The story of Spooky is over on Karen’s blog if you want to check it out.  Last week I received news from the rescue people that he had been successfully adopted and has his own swimming pool.  That’s an important thing in the Texas sun.  Spooky is a representation of where we were last summer and the path of where we have walked until this moment.  This picture, therefore, holds a thousand thoughts and memories.

Sometimes things have endings, and for now this blog is ending.  Not all endings are a bad thing, as noted in the photo of Spooky.  He’s just at the beginning.  Thank you for reading.

A few weeks ago, my friend Mrs. Klause, gave me a jar of her homemade dill pickles.  They were delicious and fresh and so I asked for the recipe.  After I read through her instructions, I thought it would be helpful if we could make them together so this week Mrs. Klause came over with her three adorable girls and we started cutting four pounds of cucumbers.  I could not find pickling cucumbers so we tried what we found in the grocery store.  Pickling cucumbers are half the size of the ones we used.

Here is our sweet friend Kennedy working on cucumbers.  She works with her mommy in the kitchen quite a bit, so this was not her first pickling experience.  We did get a kick out of her though, when on her first slice of pickle she took a big crunchy bite herself.   

Abigail helps our dear little friend Addison peel an onion.  There were also garlic cloves to peel.

Left to right, Abigail, Addison, Kimberly, Kennedy, and Kathy.

Layering the vegetables in the jar.  Originally we were going to use glass bowls, but then I remembered two of James’ kefir / cottage cheese / sauerkraut jars and they worked fine.  The fresh dill was layered stalk by stalk in with each layer.   Sometimes I amaze myself with how things never connect in my brain.  I am about to be 50 years old (sob, sob) and have eaten dill pickles all my life and loved them.  It was not until I was purchasing the fresh dill in the store that my brain made the connection that they are called dill pickles because there is dill in them.  Don’t ask me why, I just never thought of it before.  I got such a kick out of myself and my stupidity that I laughed in the produce aisle of the store.  I wonder how many hundreds thousands millions billions of things I have never connected that are totally ridiculous as the dill with the pickle. 

Emily still cutting cucumbers.  There were a lot of them!

The pickles must sit in the brine (water, pickling salt, and vinegar) for three full days.  Bowls of water are on the tops to keep the pickles submerged in the brine.  Mrs. Klause also brought bread and butter pickles for us to try and also a jar of pickled okra  leather.  I was surprised that pickling turns okra from slimy to leathery.  This may be a key to making other things more palatable.  The first thing I thought of was pickled seaweed.  That would be like making edible shoelaces.   Okra is a southern vegetable – quite alien to me before and after tasting either fresh or pickled.  It grows so easily in Texas that I’m not sure why it’s not classified as a weed.  Most often a southern will go to great lengths to make okra something to put on a dinner plate, like battering and frying it or using it as filler in stews, but my friend Dee actually eats it raw.  Brave woman.

Now the long wait.  Abigail has asked multiple times if they are done yet. 

Thank you to the Klause family for turning us into pickle making people.

This morning Karen opened the freezer and pulled out a mysterious item.  My back was toward her and all of a sudden I heard giggles.  Then laughter.  Before I knew it, a small frozen tube of toothpaste was being passed around the kitchen with hilarity. 

On the tube was this green message: 

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

Frozen toothpaste!

I almost fell out of my chair laughing.  It is one of my favorites!  I will think of you every single time I eat a bowl for the rest of my life.  I can’t wait to serve my grandchildren a bowl and tell them about my beloved friend Mrs. Spangler.

This comes on the heels of an email that I wrote to this person who snook (past tense of sneak) this into my freezer.  I had explained why I don’t like that flavor of frozen ice cream toothpaste.

What we will never forget about my friend is that sometime yesterday in the middle of snooking toothpaste into my freezer and making pickles and bringing pickled okra leather for me to taste, she did a dual demonstration of how a nurse does an IV and how a paramedic does one. 

Now that I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

Thank you, Mrs. Klause.

The beauty of a common dandelion.

Taken by Karen this morning.  Hop over to her blog to see what is going on in our yard.  Karen and I jointly have a dream of seeing Alaska though she says you don’t have to go to Alaska to see something fantastic.  We once had someone visit our home who proudly gave a long speech of all the places he had been.  Yet upon questioning, he could not detail what he saw, because he really did not see.  I have often thought that my daughter has seen more on our few acres than this man who traveled the world.  And this man never saw the need of his common man, nor the beauties of the common person… yet he held in his hands the treasures needed by the needy.  He did not give and he knew no wonder.  To me this was a great shame.  Instead of being a great man, he came up small.

C.S. Lewis …  “I gazed down in to a little ditch beneath a grey hedge, where there was a pleasant mixture of ivies and low plants and mosses and thought of herbalists and their art, and what a private retired wisdom it would be to go on probing along such hedges and the eaves of woods for some herb of virtuous powers … and having at the same time a stronger sense of the mysteries at our feet where homeliness and magic embrace one another.”

This week I received a little box in the mail – wrapped in white paper and a pink bow.  In it was a sleepytime herbal tea – maybe the herb of virtuous powers that C.S. Lewis referred to.  My friend does not have ample provision to be going around sending me packages, but she somehow saw my need for sleep and she somehow found value in someone so common and homely. (Me)  Think I’ll go pick some dandelions in her honor.

Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.

Faith is the courage to dance to it today.

No, this is not a deeply theological statement.  But “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  (Hebrews 11:1)  The challenge of my life is to live up to my name.  I am such a hope-less person.  Seems like someone else should have been given my name.  Maybe I should have been Dolores (sorrows) or Petula (seeker) or Tara (rocky pinnacle) or Brenda (firebrand).  I have been known to sign emails as just-a-dope.

I was named after my mother’s friend, who was a missionary and a children’s Bible teacher at Christian conferences and camps.  When my mother died, the people we knew were all taken away and we no longer saw family friends and relatives.  It was exactly 30 years later at my father’s funeral that a very old lady came up to me, grasped my hand and whispered, “I am Hope.”  I knew immediately who she was.  I only had a few moments with her and then she vanished.  My guess is that she is with the Lord now singing the music of the future.

Thank you, Lord, for being named after one that I admire and after one that my mother loved dearly.  Now, may I somehow live up to my name and hear the music of heaven and live courageously within its melodies right now.

I don’t like Petula anyway.

Congratulations to my son, Matthew, on winning second place in the Heard Natural Science Museum 2009 Photography Contest in the Junior Division.  Last fall he shot this photo at Lake Texoma.  I liked the dark frame he achieved with the trees, the blue lake, and the fall colors.  I guess some judges liked it too.   Matthew has not seen his photo on display but hopefully tomorrow he will be well enough to take a trip to see it.  He has been recovering from a 20 foot fall that occurred earlier this week.  He was up in our tall oak tree developing a pulley system to transport items from a smaller tree up to the treehouse and when he leaned over to grab a cord, he slipped off the branch he was standing on.   He just about blacked out, saw a lot of stars, and then could not move for a while.  He injured his ribs and his collarbone and has a pretty good backache.  I’m glad I did not see my son fall, but I have seen the indentation it made on the ground.  On the other hand, maybe a photo of the fall would have won a photo contest, if the camera would have survived me dropping it. 

Karen entered this photo that she entitled First Pickin’ and as you can see, it was the first blackberry on our bushes last spring.  I do not have it cropped as nicely as she had it when she had it printed for the contest.  I love berries and berry patches.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass.

It’s about learning to dance in the rain.

In remembrance of my mother, who passed away on March 13th when I was a little girl.

When My Mother Tucked Me In

          By Betty Garland

Oh, the quaint and curious carving

On the posts of that old bed!

There were long-beacked, queer old griffins

Wearing crowns upon their head;

And they fiercely looked down on me

With a cold, sardonic grin;

I was not afraid of griffins

When my mother tucked me in.

What cared I for dismal shadows

Shifting up and down the floor,

Or the bleak and gruesome wind gusts

Beating ‘gainst the close-shut door,

Or the rattling of the windows,

All the outside noise and din?

I was safe and warm and happy

When my mother tucked me in.

Sweet and soft her gentle fingers,

As they touched my sunburnt face;

Sweet to me the wafted odor

That enwrapped her dainty lace;

Then a pat or two at parting,

And a good-night kiss between;

All my troubles were forgotten

When my mother tucked me in.

Now the stricken years have borne me

Far away from love and home;

Ah! No mother leans above me

In the nights that go and come.

But it gives me peace and comfort,

When my heart is sore within,

Just to lie right still and, dreaming,

Think my mother tucked me in.

O the gentle, gentle breathing

To her dear hearts’ softer beat,

And the quiet, quiet moving

Of her soft-shod, willing feet!

And, Time, one boon I ask thee,

Whatsoe’er may be my sin,

When I’m dying let me see her

As she used to tuck me in.

No, they are not collies.  Yes, there is more than puppies in the photo.