eve of 2010

"The strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung." ~Walt Whitman

I Still Do

Forty-six years ago the organ chimes rang seven times and I walked down the aisle of the church where we both grew up to meet the love of my life and make vows in that beginning which was called a wedding. In all the changes and challenges in my life, the promises we made to each other and to God have held fast. In joy, in sadness, in sickness and health, in poverty and wealth (both of pocket and spirit), in the face of what at times seemed insurmountable difficulty, we have moved through the years to this day of celebration. Grace is still at work in our lives. Among many reminders of memories made in our home is a small framed copy of this prayer which we asked to be read at our wedding. It is my daily 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 doubt...faith,
Where there is despair...hope,
Where there is darkness, light.
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, It is in dying...that we are born to eternal life.
~St. Francis of Assisi

There's No Business like Snow Business

Our granddaughters who live in North Texas had a White Christmas! Maddie made snow angels and snow balls. Santa had to leave the wooden playhouse in pieces because he had trouble putting them together in the heavy snowfall. No snow for us in South Texas, but I did watch White Christmas! Our family here gathered for the day, enjoying cooking and eating and gifting and singing around the piano, with a number of telephone conversations with the snow angels and their angel parents.

Recipe for Remembering

I have been doing Christmas baking and candy making the last few days. As I got out my recipe box and files to choose which meals and treats I would make this year, I realized one more time how many of these are traditions in our family, but also the numbers of friends and family who passed these recipes on to me. Most of the recipes are handwritten, and include the name of the person who gave them to me originally. As I read through them, and particularly as I cook that special food, I think of those names, and am grateful for all the ways they were and are part of our family story. A few reflect a family experience that resulted in the collection of the recipe. This year I made a list of 18 recipes and contributors and smiled as I realized most of them I have been using for 40 years or more! Some of them were:

Dr. Pepper Bread: this came from a booklet handed out at the Texas State Fair in 1978! A family trip to the fair resulted in a recipe we have used ever since.

German Butter Balls, courtesy of my friend Nancy Johnson in San Antonio in 1970.

My sister in law, Iris' recipe for Toffee.

Candy Cane Cookies, clipped from a Ladies' Home Journal in the late 1960's This is an alltime family favorite, and the one my grandchildren like best to make as well as to eat!

Ice Box Cookies, my mother's recipe and a cookie I remember eating for well over 60 years!

Thumb Print Cookies, from Pat Tarver Taylor, our good friend for over 40 years.

Mexican Stack Up: given to us by C.W. and Mary Bess, a dear pastor and his wife, in a book of Christmas recipes in 1982.

All Bran Yeast Rolls, from Billie Housman in 1963.

Orange Spiced Wine, from Georgie Ingram, 1972

Poppy Seed Dressing for fruit salad, from Opal Carl. She was my Public Health Professor in Nursing School in 1962.

Chicken Tetrazinni, from Jean McGuire, our neighbor in San Antonio in 1966.

I am grateful for friends past and present. I love remembering with recipes.

It looks like Christmas!

Skye and her doll Molly have matching Christmas dresses. Our house has its Christmas dress on too. The outward preparations for Christmas start Thanksgiving weekend although I always give myself the gift of beginning to listen to my favorite Christmas music on my birthday two weeks prior to that. Once I get the bins of decorations into the house from my garage, I am always eager to get everything "out and up". I find it takes me longer these days, so here it is only a few days until the 25th and I am still tweaking the tree...trees, actually. Skye is here in the afternoons after school and she has helped with getting ready. We have a small kitchen tree with handwritten recipes from my mother and cookie cutters I have used since I was a child. The tiny tree in the dining room has small china teacups and saucers for decorations plus a few tea bags and the pieces of Joe's mother's spoon collection that came to us. The decorating is only a sign of what goes on inwardly for me. Advent is a time for making my heart ready.

Snow is seldom forecast for the Texas Gulf Coast. Yesterday, December 4, 2009, we had the earliest snowfall ever. For hours, we had huge wet snowflakes that began to blanket every rooftop and garden, transforming our everyday views into Christmas card works of art. I kept coming back to the window and the porch to watch it. I gathered squash, greens, tomatoes, peppers and herbs that I did not want to freeze since our temperatures for the night would drop to the low twenties.

SHATTERING

When remembering my grandparent’s old house on an East Texas Hill, my thoughts reenter the red dirt road up to the house. We never went in at the front, but always drove around to the back, parked under the oak trees and, flinging open car doors, we ran to open arms and an open screen door in the back. That door took us into the large room known simply as the sleeping porch. It had windows all across two sides , was furnished with a big feather bed, the curved front bureau that now lives in my own front bedroom, some rocking chairs, a heater, and the oak dining table and china cabinet we now call ours.

I can picture going into the small kitchen just off the sleeping porch. There was a wood stove, a bucket of water with a dipper, and there Grandma produced peas and cornbread, fried chicken, homemade blackberry jelly, and my favorite treat, tea cakes. From the kitchen a door led into one of 3 front rooms which were separated by a long hall that had speckled blue linoleum dotted with white stars. On one wall sat a long chintz covered quilt box. That box is here in my house, too. On its surface sit family pictures, generations beyond my grandparents, but none of whom would have been possible without them!

At the end of the hall, the door opened onto the front porch. Two things pulled me there. One was a porch swing where I could sit and swing and read. The other was a large rose bush, planted at the corner where the house and porch met, just outside a bedroom window. It was a yellow rose, with large fragrant petals. My grandmother often filled a jar with these roses to put on the kitchen table. She didn’t have a car or an indoor bathroom, but she had roses. We would bury our noses in their softness and fragrance and thank God for this gift to us. When these roses had blessed us with their beauty for a brief time, and began to drop their petals on the table cloth, Grandma called this “shattering”. “Those roses have shattered,” she would say. I know that we use the same term for broken crystal and failed dreams, but in today’s bouquets, the shattering of the roses always brings a tender smile and a remembering of Grandma’s yellow roses.
Lord, I want to bloom today. Keep me together. Help me not to shatter.