Heroes of Faith

As I write, my old friend Donna is undergoing serious heart surgery in a far-away hospital.

She asked me and her other friends to pray, and that’s what I’ve been doing in the short weeks since she found out the magnitude of her problem. I pray for a successful surgery, of course, and for complete healing. But mostly, I’ve been affirming Isaiah 26:3, “Thou will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusts in thee.”

Donna is one of those ordinary heroes of the faith who has faced an abundance of challenges throughout life and has come through them victorious, because her mind is stayed on God.

Not that she didn’t react as any woman would as she struggled through two difficult marriages while raising her children to be fine adults. When she finally found her soulmate, and he died of cancer after a very short marriage, she grieved as any other woman would. She suffered excruciating migraines for many years. She was seriously injured in a freak accident that caused damage to her lungs. She underwent a painful hip replacement.

But through it all, her faith in a good God has never wavered, and it hasn’t wavered now. I heard the evidence of her peace in our telephone conversations. It gives her confidence that whatever happens, she is safe in God’s hands.

Donna lives far away because she left our community to support her daughter and family. When her son-in-law was a young doctor, he contracted multiple sclerosis. It wasn’t long before he could no longer practice. That didn’t stop him and Debbie from adopting three brothers to join the three children they already had. Their mother had died in an accident and one was a newborn. All six have grown to be the kind of young people that would make any parent proud.

Debbie herself, a former athlete, has had two hip surgeries to improve a congenital problem. Her husband has been completely helpless for several years, yet she cares for him alone, as well as encouraging and mothering the children. Now she will need to care for her own mother.

I admire people who don’t get stuck in asking, “Why me, God?” They know God is not the author of sickness or pain. They live triumphantly, whatever comes, confident in a bright future for those who trust Him.

Donna, and Debbie, too, will come through this hard stretch with spirits strong. They are heroes in my book.

Tough Love

What do these eggs and this boy have in common?*




Daughter Carmen is a farmer at heart. Carmen and her husband John’s numerous garden plots burst with flowers, grapes, berries, or veggies. Fruit trees dot one slope of their thirteen acres. A well-tended woodland beyond the cultivated areas supplies wild berries. They cull trees for firewood. They have carved out areas for events such as weddings, barbecues, and receptions. For years, Carmen has taken in boys in need of tough love: grandsons, nephews, and children of friends. The farm is also home to chickens, cats, dogs, pigs, and sometimes rabbits and goats.

John does much of the groundskeeping and most of the cooking, but Carmen cuts down trees, cares for the animals, and amazes us with her creative and frugal approach to life .

We were there for a Father’s Day picnic recently, where John and the current nephew-in-residence roasted a whole pig. Carmen showed me drying racks filled with rose petals being turned into potpourri. Looking down the stairway to the basement, I noticed brightly painted designs on the floor and asked about them, so she invited me to take a closer look. She’d marked off sixteen-inch squares on the cement, like tiles. She and her grandsons had painted each one in its own riot of color and design, then finished with a clear protective coat. The floor is a work in progress. Whenever she feels the need for a creative “fix,” she designs and paints another tile.

While we were there, Carmen lifted the lid of a homemade incubator, set aside the light bulb inside, and sprayed water on a dozen or so large brown eggs. She rolled each one firmly in all directions, wetting it thoroughly.

“What in the world are you doing?” I asked.

“My laying hens are about to stop producing,” she replied. “So I’m going to raise chicks to replace them. If I don’t spray the eggs twice a day, the shells dry out and get too hard.”

“I suppose that’s one reason the hen sits on her eggs,” I said. “You’re replacing the warmth and humidity from the hen’s body.”

“Yes. They need the struggle of getting out on their own, but if the shells are too hard, the chicks can’t break through, and they die. When it’s time for one to hatch, you can hear it tapping in a circle around the shell with its little egg tooth. It rests, cheeps, and struggles some more.” If someone tries to assist the chick, she said, the process is hindered. Part of the shell will stick to the skin, and the chick will bleed to death if it’s peeled off.

She told me about her first attempt at hatching chicks. “I was too gentle when I rolled them. The chicks hatched, but they hadn’t developed right. They were lopsided when they stood, and they couldn’t walk. John had to destroy them.”

“Wow,” I said. “You just wrote my blog for me!”

“How so?”

“Well, those chicks need ‘tough love’ to be strong and healthy, don’t they? Just like human beings, like these kids you take in and help to become men.”

Carmen nodded and agreed.

Kids come with guidelines that must be met if they are going to develop into strong, healthy human beings. If something is missing in childhood, we can grow up crippled emotionally or spiritually. We need the right balance between gentle care–like the hen’s warmth and protection of her developing babies–and tough love, the need and freedom to struggle and grow strong.

I think Carmen makes a good “mother hen.” She supplies the nurturing and tough love that were missing in the lives of the troubled kids she takes in and helps them become strong, resourceful, and responsible people.



*Healthy, productive chickens and healthy, productive kids both need nurturing and tough love.

Our Front Yard Breakfast Bar

Busy at the breakfast bar













A rare visitor--a western tanager


I love mornings at our house. Hank faces me across the table. Behind him, I can watch all kinds of winged and four-footed visitors searching for breakfast just outside our dining room window.

Brother Bill made us a bird feeder that looks like a little cabin. It sits on a pole above the picket fence. A bushy spruce nearby gives emergency shelter to the feeder’s customers. All year around, especially on pleasant mornings, the air is alive with sparrows, house finches, and other birds darting to and from our yard. In June, some hatchlings are flying with their parents but are not yet completely independent. It’s amusing to watch young sparrows trying to perch on the picket points, fluttering and begging birdseed from a parent.

Occasionally, a flash of brilliant yellow announces a goldfinch, the Washington State bird, checking out easy pickings at the feeder. Our neighbors down the hill hung thistle-seed bags in a tree. One spring morning before the tree had leafed out, Hank remarked on the evenly spaced yellow “leaves” along the tree’s crown. I grabbed binoculars. “Those aren’t leaves!” I said. “They’re goldfinches, waiting for the sun to come up.” Sure enough, when the first rays hit, they fluttered down to the thistle seeds.

One morning we watched a beautiful yellow-and-black visitor with a red head...a western tanager. Another day, we identified a heavy-beaked stranger with orange markings on breast and head as a black-headed grosbeak.

Our cat Peanut ignores the birds around the feeder, but any bird perching on the power or telephone lines sends her into fits of scolding and chattering teeth. One day I glanced out to see what had incensed her. A young hawk sat on the telephone line, eyeing the goings-on at the feeder. He launched himself, but the sparrows saw him coming and scooted for the prickly protection of the spruce tree. The hawk landed on the pitched roof of the feeder. One leg slid down the side of the roof. He regained his balance, then the other leg slid out from under him. He looked around, obviously feeling foolish, then flapped away without breakfast.

The robin babies aren’t out of the nest yet, although their bright-vested parents are frequent visitors in the yard. A couple of mornings ago, a sleek robin hopped past the roses, stopped to cock her head and listen, then she darted her beak into the ground. I thought she had a beetle, but no...whatever it was resisted. The robin yanked. Then I could see she had one end of an earthworm. She yanked again and again, leaning back on tiptoes, bracing with her tail. The worm stretched longer and longer. Then, like a rubber band letting go, the worm dislodged, the robin dropped it and pounced. I wondered how she would swallow that long, long morsel of food, but she didn’t even try. She pounded in one place, then another, and finally scooped up four or five fragments of worm in her beak and flew off, fragments dangling, with breakfast for her babies.

The neighbors across the drive have a cherry tree. Every spring it blossoms in a white froth. Petals drop as the leaves unfurl, and before we realize it, green globes of cherries are growing bigger every day. But the neighbors never get to pick them. The starlings keep watch, and long before they ripen, they tug them off the stem. Steller’s jays and crows come too, swallowing them whole (and green). As soon as the cherries begin to redden, robins visit for their share.

The four-legged visitors checking out our breakfast bar are usually rabbits, squirrels, or the neighborhood cats out hunting. But one evening we saw something rustle in the cherry tree. A cat? A small bear? No...we glimpsed a black mask and a ring-striped tail and realized that raccoons like cherries, too. I grabbed my camera, watching through the viewfinder as the marauder stripped the nearby branches efficiently though messily. Leaves and broken twigs showered down as the raccoon reached out to pull more branches close. He balanced on the telephone cables passing through the tree more effortlessly than a tightrope walker, then he moved out toward the end of slender boughs until they dipped dangerously. He worked the tree until it got too dark to see him anymore, leaving only a few cherries for future visitors.

Oh, well. Raccoons have to eat too.

And we are grateful for the chance to watch some of God’s smaller creatures go about their lives, right outside our window.

Late for breakfast!

Mottos and Doughnut Holes

Living in Washington’s Robe Valley, miles from the big city, our every-other-Saturday trips to Everett for groceries and other necessary errands were big deals. With five youngsters in tow, I suppose they were probably ordeals for our parents. When everyone was good, a special treat sometimes waited when we finished all the errands.

Our favorite shop was located just down Colby Avenue from the Safeway store. We’d line up on the sidewalk and through a window watch rounds of dough ride a conveyer belt into a long narrow vat of hot grease. As they cooked, they’d rise to the top of the bubbling liquid and bob along until a mechanism flipped them over. By the time they reached the end of the vat, they were golden brown on both sides and smelled irresistible.

Inside the shop, we faced excruciating choices. Did we want chocolate- frosted doughnuts or some with sprinkles? Did we want the big puffy, sugary kind or crunchy, old-fashioned doughnuts? Sometimes we each chose our own. If we took too long to decide, Dad made the choice and we all got the same. No matter what, they were unforgettably soft and fresh and delicious. Not a crumb went to waste, not even the sugar clinging to our fingers. Sometimes, if money was especially scarce, we’d buy a paper bag full of fried doughnut holes to share. They were just as good, and we could have more than one, so that was fine with us.

One more thing about that shop impressed me. On the wall above our heads was a picture of two men in medieval costume, each holding a doughnut. One man scowled at the skinny doughnut he held. The other smiled as he contemplated a doughnut so plump it had scarcely any hole. They leaned against a signboard that read:

As you ramble on through life, brother
Whatever be your goal,
Keep your eye upon the doughnut
And not upon the hole.

Back then I wasn’t sure if I agreed with the poem. After all, we thought the holes were pretty good. Eventually, I realized the verse meant the hole in the doughnut, not the bits of dough the baker fried up for us.

It was a homey lesson and a good one for me. My parents’ struggles during the great depression had influenced their attitude and then mine. Their unconscious motto seemed to be, “Expect the worst, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised when you don’t get it.” All my life, I’ve tended to examine the negatives of a possible decision before considering the upside, “erring on the side of caution.”

But most of the time, it’s good to ignore the bumps in the road or the rain clouds in the sky and to keep our eyes on the possibilities of life’s doughnuts.

When I went looking for the “Doughnut Hole Poem” on the internet, I was delighted to find this photo posted on Flickr, by EraPhernalia Vintage. The mug is restaurant ware, circa 1965, and it’s exactly the picture I remember from the 1940s.













Here are other gleanings from an internet site at : http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/keep_your_eye_
upon_the_donut_optimists_creed/.

The Mayflower coffee and donut shops (1930s-1970s) used this "Optimist's Creed" as its motto. In 1931 Adolph Levitt opened the first Mayflower doughnut shop. (...) Mayflower shops, all bearing the trademarked Optimist's Creed, dotted the city for decades, but had all but disappeared by the 1970's.

The bit of doggerel was the personal motto of the founder. Known as the Optimist's Creed, the words were printed on each box of doughnuts sold in the Mayflower shops, where they were framed by two cartoon jesters, one frowning at a thin doughnut with a large hole, the other grinning at a plump one with almost no hole at all.


20 January 1972, Christian Science Monitor, pg. 10:
Doughnuts: the hole story
(...)
Way back in 1932, FDR and Herbert Hoover added a homey touch to their campaigns by eating doughnuts at whistle-stop rallies. With the U.S. in the depths of a depression, both candidates, by coincidence, worked the "Optimists' Creed" into their speeches on several occasions...

In the Eye of the Beholder...

This snail has spied the strawberry plants.


























Robert's
Geranium...
"Stinky Bob"

Hank removed his dirty shoes at the door after a long afternoon of yard work. “I wonder why God thought we needed so many weeds,” he said, only half joking.

“Did you ever stop to think how ungreen this “Great Northwet” would be without weeds?” I asked. We laughed at the image of our lovely part of the country being muddy and barren except where people place their favored plants.

Even though we’ve removed most of our lawn and planted wild shrubs and grasses native to Puget Sound, we still cultivate flowers of every kind in pots and in flower beds. Our tiny backyard is mostly devoted to edibles: herbs, a dwarf apple tree, strawberries and raspberries, rhubarb, even Hank’s still-under-construction 4’x 8’ raised vegetable bed. Tomatoes and lettuce flourish in pots on the back deck.

We delight in the beauty and variety of all we’ve planted, and so do the aphids and snails. Between other chores today, I’ve sprayed aphids on the rose bushes...again. The snails nibbled the first of the emerging dahlia leaves before I noticed. However, slug bait may give the dahlias a chance to start over and give us late summer color after all.

The black hollyhock, which prefers the gravel at the edge of the driveway, had been doing well, but today I noticed a few shredded leaves and looked closer. Snails!...handsomely marked and nearly as big as ping pong balls...lots of them, which I sent without remorse to snail heaven.

With equal remorselessness, I dug out “weeds.” They are as attractive in their variety and design as anything horticulturists produce but lots harder to kill. The horsetails are tiny, harmless-looking clubs poking out of the ground one day. The next time I look, they are two-foot tall bottlebrushes of chartreuse green, jointed whorls of fronds looking as prehistoric as any plant still found on earth, with a regenerating root that goes deep as the part above ground. A variety of burgundy clover with heart-shaped leaves and tiny yellow flowers grows up through the hens-and-chicks and in the rockery, almost impossible to root out. But it’s beautiful. So are the rosettes of thistle, and the noxious weed, Robert’s geranium, called “Stinky Bob” by some. (See photo above.) It is starred with little lavender-pink blossoms that quickly turn into crane’s bill seed pods. They ripen and pop unnoticed, scattering seeds far and wide to start dozens of progeny. We have dandelions too, of course, and also baby hazelnut trees, planted by squirrels right next to the house.

Whether weeding or fighting insects, there’s something soul-satisfying about working to make things grow. Is it because we’re participating in a small way in Creation? After all, the first job ever given to humankind was to look after a garden. And the second was to “earn your bread by the sweat of your brow,” cultivating the land.

So, I guess we must battle weeds. And pests that don’t know the difference between chosen and unchosen plants. But I still think they’re beautiful.

Peanut and Popcorn hunting snails

Tale of A Grand Piano

Growing up in the Robe valley back in the 1940s, we five Rawlins kids seldom felt the lack of nearby grandparents.

Instead, we had Verna and Will Blythe, cheerful neighbors who welcomed our frequent visits and invited us to call them “Aunt” and “Uncle.”

Sometimes Aunty Verna let us plink out tunes on the elegant, black piano that stood in a corner of their parlor. I never heard her play it so I assumed their daughter Helen had made music on it when she still lived at home. That piano seemed enormous. I often wondered about its history.

Helen had two cousins, Bob and Norman, who lived across the hay field. All three cousins married and raised families. I left Robe valley, never having visited in their homes. Norman and Lois Blythe moved to Granite Falls, where Norman died. Some years later, I went to visit Lois. There, filling much of her living room, was Aunty Verna’s ornately carved piano I’d last seen nearly fifty years earlier.

Lois told me its story. Her father-in-law, Fred Blythe, had two brothers. Their father died young and the oldest boy, our own “Uncle” Will, left school at age twelve to support his mom and siblings. In 1902, when Will was sixteen, he, his mother, ten-year-old Fred, and seven-year-old Rod moved by train from Michigan to Seattle. The piano had been a sixteenth birthday gift to his mother, Ella, in 1873. It also came on the train.

They removed the legs for transport by taking out the big wooden screws that fastened them to the body. The solid brass sounding board and the painted, hand-carved rosewood of the piano’s main section weighed close to 2000 pounds. Six men could barely carry it.

Lois knew that the train brought the piano as far as Hartford on the tracks of the old Monte Cristo-Everett railroad. From there it was hauled over the primitive road to Robe valley. Young Will built a home for the family, with the help of neighbors. The youngest son, Rod, learned to play the piano, but a few years later he went off to fight in WWI and died overseas.

Lois plays the beautiful old instrument now. Several years ago, when the lyre that holds the
pedals needed tightening, her son took it apart. He found a hand-carved space in the block beneath the lyre, and in it a key that locks the cover. Perhaps it was hidden there for safe-keeping when the piano arrived at its new home in the valley back in 1902 or 1903.

Attention to detail
was a hallmark of
the period.











The name in scrollwork on the front of the piano
reads RD Bullock, Jackson. The original rosewood
shows through the old paint.


The secret box is beneath the lyre.

Mom Saves My Valentine Dress...A Mother's Day Tribute

When quality fabric was less expensive and ready-made clothing was much more costly than it is now, many women sewed for themselves and their families. My mother stitched clothing for her three daughters, two sons, our father and herself.

She taught her daughters the craft as well. Sewing didn’t come easily for me. I spent lots of time ripping out mistakes and starting over, but one mistake was so bad, I had no idea how to fix it.

I was a new teacher, and like other women teachers in those days, I wore dresses and skirts to school. My students, even the boys, seemed to appreciate my pretty clothes, most of which I’d made myself. One day I found a lovely soft piece of red corduroy printed with rows of tiny white hearts and flowers, perfect for the upcoming Valentine’s Day. I knew my fifth graders would enjoy seeing their teacher in something so appropriate.

I bought the cloth and took it to my parents’ home so I could use Mom’s new sewing machine. Carefully, I pinned the pattern pieces in place, cut them out, and began to sew. The top, with its softly draped collar, fitted perfectly. So did half of the flared skirt. I stitched the other half together. Oh, no! I had two half-skirts for the right side, none for the left. And no extra fabric.

Frustration welled, along with tears. I’d wasted my hard-earned money and ruined my dress. I balled up the pieces and threw them into my mother’s rag bag.

A few days later, Mom stopped by my apartment with a gift...the Valentine dress, exactly as I’d envisioned it. Not until I inspected the reverse side of the fabric could I see how she had recut and fitted pieces together so skillfully the seams couldn’t be seen. The corduroy nap even ran in the right direction. What patience--and the designing skills of an engineer--it must have taken to accomplish that.

My students loved the dress, and so did I. Every time I wore it, I was reminded again of my mother’s love.