by jphilo | Apr 5, 2010 | Daily Life
When the weatherman predicted a few days of divine spring weather last week, I got pretty excited.
Not about walking in sunshine and warmth after six months of cold and snow.
Not about watching my garden grown.
Not about a reduction in heating costs.
I was excited about hanging clothes on the line again. Don’t ask why it’s such a thrill and don’t make any snide comments about how boring my life must be if hanging socks, underwear and sheets on the line has me all atwitter.
Hiram was also excited about the prospect of sun dried clothes. He came out and helped put things on the line. He even contributed a package of plastic clothespins he had in his handyman stash. While we emptied the baskets of wet clothes, we gloated at the prospect of crawling between fresh-scented sheets at bedtime.
Which one of the following explains our over-the-top response?
A. An extremely long, hard winter.
B. We’re on the brink of geezerhood.
C. We’ve learned to appreciate the small things in life.
D. All of the above.
If you answered C, you win the prize.
What’s the prize?
On the next lovely spring day, you can hang your clothes on my clothesline. I’ll even make sure the unmentionables are pegged to the inside lines. No one will ever know the color of your underwear.
by jphilo | Mar 15, 2010 | Daily Life
I’m back from a road trip to Morgantown, West Virginia with my daughter and her fiance. The trek across the midsection of our great country in one of the two most dismal months of the year (November being the other) confirmed my belief that March is a tease at best and at worst, a flirt.
On the trip east, the ditches strained under the weight of tired and dirty snowdrifts. They gradually gave way to their southern cousins, grass-matted and dotted with ragged, soggy litter. A little green peeked out, and suddenly the month looked less tired, more alluring. For a few hours we perked up, thinking we’d left winter behind. But our good humor plummeted as we climbed into the Appalachians, and snow filled the ditches again.
During our week in Morgantown, spring decided to strut her stuff. For a few days, the sun was hot on our backs, and we turned on the air conditioner in the car. Spring flirted so shamelessly that the snow piles shrank too quickly, and the rivers started rising. We left town the same day the rain hit, before the flooding began.
On the way home, that little minx of a March again hid under a blanket of brown ditches, gray skies, swollen creeks, and puddled fields. Once in awhile she flashed a little green on southern hillsides, red in the dogwood hedges and yellow in the willow groves, titillating and arousing within us a desire for pussy willows and warm earth, daffodils and green grass. But never did she stay and satisfy our hunger.
Her playing around put me in a bad mood, and all I can say is, “March, you little flirt, you’re ruining your reputation. Either straighten up and deliver what you promised in the next two weeks, or I’m leaving you for April.”
You just watch. It works every time.
by jphilo | Feb 23, 2010 | Daily Life
Last week, a weird coincidence occurred and reminded me that God works through people. The chain of events leading up to it began a couple weeks ago with an email from new author Paulette George. She saw A Different Dream for My Child listed when visiting the website of our mutual agent, Les Stobbe.
In her email, Paulette described her new book, Good Morning Beautiful. It’s about her daughter Christina’s struggle with a seizure disorder. Paulette was about to send in the final proofs so the book could go to the printers and asked if she could add Different Dream to the resource list. Of course I said yes, and we agreed to exchange books.
Paulette sent the electronic version, but I wasn’t able to read it until a couple days ago. I don’t know any kids with seizure disorders, so the George family’s story was enlightening. Paulette’s book told of baby Christina’s developmental delays due to seizures and treatment, her partial recovery as a toddler while on the controversial ketogenic diet, and the successful removal of her right frontal lobe as a preschooler. The Mayo Clinic surgery stopped the seizures completely. Christina is now in high school, on the volleyball team, and an honor student.
The next day, the very next day, one of my friends sent a prayer request about a five-year-old boy who is battling a seizure disorder. He’s scheduled to have part of his brain removed at Mayo Clinic, so I forwarded the email to Paulette. She emailed back to say she’d contacted the family. At their website, http://ourstrongtower.blogspot.com/, she discovered the little boy was staying in the room where Christina had stayed years ago.
God’s handprint on this series of events made me smile. Of course He’s always at work through His people, whether we see His hand our not, no matter how much we doubt his ways, take them for granted, or take the credit for ourselves. But once in awhile, He reveals Himself in obvious, unmistakable ways. Like last week, when for some reason He made me one link in the chain of people who brought two families together.
Yeah, I know some people will say the whole thing is a weird coincidence. But with coincidences like these happening more and more frequently, I see God at work building faith, keeping men from taking His gifts for granted, so we rightly attribute to God what he has done.
I could call it a weird coincidence. Or I can call it God at work through His people. I choose the one that stands on a foundation of truth and brings hope to all who believe. How about you?
by jphilo | Feb 10, 2010 | Daily Life
All right, Winter, you win. You are bigger, faster, and stronger than me. Now that you’ve made your point, would you please give it a rest?
If I say “uncle” will you quit?
Uncle.
Uncle.
Uncle.
Why aren’t you listening? Why are you being so mean? And why did you let the snow swallow our picnic table? Do you know what you’ve done?
On nasty winter days I like to look out the kitchen window and see the picnic table standing sentry beside the big, brick grill. Its presence is a promise of warm weather, shish kabobs and s’mores. Seeing it there, so resolute and solid, carries me through the darkest, coldest winter days. But thanks to you’re high-handed ways it’s gone, buried under snow drifts that wore out their welcome over a month ago.
Did your best bud, the White Witch of Narnia, teach you to be so cruel? You know, if you would just go to fantasyland and hang out with her there, people would like you again. You’d get a steady stream of people reading books about winter on hot summer days when the air conditioning doesn’t work. You’d be popular again.
Tell you what, Winter, you sleep on it overnight. Think about how nice it would feel to have people like you again. And in the morning, when the sun rises, chant this little ditty about ten thousand times.
“I’m melting, melting, melting. You wicked, wicked girl.”
Not a quote from your buddy, the White Witch, but something said by a close friend of hers who lives somewhere over the rainbow.
Give it a try. See what you think. And then go away.
Please.
by jphilo | Feb 8, 2010 | Daily Life
In a blog post about a year ago, I confessed my inability to properly fold the wraps around our Christmas dinner egg rolls. Even googling the process and following both written directions and diagrams didn’t improve my limited skills.
Apparently, the flavor of the egg rolls compensated for the lack of folding finesse because the kids requested egg rolls for Christmas dinner again, thus I fear, creating a new Christmas tradition for years to come. This time, the kids and their sweeties did the folding. Before they started, we read the directions on the back of the egg roll wrap package, which said to seal the edges with egg white. They did, and the result was perfect egg rolls.
Several wraps didn’t get used and languished in a Ziplock bag in the refrigerator until I made egg rolls again a week or so later. Since the kids were long gone, I had to fold the wraps, and even with the egg white trick, my finished products looked pathetic.
That’s when the ugly truth smacked me in the face. I have a severe folding impairment (SFV), as evidenced by my ineptitude in these additional areas:
Folding laundry. My husband does a much better job in this department than I do. In fact he volunteers to fold clothes to keep me from messing up his clothes.
Wrapping presents. Though I’m 53 years old, well-intentioned children’s gifts put my Christmas and birthday offerings to shame.
Add those two the egg roll wrap inadequacy, and my SFV diagnosis in irrefutable. But it’s way too late in life for remediation. My best bet is to delegate and/or make accommodations. Let’s see. Hiram’s already folding the laundry so that’s okay. From now on, we’ll only have egg roll when the kids are home, so they can cover that one. And instead of gift wrap, I’ll use gift bags.
Now, if I could just identify an impairment that would require delegating cleaning the bathrooms…
by jphilo | Feb 1, 2010 | Daily Life
Despite my best Pollyanic efforts to remain positive about winter, a gloomy chill engulfed me last week. Our cold, snowy, icy, and foggy winter, which came early and shows every sign of planning to stay late, is the obvious culprit. But to be honest, I can’t wholly blame this glum funk on external circumstances.
Part of my Gloomy Gus mood is self-inflicted. In the dark of this cold winter, I’ve been chaffing against the quiet, ordinary tasks God has given me to complete. Day after day, He calls me to be faithful in the non-flashy, by myself stuff – writing blog columns and book proposals, collecting tax documents, answering emails, preparing for speaking engagements, and organizing things for church. Big days in January were the ones when I took Mom to the library to check out books by authors with careers much more successful than my own.
Which points to the crux of the matter. Much of this winter’s discontent is due to flat book sales. For weeks, I watched Different Dream’s Amazon rank sink lower and lower. Nobody emailed to order signed copies. The ones in the local book store were gathering dust. And all three January speaking engagements were postponed because of weather, eliminating any hope of book sales from that quarter.
Through it all, God whispered over and over, “Trust me. Just wait and trust me,” which I did, only because there’s nothing to do in the middle of January except wait for things to improve. The trusting part was harder. But once I realized the other option was to trust myself, which experience has taught me is risky at best, I let the book sales thing go and left it all in his hands.
What happened next? A few books sold on Amazon, the book store called and asked for two copies for their store and a stack to take to some conferences over the next few weeks. A woman wrote a review for her special needs newsletter, and a Detroit radio station asked for an interview. None of which will catapult sales into the stratosphere, but all of which remind me of truth in the winter of my discontent: God is at work in even the small things. He calls me to faithfulness in more small, non-flashy tasks on this winter day.
I look outside and see a frost-covered tree branch shaped like Gonzo’s nose. The thought of the Don Juan of Muppets and his flock of hens makes me smile. The gloom lifts a little, and I tackle the small things once more.
