CELEBRATE FRIENDSHIP...AND LOVE

For the most part, the members of my church’s knitting/sewing group, called Heart & Hands, never see the people who receive the hats, scarves, mittens, and quilts we make and donate.

We’ve given products of our knitting needles and sewing machines to A Baby’s Closet, Charis House (for women), Rescue Mission (for men), individuals who come to our food bank, and other places that send out an S.O.S. for warm hats and scarves to clothe people in need.

Recently, we put our hearts and hands to work and made a prayer quilt for Lydia, our liaison with a city school; she made it possible for us to give our time to help classroom teachers, as well as donate school supplies the students may not be able to purchase. She has attended several meetings of Heart & Hands—cheerfully admitting she is not at all handy with yarn or fabric, but enjoys our company, drinks coffee with us, and admires what we make. We have adopted her as a daughter.

In August Lydia was diagnosed with breast cancer. The idea for a prayer quilt seemed to pop into the minds of all the members—we knew we couldn’t make a knitted shawl quickly enough.

In short order, we assembled fabrics and sewing machines, scheduled two sewing sessions, and got busy.

We started with precut 2.5-inch strips donated by one of the members. At one of our regular meetings all the ladies sorted through a large selection of strips to come up with the 24 we used--predominantly bright colors, emphasis on red and green. (We learned Lydia's preferences from her boss.) After the selection was complete, they laid out the strips in a pleasing arrangement and we numbered them in the order we liked with masking tape squares.

 

At our first sewing session three ladies in our group stitched the strips into sets of two; then joined the pairs into the final layout we had selected.

 

I took the quilt top to a fabric shop and bought inner border and outer border fabrics, plus backing. Members of our group contributed money to finance this part of the project.  Those who didn't sew or weren't able to make those meetings participated in different ways--either with cash donations or helping those who did the sewing.

My next task was attaching borders, layering the top, batting, and backing, and then quilting the three layers.

The backing was pieced.
Label in upper right.







 

 

 

 

I used a simple meandering curve, stitched with my regular machine--no free-motion work required. 

At our last sewing session, seven members hand-stitched the binding. Here are a few of them:

 

 

 

All that remained was inviting Lydia to visit our group "to view a project" (as one woman put it). Here's a picture of Lydia "wearing" her new snuggle quilt.

Heart & Hands members were thrilled to see one of the recipients of their handiwork. Lydia promised to use it whenever she needed a special moment of comfort during her treatments.

Today I celebrate the friendship and love that went into the making of Lydia's prayer quilt. What a joy to know there are people who still care, and will do something to show that caring.

 

 

 

 

 

DISAPPEARING ACT

Sometime in 2013 I caught on that cursive writing was becoming like the dinosaur—extinct.

Recent searches provide articles on all sides of the question—to handwrite or not to handwrite. The consensus seems to be: There’s no easy answer. Some say writing by hand (not printing) helps the brain perform better; others say that's not proven.

I’m not for or against teaching cursive writing in our schools. If it were left up to me, I’d teach cursive writing . . . just because. But I can live with either way.

Other things/notions/points of view/activities, however, may be disappearing from our culture. These seem to me to be critical. But that may just be my oddball look at the world.

Take clocks and watches. Do clockwise and counter-clockwise mean anything nowadays? I mean, besides those of us over, say, age forty? I’m completely in love with my digital clocks and watches, but I do know what it means to turn a handle in a clockwise direction.

Then there’s doing math by hand. Remember that? You used a pencil (so you could erase if you made a mistake) and did sums and subtraction and multiplication and division (even long division) on paper. If you’d gotten through fifth grade you knew about decimals and percentages and how to use them. A few years ago a friend confided that she doubted if she could add or subtract by hand—the calculator does it for her. Well, mine does it for me, too, but I still like to do the whole process by hand. I like to think it helps my synapses keep on keeping on.

For the past year or two my church has been looking for an organist-choirmaster. The few inquiries we had were a revelation—some wondered why we had an organ, when electronic pianos were the way to go; or else there were bands for contemporary services. (We don’t have either of those. Band or contemporary service.)

And just yesterday I drove south of my small city toward a larger city and noticed the number of For Sale signs on farmland. Too often those are purchased by developers. We have more and more new homes—large ones, medium-sized ones—out in the country, built on what was once productive farmland. It grieves me to see the land disappear. (Of course the land itself doesn't disappear, but its usage changes in ways that make me uncomfortable.)

-----

I can’t do much about keeping life status quo. Not Life in the sense of our culture or everybody’s life. And I’m not a hidebound negativist. (Yes, there is such a word--Merrian-Webster's 10th Edition says so.)

But I can do my part to keep my own life enriched by activities that are meaningful to me and, often, to my family. Here are some things I hope will never disappear:

·         Print books
·         Hand-written, or typed, personal letters
·         Hand-knit garments and covers
·         Home-canned veggies, fruit, meats, and jellies/jams
·         Using our brains
·         Doing word and number puzzles

·         Playing with kids
·         Helping our neighbors
·         Giving our time/talent/treasure to help people we don’t know, who are in need
·         Respect for one another

-----

To end on a happier note than I began, I’ll list here some things I know or believe will never disappear from the scene:
·         Love of all kinds
·         Strength in times of need
·         Joy
·         Faith
·         Hope
·         Smiles

These remind me to give thanks that sometimes change is good; sometimes it’s not so good; and in either case, Life goes on.

 

APOSTROPHES (More or Less)

Bills/Bill’s Dog Wagged Its/It’s Tail/Tale

(circle correct words)

Any wonder English is difficult to learn? Let alone speak or write?

Back in the day I taught writing—English composition to the unwary college freshmen who wandered through the halls of academe in my city. Yes, this is the same dreaded Freshman Comp taught in every college and university to prepare newbies for the papers they will have to write in later classes.

My first couple of years were pretty good. I honed my teaching skills on the students whose placement test scores had judged them to be in the middle class—neither gifted nor remedial in their needs. Fine with me. I’m pretty much middle class myself.

Evaluation of their papers was three-fold:

·         Grammar, diction, spelling

·         Development of the idea in the essay (based on my class presentations and their textbook)

·         Overall evaluation of the final product—wholly objective—for the grade

Grammar Bible is on the bottom

We spent little time on Grammar, etc. because they had purchased (a required text) a wonderful new grammar of the English Language, easy to read and comprehend, by Diane Hacker. We worked with the book in one class period to acquaint everyone with how it could be used and how to look up information. It was the English Comp student’s bible.

(I fear it went the way of many a Holy Bible—bought, displayed, never opened. But that’s another story.)

-----
As if often the case, I learned a lot from my students—probably more than they learned from me.

For instance:

·         How many ways can you spell their?



Never had this one tried on me....

·         Is the apostrophe dead?

·         Rules are to be ignored. (Such as—type your papers or have someone type it for you. If it's turned in handwritten, I won’t read it.)

·         Lack of class participation in no way should interfere with one’s grade.

·         Class attendance ditto.

-----
Then I was assigned a remedial class. The requirements were the same as for the regular class, but the level of preparation was much different. We used our grammar bible more diligently. We wrote more practice essays in class; these were shorter and focused on only one part of the writing process. We discussed errors in writing and why they caused a breakdown in communication between writer and reader.

Boy, did I learn a lot in that class.

The title of this post is a parody of the kind of exercises I recall from elementary school English classes (now called Language Arts). I loved those exercises. I could do them in record time, get an easy A, and feel my self-esteem rising within. (I was also good at math problems until about fifth or sixth grade; then that all went pear-shaped. Again, another story.)

-----

I leave you with these thoughts:

·         Bill’s is correct. The apostrophe shows possession.

·         The Dog, however, is a step away from Tail—the pronoun Its shows the dog's possession of a tail without an apostrophe.

·         A Tail is wagged. A Tale is a story.

Another day we’ll tackle the other two uses of an apostrophe (punctuation mark).

Class dismissed.

[By the way, you all get an A for today. Next time we grade your progress.]

Typos count as errors--proofread your work!

 

CELEBRATION OF LIFE

Recently I played a funeral service at my church, for the third time this summer.

The Episcopal Church, like many denominations, celebrates life--the life of the person who has died, and the life of the risen Lord. We follow the Easter liturgy, and the songs we sing are happy songs.

I first came across this kind of funeral service in the 1960s. My family were members of the Methodist Church at that time. I was quite attracted to the celebration of life service; it bore no resemblance to the tear-laden, gloomy services of my youth. And to me, celebration made great sense.

Yes, we are sad that the person we loved, respected, revered has passed on from this life. We mourn the loss of a valuable person who added to society in many ways, great and small. But we are joyful in the promise of new life that person will enjoy. Whether we call it heaven, or being with God, or some other phrase, it will be a new life.

Many people ask me if I’m comfortable playing for funerals.

Yes, I am. Each time I play the familiar songs and hear the familiar readings, I am comforted.

Here is a prayer I’d like to share with you. It is a well-known prayer, attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, but was, according to experts and archivists, written centuries later by an unknown writer in Normandy, during World War I.

The Peace Prayer of St. Francis

by an anonymous Norman c. 1915 A.D. Peace Prayer

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:

Where there is hatred,
Let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, Joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

-----

I wish you peace this day.

 

THAT WAS THEN . . . .

J S Bach

(Boredom Alert! If you aren’t interested in technology in any way, shape, or form, you better surf somewhere else. Today’s post is about technology. Sort of.)

In my low-tech youth, we were considered fortunate to have a telephone at home. The first one I remember was in the country, and we had a three-party line. That meant two other homes had phones that would ring when someone called us. And, obviously, ours would ring if someone else on the line received a call. Each ring was distinctive: one long, one short; or one long, two shorts; and so on. The temptation was to pick up even when our own ring wasn’t the one we heard—to hear what other people were saying. I was only six or seven and too young to submit to temptation. I can’t vouch for other members of my family.

At that time we had a rather nice radio, big floor model, on which I listened to The Long Ranger every evening at 6:30. It was my bedtime (the prevailing childrearing wisdom in that long-ago era decreed 12 hours of sleep for children—which I never got because I couldn’t go to sleep at 6:30 PM and sleep till 6:30 AM. But that’s another story). I loved listening to the radio while lying on the living room rug, staring into the cloth-covered speaker. (Sorry, I don’t remember the brand.)

For other entertainment, we had movies, both Technicolor and black and white; live bands for dancing; and homemade music—guitars, fiddles, and accordions, along with singers of varying homegrown talent.

Television was in our future, as were fax machines, home computers, and laser technology in medicine.

In the 1970s and 1980s I began to notice what I now call mid-tech events. The law office that hired me had a Mag-Card typewriter that recorded boilerplate paragraphs on flexible plastic “cards” the size of a cashier’s check. The boilerplate was coded with stops—the machine would stop and the operator could insert information, perhaps the name of the person making the will, deed, or affidavit, or the names of legatees.

In a short time we had one personal computer in the office for the real estate secretary—she typed long legal descriptions, and having once proofread it with another person, she could save it for future use on a number of documents for a transaction. A big time saver.

Next came the word processors, stand-alone machines that did primarily text, but had a couple of bells and whistles, such as calculations—adding up a column of figures being one I recall because I used it often. And loved that feature, math not being my greatest talent.

As is often the case, one computer led to another, and before we knew where we were, we had a small mainframe. This was nothing like room size, more like a two-suiter suitcase standing on end. From that one little server, we could operate three or four other workstations.

Ah, as you see, we’re getting into modern terms.

During all this technology advancement, we learned that we could do a whole lots more work with less effort. No one was out of a job, but we could take on more business because the documents could be prepared more quickly.

So—if technology changed the workplace—no, I really should say “when” it changed the workplace—what happened out in the rest of the world?

My observation is this: technology didn’t change people. That is, not their emotions, their relationships, their challenges in life. We still fell in love, lost friends or made new ones, saw our family members die and mourned their passing. The death rate, the divorce rate, the disinheriting of heirs—none of that was affected by technology.

Stories, stories, stories...

The universal truths that have come down to us through literature, visual art, music—all these have continued. If they had not, how could we, in our 21^st Century lives, appreciate the literature of the Bible? The Sistine Chapel ceiling painted by Michelangelo? Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos?

Love found and love lost . . . betrayal . . . forgiveness . . . redemption . . . sacrifice . . . they’re all found in the Bible, in the ancient literatures of other cultures--they're always with us, as they were then, and, I suspect, as they always will be.

We can see and feel and hear them through the books we hold in our hands or read on our e-reader; through a concert in Lincoln Center or on an iPod; on a gallery tour by foot at the Metropolitan or sitting at home, online.

Low-tech, mid-tech, high-tech—does it matter? I doubt it. What matters is that we continue to celebrate all the facets of life, in whatever century we live, with whatever tools we have at hand.

They’re all gifts. Give thanks for them.

Portion of Michelangelo's painting
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

 

 

HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Know who said that?

Pliny the Elder, Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher. Born 1st Century AD.

I don't know the occasion of his pronouncement, but it's become a cliché in our time. Like most clichés, it's true.

Consider the following:

• In my first 20 years on Earth, I moved from one abode to another 17 times.
• During those moves, I lived in houses, apartments, and one time a remodeled gas station.
• Our moves took us from small town to country, to larger town, to city, to country again, and back to small town.
• I lived in five different states of the Union, all of them in the Midwest

For a number of years, during these moves, my home was where my mother was. When I was 15, my mother died--so that anchor was gone from my life.

After that my sense of home--not as a place but as an attachment--underwent several incarnations. I married, had children, and began making a home for them. (In those days, wives/moms were able to stay home and be with the children, being homemakers in the literal sense of the word.) Like many new parents, I tried to give my children what I didn't have as a kid--a house they could call home, freedom to explore, and permission to keep every blessed thing they wanted to. It helped that the first house we bought was a four-bedroom, two-story square frame house, with large rooms, a basement, and an airing porch on the back. Plus a big yard, fenced in, and room for a dog and a cat (or two--they don't seem to come in singles for this family), plus a neighborhood full of friends to play with, go to school with, and get in trouble with.

When the children were in school and I had free time during the day, I went back to college to finish my degree. I made friends there who have lasted through the years into retirement. They've become part of my family--and though we aren't close geographically, we are close in the best way of all--we're at home with each other whenever we meet.

I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.

Yo-Yo Ma

I can't show you pictures of my homes--there were too many down through the years. The one I live in now is a three-bedroom ranch, like the houses my father built most of his life. My town's population is around 12,000, and it's the county seat.

 

For a number of years my oldest daughter and I went back to our hometown to visit my aunt and several first cousins. One year we attended a family reunion, on the 100th anniversary of my maternal grandparents' wedding. After a life of nearly perpetual moving around, I felt quite grounded in the park that day--I was related to all these people, and so was my daughter. We belonged.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The most important thing is this: I've been in this house, in my small city, for 30 years. I've found a physical place to call home. But if I had to leave, I could. Home is a concept--and I carry its picture in my heart.
 

NATURE'S BOUNTY

Not only Nature is generous--so are family, friends, and neighbors.

I didn't get to the Farmer's Market last week--neither Wednesday nor Saturday--where local folks sell their vegetables and fruit during the season. In autumn, when the fresh produce is finished, you can find honey, jelly/preserves, dried herbs, cider, and sometimes handmade crafts.

So since I didn't make it to the market, the veggies in the photo above came from three other sources: eggplant from my neighbor across the alley; potatoes and zucchini from my yoga instructor; and summer squash, tomatoes, and cukes from my Ohio daughter. (The green/yellow/purple/Dragon Tongue beans were already cooked and cooling when I took the picture.)

Fresh produce always makes me want to cook--and eat. Last week's Ratatouille is almost gone, so the eggplant, zucchini, and summer squash above will find their way into another Mediterranean Vegetable Stew.

-----
A short walk in my neighborhood reveals more bounty--flowers, shrubs, trees. We are at the height of the summer season, when a couple of good rains revive the grass and wash the shrubs and tree leaves and make them green again. (If they were green to begin with.)

These nasturtiums grow on the alley side of my neighbor's fence (the eggplant lady). I get to enjoy them every day when I'm out picking up sticks in the yard.

Some people call these Mallows--they're also known as Hibiscus. Another neighbor has dark, dark red ones, nearly black. The sheer size of Hibiscus is stunning. Larger than my open outstretched hand.








These roses are so fragrant! They belong to my next-door neighbor, Iola, who recently went to live with her daughter and son-in-law. The Hibiscus are hers also. She must miss them a great deal.










Although I'm not in summer's fan club, I will miss her sights and sounds: flowers in their glory, green everywhere, the aroma of the backyard grill filling the air, the song of the John Deere tractor heard far and wide.... We are in a season of sensory delights.

-----
Yesterday I noticed signs of autumn's advent. A carpet of leaves in mid-town, and a tree with one branch of red-red leaves.

The time is coming...already nights are cooler, and daytime temps reach only into the mid-to-upper-70s. Mornings are dark when I walk at six o'clock. Evenings draw in a little sooner.

So today, I celebrate not only Nature's bounty, but her variety as well. Season follows season--each brings her own delights--and we know not one of them lasts forever (however long winter may seem).

I wish you joy of the season--every season.