And Give Us Today Our Daily Bread...

Smell that?
Oh no, well, I guess you can't....you're reading a blog post and not listening for the buzzer to go off because the combined aromas of cinnamon and oven are drifting into the living room. .....

....and sure enough! There it is!

I have never attempted to tally the number of loaves of apple bread I have baked, the number of apples I have peeled to make those loaves, nor the number of said loaves I have taken to carry in dinners at our church.
Sometimes I think my fruit of the Spirit is peeling.....

But there are four more, ready to be bread...or dessert....or something to pop in the kids' mouths because they simply cannot wait their turn in line.....

As I stood at the counter this evening, counting the apples out six by six, (because a half dozen nice apples, peeled and cut in chunks, is almost always close enough to the four cups required by the recipe), I thought of our Saviour breaking bread, giving thanks, and passing the pieces to his disciples. I ponder the marvel of a loaf of bread....something that is ONE, but made to be shared with MANY, else why would there be not one, but two miracles performed by Jesus involving a multitude and a multiplying of bread.

Apple bread crumbles like crazy... So made to be morsels for many.

So much companionship over the table...so many of my very favorite recipes have been shared by this church family!

"Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house; When you see the naked, to cover him; And not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Isaiah 58:7

Tomorrow we will gather together to eat again...

 To feed all who come to our open door.

 We will break bread with Communion and fellowship with a meal.

There will be plenty and no one will leave empty.

I end this with a little piece my uncle wrote many years ago for a family cookbook. It strikes me as so right in expressing the open table and generous hearts and hands I see around me....

Yes, everything....

Including the bread.

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For Where Two or Three Are Gathered

One hundred years is a very long time: so long in fact that most of us here have only memories of those who remember the people who started this church.

When we look at the picture boards in the hallways, we are reaching back twenty, thirty, maybe forty years. In one way, that seems long ago: the photos are grainy, or Polaroids, or black and white.

There aren't very many of them either. We memorialized big events with posed and formal pictures in the not so distant past: church directories or a black and white spread in the Avalanche, not just a tap and a click on our universal and ubiquitous electronic devices. Our hair is funny in these pictures:it is big, or it exists. There are big glasses, mustaches where there are none these days, and embarrassing styles on men and women alike.

Here are group photos of groups that no longer exist and events that no longer take place. We place on our fingers gently on the photos of beloved faces, no longer part of our congregation here on earth, but smiling parts of the church of our memories and our future.

It is good to slow down and step back. We aren't the same, but why should we be? We are not called to stand pat, to bury our 'talent' in the ground for safe keeping. We ebb and flow with the passing of years, the population of our community, the talents of our members. We can get discouraged; we can be uplifted. We falter and we fail, but because we believe, we open another door.

And because we are family, we do it together.  As families do, we fuss, we disagree, we go away mad, but we also forgive and forget our differences.  We comfort, we rejoice, we lean on each other from cradle to grave, from generation to generation.  

We are celebrating our past, using our past as a vessel of thanksgiving for today's blessings and a prayer for such mercies to be granted in the future for this body of believers, this changing tapestry of people in the pews. This season begins the time of harvest. It is the perfect time to gather, give thanks, share memories, eat ( because this church does that so well!) and rejoice in a living, changing, and sustaining community of God's people.

Amen.

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Mums Away! September Song....

Oh its a long long while 

from May to December.

But the days grow short 

when you reach September...

...And the days dwindle down

To a precious few....

September....

September Song (Anderson/Weill)

Way back when, a couple of calendar pages ago, the greenhouses were full of fresh tender young things; the people began walking and watering and picking up and setting down when the day was young and rested but briefly before beginning the whole process over again the next day.  Mornings were cool but middays were bright and hot inside the greenhouses when the next season's boxes arrived via FedEx just after Mother's Day.  Those boxes held the germ of fall in the form of stems and leaves: the essence and scent of fall without the root, the flower, the hue, the mass of color that the cuttings portend.  Each sandwich baggie held 100 cuttings and a thin piece of plastic with their name.  One hundred and eighty baggies.  Eighteen thousand potential mum plants.

Mums themselves are both tolerant and tough.  But not without roots.  From May 12 to the first week of June, the cutting lived in sheltered comfort, as climate controlled as we could manage given Mother Nature's vicissitudes in late May and June.  The cuttings were watered in gently and lined out on the floor of the greenhouse where the groundcloth was still cool and damp.  The greenhouse was covered with shade cloth and the mister ran twelve hours a day providing humidity and lowering the temperature and stress level of plants and humans.  After a couple of weeks, the cuttings ceased to wilt at midday and began to put out some new leaves.  Growth on the top meant growth underground; underneath the six packs clean white roots poked out of the drainage slots.  Time to move outdoors, to be pinched, to be potted  and lined out row by row like the soybeans planted in the field surrounding.


Mums grow fast.  They are vigorous and will fill just about any size container given enough time. Mums come in multiple sizes naturally; some stay compact enough to flower and flourish in an 8 inch pot.  Others billow and branch and need more ballast to balance out their enormous bouquets atop. Mums are both daylength and temperature sensitive, meaning they are prompted to start developing buds when nights are long enough.  In the very early spring, mums in a greenhouse can set buds and bloom because the nights are long enough to send that signal.  Growing mums out under the sun and stars like we do is always a gamble.  A June toad strangler followed by July heat can put the new roots under stress and bring on some pretty nasty fungi to attack the crowns and what lies under the soil.  As the soybeans grow, the number of pests they host and protect expands exponentially as well.  No one buying soybeans has any idea what ravages the foliage of the parent plant has endured.  Not so your garden mum. If there is more than a critical mass of damage from beetles, caterpillars, grasshoppers and all other crunchings and munchings , the mum won't reach its full potential as a blooming machine. Mums in one's garden have the luxury of being laissez faire with regards to pest control, but mums contracted for sale, a certain number of a certain color for a certain job at a particular location cannot afford the natural state. We usually have to spray for pests with six or more legs twice and maybe three times.

Watering is a daily chore unless Mother Nature intervenes with at least a half inch. At the start of July, watering is an every other day affair...but by the end of the month, the mums have fulfilled their destiny, have filled their containers with roots and are reaching down through the groundcloth.  A pot bound mum needs water every day....I repeat, a pot bound mum needs water every day.  Mums are resilient but not designed for a xeriscape.  We walk the lines as the pump motors whine and the swallows do cartwheels over the greenhouses grabbing snacks off the hot plastic.  The crops in the field this year reward the temperate conditions with glorious extravagant explosive vegetation, the likes of which we haven't enjoyed for these last three dry years.  When I lift my eyes from the rows, checking for the tell tale fountains of leaders chewed off by goodness knows what small annoying thirsty creature, I follow the velvety curves of the soybeans, regular as corduroy around the terrace, 

This July's summer nights dropped into the 50s and sure enough, our mums, with no eyes to read the calendar, sensed fall around the corner and started the blooming process.  Hmm.  That is going to result in a compressed season with the mid season bloomers joining the chorus of early bloomers in a glorious explosion of color.  Not what we drew up last winter when we ordered the blend of varieties we have, but flexibility becomes a virtue when wedded to circumstance.  The moderate, wet August keeps folks from hunkering down under the air conditioning unit and makes football season and fall less a futuristic figment, so mums away!  Let the deliveries and September begin!  Harvest is upon us all....

 

When We Were Very Young

We had a set of A.A. Milne books when I was....well, very young. There were...and are...four of them...and I always thought of them as a progression: When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six, Winnie-the-Pooh, and The House at Pooh Corner. The first two books are children's poems, whimsical rhymers full of imagination about childlike observations we sadly ignore or forget as we age and are preoccupied with larger topics. The second two introduce the much loved characters from the Hundred Acre Wood, the companions of Christopher Robin as a young lad before he also leaves the enchanted land in which his stuffed animal friends reside. Our copies were cloth bound, Christmas gifts, no doubt, because all our books were Christmas gifts, well worn before we left the land of the Hundred Acre wood, but never forgotten and always beloved.

Believe it or not, the approach of another August anniversary brought A.A. Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh to mind. NOT because our ever accumulating sum of anniversaries might lead one to believe we were gaining on Pooh Bear's girth...or forgetfulness (Pooh is, admittedly, a bear of very little brain ), but because thinking of anniversaries made me remember when we married...which is "When We Were Very Young", you know.

And now we are not. Which leads me to sum up this year's anniversary in a way that might be accused as childish...but should be forgiven in one given to grandmotherhood!

"If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear."

― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

As any long married person knows, even the most attentive spouse, after years of conversation...or years of exposure to machinery...can appear distracted. His or her mate can always remember this bit of sound advice from the stuffed bear.

" When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen." A.A.Milne
After nearly four decades, (not quite there yet; that number will demand a party.) I fully expect any day to be an adventure with a small 'a'. But there is no doubt that Life happens when one tries to keep up with the Big Boots. Adventure can be exhilarating ; Adventure can be terrifying. Adventure by definition is never boring.

So wherever I am, there's always Pooh,
There's always Pooh and Me.
"What would I do?" I said to Pooh,
"If it wasn't for you," and Pooh said: "True,
It isn't much fun for One, but Two
Can stick together," says Pooh, says he.
"That's how it is," says Pooh.

Once we were very young, and now we are not. But as Pooh, very little brains or not, reminds us, what isn't fun for one is so much better as two.
Sticking together..

As years pass...
That's how it is....

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"Cool"

"I was a child of the sixties...."

This July night is cool...and quiet, too, except for the child size snoring of Gabe in the room across the hall. Gabe and Abbie are spending the night; Abbie has the big bed all to herself because Gabe prefers the rugged individualism of the thin foam mattress of the cot.

This cot is no longer new; it's a sturdy Swedish model procured from LLBean a number of years ago. If it had a conscious, it would be amused at its desirability and glamour among the younger set.
When Ben was a baby, he slept in the wooden playpen that had been mine when we visited my folks' house. It is a tribute to the peaceful flexibility of babies that he slept contentedly on that old hard thing. He graduated from the playpen to a cot in our room; my grandfather's wooden Army cot, still solid after all those years, smelling of the basement on which it had been stored for decades and faintly of the moth balls that preserved the ancient woolen Army blanket that acted as mattress. It was low to the ground and I do not recall him ever falling out of it.

This cool night is an anomaly. It may even set a record. I do not believe July was ever cool when I was growing up. I slept on the top bunk as near to the edge as was prudent, hoping to catch an errant whiff from the box fan stuck in the open window. The nights were never quiet; people were outside chatting in the dusk way past my bedtime awaiting any faint breeze. The fans were important fixtures in my life and I remember each one. There was the 24" fan with the powder blue casing that my father used to exhaust the hot air from the garage. I got in serious trouble one time when I threw water into the big fan, relishing the refreshing mist it sprayed back on my face. The other fan was no more than 16" across but the high powered motor would blast the hot air like a turbojet engine. It was an almost iridescent metallic gray, heavy for its size, and a serious piece of mid 20th century engineering. Granny had the best fan of all, though: an older style,black enamel with a gold fillet on the base and motor. The blades were elaborately caged for safety's sake, and it boasted three speeds. What made it a cut above all others was its ability to oscillate. Turn the dial and a mere one dimensional breath of air became a zephyr of comfort, cycling back to refresh the breathless soul with a barely perceptible 'click'. Oscillation! What a civilizing concept!

My other grandparents were outasight on the early adopter's curve of climate control. One summer when I was still quite young we showed up for a visit and there was a behemoth of an appliance in the front window of the living room. It was loud and large, but it was the first home air conditioner I had ever encountered. That air conditioner didn't keep us from sleeping with the windows open at night though, sweating to firecrackers in June and cicadas in July, but the living room with the televisions and my grandfather's recliner was now climate controlled during waking hours.
When Grandma and Grandpa installed central air, the behemoth window unit traveled back up to Orland Park in the back of our Dodge Dart. In my mind it looms large as our refrigerator, but surely that's an exaggeration of my memory. My father installed it in the living room wall. We could have cool air, but not much and not too cool. All the doors on the house were to be closed so the cool air could be conserved and confined to the kitchen, dining room and living room. At night we opened the doors for circulation after the air conditioner was turned off.
Our neighbors in Orland Park had a swimming pool. We could only see a corner of it through my mom's flower bed and our neighbor's shrubbery, but sound travelled just fine across the boundary lines and there was many a wistful and wasted glance in the direction of all the shrieking and splashing. Even though Orland Park flooded a flat lot for wintertime skating, there was no public pool in the town. Visits to Missouri meant pumping up inner tubes on a hot afternoon and walking down a mown path through the pasture to our biggest farm pond (christened Lake Ginger in honor of my mom). The water was bath warm from the sun for the first foot, but down below where our feet and the little fishies swam, it was calm and cool. These outings were marred only by efforts to exit the pond without becoming mired in the muck or squishing a dozen stricken frogs. Even better was summer vacation, no matter where we travelled because there was always the chance the motel we pulled into might have a POOL!

Water is the final antidote to the dust coated weariness of August. From coast to coast, forbidden Great Lake to frigid mountain stream, urban fountain to Kansas chlorine, cool blue opposes blistering orange on the color wheel of comfort.

Like cattle shoulder deep in a farm pond and hogs in the damp of their mud holes, humans escape heat any way they can. Kids spray squirt guns and bust balloons; they float in galvanized tanks and hike with their towels to the deep spots in creeks. They will finish any household chore assigned just so they can strip down to their chlorine faded suits and while away those super heated summer days in a pool.

That's the coolest spot of all.

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