A Second Childhood

Today marks the beginning of a new phase in my life. I guess you could say it is the beginning of my second childhood. Now after over twenty years of being over a thousand miles from home my sister and her husband have moved close....real close. Just a few shorts steps between us....maybe a quarter of a mile downhill. How fun!

Although we have communicated through email daily and sometimes several times a day and I usually know what she is doing every day, it is not the same as living next door to her. Now she can be a part of our coffee time with Mama and Daddy.

Holly thinks it is a conspiracy. They arrived last night.....she leaves for college on Friday. But we will all be here when she returns.

I believe it is God working in our lives....yet again. A position became available just a few miles from here...not in a big city.....but in the country. After years and years of saying the only positions available for Doug's qualifications were on either the east coast or the west coast and then plop....one just 30 minutes from here.....God works in our lives!

I think it is extremely exciting to know that God works in our lives. As I look around I see so many wonderful things happening that I recognize as God's work.
Big things...little things...things that you would think would not be important to God but we are His children and he wants to bless us.

It is my prayer today that as Linda and Doug begin this new phase of their lives they will find fulfillment and happiness living among family.

Chocolate Cake and Hospitality

This afternoon I came home and made my Grandmama's chocolate cake.
Anyone who knows me well knows the cake I am talking about.
This afternoon as I baked and made the fudge icing and turned the plate round and round as I pulled the fudge up the sides of the cake my mind was stuck on my grandmother. I remember seeing this cake in my grandmother's kitchen on her green dinette table almost every time we visited her. I remember once she made a German Chocolate cake and I was disappointed because I did not like coconut back then. (I wised up eventually and found that her German Chocolate was as good as her Chocolate but I was young and stupid.) The next time we visited she had both cakes. She was such a serving woman. Not timid and weak but hospitable as she could be. She could never understand what was so special about her cake but she humored us all by making it over and over. I wonder how many times she has made it. We went to visit on Friday nights when I was a child. We lived relatively close and could make the trip in a half hour. If we did not make it on Friday I guess we would be there on Sunday for church and dinner. She was quite a cook as so many women from her generation but she was the best.
My dad says that there was always someone staying over at their house. The house was always full. The kids would just double up sleeping and make room for someone else.

Tonight is JG's last night with us after four months of spending weeknights here and weekends with his family while he started his new job locally. Monday the family will move into their new home in a new location. I am both excited for their family and sad to see him go. Although it was hard on JG and his family at least JG was not lonely. He may have preferred that sometimes and meals were always late late for a city guy.

Grandmama's chocolate cake is in honor of JG tonight.
I will miss having him here.
A full house is so much more fun than a lonely house.

House to Home

Funny how hard I have worked this summer but loved it. I have cleaned the house, moved out my stuff from our furnished rent house which means more cleaning the house, and reorganized closets, and drawers and cabinets, worked in the heat digging flowerbeds, weeding, watering and whatever else but all was a labor of love. This week I have had to drag myself out of bed, get dressed and be at the school by 7:45, which is actually late for me during the school year, to help administer tests to those who did not pass in the spring but this week it has made me tired and lazy. Now that this work week is over I really feel that I am on vacation.

I have come to be a real home body. I hate to leave home. I love my home. My house is nice but home is wonderful, comfortable, pleasant! I have spent my summer making the space I live in a home, with cooking for the family, grilling outside, cookies in the cookie jar, the half worked puzzle and fussing over all the little things that make it inviting and welcoming to guests. I have worked at adding the little touches that say we love here. The things that take a house, a mere physical dwelling and turn it into a place of comfort, a place you can come in sit down, pull off your shoes and put your feet up and watch an old movie or baseball game (no, not me but the guys do while I work in the kitchen).

Ever see those signs "HOME for sell" and wonder if really they meant "HOUSE for sell"?

All in the Family

I guess I took a little vacation from the blog world. I still read but have not blogged in quite awhile. I guess we all go through that. I have not blogged because I am having so much fun.

For the week of the fourth of July I had all of my children and grandchildren in my home for an extended period and it was wonderful. Not all of them were with us at one time but at one time all were here during that week. Carl and Lisa came first and stayed the longest, from Tuesday evening until Saturday morning. Leann and Randy came on Wednesday night and left Thursday to attend a funeral in Randy's family. Ryan and Jenny came on Friday and stayed until Saturday.

A house is never as happy as when it is full of sounds of laughter among your family and we had it....seven children, eight grandchildren.....heaven. No worries about whether the house was clean or the meals were on time....just enjoying being together.

We are just one big family....brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. Glued together because we belong to each other.

Looking back I am not sure when the line separating those children born to me and those who married into the family blurred. At some point it just vanished and became children by choice.

Life is So-o-o Good

Life is so-o-o good!
I am still making my way through the jungle of junk.
My rental property was completely furnished....completely....kitchen stuff...linens.....toaster....coffee pot...everything....we even found a few items we would not touch. My new renters wanted an extended contract and they had all the furnishings they needed so all of that stuff had to be moved. For just a minute I considered starting a new "staging" business but nixed that quickly. Any business that involves moving furniture around from house to house is too much work for me.
While it is a relief to get a long lease contract the move was difficult.
Timing was difficult.

I never thought of myself as a pack rat really because when the kids were little I threw things out without even thinking twice about it....

"Yes, dear, you did get that at McDonald's but we will go again...."

"What are you looking for....hum-m.....don't know where that could be...."

"But honey, you had so many of those and you weren't using them."

"Your aunt who made what?"

....but as you age things you get are often things from your past like my grandparents sofa table that my grandfather used to stabilize himself while he sawed his boards for some project he was working on. The table still bears the scars from that day. I can see him standing there doing it. He was a great man. He has been gone since Caleb was born so there are few things left of him.

Then there is my grandmother's small table I can not part with. I have no memories of it but she gave it to me while she was in her nineties and I refinished it. And of course the bakers rack has to come home. Carl welded it for me and it is beautiful. But even if it were ugly it represents him and my heart melts when I think of him welding it together for me. Several of my big furniture pieces have been made or refinished by my dad so they must stay in the family.

The garage is packed with the boxes I had to bring back from the rental house. I will make it through the boxes one at a time until I can see the walls of the garage again. Anything garage sale worthy goes into big plastic containers to keep the little critters out or bigger critters.

Last night it was a raccoon going through the garage sale stuff. He has been a regular lately. He thought he had hit the jack pot when he found last falls pecans in buckets still being stored in the garage. He left his crumbs everywhere.

I long to see an empty garage.

I hear a car can be parked in there sometimes.

Jungle of Junk

I am refusing to rent a storage unit to organize/hide all my stuff.
If it has to be stored in a storage unit I don't really need it.
If I need it I want it close so I can find it.

I find that I am not alone in this jungle of junk. There are more garage sales going on every weekend than one could possible attend. Closets bursting open with so much stuff that if you tried to put one more thing in, the contents would topple outward into one big, huge, jumbled, heap into the room. The goal is to stop before it pours outward.

One of my chores this summer is to finalize my move out of my furnished rent house. Where did all this junk come from?

Sentimentalities, mementos, antiques, garden stuff, decorative items, and just plain things I could not do without. I even have saved all the gourds that had ever grown on my vines there for decorating.... like I did not have enough stuff to use to decorate. But I think it is so charming to use things from nature to decorate. And they were free.

Now two years later (today) I am bringing in things I have not even seen since I left there. Things I thought I needed but have not missed. And the worse part about it now is that as I try to combine the two houses now into one I see the stuff and still think I need it.

I have begun to nail things to the wall, rearrange things in closets, drawers and have even considered the attic in an attempt to get junk out of boxes and off the floor in an orderly fashion.

I have a garage sale pile, a pile for drawing props for school, things my kids must need and a little bitty pile called trash.

What does this say about me?
And I thought I was not materialistic.

Don't miss my garage sale now, you may find that one thing that will complete your decor!

Where'd You Get That Sense of Humor

We are made in His image.
We have a sense of humor.
So does God have a sense of humor?

I read Dana's blog and immediately recognized God's hand in the situation and saw the humor in it. It reminded me a situation I had just this week that I saw God's hand at play in my life.

I was neither in a bar nor watching people but I thought it a time that I saw God's sense of humor. Tell me if you agree.

It was after school and the only rush I felt was in that my car was sitting on empty and had binged the last three short trips I had made in town traveling only a mile or two at a time but now, I was pretty sure that this was the time that I could not push it off another minute therefore I headed to the gas pump instead of stopping in at Caleb's shop. Earlier in the day I had run to Subway, picked up a salad, used my debit card and had returned to school to finish cleaning out my room. Now tired from working at school, I felt a sense of exhilaration at the prospect of school ending. I sat at the pump and felt a rush of uneasiness because despite dumping out the entire contents of my purse into the seat of the car my debit card was gone. I looked twice but still did not find it.

Well, of course in a case as this who do I turn to....I said a quick,
"please, God help me find my debit card"......
"don't let it be stolen".......
as I turned my car around and headed to Subway's parking lot just a short distant down the road. I put the car in park and reached over to the seat next to me to begin to reload the contents of my purse which were now spread all over the passenger side seat cushion. As I picked up the first object, a calculator with a booklet like enclosure out dropped the debit card. I was stunned and in a split second I recalled a time when one of my children would play a hiding game with me and say, "ha ha! I tricked you".

I laughed and said aloud, "Funny! God!" before I said a quick thank you.

Next Plan

One more test to give then the school year will officially be over and I can move on to the next plan.....

Plant swap!

I have been working in my yard every chance I get just because I love to do that as anyone who reads my blog knows fully well. I have added new flowerbeds, a dry creek bed with a small bridge and mulched pathways here and there, moved in the hot tub and have begun to landscape around it in. Things are shaping up.

Now the old flowerbeds look drab and need to be spruced up and updated. I want color in my shady gardens.

The date is set (June 7th starting at 6:30 PM) for next weekend to do a plant swap and plans are now in place to encourage family involvement. A load of play sand will be delivered in a shady location for the little children. The older guys like Caleb will give trailer rides with the lawn mower (not running the blades of course) to the little children (or whomever. You're as young as you feel) and there will be some sort of yard games for the men or women if they choose to play. And last but not least...sharing plants with each other and those who don't have plants hopefully will enjoy just being there. As the evening winds down we will watch the sunset-extravaganza-show provided by God while we sit under the shady oak trees sipping lemonade and eating dirt cake or watermelon while enjoying the company of friends and family.

I've wanted to do this for several years and finally I have put it on the calendar and it IS going to happen.

Wish me luck that it will be fun.
Put it on your calendar
Bring your lawn chairs.

Just hours from the end

Here we are now with just a matter of hours before it is all over.
Two classes completed entirely and three more to go. I will be finished with two more classes tomorrow and one on Thursday. In a mere 36 hours it will all be complete for the year.

Not that I am counting!

What Will I Do For work?

She asked me as she sat in my class thinking about the upcoming summer,
"What WILL you do this summer.....like.....for work?"

How innocent!

One of the HUGE differences I see between the young and the old-in-their-eyes is that we are never bored. In fact, I do not HAVE enough time to do all I want to do.

Gardening, painting, cleaning, organizing, bonding with grandchildren, gardening again, going to workshops for art, get my hair cut on a regular basis, finishing the remodeling job like painting, crown modeling and flooring,.........

I just want to have the time to get to do some of the things I have on my list. Instead things that eat up my time are things like house keeping maintenance, laundry, cooking lunch now as well as supper (his mother spoiled him...he wants a big meal for lunch), Go-For tasks......oh, and this year, I have to move all of the furniture out of my rent house and dispose of it or store it.....for sure garage sale.