with changing jobs twice, trying to make new friends, having so many plans cancelled, etc. He has been spending a lot of hours in the shop where there is a pneumatic lift installed, tinkering with the dirt bike, go-cart, his trusty little Kia that finally got fatal hiccups, and the Volvo that replaced it.
Gregory is working through tenth grade this year, nose in books a great deal of the time. He has set up his forge in a lean-to and beaten out a bunch of useful things like towel holders and hooks for the house. As of this week, he is happy to be driving on a learner’s permit. As soon as he is able to drive, he’ll be going to the lake to fish every chance he gets.
Olivia is 13, and has learned to do laundry with excellence this year. It has been a great blessing to delegate this chore to her and know that she will be responsible to get it done. She has a servant heart, and a great need to keep her hands busy. Her favorite creative outlet is sewing, knitting, or crocheting: anything with textiles and fibers.
Rita remains our dreamy, outdoorsy, adventure girl. She started up a new series of places to play here, including teepees of sticks in the woods, on the creek bank, and even in the basement. Her favorite school subject is science, and she begs Gregory to teach her all he knows about skinning animals or filleting fish.
Addy is baking a treat for supper as I write this. What she lacks in finesse is made up in enthusiasm. I just heard the unmistakable splat of an egg on the floor, but she is always willing to clean up her messes. This year she no longer felt like a little child. We were surprised at her endurance in the long days of work. In typical youngest child fashion, she keeps us all cracked up at her ability to mimic accents and quote entire lines from books and movies.
Gabriel has been working a stat travel nurse position for UPMC. This means they move him every 6 weeks to places that are understaffed. It also means that he gets into some stressful situations, especially with the recent surge of Covid19 in our region. At his current hospital, ICU nurses are being assigned 3 to 4 patients per shift. Seeing so much suffering and death, he is absolutely exhausted after those 12 hour shifts. We have gotten our shop cleared of the household things so that he can organize his power tools and install heat for wintertime projects. The woodcarving hand tools are in the basement where he can carve spoons and bowls. Our property has a lot of young trees, having been recently logged, but there are plenty of greenwood options. Of course, the house projects are ever with us, but we need a break, so we are taking one.
I have been occupied with turning this house into a home. Decorating is not my strong suit, but I have been trying for “cozy cottage” and it feels good to me now. We have a considerably bigger house to work with, which is nice! I have a studio room in the basement with a large sink, windows, and lots of shelving for my pottery. It is nice to be able to work at things without going outside the house, even though I miss my lovely pottery shed. Having taken a six month break, I am really enjoying getting back into maker-mode. The Etsy shop should have some stock soon.
This letter has taken a rather large space. It has been a full year, in a weird, constricted sort of way. We have flourished and we have suffered. It felt like we were rubber bands, stretching as far as possible, then shrinking back down repeatedly. Sometimes we feel like we might need fresh elastic, but I doubt anyone is ending the year unchanged. With all the social distancing, loneliness, and uncertainty in our world, it felt important to connect and make sure our friends get our new address so that we for sure receive our Christmas letters and photos.
We pray for endurance, for peace, for justice in our world. Even when all seems chaos and confusion, we remember that Jesus came to make the crooked straight and the rough places plain.
Hallelujah for that solid fact, and for the hope that is before us!
Lots of love and blessings to all! Gabriel, Dorcas and family
And here is the picture you didn’t get with your letter, but one that seems appropriate. (Photo credits to Gabe’s sister, Ruby.)
The one photo where the dog behaved beautifully, but none of the people were ready in that exact second.
I saw a winter arrangement with apples on sticks at the orchard, and admired it enough to copycat it on my porch in a planter.
Morning often presents the most spectacular sky of the day here, with clouds obscuring the sun as soon as it rises above the horizon. It’s a great reason to get out of bed.
Here it is, but take it from me and just don’t do it. See, it sounds so deceptively simple. My boys stirred the 1 1/2 cups of water into the 16 oz. of cornstarch and suddenly it all seized up. “Hey, this isn’t working! It said to knead it together with your hands.” Naturally I plunged my hands into the mass to knead it and instantly got a traumatic flashback from years gone by.
Back then I was working part time at a bulk food store and occasionally there was a need to scoop corn starch from a large bag into smaller sized bags for the shelf. The first time I was assigned that job, I scooped right into the powdery stuff. It squeaked and felt silky and hard at the same time and my every hair stood on end in horror. I was too embarrassed to tell my boss that I would rather do anything else, please just let me wash up the floors on my hands and knees. Anything else. That day I got cornstarch overload and I got really good at being busy whenever it needed to be bagged again. Anytime a recipe calls for cornstarch, I am very, very careful with spooning it out. I get a nasty little chill just stirring a few tablespoons into liquid.
But after reading how neat this stuff is, today I dug my fingers into the oobleck, then shuddered and quickly went to the sink to wash the mass off my hands. The children found it terribly fascinating, how it gelled and wept and turned mysteriously solid by turns. I let them make a huge mess all over the kitchen because I knew cornstarch washes up very easily. My oldest son couldn’t believe I tolerated the drippings and spills. He got a spatula and tried valiantly to keep it in one spot on the table, to corral it into a bowl, just anything to contain it. “Mama! They even have it on the wall! Make them stop.” He was nearly frantic so I reassured him and sent him out of the room until the little girls were done having fun. They tiptoed into the bathroom for a full scrub down and then I cleaned the kitchen for the second time today.
This is one “neat” experiment that is definitely not for the faint of heart. I guess next time we probably will just pass on it.
This month I have been a pen out of ink. I scratched a few paragraphs now and then, deleted the whole works, or left them to moulder in the drafts folder. Even the annual Christmas letter was a chore. I like pens that glide along smoothly without sputters and skips. Anything else is insufferable! So I can only thank the Lord that blogging is for writing when you enjoy it and that I have never imposed deadlines on myself.
All this time I was out of Earl Grey, folks. Two weeks in a row I forgot to go to the tea aisle in the grocery store. I drank coffee, which is a satisfying experience all its own, but sometimes a girl wants. just. tea! I have a whole shelf of boxes of other teas. My husband likes variety, and so does Gregory, my little tea drinking buddy. On Monday morning I was reading in the quiet when I heard Greg stirring around in the kitchen. To my surprise he brought me the steaming mug he had been concocting according to his Greg Standard of Perfect Tea. It was so liberally adorned with cream and sugar as to hardly be recognizable as tea. Later I saw that he had served me detox tea, which struck me as extremely funny, taking into consideration all the “bad stuff” he dumped into it. I walked over to my grocery list and I wrote it down nice and bold: EARL GREY. This week I bought a ginormous box, inhaled deeply the intoxicating scent of Bergamot oil, and was happy.
It is such a joyful season, yet I found myself praying, yearning with my heart in my throat for days as I followed the story of a family who was keeping vigil around a gunshot victim in the hospital. Yesterday he died. As I was wrapping a few small gifts, I kept thinking about what a sad, sad Christmas this will be for that family and for his friends. It took me back five Decembers when a beloved friend of mine, the wife of my cousin, lay on life support in a hospital. Her transport to glory left me with the anguished question, “Why? There are six little children here, Lord! Couldn’t you see that?” I have never faced a more severe attack on my faith. As the questions poured out, I received the beautiful assurance of the solid fact that Jesus is Emmanuel: God with us. Here in our mess and our hurt and our confusion, He is Prince of Peace. He came to give life, if we can only see that the passing of His friends is the ultimate giving of LIFE. I have seen the triumph of those who embrace this truth, who refuse to let it go in the midst of the most painful times imaginable.
He is with us! “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14) That is all we need to know, really. There is a sturdy quality to such faith that confounds even the staunchest unbelievers. I hear my little girl singing her version of a children’s song: “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy… down in the guts of my heart!” Her siblings say, “Depths, not guts!” but she is sticking to her version. It reminds me that faith touches us in the visceral regions where logic and reason are no comfort at all. I see the impossible joy and peace blanket the soul and I say,
So when she was single, the girl didn’t dream much about ordinary things. The thing about dreams is that they are wonderful. In them, she was the heroine. She was visible. She was on top, making a difference, feeling fulfilled. She didn’t think so much of dirty, gritty details like insufficient toilet facilities and sickness in missionary families far from good medical care. She didn’t dream of difficulties; she dreamed of adventure and achievement. Of course, she reserved a very private place where she dreamed of the love of a good man and the security of marriage. To her amazement, she really did get that love and marriage (and the babies, and the baby carriage)! Wow. Things settled into a somewhat frantic routine of not neglecting the thing that was right in front of her. There really was not a lot of time for a head in the clouds.
She was sort of a hard learner, and it took a while for her to “get it” that as a married woman, there would be glory in the meld of her dreams with her husband’s dreams. Her role was cast by God as a supporting role, a helper without whom her husband would be a bit disabled. 🙂 With the years and a good bit of trial and error, she came to understand that it was a wonderful place, a privilege to stand behind her man, to help him achieve his dreams. I am not suggesting that she was on such an exalted plane that she never whined, “But, what about Me?”
Here is what she wishes she had known all along. The happy woman keeps her dreams portable. There is only frustration and unloveliness in doggedly trying to make things happen the way she thinks they should happen.
Life is seasons. There may come a time for some of the obscure dreams to become reality. But for now, she is free to revel in the everyday, sometimes camouflaged goodness that is given. I have learned something from that girl. (Work with me here. Pretend you don’t see through that third person thing. 🙂 ) Just because living is lots of sameness and hard work doesn’t mean it is not valuable. The things which endure grow out of the ordinary.
wocket in my pocket 