Category Archives: Nature
God Does Sweat the Small Stuff
One of my nature enthusiasms after we moved to the country was to collect rocks, lichen, weeds, nuts, and pods to use in making ecology crafts with my children.
My first year of teaching primary grades I decided to use all these free materials for my class to make Christmas presents for their parents. My own children had used these for their teacher presents with happy results. Of course, four of them were already teens and my first grader took after his Architect father in both creativity and natural ability in constructing things.
So, after a migraine producing afternoon with twenty-five children indiscriminately piling heaps of pods, weeds, nuts, and the like onto flat rocks and then simply pouring whole bottles of white glue over them, I placed these horrible looking gooey white messes on the window sills to hopefully at least dry over the weekend.
Monday the parents were coming for our Christmas pageant and party and taking their children and their presents home for the holidays afterward. There would be no chance to start a new Christmas present project.
Disheartened, to say the least, I belatedly resorted to prayer, “God, we need a miracle here. The children had a great time, but even the kindest parent isn’t going to be able to disguise their reactions to these presents. Help please.”
Though exhausted, I slept only fitfully all weekend, dreading facing the debacle on the window sills on Monday.
But, it seems that God does sweat the small stuff after all.
The sunshine through the windows and the heat in the room, had somehow not only dried the glue to transparent, but in ways I will never understand, allowed the excess decorations to fall off each gooey clump. The remaining creations were each unique, and all quite lovely.
The Holy Spirit works not only is mysterious ways, but in very artistic ones.
One mother of six other older children, took me aside and said, “This is awesome. It’s the first thing any of my children has ever made, that I actually look forward to keeping in my living room.”
After the happy children and parents had departed, I swept up the scattered liberated pods and weeds, and thanked God profusely for sweating the small stuff.
Sunday from Hell or Does Somebody Up There Hate Us?
(Found this thirty-two year old memoir, while cleaning out files this morning. Someday, if I live long enough, I may think this is funny.)
I really believe in a God that loves us unconditionally; that that’s sort of what He does for a living. But sometimes….………
When I wrote this, we lived way out in the country, through a creek, up a hill, down a hollow, all five miles of which were traversed on an ancient dirt wagon path, last tended by Roosevelt’s CCC Corps.
Since we had a large family; us, five kids, my mother next door, horses, and miscellaneous and multitudinous pets, we drove a Suburban Wagon and a pick-up truck. Both vehicles were middle-aged and generally loose-jointed from the constant and traumatic trips over what euphemistically passed for a road to civilization.
Our adventure started on Saturday, when our eighteen year old had to take the Suburban to his new job fifty miles away, since the special jack for the truck was broken. That left mother and me using the pick-up to do our weekly grocery shopping. No problem, until a steady downpour set in just as we hit town. I bought only enough groceries to get by that day, then crammed them, mother, the new jack, and her purchases into the cab of the truck. So far, all was well, except maybe mother.
That night we got organized for a busy two hours at church on Sunday. One child was scheduled to practice lectoring at ten, while another was to train as a new altar boy, and I was teaching preschoolers. My husband and I were to usher at the eleven o’clock service, while one son served and the other lectored.(read the Scriptures.)
Three home haircuts, one bandaged ear, clothes laid out, and my mother reminded of the exact time of departure, I even remembered to set the alarm for six a.m. to get the eighteen year old up for work. Shutting my eyes about midnight, I treasured the thought that after getting our son up, we could sleep until at least eight-thirty, since we were so organized.
Ho! Ho! Ho!
Sunday
6:00 a.m. Alarm goes off. Husband rouses son.
6:40 a.m. Phone rings and husband stumbles to it. Husband exercises remarkable restraint to his mother-in-law’s enquiry as to where-abouts of her umbrella.
7:00 a.m. Son announces that truck has flat tire and lugs are frozen. Good thing we bought that jack. That crises handled, we return to bed.
7:30 a.m. Phone rings and husband mutters his way to it. I offer silent prayers that it’s not about umbrellas. Unfortunately, it is not. It’s son fifteen miles from home with truck broken down in the middle of nowhere. We both get up and husband dresses hurriedly to rescue son.
7:50 a.m. Husband’s key chain breaks on way to car, spreading keys all over gravel driveway.
8:00 a.m. Husband drives off. ( Muttering censored.)
8:15 a.m. Husband notices that car is overheating badly. Detours to his office to get water.
8:30 a.m. Radiator bone dry and steaming, but husband cannot get into office to get water, since office key evidently still lying in driveway.
8:35 a.m. Sun is shining, not a cloud in the sky. Mother walks through woods to arrive an hour early. Still worrying obsessively about umbrella. Alarm goes off. I realize I am out of cigarettes.
8:50 a.m. Husband prays way to filling station without water. Filling station is closed. (Maybe prayer cancelled out by earlier censored muttering?)
9:00 a.m. Ingenious husband finds outside water tap and coke can to fill radiator.
9:15 a.m. Husband learns noteworthy fact: It takes fifty to sixty coke cans of water to fill a radiator.
9:20 a.m. Son calls asking if Dad went back to sleep. (My reply censored.)
9:25 a.m. I see handwriting on wall and start calling to find a ride to church.
9:30 a.m. Husband realizes Suburban’s gas tank is registering empty and wallet almost empty. (Regresses to censored muttering.)
9:35 a.m. I start calling to find substitutes for teaching, lecturing, serving, and ushering.
9:40 a.m. Husband finds open self-serve gas station. Gas gauge now registering slightly above empty. Wallet registering empty. Switches back to prayer.
9:45 a.m. My mother still worrying about umbrella. I remember it’s in the truck. I start searching purses and pockets for cigarettes.
9:50 a.m. Husband arrives to rescue son. Ignores question about whereabouts for last hour and a half. Opts to use Suburban to push truck all the way back to our regular service station where we have credit.
10:10 a.m. Arrives at service station, which is still closed. Starts son refilling hot radiator with the coke can and a seven up can from the truck. Son asks no more questions.
10:15 a.m. Service station attendant arrives. Diagnosis truck as needing a mechanic, but Suburban just needs a new water hose. Suspense builds. Do they have a water hose? Why ruin a perfect record. Of course not. Husband beyond muttering, censored or otherwise.
10:20 a.m. Miracle discovery of an open parts store one block away. Son has enough money to buy hose. Husband repairs hose.
Meanwhile back at the old homestead, chaos reigns, as children and grandmother freak out over noisy impending demise of adorable chipmunk in jaws of hungry cat in full view outside sliding glass door. I shout over uproar and hand down ruling that all close their eyes and ears and accept cat’s role in ecological balance of nature. Children go sulk in rooms and grandmother goes home in protest. I surreptitiously dig for long cigarette butts in ashtrays. I try one more call, then give up on finding a lector substitute and mentally wish priest luck.
10:50 a.m. Hooray, hose is fixed and husband and son on way home. Suburban begins to make ominous jet airplane noises.
11:00 a.m. Husband and son arrive home in Suburban with jet airplane delusion. Grandmother arrives with doughnuts to console children. Son calls boss and is requested to come as soon as possible, “or else” is implied.
For next ten minutes we hold a democratic discussion, loosely translated as everyone yelling at once, about possibilities of son dropping everyone off at church and how many friends would it take to get us all home afterward? And how would we get groceries? Fifteen year old expresses grievance about not getting to go play tennis. My and my husband’s simultaneous spontaneous responses censored. (We regress a lot.) Son worrying about jet noises, since his job is fifty miles away. Mother still looking for umbrella. Cat still nibbling on chipmunk, which fortunately is beyond caring.
11:15 a.m. We call married son, whose wife is sick with a stomach virus, but who agrees to pick us up at the grocery in an hour and bring us home.
11:30 a.m. Eighteen year old drops parents like kittens in Kroger parking lot and jets off to work.
12:00 noon Run into mechanic in Krogers. His diagnosis: truck seriously ill, Suburban’s jet noise
also may be serious and dangerous on the highway.
12:30 p.m. Married son packs us and our eight sacks of groceries into his small car.
12:45 p.m. Son’s car begins making strange noise half-way to our house. Son stops to
Investigate. Husband remains numbly staring into space, while lighting two cigarettes at the same time.
12:55 p.m. Ice cream melts.
1:05 p.m. Start on again. Noise quits, but car drags bottom along last stretch of rough road.
Son sighs a lot. Husband mute.
1:20 p.m. Arrive home with eight sacks of groceries to ravenous whiney children, full cat, Mother again asking my husband about her umbrella. As husband opens six pack bought at Krogers, I hear him muttering something about “where the sun don’t shine.”
1:30 p.m. Phone rings and I panic that it might be about son driving the dangerous Suburban. It’s the person in charge of lectors asking was anything the matter, that our son didn’t come to lector?
2:30 p.m. Person in charge of lectors says that she is sorry she asked.
2:45 p.m. Husband finishes six pack. I escort mother, who is still obsessing about her umbrella through the woods to the safety of her house.
A Country Education
When we moved to our hundred acre weed and rock sanctuary, I happily dragged the children through the woods on hunts for nuts, lichen, and pods for ecology crafts. We waded the creek finding smooth stones and fossils, even coral. In the snow, we went looking for animal tracks. And in the dark of night we drove the jeep through fields to find the perch of the Great American Owl, that we spotted flying during the day. I often enthused about all the amazing things, we were going to learn by living in the country.
One day, my first grader announced, “Mom, you were right. I’m learning a lot of new things in the country.”
Delighted, I asked, “What kind of new things?”
“Well, before we moved here and had to ride a school bus, I didn’t know hardly any cuss words.”
That wasn’t quite the answer I was hoping for.
Later, I realized that in my eagerness to get back to nature, dragging my family with me, I might have gone overboard a bit. A friend from church invited my first grader to go swimming with her first grader at the Country Club. She later laughingly told me she figured we must swim in a creek, because my son asked whether he should leave his tennis shoes on for swimming.
I told her I was surprised he didn’t throw rocks in to chase the snakes away.
A lot of things are different in the country.
Circles: Teardrops and Daffodils
I always start Lent early. When the cold, grey days of January set in, I hibernate and look inward to try to scrape a little of the spiritual mold off my soul. I seem to be on nature’s calendar rather than a liturgical one.
Sometimes it’s hard to dig my way out of my burrow again. But the first sign of daffodils bravely struggling up to the light is my personal sign of hope. (My blog post, Sign of Hope, tells why.)
This week the daffodils in my yard are almost all the way up. And it really has been a lovely grace filled week.
And as I write this, the raindrops are clinging to the bare tree branches outside my windows. That’s another of my favorite spirit lifting graces. Here’s something I wrote years ago to describe the sense of our circle of life that this always brings me.
Circles
Fat raindrops glisten
On bleak winter branches,
Wistfully clinging
In pregnant suspense.
But earth’s silent call
Comes bursting their bubbles
Of immortality.
The world weeps at endings,
Reluctant to admit
That nothing lasts forever,
Not even death.
For each dying teardrop Becomes a rainbow celebration of the sun’s rebirth.
The Night Watch
Keeping night-watch
By a silent stream
Stars spilling
Like glitter
From an open hand
A lavish marquee
For choirs of katydids
Tired children sleep
By a dancing fire
Snug in cocoons
Sticky sweet
With chocolate hands
Marshmallow mouths
And memories
Earth holds its breath
As the flames leap higher
Reaching for the stars
Melting me
Into a sense of
Simple oneness
With everything
Winter Grace
The measured tones of winter are seasoning the light
that wakes a sky with layered streaks of grey
just faintly edged with whispers of forgotten blue,
like ancient streams that long since lost their way.
Through grey of trees and frame of snowy white
sleeps faded green in winter’s silver lake.
On wooded slopes still shadowed by the night
the first pale hints of dawn bring grace.
Senior Moments
A splash of sunlight
floats lightly on the lake
like dollop of whipped cream joy
on the quiet pudding
of my morning.
Peace, simple as the sunrise
spilling through the trees,
butterfly streamers
shadow dancing
on the table.
Halloween Riot
I taught first and second grade in a four room rural Catholic School. The principal was an elegant sister in the traditional Dominican white habit, which she gathered close around her whenever she entered my classroom. I was into nature and had pretty much filled my room with birds’ nests, rocks, weeds, feathers, fossils, pet insect-eating plants, and other dust catchers. This left little room for art supplies, which sort of spilled out of my “Fibber Magee’s Closet,” whenever I opened the doors. There was a small glass window in our door to the central hall and whenever the fire inspector came by, Sister would stand with her squared off headdress blocking the window and the fire inspector’s view of my room and closet.
On Fridays the parish priest would come after lunch and teach my class religion. Halloween fell on a Friday my first year there and since we were having a party right after Father’s class, I conspired with him to be prepared for me to come bursting in dressed as a witch, screeching scary things. I didn’t think to warn anyone else.
I do a very scary witch. (Perhaps some type casting involved?) When I slammed open the door doing my witch thing, it set off a panic. Some children dived under their desks, knocking a few over noisily in the process, others fought to get into the over-stuffed closet, and one or two climbed up on the windowsills. Every single child screamed at the top of their lungs.
Their older siblings immediately fought their way out of the other three rooms to come to the rescue of their little brothers and sisters, totally filling the central hall and leaving their teachers (and the principal) blocked into their classrooms. Bedlam reigned.
No one was hurt, order was restored, children were calmed and consoled, and the teachers called it quits on classes for the day.
I really am a well-intentioned fun person, but I’m pretty sure my principal considered me a mixed blessing.
A Crawdad Named Speedy
The suspense is building as Josh and Nanu stand poised, cups ready.
It’s becoming a magical shell game in the clear rock bottomed creek.
“Where are you, crawdad?” calls Josh, as he pokes at a rock with his tennis shoe.
In a blink, the hunt turns into a race, as a crawdad dashes from under the rock.
Splashing ankle deep, Nanu yells, “There he goes! There he goes! Get him, Josh.”
But he disappears as quickly as he came. And Nanu thinks she hears him snicker.
An hour later, soaking wet, Nanu barely croaks, “Look, there he goes again.”
But, finally, Josh has placed his cup just right, as the crawdad slips out of hiding.
“Hooray!” cheers Nanu. “Now that we’ve got our bait, we’re ready to go fishing.”
But, Josh is peering fondly at the crawdad, suggesting that they give it a name.
“Oh noooo!” wails Nanu. “That’s a bad idea.” Too late. Josh is calling him Speedy.
Nanu admits it’s the perfect name and sighing agrees, “Yes, Speedy should be freed.”
As they say good-bye to Speedy, Josh cheerfully suggests that the fish will wait,
until they can buy some anonymous bait. But, Nanu is muttering under her breath,
“Just you watch out next year, Speedy.”
American Nightmare
Bulldozer ravaged land
violated
into sun scorched nakedness.
Mangled tree corpses
buried live
and bullied into corners.
Nature, God’s glory,
trash heaped
for cheap expediency.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 