Valentine

     Once again, I am rearranging my craft room.   I know, I know...I am never satisfied with it.  Were it twice as big, then I might be satisfied, but probably not.  I'd just have twice as much stuff.  This weekend I have been boxing up books that I will never read again that I have kept on the shelves out of sentamentality, and I am giving that shelf space over to getting my craft supplies off of the floor.  I have taken an old, tall metal tool chest with lots drawers in it out of the barn to put my stamps in, and I'm definitely liking the way it looks in here.  It's sturdy, and it doesn't lean the way the one on wheels did.  The one on wheels is going to the barn tomorrow...not tonight...it looks as if it might rain any minute, and I don't want to be wrestling with a leaning thing on wheels out in the rain.
     I have so many craft supplies; you would think I would craft more.  Sometimes I think I'm more of a collector of craft supplies.  I have collected so many things over the years: books, records, tapes, cd's, little village buildings, dishes, cats...it goes on and on, but I don't think I've collected many hearts.  I have loved and do love many people: Stacey, Nicholas, Jessica, Jonah, Havah, Mother, Dad, my brother and his family, Janie, Auntie, Jeannine...the list goes on, but I don't think I've collected them, not really...not to keep.  How does one keep people?  They grow; they change; they move away; they die. 
   I'd like to keep people.  I'd like to keep them near me.  Sometimes I'd like to keep time in a bottle the way Jim Croce wanted to, but none of us can.  I sometimes look back on especially wonderful times in my life and become a bit Faustian in my outlook.  Maybe I'm getting old, maybe I'm just getting sentimental, or maybe it's the novel I finished a few minutes ago, but oh, I would like to keep the people that I love.  I'd like to collect their hearts and keep them forever near me.
     But, the only heart you ever really collect is your own.  It would do me well to remember that and to make sure I'm truly happy with mine.

Quiet and Home

   I have come to realize how much I value quiet.  I didn't know that when I was younger, and, indeed, maybe I didn't value it then.  I love to be around people too, but after coming home from the crop last night into a quiet, peaceful house, I realized that it was wonderful to just be quiet.  Don't get me wrong; there is something immensely satisfying to me about being in a group of chatty, friendly, creative women for a few hours, but after being at school all day with noisy junior high students and then straight to the crop...coming home at 10:30 was like heaven.

     Stacey and I always wanted our home to be a refuge...a place of peace and restfulness from a frantic world.  He was especially diligent in providing that for me...that refuge.  I appreciated it when he was alive, but I think I appreciate it even more now that I am alone.  I value knowing that there is at least one place on the globe where I am just me.  I can sit in my jammies all day and eat Girl Scout cookies while I read, or I can clean like a whirling dervish (that dervish part doesn't really happen often anymore), or I can wrestle with the cats.  I can turn up music loud and sing while I dust, or I can veg on the patio and watch my neighbor's horse run in the pasture.

     It seems to me a shame that we don't just sit and be quiet much anymore.  People are so busy and bustling.  I think that many people are afraid to be alone with themselves.  It's not such a bad thing to be content.  In fact, St. Paul advised us to "be content in all things".  I admit that that can be terribly difficult, and I have not and still am not always so, but I try.  Since I've been alone, I've often wondered if I really need people, if I might not just turn into an old hermitess.  I know I won't; I enjoy a stimulating conversation, but I really do love just being at home...home...what a lovely word.

Porches and the Loss of Civility

     I'd like to first of all give credit to Mary Engelbreit for the beautiful drawing.  She is one of my favorite artists and inspirations.
     I've thought many times about the architecture and yard design of most homes over the last twenty years.  Somewhere along the way, we decided that front porches were extraneous.  I wonder why.  Was it just an economic decision?  Was it to cut costs and put that money into heated and cooled floor space...could be.  But I think it's a sad loss in many ways.  In the warmer parts of the country, before central heat and air, the porch was an important environmental element.  It helped cool the air in the summer before it came into the house, and in the winter it helped keep parts of the house from being blasted by cold winter winds.  Both of those lessons could be re-learned, I think, in today's "green" philosophies of living.  
    Another way that I think the lack of porches (particularly front ones) is a sad loss is that we have become less civil.  Now, I know that not having a front porch isn't exactly the cause for the current rioting in the middle east or the Somalian pirates, but when we had whole neighborhoods of houses with roomy and  inviting front porches, we spent time on them...drinking our iced tea or our coffee.  As our neighbors walked, and our children played in the yard with the other kids on the street, we actually spoke to our neighbors and passed the time of day.  We "gasp" got to know each other.  We became involved in each other's lives.  We felt freer to call on them if we needed them, and they felt the same toward us.  
     We have become an isolated and private people. We have lost our sense of community.  We have become a people who don't trust others.  Maybe we have some good reasons to be that way these days, but I think the better we know each other and are involved in each other's lives, the less likely we are to abuse each other.
     My Sweet Stacey and I built a front porch on our house.  It's not as big as we later wished we had made it, but it's big enough for a lounge chair and a couple of wicker chairs.  I'm far back from the road, but close enough for my neighbors to wave to me when they see me on the porch.  I like feeling connected and at least recognize strange cars when I see them in the neighborhood.  I know the neighborhood dogs and the kids.  I watch the seasons change from my porch and meditate on my blooming trees and bushes.  I watch it rain and I look for lightning bugs.  I watch the geese fly over, get to know the rabbits who nest under my cedar tree every year, and watch my cats play in the grass.  I hear distant projects from neighbor's houses: hammers hammering, lawn mowers mowing, chain saws sawing, and leaf blowers blowing.  I hear my neighbor's children laughing and splashing in their pool.  I listen to my wind chime forest and feel generally blessed to be alive.  
     For my mansion in heaven, I'm going to request a full-blown, wrap-around Victorian porch.  It will have a fine view of the pearly gates and those streets of gold; I'll be able to hear the saints practicing in the heavenly choir, and I will feel blessed to be alive.

Blogging Magic

     Learning to blog is nothing.  Learning to set up a blog is almost more than my middle aged brain can comprehend.  I don't know enough about computers to understand html and "redirect here" and check your "widgets" and configure your "wooglies" to coordinate with your "zibnots".  Maybe I've finally got it right and this will post the way I want it to.  

     In education, we pride ourselves on being life-long learners.  I'm not sure I'll live long enough to really understand the technical side of computers.  I'm not even sure that I really want to understand the science behind it.  I prefer to simply think of it as magic.  You know, like how the telephone works...magic.  I mean, how do we really transmit voices over those little wires or beam them to satellites?  Magic. It's all part of the wonder and mystery of the universe.  I think we all need a little magic in our lives.  We don't really have to understand all of the millions of tiny little ins and outs of everything, do we?  So long as the people at Sonic understand how to operate the ice tea machine and put extra peach in mine...everything else can be magic as far as I'm concerned...life is good.

     I'm much more of a romantic (in the classical sense) than I am a scientist.  As Jeannine knows, I don't do higher math.  I don't need to understand the science behind numbers, and as long as my calculator works, I don't need to understand the science behind it either.  I'm glad that there are scientists; I just don't want to be one.

     So, maybe what this blog is about is that everyone doesn't have to be an expert on everything.  It's ok to admit that there are some things that we don't know anything about, that we don't understand, or that we don't even care if we understand.  It's ok to say that you're not all that well-rounded and that you understand some things better than others.  I sort of wish that I had reached this stage of my philosophy earlier in life and that at a much younger age I had felt comfortable admitting ignorance of some subjects (well, really, a great many subjects).  I wish I had felt comfortable admitting that I know a great deal about some things and practically nothing about others.  I wish that I had felt comfortable saying that I believe that some things are just "magic".

Sonnets

Ah, the joy of teaching poetry to seventh graders.  So much of it is totally new to them, and I love it when they "get" it.  Today we started our study of sonnets.  They are relatively blown by the strict sonnet form, but every year, I get some nice sonnets.  Just shows what they can do when you make them put their minds to it.

Brains and Hematomas of Unknown Origin

     I went to the doctor today.  I have a headache that I've had now for 48 hours.  I don't get headaches, so when I do it freaks me out.  This one has been particularly nasty...especially since it is accompanied by a bruise and swelling on the left side of my forehead up near the hairline.  It's about the size of a quarter.  Yesterday, as I was sitting in my recliner moaning and gingerly touching the sore spot, I noticed that it felt squishy.  "Oh no," I thought, "my brains are leaking out!"  I knew they weren't really, but I sat there and immediately imagined all sorts of horrible scenarios.
     That's a thing I have known about myself for a long, long time: I have the ability to dig myself into very, very, very  deep holes.  I usually see the glass as half empty rather than half full.  Personalities are very curious things, and I spend way too much time analyzing mine.  My friend, Jeannine, is definitely a half full sort of person.  She and I have many times had the conversation where she tells me that she just always assumes that people like her and is puzzled when I've told her that I always assume that they don't like me.  She says that if I haven't done anything to them, then why would I assume that.  I don't know the answer, but I suspect it goes back to my half empty philosophy.  Why some of us are born with a sunny personality and others of us are more morose is a complete mystery to me.  I do remember many times as a teenager when my mother would remind me to smile more often.
     I don't have a naturally bubbly personality, but it doesn't mean I'm unhappy; I'm not.  But somewhere along the way I associated being bubbly with being bubble-brained.  Stupid, I know, but there it is.  I became determined that the world would view me as smart since it wouldn't view me as beautiful, and that has somehow worked itself out in me as being one to whom wearing a constant smile does not come naturally.  There is even a local pastor whom I cannot watch on tv because his smile never leaves his face.  Even when he is lecturing on the evils of sin or the depravity of man, he has a smile.  That really bothers me.  Those, to me, are not things to smile about.
     So, I went to the doctor today.  My brains are not leaking out.  Guess what?  That makes me smile.

Sons

I have one child, a son.  He has been one of the great joys of my life ever since I first touched his tiny, damp, red, screaming face.  He has also been one of my greatest challenges.  I raised him to be an independent thinker, and sometimes I think I made him too independent.  I raised him to realize that we each have to carve out our own ways through life; no one can do it for us.  I raised him to believe that if he is a moral, Christian man that even if his decisions are not those that I would have made; I'm not whose opinion matters: God's is.  I raised him to beat his own drum and go his own way.

Sometimes that has been painful for me...as I have watched him struggle to find his way...as I have watched him make mistakes...and get hurt...and pick himself back up.  What mother would not rather keep her baby's knees from getting bloody in the first place instead of being there with a band-aid when they do.

When my husband died, I was too caught in my own grief to be of much use to him in his.  He had his wife to help him, and I was alone.  I sometimes think now that I should have been more present for him, but I don't know how I would have been able to be.  Most days I was barely coherent.  But now, as he has what is to me a crisis of faith, I wonder if I have been enough for him.  I asked him recently if he thought his faith-path would have turned out differently if his papa hadn't died.  He said he didn't know, but that he had often wondered that too.  I think it would have.  I don't have the right wisdom for him.  I don't have the right words for him to hear.  His papa did.   But, then, if another person is holding us onto the path...how tightly do we really have it gripped anyway?

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Goddesses

As I sit here at my computer in my pj's, I am surrounded by many things that both comfort and frustrate me.  My crafting, specifically paper-crafting, stash.  They both move me to creativity and frustrate me.  I so long to be one of the truly gifted in terms of paper-crafting, mixed media artsyness, but, alas, I'm not.  I scraplift with the best of 'em.


I have always dabbled in something "crafty" or "artsy": oil painting, acrylic painting, embroidery, quilting, sewing, crocheting, scrapbooking, card making, collage/mixed media...but I don't feel really great about any of it.  I think my brain just doesn't normally flow that way.  They call me the "Grammar Goddess" at the school where I have taught for 28 years, and that's a title that I don't take lightly and that I wear proudly, but it's not "Art Goddess".  I'm not the "Writing Goddess" either; that title would belong to my daughter-in-law, Jessica.  I'm not the "Laughing and Sarcasm Goddess"; that would be my friend, Jeannine.  I'm not the "Savvy Business Woman Goddess"; that would be my cousin, Janie.  I'm not the "Advertising Goddess"; that would be my niece, Cara.  I'm not the "Auntie Goddess"; that would be my Aunt Diane.  I'm not the "Pink Diva Goddess"; that would be my granddaughter, Havah.  I'm not the "Natural Sciences Goddess"; that would be my granddaughter, Jonah.  I'm not the "Technology Goddess"; that would be my principal, Karen.  And...I'm certainly not the "Housekeeper Goddess"; that would be my mother, Beverly.


I am grateful to be surrounded by so many "Goddesses".  I hope you are all so fortunate.