greaterthansparrows

I have seeded the bare spots in the back and side yard today that were created by pulling out the pile, at long last, that was created by uncovering the hidden patio in the back, and then spreading that dirt into the worst of the hollows in the side yard so that I don't have to worry about turning an ankle heading for the hose.  (The elders came and took care of that task.) The grass seed was weirdly bright blue because it's coated with fertilizer, but it's easy to see. The hose is on the opposite side of the house from the garden plot.  Naturally.  And no, you couldn't do it otherwise.  The space from the exterior wall to the fences are 10 feet on the street side, 10 1/2 on the north/interior side, and 12 feet to the back...the back is probably only ten feet to the fence from the walkway that runs across it, and down to the back gate that opens onto the sidewalk.  The raised, already-there section on the street side (remember, we're on a corner) has the sunsh...

I didn't really mean to take the whole summer off.  This is what happened... My last Institute lesson, finishing Jeremiah, was done.  I had been reading a book, trying to find the William Monk novels by Anne Perry in sequence, and I knew it would become too intense to put down.  I resolutely set it aside for two days to finish preparing my lesson.  Six lessons on Isaiah, two on minor prophets and finishing I Kings, then three on Jeremiah, had been intensive.  I learned so much and was so blessed, and they had swallowed my life whole.  My garden was going in at the same time. I went to water aerobics after class, then home.  I had a quick lunch and then sat down with the book.  I made dinner on time, then back to the book.  When I finished it before bedtime, I picked up another book.  That one took me through the next day.  I was clearly sucked into the reading I had not had time for. Summer-- it's been quite a busy break....

This was my first Mother's Day as a fully long-distance mother.  I looked at the missionary dinner calendar last week and noticed that this Sunday didn't have anybody signed up to feel the elders, so I took the opportunity.  It seemed like it would be a very happy day to offer them dinner, when they got to talk to their families and we could hear all about them. We have two sets of elders right now, and when Hubby asked which ones we were getting, I told him, "the diggers."  These two have come twice to dig up space for us to plant a garden, and I got to show them what we've done so far.  I cannot dig up the space or do much, but I can (I hope) tend it once it's done.  I asked the other two last evening at a family game night for the ward if they had someone to feed them, and they assured me they did.  We would be very full with all of them, but I bought the biggest chicken I think I've ever seen (6 lbs!) yesterday in case, and lots of asparagus.  I ...

We had a very blessed Easter.  I know that was a week ago, but it has lingered.  I haven't been writing, though it feels like it's all I've done today. Last Sunday we had our first formal guests.  We didn't get everything unpacked and organized, but we made major inroads.  We have had another couple over for nibbles and a movie, but this was our first sit down dinner.  Our friend who gave us a spur-of-the-moment invitation for Christmas dinner when I was feeling blue we had for Easter.  We were only sorry that his wife didn't feel well and stayed home. We dug out the leaf for the table and pulled the table out from the wall.  For just the two of us, we don't need the full length and we don't need the back side of it.  If we have the table out enough to get in and out of it on all sides, then you have to walk around it to get to the kitchen.  So we placed it up against the wall under the window with the set of blinds that we leave closed....

It's spring, and the flowering trees around town are in various stages.  I drove down the old block and the cherry blossoms were barely budding, and I remembered how late they seemed every year, because the timetable of the trees along a stretch of South 12th, where I travel pretty much anytime I go anywhere brings them out earlier.  The Prices' magnolia tree , that was cut back to  such a truncated state two years ago, has brought back branches, lightweight ones, in a tulip shape and they were almost  ready to open; in the week since, I imagine that they have.  I loved that tree across the street, out my front door.  I miss it. The white-blossoming trees that aren't apples are in bloom, and as I've gone walking I recognize that whatever they are, the city must have been responsible for planting them years, decades, ago, because they go up and down many of the blocks in this neighborhood.  The apple tree behind us, that so surprised me last summer, ...

Yesterday was the one year anniversary of our signing the lease here and getting the keys.  We had waited on pins and needles for an extra week for the confirmation that our application was accepted.  We still didn't know what would happen with our house, we didn't know how we were going to make it, but we knew that the Lord had answered our prayers and opened it up. The sale of the house closed two weeks ago when the lease option was exercised by the parents of the mom of the couple living in it.  (Got that?)  The contract provided that they could be substituted if the young, resident couple couldn't get the financing they wanted.  (Well, the contract simply provided that they could be substituted, and we understood why that would be what happened, and then the grandparent couple will sell it to their kids when they get that worked out.)  The house is theirs. I drove through the block yesterday to see if the trees are out yet.  The cherry blossom...

I have to put these away, and I've promised that they will be organized and stored in the space waiting for them.  It's been a lift to my spirits to come in and sit down and see them spread around me.  But I have to get back to business, sadly. This one is very sweet, Geoff not quite three giving a kiss to his new baby sister Carole.  It softens my heart every time I come in and sit down and see it.  It was one that hadn't seen the light of day for a while. My column for the Nauvoo Times this week is about this whole experience of gathering photos .  It's called A Book of Remembering and you can read it here. The two pictures with my Grandmother Jeppson that are mentioned in it are here: and here: sitting out in the garden at Aunt Elizabeth's at our reception. When I was in college, I used to write letters.  Back in the day, we wrote letters on special paper called stationery, made to be pretty, and sent them off in envelopes with stamps....

I saw the caller ID on the phone, and recognized my second daughter.  She doesn't call often, so I picked up and said hello.  Happily.  She said, "Hi, mom, would you like to have lunch with me today?"  See title to this post.  I couldn't immediately process that question, since she lives almost across the country. "Where are you? Of course!" "Sea-Tac.  I'll explain when I see you, it's been completely crazy, I had this conference and was so slammed that the date suddenly arrived before I realized it."  She explained when we met why she had been so slammed, and I could understand.  She mentioned that she had said something about this coming up later, when we had talked at Christmas, but with no details it didn't stick to my mind two months ago. So yes, the only thing that couldn't be rearranged was at 4 p.m. and lunch wouldn't mess it up.  She said she realized as she went to the airport that she hadn't talked to us yet...

My project was a custom photo book, for which I had prepaid a voucher through Amazon Local.  I had tried out  picaboo.com for a smaller book, on a similar kind of deal, last fall and made a book of pictures of our grandchildren, and it came out beautifully.  This time I wanted to create a book of the forty years we have been married; from our own baby pictures to our wedding through pictures of our children and their marriages.  I got this voucher at Christmas, and it was only good through last Thursday.  After that, the amount I had actually paid could be credited to any subsequent retail purchase, but I couldn't afford the normal rates, and the savings of fifty-plus dollars was huge. Trouble was, I had to find where the pictures were.  The ones that had been in a bedroom nightstand, I thought I knew where they were, but that box was buried in the back room and I couldn't physically get to it.  Hubby has been swamped, and the other rooms are ahead...

It's Valentine's Day...[well, it was when I started to write this, now a week has gone by].  I commend this column from Hannah Bird in the Nauvoo Times. There was a show whose name I forget about a married couple, and some of the story-screen time was in the therapist's office for their individual sessions.  The scene that has stayed with me is one where the wife is talking about how all the focus is on the beginnings, the wedding plans, the blissful  embarking on a new joint life.  She offers the observation that the beginnings are easy, and marriage is easy at the end.  It's the middle that's hard.  How much of it is middle, the counselor asks.  "It's all middle," was the honest reply. Rapture and bliss will not be a normal, continuous state.  Happy marriages are not between people who are happy every second.  True, real love will keep a background, a bedrock, of bliss that doesn't get extinguished through all the 'middle' of a life s...

This is a day to stay focused and keep pushing through. I have done all the dishes, two days of them--keep in mind that I don't have a dishwasher in this old house, and  I've taken down the first load of laundry in the rain--keep in mind that the basement access is outside.   I have a lesson to prepare for tomorrow on the book of Hosea which was almost utterly unfamiliar to me.  I have a personal project on deadline for this week, and I almost forgot that I had a column due.  I got it sent on time yesterday morning. I couldn't sleep last night until past 4:00.  I did not rise and shine early and alert this morning. The reason for my unsleep was twofold.  My neck was spasmed up and the rest of me wasn't that happy.  That's feeling the effects of a weekend I really enjoyed, which is a draft in the list that I need to go back and finish.  This photo project has consumed me, and since I couldn't get comfortable and drop off, my mind wouldn't ...

I had to get up in testimony meeting last week.  It was February. Last February, a year ago, we had run out of financial resources.  We knew that point was approaching, and we kept hoping that Hubby would get work somewhere.  We knew we had to sell the house sooner than the summer target we were looking at, and that we might easily lose the house instead.  We had no idea what we were going to do.  The common assumption was that we would stay and dodge the phone calls and stretch out the process until we were foreclosed, but we wished to honor our obligation and find a better answer.  We didn't know if we would have any real alternative, though. By the last day of the month, this February right now, the sale of our house should close.  At each step along the way between last year and now events and needs lined up in ways that could not be mistaken as chance.  At each step we had no idea what would be next or how quickly, but we found a place to...

The big tree in front, that drips goop on our car in summer.  Across the street is the empty Rite-Aid store.  It was snowing last night. This is probably the only snow we'll get this year.  The storm systems come in, and most often we get rain or just a dusting, where other areas get more snow.  Many times the big systems come in from the north and Everett will get dumped on, say, and it will go east to the foothills and leave snow and curve south and back west, giving snow to Olympia, Graham, the Peninsula (Gig Harbor and beyond, up to Bremerton), but Tacoma is in that center point and Commencement Bay keeps us just warm enough that we don't get the snow. People can have some snow as close as five miles from where we live, but we just get wet. (We used to have snow more often, but in recent years it seems less common.) Taken with the flash, standing on our itty-bitty porch looking north across the street on the side.  There's a hedge on each ...

The post I didn't finish before I wrote about Joel turned into my column for this week.  Teaching Elisha and the story of Naaman the leper from Syria I used this film on DVD from the Church study resources.  It's one of those stories we might remember from Sunday school, but I hadn't looked at it in depth.  As I find over and over again, there is so much more there than we sometimes pay attention to. Here is  my column with the profound effect it had on me and on the class, seeing as if we were there, rather than rushing past the surface of the words.  We have our own struggles with assumptions or pride or faith, and this depiction speaks to them. Sometimes we have to follow the Lord's direction to its conclusion before we can see its purpose or understand its process.  The choice to trust teaches us, if we will continue.

It's been a long time since Christmas.  There are not-finished drafts in my queue, but since they haven't been finished and posted, they don't do much good.  A couple of them will be coming along later, they won't be abandoned. Our Institute lessons were set up on the calendar for four semesters of the Old Testament, to match up with the chapters in the student manual for the course(s).  We checked at the beginning for the first manual, and the teacher materials and student materials matched one-to-one, unlike the materials for the Doctrine & Covenants, where the student manual had a section, however brief or lengthy, for each section of the scripture, and the lessons were sometimes one section and sometimes several.  For a couple of the revelations, there were two lessons. But the Old Testament was straightforward, and matched up precisely, teacher and student sections.  At least the first two terms did, so we didn't check on the third and just made up ...