I Survived

Originally published in the Miami News-Record on January 4, 2015

I guess I shall just go ahead and do what everyone else does this time of year: reflect.

We began 2014 by finishing the remodeling of our new home. We adjusted to having a well and sulfur water (and my husband swears we didn’t get near as many tick bites this past summer because of it). I learned that living 45 minutes away from my mom and sister is harder than I ever dreamed possible. (But having a mother-in-law and sister-in-law who live less than a mile from you comes in handy when you need a can of diced tomatoes or some parmesan.) I got shingles less than a month after moving and spent most of the year trying to find a medication to help with the subsequent nerve pain – and discovered that sometimes the medication is worse than the problem you originally started with. But I survived.

Paul and I resigned from our youth ministry positions not long after the first of the year. There were many tears over that and some spiritual bruises and scratches. We licked our wounds and prayed a lot. Someday God may call us back into active ministry and if He does, that’s okay. But if He doesn’t….well, we’re okay with that, too. But in the midst of it all, God saw us through…and we survived.

Our oldest daughter graduated from high school a yearly early and got her first job. Our son got his driver’s permit. Our youngest daughter became a teenager. There were a few heartaches, attitudes, and tears, but such is life with teenagers. We all survived.  

My dad was diagnosed with cancer. But now he’s cancer free and only had to sacrifice 1/5 of a kidney to get that way. All glory to God, he survived.

My sister married my brother-in-law and I gained an instant niece. Then nine months later, I gained a new nephew. The whole living-45-minutes-away thing got even harder, but I learned how to make the most of the time I do get with them and savor it even more. I will survive not having immediate access to squishy baby cheeks, although I think the kid goes home thankful for the break from all my kisses.

I built my first garden and learned how to can. I now have approximately 45,062 jars of apple pie filling to prove it. (I also may exaggerate a bit.) I was asked to teach a class at our homeschool co-op and discovered that I love it way more than I imagined I would. I learned that sometimes friendships are only there for a season and that sometimes neighbors are just neighbors and you don’t have to be best friends with everyone you meet. I learned that it’s okay to ask for help sometimes even if it’s hard to do so. I was reminded that the prayers of a dear friend are precious.

I have learned that life doesn’t always turn out the way you had it all planned out in your mind. Some years of your life are going to be absolutely amazing. Some won’t. Sometimes your kids are well-behaved and polite and other times they tell their Kindergarten teacher that Daddy farts a lot. 

Sometimes life is hysterical. Sometimes it’s like a bad Lifetime movie – the kind you don’t want to watch, but you can’t stop and before you know it, you’ve gone through a half a box of tissues and your husband is ready to have you committed. Happy, sad, up, down, hills, valleys, sunlight, rain…it’s all just life. Dreams of white picket fences and perpetually clean, two-story houses turn into lived-in modular homes on 32 acres on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. 

It may not be what you had in mind when you said “I do” at the tender age of 19, but with some prayer and the ability to adapt, you realize that it’s going to turn out okay…..and you survive.   

Yes, Yes, Yes

Originally posted in the Miami News-Record on November 16, 2014

Sometimes I overextend myself. I don’t do it intentionally and most of the time I don’t even realize I’m doing it until it’s too late and I find myself sitting in the middle of the classroom floor surrounded by piles of tulle, cotton batting, and glitter, tears streaming down my exhausted face, swearing to anyone within earshot that I will never volunteer for anything again. Oh wait - there is no one to listen to my wails and declarations because they all went to bed hours before. They’re all nestled snug in their beds with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads whilst I accidentally hot glue my fingers to the same piece of cardboard over and over again.

It’s not that I can’t say no – that’s not it at all. I can say it and say it often - it’s that once I start saying yes, I can’t stop. It’s a slippery slope, my friends.

For nearly a year now I have said no quite a bit actually. We resigned from our youth ministry positions shortly after the first of the year and then moved to a whole new part of the county soon after that. The lack of 25 extra youth to keep track of greatly reduced the amount of stress in our lives right off the bat. Then add in that we moved roughly 45 minutes from everyone and everything we were used to being close to - that also reduced our activities. We needed some rest. Youth ministry ain’t for sissies (and it’s usually done by folks a lot than us). We soon settled into our new, quiet lifestyle and it was good.

Our weekends have been spent mostly at home since January. Our evenings have been spent mostly at home as well. Before we moved, the kids were begging to stay home on the weekends – as of late they have been asking to please go somewhere, anywhere besides our house or yard. When my husband and his oldest brother built a fire pit at the brother’s place this fall and suddenly we found ourselves ‘round a campfire a few nights a week the kids thought they’d won the social lottery.

Then our son asked to play basketball. And we said yes. We went from binge-watching half a season of Hell on Wheels or LOST at a go, to (gasp) leaving the house for hours at a time, several days a week. Then, in a moment of social weakness, I agreed to participate in our homeschool co-op’s Christmas Craft Fair. That youngest kid of mine is so dang cute sometimes she should be considered dangerous. She can talk people into stuff they have no intention of ever doing. The second I said yes to the fair, she whipped out her iPad, opened up Pinterest and started talking a mile a minute about decorated clothespins, snowman tea lights, Christmas trees made from sticks and ribbon (like I have any intention of going out and picking up sticks) and other hand-crafted items of extreme cuteness and adorableness that some women find enjoyable. I only see the work involved, laid out in the Excel-like spreadsheet of my overly analytical mind.

We are a week away from the craft fair. We’ve narrowed it down to two crafts. I’m voting for the one that uses the half bag of cotton balls in the bathroom cabinet and that partially dried-up watercolor set in the craft bin.

And as I write this it’s now 11pm. Not only am I just now writing my column, but I also just remembered I volunteered to create new classroom signs for the homeschool co-op. Chapel begins in 10 ½ hours.

Oh well. In all honesty, it has been a few weeks since I hot-glued my fingers to some cardboard. 

A Medical Adventure

Originally posted in the Miami News-Record on November 9, 2014

The older I get, the more often I find myself visiting medical facilities. Last week I found myself at the Indian hospital in Claremore for a CT scan.

As I pulled into the Sonic in Claremore (hey, I was early for my appointment and needed a sweet tea to calm my nerves) I got a call from my oldest telling me she was bleeding from her right ear. Since she hadn’t been to Sierra Leone recently I figured her Ebola risk was nil, so my next question was, “Did you stick anything in there?” She sighed and I’m fairly certain rolled her eyes (moms can typically sense an eye roll even over the phone) and said that no, she hadn’t put anything in her ear because she wasn’t a toddler. It sounded like a ruptured eardrum to me, so I did what I do in any crisis: I called my mom. After asking if she had Ebola and if she had stuck anything in her ear, Mom, too, said that it sounded like a ruptured eardrum. I then called Abby back and told her that she was going to have to take herself to the doctor. She was mildly freaked out by that what with being all new-to-adulthood and all, but I reassured her and hung up, ordered my sweet tea and as I reached for my wallet realized that I had her insurance card with me. I called the clinic and they told me they would see her and could look her up by her social security number. I called her back, reassured her once again that she could indeed take herself to the doctor, and then headed to the hospital. By then I was resigned to the fact that the sweet tea was going to do nothing to help my nerves.

Once I got to the hospital I checked in at registration, checked in again at x-ray, then sat in a faded pink hard plastic chair to wait my turn. I watched The Price is Right, listened to a woman have a rather loud and obnoxious conversation on her phone, gritted my teeth as a different woman sent text after text, which normally would be a non issue except she had the keyboard sounds turned up to about 40 million decibels and all of us in the waiting room were treated to “BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEP….BEEP….BEEPBEEP…BEEP…BEEPBEEP…BEEPBEEPBEEP” for a good 20 minutes, and got my toes stepped on twice. When the x-ray tech called my name I think I got up a bit too eagerly and nearly bowled him over as I ran into the CT room.

I was good and nervous by then so I was only moderately mortified that I had to don a gown for the procedure – not because I’m all that modest but because of all days to wear my comfiest underwear with two holes in them, it would be a day I’d have to wear a backless gown. It took them three sticks, a call to the lab for backup, and a full hour of inspecting my veins before they got my IV going. The dye made me nauseous and woozy and as I tried to maintain control of the world spinning around me all I could do was envision was me lying on the floor, my backless gown a’flapping while I showed off my holey underwear and legs only shaved up to the knee (because I totally phone it in in the shaving department from October through March) thus giving all of the staff of the lab department something to talk about at the dinner table that night.

Fortunately I stayed conscious and came away with nothing more than a metallic taste in my mouth and two wicked bruises. Oh, and my husband took me underwear shopping this weekend because apparently the thought of me wearing holey underwear to my next doctor visit concerns him, too. 

Cat-tastrophe

Published in the Miami News-Record on October 12, 2014

About a month ago one of the kids noticed that our momma cat, Chuck Norris, was putting on some weight.  I inwardly groaned because I knew it meant that Chuck was in a family way. Her last litter of kittens was about four months old at the time and while we like to keep a cat or two around, we don’t want to get crazy with feline overpopulation.

Typically when we notice a cat is pregnant around here there is usually time to prepare for the blessed event. I told the kids we had about a month before the kittens came, but Chuck Norris, well, she likes to keep us on our toes. A mere week after our discovery, we had another discovery: four teeny tiny kittens in a barrel out by the shop. Our oldest daughter’s pup, Josie, took to barking at the kittens, which wasn’t much of an issue considering their ears were still shut, but apparently Chuck didn’t much care for it. A little over a week ago she moved her babies to an unused doghouse right by our front porch. Josie didn’t bother them there and all seemed right with the world. They figured out how to crawl and wiggle out into the sunshine and loved being paid attention to. They just needed giant sunglasses and they’d have been little kitty Kardashians.

And then the rains came.

While I was at homeschool co-op and our oldest was at home, she discovered one had nearly drowned after she wiggled out of her house. After some drying and lovin’-on, she perked up, Abby secured them all back into the doghouse while the rains kept coming. Then Chuck decided that her accommodations were worthy of a scathing Yelp review and left her kittens high and dry. Actually, low and soaked. So in the middle of a downpour, we moved a barrel to the porch, put the kittens in it, and Chuck deemed it suitable.

And then the winds came.

The barrel started filling with water, again soaking the poor critters. When I went out last Monday morning one kitten was gone, two were soaked to the bone, and one was barely breathing. Chuck would have nothing to do with them and kept bolting away when we tried to put her with the wet little varmints, running for cover like she was insisting the rain was going to make her hair frizzy.  We found most of our Monday school day whittled away by bottle feedings and mewling kittens. My husband was less than thrilled that our No Indoor Pet policy had been pushed aside in our humanitarian (felinatarian?) attempts. I was adamant that we were doing the right thing and that we were only showing our kids how to be kind to animals.

But at 3 am when those kittens started hollering that the milk replacer was gross and they  missed their momma and could they see Santa and “Are we there yet?” all rolled into a bunch of  “She’s touching me!” type shrill squeals and meows, I found myself having misplaced my kindness. I found myself with a scratching, wiggling ball of fur in one hand while I blearily tried to fill a miniscule bottle with milk replacer and warm it so as to not scald the poor thing’s gizzard. It was a flashback to when my own kids were newborns, although with less scratching, but pretty much the same amount of yowling.

Since then Chuck has been forcefully placed into a confined area with her kittens and is only let out when the little ones aren’t screeching with all their might. She glares at us when we let her out and I’m pretty certain that look says, “I’d rip your heart out right now if I could.” And again, it is reminiscent of when my husband and I had a newborn. I’m pretty sure I blearily directed that thought at him more than once at 2 am.

Halloweary

Published in the Miami News-Record, November 2, 2014

I love Halloween. So much so that we’ve had our Halloween decorations up since the first week of September. We have these really cool pictures that look like old black and white photos but when you get close they are skeletons, vampires, zombies, etc. Our fireplace beheld a pile of bones until my husband evicted ol’ Boney Maroney when he installed our new gas logs. Now ol’ Boney just hangs out all piled up in a galvanized bucket next to the TV. There are creepy cobwebs hanging everywhere. Actually, that’s not just a Halloween thing, just my lackadaisical housekeeping.

I used to go all out on Halloween costumes. Halloween costumes and Valentine’s Day boxes brought forth a part of me that stayed hidden the rest of the year, but come October and February I was a woman obsessed. I stayed up until 3am on more than one occasion crafting and building costumes and boxes. All I can figure, I was a lot younger and really cared way too much about what other people thought. Now I’m old and don’t give much of a hoot. And since we homeschool and they’re older now, costumes (and Valentine boxes) haven’t been a big deal around here for awhile. In fact, we haven’t trick-or-treated since I made this deal with the kids: You don’t make me create a costume for you and drag you out in the wind/cold/heat/crowds, and I buy you a metric ton of candy and let you stay up as late as you want.  It’s my favorite Halloween tradition.

This year a friend of ours decided to host a costume party. And my children got really excited. I made the standard candy/stay-up-late offer and even said I’d watch scary movies with them, but no, the little extroverts wanted to go to the party. Then the himming and hawing began over costumes. And to top it all off, the oldest daughter wanted to dress up for work and she wanted to be “super scary”. Because that’s what everyone who comes in to the restaurant want to see while they eat – her creepy scary zombie doll clown vampire face.

The two youngest kids decided on cosplay-type costumes from the Batman comics – The Scarecrow and Harley Quinn. Fortunately Kady’s costume was her idea alone and she did the entire thing herself (the Overachieving Force is strong with that one) and the oldest decided on a mime (decidedly un-super scary, but sufficiently creepy for those of us with clown phobias already). The girls’ ability to create theirs on their own left me to work on their brother’s costume. By 11pm the night before Halloween I had enough burlap fibers on me to make me look like a crazy cat lady and my dining room had little bits of twine pretty much everywhere. In an attempt at singeing the cut edges of the eye holes, I managed to catch the mask on fire and here’s some wisdom for you: flaming burlap fibers will embed under the tender flesh of the pad of one’s finger. Then after I stitched the mouth with some sloppy, creepy stitches I realized the mouth was smiling happily, not grimacing menacingly. I, however, was grimacing as I pulled out the stitches to start over. And itching from an apparent burlap allergy.

When it was all said and done, though, all three costumes looked great. Harley Quinn and The Scarecrow represented Gotham City well and the mime didn’t even scare a single customer (although she did give her mother the creeps). And while I thought my costume-making days were over, I was granted one more flurry of sewing, gluing and memory-making. It was worth sporting melted burlap around in my finger for a day or two to see them trot off excitedly and for my six-foot-tall son to wrap his arms around me and say, “Thanks, Mom. It looks great. You’re the best. Really.”

Be still my Halloweary heart. I’d melt burlap into my finger every day of the week for that.  

Clowning Around

Originally published in the Miami News-Record, October 12, 2014 (with a few bonus pictures!) 

Krusty the Clown from "The Simpsons"

I was 13 and had just been given the key to Pandora’s Box when my dad took me with him to the college library while he was doing some research for a paper. I sat cross-legged in the floor on the second story of the NEO library and read excerpts and passages of a seemingly endless supply of horror novels, creeping myself out, page by page. I had never had access to such a collection of “grownup” books and I was ecstatic. The book I settled on that night – my very first scary read – was “The Bachman Books”. It was a collection of Stephen King’s first stories when he was writing under the pen name Richard Bachman. And just like that, with those four short novels, I was hooked. Between my scary book obsession and my best friend and I watching low-budget horror films (rented from Showtime Video – anyone remember that place?) virtually every weekend of our adolescence, I developed a bit of a fascination with the horror genre. I love to be scared.

Pennywise. Eek!

I have read virtually every Stephen King book ever published – most of them more than once. I got Mr. King’s book “It” in all of its 1,138-page hardcover glory when I was 14 and began reading it as the family took off for a Branson vacation. I can’t tell you much about our trip to the Country Music Capital of the World that go ’round, but I can probably tell you anything you would want to know about Derry, Maine, where the story took place. I read it so feverishly and incessantly that I ended up carsick on those Ozark Mountain backroad hills. I was also reading it late one night (when I was supposed to be sleeping) by the light of a flashlight while covered up in a blanket. My mom came in to put up some laundry not having a clue that her opening my bedroom door would shave about 47 years off my life. As she stepped into my room, all she saw was a flashlight, a giant book, a blanket, and her daughter shoot straight up into the air followed by a round of nightmarish screams. When I realized she wasn’t Pennywise the clown coming to drag me into the sewers to kill me and she recovered from the heart attack I had just given her, we both busted out laughing.

I have a short list of phobias: water, spiders, heights, sewer grates, and clowns. The last two items on that list are directly because of the aforementioned book. It is the most haunting of Mr. King’s novels in my opinion and has stuck with me well into adulthood. Now, this might seem a bit oxymoronic – the girl who loves to be scared is phobic and terrified of something, but call it what you will. All I know is: clowns really freak me out. Really. Spiders freak me out, too, but after having been bitten by a black widow, I think anyone would be slightly scared of them. But clowns…..man. *shiver* Ronald McDonald is one scary dude in my opinion.

*shiver*

There are different schools of thought regarding phobias. Some say immersion therapy is the most effective way to overcome a phobia or fear. Immersion therapy simply baby-steps a person into different levels of contact/experience with a particular phobia until they have overcome their fear. I’m not 100% convinced. Although I guess I shouldn’t scoff at something that is regarded amongst the psychiatric community as successful.

I guess if there’s a doctor out there willing to set up a scenario regarding a clown who jumps off of a skyscraper into a body of deep water where he water skis on a sewer grate to a pit of spiders, I’d be open to watching that and see where things go from there.

 Twisty the Clown
from "American Horror Story: Freakshow"
Dude is seriously messed up. 

On second thought….nah. I’m okay avoiding clowns for the rest of my life. I’m not a big fan of McDonald’s food anyway.   

Mystery Meat

Originally published in the Miami News-Record, October 5, 2014

We are a one income family and have been for most of our married life. Please don’t misunderstand – we aren’t living on one income because that’s all we need to live on; no, we live on one income because it’s our choice. We do without a lot of things in order to make it work. It’s not for everyone. Living frugally to the extreme isn’t easy and it’s not for everyone. Sometimes you just have to get creative and do the best you can. Sales are my best friend come menu-planning day and I take my shopping very seriously.

A few weeks ago the little grocery store near where we live had a great sale on fryer leg quarters. It was limit two and I wanted to get as many as I could before they went off sale. (Please don’t judge – it didn’t say “Limit two per household forever” or anything.) I picked up two and sent money with my oldest daughter to pick up two more when she got off work that night. I never thought that she didn’t know what a fryer leg quarter looked like, but later realized that at nearly 18 I guarantee you I didn’t know what they looked like either. I told her the price per pound and that they were in 10-pound bags, so they should be $6.80 a bag. She wrote all of that down along with “fryer leg quarters – CHICKEN” on a scrap of paper, tucked it into her purse with my $20 and headed to work.

That night around 9:30, she walked in the door with a rather large plastic bag of flat, frozen hunks of meat and a very upset look on her face. She held it out at arm’s length and asked, “Is this what you wanted?” I squinted at the contents and shook my head. Her shoulders slumped as she said, “I didn’t think so. But oh, let me tell you the story.” I gingerly took the bag of frozen meat pucks and inspected it, trying to not bust out in hysterical laughter only because I knew she was upset at not fulfilling her duties that night. She then told me how the nose-picking, slack-jawed hillbilly kid at the register stared at her blankly and said, “Uhm….yeah…..uh….I got no idear what y’all are talkin’ ‘bout. I don’t know ‘bout no fr’ar leg quotters,” to which my outspoken daughter then said, “Well then, I think maybe you should find me somebody who does.” The kid was still knuckle-deep in a nostril as he called for “someone from the back” who, coincidentally, had no idea what she was talking about either. He did, however, manage to dig up the bag of mystery meat and said, “I don’t know if this is what you want, but it’s only five dollars so….” and trailed off as if she should be pleased at the $1.80 price difference. She was not, but she was also tired and irritated.

One adventurous night a few weeks ago I decided to make the Mystery Meat for dinner. Abby took a picture of them and put it on Facebook. Several people commented, saying they wanted to throw up just looking at them. A few said we were crazy for eating them. A few tried to identify them. Turns out, they were backs. Chicken backs. *shudder* The family said they tasted good, but about an hour and a half after dinner we were all in the kitchen looking for a snack. Turns out, there just isn’t a whole lot of meat on a chicken’s back.

*Certain author liberties were taken with this story. There are no actual hillbillies working at the local grocery store. Nor were any noses picked during the incident in question. So says Abby. She might also be protecting her secret hillbilly boyfriend who bought up all my cheap fryer leg quarters. 

I Got Problems

I always have been and always will be a words kinda gal. I love the sound of words, the beauty of them on paper and how they sound when spoken. I love the power behind them, the things they can accomplish, the feelings they can evoke. Numbers just can’t do that. Numbers are solid, logical, tangible… and insanely frustrating. Words can’t always be captured by the voice and have many different meanings to many different people. The number five is always going to equal the number five. But say any word – any word you can think of – to five different people and it will likely be interpreted five different ways. 

Numbers are just not the primary language spoken by my brain. It took from 3^rd grade to 6^th grade before I could finally do multiplication without breaking out into a cold sweat. I took Algebra I my Freshman year and passed it by the skin of my teeth. I started my Sophomore year in Algebra II and after one week of that nonsense I marched into Mr. Lippe’s office with arms crossed, determined look on my face, demanding that he remove me at once from that vile class and put me into something else, anything else. He moved me over to Business Math, a class I passed with an A. I went on to end my high school math career with Accounting I and II, passing both with A’s. It’s not that I can’t do math, it’s that I just prefer not to. The add/subtract/multiply/divide kind of math is do-able. Please do not put letters in there. That’s where it gets all jumbly – like a really sick and twisted can of algebra soup.

Last year our son made it through Algebra I with a resounding A at the end of the year. The program we use is computer-based, thorough, and very easy to understand, but starting out this year in Algebra II has been challenging to say the least. He suffers from the same phenomenon I do: Mathematical Amnesia. If I learn a math concept I can do it all day long. But if I sleep? You can forget about me remembering a dadgum thing the next day.

I’ve been learning Algebra II right along with him this year, a task that has gotten easier in my old age – a fact I find very strange considering I have maternal oatmeal brain and am on medication for nerve pain that messes with my memory. This past week they introduced “distance” word problems. One might think I, a word person, could do word problems. One would be wrong. Oh. So. Wrong.  I loathe word problems. They never, ever make sense to me.  “If Bob is on a subway car traveling at 15mph and Douglas is on a rocket ship to Mars traveling at 27mph, how long will it take the two of them to create a macramé sculpture of the Mona Lisa using only their toes?” That’s how I interpret every single word problem I ever encounter.

It took my son and me nearly 30 minutes to figure out a particularly difficult problem one day and when we eventually got it right, you should’ve seen the high-fiving and hollering that was executed right there at the dining room table. Then we got into my secret stash of chocolate. And soon after that he decided that college didn’t seem like a real fun option for him after all and “homeless street person” sounded safely math-free. I patted his leg, handed him another Reese’s Cup and said, “Or you could always just homeschool your own kids, son. And learn it at 41 like I am.”

I’m really not looking forward to telling my husband that our soon-to-be-homeless son won’t be blessing us with grandchildren. 

Canned

Published in the Miami News-Record, September 14, 2014

This past week I had my first experience with canning. Well, I say first experience, but I guess I should clarify. I witnessed my mom and Uncle David canning before now, but I was a kid and I was sitting on a barstool in the kitchen at my Papa and Memaw’s farm eating a piece of Roman Meal bread with real butter on it, swinging my legs, chatting up a storm about nothing in particular, not being at all quiet or even remotely un-annoying. So, yeah, this experience really was altogether new.

One of my husband’s brothers has had this amazing apple tree for years now, but this is the first I have ever heard of it. I’m sure proximity has something to do with it, seeing as how we used to live 20 miles away and now we have clear line of sight between our two houses. Paul walked in the house the other night with four Walmart sacks just full of apples and I was like a kid on Christmas morning, clapping my hands and squealing with a strange glee that surprised even me. I don’t even really like apples all that much. I will eat apple pie and apple crisp, but it’s very rare you’ll see me eating a raw apple and you’ll never, ever see me eating applesauce. Why I got so excited at the sight of those apples is beyond me. Maybe it was because I was still feeling adventurous after this summer’s first garden, maybe it was because I felt nostalgic for those childhood days at the farm, or maybe it’s because I’m a glutton for punishment and like to pile my plate as high as I can with as many activities as I possibly can. I’m going with the last one.

And really now, who couldn’t use about 40 pounds of apples just sitting around their kitchen on any given day?

Our oldest daughter had a minor surgery last week and I had cleared our schedule for the days after. I figured it was as good a time as any to try my hand at canning. I was going to can apple butter. I’d never had apple butter, but it seemed like an obvious choice with that many apples in my possession. Mom also gave me a recipe for apple pie filling and I was determined to can that as well. The first thing I had to do was go to Walmart for a water bath, a jar grabber, some seals (I had jars and rings), and some lemon juice. Then I forgot the lemon juice and had to have my sister-in-law pick some up on her way home from work. (Thank God for a Walmart associate in the family.)

The first day got away from me. Then, there was the next day. On Thursday I managed to start. Bright and early that morning, with paring knife in hand, I was determined to show those apples who was boss. Then I saw the recipe for apple butter called for TWELVE POUNDS of apples. I measured out one pound and realized that I didn’t own a stock pot big enough to hold 12 whole pounds of apples. I used my math skills to cut the recipe down by 1/3 and got started.

I referred to my recipe and directions a lot. I consulted the internet a lot. I texted and called my mom a lot. I finally got the water bath to agree to a “vigorous boil”, started ladling my hot apple butter into my hot jars, to realize that four pounds of apples yields… about four measly pint jars of apple butter.

I won’t even tell you how my first experience at blackberry butter went. Let’s just say that after five hours of reducing, I now have two pints of blackberry syrup that is so strong it’ll put hair on your chest, strip wallpaper, and remove corrosion from car batteries.

I might just stick to gardening. 

When I'm Gone

From the Miami News-Record, Sunday, September 7, 2014

This past week I celebrated the life of Don Hall with his family and friends. I met Don when we attended church east of town and marveled at how many children he could fit in the cab of a pickup truck. (I became much more at ease when I heard he had bought a van – then I learned it only bought him that much more room for more kids.) I stood in that church parking lot and asked my Pops (and pastor), “Why does he bring all those kids to church?” Pops smiled and said, “Because he wants to.” And oh, how he wanted to. He felt a calling, a desire, a mission to introduce as many kids as he possibly could to Jesus and if that meant testing the limits of a vehicle to fit just one more in, he did it. About four years later my husband and I were wet-behind-the-ears youth leaders at a church south of town and had the privilege of seeing again just how many lives “Papa Don” touched when he rolled into the parking lot one night with an even bigger vehicle – a bus – in which to haul kids to church. When he stepped onto those streets of gold last week and had instant knowledge of how many lives he had touched, how many people he had led to salvation, I would imagine he just grinned his shy grin and ducked his head as he heard his Savior say, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

I am not a fan of funerals. (I might also ask, “Who is?”) I will avoid a funeral just about any way I can simply because I think too many times we get caught up in mourning and forget to remember. And since I’m a cry-er in the presence of other crying folks, I just don’t subject myself to that if I don’t have to. So often we forget to focus on the good that person did and the way they lived their life and we instead shed our tears in earthly sadness. I guess you could say we get a bit selfish when it comes to someone dying. We will miss them and we can’t stand the thought of life here without them, then we cry. And if you’re me, you cry a lot. So just know this: if I show up to your funeral, I really thought you were pretty darn special.

As I sat in that pew last week waiting for Don’s funeral to begin, I thought ahead to my own passing. (An event I am not planning on having happen for a very long time.) I leaned over to my oldest daughter and said, “Listen to me, young lady. When I die, there had better not be a memorial service held in a church. I want a party.” She looked at me with the strangest look and said, “A party? Like, what on earth would we do at a ….. a party in honor of your…..DEATH??”

So given that she pinned me down right there, I pondered a bit before I said, “Well, you had better eat BBQ. And chocolate cake. Lots of chocolate cake. You guys take turns telling stories about my clumsiness, read some of the stuff I’ve written over the years. Talk about my awful hair. Laugh. Poke a little fun at me – heck, I’ll be gone, so go for it.” I went on to tell her that I’ll be writing my own obituary, so that’ll taken care of already. She seemed relieved at that. She was amused at my party plans and nodded a lot so I hope she intends to honor my wishes.

And while y’all are at my memorial party crying only because you’re laughing so hard you might wet your pants, I will have already hit the gates of Heaven, hopefully hearing the words, “Well done, my good and faithful servant,” and not, “Girl, you’ve got some explainin’ to do.”