Maybe three of you live where a.c. is not a necessity.  Would you please read without gloating? My life has been spent in Gulf Coast towns.  One or two days each spring or fall are perfect. In the winter even slight coolness wrapped in humidity can chill the bones.  In the summer, stickiness is the way of life.  At 6:00 this morning in July, I went to get the paper with the temperature already 85 and heat index 91.  I know this because a son gave me a gadget to help measure how miserable I am.

In Hammond, the house on Linden had a big window fan in the dining room.  No one wanted to sit at that end of the table.  The motion stirred the air, and it always gathered dust, pollen, and the ever present mold to scatter through the rest of the house.  My daddy made stools to hold various sizes of smaller fans, so they could be moved where needed like the kitchen, the hall by the bath to help the final drying process, and the front bedroom which was two turns away from the big fan.

About June 1, we three moved to a large back porch, aptly named The Sleeping Porch.  Most space was taken up by a double iron bed.  I had a cot over by a screen wall.  An oscillating fan at the foot of the big bed allowed us to pull a sheet half-way up some nights. I tried to go to sleep before Daddy did because he snored.  A good night was if it rained, giving a break from the heat.  A slated blind could be let down by my cot and tied to stay in place.

Air conditioning wasn’t just a blessing for houses. It also made cars tolerable.  Long trips resembled moving through a wind tunnel with the windows rolled down.  All was bearable until we stopped for gas.  Someone stayed with the car while another went to pay, so we wouldn’t have to close it up and create a portable sauna.

Did we survive? Obviously.  Mother cooked noon dinner before 9:00 a.m.  Everyone pulled down the shades and rested in the afternoon.  We sprayed for mosquitoes and sat under the oak tree in the back yard that moment in the evening when the heat broke. Those memories help remind me to really be grateful for my electrical bill in the summer when I consider the alternative.  I  don’t mind knowing I need to take a sweater for any public building, and a cool room at night is a vote for progress.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day.  Genesis 2:8

Fireworks of my childhood were mostly loud. I vaguely remember townsfolk  gathering in the college stadium for a few arching streaks accompanied by sonic type booms. There seemed a long waiting time between flashes while adults fanned, and we younger ones ran up and down the steps.  The gathering was obligatory for 4th of July and then all dispersed to various meals of hamburgers or bar-b-que. Around the neighborhood, that group I have mentioned before were given another free range with firecrackers. Our invention was dropping them down a Coke bottle to intensify the sound.  We had one accident with a boy  checking on a delayed reaction and injuring his eye when the explosion happened.  Nobody seemed to think we needed to stop ever shooting them again; Just remember to be careful, Tommy got his eye hurt, you know.

Through adult  life, various displays occurred at various places.  A group I worked with in New Mexico was bussed to a field outside of Santa Fe for a perfect dark sky experience.  AstroWorld had fireworks on Saturday at 9:00 in the summer.  We could take yard chairs across the street to the parking lot for Rice Stadium. For several years before the oak trees grew tall enough to block the view, we had an eye on look. The distance muffled the sound while we exclaimed over each burst of color.

The glory of fireworks will always be the Smith ranch near Bergheim where we gathered for July 4.  The daddies started the first offering.  They drove to one of the roadside stands and picked with care.  The rest of us lined up yard chairs just inside the fence while all preparation was made just a little bit down the road.  Two of the brothers did the prep and lighting while one chose to give warnings and directions.  The grandmother’s ending comment was, “Now that was fine.”

The performance expanded as the boy cousins got old enough to take over.  They were handed money, and the older one could drive the group to choose.  They set up the area with the old red pickup truck and several buckets of water, Both might be needed if a spark started a grass fire. All wore boots, necessary footwear for stomping flames if required.

A defined sequence was followed.  First came on the ground volcanoes consisting of a small shower and a whistle bang.  Roman candles held ten balls.  With excited comments about whose turn it was, boys lighted the first and the rest went off in sequence. A bottle rocket was on the end of stick and gave a screaming whistle without much light. Each offering garnered scattered applause and comments. Excitement grew when the sequence mortars were fired.  Finally came the announcement:  “Now for the single tube mortar.!”   It shot 100 feet in the air and filled the night sky with expanding color.

All stood up and sang, more heart felt than tuneful, the Star Spangled Banner.  Sparklers were handed out and the yard resembled fireflies on steroids. Even in writing this, joy and thankfulness pour out for family and country.  Some of you were lap sitters and sparkler wavers in those moments. I delighted re-living part of the journey that has brought family members to this day.

 

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place, from one generation to another. Psalm 90: 1

Summary is difficult.  The Arctic was a trip that will be resavored. “Do you remember?” The best I can do today is bullet points.

• Time and place: Not as long as some.  A three hour starter flight and then a seven hour leg. Oslo in two small doses was lovely.  We walked up the slanting roof of the Ballet Theater and looked out over water, modern buildings, a cathedral, and an art colony. Vigeland Sculpture Park was made better by a good gossipy guide.
• Fjords were part of Svalbard archipelago with lots of impossible to pronounce names.  They provided the framing for our sailing.
• Expedition- Absolutely amazing! In an area of 24 hours of sun, I raised my black out curtain each morning to water (with and without ice floes) and snow capped mountains.
• Guides and speakers – maybe my favorite part.  Younger experts in a variety of         __ology fields who gave speeches and sat with various groups at meals.  Some were the so patient helpers with keep warm gear, loading the zodiacs, and guiding walks.
• Ah, yes – the animals.  We did see polar bears, mainly through binoculars on far fields.  All walks had a guide with a gun.  The balance is protection of bears and of tourists.  Arctic reindeer are numerous enough to look like white dots on a dark cliff.  The can’t be bothered walruses were the most viewable  They yawned and ignored the upright two-legged intruders.

That’s not all, but enough to whet your appetite or satisfy a so that’s what it is like question. The six of us chose individually what made us happy during the day and joined for lunch sometimes and supper always to share and be, a treat not usually available to us. A travel itch was scratched and a comfort zone stretched.  Even at 79 degrees N, I was reminded of what the psalmist who probably never went there knew.  

The earth is the Lord’s and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein.

Psalm 24: 1 

Learning travel was possible came slowly to me.  Back and forth trips by car in Louisiana to visit uncles were the beginning.  Finding various parents who would take teenagers to Panama City for a beach moment was the next venture.  I was a sophomore in high school when we took our first vacation.  Daddy had a sabbatical, and we drove from one A & M college to the next all the way to Montana and back. Giddy may be too tame a word for my feeling of seeing places I had read about and landscapes that in no way resembled swamp land.

A summer job in New Mexico ( my first airplane ride), church mission trips, ( a passport in my name) and school excursions with 8th graders (not the best appeasement of a longing) provided young adult opportunities.  In marriage, most going was instigated by me.  Forty years down the pike, I was able to talk David into cruises.  He didn’t have to pack and unpack each day, could choose to stay on a boat and call the plant or sort papers if he wished, and hamburgers were available for lunch.

DRUM ROLL!  All adult children were present the fall of 2018 when a National Geographic brochure arrived offering a tour to Norway and an Arctic island to see polar bears. The offer went out.  “I’ll arrange if you’ll buy in.”  Preparation has closed in now to packing a suitcase and planning embarking Sunday, June 23.   Enough is unknown to make a true adventure.  We have gathered winter wear, yet how cold is really cold. Will polar bears wait to be spotted or will they lumber away to Russia before we arrive? Stay tuned.  Next transmission:  Oslo.

The breath of God produces ice and the broad waters become frozen.  Job 37:10

On my Kindle, at night and in the afternoon, I am reading a book about various birds that have gone extinct and how it happened.  So many at one time that they darkened the sky, yet hunting for food and feathers and destroying habitat decimated the flocks til there were none.  I went to this book after reading about it in a devotion paper and print book that I held in my hand by morning light. Both ways of reading are my life blood.  By my choices will there soon be only one option?

In the last few years, high schools in our area have increased their digital libraries for space and rapidity of use.  No more wandering stacks for a surprise or knowing how to search a card catalogue for a Dewey Decimal number. Four years ago we moved to a smaller house, and I weeded books that occupied shelves.  A few were cradled gently and opened naturally to a oft visited page. I can even tell where some favorite books were read as on the iron bed on a screen porch in Hammond, or the ones that traveled to Holland with me as a paperback.

I caught my breath when I went to help sort books as our church library closed.  We went almost every Sunday when our children were small.  Users has lessened, and the space was needed.  Some books are being kept. We are trying to find homes in schools and other churches for the rest.

A small respite survives with children’s books.  The time may come when sitting on a parent’s lap and turning pages by swiping is the norm. If the change is a fault, it is partly mine.  I try not to buy shelf bound books. A friend passes books sideways, and then I return them. If I do buy they go back through Half-Price or Good Will.  Sometimes the desire to know now is strong enough to purchase if the internet or a library fail to quench the yearning.   Maybe I need to make a bumper sticker:  “If you can read this, go buy a book!”

To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

 

By fits and starts,  I have mothered  three children to adulthood, and they still love on me.  The point of this is to either supply you with a story that allows you to shake your head and say, “I’d never do that,” or to cause you to breathe a sigh of relief and whisper, “There’s hope for me.”

My first advice as a new mother was the nurse reminding me, “Always put Baby on his tummy.” To even find this picture I had to Google bad sleep practices.  I put new baby in the crib. He hunched one shoulder until he resembled a convoluted S, burbled twice and went to sleep.  I spent many a night repositioning until I decided he hadn’t heard the directions. (For the first time.) Since he survived, I told myself I could manage mothering.

Following this intuitive guidebook,  I (gasp!) lost contact with a child, not once, but twice.  Time one I was 7 months pregnant and the sister in law I traded children with had sent me her two girls.  I took a 9, 6, 5, and almost 4 year old to Galveston in a Texas summer. I don’t know what else we did, but ended up with a trip to the Aquarium. I was leading a duck line down the hall to the restrooms before a drive home. Checking back, the four year old with a feather in his back was no longer anywhere in sight.  None of my group remembered when he was last seen.  I sat survivors down and went to ask for an announcement of a lost child.  The door that led to the parking lot opened, and a hot sweaty tike marched in. Of course, we loved and watered and didn’t scold.  To this day, he has never discussed what happened.  He still travels with me, so maybe trauma wasn’t insurmountable.

Time two, our family now had a 3 year old girl to anchor the group.  We were at Galleria watching ice skaters, and there were only two instead of three.  I told the boys to hold on to the rink rail and watch while I made the circle.  I came around to the office where one bought tickets and saw the right color dress marching toward the seller.  I swooped her up to suddenly have a screaming dervish in my arms.  Head was twisted and her back arched as she declared, “Put me down!  I’m going to tell him my name and number!!”  The lesson of what to do had stuck.  Give me points for that.

I’d like the make the excuse that I didn’t lose them; they wandered off.  We do that. Sometimes we turn around and retrace our steps.  Sometimes we declare that we really know what to do.  Whatever the situation, God leaves the rest of the flock and makes sure that we safely join them again. That always is his plan.

 For thus says the Lord God, “Indeed, I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out.”  Ezekiel 34:11

We just had a week-end holiday and the “c” word needs to be commemorate, maybe with the third verse of the National Anthem.

0 thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand  Between their loved home and the war’s desolation. Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land  Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,  And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Wars do happen, and we hope the side we are on is just, and that those who have given us the chance to try to do better have been brave and noble. No issued uniforms, yet the women and children have also done their part to try and maintain a new normal.  We have various large congregation pictures of our church. The one from 1942 is almost all women and children.  The men were at war.  Yet, because they were gone in that year, future pictures have new faces to remember ones of the past.

Each of us has some tie to some war.  My dad served in WWI. I heard his stories of troop ships going to Europe and bought poppies to wear on November 11 for Armistice.  He died at 96 on November 11 and Mother commented, “He would have been so proud to know that.” Memorial Day in May is tied to all American servicemen who have died. At an earlier time families gathered that weekend to clean cemeteries, living caring for the place of the dead.  My husband was stateside during Korea, and our family has been the wrong age for more recent conflicts, a slight word for horrific happenings.

The hymn Onward Christian Soldiers is out of favor for some, yet the battle of good and evil is the final picture in Revelation. We shudder still with current news and unwished for possibilities and pray for a time when lions will lie down with lambs. With hope, we hear again these words. 

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.  John 14:27

Wikipedia has not validated the following.  I just needed a beginning first paragraph. History began with writing.  Words you have heard in a distance class like hieroglyphics and cuneiform. They counted as communication, yet their meaning is mostly available to ivory tower professors who have uncovered means of decoding. After chiseling information in stone passed, early monks wrote mostly in Latin by hand on treated sheep skins.

In 1439, Gutenburg invented a printing press, and the availability of messages took off.  These new writings ranged from Bibles to incitements of rebellions. To incorporate pictures or vary types of print required effort by several individuals.  Eventually, the next step forward led to me.

A copy of this poem was sent to me by my daughter-in-law.  It was written by her grandfather who lived from 1870-1943. While the words are tender, the type was my draw to an earlier time.  Instantly, I knew it was not written on a computer, not even the first ones that I knew. It was a typewriter.  I was 17 and taking a typing class. All machines clattered, and a bell and a slam told when a line was finished.  I was responsible for noting when a word needed to be hyphenated, when a ribbon needed changing, and for living with mistakes or laboriously trying to correct. All in all, the skill of its use was probably one of the more important ones of my education.

For years, a Remington reigned.  I struggled up stairs in a dorm to have one on my desk. I earned $0.35 a page typing for spending money. Mystery novels discovered who wrote the ransom note by the nicks on a lower case e, and movies had scenes of reporters typing news of the hour in a smoke filled rooms.

When change occurred, it was with the rapidity of watching a tennis match.  The first question my students would ask was “Can I change the font?” Pica and Elite of the typewriter were nothing compared to Algerian to Trattartello in various sizes and colors and a choice of bold or italic. Images could appear with a click.  It took a strong will to enforce the idea that content counted.

John ends his gospel by saying that the world could not contain the books that might be written about Jesus stories,  Even if that is the case, font and presentation are not important.  Only one thing matters.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.  John 1:14

 

Checking ads, reading op-Ed columns, or listening to friends makes me feel that having a variety of devices would free me to live a narcissistic undemanding life. I might just have a strong pointer finger from pushing the start button or a weaker voice from having only to mention needs to Siri.  Some of these options mean more to me than others.  Cell phones evolved from stationary on a wall to a coiled cord allowing movement to a speaker in a car when away from home.  Likewise the convenience of a microwave is enjoyed, though I don’t have an Instant Pot yet.  Mind wandering reminded me of the children’s song, “This is the way we wash our clothes, on a Monday morning.”

I’ve lived through a long cycle of clean clothes.  I learned early to be very invisible on Monday when my mother washed every thing from sheets to clothes of the week in the bathtub, wrung out by hand, and hung on the clothes line next to the garage. If the weather was bad, my daddy had floored the attic and put a line up there as an option. Special accessories, I guess you’d call them, were stretchers for sheer curtains and drying forms for khaki trousers to prevent wrinkles. My friend’s family didn’t have a car, so they had room for a wringer in their garage. Being able to turn the handle and feed in clothes taught us to always watch our fingers…along with noticing where the curious cat had its tail.

World War II ended, and we got a Bendix machine.  Machines have circled back to front loaders after a time for top loaders, yet for this machine that was the only option.  We kept it on a small back porch.  This is difficult to believe, but children in the neighborhood would sit on the floor and watch the soap filled water slosh around in circles. At times, the cycle was overloaded and soapy water spilled out some way, and we had to sweep it out the back screen door. The clothes line was still the dryer.

When I was in the 6th grade we moved to our last house.  A long screen porch was at the side next to the oyster shell drive way.  This machine was a Maytag.  It lasted and lasted, never needing service beyond what my daddy could perform. It was protected from elements on the porch, but it was still exposed to the temperature of the outside air. If a freeze was expected, the water hose was disconnected and drained and an old quilt draped over it for protection. Again, a dryer was never even considered.  Hot air and a breeze were just as effective and cheaper.

Now the choices are overwhelming with a dryer an essential part of the mix. Building new or redoing require considering the choices: side by side, stacked for efficient use of space, and a color to match a decor. One of you readers even has a dry cleaning option I don’t begin to understand.  Cleanliness is next to godliness is not Biblical, yet it is a standard we hold for ourselves and others. To be truly clean sometimes extends our plea beyond outward visible dirt.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin, Psalm 51: 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look up Family Tree by Norman Rockwell, a favorite picture of mine since Saturday Evening Post days.  I know. I lost some of you younger ones with that reference to a weekly magazine of an earlier time. Most of you who read this are some leaf on my family tree.   Others are close friends who at least know my name.  I didn’t intend this to go viral with unknown readers searching out my comments.  That means along the way what I write will be all about me.  The hope is you will turn the lens to make it all about you.

I have a broad feeling of family because those of birth/blood, adoption/love, marriage/in-laws, and meet a need members are a varied group  For Mother’s Day, I want to introduce the most shadowy one of that group, my birth mother. She was the oldest of one brother and two sisters in Lakeland, Florida.  She married a small town Baptist minister and lived through what were difficult times in the depression  She died when I was two weeks old. At that point, her life story and its intersection with mine stopped. My adopted mother saw that I had contact with her family, and I did write sporadically over her sisters’ lifetimes. Yet, some tension between families arose over her death and no one talked much of this young woman’s life.

Some pictures from one of her sisters show I have a family resemblance. She is the dark haired one in this picture. This is the part of her essence that was maybe passed to me. She must have had a slight arty streak.  Only two verifications remain.  I have the wedding booklet she made herself:  construction paper end pieces with clippings of newspaper comments of a shower and the wedding.  A ribbon is used instead of brads to hold pages together.  My niece, her granddaughter, has a picture of a sailboat she painted.  What I created in Friday afternoon free drawing class was not recognized nor memorable. The most I do is paste pictures in my journal or write decorative words in different colors. Her greatest gift to me was not this talent. Instead,  it is with every breath that I say, “Thank you , Norene, for life.” 

 

Honor your father and your mother.  Exodus 20:12