Letters

When was the last time you got a letter? To be honest, I can't remember - and that makes me sad.  I sort the mailbox harvest, in order of preference:  hand addressed envelopes, bills and other items with first class postage, then the junk mail which goes promptly into the recycle container in my kitchen.  I love getting holiday cards, announcements and invitations, and thoughtfully penned notes saying thank you or be well.  But it has been a very long time since a long newsy letter arrived except those of annual Christmas Letter variety.  I miss getting letters. I miss writing them.

I exchange email correspondence and Facebook messages.  I always have my cell phone with me.  I stay connected with my family in those ways although I have stopped short of texting and tweeting.  I savor engagement in these ways but I can't help but remember the difference in sitting down to write a letter and getting to settled to enjoy reading one.  Our electronic communications are immediate, instant gratification but briefer, to the point, with less feeling apparent.  Somehow posting a smiley face says so much less than a few sentences about feeling happy.

I have used the same expression most do in referring to mailbox content as "snail mail" - of course it is slower!  Just like many others, I now do my banking and much of my shopping online.  I love the internet tools available for researching, writing, and communication.  I am not suggesting we go back, only that we consider what may be lost in the progress and that we become more intentional in retrieving engagement and intimacy in our communications.  Maybe that is one of the reasons I choose to post weekly on my three blogs.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.   ~ Phyllis Theroux

P. S.  The photograph above is a letter I wrote to my parents in 1963 while I was planning my wedding (December 28, 1963).  I found it recently when I was going through one of the many boxes belonging to her I have sorted and filed since her death in 2006.  I wonder if there will be any letters for my granddaughters to read in 50 years.  Somehow, printed emails don't seem to be keepers. Who knows?  They may keep digital scrapbooks which have a file for their children's letters.  I just hope the messages of the heart will be in them.

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Being Thankful for Chores

A maid service which advertises with bulk mail in our town reprimands "Life is too short to clean your own house."  The number of meals which families eat out, prepared and cleaned up by someone else,  is an astronomical part of family budgets.  I even saw a newsclip last week touting the introduction of a Swedish invention which is a bed that makes itself!  It seems that we spend an inordinate amount of energy and resources to get someone else to do our homework!Now approaching 72, and learning to accept more help these days, I appreciate occasional assistance with cleaning and gardening. But I prefer doing most of it myself.

I grew up having chores - housekeeping and kitchen chores I was allowed to be responsible for. At times I helped when Daddy fed the cows or drug a trailer behind a tractor to pick watermelons.  I don’t remember this as a negative, just something that was done because I was told to, most of the time feeling good about it. I may have not always begged to dust or take care of my little sister, but I loved helping in the kitchen. Cleaning up afterward was just part of the process. The summer  I was twelve, I helped behind the counter of the small cafe my parents owned. I had part time jobs as a teenager. That was work, not a chore, right?  When I graduated high school at seventeen, entered college, and became solely responsible for getting myself up and off to 7 a.m. classes and to my on campus job, I was given a book with a quotation by Charles Kingsley which still comes to mind when I hear anyone bemoaning “having” to do something.

 “Thank God–every morning when you get up–that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you a hundred virtues which the idle never know.”

I wouldn’t have labeled it so at the time, but I was learning the value of discipline. I also learned that something I accomplish has a great deal of meaning that involves something I am. Beginning all those years ago, I began to understand how I could find deeper meaning in my daily tasks required to care for my home and family.   I found great creative energy in gardening, planning and cooking meals, finding ways to make our home beautiful with art and music, encouraging our boys with good books, and offering hospitality to our friends and family. But the weeding, cleaning, mopping, potscrubbing, endless laundry (3 boys certainly makes for lots of washing and ironing) and keeping up with all the practices and games they were involved in could have easily overwhelmed me except for my belief that what I was doing was more than a job that would likely be necessary to repeat soon.

 I could pray for the man who would wear the shirt I was ironing. I could be intent on loving the little boy from whose jean pocket I had just fished out a frog. I could focus on blessing the messes as well as taking pride in the delicious meals. For many years, I have kept a small framed poem. It has peeped from beneath the stacks of paperwork on my desk, perched by the detergent in the utility room, and for a long time now has rested on the side of my kitchen sink.

Teach me, my God and King

In all things Thee to see

And what I do in anything,

To  do it as for Thee.

   ~ George Herbert

 Kathleen Norris, in her little book, The Quotidian Mysteries, discusses this process of the deeper meaning in our chores.

“…all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings. But they have a considerable spiritual import, and their significance for Christian theology, the way they come together in the fabric of faith, is not often appreciated.”

We may do well to consider any differences with which we approach work (in the sense of a job for which we are paid) and chores, the necessary tasks which order our daily lives and the life of our family. 

Sign of Home

For many years we traveled a great deal, particularly during the years we lived in Indonesia.  The past 7 years we have traveled very little due to Joe's many hospitalizations and surgeries.  Occasionally I am asked if I miss traveling.  My answer can be surprising.  Other than wanting to spend more time with family members who don't live near us, I honestly do not miss "being away."   I love being at home.  I may go to Tuscany and back in an afternoon by reading Frances Mayes' lovely books.  I feel like I have been to the south of France or back to the island of Bali by preparing an Indonesian or French meal, but I am in my own garden by the time we have eaten! 

In various places in our home, there are little reminders of this feeling for me, as well as the hospitality I want to extend to our guests.  One of my favorites is this little placard which I have hanging under a large picture which is a print of work done by artist  David Arms.  This photo doesn't allow a good look, but above the birds and nest there is a line (dictionary style) defining home as a place of refuge and rest, highlighted with a couple of feathers.

         
                     Yes, home is a place of comfort, refuge, and rest for me.  Come for a visit.  Welcome home!

How Many Hats Do You Wear?

Even with today's disdain of hats for either women or men for normal dressup occasions, most of us still have a few hats hanging around.  Mine are all garden hats.  Jordann wears one here, but there are plenty for all of us.  Joe has a few golf hats and baseball caps.  When I was growing up, my mother wore hats to church, weddings, and funerals, and Daddy always wore a felt Fedora. We see glamourous hats worn at the Kentucky Derby or Fascinators perched on the side of British heads at formal functions.  When I attend estate sales I sometimes see entire walls of hats and veils of every style that some matron kept for years, probably in the hope they would "come back."  I have attended teas where ladies were asked to wear a hat, Easter functions where we were asked to make one, and the dressup box here has several.  Somehow, if you change nothing else about what you are wearing, putting on a hat suddenly says something about who you are, or what you want to imagine being. 

Maybe that is one of the reasons for the expression which arose in the mid 1900's which alluded to wearing more than one hat, (functioning in a different or more than one capacity or position). This metaphoric expression alludes to headgear worn for different occupations or occasions.

 We all wear more than one hat whether we have one on our head or not!  Multi tasking is not really new, is it?

Yea for Summer!

Officially, Summer does not arrive for almost another month!.  But a number of indicators say it is already here in every way except the calendar date. In order of arrival, but not importance, these are 1) the weather - already mid nineties and sticky with humidity, 2) the Texas size mosquitoes that seem to thrive in the heat, and 3) the end of another school year, which makes possible the joy of extra time spent with us by our grandchildren.  Next week, Maddie and Jordann arrive to spend a week.  But this week, Skye and I have three days of fun together. 

I did not set out to spend three days unplugged, but we have had little time for television or smaller electronics!  Often, necessity is the mother of invention, so yesterday one of our first projects was homemade mosquito repellent.  I had tried the mixture last week, so Skye made her own spray bottle to take home with her.  The recipe is a simple mix of alcohol, oil, and essential oils:

2 Tablespoons rubbing alcohol
2 Tablespoons almond oil (or olive oil)
50 drops of eucalyptus essential oil
15 drops each of peppermint, lavender, and lemongrass essential oils

Mix, pour into small spray bottle and shake before each use.

We tried it  - it works!  It isn't quite the same as baking cookies together, but still fun.

We also made fresh sugar water to refill the hummingird feeders after we cleaned them, and did some painting of toenails and fingernails.  Skye is very fond of mermaids right now, so she wanted blue and turquoise nails with fish scales.  I opted for plain pearl.

Today we mixed up some moss paint and painted some garden pots and statuary with what we hope grows into lovely mounds of real moss.  Results to be posted later!  Tomorrow we are making hanging basket fairy gardens.

The biggest project will take us awhile.  The Victorian dollhouse and most of its furniture is in dire need of repair.  We plan to work on this when we can, and solicit help from the handymen in the family! 

Don't you think we earned the hour we spent  on the couch reading?   

I love Summer!

Lemons!

Our Meyer lemon tree is loaded with baby lemons like these. Lemon blossoms have one of the lovliest fragrances in the garden.  One reason may be the promise of all this lovely fruit.  We love watcing the little nubbins grow, rounding out, and staying this rich green until chartreuse tinges the growing globes and eventually turns well, lemon color!  This takes ahwile, so we have to be patient.  But I already am pulling out all my Meyer lemon recipes and anticipating the delicious outcome!

Garden Ladies

Each Spring there are certain rituals we like to observe.  Just as we remember that Valentine's Day is the best time to prune the roses,  make trips to our favorite garden center to see what varieties of tomatoes we want to purchase, and sit with seed catalogs to inspire us for clearing out and preparing flower and herb beds, we love an annual celebration of good bugs!  Here, our grand-lady Skye is releasing 2000 ladybugs in the garden.  She was happy, and they were hungry!  The few aphids that had dared to perch on nearby rosebuds were not around long.

We enjoy this celebration of freedom for these little red garden ladies, even though it means finding a few in our hair or riding on our shoulder for awhile.  Don't try this if you spray your yard with harmful pesticides or chemicals.  We are organic gardeners, so the ladybugs can go about their work of eliminating aphids, the most common garden pest,  without getting eliminated themselves.

Ladybugs are one of the insects we have in our gardens today that are popular all over the world.  In ancient times, ladybugs were considered a sign of good fortune and a bountiful harvest. 

This one little ladybug is capable of eliminating 1000 aphids per day!  Good job, Garden Ladies!