Life in the Shoe

Help Me Decorate?

2012-01-29T15:58:00.000-08:00

After putting it off way way way too long, I've been painting the living room.

Maybe part of the reason I put it off was because I knew I'd have to "decorate" it then.

Some of you are very artsy and gifted in this area. I am not. So, I put it to you, dear creative readers, what would you put on this empty wall?

Emily said, "Big family pictures in country frames," which I like but I want more ideas to choose from.Here's Jenny on the right and her friend and second cousin Dolly on the left posing like cool teenagers, just for perspective. They are not permanent fixtures. Neither is Dolly's bag of dress-up clothes there toward the left.

Just fyi--the wall is now a light yellow called Lemon Souffle. All the doors and woodwork will soon be the same white as on the lower right. Most of the furniture is a blue plaid. I like red accents.

This is a 100-year-old farmhouse, just so you know, and I am not really into trendy stuff like little pictures of steaming coffee cups. I like wall words, kind of, as long as it's not just one mysterious word like, "PERSPECTIVE." I'd like something that looks at home there and won't be out of style next month. Something cheerful.

I'd be open to a narrow sofa/console table as long as it didn't have terribly fragile/valuable things on top, because it would get crashed into in this household, we know that. The door to the outside is just off the picture, to the right.

Links and pictures would be great, even stuff on Pinterest.

So, what would YOU put there?

Quote of the Day:
"Is it possible to keep a beautiful home and still be a nice person?
--my friend Judy R.

Pretty and Ugly

2012-01-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

Like most young Christians I hoped to do great things for God, and most of all I admired the Christian women I knew who had that magic way of connecting with people, and to whom people poured out their stories and their hearts.

Like my sister Rebecca, for example, who had such an incredible gift that at my grandma's Amish funeral, four different relatives told her, weeping, about their wayward children and asked her to pray for them, this despite the fact that the weepers wore long black cape dresses and white coverings, and Rebecca looked pretty wayward herself, an anomaly in that plain crowd, with a sweater and skirt and short hair.

But it wasn't just that I wanted to keep up with my big sister. Hearing and helping people one on one was what I longed to do, more than, say, medical work or teaching or street evangelism.

It didn't happen for years, though. People just never seemed compelled to tell me their problems. Oh well. I didn't obsess about it, but tried to do what showed up in front of me to do, which is a good strategy for anyone.

It was while we lived in Round Lake that IT started happening. Maybe I was becoming one of those select Christian women at last.

But it didn't take me long to discover something else. People's lives are not pretty. Somehow I had always pictured a certain sort of woman across the table, dripping tears into her tea. The dynamic, slim, popular, smart, manicured type that everyone liked and admired. And I would have just the right wisdom to neatly fix her problems.

Well. The ones who showed up in my life were not the smart and popular type. They were terribly overweight and struggling with diabetes but still they would eat six homemade cookies with their tea. They had addictions. They did phenomenally stupid things. They had messed up their minds with chemicals and didn't make much sense. They abandoned their children. They had no skills. They were not the sort you wanted to sit beside at a picnic or go shopping with.

And generally I had no clue how to help them or fix their problems.

Jesus said, "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick."

So, if our ministry is going to be Christ-like, it's going to be to the sick, damaged, chaotic, ugly, twisted, unpopular, and embarrassing. And sometimes all we can do is love them and make more tea.

Of course, I found out after a while that the slim and manicured often have their own reasons to cry into their tea; they're just a lot less likely to admit it.

I've re-learned this many times since: People's lives are not pretty. But that's why Jesus came, because all of our lives are hopelessly ugly without Him.

Now you need to go read the post that inspired my cogitations this morning. It's called Ugly Ministry and is written by a young man named Asher who works with his family in Los Angeles, and he puts it way better than I can.

Quote of the Day:
Me: Jenny, Rachel told me she saw a hole in Janane's skirt and Janane said, 'Oh, that happened when Jenny and I were lighting candles and one fell on my skirt.' So. What's with this??
Jenny: [flippantly] Oh, Janane and I were lighting candles and then we'd take them to the bathroom and put them under the faucet to hear that hissing sound and one fell onto her skirt.
Me: Where was I????
Jenny: Oh, you were in Minnesota.
Me: WELL. Just. so. you. know. From now on you ABSOLUTELY. NEVER. play with candles and matches when I'm not there. EVER. You two could have burned the house down and yourselves along with it. Dear me, the stuff you find out after the fact.
Jenny: [sigh]
Ben: Jenny, if you don't like those kinds of lectures, it's a good thing you're going into entomology and not chemistry.

Mennonite Writing Stuff

2012-01-25T07:52:00.000-08:00

I like being Mennonite. Theology aside, I like the coziness of community, of knowing all the stories, of the shared history and culture, and of having people who will be there for me in the tough times.

In this writing class I'm taking, we studied a story about southern California, and that sort of culture, where there are hordes of people but everyone lives only for himself, and people are utterly disconnected and alone, and I found it horrifying.

True, sometimes it's all a bit much, like when I feel like there's more asked of me in helping others than I have the strength to give. And sometimes everyone knowing our stories is a bit much too, like yesterday Emily had breakfast with her grandma who said, "I was talking with my friend 'Gladys Gerig' and she said you were at Fairview Sunday morning, sitting between two young men!"

Wow.

So, the laborious explanation. See, one was a college friend 'Sam' who just recently made the choice to follow Jesus, and Emily wanted to take him to church, and he doesn't have a car, and Fairview was a lot closer to Albany, and then 'Jason' offered to get involved and befriend Sam, to reduce the potential awkwardness for Emily, and so they all showed up there on Sunday.

This will get passed back up the line to "Gladys," we all know that.

So, yes, this writing class I'm taking. After a rough beginning it's going well. They say writing is a process of discovery. Non-writers don't understand this, but it's true. You'd think you write only what you know. Obviously. But when you start actually writing, either fiction or non, you find yourself writing stuff down that you didn't know was in your head.

It's weird.

We have weekly assignments, only 500 words each so you can't write much. I'm focusing on Mennonite stories of course, since my goal is a Mennonite novel.

Somehow I always seem to write about a harassed Mennonite mom (surprise!) but instead of being all useful and cozy in this church community of hers, she comes across as completely smothered.

That's kind of scary.

Quote of the Day:
[setting the table for Sunday dinner]
Emily: It just doesn't GO with the table.
Me: Well, heaven forbid that the TEA COZY doesn't GO with the table!
Emily: I knew you'd understand me, Mom.

Moms, Guilt, etc.

2012-01-22T20:21:00.000-08:00

Jeanette over at Baileyandme recently posted a wonderful piece about guilt and condemnation and Romans 8 that you should go read.

What caught my eye the most was the part about "mom guilt."

As in, moms feeling guilty not your mom making you feel guilty, a worthy subject of its own. I am an expert at mom-guilt, and my sister Rebecca and I used to sit up late and tell guilt stories, which Paul thought was really a waste of our precious time together. But we both needed the sympathy.

Here's an excerpt:

Mom guilt anyone? I am going to be completely honest. Sometimes mom guilt almost completely eats me alive. I still remember before I had children (and was wanting them badly) I heard a Focus on the Family program about that very thing- Mom Guilt. My mouth was just kinda hanging open. I didn`t have children- I had no idea this monster was out there. I thought about that program for DAYS after- and just chewed on it in my head.

And then I had two (thank you, JESUS.) And ever since then, MG has kinda hung out with me.

Here is how it manifests itself for me. It`s Monday- everyone/everything needs me. The house is all piled up with work. My calendar looks full for this week. So MUCH on my mind. . . Well, the girls are going to be knee deep in playdough, movies, and art projects on the table for today. My girls are almost-3 and 4, and they can go “auto- pilot” pretty easily actually. They are happy mostly- it kinda works.

We go this route for 2 maybe 3 days, and I am axing things off my mental “to do” list.

On day 3, once life has slowed down for the week, any of the following could happen: I am inspired/condemned by all the “do it with your kids” pins on Pinterest. Someone in my Facebook feed really goes out of their way and does something amazing with their children. I dwell on the fact that teaching is not my gift. I am horrified by a sad story of a homelife of someone else- fear grips me- I think, what if that happens to us if I don`t Quality Time my girls enough. I read a Bible passage, and it condemns me- not convicts me. I let MomTalk make me feel failing. I feel too tired (I have nothing left to give) to read stories, and dream of being a better me.

Then that night, resting festering in bed- I let MG take over. I feel condemned for my weaknesses and any TINY fault I see in my girls I think.

Have I made them this way with my dysfunctional, human ways?

There's a lot more. You can go read it.

From the comments it was obvious she had struck a nerve. Three examples:

I so resonate with this post – sometimes the things that I know I should be improving in/doing better as a mom are so overwhelming that i feel like I need to bury those thoughts in computer/fun things/etc… just to get away from feeling like such a failure.

I struggle SO BAD with mommy guilt.

Mom guilt and I seem to have a never ending battle…. it’s so hard when I feel like I give give give of everything in me but its somehow never enough and everyday I pray for the wisdom and strength for today and yet at the end of the day it seems to have eluded me.

This is a subject that is dear to my heart. So I summarized my thoughts in a comment of my own:

As an “older” mom I understand every word you say and yet I wish so bad I could make it easier for younger moms.
If I could say one thing to all the young moms out there and myself as a young mom it’s GIVE YOURSELF SOME CREDIT. My stars. It’s the toughest job on earth, and so anonymous, and doesn’t pay a penny, and has no value in our society, and yet there you are, showing up every day, not getting enough sleep, fighting pregnancy problems and sickness, like Carmen up there, and making sure these children are taken care of.
I never “got” this until I saw orphans in Africa. A child with no mom is one of the most heartbreaking sights I’ve ever seen. You look in their eyes and oh my goodness, the empty empty deep deep sadness….and every one of them would give their right hand to have the most flawed, imperfect mom among us.
So yes, pursue Jesus and joy, definitely, but also tell yourself, “I am getting out of bed even though I desperately need sleep. I am feeding my babies once again. They will be fed and safe and loved on my watch. I am not running away. I get up every day and face this. I am doing what I’m called to do. I am a tough and amazing woman.”
If I saw your children’s eyes, they would not look like orphan eyes. They would look like the eyes of children with mommies. I’m sure of it.
My daughter takes care of Jamaican orphans. She came home for Christmas and was amazed at how little kids at church run around TALKING. Little Jamaican kids at the orphanage don’t talk because no one talks to them.
I’ll bet your little kids talk too.
See? You’re their mom. You show up. You’re there. And it shows.

Some time ago I gave a talk on this theme, entitled, "Calm Down; It'll Be Ok." I probably had more of a positive, heart-deep reaction to it than to any talk I've given before or since. Some said it was the first time they'd heard a talk for moms that affirmed them and didn't make them feel like they'll never measure up to the ideal.

So I have made it a goal to affirm young moms in what they're doing.

Well.

Last week Paul and I were in the grocery store and we ran into a neighbor/shirttail-relative and got to chatting. He talked about what a blessing it is to see his children grown up and doing well and living close by, and then he said to me, "I read your articles, and it seems like you worry about your children, and I think you probably don't give yourself enough credit for the job you're doing with them."

Somehow that was just what I needed.

I guess it's not just young moms that need encouragement and need to be told to give themselves credit for showing up and getting the job done.

Quote of the Day:
[from last November]
Me: I have a talk this afternoon.
Jenny: Where at?
Me: A synogogue!
Jenny: A Jewish one??

Thanks and Snow and Floods

2012-01-21T22:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who commented on the post about the short story writing class. You all helped give me clarity and a balanced perspective and I am grateful. I also had an email conversation with the teacher and we didn't agree but she was very understanding and ended up asking to forward our conversation to her mother, as the two of them have often discussed that very thing, and I gathered we two moms were of one mind.

+ + +
We've had some wacky weather this last week, first snow and then lots of rain and then flooding. The worst flooding was north of here but we had our share of high water, including a bit of drama at school when the Calapooia River flooded the play shelter and then when Paul sent the kids home early but the roads were blocked. You can read our friend Justin's take on this here.

Steven ran out to the road for the newspaper in his bare feet.

Jenny made a snowman with a proper storybook nose.

Here's Muddy Creek, with the old bridge under all that water somewhere, and our warehouse in the background, thankfully high and dry.

Here's Jenny out paddling in the ryegrass field. She so badly wanted to go boating on all these "lakes" and if you know her, you know how determined she is once she gets an idea in her head.

First it was an air mattress, which buckled in the middle and she got drenched. She tried a round galvanized tub and a green Rubbermaid tote that also dumped and drenched her. She begged Paul to bring the canoe home and talked about paddling it down the creek herself and then hauling it across the road. Muddy Creek is about the size of the Mississippi right now and I said absolutely. not. are you canoeing on Muddy Creek.

Someone suggested an inner tube. Paul said he had one at the warehouse so today he took Jenny over there and pumped the tube up for her and brought it home. Steven helped her haul the inner tube and a half piece of plywood across the road. Jenny brought a canoe paddle, and soon she was off on Lake Ryegrass, as pleased as if she was sailing the Seven Seas, headed for Australia.

Meanwhile, others in Oregon have lost houses and property and even lives. We were spared the worst and are thankful.

Water

2012-01-19T19:05:00.000-08:00

We've had lots of rain here and everything is wet and soggy. Lots of high water but it's still two feet lower than the flood of '96, Paul says. Here are a few pictures.

Long Post About Short Stories

2012-01-15T16:24:00.000-08:00

In the last two weeks I have thought more about stories than in the rest of my life put together.

As you may know I have talked of writing a novel for years. The trouble is that I don't know how. So a while back I decided it was time to take a class and learn.

I looked into community college evening classes but needed something more advanced. I looked into the U of O's writing program. It was just what I wanted but they wouldn't let me take a class here and there; I had to be enrolled in the program.

I posted a question on Facebook: did anyone have an online class to recommend?

And like Pip in Great Expectations and many characters in Lucy Maud Montgomery's books, I got something I wasn't expecting at all: a benefactress. Two of them, in fact.

Two women from a northeastern state have read my writing for some time and decided they wanted to pay for an online class for me. From Stanford.

Such a golden peach hanging right in my face. How could I not pluck and eat it while I had the opportunity?

But goodness, how could I find the time? Well, after Christmas Ben would be in Bible school. Christmas would be over, of course. Emily could teach the writing class I was teaching at Brownsville. And Lisa the niece would be back from Poland and could help me out with housework again.

So I signed up for Short Story Writing. The novel-writing class was too advanced and also I needed prerequisites.

So I have had stories on the brain. Characters and the decisions they make. Point of view and narrative voice. Setting and plot.

And just a lot of thoughts, outside of the curriculum, on stories.

What is a story, really? Why do we tell stories, and what makes a story a story rather than an observation, a news item, a description, a list, a fact, an illustration, or a lecture?

I'm realizing that my concept of stories, particularly GOOD stories, isn't everyone's.

Here's what I consider good stories:
--Children's books such as A Bargain for Frances or The Biggest Bear or the Ramona books
--family yarns, such as Mom's stories of growing up in the Depression or my grandma's story about climbing the "vintboomp" (windmill) to see the "volf" or the Kropf/Knox stories about this house and the 75 cousins within 5 miles.
--novels such as Tom Sawyer and A Tangled Web and Great Expectations and All Creatures Great and Small and Pride and Prejudice and a thousand more.
--true-life stories such as Evidence Not Seen and Schindler's List.
--the Bible and the stories within it

So what is a story? It's characters, and they do something and things happen to them, and something about them or the situation changes, and it all looks pretty dark for a while, usually, and then things are put into place and clarified and resolved, and then the story ends.

Right?

I never thought of myself as a snooty reader until I came to realize that there is a whole universe of literature out there that seems to look at what I consider "good stories," the same way I look at the whole universe of Twilight books and most Amish novels and all those little paperbacks you see at garage sales, with pictures on the front of gasping ladies bent over backwards by hairy men with names like Flint and Torque, not that I'd ever read those books you understand.

And the whole universe that looks down on my beloved stories as just that tacky is the world of Fine Literature, as in highbrow, deep, college-literature course, New Yorker Short Stories.

Which we seem to study a lot in this class I'm taking. Somehow in high school and two years of college I never ran into stuff quite like this.

They come in nice hardbound books with impressive titles like Collected Short Stories of Jon Arbuckle or Great American Short Stories.

I feel a bit like the child saying the emperor has no clothes, because the truth is these "Short Stories" aren't actually stories, at least how you and I think of stories. They are pieces, descriptions, sometimes monologues.

Generally, you have a dreary, dark, depressing person in a dreary, dark, depressing situation. A few vague and dreary dark depressing things happen, or are done to him by other dreary, dark, depressing people, and then everything stops. Or sometimes nothing actually happens. Or maybe someone dies first, or things get a bit worse overall. No one learns anything. Nothing changes for the better. The plot generally involves alcohol, abuse, anger, alienation, infidelity, deception, and despair.

Or sometimes the entire thing is just one person talking, like a mother to her daughter, going on and on for two pages about how to do stuff around the house and occasionally running her daughter down in in a very destructive way, and then she stops talking.

That's it. Nothing works out, nothing makes sense, nothing is clarified.

This apparently qualifies as a "short story."

These writers certainly have something to offer in creating vivid characters in vivid settings with a vivid sense of emotion, enough to keep you awake at night, so there's plenty for me to learn from them in that regard.

But I'm realizing for the first time how important it is to me to have things work out in the end.

I am known for tying things into a neat bow at the end of all the essays I write. Most readers seem to appreciate this, but I've run into a few literary types who gently poked fun at me, like if I could somehow reach their Enlightened Plane of Being, I would realize it's so much better to leave it all dangling and vague and unresolved.

Which brings us back to the questions, "What is a story?" and "Why do we tell stories?"

I think we all live among fragments, sadness, conflict, just hard stuff.

And we long to make sense of it, to know that it has some sort of meaning.

But we don't get to see the end of the story and how it all works out for years and years.

So we love stories. True stories, after the fact, where the people were like us and the situation a lot like ours but it all worked out and the pieces fit together and even the sad things were redeemed in time. And made up stories, again, like our lives, where the writer looks back and sees the thread running through the whole thing and ties it into a bow at the end.

Maybe those of us who grew up on the Bible have a greater expectation for stories like this. There's the thread of redemption running through the whole narrative, even through famine and slavery and captivity and judgment and death, and in the end it all works out, and justice is done, and good rewarded, and secrets made known.

The same thing is true for shorter stories within the Bible--Joseph, Ruth, Esther, Nehemiah, and so on.

The Snooty Short Stories are presented as True Depictions of Real Life. And I'm sure they are, in their way. [Interestingly, though, they never venture into the Just As Real Life of a woman learning to use her computer or a husband apologizing to his wife or a child figuring out his math or a teacher putting in extra time for a student or a housewife finally having the nerve to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses to quit coming.]

Believe me, I get plenty of dark, depressing, dreary real life all the time, especially with all the times people look to me for answers and I have no idea what to tell them. The young man didn't get the job he was counting on, the creepy relative snuck off with the young boy at the family gathering, the person in charge won't listen to anyone, the other student won't stop when he's told to stop that, the in-laws think the parents are destining the kids to Hell....well, that was just in the last week.

The stories for this class feels like way too much of the same. In my limited recreational-reading time, I need true-to-life stories with some kind of redemption, resolution, and answers. Of fragments fitting together and things making sense, where I can close the book and go to sleep.

So, the class is worth it because I now know clearly how I want to write. I know that I will always be somewhere between Alice Munro and Barbara Cartland, very middle-brow, I guess, between the New Yorker and the National Enquirer.

I hope to write fiction that sounds like real life, but looking back, where there really is a thread running through, and you can see how things worked out, and it gives you a bit of hope and courage that someday your life will make sense as well.

Use It Up 3

2012-01-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

This time the find in the pantry was Bisquick. It's been there a long time, and I don't know why I ever bought it, because I don't even like Bisquick. It's just as quick to make your biscuits and things from scratch, and I like to make them with half whole wheat flour.

Yes, it's been around a while.
But what's going to go bad in Bisquick?

I froze lots of blueberries the last two summers. I googled "recipe Bisquick blueberry muffin" and made these for breakfast. Everyone loved them. Unfortunately they didn't use up nearly all the Bisquick, but if it's kept this long, it's good for a few more batches in the next weeks.

Quote of the Day:
[Since we all miss Ben who is now at Bible school. This happened maybe a month ago.]
"Last night Ben was like, 'Where's my flashlight?' Click click, turns on his flashlight, shines it around looking for his flashlight. I was like, 'Ben, isn't it in your hand?' He's like, 'Uh...yeah.'"
--Jenny

Use It Up

2012-01-09T13:07:00.000-08:00

This year, I am determined to Use Things Up.

You tend to accumulate a lot of food items if, like me, you a) cook from scratch b) shop in bulk c) shop at discount stores d) have a big pantry e) have a lot of people to cook for and f) have Depression-era/Amish parents who taught you that throwing out perfectly good food was right up there with cheating in school and parting your hair on the side.

So. I buy ingredients, either for a specific recipe or because they're cheap, and I use maybe half the bagful, and then they ooze to the back end of the pantry shelves and there they stay.

No more.

I'll post my first two successes in this area and if I have any more victories, maybe I'll post those too.

1. I threw out that one...oh dear, I can't even name it, with Christians starving in Yemen. But the expiration date was 2008.

2. I made cookies. This is the recipe that my sis Margaret always makes when she has leftover stuff to use up. She even emptied the pantry into a batch one day and announced that she was going to sell them at her garage sale the next day. Her husband Chad said, "Naaawwwww," in that skeptical way that only guys from the Deep South can say, "Naaawwwww."
"Wait and see," said Margaret, in her quick snappy Yankee way. Of course, she sold them all.

Famous Oatmeal Cookies

Beat together:
3/4 c. shortening or softened margarine
1 c. brown sugar
1/2 c. white sugar
1 egg
1/4 cup water
1 t. vanilla

Sift together and add to creamed mixture:
1 c. flour
1 t. salt
1/2 t. baking soda

Blend well.
Stir in:
3 to 4 cups quick oats

Now stir in pretty much whatever leftover bits of ingredients you want. I made a double batch and added 1 cup wheat bran, 1 cup coconut, 1/2 cup m&m's, 1/2 cup chocolate chips, 2 tablespoons chopped peanuts, and 2 cups peanut butter chips.

Drop on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 12 to 15 minutes.
Enjoy.

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: [leaps off her chair at the breakfast table and engulfs her sleepy brother in a hug]
Steven: Gaaaahhh!!
Me: Jenny, please. The Bible says there is "a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing."
Emily: Wow, you really do have a Bible verse for every situation.

January LFH

2012-01-08T14:33:00.000-08:00

January's column is a casserole I stirred up from ingredients in a few recent blog posts. It's for all of us who try to manipulate things and make them how they ought to be.

Here it is.

Making Change

2012-01-06T20:07:00.000-08:00

How do you make a situation change?

We all say, if we have eyes that work: "Something ought to be done there."

But what can WE actually do?

Ok, here's my situation.

We have a big, dark parking lot at church. And we have lots and lots of children at church. And we have lots of evening services and also social functions involving finger foods and fellowship after a service or program.

While the parents eat and fellowship, the children play. And invariably some of them play in the parking lot even though there are lots of other places to run around, such as the play shelter, ball field, and sidewalks.

Many times, I've gotten in the car as little people went darting here and there, barely visible in the darkness. It happens in broad daylight too, but is obviously worse at night. I've nearly had heart failure a few times and believe me, I back up with extreme caution and sometimes I tell Jenny to get out and make sure the coast is clear.

I've talked to Paul about this but he always acted like it was just one of a long list of things, like Steven's messy room and the weeds by the hedge, that I get worked into a stew about and if he gives me a little sympathy it'll soon pass and he won't actually have to do anything.

Yesterday a friend of mine talked to me about the same problem, as she almost ran over a toddler and later two girls darted out right in front of her from behind a parked car.

You know, ultimately this comes down to parents being responsible for their own children, but if any of us backed over a child, we'd never forgive ourselves. I know some parents are more relaxed and/or oblivious than others, and I am still finding out things I should have known but completely missed when the kids were little. So I know how easily these things can go on unawares.

So.

What are my options?
a) do nothing and pray hard and trust God.
b) go talk to all the parents one by one and re-affirm my reputation as an interfering nag.
c) put something in the church bulletin and hope everyone listens.
d) try to persuade the trustees to bring it up at the next business meeting and tell everyone sternly to keep the kids off the parking lot.
e) try to persuade a minister to give a stern pre-sermon admonition.
f) patrol the parking lot with a pitchfork during every finger-food event.
g) wait for a child to get run over, and then surely no child will play in the parking lot, ever again. Problem solved.
h) post about it and hope everyone in church reads my blog, but I'm sure they don't so that probably won't work.

This applies to a lot more than just kids in the parking lot.

There are just an awful lot of situations in the world that ought to be changed. Generally, people think "someone" ought to do something and if they come to me with that, I say, "If you noticed the problem, it's your sign from God that YOU are supposed to do something."

But it's not always that easy, and I'll bet you could name three situations right now where you would love to change things but don't have a clue how plus you have no authority/power in the situation. And you could name three people who are always out agitating for change and driving everyone crazy.

I can think of a (very) few areas where my action eventually resulted in change. In almost every case, this was how it worked:
1. Mention it to the person in charge
2. Shut up.
3. Pray hard.
4. Wait an awfully long time.

In this case, I'm really not sure that anyone is "in charge" of the parking lot.

How about you? Have you ever changed a situation, and how did you do it?

Quote of the Day:
"41 degrees and drizzling on Christmas Day--that's how it's supposed to be!"
--Byran, Paul's nephew, on the joy of being in Oregon for Christmas

Name, Book, and Cat

2012-01-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

Ever since I posted about my name I've been having these odd conversations about it.

Like the other day I bought cat food at Kmart and handed the my-age-ish cashier my credit card.

She squinted at it and said, "Is this your husband's card?"

"I don't think so. Can I see it?" "No, that's mine."

She said, still squinting, "But, this first name on here..."

I said, "Yes. That's Dorcas. It's my name. It's from the Bible."

She smiled and nodded and said, "Ahh."

+ + + + +

Today was the last day of the children's Christmas break. Jenny sat here reading Upstairs the Peasants are Revolting. It was very gratifying to get her take on it now and then. At one point she made an odd noise.
Me: What?
Jenny: Nothing. I just sighed.
Me: Why?
Jenny: It was a happy sigh.
Me: About what?
Jenny: Never mind. You'll just have to read the book.

+ + + + +

I went shopping at Grocery Depot on Saturday and found a little bottle off by itself of something called CONTENT-EZE. It featured a picture of a nice yellow cat and this description: "A Nutritional Supplement Which Supports Feeling Of Contentment In Your Cats"
and "Contains Amino Acids To Help Your Cat Feel Content."

Oh my! Should I get it for Ebenezer the Yowling Kitty, who was still yowling after a week and about whom I confess I had done a discreet internet search for easy, cheap, painless, humane, clean, do-it-yourself euthanasia methods, since I was convinced it was suffering from stomach cancer.

[Note: there are no such methods, and if you ask such a question on a Yahoo forum, you will get attacked. Viciously. From people who would like to euthanize YOU, in a very painful and unpleasant manner.]

The bottle was marked $2 and I qualified for a 10% discount because of Emily working there.

Feeling like a person who would buy little fleece jackets for her shih tzu, I bought it, knowing it wouldn't do any good.

The directions said, "SHAKE GENTLY BEFORE USE."

I figured the cat would yowl even worse if I shook it, gently or not, so Jenny and I fixed a dish of leftover tetrazini, gently squirted a teaspoon of CONTENT-EZE on top, and fed it to Ebenezer.

Who quit yowling.

I am serious.

We repeat the dosing daily, just in case.

I am wondering if I could discreetly pinch some CONTENT-EZE for myself. I mean, my children have been scattering to the winds after all being home for Christmas, and I have done a bit of yowling myself. 1 teaspoon per 11 pounds of cat. I can do the math.

This is Jenny posting BTW

2012-01-01T22:03:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I'm supposed to write a post about being the youngest in the family.

Being the youngest in the family has its ups and downs. There is the endless receiving of junk (which often pleases the younger members of the family), and the many nights spent alone because all of the older siblings have gone to some exciting party that you can't go to.

Then there is the attention. Youngest children tend to feel upstaged by there older siblings (at least, I felt like that). Because of this we try as hard as we can to get attention. So, how do you get attention? You act silly and/or crazy and/or cute and/or annoying. Problem solved. Everyone either thinks you are super cute or super annoying.

When older siblings get to do cool things like get together with friends and watch a movie, or go to a new years party with the youth group at church, it can be very hard on a younger sibling. I know several other people my age who face the exact same thing. Our sibs run off to do some cool thing, we have to stay home with Mom and Dad. Not that Mom and Dad aren't great, but who wants to stay home when you should be doing something awesome and exciting with your friends?

So I guess what I want to say is that being the youngest can be great. It can also be very tough. I think it kind of depends on how we react to it.

Smucker Christmas Stories

2011-12-26T21:44:00.000-08:00

Matt got a text a week or so before Christmas. From Amy, it said. "Can you get me some temporary tattoos for Christmas?"

He thought this was just a bit odd but maybe she wanted them for a fun project for the kids in Jamaica.

So he turned the town of Corvallis upside down looking unsuccessfully for temporary tattoos.

And just a day or so before Christmas he found out that Steven has been using Amy's phone ever since she went to Jamaica.

++++++

Emily has of course had A Christmas Carol on the brain, since the play dominated her life for the last three months.

Like Bob Cratchit and Martha, she had to work on Christmas Eve but came home in time for supper. In our case, instead of a goose (or, as Emily says, "The goose! The goose! Yeeaahhh, the GOOSE!" [yet another ACC quote] ) we had our annual Kenyan supper in honor of Steven coming home to us seven years ago on Christmas Eve.

But unlike Bob and Martha, Emily stopped at Fred Meyer after work. In front of the store she found someone giving away free kittens. She felt so sorry for them, trying to give away kittens on Christmas Eve, that she took one. Oddly, she felt sorrier for the people than for the cats.

"I knew there was always room at our house for one more kitten," she said dreamily, like we are just such a loving and open and warm family, like the Cratchits.

She named it Ebenezer.

On the way home the kitty turned on the windshield wipers, landed on Emily's head when she hit the brakes, and pooped, but graciously right on a paper napkin.

Since it's been here, the kitten has yowled. That's pretty much it. It yowls and yowls and yowls and tries to climb up the screen door and yowls and yowls and yowls some more. The girls wanted it inside but I said you have no idea if that cat has lice or fleas or worms or who knows what else. So it's outside with the other cats. It has food and water and a warm place to sleep. But it just yowls.

I venture that even the Cratchits would have run out of warm, friendly, always-room-for-one-more feelings by now.

+++++++
Aunt Allene says she has barnacles on her skin. I am serious. She got a bad sunburn when she was a small child. They went to the coast and it was cloudy but she still got a bad burn, and now she has these rough barnacles on her face and back.

I have never heard such things described in such a way before, but Smucker aunts have a way of putting things like you never heard them before.

+++++++
We all went to church together on Christmas morning, and the family obliged my cool-mom-fantasy by all sitting together on one pew. It was wonderful, all these amazing young people all in a row. But of course life never lets itself get too perfect, and the cost of my fulfilled fantasy was that a woman who innocently sat on the west end of the pew before most of us got there kind of got squished.

Steven took notes on the sermon. He does this for his Bible class at school, I hasten to add, lest you get too impressed. He wrote down the preacher's name and the sermon title, then he whispered to Matt, "What's the date today?"

"Dude. What is it?" Matt whispered back.

Steven couldn't remember.

Matt refused to tell him.

Matt says it took 2 minutes and 38 seconds for Steven to figure out what the date was.

The Winner

2011-12-26T19:51:00.001-08:00

Using a random number generator, the winner of the cd was comment number 22.

At 12/20/2011 4:14 AM, Wes said…

We don't live far away. I'm going to try to try to find one of their performances. Thanks, Dorcas.

Congratulations, Wes.

Either email me your mailing address (dorcassmucker@gmail.com) or email the Nolts directly (jewinbunch@dejazzd.com)

Thanks to everyone who participated!

CD Giveaway!

2011-12-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

The Nolt family has a new cd and offered to have a giveaway for Life in the Shoe readers!

Jewel Nolt, mom of this talented family, says, "It has banjo, piano, and guitar as accompaniment on some of the songs, and then we sing several a capella as well. You can listen to three of our songs on the Nolt Family Facebook page."

My evaluation of their music: unusual and beautiful.

Leave a comment if you want to be entered in the drawing, and I'll randomly choose a winner this week and Jewel will mail the cd.

If you'd like to purchase your own copy, they are $14 each. Five or more are $12 each plus shipping. You can message Jewel on their Facebook page or email at jewinbunch@dejazzd.com.

Or ask for it at your local Christian book/music store.

Weird Name And Wise Sons

2011-12-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

Remember my post about my name?

Ok, so a while back Amy subscribed to a sports magazine as a gift for Ben, and used my credit card, with my permission.

In the sneaky way they do things, the magazine automatically renewed the subscription without telling us.

Paul found it on the credit card statement. He called in. It was a bit confusing, I guess, because Amy had ordered it for Ben and Paul was calling, and he didn't realize it had been on my card. And of course they can't just take care of it; they have to verify everything down to your mother's shoe size without giving you any hints.

I guess the guy on the other end, who won't get promoted to P.R. any time soon, decided to give Paul one hint: "It's this really weird first name on this account."

"Uh, yes, I guess that would be my wife, Dorcas."

See what I mean?

Two Quotes of the Day:
[In which Mom learns that her sons have more wisdom than she gives them credit for.]

The day before Steven's baptism, at which he was to give his testimony before all:
Steven: I'm getting nervous.
Me: Oh well, you'll live if you don't die.*
Steven: How is that comforting?
Me: Well, if you live, then you'll live, and if you die, you go to Heaven, so what's to be afraid of?
Steven: The living part.

*which probably qualifies as Dumb Things Adults Say to Children

Our church is going through some Serious Issues, which were on our minds as we headed for a church business meeting the other night.
Me, to Ben and Steven: Ok, guys, whatever happens, I don't want you to get bitter about God and church.
Ben: Actually, Mom, I think there's a lot more danger of YOU getting bitter than us.
Me: Uhhhmmm....actually......you're absolutely right.

Dumb Things Adults Say to Children

2011-12-13T07:44:00.000-08:00

1. "It'll all be mixed up in your stomach anyway."

This is said in a cheerful voice as they scrape together mashed potatoes, jello, gravy, lettuce bits, ham, and ranch dressing--and expect you to eat it just as cheerfully.

2. "This won't hurt a bit!"

or, almost as bad, "Just a tiny little poke..."

This also requires a cheerful voice. As Jenny says, "Most dumb things are said with a cheerful voice."

You've had tetanus boosters and dental work done. They hurt. They didn't kill you, but they hurt. What's wrong with the truth? Like--calm, matter-of-fact voice--"This will hurt but not as much as skinning your knee."

Speaking of skinning your knee:

3. "You're fine! Hop up!"

And its corollaries, "Jump up!" "Don't cry!" "You're all right!" And my mother's favorite, "Hosht's meisly kfongga?" which means "Did you catch the mouse?"

These are spoken by hyper-cheerful adults who look on when children trip and fall flat on their faces.

I don't get it.

One woman in my life was especially big on this when my kids were little. She thought I would teach them to be wimps if I helped them up and kissed the scraped knee.

I always wondered what it would be like if SHE tripped and went sprawling on her face right in front of me, and I kept sipping my coffee and said cheerfully, "Hop up!! You're all right!!"

The idea was tempting.

4. "Life isn't fair."

Emily suggested this entry. Her explanation: "This is when something is legitimately unfair and your parents say, 'Life isn't fair,' and it's like, 'Duh. You could make it fair. Right now. You have that power."

I contend that "Life isn't fair" is justified when it's all out of your control and there simply is nothing else to be said.

5. "The starving children in Somalia would be so happy to eat that."

A Smucker offspring suggested this one, too. I'm guilty as charged.

Parent's perspective: If these picky children only had a CLUE of what the rest of the world endures they would clean their plates with gratitude.

Child's perspective: So, send these peas to Somalia if you're so worried about little Somali kids.

Quote of the Day:
Ben: So when I go to Bible school, how often will I be expected to communicate with you?
Me: Once a week, at least.
Ben: That much?

December column

2011-12-11T14:04:00.001-08:00

December's column is about gifts--those given, those withheld, and those given instead.

Here.

Quote of the Day:
[Amy, this is to make you homesick for Sunday dinner conversations.]

Jenny: It's so gross. Mom coughs in her hand and then she DRIVES. Her steering wheel is like COVERED with viruses!
Emily: So? It's Mom's car.
Jenny: Yes, but if someone else drives it...
Paul: How long do viruses survive on a dry surface?
Me: Half a day I think.
Ben: So is it viruses or bacteria?
Me: I don't know.
[Steven has that one-raised-eyebrow look like he's patiently waiting for rescue.]
Jenny: It's still gross.
Me: Everyone's exposed anyway. I mean, I've been touching doorknobs and coughing and breathing around here for over a week.
Emily: MOM! Breathing??! Seriously??!
Me: Well, I'm trying to quit breathing, because it triggers my asthma.
Jenny: Wouldn't that be cool if you could breathe through your skin?
Ben: That would be annoying, because when it was cold, you could only breathe through a little part of your face. Oh wait. That's how it is normally.

[At which point I laughed so hard I had an asthma attack and spread lots of viruses and bacteria into my hand, which I then washed. After that we talked about when to schedule all our family Christmas activities and ate cheesecake and had coffee and tea like normal people.]

Random Thoughts Between Coughs

2011-12-06T19:29:00.000-08:00

I am sick again, with the Bubonic plague or something like it that began a week ago with a sudden sore throat that felt like an acetylene torch had blasted at my tonsils. It has now morphed into the most wretched cough you can imagine, involving great loss of sleep and throwing up of breakfast and other terrible results.

My only comfort is that about every third person in the valley has the same thing, including a few strong men in this household who seldom succumb to colds.

I reek of garlic and other potions. Jenny walked by and said, "Mom, what do I smell?" I said, "I smell like That Lady That Uses Essential Oils." Jenny said, "Oh yeah. You do."

I like the smells of essential oils, really, especially if they work.

I've spent too much time huddled up in the office chair, clicking around online, because it was easier than anything else.

This was interesting, about Tim Tebow.

NFL quarterback is a position best played by young men who were raised by strong fathers. Quarterback is the ultimate leadership position. You have to be taught how to lead. You have to be taught how to prepare.

Yay for all the men out there who stay with their families through all the tough times.

And No, I don't have a mom-crush on Tim Tebow. Well, not really, that much, beyond thinking wistfully that he is very close in age to Amy and Emily, and he just seems so NICE. And if he married either Amy or Emily and the house were on fire he could pick up his wife and tuck her in his elbow like a football and run outside and save the day. And Amy could discuss football with him over breakfast like she did with that one guy on the plane one time who couldn't believe that this little Mennonite girl knew that much about dual-threat quarterbacks and possession receivers or whatever technical stuff it was.

Ok, never mind.

Saturday I dragged myself to a book signing because I had promised the lady I'd be there. Her name is Amanda Bird and she has a little book shop called The Book Nest (clever) in the antique mall on the south end of the big building just south of WinCo and McDonalds in Springfield, where the Teen Challenge thrift store used to be on the north end.

There were about five other authors there. One of them is named Laurie, with a long Iranian last name, and she wrote a book about her daughter with autism. Laurie's mother is none other than Marcy Tigner, the lady with a little-girl voice and a ventriloquist's dummy named Little Marcy, who produced dozens of "Marcy and Little Marcy" children's records back in the day.

If you are Of A Certain Age and grew up Christian but not too Plain, you know exactly who I'm talking about.

Laurie says a lot of Marcy's success was due to her husband, who loved to promote her, and who would breeze into town and call the radio station, the bookstores, and I don't know who all else to set up appearances for Marcy.

I think she thought our little book-signing venue could have used some of her dad's flashy expertise, but really it was well-attended, considering.

And, if you're interested, Laurie has a stack of old/new Marcy records in her garage that she'd like to sell.

Here's a link for Marcy.

And then we have this story. I have my issues with the UN. Among other things, when they go into a country to do all their good deeds they refuse to collaborate with missionaries, even if they've been there for 20 years and are fluent in the language and know the local culture. No no. Missionaries are evil. So they go in and spread their good deeds in the most culturally offensive way and where least needed, because after all, they know best.

Then there was the time Canada had a general election and the UN sent a representative to the reserve we were on to make sure the First Nations people were well educated and informed regarding this election. Well, was there the slightest chance the crusty old Lazarus Kakegamics and Jowin Quequishes of Weagamow were interested in what this greenhorn had to say? No there was not.

So he spent about three days fishing from the airplane dock, as I recall, and had one evening session at the band hall to inform the ignorant populace about the election.

But worst, far far worst, is the UN's policy on adoption. They feel that country of origin takes precedence over everything. And they put a lot of pressure on third-world countries to quit adopting internationally. Which means that way way too many children get to live in third-world orphanages rather than with moms and dads in a different country. But if they survive to adulthood, we can be assured that these orphans are oh-so-grateful to be culturally intact and whole.

More here.

Now before I get any more political I will share something I found in the archives. I had written it in a form letter to family and friends years ago, and our friend Dave Hertzler reprinted it in Today's Native Father. I think Matt was about 11 years old here, and Amy 9.

Quote of the Day:
Matt and Amy have slept outside in sleeping bags quite often. One night there were supposed to be lots of shooting stars, so they wanted me to come out and watch the sky with them. They settled down in their sleeping bags, and after a while I bundled up in winter wraps and joined them. I have long suspected, and now know for sure, that my children win all the prizes for being competitive.
Me: Ahhh, what an awesome universe. . .
Matt: There's one!
Amy: I saw it too!
Matt: Now I have 21. I'm still ahead of you.
Amy: And I have 19.
Me: (sigh) Why can't you just enjoy these stars without being so competitive?
Amy: We're not comPETTING! We're just keeping track. That's what makes it fun. (pause) There's one! Now I'm only one behind you!
Matt: I saw it too, I think.
Amy: Was it a light one over by the pine tree?
Matt: I think so.
Amy: I don't think you saw it because I saw it AFTER you last said, "There's one."
Me: If you two don't stop this now, I'm going back inside.
Matt: Ok, I guess I can stop.
Amy: (No answer. The sleeping bag is pulled over her head)
Me: Amy, WHAT are you doing??
Amy: If I can't count them I might as well go to sleep.
Me: Amy, God made these shooting stars for you to ENJOY, not for you to figure out a way to be better than Matt. There are a lot of things you can do better than Matt, like thinking before you do stuff. And there are lots of things he can do better than you--
Amy: (interrupts) You can't say seeing shooting stars is one of them because I WAS ahead of him!!

If I Could

2011-12-05T17:08:00.000-08:00

I think the conversation began after a hot lunch I served at school. My friend "Twila" showed up to volunteer in the classroom, but first she helped me serve the food.

"If I could, I would start a coffee shop in Harrisburg," she said. She had it all down--the baked goods, the decor, the clientele.

All she needed was the time, the money, and a few other small details.

I've found that most of us go around with an "If I could" idea in our heads.

Emily has a similar idea for a shop in Harrisburg. She even has the place picked out, an old empty brick building with an arched front, a little courtyard behind a fence, and a tiny attached house. She calls it "Whispering Winds" and went so far as to have a real estate agent give her a tour of the place.

She's a bit vague about what services or products she would actually offer there. Also, she lacks a few small details like time, money, and being able to be in two places at once, since she wants to go on the mission field after college.

I told Twila that I also have an "If I could" for a business in Harrisburg, and that is a fabric/paper/tea shop. In addition to the normal quilting cottons I'd have a stash of fabrics that a person would actually wear. I'd have a comfy chair and coffee and Outdoor Life magazines for waiting husbands. And in the back I'd have a room for my Fabric Exchange, where you could bring in fabric from your stash and get so many points based on yardage and quality, and then you could pick out what you wanted, for similar pointage, from the stash that others had contributed. I wouldn't get anything out of it but I think it would be fun.

Also, with Emily working at Grocery Depot, I've been thinking that there just has to be a whole hidden industry out there of damaged and outdated fabric just like there is for bent-n-dent lotions and canned vegetables. How do I tap into that delightful river, I wonder?

I haven't thought out the paper and tea part as well, especially since I don't see myself baking scones and other dainties to sell. Maybe I'd just brew a pot of tea and sit down with customers and let them sip free tea while we talk.

All that stands in my way is . . . everything.

Someday when Emily is out of college and Twila's and my children are all grown up and I figure out how to be organized, we'll all have to collaborate on the Perfect Business in Harrisburg.

I have an even bigger "if I could" and that is a house at the coast. It would be on the west side of Highway 101 so you could take children to the beach without crossing that busy road. It would have lots of space for big families or groups. Our family could go out for brief retreats from real life, Paul and I could go there for time alone, and Emily and I could go there for a week at a time to work on our novels. We could use it for Bible Memory Camp, Ladies' Retreat, and the annual Youth Coast Trip. We could rent it out for a reasonable price to Mennonite families who always have a hard time finding a place both large and affordable and who could be counted on to clean up after themselves. Most of all, I could offer it free to missionaries on furlough who desperately need rest but could never afford to rent a place.

All that stands in my way is a million unsold books and free weekends to drive out and keep the place up.

Meanwhile, I wonder, what is the "If I could" floating around in everyone else's head?

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: [sitting on her bed one night, solemnly pronouncing] You know, I'm not that interested in bugs any more.
[Pause]
Jenny: I'm not gonna be an entomologist.
Me: You're not?
Jenny: [suddenly noticing picture of butterfly on her pillowcase] Oh my goodness!! It's a swallowtail! An eastern tiger swallowtail!!!

Short Poem And Long Explanation

2011-11-27T21:05:00.000-08:00

When I write something, I always want people to "get" what I'm trying to say.

You might think "duh" but believe me I have been in plenty of critique groups and on plenty of blogs where writers prided themselves on turning out such obscure, foggy, wafting, poetic stuff that only they themselves and an Enlightened Few could understand it.

Not me.

You can't get any more normal-reader than Paul, who is only interested in what a piece says at first rapid read, and if it doesn't tell him anything, then what's the point?

So if I write something and he gets it, I know I'm good to go with the rest of the world as well.

On Thanksgiving morning I woke up feeling heavy in spirit. We've had a lot of difficulties recently, a lot of decisions to make, and a good share of misunderstanding and such, and I'm sorry to make you curious but I can't elaborate.

What if I were thankful for all of THAT, I thought, and recoiled at the very thought, and then reconsidered.

And then I got up and wrote a poem about determining to give thanks for those things we don't normally feel warm and grateful for on Thanksgiving.

I posted it here on the Shoe.

And then I had second thoughts. Who did I think I was, writing poetry?

So I had Paul and Jenny read it. Both were completely mystified at what I was trying to say. Something about whining about all the awful stuff in my life??

Ok, then there was no way anyone else would get it.

So I pulled it off.

Well, today Shelley the nephew's wifelet posted about Thanksgiving. And she referenced my poem, which wasn't there when she went looking for it again, and she had completely understood it, I could tell.

So I'm going to post it again. I've learned three things: A) Maybe going solely on Smucker-by-birth evaluations isn't always the best idea B) A simple word of encouragement from you can make a big difference to someone else. Thanks, Shelley! and C) As long as at least a few people understand you, it doesn't matter so much if the rest don't.

THANKSGIVING

I normally give thanks this day

For all the good and pleasant stuff

Like tea and health and family

And house and clothes and food enough.

-----

A longer list is left unsaid:

The things I don’t appreciate:

Frustration, pain, and endless work

The silence while I pray and wait.

-----

Today I’m stepping out in faith

To see these too as gifts and grace

My thanks a symbol of my trust

Of purpose not of useless waste.

-----

The cat with worms; the hungry teen

Who ate that Starbucks bar I’d hid;

The wind and rain; the gaining weight;

The suddenly-defiant kid.

-----

I thank Him for the blogger moms

with hits a thousand times of mine,

The memories that still return

Of pain and shame when I was nine.

-----

The folks who irritate me so

With grating quirks and talking much,

The ones who don’t appreciate

My friendly intervening touch.

-----

The situations I can’t fix

That drive me to despair and tears.

The quiet suffering that lasts

For days, then weeks, then months and years.

-----

The niece with infertility—

Should I give thanks for good held back?

For loved ones deep in grief and loss?

For Kenyan friends with constant lack?

-----

The words I have to leave unsaid,

And situations I can't share.

The deep regrets of choices past

The list of things that seem unfair.

-----

I come today with hands held out

To trust the Father’s hands to sift

Through all the life that comes my way

And thank Him for His choice of gift.

Thanksgiving N Stuff

2011-11-26T14:01:00.000-08:00

As always the book giveaway has been a ton of fun and I have a stack of brown envelopes here ready to mail on Monday.

And as always the stories that come with the nominations are simply heartbreaking and they all qualified by my rather subjective standards. Well, all those unfortunate people are so blessed to have friends and family like you to care for them.

And I haven't reached my max yet so feel free to send me a few more names. dorcassmucker@gmail.com

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving and long weekend.

On Monday the school kids had a Thanksgiving party. Jenny of course wore the outfit in the recent tutorial, and Paul, of the great dignity and lack of drama, agreed to dress up as well.
On Thanksgiving Day we had dinner at the church fellowship hall with a fun combination of people that included Aunt Allene, Uncle Milford and Aunt Susie, Stanley Warfel, Paul's mom, Uncle James and Aunt Orpha, and my brother Phil and his wife and family. This was the first holiday in a long time that Phil and Geneva could just up and go somewhere, as they've been caring for Geneva's dad for six years. He passed away at age 91 two weeks ago and now their lives and routines are completely different.

Yesterday we all went outside and cleaned the yard in one marathon work session. Paul and the children raked leaves while I trimmed and pulled and swept in flower beds.

Steven innocently rakes leaves onto an innocent pile.

Surprise!

I also sewed a quilted purse, something I've wanted to do for a long time. I like the look and feel of Vera Bradley bags, but not the prices, so I made my own and am very happy with it.

Then Jenny got inspired to make a drawstring backpack.

Tomorrow Steven and a bunch of his friends get baptized.

We are very blessed.

Quote of the Day:
[stolen from Emily's Facebook page, so "Me" is her.]

Steven:It's gonna beep!
Fire alarm: Beep, beep, beep!!!
Me: Steven, what did you push??
Steven: There's a fire! Hee hee hee
Me: (very annoyed) Steven, WHAT DID YOU PUSH?
Steven: I pushed your buttons.

On Reading To Children

2011-11-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

My educational philosophy came from
a) how I was raised
b) intuition
c) the situation I was in
d) one random class I took on creativity for pre-schoolers
e) what my children were like.

So there we were, way up north, out of the educational winds that blow through American/Christian/Mennonite society. We had very few electronic devices. But we had books. And time.

We also had phenomenally smart, curious, engaged, creative children. Ok, doesn't every parent say that? No, but they should. I've had people tell me, "Your kids are so clever. They say the most amazing things." True, but I want to say, "LISTEN TO YOUR CHILDREN. You'd figure out how clever they are too."

So, this became my strategy for "educating" my preschoolers:
1. Read to them.
2. Answer their questions.
3. Let them bake and do other work with you.
4. Turn them loose when they play and don't over-manage things.
5. Limit screen time.

Obviously this worked, if you know our children at all.

Later Paul became the school principal and through anguished phone calls from young moms I came to realize how hideously complicated our culture has made the preschool years. My word. These moms would detail to me how they got THIS workbook for their 4-year-old and THAT one when they were five, and how much should they be reading when they come to school, and Ruth likes CLP Learning-to-Read but Tina likes ACE and their cousin likes Sing-Spell-Read-&-Write and oh, dear, what if little Harold can't read nursery rhymes by September?

And always, always, they were sure they hadn't done enough and their child wouldn't be ready for school.

And I would always say Calm down. Read to your children. Answer their questions. Let them do stuff with you. Send them outside to play with sticks and mud. And, especially with boys, I'd say, Ditch the workbooks. Dear me, what punishment, to set these wild little 5-year-old boys down to workbooks when they should be outside playing with the dog and running trucks through the sandbox.

I don't think I convinced any of them, unfortunately. Moms like to make things complicated, I think.

Today Matt, of the 118-why-questions-in-one-day-at-age-3 and the recent engineering degree, linked a Thomas Friedman article on his Facebook page. He also noted, "To Mom and Dad: thank you," which made me weepy.

Anyway, Friedman says:
There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents.

and

“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background.

There's a lot more. You can read the whole thing here. And while it doesn't advocate following my ideas step by step, it's still really affirming for parents who want to help their children without obsessing over workbooks for 4-year-olds.

If you don't do anything else, you busy young parents, READ TO YOUR CHILDREN.

Quote of the Day:
"It always had this mysterious ending. Was it really just a hedgehog, or could she really talk and stuff? And she had this thing called a pinney. She heated her irons over the fire, which was interesing. And she starched things. I'd never heard of starching things and there was also this thing, the girl could look down people's chimneys or something. and there was like a robin and Mrs. Tiggywinkle washed his red thing (me: waistcoat) and she washed something for Peter Rabbit which is weird cuz he was in a different story. And all her hairpins were wrong side out and you explained to me that was all her prickles because she was a hedgehog and there was a hen, Henny Penny, who always said the same thing I go barefoot barefoot barefoot, and you always said it the same way."
--Emily, when I asked her what books she remembers me reading to her and she went off about The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle by Beatrix Potter

Easy Pilgrim Costume

2011-11-19T15:25:00.000-08:00

Monday is a dress-up day for the kids at school. They can be either Pilgrims or Indians.

Jenny opted for "Pilgrim" so I got her outfit together today. I thought I'd share the easy-peasy directions for the cap in case there are other moms out there needing a quick Pilgrim-transformation for their daughters.

First you cut a rectangle of white fabric. About 18 inches by 12 inches.

Serge the edges, or turn under and narrow hem. The less in a hurry you are with this, the nicer the result.

On one long edge, fold down about half an inch and iron it. Then sew it along the serged edge.

Turn the fabric over and fold up about 3 inches along the other long edge. Iron it but don't sew it.

When you sew along the narrower fold it makes a neat little casing. Take a foot-long piece of ribbon and thread it through and tie the ends.

If you grew up in my setting, you see white satin ribbon and think "coppa bandel." The rest of you: never mind. So, take two more pieces of ribbon, maybe a foot long each, or less.

Stitch them to the folded edge to tie under the chin.

Here's the finished back.

For the collar, I found a dress pattern with a big collar that lay flat. I took a ruler and pencil and lengthened the front point, then cut out two pieces.
I sewed them together in the back, serged the edges, and sewed on ribbon ties at the front.

Again, less of a hurry, and doing all the edges "right" would make a nicer product.

The apron came from a stash of Great-aunt Berniece's vintage wedding-server aprons.

The dress is one Jenny had on hand.

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: Mother, thou art the best seamstress in all of the New World. Do I look authentic?
Ben: If I were a professor of history, I probably wouldn't say you look authentic. But I guess I'll just say you do.
Jenny: Prithee, Mother, I request permission to kick our brother Ben.

Interview

2011-11-18T18:54:00.000-08:00

Some of us, writer types in particular, take ourselves way too seriously and when someone wants to interview us, we talk so much they almost beg us to be quiet.

So maybe we could learn a bit from a certain 9-year-old boy, son of my friend Arlene, who is staying with us (along with his sister) while his folks are at a wedding. I thought I'd interview him and see what clever observations he comes up with. But he didn't see any compelling need to be either talkative or clever.

What a thought.

Q: What do you like to do at our house?

A: I like to play Legos. I like to play chess.

Q: Chess!? Did you play chess at our house?

A: Not really. I like to play puppets.

Q: You were cold last night, right?

A: Yeah.

Q: But not the nite before?

A: Nuh uh.

Q: What do you think of Ben?

A: I think he is nice.

Q: What about Steven?

A: He's kind.

Q: What else?

A: I like it at your house cuz it's fun.

Q: Did you talk to your mom today?

A: Yes.

Q: What did she say?

A: She said hi and are you being good and stuff.
She said are you being kind to others

Q: Is she a good mom?

A: Yeah. My dad is nice too.

Q: Did you talk to him today?

A: Yeah. He also wants me to do some stuff.

What if we all gave such concise answers whenever someone asked us a question? How much more efficient the world would be. And how much quieter.

Quote of the Day:
"Ben, stop using logic and use common sense!"
--Jenny

Column: tea

2011-11-13T19:56:00.000-08:00

This month's column is about tea.

The Annual Giveaway

2011-11-12T11:06:00.000-08:00

The last two Christmases I've had book giveaways and they were a lot of fun for me but the biggest benefit was hearing all these gut-wrenching stories and realizing how phenomenally blessed we are.

And in giving these people a little bright spot in their holidays, as I got some amazing letters in return that warmed my heart.

So I'm doing it again.

Here's the deal:

You can nominate someone to receive a free book that I've written. Send me an email or Facebook message with their name and address, and tell me why they ought to receive a book. I'm looking for people going through a hard holiday season due to grief, health issues, job loss, etc. If you prefer a specific book, tell me that too. (Ordinary Days, Upstairs the Peasants are Revolting, or Downstairs the Queen is Knitting)

Disclaimers:

Don't nominate yourself. Duh.

Please stick with people with genuine needs rather than "Aunt Sadie is in perfect health and all but she deserves a book because she's so sweet."

Last year two books didn't get out til after the holidays (Sorry!) so this isn't a cast-iron promise that people will get them by Christmas.

I'll limit the number of books I'll give away so it's first come first served.

Drop me your nomination at dorcassmucker@gmail.com

Let the fun begin.

Yes and No

2011-11-11T21:23:00.000-08:00

I have a hard time saying no.

Actually, I have a really terribly hard time saying no. Especially to good spiritual helpful projects. Especially when good kind people ask me. I drown in guilt and second-guess myself.

But yesterday I said no.

My friend "Belinda" is always helping people, and she had offered--well I will just say she had offered to can applesauce for someone who needed it even though that's not exactly what it was.

It turned into a huge project and Belinda called and asked if I had anything going on and could I help her?

It's very hard for me in a situation like this to say, actually I have a lot going on: dishes, laundry, writing to Amy, getting groceries, emailing that one lady back, reminding Steven to scrub the blop of ketchup he left on the carpet, washing my hair, and making supper.

Because that doesn't sound nearly as important as helping to can applesauce for a deserving family.

But for once I knew what I needed to do and I said no.

So I did dishes and laundry and got groceries and did lots of other fiddly stuff.

That was yesterday.

Early this morning my sister-in-law Geneva called and said her dad passed away during the night and they were having a private burial this afternoon that we were invited to. [Phil and Geneva have taken care of him for six years and he's had a long, lingering, slow demise.]

So. Because I said no to Belinda yesterday I could say yes to today. I had a clean outfit to wear and gas in the car and food here for the children after school. I pulled chicken enchiladas and cinnamon rolls out of the freezer to take along. I had piecrusts on hand so I made two apple pies, one for my brother's family and one for us. And I left before noon with no frantic last minute dashing around the house while watching the clock and was able to spend a few hours with Phil and Geneva before the burial, making tea and talking and ironing Phil's shirt and trying to get Geneva to take a nap.

It's not always bad to say no to a good thing.

We'll see if I remember that next time.

Quote of the Day:
"Is there something you should be writing?"
--Paul, when I was mopping the kitchen at 10:30 pm

Analyzing Authors

2011-11-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

Today I was writing about my addiction to tea, and in researching I ran across the best analysis ever of tea, by our old friend Alexander McCall Smith of the #1 Ladies Detective Agency series.

Here it is.

Tea, for me, is one of the great subjects. It is a romantic trade, it does not pollute excessively, it has all sorts of health benefits, it calms and wakes you up at the same time. It promotes conversation. You can give it to the vicar when he calls – if vicars still call – and you can give it to the builders when they come to knock down your wall. Builders still take sugar, but then I'm sure they need it.

Tea can be drunk by everyone. Pilots high in the sky drink tea as they fly across oceans. Captains on the bridge of the humblest vessel drink it as they plough slowly through the waves. Submariners drink it as they sail under those very waves. A person who is troubled in heart can drink tea and for a moment feel happier about life. A person who is happy with his lot can drink it and perhaps think about those who are not quite so happy. Members of Parliament may drink it – at our expense – and not feel too guilty. Policemen drink it – as the Ahlbergs point out in the story of the cops of London town – and so do robbers. I have seen a horse who loved to drink it from a cup. Dogs like it, too.

I must now go and put the kettle on.

He is the first person I've ever run across who acknowledges the horror of mixing the flavors of tea and coffee, and of how American motels err in this regard.

Certainly you will find tea (in the form of tea bags) in your room, but how do you make it? The answer is that they expect you to make it in the coffee maker.

Now the problem with that is that if there are two flavours in this world that cannot – in any circumstances – be combined, it is tea and coffee. To make tea in a container that has been tainted with coffee is to ensure that the resultant tea is undrinkable. The flavour of coffee lingers in a vessel long after the last cup was brewed, and it is impossible to use that vessel for tea-making no matter how much it is washed. Try it. Put coffee in a vacuum flask and then, after washing it out thoroughly, try to use it for tea.

He just GETS the charm of tea. Read it if you like tea also.

Meanwhile we move on to another favorite author of mine--Lucy Maud Montgomery. I have been over-indulging in her stories ever since Emily found me a new and very inexpensive Jetbook (Kindle knockoff) at the bent-n-dent grocery store where she works and Matt helped me download half a dozen free collections of LMM's short stories.

I've also been analyzing her stories to figure out their structure, hoping to emulate their charm someday.

And I've come across some very interesting things that keep coming up which I may or may not emulate.
1. A first sentence that plunges you right into the story. "I had two schools offered me that summer; one at Rocky Valley and one at Bayside." "At sunset the schoolmaster went upstairs to write a letter to her." "Miss Hannah was cutting asters in her garden."

2. A recurring theme of families fragmented by death, and of children being raised by people other than their parents. With all the halfs and steps it reminds me of children today, but the sequence was always marriage-death-remarriage rather than marriage-divorce-shacking up etc.

3. Girls at boarding school having fun. That happened a lot back then.

4. Women who got to stay home and keep house were to be envied. Women who had to be employed were to be pitied. The former got married, or were adopted by rich relatives. The latter were thin, haggard old maids who didn't have any family and had to live in bare boarding houses and either teach school or work in department stores or be maids for wealthy people.

5. Bachelor farmers were quite common, and quite self-sufficient. They usually had housekeepers, grim old aunts who didn't darn the socks and didn't clean corners.

6. Women farmers were surprisingly common too. Most of them were the efficient-manager type who got along just fine with a hired man and a French-Canadian boy to run errands. The exception was the little widow with two little boys whose pigs kept getting into the bachelor farmer's garden, and at first he got all upset but then he fell in love with the widow and married her, and then she was to be envied because she was well taken care of and got to stay home and keep house and do all the cooking she wanted without worrying about the pigs.

7. Unrequited love was a good and noble thing, and if you wrote secret love letters for 20 years and kept them in a box up in your room because you could never marry because you were from two different classes, your love was still a good and noble thing, and somehow you kept up the energy of this high and noble true love and didn't get tired of it after 20 years even if you never talked to each other.

8. Young men who weren't accepted at home or who wanted a new start always went out West, usually to Manitoba. Many came home rich after 20 years away. This sheds an interesting light on Paul's great-great-grandpa Christian Smucker who we are told was the black sheep of the family in Ohio and came out to Oregon many years ago, and who never had much to do with the Ohio Smuckers ever again. So evidently he never went back and snuck down a moonlit road and found his former love out wandering around at night, still unmarried and still thinking about him.

9. Family members kept losing contact with each other and finding each other when a random person did something noble. Like, a man would die leaving a wife and child, and eventually the wife would remarry when the child was in his teens, and they'd have another child, but then the wife would die also, and the younger child would live with another family and the teenager would go out West, and they would totally lose contact. Years later they would meet by accident when the older guy would go to a friend's house for Thanksgiving, and meanwhile the friend's younger sister would after a sleepless night of tormented conscience decide to invite the shy girl in the bare boarding house home for Thanksgiving, and the two guests would take one look at each other and realize they were long-separated half-siblings. And then the brother would take his half sister home with him and she was so lucky that she had a home she could be the mistress of and could leave the awful boarding house and her awful job as a teacher.

10. Abrupt endings. I'd say 75% of LMM's endings are just WHAM. Done. That's it. Before you're quite ready.

Like this.

Quote of the Day:
Jenny: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!! Look at that spider!!!
Ben: WHOA! That thing's got like a cubic centimeter behind!

Good Morning to You Too

2011-11-04T22:01:00.000-07:00

This sweet scene greeted me in the kitchen this morning.

Quote of the Day:
"Mom! Go long!"
--Jenny
[Gotta say this was the first time I heard this yelled at me in the grocery store. I turned around. Jenny was a ways down the shampoo aisle, all wound up and about to throw me a foam football she had pulled out of a display in the aisle. I don't think I went long, but she threw it, and I caught it and threw it back, and then it went back in the display.]

Names

2011-11-01T15:23:00.000-07:00

When I was young I hated my name. Dorcas Yoder. It was full of R's and O's, and it twisted your mouth, and it was was so WEIRD among all the Lories and Tammies and Vickies. And nobody who wasn't Mennonite had ever heard of it.

I could never buy a cute key chain with my name on it.

And I had a sister who went by Becky, and she was cute and vivacious, and I knew if we switched names I would have a chance at being cute and vivacious too, and she would be awkward and overweight. What was really irritating was that Mom and Dad had "Dorcas" all picked out before Becky was born, and then right before that their good friends had a baby and named her Dorcas, so Mom and Dad switched to Rebecca and saved Dorcas for me, a year later.

THAT close I could have been a Becky. Imagine.

And then my younger sister was named Margaret, a lovely name as well.

I doubt that the Beckies and Suzies of this world ever had to put up with stuff like the lady behind the counter saying, "DORcas??? [Lord's-name-in-vain] WHAT a NAME, eh?"

I used to read Newsweek magazine and gaze in envy at the column by Jane Bryant Quinn. What a perfect name. If I had a name like that, full of N's, I could be a writer too.

Well. If there is a young person reading this who has something in his or her life that seems irritating and unchangeable and beyond redemption, let me just say that you never know. God takes delight in redeeming the very thing that you think stands in the way of you ever doing anything successful and meaningful with your life.

Obviously I got used to "Dorcas" somewhere along the way and had much weightier things to worry about, and it really didn't matter any more.

And then the world kept spinning around and I started writing.

And a very strange thing happened. People thought I had the most wonderful name, that it sounded just like a writer's name ought to sound.

Bizarre, isn't it?

A lovely local woman whom I got to meet one time posted this on her blog--

In this part of Oregon I share my name with several Kathy Davises, and the name Kathleen Davis is just about as common. . .At Adams Elementary School in the 60s it seemed there were Kathys in every classroom. I believe it was in 2nd grade that there were 3 of us. . .At one point, I remember, I wished for a dreamy princess name like Cinderella or something. . .

That’s why I stuck my maiden name in my title for this website. I may still be a little bit envious of people with simple but unique author’s names like Dorcas Smucker, but I’ll get over it. I’m thankful for what I’ve been given.

Interesting, isn't it?

So, you with the celiac disease or "too many" younger siblings or weak ankles or dandruff or strict parents or dyslexia: Hang in there. The Lord loves to redeem these things.

Quote of the Day:

"She strikes me as Godly but unintimidating."

--Jenny. We all like that kind, don't we?

Romance

2011-10-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

29 years ago tonight we had our first date.

That's the statistic for the day.

Now for a story about a romantic Oregon farmer. I spoke at a women's retreat up in the mountains an hour and a half northwest of here on Friday and Saturday. One young woman there is married to a grass-seed-and-clover farmer who heard about the retreat and said, "Oh--Smucker? That's where we send our screenings." That would be Steve the BIL who turns the offscourings of grass seed cleaning into pellets for cattle feed.

Anyway, when this young couple was dating, the guy, who sacked seed for the family warehouse, took the stencil maker for the bags and punched in "I love you Mary" and inked it on duct tape and wrapped the tape around a water bottle and gave it to his girlfriend.

Anyone who has sacked seed will appreciate that romantic gesture, I think.

As for that anniversary, today in church I was thinking, if I would have known what I was in for, would I do it over again?

That's not really a fair question, is it? It wasn't the date or the guy that made things hard or easy since then, although we have certainly had our tough times. Life just finds ways to be hard whether you say yes or no to the nice tall freckled guy.

But I'm glad I said yes.

Quote of the Day, in which Mrs. Smucker thinks it's good she didn't have a premonition of this when she agreed to that first date.
Emily: You put SUGAR on your CEREAL??
Paul: Yes.
[Too-long too-loud discussion/argument on whether or not sugar is bad for you]
Emily: Just don't come running to me when you're sick and dying and on your deathbed!
Paul: Do I tend to do that?
Emily: What? Be sick and die or come running to me?
[etc. etc.]

My Cold

2011-10-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

I have a cold.

When other people have colds I tend to say, Oh that's too bad, and I tend to think, Well, it's just a cold, get on with your life.

If I remember right, I haven't had a real full-blown cold for a long time. I've spent the last couple of winters swallowing vitamins and cod liver oil and echinacea, and when others in the family got sick I sliced raw garlic into my salads despite the family's protests and plowed through like James Bond piloting that plane through the flames in Tomorrow Never Dies, which I once watched on a plane, never fear, I don't watch JB on my own time.

I also haven't had a full-blown flu since that horrible bout with swine flu a few years ago.

Well.

I came home from Minnesota and Emily had a cold that made her look like she was weeping miserably for a couple of days, and it was bad but she said it's not as bad as feeling sick all over.

I took my vitamins and was sure I'd be fine.

But I caught her cold and oh mei zeit I am sorry for ever not feeling sorry enough for you if you ever told me you had a cold.

I feel like someone dumped acid in my eyes, stuffed styrofoam up my nose, pushed me down the stairs, attacked me with the forklift, and ran me through the spin cycle on the washer. I glance at the light and my eye gets all prickly and gushes forth tears that stream down my cheek. My chest is slathered in Vicks but I can't smell it. I cut up pieces of an old flannel sheet for handkerchiefs, since Kleenexes are just too savage for my raw nose.

I spend a lot of time in bed and can't muster up the courage to do a load of laundry.

I can think of only one good result of this and that is that when I'm not lying down I can usually work on the computer, and I did a bunch of work on my next book and also planning for the writing class I'm starting to teach next week.

You're probably thinking, It's just a cold, why don't you get on with your life? I guess colds are much more dramatic and portentious when they're your own and not someone else's.

Quote of the Day:
"I came to the conclusion that if things are difficult, that's not an abnormality. That's just normal."
--Mike G., a friend from church

Old Pictures

2011-10-21T21:50:00.000-07:00

After posting the other day about Matt's surgery in 1991, I dug out some old pictures of the occasion, just for fun.

You can see them here.

The Dakotas

2011-10-21T11:32:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why I find South Dakota so interesting. Both of the Dakotas, actually. It has always seemed to me that people from there are friendly, tough, practical, and unpretentious in a way that makes people from other parts of the country seem a bit sissified in comparison.

Some of my perception is due to random snapshot experiences. Like the time we were driving to Minnesota and stopped at a cafe in a tiny town for breakfast. I looked over the newspapers for sale at the front counter and asked the cashier if they had any with national news. She paused. "Well," she said, "as national as we get out here."

I loved that line.

Or the time Jenny and I rode the bus home from Minnesota and I talked with a few Dakota grandmas for a couple of hundred miles, and then one of them got off the bus and got picked up by a wholesome, smiling teenage farm boy in a pickup truck with a trailer behind who hugged his grandma and hoisted in her luggage and seemed a world apart from the slouching, miserable-looking, black-clad high school crowd that crosses the street by WinCo in Eugene.

Then of course there was my nephew who died in South Dakota, and his crowd of friends who came to his viewing and hugged the family and freely conversed with this West Coast aunt like they wanted to know how I fit into Leonard's life and like I was worth getting to know.

And then there's the mystique of the South Dakota Farm Boy as the Ideal Man, as discussed by Emily and Hillary way back in early 2006.

So I have a bit of an idealized picture of Dakotans. But I didn't know if I could ever live there.

My nephew had been very good friends with a family in South Dakota--Tim and Katie Faber, I'll call them--and their many young-adult children. When Leonard died, the Fabers were "there" for his family in intensely supportive and ongoing ways.

Some time ago the Fabers moved to a ranch in western South Dakota where they raise hay. I'm not sure if they also have cattle and sheep, but I know others in the area do. [They also put llamas out with the sheep to chase off coyotes which I find intriguing.] While I was at Mom and Dad's last week, my brother Marcus and SIL Anna went to visit Fabers for the weekend.

They came home with lots of stories about life in western South Dakota. It's rugged but not Badlands country exactly, Marcus said, and not all prairie either. Basically ranch country with buttes here and there. There are two public high schools to choose from, he said. One is 30 miles from the ranch and the other 35. The bus from the one school goes as far as 50 miles away to pick up students.

If a part breaks down on a John Deere baler, you have three John Deere dealers to choose from to get the part, but they are all about 85 miles away. So do you spend the day making a 170-mile round trip, or do you order the part and wait for it to be delivered the next day?

Tim and Katie took Marcus and Anna to a Norwegian supper at a small Lutheran church, some 60 miles away. About 200 people showed up, most likely from all directions and distances, and they all seemed to revel in the chance to talk with "neighbors" like this.

"It would take a special person to live in a place like that," I said.

"How so?" Marcus asked.

"You'd have to be ok with not being connected with people," I said. "I mean, driving through Montana and North Dakota, I'd see these houses sitting there alone in miles and miles of countryside and I thought, I don't know if I'd have it in me to live there, so far from other people."

Marcus disagreed with me. "You wouldn't believe how connected those people are with their neighbors, even if the neighbors are five or ten miles away. They really watch out for each other. If someone is making a run to the grocery store, they call each other up to see if they need anything. Someone called up Katie to see if she needed groceries, and she said she needs lettuce, and the next morning there were two heads of lettuce on the front seat of the truck. If someone is having a hard time, the neighbors help them out. People make you feel valuable, and they talk with you. On our way out there we stopped and ate at a little cafe before we went on to the ranch, and there was only one other customer, and she struck up a conversation with us and wanted to know all about us and told us about her work as an EMT."

"In fact," Marcus said, "I really think people are more connected in that part of South Dakota than they are in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania."

Wow. Maybe I could live in South Dakota after all.

20 Years Ago

2011-10-19T22:00:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago today we almost lost our son.

We were living in the wilds of Northwestern Ontario, on an Indian reserve of some 800 people. Paul taught at the little Christian school. Matt was 5, Amy 3, and Emily 1.

A child on the reserve belongs to everyone and this was especially true of our children who were stared at and gushed over and discussed and kissed everywhere they went. People loved Emily's big blue eyes and Amy's charm, but they seemed especially fascinated by Matt with his red hair and his way of going up to anyone, anywhere, and talking their ears off whether they spoke English or not. "Matchoo," people would murmur with a twinkle in their eyes. "Matchoo, Matchoo," and they would shake their heads. They couldn't understand him, but they loved him.

"Emmity-go-genes," the old people would say as they grinned indulgently at our crew. "Little white kids." And when Matt sat by the aisle in church, old men shuffling up to their seats would reach out and reverently touch his hair as they passed.

They also discussed us on the village radio. It's hard to explain the role of the local station on the reserve, not that there were any non-local stations to choose from. Everything was announced and discussed there. The time Paul took the kids out canoeing when the ice was breaking up--that got discussed on the radio. And when the other teacher's parents came to visit, the neighbor lady went on the radio and said everybody be careful driving down this way, there are two old people visiting. His parents were actually in their 40s.

We had electricity and phones at Round Lake but it still felt very isolated. During most of the year the only way in and out was by plane. The exception was from January to March, when you could bump your way out some 25 miles of bush road pushed over the frozen ground.

There was a nursing station on the reserve, and a small grocery store. The nearest doctor was some 175 miles away in Pickle Lake. The nearest hospital roughly 300 miles away. The nearest big grocery store some 400 miles.

That fall of 1991 Matthew got sick. We seemed to get sick an awful lot, so this wasn't such a big deal. He had a stomach ache for a few days and just didn't feel good. Then one night he vomited off and on all night, so I took him to the nurses in the morning. They said it's just a virus and his stomach hurts from all the vomiting.

He got a bit better but I was still concerned. Then a few nights later he woke up screaming. We took him to bed with us and he was in terrible pain and his abdomen was as hard as a board. What on earth? Finally he fell asleep and as soon as we could I laid him on a big sled and hauled him to the nursing station.

Something was obviously wrong, they said. Something had ruptured inside, but it didn't seem like appendicitis. They started an IV and said he needs to be flown out for surgery. So while they called in the air ambulance from Sioux Lookout, 300 miles away, we made hasty plans, finally deciding that Paul would fly out with him and I would stay home with the girls.

An old van drove us to the airstrip and the big sleek ambulance plane landed. They loaded Matt's stretcher inside and I tearfully told him goodbye, with that ghastly knot in the pit of my stomach that you feel when you don't know if your child will live or die.

They flew off.

Someone took us back home. I tried to do housework, and people came by all day, offering their support. The radio station announced updates whenever I got a call from Paul.

Meanwhile Paul and Matt were taken to the hospital in Sioux Lookout. Matt was evaluated. Yes, he needs surgery, although they still didn't know what for. The lone surgeon was out fishing. The policemen couldn't get their boat motor started to go fetch him.

They called the Dryden hospital. The one surgeon there was out moose hunting.

They would take him to Thunder Bay.

At 9:00 that night he went into surgery. The radio announcer told the whole village to stay awake until they knew if little Matthew Smucker would be ok.

At 10:30 I got the call that Matt was out of surgery and he would be fine. I fell to pieces from sheer relief and gratitude. Our friend Lucy Day was less sentimental. She grabbed the phone and called the radio station. They announced the news and told everyone they can go to bed now.

So we all did.

The trouble had been a Meckel's diverticulum, a little tube or pouch on the small intestine, left over from before he was born, that had a bit of stomach tissue in it. This developed an ulcer and eventually burst through the intestinal wall.

He would probably have died without the surgery, said the doctor. And, he said, looking a bit puzzled, often these cases bleed heavily before surgery but for some reason Matt's didn't.

Two weeks later, we had a blizzard and the planes couldn't fly.

So despite the ordeal we saw God's hand all over it and knew He still had a purpose for Matt's life.

Matt was in the Thunder Bay hospital for a week. The mission pilot flew me and the girls out a few days later. We hung out at the hospital and watched Matt recover.

And 20 years later Matt is all grown up with a scar across his belly button to remind him of the time he got to live and not die.

Quote of the Day:
"It hurts so bad and I'm so hungry but they won't let me eat and I told the doctor I want a hamburger but they won't let me have one."
--Matt's teary words to me when I got to the hospital which of course made me cry as well. We got him a hamburger before we left Thunder Bay a week later. Maybe this deprivation is what makes him so fond of Wendy's Baconators

Minnesota Musings

2011-10-19T08:57:00.000-07:00

We set a new record, Caleb and Grandma and I, door to door from here to my folks' in 26 hours. Let's just say that when you have a determined 19-year-old driver, Montana roads at night, and 3 Monster energy drinks for the driver, you cover a lot of ground in a short time.

Dad at going-on-95 tends his garden, picks apples, milks the goat, cuts wood with the chain saw, and a lot more. He has a few ongoing health issues related to his setback in April, but on my sister's advice I got some apple cider vinegar and he's on a regimen of a few tablespoons a day in a glass of water. Some people might fuss at drinking vinegar but it fits right in with Dad's philosophy that if it tastes terrible, it's probably good for you. Hence the broccoli in his oatmeal, for one minor example.

Dad has the most astonishing memory. He can pull up names and dates like his brain is Google with a high-speed connection. I'm happy to say that he's 14 pages into writing the story of his two years in Paraguay with MCC back when the Mennonite refugees were coming there from Russia. I read his story--so far--one night. He and a few other MCC volunteers took a freighter to Paraguay (actually they landed in Buenos Aires) and Dad was seasick the entire 28-day journey. Another one of the 8 or so passengers was a French guy who was involved in the movie industry, but unfortunately that was one name Dad couldn't recall.

My favorite story was how he was invited to a "tea party," a fancy affair where the MCC guys and two doctors and a few others were brainstorming about possible medical projects. Now Dad, growing up Amish in Oklahoma, was not accustomed to tea parties. They offered the options of sugar, lemon, and milk for your tea, so Dad put in all three. And, he said, it made cheese. He drank it, of course. See that previous paragraph about eating gross foods.

Mom's memory is still good for being 91, but names escape her all the time. It's very frustrating, because she has always loved to recount stories of people she worked for and all the hundreds of friends and relatives she knows, but she starts to tell a story and the name is just gone.

But there was one episode where Mom's memory was better than Dad's and mine. They had missed their grandson Jason's birthday. Oh dear. So Mom told Dad to buy a "grandson" birthday card when he went to town. Unfortunately he got a "granddaughter" card, which will be fine for Janet later this month but won't do for Jason. I was going to go to Paynesville to do my email at the library so I told her I'd pick up a card for her.

After I used the library I put my computer in the car, locked it, and went over to Twice's Nice, the cool second-hand store across from the library. And there was a whole box of cards. Bingo! I found a nice one and paid the very discounted price and went home and triumphantly gave it to Mom. She looked confused instead of pleased. "But," she said, "this one is for a granddaughter too!" She was right. What was I thinking???

On Monday I took Mom to Willmar for groceries and she picked out her own card.

Meanwhile with great effort I had managed to unlock the battleship a.k.a Pontiac doors except for the back door on the driver's side. The little knob simply wouldn't budge. I gathered, and Dad affirmed this, that those doors pretty much never get locked. I don't think the keys get pulled very often either.

You gotta love Minnesota.

Etc.

2011-10-11T16:13:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning off some SD cards and putting the pictures on cd's for storage so I needed to label them. "Spring 2011. Jr. Convention. Kittens. Oklahoma. MN. Etc." Another one: "Summer 2011. Cats. Bible Memory Camp. Etc."

"Etc." can mean a lot of things. A close-up of a pansy in the flower bed. A shot of orange dots on the ceiling. Trish's kids on the trampoline. Jenny and Janane's artfully arranged Converse shoes. A pretty cake. Etc.

* * *
Tomorrow I'm off on another visit to my parents in Minnesota. Caleb the 19-year-old nephew from Wisconsin has been out here working for about 4 months and was going to drive home by himself. So I suggested going along as far as Minnesota so I could help drive. And then Paul's mom decided to go along too.

So we leave early tomorrow morning and drive "straight through." It used to take us 32 hours from here to Minnesota but I think Caleb thinks we can do it in less than that. I have a feeling we will all three have some stories to tell our friends when the trip is over.

* * *
I read a moving post by a blogger named Jessica Derstine, on miscarriage.

Questions

I look around and wonder.
How my mind would feel right now.
How my body would be changed.
How my days would play out.

I look around and wonder.
Why does no one talk about this.
Why does everyone ignore it.
Why does it feel so alone.

I look around and wonder.
How many mama's feel the same.
How many babies are not here.
How many times they are missed.

I look around and wonder.
If I'll ever understand.
If I'll ever be here again.
If I'll ever forget.

And she adds: Why does no one talk about the babies that they lose.

While I am very grateful I've never had a miscarriage, I often feel inadequate in comforting or supporting women who have. This helped me understand what they feel.

* * *
This writing tip was on a recent Willamette Writers email. I thought it was really simple but profound.
Playwright, screenwriter, director David Mamet presents the foundation of storytelling this way:

· Once upon a time -
· And then one day -
· Just when everything was going so well -
· When at the last minute -
· And then everyone -

If you can complete these sentences, you have the outlines of a tight, beginning-middle-end story. Let's work it out for a film you probably are familiar with, E.T.

· Once upon a time -- there was a lonely boy.
· And then one day -- he met a stranded alien.
· Just when everything was going so well -- the alien said, "E.T. go home."
· When at the last minute -- the boy revived E.T., rescued him from scientists, and helped him catch his spaceship.
· And then everyone -- was sadder but wiser, learning that love is letting go.

(by Charles Deemer)
* * *
Quote of the Day:
"Mom? Five minutes with Dorcas and already you're crying?"
--my friend "Jill's" daughter "Alice," after church one Sunday this summer. When "Jill" and I get together we cut to the emotional chase immediately.

October column

2011-10-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

Today's column is about education and learning and wisdom. I'll let you decide whether or not the bribes were worth it.

Here's the story.

Deals

2011-10-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

Today I was working on my column for October, having gotten my deadline extended just a bit by my new editor who has yet to get used to my procrastinating ways. After I finished the column, I posted this on Facebook:

"Writing is expensive. No, not Writers Digest magazine or online classes, but paying Jenny $5 to let me put in that paragraph about her making apple crisp and I think the orange-pop-on-the-ceiling story about Steven will set me back at least $10. Yes, I'm desperate."

A lady named Valerie Martin commented: "Trying to decide if it's free-market capitalism or extortion. :o)"

And Katie Troyer said: You are going to end up in the Poor House.

So I thought maybe I should explain how this works in this household.

I have a policy that I don't write about the children in my newspaper column without their permission, and they have veto power over anything I write about them. This would be much easier if I always worked on the column two weeks ahead of the deadline, or if they never did anything they didn't want the world to know about. [On the other hand, what on earth would I write about if they were that well-behaved??]

But when I'm down to the wire with my deadline and sitting here furiously typing, with everyone else off to school, and with my hair uncombed, and a wild look in my eyes like the ghost of the butcher's first wife in Fiddler On the Roof, well I am way beyond considering the tender feelings of the poor little Smucker darlings. I've just GOT TO GET THIS DONE NOW!!!!!!!!!!!

That's how I was today, with the Looming Deadline at noon.

But then I had a moment of sanity, remembering how wrong things have gone with a recent column or two, and I reconsidered.

See, I had written this very accurate paragraph about how Jenny made apple crisp the other day and fussed almost the entire time.

But oh, the dilemma, because if you have a third of the article pinned on this example, you have to rework the whole stinkin' thing if the child says you can't use that story.

I called her up at school.
Me: Hey, Jenny. I wrote about you in my article and I want to know if it's ok. Here, I'll read it to you. [read read read]
Jenny: No, Mom!
Me: But it's true, isn't it?
Jenny: Well, yeah, but I don't want people to know that about me!
Me: How much will you charge?
Jenny: Five dollars!
Me: Deal!

Now I'll let you decide if that's bribery, extortion, or good old American capitalism.

Another example I used was Steven's exploding can of orange pop. I told him this last night. He said, "Moooooooommmmm...!" I could hear the abacus beads clicking in his head and as mentioned above I thought sure this was going to cost me a good $10. But he settled for $7.

I'm still making a slight profit, and I can probably file these under Expenses when I do my taxes.

I also mentioned Paul's mom in the article, so I emailed her those paragraphs for approval, and she didn't charge me a thing.

Saw it, Liked it, Stole it

2011-10-03T00:29:00.000-07:00

A List of Rainy Thoughts

2011-09-27T10:19:00.000-07:00

1. The rains have begun in Oregon, which sounds like a deep-voiced narration on a National Geographic film. We hope the adult female of the species manages to avoid SAD this season.

2. I love being home alone. Summer is nice, in its way, with people in and out, eating and sleeping and working at odd hours. But this time of year, now that school and community college have started, and I have predictable times alone at home, this is blissful.

2a. To my children: I love you a lot, especially when you're gone all day and I have time to recharge my batteries, and then you come home all beautiful and hungry and talkative.

2b. I'm told there's someone in this community, an adult female mom, who hates being home alone. Really. She has a big family so it doesn't happen often, but when it does, I was told, she calls up a friend to come hang out with her so she doesn't have to be alone.

3. We "did corn" last week. 450 ears in two afternoons and it was amazingly efficient, with everyone helping, and Bonnie the SIL came by and saw us and helped with the cutting for a while.

4. I have been thinking and praying a lot about writing. As in, do I quit or take it seriously? Is it a calling or not? So far I've always been all slap-dash, hurry-up, impulsive, fly by the seat of my skirt, do the least possible work, screech in right under the deadline. And I've never felt like either God or I ought to take this too seriously. I mean, why bother God about a post describing orange pop sprayed on the ceiling? But I feel like I need to either quit writing entirely or take it seriously, as in, plan ahead, write every day, send more stuff out, edit it better, do more marketing. Or in other words quit nibbling on the dinner rolls and either leave the table or dig in and eat the steak and potatoes and spinach.

4a. But how do you take writing seriously without becoming one of those pitiful dreadful earnest desperate writers who think they are sending out almost The Very Words of God and can't understand why they have so much trouble getting published?

4b. I was praying about this the other day and then opened my One Year Bible to the proper page and immediately read this in Isaiah:

2 “Enlarge the place of your tent,
stretch your tent curtains wide,
do not hold back;
lengthen your cords,
strengthen your stakes.
³ For you will spread out to the right and to the left; . . .
⁴ “Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame.
Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated.
. . .
¹⁴ In righteousness you will be established:
Tyranny will be far from you;
you will have nothing to fear.
Terror will be far removed;
it will not come near you.
¹⁵ If anyone does attack you, it will not be my doing;
whoever attacks you will surrender to you. . . .
¹⁷ no weapon forged against you will prevail,
and you will refute every tongue that accuses you.
This is the heritage of the servants of the LORD,
and this is their vindication from me,” declares the LORD.

Well! That seemed pretty direct, if slightly out of context, and I really liked that part about whoever attacks you will surrender to you, thinking of that horrible phone caller recently. However, I was like Gideon and asked for an additional sign.

5. Someone I know thinks we all have hard lives, some of us just have more obviously hard lives than others. I disagree. I think some people have much easier lives than others.

6. Sometimes life brings its own plateful of suffering that is very personal and private, and it goes on and on, and you can't talk about it, and you think you are stuck in this forever because God has forgotten and no one else knows. And then suddenly the wind shifts and it turns out God knew all along, and others suspected, and you weren't as alone as you thought.

7. I used to not like Agatha Christie books, with that pompous Hercule Poirot and his moustache and his arrogant way of announcing that he knows exactly what happened and if you weren't so slow and unobservant you'd have caught on too.

7b. But then I picked up The Spies Among Us, a collection of three stories, and loved it, but it's a dangerous book to read on the way to John Day in the wilds of eastern Oregon to visit a young friend in jail, because when you stop for gas at Plum Fierce in Redmond, you look at the heavyset gas station attendant and wonder if he's actually spying for an international outfit hiding in the mountains that's about to overthrow civilization as we know it, and you're very careful about using the restroom for fear someone is hiding there, and they're going to whack you over the head with a rolling pin and switch your clothes with someone who looks just like you, and put that person in the car and Paul won't know the difference, and that person will deliver a secret message to another camp out by the John Day Fossil Beds.

9. I am trying not to compare myself with others or do things out of guilt, but these habits are deeply entrenched.

10. It's become a family joke how easily intimidated I am by people. I always thought my children were all like their dad, utterly oblivious and fearless, but then the other day Jenny said, "I don't want to [do certain activity] because [certain person] intimidates me too much." Yikes. No Fun, to have my words echo back like that.

11. When your children grow up, you cannot make their decisions for them. This is terrifying and sometimes it makes you wish you could go back to the days of dictating who sits where in the van and when they go to bed. But those were also the days of one screaming to another, "Mad-maker!!!" and the mad-maker screaming back, "Jealous-maker!!!" and then for good measure they would shriek, "You...you...VERB!!!" and "You ragged wolf!!!"
So, yes, I don't always like their decisions, but they are friends with each other on Facebook, and they like and link each other's statuses, and when Amy posts gorgeous shots of Jamaica sunsets, Matt and Emily never write "JEALOUS-MAKER!!!" in the comments.

12. Quote of the Day:
"In the Sewing Room on a Piece of Pink Fabric the Cat is Giving Birth."
--Jenny's title for my next book

Bible Memory Camp 2011

2011-09-16T11:57:00.000-07:00

Last week we took 11 youngsters to the coast for Bible Memory Camp. Here in the Valley the temps were in the 90's [we finally got July in September--loved it!] but at the beach it was breezy and in the 60s.

This year we decided to rough it a bit more, staying in tents at a campground instead of in a house, and cooking over a fire.

The biggest advantage to this arrangement was that there was plenty of room for everyone and all the stuff. Also, cleanup was very easy and we didn't have to obsess about keeping sand off the floors.

There weren't a lot of disadvantages, but we should have brought lanterns so we could play games after dark.

You can see pictures of the weekend here. Jenny shot most of them.

Quote of the Day:
"Cuz you're his cheeseburg-ER. . ."
--an inspiring song sung around the campfire

Mrs. Smucker Obsesses About Writing

2011-09-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

I have several times given a speech in which I rhapsodize on The Wonder of Words. Think of it: with funny black lines on a page or sounds coming out of my mouth I can take thoughts and impressions in my head and communicate them into yours.

For example, I can use words to say that I'm cold and you understand that and loan me a sweater. I can be worried about a family member and you understand my burden and offer to pray for me or them. I can tell a story and we laugh together.

Amazing.

And God chose words to communicate to us. In fact he valued words so much that Jesus was called the Living Word.

Well that is all very nice.

Until you find out that we live in a broken world and sometimes words are pretty makeshift ways of communicating.

I write, you all know that. Sometimes people ask me why, exactly, and the answer is always a bit uncertain. Well, I like working with words. And I feel like I"m supposed to do this because there's a constant nudging like a fatherly thumb in my backbone pushing me in this direction.

Mostly, I don't like to think or overthink about why I write. That way, I've found, is fraught with peril and paralysis. Better to do and not think.

Usually, writing is a rewarding enterprise. When I get an email and I can tell that someone precisely "got" exactly what I was trying to say in my last column, that is just utterly satisfying.

But, as I said, sometimes the words don't work so well, and instead of words communicating precise ideas, it's more like I'm cobbling together little forms with play-doh, and someone is trying to figure out what on earth I'm trying to say.

I am going to be very vague here even though I much prefer specifics, but several times recently I chose words that I honestly thought communicated THIS and a few people read them and really honestly thought I meant to communicate THAT.

By the time the words filter down through all my thoughts and perceptions and intents and then get printed and then get filtered through all THEIR thoughts and perceptions and intents, things can go very very wrong.

Which, to put it gently, is what happened. It was horrible. One phone call in particular, from a powerful and intimidating person, will go down in history as Pretty Much The Worst Feedback Ever. To make it worse, I really had made some serious errors in my choice of words, so I can't write it off as just a cranky reader rattling his cage.

And at those times I think, this is crazy. I don't even know why I'm writing, and here I am, putting my soul out there, as vulnerable as a kitten in front of a bunch of target-practicing rednecks, and really there are not enough good reasons in the universe to keep doing this.

And yet.

Would you believe the same day as the phone call I got an email with a very opposite response?

She said:

Biblical inspiration, of course, refers to the power of the scriptures, but all writers have a form of the power to raise readers above themselves. By living your life in the way you do, and chronicling the details in a way that is not judgmental, just honest and true, you have provided a compass to the souls lost in the mall, trapped in the world of Netflix and the Nail Niche, living lives without purpose, what Ecclesiastes describes as "striving after the wind." The power of picking green beans, making homemade jam, camping, sewing beautiful dresses, and being a helpmate to a kind, devout and hard-working man is a tonic and an inspiration to those who right now can only wish for something better. They read about your life and long, sometimes vow, to do better.

I have a childcare in downtown "Whoville." In the eleven years of its operation, more than a hundred parents have been clients. Most have been single mothers. . . most have been clerks and waitresses, and there have been two strippers. At least half of my children have had to deal with at least one parent spending time in jail. . .

More than 90% of the parents have discussed the sexual abuse they suffered as children. They continue to create chaos for their lives because they cannot move beyond the mentality of "victims." Their children suffer enormously because their parent has no peace. I spend a lot more effort helping the adults toward self-sufficiency than the children, but many of the parents have been successful at learning to cook, do laundry, clean house, get their kids to school on time, obtain better housing, get into vocational training, get better jobs, or abandon substance abuse. Some have even begun to study the Bible. I read your essays to them because you can make them feel that the "old" way of living is desirable. They want a family dinner, even though it is more work than McDonald's. Some have had to obtain a dining table to make that happen. They know camping is better, but more work, than video games. You inspire them to be better parents because of your commitment. Your words are confirmation that they do not have to live such stressful, empty lives if they are willing to make the effort.

Sometimes we even discuss "What would the lady in Harrisburg do?" if she had to make their decisions.

Well, I have to say that response left me just as speechless as the negative responses. I suppose I ought to be delighted. In both cases, the words went floating out into the universe and had interpretations and results that I never intended.

And that is terrifying.

And I don't know what to do about it.

How do you do it, those of you who preach and teach and write and sing and otherwise fling your words into the ears of the fickle public? How do you survive?

My story on RFE

2011-09-09T10:01:00.000-07:00

My first editor at the Guard now works for Radio Free Europe in Prague. His wife compiled a podcast* about 9/11 and how it affected lives around the world. My story is included, at milepost 22:16.

Here it is.

*I had to ask what that was. It's a recording you can access online rather than a live radio broadcast. Something like that.

With a name like. . .

2011-09-07T20:56:00.000-07:00

I found this on Wikipedia today--a list of past and present Smucker's catchphrases.

"With a name like Smucker's, it has to be good!"
"Smucker will make you pucker!"
"If you find a better jelly, you buy it!"
"Smucker Company, the brand you can trust"
"There ain't no place like Smucker's!"
"The only brand of jams that can make a piece of bread lively!"
"If you're hungry, Smucker's is the way to go!"
"Smucker's may be yummy, your tummy may be too, but your grocer's freezer, is not far from you!"
"Bread, jam and jelly, in your belly, lick your spoon and cut your bread, then you will be Smucker's well fed"

The second one reminds me of the time our friend Dave H. was introducing Paul at a meeting of some sort and with a straight face called him Small Pucker.

September Column

2011-09-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

About a week ago Paul got a gash in his head at work and as it healed up it grew into a column about making choices with your life.

Here.

Drowning in papers

2011-08-30T22:24:00.000-07:00

I am constantly drowning in papers.

I've read FlyLady's suggestions by the boxful and read organizational books by the truckload but still I am forevermore snowed under by bits of paper containing little pieces of my brain that I will lose if it isn't written down.

Sometimes these actually get transferred to a file, or a list in my big notebook/calendar. And as I finish whatever the paper is about I get rid of it. Eventually.

But still. Far too many papers don't fit a magic category and so they sit around to remind me of whatever I need to remember.

Here are some of the papers within arm's reach as we speak:

--a note about the dress code at IGO in Thailand, since we plan to be there for a few weeks next summer

--an appointment on Thursday morning

--a note that Jenny's piano lessons will be on Tuesdays this year

--a paper telling me what to do if the computer keyboard goes all Arabic, a relic of Matt's college Arabic class using this computer

--a list of Jenny's current persona: Warrior Princess Bug Book

--Brittney M.'s email address so I can send her the list of Bible Memory Camp verses

--a request to put on the prayer chain

--a thank you note from Jenny to Letha R. for that cute pencil case

--a phone message Janane D. left for Jenny

--a thank you note from Jenny to Simone, for taking her to the state fair

--a page of notes for my September column

--a prayer request from my prayer sister at church

--a quote of the day

--information about a fiction class at Lane Community College

--the name of a movie on African cats that someone recommended for Steven

--a cute printout of lunch box notes that I hope I remember to actually use

--another quote of the day

--and another one

--a pesto recipe

--a schedule for me after school starts that will enable me to always be caught up with my life and have time to sew

--notes from conversations with people at the fair

--a reminder to tell Lorenda K. that I met a lady who listens to her cd and loves it

--a note to tell Ben that when he leads singing at church he needs to say "three hundred seventy four" and not "three hundred AND seventy four."

--a list of Sunday school kids who were absent on Sunday and need to get their prize next week

--two possible themes for a novel

--yet another prayer request

--the date for the Joyful Noise potluck

--information about a speech on the 19th

Like I said, that's just the papers within reach.

My idea of Heaven on earth: not having to keep track of anything or remember anything for a whole week.

One of those Quotes of the Day:
"I am not related to you!"
--Jenny, the almost-teenager, in her long skirt and flipflops, as we crossed the bridge into Harrisburg on a warm evening with the car windows open, and she reached over and cranked up the music to huge volumes and then slouched way down in her seat, giggling.

Mrs. Smucker Goes To The Fair

2011-08-21T21:52:00.000-07:00

Thursday was my annual Day At The Lane County Fair Oregon Authors' Table.

It was a grand mix of sheer boredom and being interviewed on KVAL, of watching overweight people shuffle by eating ice cream and of seeing the fascinating Frog again, of doing poorly on sales but richly on connecting with readers.

Always before, I parked in the field beside the fairgrounds, and old men on horses waved orange flags to tell me where to go.

This time, that lot was blocked off and I followed the traffic down meandering one-way streets, getting loster by the second, until I found a parking spot.

As I was unloading my stuff, a group of young women walked by. One had a tripod and one had a camera the size of a hav-a-hart skunk trap. I asked them if they know if it's ok to park there. They didn't know. Then one girl said to another, "Hey, maybe that's someone you could interview about parking."

She said she's from KVAL news and would I mind? I said no, if it doesn't take too long.

So she pinned a microphone to my shirt and hoisted the huge camera to her shoulder. She asked my name and had me spell it. "Where are you parked?" she asked me. Well, she had me there. "I don't know," I said. "I think I'm on Jefferson, and I'm just going to head out in that general direction to find the fair." I waved toward the northwest. She wondered if I thought something should be done about parking. I said I'd never had this problem before and if it only happens one or two days a year, there's no sense building a new parking lot.

And soon we were done. She got a shot of me walking off with a backpack and two rolling cases of books. Then one of them hit a crack in the sidewalk and the box flew off the rolling rack.

I don't think any of the footage ever made it on TV.*

Dan Armstrong the ex-mechanical-engineer-turned-fiction-author and I talked about his work to get the grass-seed-growing farmers to start growing more beans and grains. People in the Valley grow lots of fruits and vegetables, but actually only about 5% or less of the food we eat is grown here. He'd like to see that change and I have to say he makes a lot of sense. With the price of fuel, it seems like good insurance to have a good variety of food plants grown close by.

But if everyone switches to quinoa and fava beans, Paul will soon be out of business.

Sales were terrible compared to previous years but lots of people stopped by to say they read my column. The proportion of buyers to column-readers was 1 to 7.

One woman told me that my work is "so needed," that I show people how family is done, that people like her, with an abusive alcoholic mom who literally didn't speak to her for 14 years, want to have a sane, normal family life but don't know how. And I show them how and I give them hope and she thinks that's wonderful. Of course my first thought was, "You've got to be kidding." But when she described her situation I got what she meant. Sort of.

One lady came by with a t-shirt that said, "I am not fat. I'm hiding my fabric stash." I get that.

Another woman said, "My children have benefited from your writing. Some of your columns have stopped me from killing my kids."

Oooookaaaaay.

A young man named Jason was supposed to show up at 7 to sell his memoir but he couldn't make it. It turns out he has that same disease as Stephen Hawking has, and is just as crippled, and communicates by blinking once for yes and twice for no, and actually wrote a good memoir by blowing through a straw at a special computer screen. Imagine.

The famous Frog came for the last two hours. I've written about him before.

Frog smelled nicer than he ever has before at the Fair but he still has lots of bushy hair and his dirty joke books and his odd quirks.

But I have to say I like him. What you see is just what you get. And he isn't jealous if you make more money than he does, and he doesn't care if you wear Christopher and Banks or an old T-shirt, and he is kind and friendly.

Now the truth is he wouldn't be easy to live next door to, with his disdain for city law, and he also would neither judge nor care if I cheated on a final exam or my taxes or my husband.

But something about him always reminds me that there's a lot we Christians can learn from publicans and sinners.

I took a picture of Frog and me and sent it to Emily with the caption, "Me and my friend Frog."

Then at 9:00 I packed up and left, dreading that long walk back to the car in the dark. At the gate were two young men with bike pedicabs or whatever they are, with a little bench in back and a bike handlebars and tire in front. One offered me a ride to my car. Oh, how tempting. How much? Tips--whatever I want to give.

Ok, wonderful. I piled on my books and we set out, together finding our way back to the car. I figured he's a typical pot-smoking hyper-left-wing U of O student. We started talking. He came from a small farm in eastern Oregon and a family of six children. He was happy to live in Eugene because he could grow a garden in his back yard. Ok, I stood rebuked.

I gave him $5.

I still had to get groceries but first I stopped at Taco Bell for my first real food of the day. While there I got a text and photo from Emily. It said, "Me and my friend Frog."

It turns out Jenny had brought home her costume for the VBS program skit in which she was to be the prodigal son's dad.

I don't often laugh out loud in Taco Bell but I sure did then.

Quote of the Day:
"Yes!! You should write a Mennonite murder mystery!!"
--Shirley Tallman, the mystery writer. She and Dan Armstrong and Carola Dunn were trying to persuade me to broaden my repertoire.

*Actually, yes it did, a 3-second blip where I rather nervously say, "I've never had trouble parking before." (Here's the link. I'm at 00:25)

Jenny's Lemonade Stand

2011-08-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

Jenny's had a lemonade and pop stand over at the warehouse this summer. I posted some pictures of her and it on Facebook.

You can see them here if you wish.

Monster Cookies, the Recipe

2011-08-16T22:28:00.001-07:00

Someone asked for this, so apparently I didn't scare her off of ever making them.

MONSTER COOKIES

Mix: 1/2 lb. (2 sticks) butter
2 1/3 c. brown sugar
2 c. white sugar

Add: 2 1/2 cups creamy peanut butter (Jif or other good brand!)
6 eggs
1 1/2 t. vanilla

Mix well.
Add 1 1/2 t. light corn syrup
4 t. baking soda

Stir in 9 c. quick oats
1 1/2 c. M & M's
1 1/2 c. chocolate chips

(Edit: Refrigerate at least 2 hours)
Put them on a greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for 12 minutes.

Note: no flour in this recipe. Feel free to add your variations/suggestions.

Monster Cookies and The Minister's Wife

2011-08-15T19:27:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I'd just like to Get it Right. Is that so much to ask, from God or me? Just to take on a task, work at it, finish, know I did a good job, go on to something else.

This week is our vacation Bible school, an annual event in which dozens of church and neighborhood kids descend on Brownsville Mennonite every evening for Bible lessons and songs and crafts and homemade cookies.

I was thinking I ought to teach this year, since they're always desperate for teachers. I mean, I'm the minister's wife and my youngest is 12, so surely I could manage. But when they announced the dates it turned out I had two previously scheduled things, book and speech related, that conflicted.

I felt good and guilty, especially when the superintendent personally called me up to ask if I'd teach, but I couldn't very well cancel the other things.

So, if I couldn't teach, maybe I could make supper for another mom who was teaching. Like Rita Baker. I called her up, oozing with righteousness and generosity. Oh, that was sweet of me, she said, but two other people were there ahead of me.

Bonnie called and asked me to put on the church hot line that they really need more cookies for snacks for all the children. So I sent the message on and decided that this, at least, was something I could do.

I would make cookies. Monster cookies. Which I have made many times in my life. And I'd have to make a double batch, since one batch doesn't last long here, and we needed some for us, too, charity beginning at home and hungry teenagers and all.

So I mixed up a double batch which makes a huge vish of dough, as we say in Dutch. I didn't have any trouble mixing in the dozen eggs but by the time I poured in 18 cups of oatmeal I needed a tractor and front-end loader.

I know I got all the amounts right. I double and triple checked.

So why why why did they turn out like this:
and this:

I stirred in the oatmeal better, tried this and that, fiddled and experimented. And got one disastrous pan after another.

Finally I got some help, which was very nice.

He stirred in a bunch of flour, and then at last the cookies looked like this:

Not perfect, but good enough.

Now while this was going on I was thinking a lot about our young friend Esta's latest post which it seems is going viral, judging by how many times I see it linked and referred to on Facebook and such. This is good.

You need to read the whole thing, but among other things she says,

The starting gun was shot a long time ago.

I didn’t know this was a competition. I didn’t know I was loosing until then.

My round angles didn’t fit in square holes, which, instead of showing me how silly the striving was, just made me feel like everyone else had a head start.

But round holes or square, we still race, don’t you see?

Even the old ones do it, this comparing...

She has a bubbly personality and we wish we could make people laugh like that, but hey, at least I don’t come across like a flirt.

She wears clothes like they are art, every movement grace, and we automatically analyze our outfit and decide she must be a show-off.

She travels and witnesses as easy as breathing and we feel like spiritual buffoons.

She talks during Sunday school, people tear up, and we spend the next weeks trying to be more “deep”.

We feel either proud, smug, frantic, insecure, or a nasty mix of all four.

We are not safe places.

I feed my hungry insecurities with your talents and you feed yours with mine.

No one ever wins.

But the more I wrestle to find what it is to truly be a woman, the more I hate the lies and what the lies make us do. And the more I see how many of us don’t stop until suddenly we are comparing our grandchildren and the whiteness of our dentures.

I’m pulling out of the race.

I’m pulling out because last week I actually saw what God kept pounding in me the last three months.

How it doesn’t matter.

How He perfectly places and designs and arranges our hearts to be who we are, and it is HIS doing. Our job—my job—as a woman is only to embrace it and finally move free.

That is all.

Free.

And all the passion can be turned outward and upward, instead of spent on protecting and embellishing and worrying about my identity.

I am not a hidden threat to you—you are not a hidden threat to me.

As I embrace who I am, I am left unencumbered to embrace who you are with passion and abandoned, joy, because you are not a threat, you are a gift.

We are free and only then do we create a safe place to sit and care for each other.

I realize I took her words out of context, kind of, but the reason I thought of them was because if you know me at all you know the messages scrolling across the screen in my brain while I was wrestling with those cookies:

"Really now. Monster cookies. Of all things. What kind of Mennonite mom/housewife/daughter of Sara Yoder/minister's wife cannot manage to make a batch of monster cookies??? And why does this always happen, when I'm trying to do a good deed and do my part for the cause and not look like a total slacker with VBS when everyone else is working their tails off, why does it always have to blow up in my face?"

My mother-in-law sometimes says, in her cheerful way, "Well, as Wilton used to say, 'You can't be good at everything!"

She also says, "Well, the Lord knows all about it!"

Both are true, of course, not that it helps much at the moment.

I had a fleeting thought that maybe the eggs had salmonella in them, and this was God's way of keeping the VBS kids from getting sick, kind of like every time I miss a flight I think, "Oh, I'll bet that flight is going to crash, and for the rest of my life I can give this amazing testimony of how God spared my life," but it never happens that way of course.

So. We now have three Tupperware containers full of delicious but twisted and clumped and flat monster cookies.

I have once again failed to do my part for the cause.

I don't plan to lose sleep over this or obsess over it after I'm done writing about it. But I wonder...is this about comparisons, deep down? About looking for affirmation in all the wrong places? About proving something I was never meant to prove? About embracing who I am and what I can and cannot do well, and finding joy in that, instead of slogging away at what I'm not good at, for all the wrong reasons?

Or am I making it too complicated, and the only problem was that the peanut butter was cheap and oily?

I welcome your input and if you have a story to top mine, I want to hear it.

Quote of the Day:
"Maybe we should call up the people in Paris and see if they can come up with a metric measurement we can call a VISH."
--Ben

Dibs n Dabs on a Sunday Evening

2011-08-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

One of the things I miss about having young children in the family is their observations about life and people that are so honest, so dead-on, and so unexpected.

Well, except for that time we were at Philip and Anna's wedding and little Matthew told a woman that she couldn't possibly be a grandma because she's too fat. I could have done without that one. I guess she was quite a ways plumper than both his grandmas.

Thankfully I still have Jenny who is young and at home and very observant. Today she said, "There's this guy that comes to my lemonade stand with 'Travis' and I don't know who he is, but he has a Mennonite accent."
Emily and me: A WHAT?
Jenny: You know, like, a Harrisburg Mennonite accent.
Emily and me: No we don't know. What do you mean?
Jenny: Well, like, he said he wants lemonade and I said, "Do you want pink or regular?" and he said, "I'll take regga-ler." That's how he said it. I said reg-u-lar and he said regga-ler.

I was laughing too hard to try to figure out who this person was.

But Jenny was spot-on with her observation and you know it.
--------
The other day my former student Sharilyn came by for tea. She brought her adorable little 3-year-old son with her. We talked about writing, adoption, our children, other people, and writing some more.

A former student who is now my sister-in-law once accused me of having Sharilyn as the "teacher's pet." Looking back, she was probably justified in this. I was very young and she was mature enough for her age that we were in some ways equals.

It's nice to relate to both these ladies now as equals without worrying about who is a pet and who isn't.
-------
Today we went to a gospel-music concert in the Brownsville Park. Music is nice but watching people is even nicer. It was a wonderful down-home mix of various Mennonite brands mixed with older ladies in generic white perms and homeschooled young people trying to be cool and gentlemen in baseball caps and little kids running around the bike paths.

One of the singing groups was the Todd Neuschwander family. Todd told the story of how he came to travel and play piano with the Gospel Echoes team at the improbable age of 15. Which took me back to when I was in the youth group and all of us who were trying to experience life beyond Grove City drove four hours north to hear the Gospel Echoes team and there was this young man named Todd playing piano.

When I saw and heard Todd playing piano and singing in that little church in Bemidji, Minnesota, I never dreamt I would someday be married to his second cousin.
-----
Todd is in Oregon because his dad just got married. For some reason people my age tend to look at young love with seriousness and sentimental admiration, and at old love with amusement. Why is that?

Maybe because we've been young but not old.

Today at the concert there was an older couple in front of us. Someone recently informed me that these two are emphatically not dating, they are just keeping each other company.

But then today I saw them leaning in to tell each other something during the concert and I thought, Hmmm, surely it isn't necessary to lean their shoulders THAT close to say something if they're just "keeping each other company." And then I remembered their ages and thought Oh wait, it probably is necessary after all, so they can hear each other.

See, we find old love merely amusing.
------
Today Paul preached to a grand total of 5 people.

We went down to Winston, two hours south, to help out the little Mennonite church there and for some reason almost everyone had plans other than going to church there.

But Jesus promised to be there even if only two or three are gathered, and He was.
_____
Quote of the Day:
Family member: Didn't "Bertha's" mom die recently?
Me: Yes, and her dad is "seeing somebody" already.
Emily the hysterical: SEEING somebody??!! Like, a GHOST??!!

The Scientific Experiment While Mom Was Gone

2011-08-11T21:19:00.000-07:00

This evening I sat at the kitchen counter having hot chocolate with Emily. I looked up and on the ceiling I saw this:

Hmmm. I said some words about this and got this response:

Quote of the Day:
"What's so weird about little orange flecks on the ceiling?"
--the culprit

I was gone all day. A Methodist church in Florence, out on the coast, had invited me a long time ago to come speak today. Paul and I had decided to make a two-day anniversary expedition out of it and I looked forward to this very much.

However. Harvest almost didn't happen, as you know by now, and then it was really late, so there was no way Paul could come to the coast with me. So I took his mom instead and we made a day of it, and while it didn't have the ambiance of a 27th anniversary getaway, it was still fun, and we had a good time catching up on all the MennoValley news and eating at Mo's and talking with friendly Methodist women.

It turns out that while I was gone, someone did a scientific experiment. First he froze a can of orange pop. When it felt good and solid, he decided to peel off the can and have a nice slushy orange treat.

So he stabbed it with a "sharp cutter thing."

This was not such a good idea, we are told.

The culprit and Emily did a lot of scrubbing and spraying and wiping, but after I came home I still kept finding funny little orange dots on the fridge, the bar, the wall, my notebook on the table, and probably lots of other places that I am sure to discover in time.

And then I saw them on the ceiling.

So this happened:
The culprit explained the scientific process of the experiment to his dad, ending with,

2nd Quote of the Day:
"But apparently carbon doesn't freeze very well, and so . . . [shrug] it exploded."

And somewhere in there he sighed and said,
3rd Quote of the Day:
"Life at the Smuckers, where every time a fly flaps a wing it has to go on the blog."

All I can say is, eat your heart out, Esta, my fine young friend who wants a whole houseful of this sort of son.

LFH: The Late Harvest

2011-08-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

Today's Letter from Harrisburg is about the harvest that finally arrived.

You can read it here.

Baling

2011-08-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

Baling straw has changed a lot since I was young.

I'm guessing the terminology hasn't changed in the Midwest since I was a kid, and hay is still baled alfalfa for animals to eat, and straw is still the byproduct of another crop, used primarily for bedding.

Here in Oregon, the two terms are used interchangeably, even though 99% of the baling industry is straw. "Valley Hay," for instance, is one of the big operations around here that bales the straw left over after the grass is harvested and ships it over to places like Japan.

Anyway. Back in my youth in Minnesota you would first take a tractor like our John Deere 720 and mower into the field and cut the alfalfa. The mower was like an oversized electric knife lying flat on the ground.

Then you pulled a rake behind a tractor and piled it all in nice windrows.

There were farmers who combined these steps with a machine that I forget the name of that had two rubber roller things that compressed the plants just enough that they dried better. My dad was not one for anything modern or efficient so we didn't have one.

Then you baled the hay. First the 720 or the Farmall M, then the baler, then the hay wagon. We all took our turn on either the tractor or the wagon. Driving the tractor was way more fun, of course, except for the time Fred found a garter snake in a hay bale and tossed it at Rebecca who was driving.

If you were the person on the wagon you watched as the baler went ca-chunk ca-chunk and a bale came out the chute toward you. You grabbed the twine and hauled the bale to the back of the wagon and put it where it belonged. You had to do each layer just right, two bales this way, two the other way, two this way again, and change them around with the next layer up.

It was hard work. I'm guessing each bale weighed about 40 pounds.

Being Beachy Amish Rebecca and I wore dresses for this task. I don't know why it never crossed our minds to wear the boys old jeans under our dresses or have Mom make us some denim leggings or something. Or maybe we prided ourselves in being tough. When the job was done we'd come in looking like our arms and legs had been attacked by an army of rabid cats.

When the wagon was full we would drive up to the hay shed and unload all these bales onto the elevator that would hoist them up to the top of the very large pile in there, and someone would stack them. Unloading the hay wagon was far easier than loading it, except for that one time when I was about 13 and there was a storm brewing, with thunder and lightning all around, and I was on top of the hay wagon, all exposed, and certain the next bolt of lightning was going to hit me, and I was having issues with my conscience just then and was certain I wasn't saved, and was sure I couldn't be until I had apologized to some unfortunate soul, I forget who or what for, but I certainly remember the fear, and the thunder roaring.

I didn't get hit by lightning except later I got hit by the lightning of God's grace which was very nice.

But yes, as I was saying.

Baling around here, in this era, is much different.

For one thing, it's done by crews of young men who show up for the summer from as far afield as Paraguay. They all seem to share a streak of recklessness, the type that would actually enjoy being on a hay wagon in a thunderstorm and, I've gotta say, a few of them act like they could use a slightly more sensitive conscience.

And the equipment is huge, and there's lots of it, and the job gets done in a very short time.

Last week Kenneth and Lisa harvested the ryegrass field north of our house.

Yesterday a fleet of monstrous tractors came roaring by our place pulling equipment that blocked the whole road. They turned into the ryegrass field and got to work.

Three huge rakes piled the straw into windrows. Three huge balers came behind and coughed out bales that looked about 25 times as big as the bales I used to hoist on the hay wagon.

They flew around that field and in a short time they were done and roaring off to eat up another field.

Next came that glorified forklift thing that picks up the bales, and a series of huge semi trucks with two long trailers, or maybe it was just one that came over and over. It would turn right on Powerline pulling a load that looked the size of a couple of houses.

And then they were done.

As nearly as I could tell, not one person had touched a stalk of actual straw. And I'm sure none of them got a single scratch.

And judging by the way they drove and how much fun they were having, none of them were having a crisis of conscience either.

And there's no danger of a thunderstorm in these parts.

Yes, baling is very different from what it used to be.

Quote of the Day:
"Ummm, I gotta go. I just ran over a bush."
--Steven, on his cell phone, to his friend Trent. Or so I was told, about third hand. Steven has since made some emphatic promises to his parents regarding cell phone usage.

Who I Want To Be Like

2011-07-31T22:36:00.000-07:00

When I grow up I want to be like Josie and Andrew and Dema.

Josie is this lady from the East somewhere, maybe Delaware, and she used to be married to a Baker from this area, until he died of cancer many years ago.

Later she remarried and now she comes to Oregon I'm guessing twice a year.

We have no past or family connections but she is always smiling and she always greets me like she is just so delighted to see me again. You know she does that to everyone but she makes me feel like she's happier to see me than her own relatives, and it's our secret.

I'm easily fooled like that.

Yesterday I heard that Josie was in the hospital with an infection that was turning to sepsis, but she was up and walking around, which the doctor said was impossible or miraculous or something. Josie told him that all her friends were praying for her. The doctor said that's the only possible explanation.

I hope she'll be ok. I want to see her again.

Andrew and Dema are an older couple whom I see several times a year when our church has some meeting or activity with theirs. They come from Amish stock so we always chat in Dutch. The best way to describe them is Christ-like. Andrew often says, "God bless you," in German and it feels weighted, a little like it must have felt for the children to have Jesus lay his hands on them and bless them.

Andrew and Dema are both tiny people but they radiate that same warmth Josie has, like they are just delighted with you and seeing you again, and this is their lucky day, getting to see you! And oh, pooh on the aches and troubles of old age, they want to talk about the important stuff, particularly how you are doing.

I found out today that they lost their oldest son at age 20 in an airplane crash in 1975.

I want to be someone who can move beyond personal loss and get old and just radiate this joy in living and this interest in others.

Quote of the Day:
"You set such high standards! I don't think anyone else's mom makes them pick blueberries before they can go to Dollar Tree!"
--Jenny

Another Mystery to Solve

2011-07-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

This is for all the ladies who were at the women's retreat at Paden, Oklahoma, in April.

I had some of Emily's books along, but not enough, so a few people paid for a book and wrote their addresses down for me.

After I came home, Emily was filling out the orders and was down to the last order when she ran out of books. So she ordered some more books, and by the time they came, she had lost that last address. She thought she had put it in the pocket of her backpack but it's not there any more.

All she can remember about it is that the handwriting was hard to read.

If you were there, would you mind asking around to see if we can locate this person and get her book to her.

Thanks.

Quote of the Day:
"It WAS his fault! He did NOT have to listen to me!"
--a lovely young guest in our home the last few days. I overheard this from the next room. I think she was talking about her brother.

The Odd Harvest

2011-07-22T23:05:00.000-07:00

This is the harvest that everyone will tell their grandchildren about.

Normally, somewhere in June it stops raining. The farmers start cutting toward the end of June. The grass dries in the windrows. The combines roll in sometime between June 28 and July 4. Paul's has the warehouse running 24 hours a day.

Everyone works like crazy and is done combining by the last week in July or maybe a little into August.

Not this year.

June consisted of rain and clouds and chill and damp, interspersed with just enough nice weather to get our hopes up.

Finally, sporadically, people got their fields cut. A lucky field here and there got combined.

But mostly, all this long way into July the grass has been sitting there in windrows, waiting waiting waiting, for the crucial warm, sunny, nice weather that July always brings.

Except this year July just won't bring. It dries for a few days, then rains for a day, dries for one or two more, then more rain.

The danger is that if it's too wet, too long, the seed will sprout in the rows and be worthless.

We still keep looking at the thermometer every day, willing it to please get up to 70--or please pretty please, 75, or will we actually be so fortunate to hit 80!? Here's a calendar with the last month's high temperatures.

So now it's the 22nd of July. Paul has three able-bodied young men all raring to go make some money sacking seed, but there's no place to rare to and no seed coming in. So today they all weeded my garden, just to have some work to do.

So far this year 400,000 pounds has come in. Normally by this time it would be 3 to 5 million pounds.

Meanwhile the rest of the country has been baking in hideous heat. Mom and Dad in Minnesota are doing their best to cope but it wipes them out. In Kansas they're meeting to pray for rain. In Northern Ontario, where we used to live, the northern reserves are threatened by forest fires and they are evacuating the most vulnerable people.

As you can see on that Accuweather calendar, it looks like the lumbering weather ship in Oregon is finally turning. To the very great relief of the farmers.

I hope the ship turns in other places as well.

Quotes of the Day:
"If the farmers lose their crops, I wonder if they're gonna sue God."
--Emily

Tonight we ate supper outside.
Paul: [knocks Jazz off his lap with the back of his hand] If I brush the cat off my lap, is that like what's-his-name kicking the cat toward the fire?"
Me: Ha ha, no.
Me: (thinks) AAAHH, he actually read and somewhat paid attention to that story I wrote!!

My First Mennonite Fiction

2011-07-19T17:24:00.000-07:00

It happens every time I rant about Amish fiction. Everyone says, and rightly so, "Why don't you write something better?"

And my answer is always, "I have no idea how to write fiction. I never write fiction. I have no idea how to get started. It's not something I can do."

Kind of like climbing Cape Perpetua, come to think of it. Or typing, back in high school, finishing those quilts, or any number of other things I just know I can't do.

So last night we were sitting around having this same discussion, again. And Emily and Jenny said, "Mom, of course you can write stories. You just need to do it."

"No," I said, "I don't know how."

"Here." Emily put the laptop on my lap. "Just start writing. About anything. Write about Jenny and her cats."

Ok, fine. I started writing. Two paragraphs later I suddenly realized I was having fun. Emily posted this on Facebook: "Mom: (looks at me with big eyes, like she's just discovered the secret of the universe) I guess if you just take facts, and embellish them any way you want, you can write a story!"

I had so much fun that I wrote late into the evening, and then I went to bed and thought of more details, so I got up and wrote some more.

Today I took turns between writing and housework.

And here it is, my first Mennonite Short Story.

I'm tempted to flood you with disclaimers first such as, be kind, it's my first attempt, it's not meant to be heavy theology, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

So I'll just post it and you can be honest about what you think.

What Needs To Be Done
by Dorcas Smucker

Jenny had been crazy about cats since the age of 10 when she found a half dead kitten under the oil tank on a cold, dripping Oregon-winter day. She pulled it out while their big German Shepherd licked his chops over her shoulder, then held it tight so the dog couldn’t eat it, took it inside, and bathed it in the bathroom sink with her mom’s Midnight Orchid Bath and Body Works shampoo and blow dried it with her mom’s hair dryer, without asking her mom about either of these. Jenny believed, as Mom had taught her, that you just did what you needed to do. And this needed to be done.

She named the kitten Fluff because she was young and the kitten was fluffy and needed a name. She convinced her dad to let it sleep with her, just one night, which led to two and then a week, but then Jenny got sloppy with changing the cat litter and out Fluff went, where it scratched the dog across the nose, once, and then reigned on the porch like a queen. Once a week Jenny fed it tuna, and Fluff would abandon her mouse-hunting in the ryegrass field, streaking to the back porch just as Jenny scraped the last of the tuna into the cat dish, because she loved tuna more than anything except Jenny herself.

Jenny was now 17 and had owned at least six additional cats in the meanwhile, most of them rescued strays. On summer afternoons she sat reading on the hammock with cats lying like sacks of warm liquid on her shoulders and in her lap. In winter she opened her window and let them in off the porch roof and held them while she did her homework.

She loved her cats with a pure and unselfish devotion. She even loved Fescue, the yellow half-blind cat someone had dropped off beside the road three years before, who sat on the porch rail by the hour, glaring at everyone but Jenny, and who flew into a frenzy at the sight of bare feet, particularly on men, which was not a problem most of the time because the men in the house, being farmers, wore heavy work shoes. But Jenny always had to tuck her bare feet under her skirt when Fescue joined her on the hammock.

Even Dad no longer complained, much, when the cats came indoors, unless they actually jumped up on the kitchen table. Everyone in the family indulged Jenny because she was the youngest and charmed them all.

Jenny also loved Travis. Ah, Travis. 19 years old, tall, curly haired, already making a name for himself as the best mechanic around, having quickly graduated from combine driver to mechanic the previous summer when he worked for the biggest grass seed farmer in the valley and nonchalantly replaced the header clips when the rollers got plugged, using and ruining the only tool he had, the fork his mom had packed in his lunch, and impressing Mr. Powell, who didn’t need to know that Travis had simply Googled the problem on his Iphone and followed the directions.

Travis had told this story to all the guys at a Sunday evening youth group gathering, around the fire pit at Mark and Nancy’s the youth sponsors, soon after it happened, while the girls went in the house to fetch the marshmallows and graham crackers and sticks and Hershey bars to make s’mores, and also lemonade and watermelon and hot chocolate and brownies and chips and popcorn, this being a Mennonite gathering.

Just as Jenny had come over with a stack of paper plates, Travis had said, loud enough for her to hear, “and Don was like, ‘WHOA, no way did you fix that all by yourself!‘ and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s just me and the combine out here!’”

She had pretended not to hear, but resolved to ask her brother Ben later what that was all about, when she suddenly kicked a leg of the picnic table in the dark and the entire stack of plates flew out of her hands and under the camp chair that Dave was sitting in.

Dave, who was far too tall and thin and normally couldn’t put two words together in any coherent fashion when a girl was around, heard the thump and the swish and turned around curiously. He saw Jenny grimacing and holding her flip-flopped foot. “Are you all right?” he said, too concerned to be shy.

“I think I broke my toenail,” Jenny said. “But I’ll be ok, really. I just need those plates under your chair.”

Dave leaned forward, reached through the metal X of the chair, and patted around for the plates. Jenny noticed with one horrified glance that this made his polo shirt, an old school uniform from two years ago, ride up in the back. Too high. She thanked God for the merciful darkness that kept her from seeing details.

Dave finally retrieved the plates and handed them to her, his dark eyes searching for hers in the firelight. “They even landed bottom side down, all in a stack, aren’t you lucky?” he said, the longest speech Jenny had ever heard from him. The word “bottom” reminded her too much of polo shirts riding up, so she blushed in the dark, snatched the plates with a quick thanks and was gone.

Travis, who was wearing a green t-shirt with a Bible verse on the front contorted to look like a Mt. Dew logo, leaned back in his chair on the other side of the fire and smiled to himself. Dave didn’t stand a chance, they both knew that. Long ago, when Travis and Dave were both juniors at the church ACE school, Travis had flipped through a spiral notebook in Dave’s cubicle and discovered a poem, a real rhyme-and-rhythm poem, with a line of hearts in the margin, devoted to Jenny, with hair like a penny, golden and copper, with a heart as full as a seed-warehouse hopper. That was crossed out and replaced with “copper and golden, the heart of a guy to embolden.” Of course Travis had shared this treasure with everyone in the classroom.

While Travis, still chuckling, had served his detention that day, Dave drove home wishing it would be ok to drive into that large Douglas fir along Highway 228 and die quickly, and Jenny sat weeping all the way home in her brother Ben’s car while he said, “Oh, that’s just Dave, that’s just how he is, don’t worry about it, Travis would never write you a poem, believe me.”

And somehow after that she was in love with Travis, with his dangerous ways and his coolness and his grin and his way of always knowing just what to do to look smooth. Jenny’s dad wouldn’t let her date until she was 18, but there were always notes slipped under dividers in school, text messages on cell phones and meetings at the water fountain after Sunday school, when Travis gave her a quick wink as he pushed the button for her.

Everybody knew they were an item and would start dating officially and post pictures on Facebook as soon as Jenny was 18. Jenny’s parents tried to rein things in in the meanwhile, with limited success.

Jenny’s mom did not like Travis. She knew his type. She could tell a mile away what sort of character a man had, and no way was her beautiful and innocent Jenny, pride of her heart and last of her many children, tossing her life at that hollow chocolate bunny in an Aeropostale shirt.

She kept quiet, but she was a woman who always saw and knew what needed to be done, and did it.

Jenny went to school the following year, surrounded by the love and support of her doting parents and her cats and her friends and always the exciting presence of Travis on the edge of her life. Travis was taking the farm-equipment mechanics course at the local community college, paid for largely by his boss, he informed her at least once a month. Jenny graduated from high school in May and all through June she updated her dad’s books for the warehouse and baked for her mom and texted her friends and sat in her room with cats on her lap and thought about Travis and life and going to Bible school in the fall and who would be her bridesmaids when she and Travis got married, some lovely future day, and should they serve a full course meal at the reception, or a buffet with salads and sandwiches?

The grass in the fields grew heavy and brown and Jenny’s dad told them all at the supper table about who he had hired to sack seed, and which shifts they would work—Ben at night, Dave on the afternoon shift, and Shawn the neighbor boy would take mornings—and he hoped they could start cutting by the end of June this year. Jenny and Mom were not terribly interested in these details but they let him talk because they loved him.

When the youth group got together, Travis talked loudly of how he was now in charge of not only prepping the combines for harvest, but all the windrowers as well, and Don Powell told him he could beat the guys at Fisher Implement, hands down.

One evening at the supper table Dad said, “Dave came by today and offered to clean the office, the bins, anything, because he wants to be familiar with how everything works before he starts sacking. I like him. A guy that offers to do extra, that’s who I like to hire.”

“Everybody likes Dave,” said Jenny. “Bless his heart.”

“He’s saving money for college, did you know that?” said Dad. “He says he wants to be a teacher. Not that I think college is necessary to teach in our school, but we could sure use a teacher for the upper grades who knew what he was doing with math and science and stuck around for more than a year or two.”

Dad was the school board chairman and had spent far too many Augusts with the double burden of cleaning the summer’s seed plus trying to recruit teachers from back East who too often ended up being silly 19-year-old girls who couldn’t do algebra.

Dad grinned. “And if there’s anyone that college and the World won’t be able to pollute, it’s Dave.”

The hot weather came right on schedule and by the end of June everyone was busy from early morning til late at night. Jenny drove her dad’s combine every day as soon as the dew was off the grass and came stumbling in the door exhausted at night. Once in a while Dad took a turn on the combine and she drove the truck full of seed to the warehouse, where Dave, dusty in a summer camp t-shirt from 2004, bought her a Diet Pepsi, her favorite, from the fridge in the corner and told her to sit down and rest on the sacks while he got in the truck and dumped the seed.

“We’re having the youth over Sunday night after church,” said Jenny’s mom the last week of August, when the frenzy of harvest was wearing off and her husband had laid off the neighbor and cut back the shifts of Dave and Ben.

“Nice, Mom. Real subtle,” Jenny said. “I’ll act surprised when they all sing Happy Birthday.”

Travis texted Jenny during the sermon on Sunday evening. “Heard this same sermon twice b4 I think.” Jenny snickered but felt a whiff of irritation. She had told him her parents didn’t want her getting or sending texts in church.

Oh well, she was almost 18, nearly an adult.

Jenny’s parents hurried home after church and, as she had hoped, Travis offered Jenny a ride. The driveway was full of cars when they arrived, and out by the clotheslines a dozen young people played volleyball as the lingering dusty yellow haze hung in the air, with the smell of summer and hay and grass and wonderful possibilities.

Gradually the game slowed and the sun dropped toward Mary’s Peak and the young people drifted to the back of the house where Dad was building a fire in the bottom half of an old metal barrel. Jenny found this embarrassing—why couldn’t they have a brick fire pit like everyone else?—but she knew he didn’t want to set the ryegrass stubble on fire, as dry as it was.

They filled their plates and sat around the fire, tired and sweaty and enjoying the last of a day of rest before another busy week began. Everyone sang “Happy Birthday,” of course, and Jenny acted surprised and embarrassed.

Fescue watched, glowering, from the porch rail. Jenny, in her green camp chair, looked around, contented, taking in the magic of the late-summer air and this group of people she loved. Soon it would all change—summer would be over, school would start, the harvest workers would leave, the rains would come. But tonight it was all wonderful, and Travis was beside her, and she was almost 18.

She watched the different groupings around the circle and guessed what they were saying. Dad was over there talking with Dave and Tom about how the rain on the 8^th of July had affected the ryegrass yield—she caught the words “two tenths of an inch.” They both looked attentive, bless their hearts. Ben and Shawn were planning a canoe trip down the Willamette, Edith and Sandy were giggling, no doubt about the Amish crew from Indiana that they cooked for this summer. And half a dozen guys and girls leaned in and loudly discussed the merits of EBI, SMBI, and even Calvary Bible School, whose only first-hand authority present was a Beachy guy from Iowa who was out for the summer, baling straw for Hostetlers. Travis insisted that EBI was the only place worth going to, even though he had never been there. “They say you have to study your brains out at SMBI.”

Mom wandered softly around the group, pouring iced tea, gathering empty plates. She stopped in front of Dave. “There’s one sandwich left and I’m sure you’re still hungry, sacking seed all week.” She handed it to him and smiled.

“Thanks,” he said, and took a bite. Hmmm, he thought to himself. Tuna? I thought they were all chicken salad. Oh well. Tuna’s good too.”

Five seconds later Jenny giggled to herself as Fluff leaped into Dave’s lap and sniffed at the sandwich. Dave carefully broke off a small bite and fed it to the cat, then took turns feeding the two of them. Good old Dave, such a softie, she thought. Fescue will be jealous, no doubt. She glanced up. Fescue was no longer on the porch rail. Probably out hunting mice, which was just as well.

Mom wandered slowly behind Jenny’s chair and leaned down as though picking up a stray napkin.

A moment later the quiet evening was ripped by a strangled cry from Travis and a stream of words that had never been heard at any Marksville Mennonite Church youth gathering before, ever, the best of which included “Crazy, blasted cat!” Jenny gasped in horror as Fescue the cat flew through the air, propelled by Travis’s flip-flopped foot, straight toward the fire and mercifully over it and out the other side, and then tore off toward the rhododendron bed with a yowl and a lingering whiff of singed fur. Travis lifted his foot in the air, a line of bloody streaks down his bare big toe.

Mom was behind him in an instant, patting his shoulder, fussing and soothing. “Oh Travis, I am so sorry, that is just terrible, that silly cat cannot stand bare feet, dear me, Jenny, you should have penned him up, tsk tsk, here, come inside, I’ll get you some Neosporin and a Band-Aid.”

Travis limped to the house. Mom followed, brushing a few cat hairs from the front of her dress.

Jenny looked around, stunned, and noticed with sudden clarity that all the other youth guys were wearing basketball shoes, as always. Except for Dave, who also wore sandals--Birkenstocks in fact, as always--with white cotton athletic socks, and who was still feeding the delighted Fluff bites of tuna sandwich.

Suddenly, Jenny knew things she had never known before, about herself and her life and her choices and what she wanted her future to be like.

What was it Mom always said? You do what needs to be done.

She got up and walked over to Dave. “Can I have a bit of that sandwich to give to Fescue? I think he might need some comfort.”

Dave looked at her, holding her gaze just a moment longer than necessary. “Yes,” he said, “I think he might.” He broke off a generous corner and gave it to Jenny, whose hand shook just a bit as she took it.

Dave slowly ate the last bite and scratched Fluff under her chin, thinking. There were things that needed to be done, yes there were. And when the time was right, he would do them. Yes, he most certainly would.

Another Amish Novel Rant/Critique

2011-07-18T13:37:00.000-07:00

Ok, here I go again.

Every time I go on a rant about Amish fiction I tell myself, as you probably would like to tell me also, ok, enough already, we get it, hello?, time to move on, JUST LET IT GO.

And then I do it again.

At our annual birthday tea on the porch the Neighbor Lady Who Does Not Like to be Named Online said her daughter has a set of Beverly Lewis books that I just might like. She thought they were better than the norm. And she was interested in my take on the historical period they covered, which was in the 60s when the New Order began.

So I borrowed the 3-book Courtship of Nellie Fisher set, read the first half of the first book, and quickly skimmed the rest.

I have to hand it to Beverly Lewis, she actually got me interested in the story lines. Will Nellie and Caleb get together? Well, you know they will, but how? Was Suzy saved before she died? Whatever happened with that bizarre baby-sharing idea? Did Datt and Mamm join the New Order?

And I have to admit the characters were reasonably authentic and real and interesting.

The historical aspects of how the New Order began were probably the most interesting. It doesn't mention the Brunk revivals specifically, but I wonder if they were involved. And my biggest question was--with all these winds blowing, why didn't my parents join the New Order instead of leaving Iowa in 1967 for the sake of their older children approaching Rumspringe age? They moved to this new community in southern Ohio composed of people from northern Ohio who turned out to be a rather hotheaded bunch, very different culturally from Mom and Dad, even though they were Amish, and it didn't work out well at all. So yeah, why didn't they stay in Iowa and join the New Order?

So I have to hand it to Beverly Lewis for what she gets right. And for how many books she sells. Mei zeit. I'm sure she could have bought that house at the coast, the one I'll get when my ship comes in, half a dozen times over by now. Not that I'm jealous.

But.

You know this is coming.

The details in her books are what drive me crazy.

She goes to great lengths to show us that these characters are speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. She throws in such words and phrases as Denki, wunnerbar gut, Ordnung, rumspringe, ferhoodled, and so on.

So, ok, we get it, they're speaking another language.

But then of course she writes 99.5% of the dialogue in English, since not all of us know Dutch, primarily Beverly Lewis herself. So, this is all a translation, right?

So why? WhywhywhywhyWHY does she always write the dialogue in this bizarre hick-pioneer-midwestern-redneck lingo, dropping g's all over the place and putting in these strange phrases that have absolutely no counterpart in Dutch? "It's ever so wunnerbar gut of ya to take me to the quiltin'." "Time to get to the plowin' fer sure and certain, ain't so?" "I was hopin' ya would be willin' to go home from the singin' with me tonight."

Ok, I'll stop there before I start foaming at the mouth.

But please hear me on this: AMISH PEOPLE DO NOT TALK LIKE THAT.

If Beverly Lewis could get this part right, I would be quiet, I promise.

Quote of the Day:
"I saw me some wonderful-gut writin' today, Mamma."
Emily, after I mockingly read the line, "I saw me some wonderful-gut stitchin,' Mamma!" and Emily said after I write my Amish/Mennonite novel, people will say this instead.

Connecting the Dots

2011-07-11T16:37:00.001-07:00

As we all know, one of the nicest things about the Web and blogs and Facebook and such is the immediate connections.

So, maybe one of you can help me connect the dots from Oregon to Pennsylvania.

My e-friend LuAnne sews athletic skorts for the girls at the local Mennonite high school. She researched the best source for athletic knit fabric and, not surprisingly if you know the Pacific Northwest at all, found it in Portland, Oregon.

She ordered what she needed and discovered that the shipping is very expensive. She contacted me: Would I know of anyone going to Portland who could pick it up, and of anyone who could then get it to Pennsylvania?

Last week I went to the Union Station in downtown Portland to have lunch with a cousin on an Amtrak layover, then I drove another mile or two to Rose City Textiles, a fascinating place with zillions of types of athletic fabrics, and there I picked up LuAnne's fabric, two rolls about a foot in diameter and 5 1/2 feet long.

So now the fabric is at my place.

Option A: too late--I should have sent it with the Faith Builders chorale over the weekend, and had them take it to Canon City, Colorado, where LuAnne's family is headed on a trip.

Option B: Is anyone from Oregon driving to the BMA convention in Ohio next weekend, July 22-23? LuAnne won't be there but could have someone from her church pick it up.

Option C: Paul's nephew is here for the summer, working in the warehouse. He'll be driving to Wisconsin at the end of the summer and could take it home with him. Is there any traffic between WI and PA?

Option D: Another nephew might be moving their things to Indiana soon and I could probably tuck it in their truck, but I haven't checked with them yet. (JoNell??)

Option E: of course, someone might be driving straight from Harrisburg, Oregon to Newmanstown, PA.

If you have ideas, you can either leave a comment or email me at dorcassmucker@gmail.com.

LuAnne thought I should cut off some fabric and keep it for my bother but trust me, I enjoy this kind of bother.

Quote of the Day:
(at the picnic table)
Ben: Did you know if you eat that you have to get married in a traditional church type setting? Cuz you can't elope, ha ha ha!
Jenny: Is that why you don't like cantaloupe?

July Letter from Harrisburg

2011-07-10T14:49:00.000-07:00

Today's column is a takeoff on Paul and the children's canoe trip.

Here.

Why Today Was Nice

2011-06-27T22:40:00.000-07:00

This was at the bottom of my blog when I checked it today:

Maybe you can't see it, but my hit counter said 222222, which makes me happy with its neat, unusual row of digits, and also because it means all you fine readers have been doing a lot of clicking. Thank you, all of you.

My sister-in-law Lois is only 4 days older than me. My neighbor lady's birthday is the same day as Lois's but she's a few years older than Lois and me. We have a tradition of the three of us getting together to celebrate our birthdays. It's a very special time.

This time we had tea at our house.

The neighbor is on the left. She feels uncomfortable with her name and details being splashed all over the world, so I won't name her but I'll just say that she is a wonderful neighbor and friend who always makes me feel special.

Lois is on the right. She is a friend and sister-in-law both, and she makes me laugh, and she likes books, and she is both practical and empathetic.

Details for those who like details: the wicker came from Kenya some 7 years ago. The table is a piece of plywood from the warehouse laid over the wicker coffee table which is too small on its own, and has an uneven surface. Emily arranged the bouquet on the table, and the neighbor lady brought the roses.

I served tea, scones, cucumber sandwiches, lemonade, and fresh fruit.

I am sitting in a teeny-bopper chair because it came the closest to being the height of the wicker chairs, but I was still looking up at the others.

The big china plates are from Paul's grandma Lena.

Jenny served us, and then she laid down her tray on the floor to take the picture. Down there on the left, lined with a bandana (her idea.)

We had a brief moment of panic right before the guests arrived when Cleo the diligent cat caught a mouse and proceeded to eat it right below the fancy table.

Quotes of the Day:
"PAUL!!!"
--me
"DAAADD!!"
--Jenny
[he bravely removed the mouse and saved the day]

"It used to be, I just had to do two or three things to get ready in the morning, but now that I'm older it takes so long because there's so much to do. I mean, you have to hunt for chin hairs!"
--anonymous friend

People in Cars

2011-06-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

Today my Facebook friend Shari wrote about visiting a Mennonite church, I assume near her home in Arkansas. She says

At dismissal, everyone stood up and just started visiting with their neighbors, not even congregating in the aisle as we are used to.

That's definitely what it's like at Brownsville Mennonite. People turn around, talk with people behind them, wander forward or back to talk with a specific person, join a group, leave it and join a different group, hold a new baby, return a borrowed item, hand out food assignments for a special-meeting dinner, talk with a child's friend's mom to see if it's for sure ok if your child comes over for the afternoon.

It seems like everyone does this, all the time. Including me.

But sometimes I go through days or seasons where I can't face the after-church socializing. And I head for the car as soon as the service is over. Well, almost. First I have to get my mail and give Dakota those two books on animals that I promised him and shake the preacher's hand and pick up the Sunday school money. Then I head for the car.

Right now I suddenly find myself in a fragile season where I can't handle the visiting that I normally am an eager part of. And no, I can't share the reason, which doesn't really matter anyhow.

I'm making this discovery: there's a whole subset of Mennonites that I wasn't aware of: Those Who Sit In Cars After Church. I left as soon as I could get away and hopped in the Kia and opened the windows because it was actually hot, a new experience in these parts, and then I glanced over and there was "Ralph" sitting in the car beside me, looking amused.

Then I looked further and behold, there was "Ethel" sitting in her car, looking sad, and "Jason" sneaking furtively out of the double doors and toward his car.

I thought, who are these people, really, and do they always slip out as soon as the service is over and wait for their healthier and more gregarious family members, and I never knew because I was always busy talking, and do they have Deep Unmet Soul Needs The Church Should Address?

Maybe we PICs should form our own little club. We could slip out and meet in someone's van and have iced tea and cookies that I would pack in the morning, and we could talk, or not, as we felt like it, and then when the talkative people started coming out of the building we could slip back to our own cars. We would have plenty of time for this, because the talkers always have to stop on the sidewalk and talk to one more person for a few more minutes.

I know what takes me to the car right after church, but I wonder about the others--how long have they done this, would it help to talk about it, what does it take to be integrated back into the Talkers After Church? Or is it ok if they remain PICs?

Quote of the Day:
"Mom! Didn't you hear what I said?? Didn't you think it was funny?? You didn't laugh or quote of the day it or anything!!"
--Jenny

Family Pictures--Then and Now

2011-06-21T09:51:00.000-07:00

In case you didn't click on the link to see our recent family pictures, I'll post one here:

Amazing, isn't it? Eight people all behaving themselves, holding still, looking at the camera, cooperating, fond of one another, even looking real with their smiles.

I mentioned in my last post that things didn't always go so swimmingly with family portraits at the Smuckers. So I dug in the attic and found proof.

(Sorry they're a bit crooked. I managed to scan and crop them but couldn't straighten them.)Here we have Matt feeling like he has to carry heavy burdens in life, like that little sister, maybe as punishment for taking that gouge out of his nice straight bangs. Emily is oblivious to having her picture taken, a trait that was to change a lot in the next 20 years. And Amy is about to punch the lights out of the next person who tries to get her to smile.
This was taken in Weagamow Lake a year and a half later. We had missed out on the annual NYP portrait session for the Gleanings newsletter [the one a young friend once called the "shopping catalog," with all those shots of single girls]. Anyway, the day we were supposed to get our picture taken, Paul and Amy hopped in the van to pick up something half a mile away, and Amy didn't buckle in or close her door right, and when Paul went around a corner the door flew open and she sailed out face-first into the gravel. So a month later when she was all healed I set up my camera on a tripod in the living room and took pictures.

This was one of many attempts. We note the fine view of Emily's tonsils, and we won't talk about The Poof That Lost Its Way.

And this was a few years later. We note The Poof That Still Won't Behave, Matt at the front barely suppressing some terrible mischief, Emily being inquisitive on the right, Ben the baby not appreciating family pictures, and Amy on the left trying very hard to be Good. I hope I praised her but I probably didn't. [Amy: thank you for being Good. I appreciate it now.]

[And a note to my snickering daughters: Those big glasses were cool back then, really they were.]

So that's why I say, Take Heart, all you young moms out there. It gets better.

Quote of the Day:
"Our proximity to the Pacific makes that unlikely."
--Matt, when we were discussing global warming and Jenny asked if he thinks the Willamette Valley will ever be a desert. I wrote down the quote because it was so astonishingly like something his grandpa Wilton would have said, only three times as fast.

Family photos 2011

2011-06-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago Ruth from Swartzendruber Photography came over on a Sunday afternoon when we were all home and took our family pictures.

You can take a look at them here.

Ruth is wonderful to work with, and I think she did a great job. As I recall, the warehouse setting was her idea.

The color scheme was Amy's idea and she told us all what to wear.

To all you young moms who hate having family pictures taken--in a few years it will be all different. Your daughter will outfit everyone, and they will all do what they're told, and it'll be a fun afternoon for everyone, and no one will cry or pick their noses.

I love this stage of life.

Robin's Blog

2011-06-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

In Sunday's column I mentioned my athletic friend Robin. She did a very nice review of the column on her blog, Everymom to Ironmom.

Letter from Harrisburg

2011-06-12T17:06:00.000-07:00

Today's column is about climbing Cape Perpetua and other impossible mountains.

Baptists and Food

2011-06-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

I have been informed by many ex-Mennonites that no one cooks like Mennonites. One cost of leaving the church/community is that for the rest of your life, when you go to potlucks, you think, "Dear me, why doesn't someone bring some decent FOOD to these things?"

A while back some of us attended a children's event at a Baptist church. [Details will be kept vague.] Meals were included in the price and in my opinion were on the spendy side. However, I saw four busy, aproned, matronly ladies rattling around the kitchen looking very serious about their job, so I figured the meals would be worth the cost.

They also had four teenaged helpers.

Meal A consisted of tacos. Hard shells from a box, clammy unseasoned fried hamburger, cold refried beans from a can, and a few toppings such as lettuce. Dessert was cupcake papers with a few little cookies, and cups of jello. A stern aproned cook guarded the desserts and informed even adults that it was cookies OR jello, not both.

Meal B consisted of buns from a bag, cooked hot dogs, potato chips, baby carrots, and a food that actually required processing by human hands: apple slices.

If you've ever been Mennonite you can imagine the conversation among us ladies on the way home. Jenny said, "Mom, you could have cooked and served a meal like that all by yourself!"

"Are all Baptists terrible cooks?" I asked. Trish thought that was unfair stereotyping. "Maybe nobody wanted to cook for this event, and they finally found a few people who were willing, but they didn't know what they were doing."

Today I once again got to taste Baptist food when the First Baptist Church in Junction City invited me to speak at their annual tea. The main room had twenty round tables all lavishly decorated, and through the doorway into the kitchen I glimpsed a number of earnest men(!) busily preparing food. One of them wore a white chef jacket.

The menu was printed on the program:

Herb Roasted Turkey Croissant
with watercress, roma tomato, dill havarti, and tarragon & Dijon aioli

Spinach Salad
with pear, cranberry, candied hazelnuts, chevre cheese, and creamy balsamic dressing

Creamy artichoke, roasted garlic and potato soup

Strawberry shortcake

It turned out that the menu was chosen by a Jeremy Lowman, the guy in the chef outfit, who is a member of the church and also a caterer of some renown.

The food was just that good, too. Oh my yes.

I could jump to further conclusions here about Baptist men vs. Baptist women and food, but I think it's time to quit making such assumptions. It's really not fair.

Since I don't like it when all Mennonites get dumped into the same box. Unless, of course, people stereotype us all as being good cooks.

Quote of the Day:
[the day after Amy left for Jamaica and Emily and Ben went to the east coast to drive Em's car back]
I thought Jenny said: It's so sad when those three are gone.
Me: I know, but we'll have fun while they're away.
Jenny: Mom!! I was actually talking about the kittens! I said, I'LL BE so sad when those three are gone!

Coast Pictures

2011-06-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

Amy posted a bunch of photos of our time at the coast.

Click here.

Quote of the Day:
Me: Jenny, it's time to get up.
Jenny: What do you mean, 'time to get up'?? It's only 10:00.

(Yes, it's summer now)

Trees

2011-06-03T15:50:00.000-07:00

Maybe it was the oak tree falling that inspired us to replace some other trees around here, such as the runt maple by the west driveway, and the spindly tree by the lilacs. So far we've only been planning and haven't cut either of these.

And we should do something about the pine trees. Maybe. Paul's parents got them very inexpensively from somewhere and the seller forgot to tell them that they shed their long, spiny, poky, nasty needles by the millions every fall. And that you can't pick them up with the lawn mower. And they clog the gutters along the roof. And you end up raking them up about five times each fall.

But now they're big trees, and they look nice.

I finally gave my consent and Paul had our friend Chip come over and take out one pine tree while we were at the coast. I said I'd see how that looked before I gave the ok for more.

We decided we need to do some serious research on what trees we want.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, a nursery near Coburg had a batch of trees out back that hadn't sold, and they kept blowing over, so they told their employees that the trees are theirs for the taking and what doesn't go will get destroyed.

One of the employees was Susan. Susan had a pig. She happened to sell this pig to Paul's cousin Darrell and told him about the free trees. So he got some.

Paul called Darrell about borrowing his chain saw. Darrell thought, "Hmmm. Chain saw. To cut down trees. That he might need to replace."

So Darrell told Paul about the free trees.

Paul called me. I said yes, what can we lose?

So Paul and Darrell went and got four trees for us, two maples that are about 20 feet high already and two pines that shed their needles but the needles are tiny and soft.

We see here that I am being a true Yoder, justifying all the faults because it's a find and it's free.

Paul went back with the van and trailer and got ten more trees, because his wife is a Yoder and feels sorry for objects no one else wants, especially if they're free, and is sure she can use them, one way or another, because after all, they're free for the taking.

So you may soon see a different look to our place when you drive by.

Quote of the Day:
Son A: Let my people go!!
Son B: No! Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin!
--overheard at the coast