“Closing up” time

Today is a beautiful fall morning in the garden.  It’s 42 degrees, the sky is baby blue, and the just risen sun is creating facets of light on the grass.  I love how these pieces of light dance around when the wind blows through the trees.  I love how the light dances off the falling leaves in their glide down to the ground.

The walnut trees have shed all their leaves and most of the walnuts are on the ground.  It makes it dangerous to walk through the yard – catch your foot on one of those babies and it’s like slipping on a banana peel – down to the ground you go!  The ones left on the trees make a sound like the barrage of heavy artillery fire when they fall and hit the ground and the tin roof of the house.  One of these days I’m going to turn those two trees into a nice table.

Nellie’s Garden had an interesting event recently.  Turns out that there is an old well in the center of the Garden, and it caved in.  It’s repaired now, but I like the idea that there is a well in the center of the Garden.  I like the symbolism of it being even more a place to come for rest, soul nourishment and the enjoyment of silence.  A place to ponder time.

The changing of the seasons always causes me to ponder time.  My parents taught me to love the seasons, and the differences in them.   They taught me how to settle into the different kinds of rest that come with the different seasons.  Fall is a “closing up” kind of rest.  You put away the  things of summer.  I took some of the summer chairs and tables off the porches yesterday, rolled up the hoses and put them away, clipped off the basil plants.  No more pesto until next summer.

This closing up is also a creative act for me.  It creates a space in my soul that yearns less for activity and more for watching the light dance across the yard.  This closing up gives time to look into the well of my soul and see what I left  there during the activities of summer. You have to be careful around wells.  You never know what you might find when you look into them, or who you might meet hanging around them.  In the story of the Samaritan woman meeting Jesus at the well (John 4) he told her to “wait no longer and look no further for I am he who is to come…”

Fall in the garden…encounters at wells, light dancing with the falling leaves, “closing up” time to look into the soul.  Wait no longer and look no further.  What we need to see, hear and learn is already within us, waiting to be drawn up so that it too can dance with the light.

The Sounds of Summer

It’s mid-August here in the garden and the night sounds have changed.  You can tell a lot about a season by the outside sounds.  In the early summer there are Whip-o-wills.  Lately we’ve had the tree frogs and some other tree critters singing to us. My grand-father especially loved those. The bull frog in the near-by pond is a constant summer sound.  Late at night you can hear the deer and racoons rummaging around in the bushes.

Ah yes, mid-August in the garden and the other familiar night sound is back…the tat tat tat of the marching band drum line.  Actually it’s the sound from early morning to late at night.  Bam bam bam.  The same rhythm over and over again.  You’d think they’d eventually get it right.  The drum line practices on the hotel porch that faces my house so the sound floats clearly over here.  They’re persistent and consistent.

It’s nice when they get free time or go to meals.  Then it’s quiet again.  And sometimes the entire band practices real tunes (tonight it was Oh Shenandoah) and that’s very nice.

I’m not complaining though.  It really is an August sound that I’ve come to expect and count on.  It’s familiar.  The kids are very nice and they have a great time.  And my daughter and son-in-law were in high school bands, and the Virginia Pep Band (may it rest in peace) so I have a real soft spot for bands.  I just thought you’d like to know that the summer sounds in the garden aren’t always what you’d expect for a country garden!

The Evening Light

The sun has been down for an hour, but the evening remains bright .  The sky is blue with pink streaky clouds.  The wind has turned soft and dry after a sweltering day of humidity and 95 degrees.  There are a few birds singing softly, but otherwise it is utterly quiet.  Hildegard-the-cat is curled up at my feet, every now and then rolling onto her back so that I can admire her snow-white tummy.  Claire cat is hiding in the day-lilies – hoping to catch something, I suppose.

This evening light, it penetrates the soul with its clarity. It ushers in a beauty that suspends time.  The quiet heightens the voices of the past.   The breeze blows in suspense.   I sit still and wait.

Happy Birthday, Pop!

This is one of my favorite pictures of my father.  I think that it really captures his spirit – quiet, simple, hard-working, love of the outdoors, pragmatic.  This is on the front porch of his house, taking a late morning rest after a lot of yard work.  My guess is that the yard work was weeding the flower beds.  It’s a high-maintenance yard.  You have to rest.

Our family has lots of stories about my parents.  We tend to tell more about Mom because she was the extrovert, and she had such a great way of mixing up words.  But, in honor of Pop’s birthday, let’s have a few Pop stories…

…he got in big trouble as a teenager for driving his car down the frozen Shenandoah River.  As I recall there were 2 or 3 of them doing this.  The fun was not just driving on the frozen river, but doing doughnuts – you know slamming on the brakes and hanging on as the car spins in circles.

…he and mom started dating after he was assigned as her high school math tutor.  He was a whiz at math; Mom…ummmm.. not so much.

…as a teenager he worked at the Orkney Springs Hotel.  He had a number of jobs (pretty much all at the same time, I think) which included sweeping the ballroom every morning, setting up pins in the bowling alley (I think he was paid 3 cents a pin, but that may be high), and writing out the lunch and dinner menus because he had such beautiful penmanship.

…as a senior in high school he was the May King.  I have a picture of him and a bevy of girls, all in long white dresses, around the May Pole. Pop is in a white suit.

… Pop was often chagrined to be dating Mom because she was always in trouble in school.  Probably less so  in high school than elementary, but she’d play tricks on people (dipping the pig tails of the girl in front of her into an ink well…).  He would tell stories of having to stay after school waiting for her because she was so often in detention writing sentences on the blackboard!

…Pop and Dr. Edmund Woodward, Shrine Mont’s founder, were a team from the beginning.  Dr. Woodward took Pop under his wing and taught him theology, Bible and his vision for Shrine Mont.  Pop had lots of hysterical Dr. Woodward stories.  Many involved taking Dr. Woodward to Richmond.  One trip was to meet with the President of one of the banks to ask for a loan for Shrine Mont.  They got to the front of the bank, and the doorway was a revolving door.  Neither Pop nor Dr. Woodward had ever seen a revolving door.  They watched for a minute, and then Pop said to Dr. Woodward, “I’ll get in one space and push, and you get into the space behind me.”  Pop stepped into the door, but unfortunately Dr. Woodward stepped in the same space with him, scrunched up against Pop.  So around they went, taking little baby steps, and when the door opened into the bank lobby, they both fell out on their faces in the bank lobby.  Pop said it was a less than auspicious beginning to their request for money.

…Pop loved winter, I think because it gave him more free time from work and more time with his family.  I know that winter was my favorite season as a child because I got my father back.  When we’d have big snows, he would take an old tire, and build a huge bonfire at the bottom of the “school-house hill.”  Then after dinner, everyone in Orkney would go out sleigh-riding.  There would be marshmallows by the fire, and everyone (and I mean even the adults) would trek up the hill and sled down.  We stayed for hours, it seemed.

…I sat on his lap every night as a child and he would read me stories.  Every Christmas Eve he read me the Christmas story from Luke.  Our favorite thing to do after dinner was to watch Gunsmoke, Bonanza or Perry Mason.  On Sunday nights we watched Lassie.  Mom and I, on the other hand, watched Peyton Place ( an early version of Dallas)!  In the summer, we liked to go across the street to Jake’s store and have a chocolate nut sundae.

…he sometimes put sugar and vinegar on his sliced tomatoes.  He’d eat an onion straight out of the garden just like you’d eat an apple.  He didn’t like chicken, rice or pasta.  He loved dogs and cats, except for the puppy some Shrine Mont dishwashers fobbed off on Mom.  The puppy ate one of our nice wing chairs.  The puppy was fobbed off on someone else about 3 weeks later.

My father was born May 13, 1917.  He died  January 13, 2004.   It was a very good life.

I am so blessed.  Thank you, Pop!

Flowers,Snakes and Fathers

It’s a beautiful spring here now, full of color.  The purple lilacs, white Lilies of the Valley, the Red Bud trees, the emerald grass.  And a black snake.   Our days are typical May – upper 80′s one day and 60 the next.  We’ve had a lot of rain, so much so that the grass grows long because the ground is too wet for mowing.

The 80 degree weather earlier in the week found me in the garden raking out leaves, pulling weeds, doing a spring clean-up.  As I returned from a rest break, and bent down to pick up my gardening gloves I found myself face-to-face with, yep, a very  fat black snake. I don’t like snakes, especially fat ones.  They’re just gross.  I jumped back, ran into the house and locked the door.  And then I called for my husband to come home immediately.  Which he did, and he chased the snake away from the basement door.  John remarked that it was a good thing I’d locked the door – “crafty snake,” he said.  “You never know with snakes, it might have crawled right up the door and opened it.”   Ha-ha.

Of course, the question around town was, “You didn’t kill it, did you?”  And of course, killing it never occurred to us, not even to me.  It was a black snake after all, fat and shiny granted, but still a black snake.  And you don’t kill black snakes around here.  My father taught me that.  They’re good snakes, they eat critters you don’t want in the garden, so you don’t kill them.   The gardens around here have plenty of black snakes and I have many memories of Pop  picking them up with a rake or shovel and carrying them away.  Guests here didn’t appreciate that he wouldn’t kill them, but he wouldn’t.  He just moved them.

I thought of Pop as I hid in my locked house.  He would have scratched his head, smiled a little, and said how the snake disliked me as much as I disliked it.  (Which John had also pointed out!)  Pop’s birthday is next Friday.  He would have been 94.  In a show of bravery to his teachings about black snakes, I’ll work in the garden again today.  I just hope that the snake has moved  far away.  I’d like to do my gardening by myself!

May Lilacs

A Parent’s Gift

Parenting has some tasks that are foundational, it seems to me.  Instilling a sense of trust is one, as developmental experts have been telling us for years.

My own mother said that every child needs at least one adult in their life who thinks they are perfect.  She and Pop saw that as their job as parents and grand-parents.  Maybe more so as grand-parents!  She also would add that children needed to eat a certain amount of dirt every day to grow up and be normal.  I never knew what the “certain amount” really was.  I think her point was that children should not be watched over too carefully.

Which was true in my own childhood. I was turned loose to play at a very early age, especially in the summers.  I recall hearing people ask Mom about that, being incredulous that she had no idea where I was.  “Oh, she’ll come home when it gets dark or she gets hungry,” she would say.  “But what if something happens to her?” they would counter.  “The dog will come get me,” was Mom’s answer.  I now know that somebody in our tiny town knew where we were all the time.  It takes a community to raise a child.  Another foundational principle I think.

The Young Mother Abroad by Janny Scott, NY Times Magazine, April 24, 2011  is a wonderful article about President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.  Much has been written about his father, especially by the President himself so this article is a nice addition to the picture of his childhood.  It talks about her instilling in him a sense of respect for himself and others; self-confidence; a love of learning;  and curiosity about the world.  All foundational principles in my book.  This quote below, which concludes the article, sums it all up for me too:

“As it was,”  the author of the article writes, “she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give.”  In Mr. Obama’s words, she gave me “a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

Happy Birthday Mom

Mom

Today is my mother’s birthday.  She would have been 95.   As I write this, I’m looking out at her yard.  The forsythia is a sunburst surrounded by rays of white daffodils.  The hyacinths are pretty in pink – she often said these were her favorite flowers.  The walnut trees have tiny leaves on them now.  They are a mixed blessing those walnut trees.  They provide wonderful shade to the front porch in the summer, but in the fall the fallen walnuts turn the front yard into a danger zone – step on one of those babies and you fly through the air and land on your butt.  Their roots are also poisonous to many other plants which is causing no end of havoc to my front yard landscaping plans. Like my parents, I threaten them periodically with being turned into a table.

The lilacs have leaves on them now and will be in bloom by the first week of May.  They were gifts from the yard of Bishop and Mrs. Baden.  When I last saw Mrs. Baden several years ago she was so pleased to know that those lilacs were still giving us joy.

But best of all – mom’s real favorite – is the clove bush by the back deck.  It has just started to bloom with tiny deep yellow flowers that have the most wonderful scent of yes, cloves.  Someone, now forgotten to me, gave her this bush when they moved into this house, and she loved it.  The bumblebees like it a lot too, and their buzzing chants of happiness add to the spring aura.

John and I are going to walk up to the Old Place today to pick daffodils to put on my parents grave.  The Old Place, several miles from here, is where my paternal grand-father was born.  It’s about 70 acres of wooded heaven with only two chimneys left standing from the house and kitchen that were there.  But it has hundreds of daffodils, and is a family pilgrimage site in the spring.  My parents called these daffodils the “old fashioned” kind, but I think a more proper name may be “double daffodils.”  Whatever, they’re glorious, with a beauty and strong scent of personality just like mom.

Mom was a spring bouquet of laughter, wisdom, color, opinions, hard work and love.  Mostly love.  She loved us with a fierceness that continues to sustain me and challenge me to do the same for others.   She loved life with this same fierceness, and I can see  it as the spring light inflames the forsythia, as the bees and birds sing out the joys of warm weather, and as the smells of new life fill my soul.

But as s a closing tribute I just want to say that she would be flat busted mad at the cancellation of two more day-time soaps – “One Life to Live” and “All My Children.”  She called them her stories, and she watched two of them faithfully every day. I can’t remember which two though I bet some of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren can because she allowed them to watch them with her at very young ages.  I complained about this when the young child was my own daughter.  I remember mom just looking at me, saying nothing, and then turning back to watch the story.   My mom was gonna’ do what she was gonna’ do.  And that’s part of my why we all loved her to pieces.

Happy birthday!

Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog | Faith & Leadership | Scott Benhase: Multitasking kills leadership

A friend of mine told me the story of one of his colleagues in ministry who was unable to see how her (the colleague’s) actions or in-actions impacted the work of others on the staff.   Despite numerous attempts at conversation, several even involving the Rector, the colleague still could not reflect on her own actions in relation to others.  Hearing this story, reminded me of this blog article on leadership and multi-tasking.  Maybe you’ll find it interesting too.

Duke Divinity Call & Response Blog | Faith & Leadership | Scott Benhase: Multitasking kills leadership.

Hildegarden

We have two feral cats, Clare and Hildegard.  We named them for the saints of those same names, and like all people and cats they have their saintly and not-so-saintly moments.  Because they’re feral – we’ve been unsuccessful in fully taming them despite 10 years of trying – no one sees them very often. My father once said that if had a name like that he wouldn’t come out either! Oh well.

Many years ago we were out-of-town for a week and my mother was left in charge of these cats.  She got worried because she never saw them, and set one of her great-grandchildren to looking for them.  Elizabeth asked, “What is that black and white one’s name?  It has something to do with a garden.”  And so they re-named Hildegard Hildegarden.  And mostly it has stuck.

I was working in Nellie’s Garden a few weeks ago and there in the sun sat Hildegard. Opps, Hildegarden!  She could only have gotten in there from underneath the Hotel.  Which, as it turns out is one of her sleeping places.  We had been wondering where she slept and went at night, but never considered Nellie’s Garden.

It’s a perfect place – quiet, protected, sunny, probably some voles or mice to make for some sport.  My guess is that it is the privacy and security that is so attractive to this feral cat.  Who does not want that sometimes?  A secluded place to relax and be yourself, do what you want without fear of being watched or bothered.  It’s the beauty of the garden and so many places around it.  They are places to slow down, stop, sit and let your soul catch up with your body and mind.

I hope that you have a place or two like this in your life.  Maybe it’s a favorite chair by a window, maybe a park near you, a favorite spot at your church.  If you do not have such a spot, I urge you to find one.  A little nest like this can be a place to be attentive to yourself and to God.

Really, who does not benefit from a nap in the sun?

Thanks for the reminder Hildegarden.

A Prayer for Japan

Most merciful and compassionate God,
Giver of life and love,
hear our prayers
and let our cries come unto you.

Dear Father of all,
We weep with your people in Japan.
We hear the cries of orphaned children and laments of bereaved parents.
We feel the desperation of those searching for loved ones.
We behold the silence of vanished villages.

We see the devastation.
We are overwhelmed by the enormity of it all.
Our hearts are hushed, our minds are numb.
Let not our hands be stopped, our voices dumb.

Lord Jesus Christ,
Open our hearts to feel your compassion
Galvanize in us the act of continued giving.
Bond us to our sisters and brothers in need.

O Holy Spirit,
Comfort and heal the injured, the bereaved, the lost.
Strengthen the aid workers and medical personnel.
Bolster the resolve of governments and those with power to help.
Open through this tragedy pathways to partnerships and peace.
In Your holy name and eternal life of love and mercy, we pray;
Amen.

(From the Bishop’s Office, Episcopal Diocese of Virginia)