Enjoy the good

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It takes all of us to make a balanced world. But silly me I fight battles where there aren't any, usually little skirmishes inside my head and heart. I can tell someone not to compare themselves with anyone else, but I'm not as good at believing it for myself.

Prepping for Farm Wedding day right here where we live, I've watched my sister scrape, sand and paint the porch and deck four days straight. I've watched my niece weed the veggie and flower beds and paint the studio roof in the hot sun for hours on end. I've watched Don build a fence, straighten the barns and a dozen other tasks. I've watched Peter dig dirt, haul pea gravel, design a stoop for l'atelier and paint roofs. Me? I've watched myself float from laundry line to flower beds to the stove and the sink, all things I enjoy. I compare tasks, and mine come up short.

But by the end of the second day when my dear, weary hard working family was eating a meal outside that I had loved fixing, and we sat there in that perfect evening light with a breeze touching the outside of us while warm food and wine touched the inside - I got it - and actually felt a little proud.

My sister loves to paint, making everything fresh. My niece loves to weed and see what she accomplished. My husband loves to piddle in his barns and garden. I love to plant flowers, hang laundry, cook, organize and clean. Carrying a tray of farm glasses outside full of cold well water to the troops makes me happy, and so does chopping garlic and an hour later smelling its musk on my fingers. Just as there is a time to work and a time to rest, different people are good at different things and have different roles. I had to remind myself of my Christmas post.

And as my sister later said, she'd rather work 8 hours scraping, sanding and painting than spending one hour in the kitchen cooking.

No, I didn't bake this chocolate torte, but it sure was good. I did make the savory spaghetti from scratch. It was the perfect balance.



Ecclesiastes 3

¹To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

²A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

³A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

⁵A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

⁶A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

⁷A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

⁸A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. . . .

. . .

¹³And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. . . .

. . .

²⁰All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Listen to Pete Seeger, and members of The Byrds - Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby talk about Pete Seeger's song "Turn, Turn, Turn" that he wrote in 1959 pretty much word for word Ecclesiastes 3. Of course Seeger added that last line to verse 8, as well as the refrain "turn, turn, turn":

A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it's not too late!

Today is my mom's birthday

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. . . and Father's Day was Sunday, so let me remember them with a photo of the three of us. I think it was the year I turned three, making it 1959. I am the youngest of their eight children. Being forty when I was born they were old enough to be my grandparents. In 8th grade that embarrassed me when my classmates' parents seemed half their age at our school open house. Then again, when I was in 8th grade nearly everything embarrassed me.

One thing that strikes me about the photo is our three distinct facial expressions.

My father's smile seems stagy - the pastor, the preacher, the performer who had to please everyone and was ever diplomatic. He is the only one looking away from the camera. Maybe a parishioner caught his eye, one of the poor he cared for so well. Or maybe one of my brothers was acting up. He had just preached his weekly sermon and was no doubt exhausted. (I recall him practicing his sermons Saturday nights pacing the long upstairs hall.) He slept Sunday afternoons, preached again Sunday night and rested on Mondays. You can't tell of course, but his hair was red, and his voice Virginian - soft, lilting Southern with grace. I love the way he said, Mrs. Culpepper: "Mrs. Culpeppah."

Believe it or not, I remember feeling grumpy on this Sunday, after church. No doubt I needed a nap after playing hard in the nursery. I was normally a happy child, but I distinctly remember willfully not smiling for the camera even though I was being urged to. And I've remembered it because it got embedded in my Christian-guilt-ridden brain's memory. Nowadays I joke that I felt grumpy because I had to go to church at all - let alone three times a week. I wonder if my photographer brother Bennett shot this with a Kodak Instamatic when he was about 11. Or it might have been shot by a church member. I do know that ivy was growing on the side of our brick church in Grand Ledge, and this seems like a special occasion - maybe Easter? But where are my siblings?

My mother's smile is a moonbeam -- look how beautiful she is in her goofy '50s perm and nerdy glasses. I saw a family movie of her when she was 12 - called "Bobbie" then, and she flashed this same triumphant smile under a straight shiny bob - as she bounced like a puppy around her staid parents. She leaped into being Best Athlete in all her schools, including college - playing field hockey, tennis, swimming and basketball. In this image of her I see a woman who is spent after playing piano for the church service, leading the choir, being the perfect pastor's wife and mother of eight, on her way home to put dinner for ten on the table. I remember having either roast beef or roast leg of lamb on Sundays, and peppermint candy ice cream with real chunks of hard candy for dessert with every place set perfectly (by us kids) with the fork, knife, spoon and napkin in their proper positions. But that was only until I spilt my milk - invariably - and everyone grabbed their tableware and placemats out of the white river, letting it drip between the table leaves. Then I ran from the table bawling with embarrassment and humiliation. Is it any wonder I am only now becoming a confident person? (Thank you, friends and family.)

My father died in 1995 at age 78, Mom died in 1997 when she was almost 80. Bennett the photographer died the year in between at age 47. Today Mom would be 93, and Sunday Bennett would be 61. I feel them acutely, as if birthday balloons are bobbing inside, urging me to smile.

first of May and counting

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For a few years now we've had a family reunion we call Farm Day at the beginning of August. Children ride the red 1941 Farm-All B tractor down the hill to the meadow with Uncle Don; adults sit in a circle of camp chairs in the maple tree shade next to the house and gab - or play badminton, ping pong or croquet; guys pull out guitars in a grass circle; and my brother Jim helps grill brats and burgers. However this year, instead of Farm Day, we'll welcome 150 of our friends and family for our daughter Lesley's Farm Day Wedding: three months from tomorrow.

THREE MONTHS FROM TOMORROW!

Don is fully in gear and has recruited farm hands to help clean up the beds. He only pays them chicken feed, but they are enthusiastic and hard working, though sometimes a tad lippy.

Too bad they can't weed out this grass in the herb bed. Oh well, Don will be digging it up anyway to plant a Three Sisters garden. The herbs, tulips, daffodils, lilies and irises - but hopefully not the persistent grass - will get transplanted to some other as yet un-dug bed. (Peter's the digger.)



Notice all the Don Don Don and they they they and busy busy busy? They - those plucky chickens - clucked at me as I lay around on the ground with my camera, "Woman, you are so lazy, look at these grapevines! Didn't you weed them last year? Look at you lying there making strange noises with that black box. [I make strange noises?] These grapes should have been pruned in March, what a mess! You're a pitiful farmer's wife." Khan brrraughed at them to shut up, or else. He knows who writes the checks.



I was slightly offended and felt guilty, but Bishop showed me how to ignore them as they go about their business. Thanks, Bish, you're a real pal.



The thing is, if I keep taking my cues from Bishop, and all I do is an approval here and there of Lesley's wedding shoes and the restaurant taste test for the rehearsal dinner (yum!), then poor Don will have to rely on these ladies, who I think can't landscape the yard or hold a paintbrush.

Awright, awright, you squawky hens, I'm up, I'm up.

I is for Imp

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imp

-noun

1.	a little devil or demon; an evil spirit.

2.	a mischievous child.

There is a lot of folklore about imps. They take other forms too, such as gremlins, goblins and gnomes (what's with the "G"s?), and Pan and Puck, oh and Dobby the house elf.

I was told recently by my sister that my life path number (15) indicates the need to let loose and be more of an imp. If your older sister (eleven years older) tells you something like that, doesn't that impart a mandate? This was especially intriguing as it came just after I'd added that little girl to my sidebar. I thought, hmm, not only am I shrinking back to childhood, maybe this is a call back to a childhood I never lived, that of the mischievous child.

So, picture the image at the top, and those aren't sheep, but chickens.

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Don, suddenly looking up from his Hobby Farms magazine, over his reading glasses: "What the . . .?! How'd the chickens get out!!?"

Ruth: "Wha?"

Don, now at the window, confused: "Look! I didn't let them out!"

Ruth, turning to look through the window at the hens frolicking with Khan, then back to Henry James to re-read the same sentence for the fifteenth time: "Wow, that's weird."

Don: "Did you let them out?" he asks incredulously. Suddenly he reviews the mental calendar in his head wondering if it's April Fool's Day yet.

Ruth: "Moo heee?" (pulling a phrase her impish mother used to say for "Who me?")

Don, scratching his head: "Maybe I didn't latch the coop tight last night." And he throws on his jacket, steps into his farm clogs and lets the door bang behind him.

Ruth peeks out the window at him, trying to enjoy watching him make a beeline for the coop door. But she's afraid. What if one of the hens got gobbled by a hawk in the last 15 minutes since she snuck out and opened the latch? That would be a bad life path number 15.

Don returns. "I must be losing my mind. And I'll never get them back in until dusk. Oh well, hope they enjoy the day out."

Ruth: "So they're all accounted for?"

Don: "No, they're scavenging now, so I won't be able to count until they're back in the roost this evening."

Oh dear, Ruth will have to suffer as an imp all day Sunday. And oh no! Last night was daylight savings, prolonging the misery an extra hour!

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from light to dark in a few hours

One year we lived near the railroad tracks in a depressed little town north of here. Dad took a small church as pastor - in an act of kindness, I think. The church basement smelled of mildew, and only a handful of the townspeople attended. My dad always cared about poor communities and so-called lost causes. But after less than a year we moved back to our old home town. Dad went into a new line of work, no longer a pastor.

A bright spot in the year of the dingy, depressed town was a family of five beautiful girls. It was as if Sweden had airlifted a gift and set them down gently for all of us to enjoy beside the lake where they lived. Not that they were Swedish, I don't think they were, but they were perpetually blonde and tan, with the whitest teeth, biggest eyes and sweetest dimples. They charmed us all with their worldly innocence. It didn't hurt that they also had a colored TV. (This was 1966, so: Flipper the dolphin, and funny-wacky-leggy Phyllis Diller in flashy dresses and spiked hair and ankle boots.)

My 14-year-old brother was in love with one of the gifts - Candy, who was his age. Yes, that was really her name.

One summer evening after dinner he asked me to walk to their house, and I was happy to, since Candy's sister Barb was 10 like me. Off we trotted down the tracks, which led us straight to a radiant evening in Sweden-land. Even the girls' mother was full of cheerful goodwill and prettiness.

Time flew as we played, laughed and ate chocolate chip cookies, and before we knew it, dusk was falling. Reluctantly, we said good-bye to Candy, Barb, and the gang, and skipped the mile and a half home over the tracks as the sky darkened.

Arriving home in the dark, we recognized immediately that our house was not so full of cheer and prettiness as the cottage of the blonde beauties. Our poor dad and mom had no idea where we had been for the past 4 hours! My brother, four years older than I, had not mentioned our plans to them. As the younger guilty party, I was not deemed as culpable, so I did not suffer the sound whipping he did.

I wonder if my brother thinks of the family by the lake with guilty pleasure as I do.

atumnal equinox tomorrow

On this last day of summer, I'm sharing a poem I wrote in 1994 at the same time of year. It's strange to remember how it was when the kids were home, at the start of a new school year.

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Also, today is the International Day of Peace. See my sidebar and click for more information.

Tomatoes

The tomatoes are sagging to the ground,
red and accusing.
I already had to refrigerate
some overripe ones that stared
at me red-eyed
for a week from the formica.
It is a sin to refrigerate tomatoes
and worse
to allow them to putrefy
on the vine.

For a few brilliant weeks of August
I did my duty to Italian and Mexican sauces,
to Turkish village salad with cucumber
and tomato cubes, onions, parsley, olive oil and lemon juice,
to warm tortillas with scallions,
tomatoes, mushrooms and cheese.
They didn’t ripen quickly enough.
And hadn’t I waited all winter,
spring and summer for this?

But now it is mid-September.
The slanting sun is curling the leaves
of the six tomato plants up
to the sky
like Sunday School children
raising hands for recognition,
not subtly, but nonetheless
ignored in a corner
of the backyard fence.

Today, Saturday, after
a 40-hour week in the office,
the sun insists with all its
clear forgiveness
that I should sit outside,
not out front with the neighbors,
but out back inside the cedar fence
under the mesh umbrella with my back
to the tomatoes.

September is a strangely mixed
month of re-boxing routines
of work, school buses, piano lessons and doctor appointments
into calendar squares
while the air outside is wearing
amber, as if, like honey
it would slow down
the process
if it could.
Flowers are full, better really
than they were all summer when we kept them in order.
And the heavy disarray of ripe tomatoes begs
for indolent days
when stuffing manicotti shells
might fill a morning.

I wonder why someone
would even grow tomatoes
without the permission of Italian, Greek,
Mexican or Turkish time.
Tomatoes aren’t meant
to be rushed
in ripening,
in cooking,
in eating. They are
intended for moussaka and lasagna
and paste that is stored
in a gallon jar under the sink
without a chance of molding:
fresh paste is spooned off every day for a recipe
and a new layer exposed to the air.
In a month the jar is empty.

I deposited six little plants
in June, hoping for a taste, a return
to the old country.
Any old country.
I forgot that behind every taste
hides a little woman or man with shiny red round
fingers.
The old fruit is bursting the skin
and I am not watching.

- Ruth M. 1994