I’m joining Jeff Goins’ challenge to write 500 words per day during January. I’d like to develop more consistent daily writing habits and this looks to be a good start.
I’ll post updates during the month. If all goes according to plan (and it always does, right?), I should have at least 15,000 words down on paper -well, on my hard drive – by the end of January and several blog posts in the queue.
Hold me to it!
In the movie Up, a dog with teeth bared moving in for the win could be distracted by the call, “Squirrel!” The dog’s head instantly rotated in search of the new prey.
That problem isn’t just with dogs. My sister and I have been struggling with the same issue.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
I recently had a couple of errands to run before visiting my mother, who is currently living in a nursing home. From the bank, I headed downtown for errand #2 – picking up a part from an appliance store. One block before I arrived at the store, I instead turned right onto Main Street and drove back across town to the nursing home.
Two hours later, I realized I hadn’t snagged the part I needed.
Squirrel!
A few days ago, my teenage son and I headed out on a day-long trip. Before we walked out of the house, I reminded him, “You ought to take a water bottle with you.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said and filled a stainless steel bottle pulled from the cupboard.
Then we got into the car and I buckled in. “Oh,” I said. “I forgot my water bottle.”
I got out of the car, headed back toward the house, and he rolled down his window. “Would you grab mine while you’re in there?”
Squirrel!
My sister is working with an essential oil that is supposed to help with distractedness. I’m calling it squirrel oil and, if it helps her, I may mainline the stuff.
In my father’s last morning on this earth, I was privileged to sit alone with him for over an hour.
The night before, I realized that the family had come to tell Dad goodbye and assure him of their love. But Dad wasn’t able to speak at that point and I went to his bedside that last morning with one idea in mind: to speak what I thought he’d like to say to us.
I assured him that we knew he loved us. We knew he’d worked hard for us and that he had provided very well for our mother. I told him that we knew many practical things because of his teachings.
And then I launched into stories that I knew he’d remember.
“Remember our neighbors up north? Remember when they had a sick horse and called the vet but by the time he arrived, the horse had died. So the neighbor met the vet at the driveway. ‘The horse died. Do you want to see it?’ The vet shifted his pickup in reverse. ‘Naw, I’ve seen plenty of dead horses.'”
My dad loved a story and had told this one to the family many times.
I took his hand that morning and searched my memory for another story.
“Remember when you were tired of buying fly swatters for Mom? She was murder on those flies but the swatters splintered under her stern hand.” I swabbed some water in Dad’s mouth before going on. “You decided to cut a fly swatter from an inner tube and punched holes in it. That fly swatter could take on Flyzilla. The only problem was the black marks left on the walls when Mom went fly hunting.”
Once Dad would have snorted with laughter. Now he blinked and swished drops of water in his mouth.
“You’ll remember this one better than me,” I went on. “But I hear that when I was two, I could escape the fence around our yard and go exploring. When a guy doing groundwork with grader found me watching at the edge of his field, you decided to fortify that fence. I could shinny under the gate and I could climb up the wire fence. So you jammed railroad ties under the gate and put barbed wire at the top of the fence. It was that way until we moved. I was 13 by then, Dad!”
No chuckle. Once he would have leaned his head to the side and told me that he couldn’t be sure about me at 13, either. Not this time.
I gripped his hand like it might slip away at any moment. “You were always a little slow to talk about your World War II days, Dad. Being an orderly kept you away from the front lines. Maybe that was a failure to you but it was great to me because it meant you came home in one piece.”
No one drifted down the hallway past our room. Even the horse in the painting on the far wall seemed to hold its breath this morning.
“I remember the story you told about the young soldier who arrived in a body cast. The nurse insisted on pulling the bedsheets tight and clamped that young man’s feet flat to the bed. When he cried in pain, she called him a baby. But you came behind her and jerked the sheets off his feet. I still remember you bobbing your head as you said, ‘And he said “thank you” after I did that.'”
As Dad’s health had declined over the years, so had his ability to fix things. Whether inventing a better fly swatter or freeing a soldier’s painful feet, Dad responded to problems with a solution.
In his final years, Dad had not been able to solve what he had once easily fixed. He needed his children, whom he’d taught.
On that last morning, I wanted him to know that his gifts were remembered. And that his family, who had watched him for many years, could carry on what he had begun.
I remember walking somberly into my church as a child on Good Friday, surprised at the dimness of the sanctuary and the absence of candles on the altar. A black cloth hung over the cross and no music played.
It was a powerful reminder of Jesus’ death and the hopeless of a world without God.
I had a time several years ago when I believed God had abandoned me and so I allowed a wall to form around my heart. But eventually I found I missed him. I didn’t want a world without God.
So today I reflect – again – on the thorns of my own pride and find my heart longing for the abundance of God’s fruit.
Fortunately he’s promised never to leave me or forsake me. I don’t have to wait until Easter to celebration.
My joy happens moment by moment.
The photo came via a text on my phone along with a message:. “Tell Mom the daffodils have finally pushed through.”
Our mother loves to garden. She ordered the bulbs for her yard last summer, before her stroke felled her. The bulb package showed up the week after Mom’s stroke.
My sister and her family managed to get 75 bulbs in the ground before the temperatures plummeted.
You plant bulbs with hope. The bulbs look too dead to endure a harsh winter. But the vision of the spring’s new life and colors spurred the family on.
Here in Colorado, we’ve been hammered by the lack of snow this winter. The ground is so dry that many farmers are considering parking their planters this year. The cost of buying seed and fuel may be greater than the potential harvest.
Our family has been hammered, too, this winter. Not by lack of snow but by loss and disappointment. As I’ve mentioned before, my father died in September and my mother suffered a major stroke in October. Our winter has been consumed with therapy and fear.
For a time, we wondered if we’d lose both parents back to back. Then we wondered if Mom would regain anything stolen by the stroke.
Mom has learned to sit up again, lift herself with one arm and a grab bar, and swallow again. The therapists have her walking – stiffly, awkwardly, but one foot in front of the other.
“She’s doing great,” they tell us.
My sister’s photo of the emerging daffodils made Mom happy. “We’ll have to go see those one of these days,” she said.
When those bulbs went in the ground, we all wondered about Mom. Would we be able to show her the new plants? Would the bulbs even grow in this drought? Would she survive the winter?
Yes, yes, and yes.
And I think those daffodils mirror our hearts as well. It’s been a long dry winter but spring’s coming.
If it weren’t for apple pie, I’m pretty sure I would have been a high school dropout and begun a checkered career involving recycled bicycle parts and horseshoes.
But that’s a story we won’t have to write because my mother was an ace pie baker. None of this thawing a pie and sneaking it into the church potluck. My mother wouldn’t even use canned pie filling.
She would buy 30 pound cans of frozen cherries at the end of summer and re-package them into pie-sized bags, sprinkling the cherries with corn starch and sealing each for the winter pie season. That was as close as she got to prepared pie fillings.
Her children were devoted but naive fans of her pies. If we ever got a bowl of the cherries during re-package day, we’d sprinkle our cherries with corn starch just like Mom’s pie filling. Even though the corn starch squeaked against our teeth as we ate the fruit, we couldn’t imagine cherries any way but Mom’s.
Our Thanksgiving feasts were not much about the turkey and a whole lot about the arrangement of pies, from pumpkin to apple to mincemeat. We saved room for an afternoon of dessert.
Mom baked a pair of pies the day before her stroke. Now her left arm hangs limply at her side and we don’t know if she’ll ever make another pie.
I am going to learn to make pies. I have avoided that arena because Mom’s pies are legend in our family. They were beauties with a golden crust sparkling with the sugar sprinkles. Mom’s pies were the reason to invite family and sometimes a lucky neighbor over for dinner.
It seems right to learn. Not to replace Mom’s heritage, for I can’t begin to do that, but somehow to honor it.
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