Stubbed for three days. One class, 6th graders, I think, said things like,”We remember when you dubbed us in the 2nd grade!” And, “Remember when you gave me lunch detention?” Maybe thee is just a myriad of things in my head, I can’t remember.them all!

Happy New Year!

I hope that is the first happy new year  you have gotten from this blog because I wrote one from my kindle and it totally ran off as soon as I think I published it. Not sure what I did , Can’t find it , but if you see it can you please let me know?

Yes, the kindle is the new toy! It has been delightful to have music all over my house and when I wake up in the morning. I have read two books so far, Jack and Jill by Louisa May Alcott and  A Meal with Jesus by Tim Chester. I got an ESV Bible for free and an interlinear Latin New Testament. Yep, and I downloafded a couple games so when Ellis slept with me he had something to do while I rolled over for a few more snoozes!

Sam came on Friday before Christmas with his his big black cat. He and Nick and co. were at our Babikow get together. Scott and Mary are doing the choir rounds at Westminster like I used to. It’s kind if an all nighter. Scott was allowed to take his choir music home and teach it to Mary so she could sing with the senior choir on Christmas Eve. She turned 30 this year. She’s old enough to sing in the ‘senior’ choir! We had an ensemble of 8 at New City Fellowship, 5 women and 3 men and it was amaaaazing. It was what I call an outtayerseat kind of morning. I wish I had had the presence of mind to get a video.

Jeannette and Chris and their boys got in Sunday evening. Marlowe rediscovered Sam as he found him sleeping on the sofa the next morning. When Joel came down he said, “Grandad, do you remember Uncle Sam? He’s right over there!”

Luisa flew in on Monday and Mary and Nicky cooked dinner and Jeannette and I straightened up and set the table. Nice arrangement. made my day!

So…. for the New Year I have  couple resolutions. I think if I write them down, I’ll remember that I made them. The first one is to keep a little household maintenance schedule that I already made up with a few chores each day so the house doesn’t get so neglected. The other is getting some filing done with Joel that has gotten behind. Now that the holiday is overrrrrrrrr.

I’m ready for it to be over.

Hasta luego

That for which I am Thankful

On this Black Friday morning, I think I shall write about that for which I am thankful, since I haven’t done so yet! A lot of things come tumbling through my mind, some with more substance than others but for which I am thankful. So I won’t take up a lot of your time unless you choose to spend it. I am thankful for this ancient laptop sitting on my wooden desk  and I can see the sunrise while I write. There is a peace that comes to me in writing. Somehow I got into this thing of getting up early, totally inadvertently! I am thankful for my home and the warmth and peace others feel as they enter it. I am glad it is warm, for that was a struggle for a few winters! I am so thankful for my little teaching job and the ability to connect with 5 and 6 year olds, something I thought I could never do after years of teaching Latin! I am thankful for the beautiful walk I have every day to school. For my good, kind neighbors, for new friendships. For godly doctors.  For a good garden crop. We ate sweet potatoes and carrots from our garden in our Thanksgiving feast. For a church where we feel a family home feeling. For our new music director. For my music friends who encourage me. For healthy bodies. I have been in leaf ecstasy during these leaf changing months and I feel addicted to their beauty. Now I can see black, lacey branches against the sky and I do not tire of the beauty. That, I believe is a gift from God.  I have a little girl in Sunday School who hated music and singing. In church she would lie on the seats with her ears plugged and in Sunday School she would cross her arms and glower at me. I tolerated that for a while because I think the loud music hurt her ears. Then one Sunday I encouraged her to stand by me while we sang in Sunday School and lo and behold, I start hearing this little off-key voice singing right along. A couple Sundays ago I put on the DVD and there she is in the first row of kids doing all the motions and singing all the words. I am thankful  to have witnessed this miracle. I am thankful I can watch my grown children grow through their difficulties and grow their own children! I am multiply-ingly thankful for my husband who sticks with me through thick and thin and for all I have learned living with him. For his genius and hard work that keeps this household together. AND, most of all, I am thankful for Jesus, who, whether I had all these things or not, would still be my Savior. “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name…..who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies.”

Back in the saddle again….

So… I am back in the teaching saddle. About a year and a half ago a friend of mine had been approached by families about starting a school that is like a home school. When she told me about it I told her I would be interested if she ever thought she needed help. Last year was her first year and she had 4 kindergartners all at about the same pace. This year she has two first graders and 5 kindergartners and things are Not all at the same pace. She picks up phone, calls Melinda, “Help!” she says! Not really. She emailed me and said “Are you still interested?” Well, if I am honest about my life, sometimes I have to try to find something to do. I like to have some place to go, somebody expecting me sometimes! I am so interested. I knew when I left school I was done with all those years of that, but I still like to teach.  I am not teaching Latin, that’s for sure! But teaching the basics of reading is not all that different from teaching a new language. I had a Latin text that I used I would always warn my students that is sounded like an “I Can Read’ book. Repetitive, cute stories about things they understand. And my mind is still saying why those words are thus.

One thing you have to say is that you never know what is coming next with the ‘little people’! The bigger ones can be pretty funny , too, but they are quieter about it. So we are going through our itsy, bitsy alaphbet books and looking at the pictures and making the sounds, “b-b-bat, c-c-car” and when we get done with that  I try to get them to come up with their own words. The boy, J, is all into it, but I am trying to get the girl, M, to take a turn.

Me: M, can you think of a word that starts with c….c….c

M: (coloring) No, I can’t think of anything

Me: Just try one word. Look ( I make like I am drinking something)

M: I don’t know

Me: sometimes adults drink it in the morning….

Without missing a beat, J’s voice pops up, “B-b-beer!”

Have fun everybody!

What’s for Dinner?

I don’t know what Em is having for dinner, but here is what Melinda made. So I get out my minestrone recipe that I got off the internet for “Olive Garden ‘s minestrone recipe”. Not really advertised as that.  I like it with a meat base so it is more like a stew so I put a little chuck roast in my crock pot with some meat and onion and some veg. broth. If I had onion soup mix, that is quite good in it, too.  Then I see I need celery, garlic, and green beans. Have bok choy and garlic and mushrooms. So I saute’ them. Then I get the meat and broth and dump it in the pot with the vegetables, chopped up the meat and put it in, added a pint of canned tomatoes, a handful of little carrots from my backyard and an adventuresome little turnip, just because it was growing in the backyard like the carrots, some chopped parsley, salt (which actually was with the meat) black pepper and a cup or so of frozen black beans. I would have put in kidney beans but I keep forgetting to start cooking them in the morning and they are an all day thing. You can stretch it by adding water and pasta. Can’t wait to eat!

A New Look

Who doesn’t like a new look? A clean house, a new dress, an unread book, a new baby even always brings freshness to our lives. The sunrise,  a newly planted garden, or a freshly weeded one! I think it makes us better appreciators, or gives us a new intake in hope. Maybe I can add to this list of feeling better after a long or short sickness, a good night’s sleep (finally!). You can add your own. A few years ago I decided to start reading the Bible like I hadn’t been reading it all my life. No more taking things for granted and I have shared with some of you some of the nuggets along the way (not necessarily here). Things that have astounded me. But even a few years before that I incorporated Bible memory into my Latin class and every time I was amazed at the color of language I found there. I have a teacher friend who says, and has the qualifications to say so, that the Hebrew language was illustrative, Greek is precise, but Latin made them ‘user-friendly.’ Still in its user-friendliness it did not lack colorfulness and beauty. Psalm 36 I found was ‘in alphabetical order’, but is the Hebrew aplabet. The order is kept as it goes into English, but losing its alphabetical-ness. I learned that when we ‘dwell’ in the land, the word for ‘pilgrimage’ is used and it is ‘pereginare’, you know, like the bird! (spera in Domino et fac bonum peregrinare in terra et pascere fide) Maybe one of my faithful readers can truly identify with this! One of the first verses I taught was the fruit of the Spirit. It is almost like poetry. Here it is:

“Fructus autem Spiritus est

caritas, gaudium, pax,

longanimitas, bonitas, benignitas

fides, modestia, continentia

adversus huiusmodi

non est lex.”

There you have it. A new look. A new blog post. The morning’s muse.

The Day Lily Blog

I am what I call  a ‘Lord’s mercies’ girl. For as many times I as I spill, break, forget, stumble, (which are many), I come out exactly right without really knowing what I am doing. When we lived at Cono I would say to anyone who was with me in the kitchen or the car, “When you’re in my kitchen, you wear an apron and when you’re in my car, you wear a seat belt. You never know what is going to happen next!”  When my daughter got married and told her bridesmaids they could pick out their own dress, one went straight to the thrift store and came home and got a a gorgeous dress that didn’t quite fit. I was busy saying , “It’s so beautiful, Too bad store bought seams are so small and unadjustable, let me show you.” and discovered an inch seam in every seam and I think there were 7, counting the zipper. So I took it alllll the way out and just put it back together. And it fit perfectly! Well, one of my sisters put the zipper back in for me in the last days or hours before the wedding. When same maid asks me to sew something for her wedding I said, “You know how I operate. It’s the Lord’s mercy around here.” And,yes, I pulled off the same sort of stunts and everyone I sewed for had perfectly fitting clothes on the day of the wedding! If anyone asks me for directions, here they are. “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.” Lamentations 3:22 Well, maybe Jeremiah had something else in mind than rescuing a dress from unfitting to fitting, but I still feel the Lord’s mercy in helping me do things that seem insurmountable to my pea brain and when they come out sooo right, I know it can’t be all my doing. So what has this got to do with daylilies? They are my ‘perennial reminder.’ They show their beautiful faces for a day and then they are done and you get a fresh one the next, “They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” So the next verse says. Have we ever known the sun to not rise? Just as surely I can sure of fresh mercies! My first year teaching I had an 8th grade class first thing in the morning. Some of them were not morning people any more than I was! I would often open the class by thanking the Lord for his mercy that was new every morning, because that’s all I could think of and I felt like I had to hang on to it! One day a yearbook person came in and asked me for my favorite verse and while I started to mull around in my slow brains for a good one, they all chimed, “What’s that one you pray every morning?” Ah…… made an impression on those ornery younguns! Hope they still remember!

Working at the Greenhouse

Working at the Greenhouse is what my husband’s family has done for at least 4 generations, if not 5. His great-grandfather started what is now called “Babikows’ in Baltimore and his uncles began what we called ‘Greenleaf’ in Lancaster. When we first married I  got introduced to greenhouse life by living across the driveway from it…. and on the other side of them from his grandparents and down the street from other relatives who also worked in the family business. One of my favorite memories was watching the poinsettias arrive and grow and turn colors. Will never forget it. Our first ‘spring rush’ our first baby was due and Joel was spending his days on a delivery truck. Fortunately, I went into labor on a Sunday so all Joel had to do was drop his hose and take me to the hospital!  Later we joined the other family business in Lancaster. Joel had worked there while he was still a teenager and had left it to go to horticultural school. His uncles had started the business with mostly their families (kids!) and a bunch of twenty somethings for employees, most probably excited about the idea and more ready to learn than knowledgeable, but it worked. I’m sure there were a lot of headaches for the uncles , but I don’t ever remember a payroll not being met. We often lived next to or on greenhouse property and I knew most of the employees and they us and our children. There were probably lots of aspirations on those days, ours included. What triggered these thoughts is a little discussion Joel and I were having of the plant names. Since  this is my 4th week working in the greenhouse and working in the ‘tag house’ (really a trailer that used to be aforesaid uncles’ office!)  I have started to memorize the names! There are several echinacea with names concerning the sun and the moon. Sunrise, Sundown, After Twilite (or is Midnight?), Harvest Moon, Summer Sky, etc. The moon the other night was a sliver on the bottom and I said, “Just wait till an echinacea gets named after that moon!” Then I said there is one that I really like to rattle around in my mouth. ‘Tiarella Susquehanna.’ Joel replied that it was Sinclair’s, one of those ‘aspiring 20-somethings’ And the T. Octarara, and T. Delaware…… ‘And what about “Dale’s Strain? Is that our Dale?” Yes it is. The friend who sent my sick husband home and did his work, and gave up his (and his wife’s!) bed and watched our greenhouses so we could get a decent night’s sleep during some harsh Christmas weather. He went on to own his business and now he’s up to something else, I’m not exactly sure what, but another adventure, I’m sure. The family business is no more as it was, although I think all are still in the same kind of work. Joel now works for another one of those 20 (or 30) somethings who bought the site his uncles sold. He worked with Joel when we lived in Chester County and sometimes his daughter would come to work with him and play with ours who was the same age to the month.  They were funny girls together.

Even though some aspects of this business are more complicated than others, it is all meaningful work, whether it is filling soil flats, moving plants, dealing with customers, looking for bugs or engineering climate conditions to get the product you want when you want it, it all works together to bring beauty to people, beauty that started with a Creator. While there is always some competition in business, it’s a friendly business. In fact some of those ‘kids’ who had to scramble around working in the greenhouse and those ‘aspiring 20 somethings’ have been gathering for a game of darts on Friday after work in the lunch room (is that what you call it??) of another greenhouse business, I think three business are represented in the bunch of former ‘Greenleafers’. Friendship. Camaraderie.

 

Songs in a Mood

I was just thinking about the statement in Genesis where it says, “Let there be light.” In the English (and in the Latin) this is in the subjunctive mood and I have always wondered about that. Why would God create in the subjunctive? To me, ‘subjunctive’ means dependence on something else. ‘If, when, may, let’ are all dependent  words. But then immediately following is the indicative; “And there was light.” Period. It happened. “ And God saw that it was good.” Approved, true, right.  Now I am thinking about how we can apply it to our worship in the context of a service, but certainly not limited to that context. How can we go from subjunctive to indicative to truth? I started thinking about this in relation to music, being musically inclined, but I am not sure that I would limit it to that. Couldn’t that be the flow inside of me for the whole service? I come in hoping that I will be glad to have been there (lagging a little behind David), I am encouraged by the words I hear and the fellowship I sense and then it is verified by the preaching of the Word. But what if I were to apply this to music? What would it look like? What would the songs look like?    ‘May the mind of Christ my Savior live in Me from Day to Day’. ‘Let me hide myself in Thee.’ How do I move from that subjunctive to the indicative? The subj. deals with my heart’s desire, but I am not going to be done deal until I get to heaven. The ‘done deal’ has more to do with what Jesus has done, so it speaks to me of a grace-based  rather than a works based salvation. But things happen. Hearts do change. Or rather, hearts are changed. Maybe I got to church crabby and wondered why I even bother. I go to avoid the heresy I’d feel if I didn’t go. Is the truth we sing about so life-changing in this crazy world we live in? There are songs that are not only indicative but also definitive. ‘The Light of the World  is Jesus.’ ‘What can Wash Away my Sin? Nothing but the Blood of Jesus.’  ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’. In fact, the subjunctive is often quickly followed by the indicative. ‘If thou but suffer God to guide Thee and hope in Him through all thy days, He’ll give thee strength whate’er betide thee and help thee through the evil day.’ There is real life indicated in these verses “Sometimes a Light surprises a Christian while he sings……It can bring with it nothing, but He will bear us through………Though vine nor fig tree neither their wanted fruit shall bear………while in Him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.” Words written by a man most likely manic-depressive, they reprove me as they encourage me. Reminding me that ‘this world’ is not all there is. I do not see the ‘big picture’ from my tiny spot in the USA. Trust is a daily attitude required in the Christian walk. I use the example of God’s Word for a reminder. When he called the Israelites to new things he would remind them of how he delivered them from one of the most powerful civilizations, parted the Red Sea (including  dry land to walk on, must have remembered the hard working women!) fed them from heaven, provided all their needs, delivered them from their enemies. For me, did He not separate Himself, this Trinity, to come and be a man on earth, so he could die a death that would save me from Hell and destruction? Is that enough reason for me to trust Him and sing of it? ‘I am delivered, Praise the Lord, I am delivered by his Name! Once I was bound by the chains of Satan, I am delivered, Praise the Lord!’ Truly indicative. Declarative. Definitive.

Wired Up

Lots of music these days is wired up. While I see the advantage of it and can understand why people enjoy it and have moved away from a personal bias against any of it, there is also something lost. With most technology you win some and you lose some. We go with the most wins and usually forget the losses. A friend of mine keeps me at my electric keyboard with the words that the possibilities with electronics are endless. I’m not the best candidate for demonstrating that but I’ll grant that someone could, and could show me, too.

But yesterday in church we went , in our singing, from a nicely played wired up guitar to just a keyboard (wired, but not miked)  and all of a sudden I could hear people’s voices, the voices around me. Singing falls on me like a waterfall. I am not a proponent of strict a Capella singing in church, but why have we wired up to the point that we drown out people’s voices? … And that includes great, big organ sound, too.

I’ve sung in a few really good choirs and I remember coming in late to rehearsal and hearing a song that I was not particularly interested in. The voices were so lovely I was won over. I watched ‘The Sing-off” avidly this past fall, noting that there were no instruments to cover up the singing. There was such satisfaction and camaraderie among the singers from the opportunities they were afforded through the singing. I especially noted when they mixed up their groups to do vignettes in the show.

Maybe I am picking this bone because I am at a dry spot in my singing. Physically, I don’t think I can keep up with a choir  I would find it enjoyable to sing in. And at church, the singing is drowned out. ‘Tis a pity. We need to pull a plug once in a while, and feel the waterfall.