Pumpkin Patch

Last night, under a glorious half-moon, we harvested a lovely crop of pumpkins at our place. They are at varying stages of ripeness, but with the danger of frost that evening, we decided to bring them in.

This is a very special crop of pumpkins. We never watered them. We didn't weed them. We didn't tend them in any way. In fact, we didn't even know that these pumpkins existed until a couple of weeks ago!

My husband discovered these pumpkins when he was out checking the cattle in the pasture close to our house. Here they were, growing in a dirt/burn pile we have in our pasture. This pile is waiting for a calm, damp day to be burned, which never quite happened this summer, and so instead became a pumpkin patch, unbeknownst to us.

It is not a great mystery how pumpkins came to be growing in our burn pile. Each year, I purchase a pumpkin for the kids to carve. Last year, I decided to buy an extra one to make into pie or soup. The one previous time I tried to make a pumpkin into a pie it resulted in a lumpy stew which could hardly be called a puree, and so I have never tried it again. However, my husband has made a pumpkin soup before that he was interested in trying again. The carved pumpkin's face had long since collapsed and ended up in the compost, and still this other, extra pumpkin sat on a shelf awaiting it's fate. And still longer. And perhaps Christmas came and went and squashes of any variety are remarkably long-lived.

Eventually, I got tired of looking at the pumpkin and it's only good use was to be smashed and shot at, which the boys were eager to take care of. They took the pumpkin out to the burn pile and first used it as target practice and then finished it off by smashing it to pieces, effectively scattering the seeds. And spring came, and the seeds grew and flowers blossomed and pumpkins formed and now we are the proud owners of 13 pumpkins. Which is really quite a happy thing.

Earlier this week, I went to visit my husband's aunt in the hospital. Just before I left, I asked her if she would like me to read a Bible passage to her. She suggested a passage and I went ahead read it. She said, “That was very nice, but that was not the passage I asked for.” Eventually, I located the right passage and read that too. But it was the first, “wrong” passage that stuck with me.

                        Here is a trustworthy saying:

                                If we died with him,

                                   we will also live with him;

                               if we endure,

                                  we will also reign with him.

                               If we disown him,

                                  he will also disown us;

                              if we are faithless,

                                 he will remain faithful,

                                for he cannot disown himself.

                                                     2 Timothy 2:11-13

God is faithful. God cannot be untrue to his character. And God is the consummate creator of new beginnings, the God of redemption. So that even with our failed attempts and neglected obligations, God still creates something new, some unexpected blessing, even for the faithless. Sort of like our pumpkin. We had left it too long to be of any good and it ended up on the garbage heap. But that wasn't the end of the story, even though we thought it was. The God of creation took over and life began again. It kind of makes me want to do something proper with these pumpkins we have now, to make that pie or that soup, to not just let them go to waste. Now, if I can just remember that life can grow up from the ashes of other, larger, life mistakes, there would be a lot of Thanksgiving to be had.  

Birthday Blessings

Norma Katherine Peters Funk

Born September 16, 1947

She is clothed with strength and dignity;

she can laugh at the days to come.

She speaks with wisdom,

and faithful instruction is on her tongue.

She watches over the affairs of her household

and does not eat the bread of idleness.

Her children arise and call her blessed;

her husband also, and he praises her:

"Many women do noble things,

but you surpass them all."

Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting;

but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.

Give her the reward she has earned,

and let her works bring her praise at the city gate.

Proverbs 31:25-31

This is who my mother is.

I have learned much of value from her:

to protect,

to listen,

to pray,

to trust,

to persevere,

to wait,

to learn,

to never stop growing.

She is a woman of great character, a woman of tender wisdom and kindness, a woman of deep faith.

I am blessed to call her Mom.

Happy 65th birthday, Mom;  I wish you many more!

Happy September

It has long been my view that the New Year ought to start in September. It lines up so conveniently with the change of seasons – from summer to fall. It coincides with a change of pace – from vacation to work. It seems to me such a happy time with harvest and canning and ripening apples, colourful leaves and sweaters and “bouquets of sharpened pencils,” as Tom Hanks' character writes in the movie “You've Got Mail.”

And then, of course, there are the bright shiny new school supplies that just radiate optimism and hope. All those fresh, unused crayons, the glue sticks that have yet to dry out, so many pencils that haven't been chewed, and of course, the notebooks. The beautiful, blank notebooks that are just waiting to reveal vast amounts of creativity and wisdom, the empty pages that seem to embody the sentiments of Anne Shirley when she says, “Tomorrow is another day with no mistakes in it,” in 

L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. Maybe this will be the year that....

And so in that vein, I hereby submit my new year's resolutions. It is so much easier to make resolutions in September when the sun is still shining than in January when it's a struggle not to just succumb to the “bleak mid-winter” blues.

1. I will wash the dishes.
   I know exactly what Gretchen Rubin means when she writes in her book, The Happiness Project, that “Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy.” One of the things that brings me a ridiculous amount of pleasure is coming downstairs in the morning to clean and empty counters – no remnants of yesterday's work loitering about in the new day. However, in order for me to experience that kind of happiness, I have to actually wash the dishes the night before. This is a chore I would trade for almost any other – I greatly dislike doing the dishes. But now my aim will be to have the dishes done every evening in exchange for that delicious, if delayed, gratification.

2. I will have a plan for my days.
   My position in my family often leaves me feeling like the activities of my days are at the discretion of whoever or whatever calls most loudly or urgently for my attention. Go to town for this, make an appointment for that, deal with these vegetables now or rot and decay are imminent, help find this, make food now, arrange for this activity, clean that now, tend to this sick person. Life, of course, happens and sick people can't be scheduled, but I am determined to be more in charge of my days, to invite more order and structure into my life.

3. I am going to make more food ahead of time.
   Right up there with washing dishes on my dreaded chores list is coming up with supper ideas. I don't mind making supper so much as I struggle to come up with ideas to make, especially when it's left till 5:30 PM. And right up there with coming down to clean counters in gratifying events is opening the freezer to a ready-made supper idea in the form of a frozen casserole or something. I already had the kids each list their ten favorite supper ideas, which gave me approximately 30 ready-made ideas. (If you are wondering how 3 kids times 10 ideas equals approximately 30 ideas, it's because one child wanted to trade extra snack ideas for fewer supper ideas.) So now that I have ideas, I can get cooking! And my husband always says I am a happier person when I have a long-term menu-plan. So here's to a happier wife!

So, clearly, not very lofty goals. But perhaps manageable and perhaps achievable. And perhaps, if I feel more in control of myself in these areas, I will be a happier person which will possibly lead me to being more compassionate and empathetic, more generous and kind-hearted. As Samuel Johnson says, “The business of a wise person is to be happy.” Happy September to all!

“Teach us to number our days aright,

that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”

Psalm 90:12

Tradition!

For my kids, if we have done something once and it went well and there is an opportunity to do it again, then we must – it's tradition! They come by this trait honestly, this strict observance of tradition. They are not unlike their mother in this regard.

And so, in keeping with tradition, our family went to the Corn and Apple Festival in Morden on the last Sunday of August. We have done this for six or seven years. We'd be hard pressed to say why exactly we do this, except for the fact that we have done this before. Perhaps it's because it closely approximates the county fair my husband and I experienced in the States. Perhaps we started as a way to do something outside our small community an hour west of Morden all those many years ago. And by now, perhaps it's simply because we've done this for the past number of years that we keep going back.

Here's what our family has to do in order to follow tradition: 

We must stand in the remarkably fast moving queue for free apple juice and corn-on-the-cob.

We absolutely need to eat corn dogs (the first corn dog I ever ate was at the county fair in Whitesburg, KY and so corn dogs always make me think of that place).

We must all ride the Ferris wheel together, despite the fact that it uses up 25 tickets of our limited stash.

The boys must ride the Tilt-a-Whirl and our daughter must go fishing in a pond of plastic fish opening and closing their mouths in order to win a prize of minimal value. 

We must look at all the vendor booths while my husband nurses his traditional headache, which is traditionally exacerbated by the heat and noise and crowdedness of said vendor booths. 

We must have ice cream at Dairy Queen before heading out to Colert Beach where the kids swim and my husband recovers from his malaise. If we have done all these things, we have had a successful day. Which we did.

Not everyone loves tradition as much as I do, even in my own family. I would agree that it is dangerous to be ruled solely by tradition, a distressing tendency of people who like predictability. I would, however, assert that tradition keeps alive memories and solidifies connections, particularly of family. Tradition, like ritual, transforms the ordinary into the sacred. So while we may not go the the Morden Corn and Apple Festival every summer from now till the end of our days, I'm glad we've had this little family tradition to tie us together for now.

We already bucked tradition this year by going looking for supper before the food booths were closing down for the evening. If all else fails, tradition provides something to deviate from now and then.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good;

blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.”

Psalm 34:8

Pedal Boats

Ah, the perennial summertime siren's call of pedal boats.

They look so cheery and inviting sitting there, lined up so colorfully at the dock, or floating placidly in the middle of the lake powered by someone else's legs.

In any case, I found myself pedaling a boat with my oldest son and was quickly reminded of how it feels to be going nowhere fast with much effort. Eventually we got going and my son took charge of the steering stick.

“This is great!” he exclaimed.

“What's great?” I asked. “Being in control of your own boat?” That was it exactly.

A few minutes later, the exclamation was more along the lines of, “Hey, this thing isn't steering!” Turns out you actually need to be pedaling for the steering to work. And that both over-steering and under-steering take you to places you don't really want to go. And then after making slow, hard progress across the lake, it was more like, “This is hard work.” Maybe even the suggestion that the results weren't quite worth the effort.

But we kept on, visiting shores we couldn't on foot and meeting up with other family members in matching pedal boats. And then we discovered that if we put our feet up and took our hands off the steering stick, we indeed would go nowhere fast and that was exactly what we wanted. It was lovely to sit and float in the middle of the lake, a slight breeze moving us languidly towards the shore.

What struck me was that each of those exclamations was true – at the time. It is great to be in charge of one's own boat; it is hard work; the boat won't steer if there's no pedaling; working hard causes the boat to go in endless circles – or to a shore one wants to explore; sometimes it is nice to not go anywhere in particular. And it made me wonder if the same could be said of life in general. That some things are true at a particular time, but then aren't true at a later time. That maybe at one point in a person's life one dearly wants to be going somewhere and then at a different point doesn't want to go there at all, or even move. And does changing one's mind or priorities necessarily constitute failure? Or is it just the inevitable change that forms a person's life? And what if a person only knows where she doesn't want to go, but not where she does? What then? It's almost like a pedal boat going in circles.

After 15 minutes, which seemed more like an hour, we were ready to be done pedal boating. We got to shore, switched boat-mates, and headed out on canoes, which is different kind of work and satisfaction altogether.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord. “Plans to

prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

                                                            Jeremiah 29:11

Birds of a Feather

This week is nestled snugly between two family gatherings – mine last weekend, and my husband's this weekend coming up. Two fairly different affairs, given the nature of the locations and the natures of our families-of-origin and I wouldn't miss either of them for the world. It has me thinking a lot about family relationships, differences and similarities.

My Dad had collected several nests he found to show his grandchildren. It was interesting to see how different birds construct their nests – different materials, located in different places, the size varying according to the size of the bird or the number of the eggs expected to be laid – and how one can tell what kind of bird had built the nest based on those characteristics because that's how that species always builds their nests, generation after generation.

It got me thinking about the “nest” I grew up in, and the “nest” I have built for my own little brood, and the ones that my siblings have built. My siblings and I all grew up in the same place, raised in generally the same way and yet when one looks at how we have all created our own homes and ways of life, one might almost think we are different species building our unique nests. There are, to a greater or lesser degree, variations in our lifestyle choices, value systems, how we make and spend money. These things can be intriguing and great fodder for discussion, or they can be confusing or worrisome; they can make one question the other person's choices, or question one's own.

This verse in Psalms made me think that when it comes right down to it, it is less important how we build our nests, or even what kind of species we are, than where we build them. So long as we construct our nests near the altar of the Almighty and sing our hearts out in praise to the Lord, what we've made our nests with, whether that be sticks and leaves, or mud, or string and animal hair, becomes not quite so critical.

“Even the sparrow has found a home,

and the swallow a nest for herself,

where she may have her young -

a place near your altar,

O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house;

they are ever praising you.”

                                                                   Psalm 84:3-4

Grand Plans

Before school let out in June, I had grand plans for the kids. There were going to be chore charts and art lessons, printing practices and educational excursions. And then summer descended upon us and the kids were home. And somehow all my great ambitions were a little harder to execute than to plan.

The kids have done some chores, but without a chart. We did one art project after going on one educational excursion to an art gallery and there was one printing practice session, and does it count that we went to the library a couple of times? But by and large, summer has mostly happened to us and a fair amount of TV has been watched and computer games played.

However, one plan has stuck. I wanted the kids - and me - to memorize one Bible verse a week and write in a gratitude journal everyday. So far we have four verses memorized and we're working on the fifth. When I haul out the journals at lunchtime, the kids never complain about listing things they are thankful for. I'm glad about this. I am glad that the most important plan is working out. Chores there will be  

ad infinitum, art and printing happen everyday anyway as they draw their pictures and label them, and any experience can be educational. Absorbing Scripture and cultivating gratitude takes a bit more effort, but the returns are more long lasting. It helps put into perspective the lack of fruition of my educational and organizational plans.

Be joyful always.

Pray continually.

Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5: 16-18

The Lord your God is with you;

He is might to save.

He will take great delight in you,

He will quiet you with his love,

He will rejoice over you with singing.

Zephaniah 3:17

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only that which

is helpful for building others up, according to their needs that it may benefit

those who listen.

Ephesians 4:29

A good name is more desirable than great riches;

To be esteemed is better than silver or gold.

Proverbs 22:1

The Lord appeared to us in the past saying,

“I have loved you with an everlasting love,

I have drawn you with loving kindness.”

Jeremiah 31:3

                    “For I know the plans I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans

                     to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope

                     and a future.”

                                                                 Isaiah 29:11