Our Table

For me, it is very important to have meals together, sitting at the table.  At different times, different homes, for different reasons, we have had our meals pot-luck-style, grabbing a plate, filling it from the pan, and going to sit wherever to eat.  Balancing a plate on your lap, or scooting a pile of books off the couch to find a spot to sit is not as comfortable as joining together at the table.  We talk and laugh, or sometimes quietly eat, but together. If I had to pick what piece of furniture would be the center of our home, it would be our table.


I love this painting.  A friend had it in her dining room, years ago, and I loved it then.  In Colorado, one of the homey little restaurants where we liked to eat had it on their wall, too. Through AllPosters.com I tracked down the print, and my family bought a framed copy for my birthday.  The multi-generations, dad hanging up his coat, just in from the barn, the fresh baked bread, the animals as part of the family (love that horse with his head in looking for a treat! - someday I want a dutch door like that), the border collie begging her treat, the little girl wanting to share her share, the growing boy too busy with his own eating, the knitting on the windowsill.  In five different houses, this has hung in our dining room, a reminder to enjoy and appreciate our mealtimes together.


Here is our table, a blank canvas for colorful meals and conversation, and for many, many memories. It is two laminate doors (my husband is in the door business), screwed on to the top of a smaller table for support, with matching benches. It has survived gallons of goat milk being filtered and poured into jars (and spilled, of course), hours and hours of schoolwork, art projects, construction projects (it was our work bench as the house we built in Colorado went up around it); we have covered it with chocolate chip cookies, muffins and breads, Christmas cookies; we have surrounded it for years with family and friends. An ever-changing, colorful assortment of food, projects and people.


What piece of furniture is the center in your house?

Control Tower

I like a quiet life, and for the most part, we are successful at maintaining that. We are generally home, doing school work together in the mornings, limiting errands to once a week.

Yesterday, though, we were taking off and landing all day.  The car was in and out of the driveway ten times during the day, transporting kids from equestrian center to state achievement testing to dry cleaners to an evening Civil Air Patrol meeting, to grocery shopping (and a late Starbucks Frappuccino and quiet talk with my husband).  This may be normal for some, but for us, it was an unusual, busy day.  I felt like I needed a control tower to monitor who was at home, who was coming and going next, who should be calling soon, and what was needed for the next trip out. Like an air traffic controller clearing the runways and ensuring safety for the pilots and their planes, my job was to keep everything running smoothly and safely, continuously monitoring the movement on the airfield and in the skies.

I make no pretense of being in complete control - that is not my job. I'm just traffic control, monitoring the bustle of motion around me.
Flying is on my mind today - I'll be in the air again on Friday, headed to Colorado Springs to meet our daughter and her family who moved there today, to help them get settled in to their new house.  Busy days.

At the Beach

The day we went to the beach I took along Gift from the Sea, by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Seemed a perfect choice to read while I relaxed in the beach chair, brushed by the sea breezes and toasted by the sun. Didn't even take it out of the big blue beach bag.  It was much too distracting and fun to watch the people and their dogs.  This was the first time we had been to this dog-friendly beach.  Quite interesting to see the people and their dogs (or is it the dogs and their people?) interact and enjoy the beach together.

I'm also easily distracted by the beach itself.  The waves, the birds, the blowing sand, the reflecting sunlight all absorb my attention. Someday, when I have nothing else to do: no meals to fix, no children to keep an eye on in the waves, no imminent tasks waiting for me at home, no work to be planned, I will spend a whole day just sitting, just watching the waves come and go, flow in and out scalloping the beach with their foamy lace.

It will probably never happen, but I enjoy thinking about it. Even the vivid contrast between the man-made oil derricks, the colorful sail boat, the squealing kids, and the fluid line of pelicans soaring overhead makes for a pleasant pastime.

A little piece of driftwood sparks my imagination and wandering thoughts.  Where did this wood start it's journey-Oregon or China?  What has it seen in its rough and tumble travels through the waves?


This weekend, when I finally did start reading Gift from the Sea, I had to laugh at the first lines.
"The Beach is not the place to work; to read, write or think.  I should have remembered that from other years. Too warm, too damp, too soft for any real mental discipline or sharp flights of spirit.  One never learns.  Hopefully, one carries down the faded straw bag, lumpy with books, clean paper, long over-due unanswered letters, freshly sharpened pencils, lists, and good intentions.  The books remain unread, the pencils break their points, and the pads rest smooth and unblemished as the cloudless sky.  No reading, no writing, no thoughts even--at least, not at first."

She goes on to say it takes until, "some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again."  Guess my one day at the beach won't be quite long enough.

 Being by myself all day without family or responsibilities isn't really what I want, anyway.  I enjoy being busy and surrounded with family laughter and talk. But when the overload alarm threatens to buzz, I like to imagine a day of nothing, lolling at the beach.

         Do you have a favorite place you like to imagine
                       as an escape valve?

Beach Day

One Thousand Gifts

I finally finished reading Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts. Parts of it are tough, uncomfortable reads, but mostly it took me so long because I wanted to savor it, absorb it, appreciate each word.


Have you clicked on the tab above, "A Counting of One Thousand Gifts"?  I update it often, as I create my own personal list of one thousand moments that cause me to pause, stop, pay attention, to be aware of the many, many blessings in the little things of daily life. As I look back over the list, four hundred so far, it is a happy list, full of memories, richness, heart lessons, joy, progress, surrounded by family and home.

When we lived in Central California, our house was part of a horse ranch.  Our access drive wound between open fields of horses and cows.  Especially in the spring when the wild mustard plants splashed their sunny yellow spots across the hills, our house became hidden, secreted away behind the tall mustard plants,  surrounded in our own little secret garden.  We could walk down the driveway in a narrow path walled by yellow, the mustard taller than the horse's heads.

I would think of the verse, "Therefore He was saying, 'What is the kingdom of God like, and to what shall I compare it?  It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden; and it grew and became a tree; and the birds of the air nested in its branches.'" Luke 13:18-19

Here, now, there are splatters of yellow across our dusty hills, a reminder to me of the hope and blessings, the touches of the Lord surrounding us.


As she so aptly describes in the book, life is not always beautiful or comfortable or easy.  Far from it.  But, even in the rocky times, the seeds of hope and beauty, peace and rest are there, if we take the time to look.


This is a book I will re-read many times as I continue on my own journey- list of one thousand gifts.

Muscle Memory

Did you know that a lasso has memory?  Huh?  An inanimate rope couldn't have a memory.  On Tuesday, I wrote a little about our son's new lasso.  He is having a lot of fun with it, developing his skills, and  I'm learning that it is not just a piece of rope. The lasso is a tool that needs special care and careful use. After each session, he untwists it, then coils the lasso into exactly the same shape and ties it with plastic twisties to hold it there.  A new rope must be shown how to behave, and once learned, it will remember and go back to its "proper" shape.

As he prepares to throw he sizes the loop, brings it up over his head, moves it in a circular motion and tosses it toward the target. The rope knows how to make the curves, smoothly, untangled. Sometimes he has to stretch the rope into its full length and put pressure on it to remove any kinks or unbalanced spots. Then, coil it again and let it rest.
Can you see the analogies?  Our actions, repeated, repeated, become ingrained and cut a deep groove, or rut, and we become set in our ways. Sometimes we need untangling.  De-kinking.  Be sure you have dug the rut that you want to be in.

This morning, in our exercise session (we started a new series this week, I'll write about it another time), we were stretching and she mentioned muscle memory.  I perked up - oh, I know about that, just like a lasso. Of course, it's the other way around, but here again, is a lesson.  Our muscles, moved properly, consistently, repeatedly, carefully, will learn their proper shape and hold to their correct form.  It takes work, over and over again, practice and more practice, until it becomes instinctive and smooth and you couldn't imagine it any other way. It becomes natural, the norm, a good kind of rut to be in.
I googled muscle memory and found there is a debate (isn't there always?) as to whether the muscle memory is a brain function or if the memory is actually within the muscle itself, but the point remains the same.  A repeated action becomes intuitive, routine, easier.  A fast typist doesn't have to think through the location of each letter and the movement to reach that key. Their fingers just "know."  An excellent knitter can continue knitting without looking because her fingers "remember" the motions.  An athlete practices their routines or techniques hundreds and thousands and thousands of times until each move is "memorized."

We can set the patterns, the habits of our lives by making little changes, consistently, over and over and over- it is a choice.
 

Two More Short Stories

Two more short stories have been posted on WordsbyMo.  The first, CAUGHT! was written for a writing class I did, the second, BULLIES, was written mostly on our recent trip: at the airport, thoughts jotted down in the car, or sitting on a low rock wall while our granddaughter showed off her new no-training-wheels bike riding skills.

So, I have this problem.  I love to hold a book in my hands, to feel the pages, crisp or soft, to thumb through, either backwards to re-read a section, or forwards to jump ahead, to close the book with a bookmark in place, ready for the next time I pick it up, to run my finger along the edge of the page as I read.  The problem?  This digital age we live in.  Kindle. Nook. E-books on the i-phone. Downloads. On-line classes with all the textbooks on the computer screen. I am out of my realm, and don't even know what I'm talking about, though I have kids who study on-line every day (yes, I hear some of you laughing at me). 
But, as an author with a manuscript nearly ready to seek publishing, the traditional methods of getting a book published have fuzzy lines. Actually, this blog came out of an interest in understanding the e-world of books. I have downloaded short books and read them on my computer (motivational, informational type books).  The short stories I write are informally published and read on the blog - by the way, how do you like reading them on the computer, does it work for you?
This is more about questions than answers.  Research, figuring out how to fit what I do, what I write, into the resources available. Being willing to learn and grow and change and gain new skills.
It would make sense to move toward having digital books. They wouldn't need dusting or shelf space, and it would definitely be a step toward traveling lighter.  In this case, though, it is not a step I am eager to make.
I am not opposed to publishing an e-book, if that's the way people will read what I write. But, if you're going to give me a book, I still prefer the actual hard copy, with real pages I can touch and thumb through.