Spring and the Sounds of Little People

There is nothing like camping in the spring. Seems like we usually end up camping in the fall and winter, who knows why. This year, instead of Pigeon Forge (please don't hate me for not liking it) we went to Hiawassee. The traffic and mayhem in PF surely make those gorgeous mountains in the distance cry. When we are stuck, with thousands of cars all around, I look to the hills and wonder what they must be like. and what it would feel like to breathe in some fresh air. But in Hiawassee, the crystal clear sky and mountain views are in and through everywhere we are. The lakes, creeks, old farmhouses...they all beckon in their ancient stillness. No matter what place you are on earth, where there is nature close by, it is good for the body and the soul.  

Children who are raised with lots of outdoor time, less screens, no phones -- are the blessed ones these days. We had a week with a clutch of such kids. They speak to adults, laugh and play, and are content with what they're given. All week, they made great fun out of the old-timey things: swings, slides, bikes, putt-putt and that original invention - other kids. It was refreshing. We had campfires every night with Smores and plenty of smoke, including some fine cigars. Stories were told, laughing and seriousness were had, and all agreed that this was the best time ever.

The last day of our trip, we headed up to a place called Bell Mountain. I kept thinking someone was mistaking "Bell" for "Bald" -- and in my ignorance thought we were driving to Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia. Ken loves to torture me with views of very high places in our truck. He seems to veer closely to edges and takes great glee in whipping around corners of mountains. All for the purpose of me protesting and freaking like a little girl. On this particular drive, I refused to look out the windows until we got to the destination. Then I broke my rule as we were basically riding on two wheels around a curve. There, spread out in panoramic vision, was a whole valley of mountains (if that makes sense)...the sky was azure blue, with wisps of clouds. I gasped and might have accidentally cussed. I don't know if it was the beauty or the danger that overtook me. Cussing might be a sin, well, of course it is. Ken never, ever does it and I am grateful for that. I, however, have been known to sin, when the world is about to end or I am severely shocked. Or kids have hidden a stinking mountain of clothes under their beds. These are just some of the reasons I need Jesus.  

When we got to the top, there was a parking lot, a mile of stairs and lots of rocks with graffiti everywhere. We hauled ourselves to the top, some of the grands clinging to us, dizzy in the thin air and slightly carsick. It was magnificent. We were overwhelmed with the wonder, marveling that we'd never seen such. Thank you, Aunt Melissa and Uncle Jeff, for telling us about it. Overwhelming is the glory of God's creation.

This morning, I am sad. We are packing up, about to pull the camper back to Villa Rica. There's much to do when we get back, which makes it extra sad. My calendar is already overfull for the rest of the week. I don't want to leave. Can't we wait until the trees are completely unfurled? It will be difficult to get up in the mornings, knowing that there are no grandkids waiting to throw themselves into my arms or ask for gum. Ken goes back to work in the morning and I start hitting appointments. There is quiet. There is work. There are cats (I wish I could take them camping) and plants to water and feed.

 Thank you, God, for the means to do all these things and the joy of living.  

Kernels of Wisdom

I have no idea who decided to throw hard corn kernels in a pan and pop them, but I am eternally grateful.  

Popcorn is the stuff of heaven. It's cheap, easily made, and you can hear angels sing when it's done right. I grew up in a frugal home with modest surroundings. Popcorn was the snack of choice. Hot, buttery, crunchy, salty. Dangerous. Then there was ice cream, the perfect counterpoint to it. Cold, creamy, silky, sweet. Our growing up years were cycles of salty to sweet. Our Daddy who was tall and willowy, with arms long enough to reach all the way around people, a snack-eating enigma. He loved to eat, should have weighed 500 pounds considering the amounts, but didn't. He worked hard but never "worked out" that I remember. He kept our big yard, dug a garden most years, would play ball with us kids, and walked and lifted a lot of heavy packages at his job at the Postal Service. But I never saw anything approximating a barbell in our home. He loved popcorn, ice cream, pickles, cottage cheese and peaches, fried pecans, chips and garlic cream cheese dip and oh yeah, Stuckey's pecan rolls. He'd switch from savory to sweet and back again. But the winner-winner-chicken-dinner was the popcorn. The day he died, he asked Mama for some. She made a batch in the kitchen, handed him his bowl (he said "thank you"), stepped to the kitchen to get hers...when she turned back to him, he had already gone to Jesus. With some popcorn kernels on his lips! He figured he'd just head on up after all that goodness. 

I came to marriage with opinions about the stuff. I didn't know how to cook anything useful, but I knew how to make a proper batch of popcorn (as well as rightly fell a large tree). I remember boxing out people when they tried to mess with the salting and buttering of it. Basketball definitely interfered with my domestic training. Ken and I's first "fight" was over some popcorn. We were very good friends, not dating yet, but were sharing a bowl at one of our singles gatherings after church. It was especially good, with lots of butter and Old Maids at the bottom. For those who don't know what Old Maids are...they are the half-popped, kinda burnt kernels that you find at the bottom of the bowl. They are the Goody. There are also Old Maids who are young ladies who are almost not young anymore and who are not married.  But I don't think they're called that anymore...they're just called Successful Career Women? I am not sure and will cease talking about it. I tend to get in trouble when talking about women for some reason, even though I am one. I thought I was almost an Old Maid when I got married at 21. Now we call a woman that young a baby or teenager or something. But I digress... Ken and I got to the lowest dregs of the bowl and started digging for Old Maids. He slapped my hand and told me that I had to wait until all the popped kernels were eaten. I grabbed the bowl and said watch me. We did some wrestling and I think some of the bounty was lost in the melee. Who makes up rules about popcorn, anyway? Little did we know that this was a pretty good harbinger of our future fights. Not the physical part, but the nature of it. That might have been put down to some kind of underlying tension, but I'm not sure. The temperature definitely went up in any room I found myself in with Ken Norton, but don't tell him that.

Our decades of popcorn love included us and everyone who visited and then our progeny who followed. I have perfected the making of it. For a few years, we bought that chemical-filled product you throw in a microwave. But why? When I found out about how toxic that stuff is as well as the dangers of GMO foods, I chased down some regular ole popcorn, raised on Amish farms and without hybridized genes, hormone-disrupting chemicals or alien DNA. It was heavenly, crunchy, coma-inducing. And then I discovered the real, real butter. Irish butter, that requires you to sell your first-born child to buy. I only use that particular kind on special occasions, which happens, well, maybe weekly. You get a big Dutch oven, heat up a mess of coconut oil til scalding hot. Then pour in these precious nuggets, keeping the pan moving until everything seems popped (please don't remove the lid until done). Then pour it into a gigantic farm bowl, if you have any integrity. Melt a hunk of Irish butter in same pan, then pour it over the corn, stirring it all around. Then salt, not too much, not too little. This is more art than science and I can't help you until you experiment for at least a decade or two. Bring bowls and several bar towels to the living room, along with your beverages of choice. Don't wait. It's still hot and needs to be consumed and now. We are known, however, for leaving leftover popcorn on the kitchen counter with a towel over it, and will commence to snacking on that until it's gone. Heaven forbid you would ever throw any of it away.

Tonight, I'm having a big pile of ladies from church over for movie and game night (we invited all of them) and my contribution is as much popcorn as I can muster up (til the butter runs out). They don't know what's about to go down. I can see Daddy with a grin and a thumbs up. Like I said, that's some heaven right there. And also maybe a 12-step program... 

Alleluia and Pass the Ham

In the haze of clouds of pollen last week, I kept noticing the bodacious azaleas by our front porch. They show off just once a year, but wow, the show. Here we go again....  I thought of our first home (there were azaleas...). We had rented a couple of other houses before we finally bought our first dollhouse. It was situated right by the railroad tracks in downtown Mableton in a little neighborhood of similar tiny bungalows, all under 1000 square feet. The yard was loaded with all sorts of random plantings and the house was the very definition of fixer-upper, maybe even a dump, before we even called them that. We paid $32,900 and thought we had won the lottery. My parents graciously allowed us to move in with them while we worked on it. We were pregnant with our first child, naive and full of can-do spirit. How little we knew...

We dove in with hammers and screwdrivers. By the time demo was done, you could see straight through to the other end of the house. As sick sheetrock and trim was pulled down, there were mountains of dead roaches and their leavings in the piles. It's a wonder we didn't swell up and die from all the toxins. Ken had never really done any type of construction, but he learned beside Daddy as we dug in. Ken was on evening shift at the plant, so he would work on the house in the morning and then head to his real job in the afternoon. When Daddy would get home from his day job, he and I and Mama would head to the fixer and work til late hours. Saturdays were marathons. 

We yanked all the nasty cupboards out and laid them on the back patio, where I cleaned and sanded them. One day, Daddy and I were headed back to their home when he spied some cabinets laying in some random person's yard. He slammed on the brakes and wheeled into their driveway. The guy gave us a kitchen's worth of those (also) nasty cabinets. We added them to the arsenal. These were even worse. Mama and I scrubbed, bleached and dried them, then set to sanding off the past. Ken and Daddy assembled them into our old-new home, leaving us with double the original amount of storage. I painted them a shiny cherry red and put on white porcelain knobs. There was an old, rusty light fixture in there that looked for all the world like a farm lantern. I scrubbed (scrub and sand being the dominant theme in this renovation) and sanded it, painted the inside of it snow white and the outside the same red. I found some cheap wallpaper, white with yellow lines and red cherries. A friend gave me some red and white gingham checked curtains for the window. We put in laminate counters that looked like butcher block, and vinyl floors. The kitchen was smack-dab in the  middle of the house and looked like a cottage belonging to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  We had to completely re-do the bathroom, using the cheapest materials we could find and using the original sink, tub and toilet. I wallpapered the hall and the main bedroom because the walls were so boogered up there was nothing else to be done. There were two tiny closets in the whole house, ancient carpets that we couldn't afford to replace so we just cleaned them, and old pine paneling in the den that we degreased and shined. I painted the tiny nursery baby blue and painted lambs on the wall with scripture twining between them. 

It was a mess. But it was our mess. With the help of family and friends (because there was no money), we scrubbed up this little place and made an adorable home for us and our upcoming baby. I had quit my job before we started, well before we got pregnant. There were people who criticized us for that. But I learned untold amounts of skills before that first baby came...things that benefit us to this day and that can't have a price put on them. Mama helped me learn to sew during those same days. I proudly put on my first maternity dress, made from my own hands. Painting, stripping furniture and cabinets, scrubbing, wallpapering, gardening, feeding my people...these are golden skills that have blessed my family and many others over my life.

I remember the weeks after we moved in, and everything was done, clean, serene, ready. The church and family gave me a huge shower and we settled in to wait. I would spend warm mornings with my Bible in the backyard, in the swing that Ken's Pop had given us, the same swing that Ken played on when he was a child. I would put my hands around my burgeoning belly that contained an apparent Lamb of Great Size. I would talk to him, knowing he was a him even though we didn't get sonograms back then. I sang to him, wondering what and who he would be. I saw in my mind's eye a man of God, strong and willful, a light in the darkness. We named him Jonathan (gift of God) Uriah (the fire of the Lord) -- because that's what he was going to be (and is). Those sweet early days, misty and ethereal in my mind, difficult and yet simple. Happy, happy, unworthy and blessed beyond anything I could have imagined. People were often thinking we were crazy because we took roads less traveled. 

Then there was yesterday, Resurrection Day, where I sat in the middle of the years of progeny that have come behind us. My favorite holiday, where church was rife with love and victory, then home with the grandchildren all around like flowers and bees and honey all buzzing. Noise, food, laughter, green grass, pollen, and dirty little feet everywhere. 

While we were getting ready, we (finally) hung the two plates I was given at Christmas -- one with our family tree on it, growing outward like a great oak. The other, a picture of our darling but big Victorian bungalow that we ended up with all these years later. It says: "For indeed, a house is a little church." The older I get, the more humbled I am as I realize that I get so much more than what I actually deserve. The God whom I love and loves me is merciful to His children. Simple dreams. A simple yet complicated life. Easter blessings. Open hands. And a God who is greater than all our sin...