Good things

So, there are good things and there are bad things. Good thing: I finally got my tomatoes, peppers and eggplants planted. Bad thing: There were flea beetles on my eggplants the minute I put them in the ground and I can't remember where I put my floating row cover. Good thing: We just had a delicious lunch of charcoal-broiled chuckburgers with grilled buns, homemade redskin potato salad and corn. Bad thing: I'm so stuffed from eating that I really need a nap, and it's just too beautiful to spend the day sleeping. Good thing: It's nice enough to have all of the doors and windows open. Bad thing: the flies have decided that today is a good day to multiply and conquer.

Still, the good stuff is just too good to pass up, eh?

Now, I'm off to nap off those chuckburgers.

Psalm 51

Things I Love Right Now

That the dryer is running.
Homemade hot fudge sauce.
My son's recent amazing change in behavior.
My daughter being home from college for the summer.
My daughter scoring a job at a local greenhouse.
The This American Life podcast.
My vegetable and flower gardens.
My fruit trees.
My ASPARAGUS! I'm totally digging that!
That The Baby is missing her front tooth.
That the family has a music studio set up in our gathering room and intermittently jams together throughout the day (video soon to follow!)
The four little kitties we have that the girls and Monet are totally in love with. I do not, however, love their poop.
Seeing Rejoice laugh.
God's amazing provision in my life, even when I totally screw things up.
The chapter "Blink of an Eye" in Anne Lamott's book, Grace, Eventually.
Facebook. Totally. I know.
Mike Birbiglia.
Greenhouses. Yet spending money in them--not so much.
Sweetheart's piano playing.
Houdin's piano playing.
Rejoice's piano playing.
Monet's drumming.
Bard's guitar-playing.
Sweetheart's fiddling.
Working vehicles.
Twitter.
Life in general.

How about you? What do you love right now?

Today...

I miss my mom.

::: dance, boy :::

It didn't seem all that long ago that I was stuffing the squirming toddler Houdin, a Hot Wheels car tightly gripped in his fist, into a miniature black suit so that he could saunter down the aisle at my sister-in-law's wedding and wiggle his little-boy dances at the reception. That's been about fourteen years ago, and now that little boy, who had to have his diaper changed right before the ceremony, has grown into some guy I barely recognize, a guy who bangs out Ben Folds and The Beatles on the piano, sings songs I sang when I was his age, and dances whenever the mood strikes, and today, he is wearing a glossy size 13 dress shoe and snazzy black tuxedo. In a few minutes, Bo and I will climb into the car and journey with our soon-t0-be eighteen-year-old spiffed-up, showered, shaved and shined son to his girlfriend's house, almost two hours away, and he'll go to his first prom.

We've had a rough time of it, Houdin and I. He's so much like I was at that age, and probably still am today--stubborn, opinionated, indignant and mouthy. But I can't even begin to tell you how much love fills to overflowing in this heart of mine when I see what a young man he has become. In the end, it doesn't really matter if he keeps his room clean, or if he passes algebra, or if he wears white dress shirts and khaki pants. What matters is that we have a relationship, that he knows I love him so deeply that I would give my very life for him.

I'm not proud of all of the mistakes I've made in raising a son. I wish I would have been less critical, less impatient, less demanding. I wish I would have known more, read more, prayed more, loved more. I'm so grateful for a God who can heal brokenness, can turn our mourning into dancing.

But, Houdin, I'm proud of who you are. I'm proud of who you're going to be. I'm proud of who you've been.

Now, get out there and dance.

The Swaziland Book Project

We are blessed to have "Rejoice," a young man from Swaziland, living in our home through the end of June. Rejoice has shared with us that access to print media, especially books, is very limited. It's very difficult for a person to get a library card, and libraries are hot, crowded and inadequately supplied. He would like to build a personal library to share with others in his village. We would like to help him by gathering these books and shipping them to his home in Swaziland.

Below, you'll find a list of specific books that Rejoice would like to own as well as a few suggestions from me.

If you would like to help Rejoice build a library, there are several ways you can help:

• You can send any extra copies of these or other appropriate books that you might have;
• You can locate any of these books through Amazon or some other book dealer and have them sent to Rejoice here at our home so that we can compile batches and send them to Swaziland;
• You can donate money to help others locate and purchase these books for Rejoice as well as postage to ship the books;
• You can donate or suggest other books that you feel would be of interest to Rejoice. If there are books that you feel are important for a person to have in their personal library and you have additional copies of those books, donations of those would also be appreciated.
• Once monetary donations have been made, you can help locate copies of the books Rejoice has requested.

If you would like to help in any of these ways, please contact me at books4thoksATgmailDOTcom (replacing the words with the appropriate symbols). If you would like to donate specific titles, please send me those titles so they're not duplicated by others.

Thank you for helping with this project, and I welcome you to spread the word to others you think might be able to help.

My suggestions:

Anything by C.S. Lewis
Pilgrim's Progress
Hind's Feet on High Places
A Wrinkle in Time
Anything by George McDonald
Anything by Max Lucado

Rejoice's List, according to his priorities:

1. Christian books

• Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life - Donald S. Whitney
• Spiritual Leadership - Oswald J. Sanders
• Spiritual Discipleship - Oswald Sanders
• A Biblical Theology of the Holy Spirit
• Planting and Growing Churches for the 21st Century- Aubrey Malphurs
• What everyone Should Know about Leadership and Church Structure- Denis Moses
• The Power of Prayer and Fasting
• The Spiritual Keys to Spiritual Growth
• Launch: Starting a New Church from Scratch

2. Business related.

• The Bankable business plan
• Start your own business 4th edition
• Bankable business plans for entrepreneurial ventures
• Everything start your own business
• small business start up kit
• excel for dummies 2007 or 08
• marketing for dummies
• public relations for dummies
• marketing tool kit
• competitive strategy- Michael E. porter
• strategic marketing management - Richard M.S. Wilson
• Financial accounting
• book keeping basics- Debra Rueqq
• starting and building a non profit- peri Pakroo
• cash flow for non profits - Murray Propkin
• quick books

3. Miscellaneous

• The 25 best time management tools and techniques- Pamela and Doug Sunhedem
• any book about writing resumes e.g. Expert resumes for managers and executives
• Job searching
• career guidance
• Beef and dairy cattle - Heather Smith Thomas
• Raising milk goats
• raising poultry

Note from Rejoice: "Please be informed that I would like to have any other suggested book that you think could be helpful in developing young adults and some teens into matured people who are well established in their faith in Christ Jesus. May God bless you as you are working on this book hunting process."

Good Day, Sunshine!

Remember those gorgeous Spring days when the sun was shining, and you'd drag the record player to the other room and stick the speakers in the windows, find your favorite Beatles record, and play "Good Day, Sunshine" while your mom pulled weeds and you raked the crass clippings into a wheelbarrow that would be hauled up to the vegetable garden and thrown down between the rows of onions, carrots, peas and lettuce?

Remember how the wind would blow ever so gently, just enough to cool the sweat on your brow, but not so wild as to toss around the piles of clippings you'd worked so hard to rake? If you did a good job, there might be a trip to the ice cream shop in your future, or a few dollars in your pocket to use at that summer's festival. Every once in a while, you'd stop for a drink of ice water or fresh mint tea, and you'd linger a bit too long, and your mom would shout out a reminder to get back to work, and you'd haul yourself back in from the roof to go back to the sunshine and grass and dandelion fluff and bickering with your sisters or brothers. And if no one was looking, you could lay back in the cool grass under the tree or stretch out in the hammock until someone noticed and cried "no fair!" And then you'd grudgingly pick up a rake and get back to work. At least until you could sneak away long enough to take a peek into the bluebird box and see that there's a mama bird sitting on her tiny sky blue eggs.

Yeah.

That's what my kids' day is like today, right down to the record player in the window. Since their sister sent her Beatles vinyls home from college yesterday, they've been spinnin' the tunes, and it's a soundtrack custom-made for a day like today. "Here Comes the Sun" and "Good Day, Sunshine" are in rotation.

"I need to laugh, and when the sun is out
I've got something I can laugh about
I feel good, in a special way
I'm in love and it's a sunny day."

I'm telling you, there could barely be a better day, unless I had a maid to clean my house and a cook to make dinner while I'm outside digging in the dirt, spreading manure and sowing seeds.

I have work to do inside, filling out forms and finishing video projects, but I just can't tear myself away from the beauty of this day. I absolutely want to soak up every minute of this paradise.

Always Learning

"The parent who sees his way––that is, the exact force of method––to educate his child, will make use of every circumstance of the child's life almost without intention on his own part, so easy and spontaneous is a method of education based upon Natural Law. Does the child eat or drink, does he come, or go, or play––all the time he is being educated, though he is as little aware of it as he is of the act of breathing."

~Charlotte Mason

Calling All Organic Gardeners: The Forty-Eight Hour Contest

On Saturday, I will be giving a presentation on organic gardening for the home gardener at our local public library as part of an Everyday Organic program and would be pleased as punch if you would send me your very favorite organic gardening tips. What works for you? What doesn't? What is your favorite home-gardening tool? Book? Website? Mulch? I would love tips on everything from pest control, to soil enhancement/management, to weed control, from veggie gardening, to flower gardening, to natural landscaping. 

I'll choose one name at random from the comments to send a fun gardening care package featuring some of my favorite seeds (including a few from my home garden), a Mary Jane's Farm magazine and some other excellent gardening stuff. 

Offer ends at midnight on Friday, so comment now, and spread the word! 

Morning Walk

After I took Rejoice to work this morning, I took a walk around town, snapping photos of what I saw there, as well as what I saw on my way home and in my own front yard. 

Rabbit the Lamb, named because when he came to us, he wasn't much bigger than a rabbit, and he kinda looked like one. 

Lewis the Dog, named after C.S. Lewis

A neighbor plowing his field.

A neighbor's sheep grazing.

One of the local Amish one-room schoolhouses.

A buggy tied to the rail at the local grocery. 

In the woods during my walk. I saw a bunch of deer near this spot. 

A sign and display near the grocery. 

The gorgeous trees lining the street in town.

At the Recital

I felt a dream today,
my cheekbone against the top of your head,
separated only by the thickness of my flesh
and the softness of your hair;
Deep breaths through my nostrils,
inhaling the scent of you,
feeling your pulse against my face
(or was it mine?),
I had to coax myself into realizing
that you were real.

::: ode to the cherry tree :::

Blow-Up

Our cherry tree
Unfolds whole loads
Of pink-white bloom -
It just explodes.

For three short days
Its petals last.
Oh, what a waste.
But what a blast.

~X. J. Kennedy

When we bought our first piece of property in a rural county eight and a half years ago, one of the first things I did was take seriously author Gene Logsdon's advice to plant fruit trees first. I ordered a selection of bareroot dormant saplings from Schlabach's Nursery and waited. Our good friend Richard, who had sold us the property, came with a tractor and auger attachment and dutifully dug holes where I pointed, which I then filled with organic junk--manure, peat, sawdust--and I was ready for my trees to arrive. 

When they came, life was moving a bit too fast, so I followed the instructions, keeping what looked like dead sticks moist and cool. I couldn't believe, looking at these things, that they would ever actually be trees. And I was right, for some of them. The nectarine and one plum never did grow. One peach tree filled with peaches last summer and then, before they ripened, before the promise of peach jam and peach pie, they all withered and the tree died. It stands there still. I haven't yet had the heart to cut it down. I kept hoping that, this year, in the face of all that is obvious, it would still bloom and produce fruit, but it has not. 

The cherry tree, however, which was actually planted very first and came not from Schlabach's Nursery but from a greenhouse sale the very first year we were here, was planted in the fall of 2000 and has grown into a fine and beautiful tree. It's called a Hedelfingen Cherry tree and is supposed to produce sweet cherries. Unfortunately, we haven't really had much fruit from it, and the cherries are not large and sweet, but small and light in color. I planted a companion for this tree in hopes of providing a pollinator, but that tree hasn't grown so well and even had to work hard to recover from the damages caused by renegade goats. 

But the blooms on the Hedelfingen tree are beautiful, and when I look out my kitchen window to see the bursts of white inviting the bees to come and feast, my heart knows that it's spring. It asks me if I'd like to stop what I'm doing, pack a picnic lunch, and relax beneath its boughs. 

I'm so glad that I took Mr. Logsdon's advice. I do hope to come up with a good pest prevention program, as my poor trees are constantly attacked by every aphid and curculio there can possibly be, but, still, the benefits of beauty remain. 

Follow Mr. Logsdon's advice. Do yourself and the bees a favor. Plant a fruit tree today! 

::: a walk on the trail :::

SPRING!

Facebookin'

It was early in the facebook craze when a college-aged friend told me about the social networking site. At that point, facebook was mostly for college students. I don't think it even accepted high school students then. I was skeptical of it. Okay, let me rephrase that. I thought it sounded pretty stupid. 

I mean, "facebook?" What the heck? What does that even mean? 

I tucked the concept away, sticking it into my brain's version of the mini mesh metal trash can in my Mac's dock. Much like with that icon, there are times when I fail to right-click on my brain's trash can and choose "empty." 

So years later, when my high-school aged children mentioned facebook again, I opened the contents of my brain's trash folder and scanned the files. Ah, yes. There it is. That's the site I thought was so stupid years ago. Facebook? What does that even mean? 

"It's like a yearbook, Mom. Get it? Like a yearbook online, where you can see everyone you know, and all of their information, and their pictures. I think you'd like it. You should join."

And to appease my children, I let them set me up with a facebook page. 

Oh. My. Goodness. 

Suddenly the social networking world opened me up and swallowed me whole. Sure, I had a blog. Sure, I had a myspace. But this--THIS--was something completely different. With facebook, I could keep in touch with all of my young friends, like my speech and debate students, and my homeschool group students, and even my college-aged friend who first introduced me to facebook. I could keep in touch with my extended family, posting pictures and having brief discussions. I could even have conversations with my children, play games like Scrabble and TextTwirl. I could keep in touch with friends who had moved away or I'd moved away from. I could connect with high school friends that I hadn't seen in twenty years. And instead of asking them to update me on what was going on in their lives, I could just click, click, click, and I'd know what was going on without them even telling me. I could create groups about things I loved, invite people to events I was hosting, or post video projects I'd created. It was like being in one big room where everyone I knew and loved was present (kind of like my idea of heaven!), even though they weren't connected to one another. And because it's a private place, a place where only my friends can view my information and interact with me, I wasn't all that worried about my personal security.

It wasn't long before I was hooked, addicted, strung out on facebook. And it wasn't long after that before I received an e-mail from a friend exposing me to the evils of facebook. A frightening presentation told me about the risks I'm taking by divulging my personal information on a social networking site. In McCarthyistic style, the presentation suggested that the information that I share on facebook could land me on a blacklist sometime in the future, possibly when religious and political freedoms are limited in the United States, possibly in the very near future, and that all information, including my interests, organizations and affiliations, could be used to indict me. 

For a little while, it frightened me. Actually, sometimes it still does. I know what kinds of persecutions took place when between 11 and 17 million men, women and children were systematically exterminated during the Holocaust, starting in 1935 with the Nuremberg Laws and continuing on through the liberation of Theresienstadt in 1945. That kind of systematic destruction of a people is not behind us. It happens today in many forms, whether through the murder of white farmers in South Africa, vandalism and destruction in Turkey, or torture for Christian conversion in Laos. 

So if facebook were a government fact-finding service, designed to collect as much condemning information about me as possible, what would they find? And if I didn't have a facebook, would there still be enough evidence in my life to convict me of being a Christian? A peacemaker? A thinker? An NPR listener? A music lover? A reader? A volunteer? An addict of The Office?

Of course there would be. 

Which brings me to this thought: I'm not worried about my facebook information because I have nothing to hide. I have nothing to hide. I have to think pretty hard when I consider those words. Are they true? Yes. Yes, they are. I have nothing to hide. At least I don't want to hide anything. I want to be real about who I am. I want to be open with the fact that I am an imperfect person. I'm a self-centered, quirky, eclectic, stubborn woman with vain ideas. I'm materialistic and frequently overspend on things I don't need. I lose my temper easily and often get impatient with my loved ones. I'm prone to paranoia, self-doubt and intense moments of self-criticism. I'm a blamer, and I expect way, way, way too much of people. I'm opinionated, idealistic and argumentative. 

But I also want to be open to what God would have me be. Through him, through Jesus, and through the Holy Spirit, my weaknesses can be his strengths. The Holy Spirit can make me what I need to be. I can be kind and loving. I can be a visionary and a peacemaker. I can encourage, lift up, serve and intercede. Through God, I can be made new. 

God is doing all kinds of new things!

Technology is moving forward, and these crazy beings called "people" are moving along with it. While we can lament the disappearance of the hand-written letter and look with disdain upon the rash spontaneity of e-mail and text messaging, the truth is that these actions are merely symptoms of a truth. Human beings want to interact with someone. They're looking for acceptance, love and relationship. They're looking for someone to always be there to hear them, to listen, to respond. 

I believe that God can use me, in all of my imperfection and maybe even in spite of it, to work in the lives of others, being his hands and feet, his eyes, ears and mouth. 

And I believe that he can use these ridiculous inventions like social networking sites to do it. 

Up next, my thoughts on Twitter. 

Exorcising Demons

I began writing at age five. 

The first thing I wrote was jotted on a single piece of notebook paper with scrawled, childlike stick figures illustrating a story consisting of five or six lines. It was a story about my mother, about one of my first visits to the hospital to see her. It wasn't very descriptive, and the plot line was kind of predictable, but it told the story, and it served its purpose. My mom was sick. We drove to the hospital. We went inside. We rode up the elevator. We went in to see her. The end. And there is five-year-old-me, illustrated by five-year-old me, in all of my wild-haired, five-year-old, stick-figured glory, walking into a hospital room to see my mother. 

That was one of the first of many hospital visits, one of many times I'd write about my mother, most of which took shape in the many different handwriting styles I experimented with in the eight years that I intermittently kept my thoughts locked in a small, white diary purchased for me at Hallmark Cards.  Over those eight years, I both embraced and abandoned that book, filling its pages with careless ramblings, self-absorbed complaints, hormonal rages and irrational declarations of undying love, leaving it on a shelf, forgotten, to find it again, scratch out the names of my forever-loves and pencil in some new ones. While I'd like to say that this no longer characterizes my writing, I'd be lying. Nothing has changed, really, except for my writing style, my spelling abilities, and the fact that I don't dot my i's with little hearts or confess fantasies about Luke Duke. 

Reading that early diary as an adult has always been painful for me, has always sucked me straight back into those helpless, hapless, heavy days of childhood, when my parents argued, my mother left my father over and over again, like a tragic After School Special on a terrible rewind-replay loop, and I, an only child, caught in the middle, would go with whoever tugged the hardest, moved the quickest, drove the fastest. This was always my mother, who, ironically, claimed to be so ill and frail. My father would watch, a heartbreaking vision of pitifulness, as I, staring out the rear window of the station wagon or Pinto or pickup truck, watched his motionless retreat as my mother sped from the white limestone driveway. What were they fighting about? 

I never knew. 

I'd like to say that I felt loved during those times, when the two grown people who meant so much to me would battle for my possession, but I didn't. I don't. They were using me to hurt each other. I could sense it then, but I know it now. These leavings were not in my "best interest," as my mother tried to reason, when she tried to reason. The places my mother took me, her safe places, were not my safe places. Always to the home of a divorced friend or a non-matronly woman would we flee, and they would sit at the table, smoking cigarettes, drinking Coke and hating men, no one serving me cookies or clucking over me with concern, the poor little girl with the broken family. And I know now that my dad always knew where we were. These safe places were not secret places at all, so I resent him for not rescuing me from those houses that were not home, from those older boys and girls who would lure me out back or into the cornfield or the garage with promises of friendship or kittens or candy only to whip down my pants, or theirs, leaving me embarrassed and confused, my empty hands and heart still outstretched, waiting for the promised prize while my mother, inside, played Bridge and laughed. 

As I grew older, my parents no longer fought over me as much as they fought about me. My father, in his own immaturity, lobbied for arbitrary freedoms like extended bedtimes, or another dollar, or one more ride down the sliding board. My mother, who was trying to raise a daughter who would not be a spoiled brat (her words), would emphatically say no. And I, like a normal, selfish child, sided with my dad, leaving my well-intentioned mother feeling rejected, which made her angry, which made her lash out at both of us, but especially at me. This made my dad and me a team, and I liked that. We were comrades. She was the enemy. My dad was fun-loving and reasonable. My mother was rigid and hateful and, when my dad was at work, physically and verbally abusive. It was all very clear in my young mind who was right and who was wrong. In spite of her tremendous housecleaning ("neat freak," I would call her disdainfully), creative abilities (she was an artist, a writer, a seamstress, a knitter, an interior designer), and her industriousness (she grew her own garden, canning and freezing and cooking from scratch; though I loved my mom's cooking, my deepest longing was for a McDonald's to be built in the cornfield next to my house), my mother, I knew, was ill. And eventually, I knew, she was also crazy. One sarcastic or disrespectful word from me could send her into a fit of physical and verbal rage. Once, when I muttered under my breath an epithet that I'd often heard my dad utter, "You 'ol bat," she came after me so hard and with such force that I was cowering in the corner, wrapping my arms around my head to ward off the blows. 

So nothing she did or asked me to do could ever be reasonable. I despised her, looked on her with loathing. Even in her years of manic depression, after her several attempted suicides and threats to kill both my dad and me, when she was spending more time in the psychiatric ward of the hospital than out, receiving massive amounts of medication and regular rounds of shock therapy, I was angry and disgusted with her. I clearly remember the afternoon we were returning her to the psychiatric ward after a weekend visit as she, sitting in the front seat of the truck where I was wedged between her and my father, looked at the digital radio display which read 96.5 and slurred, in all seriousness and panic, "Oh...God...no! It's 9:65! I'm...late! They might not let me sign back in! I'm...late!" 

Stop the dramatics, I thought, and grow up. Be normal. None of us feel sorry for you, and you're ruining my life. You're supposed to be the mother. You're supposed to be raising me, for crying out loud. 

And while those things may have been true, there really was nothing she could do about it.She was, it would become clear later, sick beyond recovery, and no amount of medication or shock treatment would reverse the depression she endured. What was worse, for me, was that there was nothing I could do about it, either. So I ran to my own safe places--friends, little pink hearts, writing, hair, clothes, music, roller skating, obsessions with boys--and I would roll my eyes when she would say she was "depressed." What a rotten little liar of a word. Depressed. Just another way of saying, "I'm choosing to care more about myself than I care about you. Give me my crossword puzzle, my anti-depressants and my cigarettes and leave me alone." I hated that word, depressed, swore I would never use it. It meant selfishness, weakness and ugliness. My mom was selfish, weak and ugly. If ever I were a mom, I would be giving, strong and beautiful. I would take care of my children. Be responsible. They would love me devotedly. She was inhuman and wrong. I would do things right.

I didn't always scribble the angry thoughts or even the arguments on the pages of my diary. Most of those are still burrowed like a tumor in my head. My writing was always cathartic, but it wasn't always real. Or maybe I wasn't always real. I don't know. But when I read back through the writings of the younger me, I simultaneously remember the events and am a stranger to them. When I read what the young, impetuous, clueless me saw of my world, thought was important, the me of ages 10-18, I feel ashamed and appalled. Who was this child, so prone to selfishness and melodrama, who thought she knew everything? Who was so very wrong? What value does such hedonistic writing have?

What I realize now is that it wasn't the product of the writing that was important. It was the catharsis. Writing helped me through those times when I was confused and alone, when the ones who were supposed to be my strength were too weak to help me. My diary was my therapy, my confidante, my God before I knew my God. It wasn't meant to be re-read and analyzed. It had served its purpose of helping me sort out my feelings. It was no longer needed. This is why, on a brisk winter day in late January, I sent the little thirty-year-old diary out with the burn trash. "If you see a little white book in there, don't rescue it," I told my young son as he headed out the door with the matches. "I want you to burn it. It's not worth saving."

Some days, I forget that my writing still serves me. I try to make what I tap out onto the screen palatable, homogenized, inoffensive, easily digestible. But that's not always what my writing is meant to be. While I do hope it speaks to someone or moves someone or motivates someone, I also know that it helps me pick through the train wreck of my thoughts, memories, ideas and fears. I once read an interview with Stephen King in which he said that he writes is to get the menacing thoughts out of his own head. He writes to exorcise the demons. He writes to answer the "what ifs" in his mind. 

While my writing is no longer locked away in a little white diary, decorated with a disembodied female head and her flowing floral tresses, whose key was misplaced long ago, it still serves that purpose of exorcising demons, hacking through the tangles of my thoughts with the machete that is my pen or keyboard. My writings are letters from my spirit to my God, from my past to my present to my future,  from my brain to my heart, or vice-versa. The blank page does not sit in judgement of my feelings, but listens quietly, soaking in each word. My writing is a place where I can be giving, strong and beautiful, in spite of what my loved-ones think. 

But it's also a place where I can be selfish, weak and ugly. 

Even depressed.

A human being can be nothing less than all of these.  

A Lamb by Any Other Name

A couple of weeks ago, Monet was given a little lamb to raise. Monet thought the scrawny runt looked more like a rabbit and, in fact, I've held rabbits that have weighed more, so the bundle of wool and blood and goo was given the name Rabbit. Six times a day, Monet feeds Rabbit from a bottle, a task that takes just minutes per feeding. Rabbit guzzles down the warm liquid and nuzzles the baby bottle for more. Now that he's older, he's become much like Mary's lamb, following Monet everywhere he goes, acting more like a dog than a farm animal. When the children run out to play, there's Rabbit, hopping and leaping along, kicking his feet up under himself and twisting in the air. When I see him, I can't help reciting this poem:

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee,

Gave thee life, and bade thee feed

By the stream and o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing, wooly, bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice?

Little lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;

Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:

He is called by thy name,

For He calls Himself a lamb,

He is meek, and He is mild,

He became a little child;

I a child, and thee a Lamb,

We are called by His Name.

Little lamb, God bless thee!

Little lamb, God bless thee!

Poem by William Blake

What Forty Looks Like

Here's what I am: 40. Here's when it

happened: yesterday. Here's what I did: went to the zoo. Here's what I had: fun. 

Last summer, we bought a membership to the Columbus Zoo, and we made good use of it. We visited several zoos within driving distance, including the Columbus Zoo. Problem was, it was Africa hot on the day we went, so we were only able to enjoy 1/3 of the zoo before we were forced to the comfort of our hotel room. 

That's cool, though, because we didn't know at that time that we'd be welcoming Rejoice into our lives. I thought it would be a great idea to go to the zoo for Sweetheart's and my birthdays, which are within days of each other, because we could show the zoo to Rejoice. Just a few days before we were going to go, before we had told Rejoice that we were going, we played an after-dinner game of I Never, a game where you try to earn tokens, pennies or pieces of candy by having never done some thing your opponents have done. It was then that Rejoice shared with us, before he knew of our plan, that he had never been to a zoo! 

So we took the day to go to the zoo. Here, for your enjoyment, are some of the photos.

Right Now

Listening to: U2's No Line on the Horizon. Favorites: Moment of Surrender, Unknown Caller, White as Snow.
Cleaning: under my bed. I don't know if I've ever seen anything quite so disgusting and dusty! Finally taking down my Christmas decorations from my bedroom. They were so pretty and peaceful, I just didn't want to do it until it was officially Spring.
Thinking: about grace, compassion, justice, truth, wisdom.
Dreaming: of a worry-free vacation. Probably won't happen this side of heaven!
Worrying about: money, provision, though I know I shouldn't. I do what I can and the rest is in God's hands.
Remembering: when money really, really was a problem. Repossessed car, threat of losing our home, young children, no groceries. I have so very much and need to remember how many have so little.
Talking: to my daughter on the cell phone. The school year is almost over, and end of the year stuff is due. The opening night of the play she's in, God's Favorite, is Friday night.
Processing: complicated events from the weekend.

What's new with you? What are you doing right now?

In Which God Smiles on My Garden

I'm so amazed by this incredible weather! And what are the chances that I get this weather AND a spot of energy to go along with it? It's, like, amazazing!

And can you believe that I got all of my red onions planted this morning? So, get this. My flower beds are cleaned out, my manure is spread, my asparagus is coming up, I will finally have RHUBARB this year, after years of failed attempts, my garlic is sprouting, the chives are up, my fall bulbs are coming up, the lilac and hydrangea lived, AND I planted three rows of red onions! I'm almost afraid to believe it all. It's like the heavens opened up and God said, "I love you, Thicket Dweller." It's incredible, I tell ya. Just incredible.

I hope to scatter some lettuce seeds today. Maybe some arugula, some romaine, maybe even some parsley and cilantro so I can stop buying it when I make ranch dressing.

I know that it's pitiful that things like this get me so excited, but what can I say? These are the very reasons I moved to the country! And after eight years of struggling with garden and livestock issues, it's incredibly refreshing to actually have something go right.

Hallelujah!