Daddy's Home!

Dad is back from a week in Reno, Nevada at his company's annual national convention. It was a long week for him and a long one for me and the kids. He missed his flight early this morning and didn't get home until nearly six.

There were shouts,"Dad's home!" and thundering hoofbeats through the house out to the garage to meet him and welcome him inside with all his luggage. When the kids were little they'd run squealing to meet him at the door when he came home for work. They still are excited, though granted, a little more "respectable" when they see him drive up to the house after a trip.

It does my heart good to see them hurry out and hug him. My big teen sons never hold back from  expressing their love for their dad. Brenna squeals and won't even let him get out of the car before she gets her hug. I loved my own daddy like that-- still do. Good fathers are a decided and incomparable treasure.

Today, after going to pick up a granddaughter, he will take us for a Christmas outing to choose a tree and we will get to spend the evening listening to Christmas music and decorating our tree. Families are a wonderful creation!

Daddy Cooked Tapioca

When I was growing up in a large family, Mama was often busy with the little ones' bedtime routines in the evenings, so Daddy would cook for us older ones if we wanted a meal or snack late at night. One of his favorite projects was tapioca pudding.

Sometimes he cooked  tapioca after church on Sunday night. It is now a food I crave when I am homesick or when the weather is nasty and miserable. I love to eat it hot with a sprinkle of nutmeg or cinnamon on top.  It reminds of my sweet daddy and so it comforts my soul.

Many of you have experienced tapioca as a school  cafeteria or restaurant food. That form of pudding may have been gooey and cold and practically inedible. You probably have never tasted any cooked at home from fresh ingredients.If you have tasted the real thing, you likely love it like I do.

Daddy used Minute Tapioca, which is ground so it doesn't need to be soaked overnight before cooking. In the pan you combine eggs, a few tablespoons of tapioca, salt, milk, and sugar. Let it sit for about ten minutes then cook over medium heat like any  pudding. When it begins to boil, take it off the heat and let it set. The pudding will thicken. While it is still warm, ladle it into bowls and sprinkle with a dash of nutmeg.

Tapioca keeps well in the refrigerator and is delicious cold, or reheated in the microwave.I make a double batch. My children love it as much as I do and so often there is none to keep. It makes a perfect winter dessert.

All's Well

The evening sky was clear and stars began to show even before the sun set. The world was still and faded like an old woolen coat. The were colors, but not bright or harsh ones in the setting sun behind the bare tree's filigreed silhouettes. The only sounds coming to my ears were the gentle creak of the porch swing's chain and the rustle of dry leaves as the dog settled into them to sleep under the bedroom window. In the distance, I heard a cow bawling, a few birds calls, and an occasional far away bark of a dog. There was no wind, no tractors rumbling, no sound of traffic passing. All quiet on the home front.

Like A Green Pine Tree

"I, the Lord, am the one who answers your prayers and watches over you. I am like a green pine tree; your blessings come from me." Hosea 14:8

"He that has a bountiful eye shall be blessed, for he gives his bread to the poor." Proverbs 22:9

Truant Sun

The Truant Sun
By Elece Hollis

The sun peeped out this morning
No color, no majesty,
No pomp and splendor, just a peep.
I think he must have been ashamed of himself
After all those days of gloom and drear.
There he was!
He peeked out like a child
Accused of a cookie snitching,
Like a puppy who has
Shredded the morning paper—the Sunday paper
The severity of his crime escaped him.
To my eyes he was a traitor seeking amnesty.
”It’s about time you showed!” I blurted
And sent him scuttling for cover
Like a frightened rabbit back
Behind a cloud.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry! Please don’t go!” I cried
“ We need you today! We can’t take it!”
Out he peered tentatively
I sighed with relief.
“Please,” I pleaded plucking carefully
At the sliver of light like a weaver
Who has dropped a thread
And must most gently attempt to reach
Through the warp
To retrieve it and pull it back into the design.

The Snowflake

It snowed in Oklahoma last week, which was the cause of a great deal of delight at my house. The kids zoomed through their schoolwork and headed for the back room to don overcoats, stocking caps, and gloves. I ventured out long enough put a tray of extra birdseed in the front yard for my cardinals, juncos, sparrows, and nuthatches. Two pairs of bluebirds and a Jay scrabbled at the suet feeders with the woodpeckers.

I watched the kids build a mini-snowman (a snow-baby or a result of global warming shorter snowmen?). I watched them slide down the hill on a blue plastic sled and clobber each other with snowballs. Their shouting and laughing didn’t dissuade the birds from eating.

The snow fell in huge flakes. Soon the whole ground was covered and the branches of the trees and the bushes were frosty. The blowing snow against the dismal browns and grays of Oklahoma’s January were a welcome sight. It made me understand Northerners for a fraction of a minute.
No wonder they love it. It is beautiful!

Have you ever felt like a snowflake—just a one small person in the great span of eternity—just one diminutive drop in the great ocean of humanity—just one tiny part of God’s world? Oh, I have.

Snowflakes are formed when minute particles called ice nuclei pass through the clouds. As a particle tumbles in the super cooled moisture, it forms a six-sided crystal—radiating from the center. The sides add branches and buds that make the snowflake grow and change as it falls. Though each snowflake is small, flakes soon cover the ground.

I am like one of those snowflakes. My influence begins inside my home, with my own children and my grandbabies. The things I do and say affect my neighbors, my community, and my society. My influence reaches beyond my house to other homes. My influence, for good or bad, grows and continues past myself, past days at home washing faces and sweeping up messes, past soothing quarrels and folding dish towels, past cooking supper and changing bed sheets.

My home is a mission field and I serve God here. I represent Christ here. Some days I feel like I am being tumbled in cold places—buffeted by trials and weighed down by work and problems. Some days I feel small, fragile, and isolated. That is the time to spread my hands farther and be like a snowflake, helping to cover the world with the beauty of the knowledge of Jesus.

(Taken from What's Good About Home 2007)

Woodstove Warmth

Fire is crackling in the woodstove this morning. This old house is blessed with a fine large square woodstove. It is a comfort on winter days when cold creeps in like smoke around windows and doors. We love to open a door and watch the orange flames until the fire grows so we have to close the doors. Then the stove radiates heat to our whole house and we sit nearby or take spare minutes to stand in front of it and absorb the heat.

I suppose it is piece of yesteryear, in these modern times of central heat systems with thermostats that keep houses evenly toasty. Still , it is a benefit to us, the only cost being the labor of cutting and splitting wood , hauling the wood in, and cleaning the hearth of ashes.
This is not the first stove this old house has known. Out in the barn we found an potbellied stove that may have once heated the Evening Star School. The Evening Star was built in the early 1900's by homesteaders who claimed acreage along what is now Highway 52, near Morris, Oklahoma. When a new brick school was erected in 1930, the old frame building was moved to this land and converted into a home. Old timers say the building was hoisted onto wagons and pulled by oxen teams to this spot. Later, several additions and siding created the house we now know.

I had hoped to fill the old stove with soil and plant strawberries and flowers in it and set it on the porch. The stove , produced in 1906 at a foundry in Kansas City, might be the one which was ordered by the school board's building committee to heat the newly built schoolhouse. It was shipped by train to Okmulgee where a farmer waited at the depot to load it into his wagon. He hauled it to the schoolhouse to be installed in the center of the classroom in time for the winter session.

I imagine the school teacher arriving early in the morning to start a fire and soon afterwards, students arriving , hanging their hats and coats on hooks along the walls and coming to warm their cold selves by the stove. I imagine boys carrying in armloads of firewood to keep the fire going all day. The teacher may have heated water in a kettle atop the stove for warming cups of tea or coffee or simmered a kettle of beans for lunch or even baked potatoes in the coals.

My woodstove, though you may be messy and troublesome, I thank God for the blessing of comfort you add to my home.

Breaking and Enduring

As my friend Dawn was helping me wash dishes one night during their visit she dropped my Phaltzgraf soup tureen into the white porcelain sink. It bounced twice and split in half like a ripe melon. “Oh, don’t worry, Dawn. It’s just an old bowl. I have loads of bowls.” I tossed it in the trash can and later threw out the useless lid. I didn’t tell her it had been a gift from my mother-in-law. WAH.

I love all my pottery, crockery bowls, bean pots, and pitchers. I have a set of bowls from Marshall, Texas, besides many other heavy bowls, and a couple of old pitchers that keep tea cold and fresh. I have a pickle crock that I store rolled maps in all year, except for a month or two in summer when I make pickles in it. On my dinner table I have a lovely satiny blue pottery bowl that I bought from a Creek Indian potter.

Recently, I threw away my “pomegranate bowl”—a beautiful antique cream-colored bowl with fruit painted delicately on the side. It cracked during a move and I had kept it on a shelf and put some old spoons and packets of flower seeds in it. I chipped the edge of my brown Hull platter and had to throw it. I have trouble parting with some things— any pottery dishes especially. I kept the pieces of a broken china teapot with a wicker handle for years before I could throw it away. Why do I cling to these things so?

But living with kids, which, of course, is one of those things you do during motherhood, means things will get broken. I could put all my pretty breakables aside and never use them. I could pack them up and preserve them, but I love to use them. Life is fuller and richer with them. A friend whose house burned told me she had never eaten off her china—never! She said if she ever got more she would use it as often as she liked.

My mama, who raised nine children, used to say in despair at an accident, “You can’t have anything!” I know the feeling. Things get broken, scuffed, worn out, cracked, chipped, stained, scarred, scratched and marred. It can’t be helped. But you can’t get mad. People must be valued over things. We toss and go on. There will be other pretty things to enjoy in the future. Today there are friends and family to love and the sun is shining.

Barns in America

Traveling to north Michigan, across Illinois and through Indiana, Arkansas, Missouri, and back into Oklahoma, I became intrigued with barns and the state of farming in America. This barn is Silver Lake in Traverse City, Michigan. A beautiful well-kept barn and grounds with a neat silo and a good roof, this barn seemed the essence of the small long-established family farm. These barns are huge and stand out above the farmland and houses around them. Some had silos of stone or brick. Many had silos missing. Some were maintained and many were decaying and no longer used.

The Boone Farm is a landmark. The family is proud of it and maintains it. Notice the stone base and the word BOONE across the front. Beside it is a small shed and the farmhouse which is small by comparison to this monster-sized barn. The porch of the white clapboard house is embellished with scrollwork--a fine touch of beauty for its day.

This stone barn must have been used as a home at one time. Now it is full of fresh-baled hay. It is located east of Westville, Arkansas. It is built of round white and gray rocks. I can imagine it with pigs, cows, a pair of mules, and a chicken yard. The farmhouse is gone; maybe burned down or swept away by a tornado. Who knows?

Many old weathered barns like this one seem to still be in use. Imagine it full of life with snow banked against it outside. Imagine the farmer and his sons working- feeding the animals, forking down clean hay from the loft and dried corn from a silo, long-since dismantled. Imagine children playing in the loft; hide and seek and swinging on a rope out of the loft to the floor below.

Several old red barns had white trim and the white arches painted on the side doors like this one does. I wondered if that style is a particular ethnic style like a Polish farm, or a German farm. I will have to study. The silo is empty and in bad repair. Barns are not used as much for farming, for animals, for hay or storing tractors and wagons. They are picturesque reminders of the days when a farm could support a family growing corn, beets, potatoes, working a cherry or apple orchard, tapping maple trees for syrup, milking a barn full of black and white dairy cows, or harvesting wheat.

There is certainly still much farming going on. We are a rich country as far as arable land is concerned. Farmers have formed cooperatives and they have the means to ship to markets and yet they cannot compete with the huge conglomerates that have the money for irrigation systems, major equipment like combines and tractors, fertilizers, crop storage with refrigeration, transporting, and marketing.

We drove past hundreds and hundreds of miles of corn, soybeans, and past orchards of peaches, apples, and cherries. We saw farm equipment, irrigators, windmills, and barns; larger barns with tin roofs, larger silos for the huge amounts of corn a farmer can produce with all the equipment -faster and more efficient than a team of mules.

We stopped at one old barn and bought corn. We stopped at still another to buy gladiolas - white with pink edges. We dropped our quarters into a weathered wooden box since noone was minding shop.

Soon I will tell you about the trip -the lakes, the bay, the birds, the foods, the people, the fun, and mishaps. I'm too tired now. Be watching for more beautiful barn photos.