Waiting to Sprout

When Mama died, someone gave me a poem that I carried with me for a long time. I am ashamed to say that I cannot remember her name. I see her face. But I don’t remember names. She might even be on one of my teams.

I lost that poem a few years ago, and I have searched everywhere for a copy of it. That is difficult because I do not know the name. The basic concept will live with me forever. The poem compares the mother to the redwood tree. The seeds of the daughter trees live in the roots of the mother tree, and the mother must die for the daughters to live. The comparison suggests that we can never become women in our own right until we have lost the women who gave birth to us.


I am still waiting to sprout.

My Sprouts

Abundance

Joel 2:23

23 Be glad, people of Zion,
rejoice in the LORD your God,
for he has given you
the autumn rains in righteousness.
He sends you abundant showers,
both autumn and spring rains, as before.

24 The threshing floors will be filled with grain;
the vats will overflow with new wine and oil.

25 "I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten—
the great locust and the young locust,
the other locusts and the locust swarm —
my great army that I sent among you.

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It is all too easy to get caught up in the frustrations of every day life and neglect to notice the abundance of blessings that God has showered upon me. I have a great family and have always felt loved. While I lost my mother many years ago, I am blessed to have Daddy living nearby. I have never had a child or grandchild suffer from a life-threatening disease. I have a pretty good job. In a society where so many people are laid off and losing their homes, my job is a great one. It is all about perspective.

I struggle with making good choices for healthy living, but lack the perseverance of our ancestors who suffered without even shelter sometimes on the promise and faith in an abundant future. If I could learn to bend to God's will a bit more, my grain stores and wine vats would overflow. Until that day, I am sustained by the faith that my stores and vats will be in abundance in the next life.

As for this life, I am thankful for the many blessings God has bestowed on me and mine.

They Smile Back

We have all seen that movie where the wife sneaks some type of nearly undetectable poison into her husband’s food. They call her the Black Widow because she moves on to another hubby as soon as she gets her insurance check on the dear departed. It is the same old plot, time and time again.

I have not seen the variation where the Black Widow is actually a daughter, but that is what I feel like right now. Over the holidays I dug out the recipe for my mothers Old Timey Sour Dough bread. It is delicious, but it takes a couple of days to make. I took the first loaf to Daddy, and he loved it so much that I got busy and made another batch. There is very little that I can do to brighten Daddy’s day, but this seemed to do the trick. I made myself a little vow to take him bread every week.

Daddy is on a very restrictive diet, and potassium is his worst enemy. He has to watch it very carefully and never eat any of the good foods, like taters and naners, that are full of potassium. We talked about the ingredients before he ate any. I told him there is nothing here but flour and a few spices. A very little bit of sugar. It seemed safe enough to eat . . .

. . . UNTIL Daddy went to the doctor for a routine check-up. Blood tests exposed an extraordinary and dangerous amount of potassium. Thus, my father was prescribed a rather nasty medicine to take. Where could that have come from? He had been so very careful about what he ate.




It was the bread. Even though I am the one who made the starter and the bread, it never occurred to me that the potatoes in the starter contained enough potassium to kill my father. With every slice of bread, I poisoned my father. As soon as he finished one loaf, I was busy making another one. It goes without saying that I never meant to hurt my father. I love him. I adore him. My relationship with him is a close one, and I cannot imagine life without him. Still yet, without even thinking about it, I was hurting him.

Sadly, it is not unusual for us to hurt the people we love without realizing what we are doing. The truth is that we spend a lot more time trying not to hurt, offend, inconvenience Stranger on the Street than we do our own family. We live in this polite society where we plaster a smile on our faces, even when we are doing something unpleasant OR having someone treat us in an unpleasant manner. When we go home to the people we love, all the poisonous hurt and insults that have been suppressed all day comes to the surface and spews out like hot lava. Our loved ones cannot help but contracting some of the poison, and we do not even realize it is there.

The most obvious way that we hurt our loved ones is by mouth. When the counterfeit smile is gone, ugly words and a sharp tongue are unloosed. Nothing poisons our relationships with father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, and friend more than the words that slip out of our mouth. They cannot be taken back, and “I’m sorry” is only a Band-aid for a gaping wound.

There are other ways we hurt the ones we love. Time is our most precious relationship commodity. I regret all the ballgames I missed, so I could work overtime or take a nap before supper. Why did I tell the children to go watch TV when we could have been playing a game, taking a walk, cooking together? But they understood that I was too tired or had work to do. Right? That is what I thought at the time, but the reality is I was hurting them. I did not know it. I did not mean to. Still yet, I was poisoning my relationship with my children just as surely as I was poisoning my father with potassium.

The antidote is love. Devote more time to your loved ones. Say I love you more frequently. Spend Sunday afternoon playing a card game or monopoly or fishing together. If you can suppress those bad feelings and slap on a smile for a disagreeable stranger, you can do it for your family. Indeed, it is even easier because they smile back!

Grandma Got Run Over by a Wii Dear

When I was a child, we had one television and one telephone in the house. The television had three channels IF the wind was blowing just right. If you wanted to know what was happening in Memphis, instead of Little Rock, someone had to go outside and manually turn the antenna. Someone else had to stand at the door watching the screen and shout when the picture came in. Of course, a bit of fine tuning and colorful language was usually exchanged before the picture was clear enough to watch. We were rarely allowed on the telephone. It was a party line, and good neighbors did not tie up the line with chit chat. No computers. No video games.


We did have books to read. Back then a book was a lot of pages of paper bound together – about 4 inches wide and 6 inches long. Sometimes they had a paper cover with a nice picture, and sometimes they had a hard cover. They were much thicker than a Kindle and could be 300-400 pages long. The great thing about the old-fashioned books is they needed no batteries. No power source required.

We climbed trees. We swam in rice wells and creeks. We rode bikes and horses. I spent the majority of my summers in a tree with one of those 4”X6” block of pages bound together with a glue spine. Treats were whatever fruit was in season, usually right in the field or orchard with no washing. Every great once in a while, my brother and I were allowed to split a coke and a candy bar between us. Sometimes we got homemade ice cream, but you had to expend a lot of energy in churning it. I am certain that torturous exercise burned more calories than the ice cream provided! The majority of children were fit and happy. We learned through discovery, not computers.

We entertained ourselves.

Today’s child has to be entertained. They cannot ride in the car for 30 minutes without a DVD. Our cars come equipped with all the gadgets to entertain the child, which has become much more important than comfort for Mom and Dad. Some children still have bikes, but they hate to ride them because it takes 30 minutes to get strapped into the helmet, knee pads, elbow pads, shoulder pads, chest padding, and mouth guard.

Video games are the main form of entertainment for children today. They have televisions in their rooms equipped with video games and dvd players. They have cell phones with video games on them. They have computers with video games on them. Some of them are “educational games,” but where are these kids getting their exercise? They aren’t.

At least they weren’t. Now we have Wii. Wii Sport comes with bats and tennis rackets, so our children can get their exercise in front of the television! What a marvelous idea!

My grandson got a Wii with Wii Sports for his birthday. I am staying with him for a few days, and he is really getting his exercise. I tried to get him to go for a walk with me or ride his bike while I walked. No way! He wants to play with his Wii. Lucky for me, I still have a few of those 4”X6” books that I carry with me when I travel. I decided to curl up in a sunny spot and read while Christian got his exercise/entertainment. That was fine when he was bowling.

I was deeply engrossed in Silas House’s newest novel, Eli the Good, when the Wii Dear decided to play tennis. My daughter has a nice large living room, but tennis is a very active game. I thought I had been hit in the face with a virtual ball when the Wii Dear stepped backwards and popped me in the eye on his back swing. Who would have thought that a video game could be so dangerous?

The last time we got better technology, parents had to rush out and buy a new car with a dvd player and charging stations for PSP, cell phones, and other gaming devices. I foresee a booming real estate market as parents rush out of find houses with large dens or play rooms to accommodate their Wii Dear’s gaming needs.

I will finish my book when the swelling in my eye goes down a bit.

The Jewels in My Life

It is Sunday night. As the week begins, my floor is covered with jewels of many colors. There are piles of pearls, mounds of rubies, stacks of sapphires. From my throne (a blue recliner) I see a small heap of emerald, and there is a new copper color this year that my grandson argues is red. I think it may be a shade of topaz.

My dear cousin and beloved friend, Suzette, lives in New Orleans. Every year Suzette sends my grandchildren a big box of Mardi Gras goodies -- beads, coins, cups, stuffed animals. The children have no idea what Mardi Gras is. The girls see fine jewelry. The older boy sees a coveted pirate's booty. Undoubtedly, the 2 year old boy will soon join the older one as a team of pillaging pirates. Look out Captain Jack!

My grandson has been visiting for a few days, so the plastic jewels have been pirate booty this weekend. We have sorted and examined each piece carefully. I have worn most of these beads at various times over the weekend and have been scolded for making the mistake of calling a strand of pearls beads. How silly of me!

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When I started writing this post, I had been looking for a different type of jewel for nearly two months. Sometime over the Memorial Day weekend I misplaced my mother's sapphire college ring, my grandmother's Eastern Star ring, and a watch that my daughter gave me one Christmas. I had a "throwing out" that weekend, and I had just about decided that my jewels had accidentally been tossed. I have searched every nook and cranny, under furniture, in the vacuum cleaner bag. I even put on the heavy armor and cleaned out my truck. My precious treasures were no where to be found.

I shed many a tear trying to think of places that I might have stuck my jewels. I felt like a part of my soul had been lost forever. The cherished treasures turned up in a most unusual place as I contemplated the importance of the jewels that painted my carpet with color.

The tears I shed were wasted ones. The missing rings and watch are not a part of my soul at all. They are a part of my memories. For the time being, those memories are still intact. When I lose the memories, the rings and watch will be meaningless to me, and it is not likely that my soul will be lost with the memories. At the end of the day, my precious jewels are worth about as much as the ones that turned my living room floor into a Jackson Pollack.

The true jewels in my life are in the eyes and smiles of my family. Of course, Daddy is a diamond, & his brilliance lights the way for the rest of the clan. Without him, the rest of us would lack luster. Amanda is a garnet. Shell is an emerald. While Roger is a tangerine topaz, his wife, Jessie, is an aquamarine beryl. Asia is a pearl, and her sister is a pink topaz. Christian is a peridot, a paler image of his mother. Katelyn is an amethyst, and her brother, Madden, is malachite. My brothers Mal, Craig, Greg, & Lance are various shades of agate. My best friend, Cathey, is a star sapphire. Suzette, the family jeweler is a ruby. Me . . . I am like the Mardi Gras beads, with lots of flash but simple plastic underneath all the flash.

My life has been blessed with the most precious jewels and gems God put on this earth.


"You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it."
– Robin Williams