Change

On my way home today as I turned on the road just a mile and a half from the house I looked at the beautiful newly cleared field situated on the corner of my road. Just a short month ago, it was a brushy corner that no one even thought about. With all the brush it was difficult to see more than just a few feet from the barbed wire fence surrounding the field. As soon as the big equipment was moved into the field and the clearing of the land began the speculating and worrying began.

Some worried that the land would be subdivided and small plots of ground would be sold off one at a time and a little community of mobile homes would pop up just a mile from the house. In a farming community this is the kiss of death. Roads will wind from one end of the field to the other and wind in and out of individual plots of land. Everyone was asking what was happening but no one seemed to know what was going to happen. I guess time will tell.

Now the freshly plowed field sparkles like black gold across the gently rolling hills with small trees newly covered with tender leaves. The big equipment is gone. The field has been neatly plowed and grass seeds are waiting on the rains. The barbed wire fence is gone on one long side. A small pond in the middle of the field now visible, has been hidden in the midst of the brush all these years. It has dried up but it has been left intact and small blades of grass grow along the banks of the pond.

It is a beautiful field.

As I drove past the field and looked at it today both the beauty of the field and the fear of the unknown struck me. I realized the fear of change that I thought I was so immune to. I thought I welcomed change. Being an artist I always thought change is fun. My students know that in my classroom if the furniture is not nailed down it is subject to rearrangement. From day to day the configuration of the room changed. I think that is one thing I love about my gardening. I can change the look of the yard with just a few little changes (or big ones). I thought old people feared change but not me. I welcomed it. Change means something new happening. And new is fun......but maybe not always.

Maybe today it just has struck me a little harder because of the changes taking place in my work place that are not changes I perceive as good changes.

I guess I still have choices in my life.
I can choose to accept it
or
I can choose to move on and find something different.

Update on Eric

Everything went well with Eric's surgery.
He stayed over night last night.
He did not like having an IV in his arm but there were no problems.

Now for the hard part....keeping him subdued for three weeks while he heals.

Eric

Eric goes in for surgery today.
It is for tonsil, adenoids, and tubes in his ears.
Please, keep him and his family in your prayers today and the next couple of weeks.
He will have to be kept quiet and still and that is NOT in his nature.
He is a precious, active, four year old.

An Old Woman's Spring Fever

I think I have spring fever.....
Everything is greening up so nicely and the flowers are putting on blooms, some already blooming.
My mind begins to get creative.....pathways, dry creek beds, and sprawling flower beds meandering all over the place would be nice.

Put a shovel in my hands and I start digging.
Just enough space to plant a few gourd seeds under the windmill so they will vine upward and the gourds will hang downward and be beautiful.

And Zinnias are good with the gourds because they attract the beneficial insects to eat the aphids that get on the gourds. Dig a little larger area.

I really like pink zinnias. Just a bit more digging.

And caladiums....more digging toward the west.

And maybe something to edge the beds.....digging toward the south.

And then in the dappled shade side of the windmill....maybe a hydrangea......now moving eastward.

Oh, and now the lawn mower will not fit between the tree and the windmill because it will mow over the caladiums.....now stretching toward the tree.

And to finish off I think a little bit more to round it off.

Now, over there in that part of the yard it looks pretty dull....... maybe, if I dig a little over there I could make j-u-s-t a little flower bed, just enough for my plumeria.

Punished with a baby?

Okay, I did not intend to get into this but really!.... Obama.......punished with a baby?
How many women in this world long for conception and can not conceive? I bristle at that statement.

As a high school teacher I KNOW that the majority of our teens are sexually active. Because I teach art my students relax and often begin to discuss a variety of subjects. It is no mystery that a baby during the teen years is a hardship on the teen but punished is not the word that we should use here. A common subject matter for drawing in all of our art classes is the student's baby. I do not think they would say they are being punished. They love their babies.
I am not condoning their irresponsible and immoral behavior. But to state that we are punished with a baby is to suggest that a teen should be able to choose to murder the baby that God breathed life into and placed in that womb.

One of my classes got into a discussion about abortion this past week. The majority of the class initially felt that abortion is wrong but in the case of rape they felt it was alright. The most selfish people in the room backed their choice of abortion not surprisingly. I carefully guided my questions so as not to tell them what I believe but rather to make them think. (I find that when people feel that they came to the decision without being told what to think, they take claim to it better.) I did not present any new arguments but asked questions at specific points in the discussion that I felt they needed to hear.

• One girl in my class is all about herself, her dancing and advancing in dance. Her mother told her not to mess up her chances at advancing in her dancing by getting pregnant and basically said she would get an abortion should she get pregnant. She is sexually active (I will not go there). I asked her when did it become a selfish act to abort a baby? She looked at me stunned beyond words when I asked the question. Others jumped in agreement. Adoption was mentioned, women who could not conceive were mentioned and the conversation turned to mutual friends of several who adopted children and how wonderful it was that those children were not aborted.
  
• At some point in the discussion I asked if the cells were growing inside is that evidence of something alive like a plant growing? And if that is a life did that make a mother a murderer if she aborted?
  
• And of course, the primary question: what did that baby do to deserve to be denied life?

The question of abortion was truly a controversial question when I was a teen. Although it continues to be a controversial question I fear that our youth have not considered it fully or REALLY thought of it from the moral standpoint.

Well, in my fourth period class they now are at least, thinking of it from a more mature point of view.