Delaying Real Work
First day of the past four days with no going-away obligations. Check. No car to go anywhere. Check. No food to prepare and no asparagus to harvest. Check. Wild weather in the forecast for today and tonight. Hiromi gone to work. Scared to set out plants today for fear they'll get hailed to smithereens with some of that <3 inches in diameter hail we're being warned about--or if the whole place blows away in those "long-track, strong tornadoes" we're also warned about. Head full of ruminations because of having spent a lot of time talking and listening and reflecting over the past few days. Checks on all counts.
If this doesn't sound like a blogging day to you, you must not be a blogger. Or you might be a lot more responsible than I am.
**************
Last night at Marvin and Lois' house our local extended family enjoyed a picnic supper with family members from distant places. My brother Ronald (SE Kansas) and his family had already gone home, but my sister Carol (KC area), and Dorcas (North Carolina) were still here. Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary were here from Iowa, and their daughter Edith (South Carolina), and son Lloyd and his wife (Ontario) were part of several family gatherings throughout the weekend, including this one. Duane W. stopped in after the stars were out and we had moved closer to the roaring bonfire that had morphed into a glowing heap. We had all watched the sun sink--not in blazing colors, but in soft, tasteful brushstrokes. Some of the family stayed long enough to hear the coyote chorus.
My soul was restored in the calmness of an evening under a clear sky in a quiet country spot surrounded by green wheat fields and an unobstructed horizon. Members of Joe and Mary's family always seem very near and dear, although we've often been separated by many miles and a lot of time. All our genetics come from common ancestors, and it's surprising how much that makes us seem alike, even though our life experiences have been highly varied. This old-shoe kind of comfort transcends differences like having lived for great swaths of time in the Middle East or Asia or Central America or the Canadian wilderness--all true of one or more people in that gathered group.
Uncle Joe, now well along on the high side of 85 and residing in a retirement community, puttered around the fire, tossing isolated pieces of ice-storm detritus into the fire. "He loves a fire," someone told me. "It's one of the reasons he hated to move into town--because he can't burn a brush pile there." I know something about the allure of tending a fire, or just gazing into it, and I'm glad Joe had this small pleasure last night.
*******************
Winds on Sunday, the day of Aunt Lizzie's funeral, had been very strong. At the cemetery, exposed to the full force of the south wind, those in charge urged the crowd to form a human wind barrier to shelter the family seated and huddled around the grave. It helped, but even those of us ladies who were partly sheltered maintained an uneasy focus on what our skirts were doing in the wind. Anyone primly coiffed before the burial looked as unkempt as the rest of us afterward. Those who are bald and long past concern about hair arrangement looked better than most of us. Our area was actually under a tornado watch all afternoon and evening, and large hail fell and funnels formed in counties northeast of ours. We treasured yesterday's gentle breezes all the more because of Sunday's unsettledness.
*****************
I identify with Jack M., who told Andrew S. and me at school years ago that he has trouble with face-name memory, perhaps because he has adult ADD. He had come to donate a printer to our school, one that was a big upgrade to the equipment we had. Hiromi and I had introduced ourselves to him once before, since he was an old friend of my father's. This time I told him again that I knew him mostly through my father's connection with him. That's when he apologized for not remembering me. No worries here, and a lot of empathy.
Hiromi is much better at remembering faces than I am. Often he can tell me many things he remembers about the person the face belongs to, and then I can supply the name--which has escaped him. We're a good team that way.
I needed Hiromi's help on Sunday morning, but, for various reasons his help was unavailable to me. We had company in church, including a young lady who came with Jewel to the SS class I was teaching. I assumed she was a college friend and welcomed her and the other visitors generally. I don't know why I didn't take time for in-class introductions. Later I saw a young man seated on the men's side who was a visitor, but he looked familiar. I couldn't attach a name to the face, however. On my way out of the sanctuary, I walked past a gentleman my age or a bit younger, and he looked familiar too. No name there either.
Further along the path toward the exit, someone told me that Jewel's guests were from Sterling College. That's when I remembered the older gentleman's name. He was Dr. Watney, whose English class I had visited during the in-service day when our school staff members fanned out to area schools to learn from other educators. Dr. Watney had kindly engaged me in conversation after class and escorted me to the administration building between classes, brought me coffee, and showed me some interesting reading material. Then he retired to his office to do prep work for his classes.
Later, I took a group of students from our high school to Sterling College to see "The Great Divorce," a drama on C. S. Lewis' book. Dr. Watney gave a lecture on C. S. Lewis and this story just prior to the play. He is an authority on C. S. Lewis. All that, and I still did not remember the name for the face I saw after church--till the "Sterling College" context illuminated me.
The Eureka moment on the young man's identify didn't happen till that evening when Christy and Kristi and I were telling Benji about the visitors. He wasn't at Center that morning, but was a close friend of Dr. Watney's son when they were both Sterling students. One of the girls said the young man in church was Aaron and that he was a teacher at Sterling. Now I knew! I had met him in the writer's group at the Hutch library. He had stopped in after the group had begun to gather, and said he couldn't stay for the meeting, but that he did want to begin to attend these meetings. Aaron replaced Gentry Sutton at Sterling, whose class I had also attended the same day I sat in on Dr. Watney's class.
All that, and I missed the opportunity to re-connect with them again after church.
*****************
Lest you think me a hopeless recluse (I'm shocked by how much I act like this sometimes), I'll try to offer some reassurance.
On Saturday I drove to Hesston for the Dyck Arboretum Native Plant Sale. While I was there I spotted someone who I thought might be Brad Guhr, the man in charge of the Earth Partnership for Schools project. I have enrolled in the EPS training that is to happen throughout the first week in June, and Arlyn N. and I had consulted with him by phone the week before regarding our own Pilgrim Pocket Prairie project. When I heard him talk on Saturday, I knew for sure that I was seeing Brad because I recognized his voice.
I gathered my wits and my courage and decided to introduce myself (lots of Amish reticence going on here), reasoning that I would wish for that if our roles were reversed. Then I waited till he was finished with the conversation he was engaged in. And waited. And waited. And continued perusing the plant offerings. And waited. Finally I gave up.
I hope he doesn't see me next June and think I look familiar and then much later remember that I was the Amish lady in the aqua dress at the plant sale--and then wonder why I didn't talk to him then. With a little luck he'll be a little more clueless than I am, and he'll think our EPS class meeting will be the very first time we've been in the same place.
****************
If you had seen me on Saturday as I walked among the prairie plantings you would have seen a big smile on my face. Dyck Arboretum provides a landscaping model that feels right to me down to the core of my person. This exposure restores my soul too. Although most plants are not blooming now, the varied shapes and textures of the plants nestle comfortably alongside each other, filling the space with growth and greenness. The dead stalks from last year have been removed, so it's obvious that the plantings are not being neglected. They're given just the right amount of tending--obviously with the intent of cooperating with nature as God created it rather than coercing it into man's "superior" ideas of what is proper.
I'm pleased to have found a name for my landscaping style preference: Dyck Arboretum Style.
***************
I'm not really done writing, but I can no longer delay doing the real work of the day--after I've plunked into this post two Facebook status posts that I put on my wall yesterday.
Most surprising phone call of the morning--From Ann Schrag at Nisly Brothers Trash Service, Inc.: " Congratulations! You are the first prize winner of the drawing for the adults [at the Nisly Brothers 60th anniversary celebration last Saturday]. The prize is one year of trash pickup service at the 1956 price." Made my day! Thanks Nisly Brothers.
[The 1956 price is $3.00 per month.]
************
Everyone should applaud the accuracy of this new measure of gun violence, regardless of their position on gun control. Everyone agrees that gun violence is a bad thing, and it can come from carelessness, ignorance or maliciousness. This records them all impartially.
Here's the link. It's an article in the Washington Post.
***********
I'll tell you later about the surefire way to stay awake while driving that I learned from Duane and Leroy while chatting after Lizzie's funeral. If I can reconstruct it well enough, I might also tell you about the time Leroy popped a wheelie on his bike in the middle of US50 with a semi and an RV and a little car traveling in the semi's vacuum bearing down on him. I want to tell you too about what Phil W. told me in the cemetery after his mother's funeral on Saturday. And I want to write more about Aunt Lizzie. Inshallah (if God wills it). I heard this Arabic expression last night, without the translation, guessed at its meaning and thought it sounded like a useful word. Google confirmed it just now.
***********
One more thing: Dorcas says that Lizzie told her once that "Leroy is not my son, but he's my boy." I love that example of Lizzie's ability to say things well and kindly and inclusively. Leroy has lived in Lizzie's home for more than 30 years.
Another thing: Dorcas says that Lizzie said she felt like she had "come home" when she was finally settled into the house that Harley built for her use as long as she lived. She died in her bedroom in that house. I hadn't heard her complain about having to leave the farm and live elsewhere in the country for a time, but being back on a working farm apparently felt right to her in a way that the interim residence had not.
Harley is still teaching in a university in Russia, but "Lizzie's house" will presumably be his primary residence at some point in the future.
If this doesn't sound like a blogging day to you, you must not be a blogger. Or you might be a lot more responsible than I am.
**************
Last night at Marvin and Lois' house our local extended family enjoyed a picnic supper with family members from distant places. My brother Ronald (SE Kansas) and his family had already gone home, but my sister Carol (KC area), and Dorcas (North Carolina) were still here. Uncle Joe and Aunt Mary were here from Iowa, and their daughter Edith (South Carolina), and son Lloyd and his wife (Ontario) were part of several family gatherings throughout the weekend, including this one. Duane W. stopped in after the stars were out and we had moved closer to the roaring bonfire that had morphed into a glowing heap. We had all watched the sun sink--not in blazing colors, but in soft, tasteful brushstrokes. Some of the family stayed long enough to hear the coyote chorus.
My soul was restored in the calmness of an evening under a clear sky in a quiet country spot surrounded by green wheat fields and an unobstructed horizon. Members of Joe and Mary's family always seem very near and dear, although we've often been separated by many miles and a lot of time. All our genetics come from common ancestors, and it's surprising how much that makes us seem alike, even though our life experiences have been highly varied. This old-shoe kind of comfort transcends differences like having lived for great swaths of time in the Middle East or Asia or Central America or the Canadian wilderness--all true of one or more people in that gathered group.
Uncle Joe, now well along on the high side of 85 and residing in a retirement community, puttered around the fire, tossing isolated pieces of ice-storm detritus into the fire. "He loves a fire," someone told me. "It's one of the reasons he hated to move into town--because he can't burn a brush pile there." I know something about the allure of tending a fire, or just gazing into it, and I'm glad Joe had this small pleasure last night.
*******************
Winds on Sunday, the day of Aunt Lizzie's funeral, had been very strong. At the cemetery, exposed to the full force of the south wind, those in charge urged the crowd to form a human wind barrier to shelter the family seated and huddled around the grave. It helped, but even those of us ladies who were partly sheltered maintained an uneasy focus on what our skirts were doing in the wind. Anyone primly coiffed before the burial looked as unkempt as the rest of us afterward. Those who are bald and long past concern about hair arrangement looked better than most of us. Our area was actually under a tornado watch all afternoon and evening, and large hail fell and funnels formed in counties northeast of ours. We treasured yesterday's gentle breezes all the more because of Sunday's unsettledness.
*****************
I identify with Jack M., who told Andrew S. and me at school years ago that he has trouble with face-name memory, perhaps because he has adult ADD. He had come to donate a printer to our school, one that was a big upgrade to the equipment we had. Hiromi and I had introduced ourselves to him once before, since he was an old friend of my father's. This time I told him again that I knew him mostly through my father's connection with him. That's when he apologized for not remembering me. No worries here, and a lot of empathy.
Hiromi is much better at remembering faces than I am. Often he can tell me many things he remembers about the person the face belongs to, and then I can supply the name--which has escaped him. We're a good team that way.
I needed Hiromi's help on Sunday morning, but, for various reasons his help was unavailable to me. We had company in church, including a young lady who came with Jewel to the SS class I was teaching. I assumed she was a college friend and welcomed her and the other visitors generally. I don't know why I didn't take time for in-class introductions. Later I saw a young man seated on the men's side who was a visitor, but he looked familiar. I couldn't attach a name to the face, however. On my way out of the sanctuary, I walked past a gentleman my age or a bit younger, and he looked familiar too. No name there either.
Further along the path toward the exit, someone told me that Jewel's guests were from Sterling College. That's when I remembered the older gentleman's name. He was Dr. Watney, whose English class I had visited during the in-service day when our school staff members fanned out to area schools to learn from other educators. Dr. Watney had kindly engaged me in conversation after class and escorted me to the administration building between classes, brought me coffee, and showed me some interesting reading material. Then he retired to his office to do prep work for his classes.
Later, I took a group of students from our high school to Sterling College to see "The Great Divorce," a drama on C. S. Lewis' book. Dr. Watney gave a lecture on C. S. Lewis and this story just prior to the play. He is an authority on C. S. Lewis. All that, and I still did not remember the name for the face I saw after church--till the "Sterling College" context illuminated me.
The Eureka moment on the young man's identify didn't happen till that evening when Christy and Kristi and I were telling Benji about the visitors. He wasn't at Center that morning, but was a close friend of Dr. Watney's son when they were both Sterling students. One of the girls said the young man in church was Aaron and that he was a teacher at Sterling. Now I knew! I had met him in the writer's group at the Hutch library. He had stopped in after the group had begun to gather, and said he couldn't stay for the meeting, but that he did want to begin to attend these meetings. Aaron replaced Gentry Sutton at Sterling, whose class I had also attended the same day I sat in on Dr. Watney's class.
All that, and I missed the opportunity to re-connect with them again after church.
*****************
Lest you think me a hopeless recluse (I'm shocked by how much I act like this sometimes), I'll try to offer some reassurance.
On Saturday I drove to Hesston for the Dyck Arboretum Native Plant Sale. While I was there I spotted someone who I thought might be Brad Guhr, the man in charge of the Earth Partnership for Schools project. I have enrolled in the EPS training that is to happen throughout the first week in June, and Arlyn N. and I had consulted with him by phone the week before regarding our own Pilgrim Pocket Prairie project. When I heard him talk on Saturday, I knew for sure that I was seeing Brad because I recognized his voice.
I gathered my wits and my courage and decided to introduce myself (lots of Amish reticence going on here), reasoning that I would wish for that if our roles were reversed. Then I waited till he was finished with the conversation he was engaged in. And waited. And waited. And continued perusing the plant offerings. And waited. Finally I gave up.
I hope he doesn't see me next June and think I look familiar and then much later remember that I was the Amish lady in the aqua dress at the plant sale--and then wonder why I didn't talk to him then. With a little luck he'll be a little more clueless than I am, and he'll think our EPS class meeting will be the very first time we've been in the same place.
****************
If you had seen me on Saturday as I walked among the prairie plantings you would have seen a big smile on my face. Dyck Arboretum provides a landscaping model that feels right to me down to the core of my person. This exposure restores my soul too. Although most plants are not blooming now, the varied shapes and textures of the plants nestle comfortably alongside each other, filling the space with growth and greenness. The dead stalks from last year have been removed, so it's obvious that the plantings are not being neglected. They're given just the right amount of tending--obviously with the intent of cooperating with nature as God created it rather than coercing it into man's "superior" ideas of what is proper.
I'm pleased to have found a name for my landscaping style preference: Dyck Arboretum Style.
***************
I'm not really done writing, but I can no longer delay doing the real work of the day--after I've plunked into this post two Facebook status posts that I put on my wall yesterday.
Most surprising phone call of the morning--From Ann Schrag at Nisly Brothers Trash Service, Inc.: " Congratulations! You are the first prize winner of the drawing for the adults [at the Nisly Brothers 60th anniversary celebration last Saturday]. The prize is one year of trash pickup service at the 1956 price." Made my day! Thanks Nisly Brothers.
[The 1956 price is $3.00 per month.]
************
Everyone should applaud the accuracy of this new measure of gun violence, regardless of their position on gun control. Everyone agrees that gun violence is a bad thing, and it can come from carelessness, ignorance or maliciousness. This records them all impartially.
Here's the link. It's an article in the Washington Post.
***********
I'll tell you later about the surefire way to stay awake while driving that I learned from Duane and Leroy while chatting after Lizzie's funeral. If I can reconstruct it well enough, I might also tell you about the time Leroy popped a wheelie on his bike in the middle of US50 with a semi and an RV and a little car traveling in the semi's vacuum bearing down on him. I want to tell you too about what Phil W. told me in the cemetery after his mother's funeral on Saturday. And I want to write more about Aunt Lizzie. Inshallah (if God wills it). I heard this Arabic expression last night, without the translation, guessed at its meaning and thought it sounded like a useful word. Google confirmed it just now.
***********
One more thing: Dorcas says that Lizzie told her once that "Leroy is not my son, but he's my boy." I love that example of Lizzie's ability to say things well and kindly and inclusively. Leroy has lived in Lizzie's home for more than 30 years.
Another thing: Dorcas says that Lizzie said she felt like she had "come home" when she was finally settled into the house that Harley built for her use as long as she lived. She died in her bedroom in that house. I hadn't heard her complain about having to leave the farm and live elsewhere in the country for a time, but being back on a working farm apparently felt right to her in a way that the interim residence had not.
Harley is still teaching in a university in Russia, but "Lizzie's house" will presumably be his primary residence at some point in the future.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
9:39 AM
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