Beloved,

        At six weeks old she's the size, shape and shade of a fat loaf of bread. Abducted from her cuddle puddle of 10 brothers and sisters she weeps for her lost family. Except Scout doesn’t weep, she wails.  She wails and flings herself against the crate door until she is hysterical and hiccuping.  So we hold her until she sleeps, sneak her back into the crate where she’ll stay an hour or so.  Then she cries and we start all over.   

Those were her first two and half nights.  Decisions made by the sleep deprived rarely make sense long term.  The teenager finally took the puppy to her own bed where they both slept 6 solid hours.  Times all three of us that’s 18 hours of bliss!  The morning seems brighter, happier, more hopeful.  

I wish our older golden, Rosie Cotton, would help.  She could snuggle her or sleep by her crate.  But she’s hurt and jealous. Maybe she feels displaced.  Maybe they are acting out some ancient rite of canine dominance.  Rosie is either standoffish or snarly, her own hysteria over perceived loss.  I try not to compare her to Cody, who let the baby Rosie chew his ears and paws.  These two will work it out, be friends eventually, cuddly even.

Relationships are always hard.  Denial of our own anxiety and neediness get in the way of trust.  We miss the very thing we need most, the grounding comfort of another person’s presence. The Creator made none of us to thrive alone.  Some trees even promulgate in circles - as if each one needs to be close to all the others.  What life we forfeit in pride and fear!

Scout has crawled into her crate for the moment and she’s even sleeping.   Maybe she’s starting to feel at home.  I pray today you know yourself well-loved.  peace & prayers, pastor annette     

March 11, 2014


Beloved:

        The herb patch looked dead as the rest when I combed winter’s dross from some garden beds yesterday.  Then I smelled it, not spring but summer, the heat and spice of oregano and rosemary.  Lavender, thyme, lemon balm and mint with just a whiff of chive.  Enough dried herbs to stock a restaurant kitchen raked into the yard to be trampled and pecked through by hens with hardly particular palates.  I found some green things too; tulip blades and a tendril of butterfly weed.  

     The tulips will survive winter’s final lash but probably not the butterfly weed.  She’ll have to try again in April.  It’s no new observation, that just below the dross of winter, summer is in full swing, hardly able to keep its proper place in seasons’ line.  All that’s required is a rake and the will to go outside.  

     I claim to want the spring and yet cling to the indoor warmth of winter, finding one more inside chore while the animals are desperate to go out.  The dog even went swimming yesterday!  The chickens scratched around the woods until evening. And I was ever so glad I finally put on my gloves and muck boots.  

Today is promised as sunnier still.  Enjoy the warmth inside and out.  peace & prayers, pastor annette

Beloved:

For all my knitting, sewing and gardening, I’d still rather read.  I get sad realizing I may have only forty reading years left, knowing there’s fiction, history, geography, theology, poetry and science I’ll never even touch. Or that I could read everything written in English and not scratch the surface of it all.  When I was a new reader, I worried I would forget how.  It was a relief to look at the cereal box every morning and confirm I could still do it.   

Right now I have bookmarks in The Federal Papers by Alexander Hamilton, The Finest Hour by Winston Churchill, This Is the Story of A Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett, and R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman. (I find it funny that he abbreviates Lee’s name but not his own). Churchill was a beautiful writer.  Every third or fourth page in between are excruciatingly detailed verbatims of meetings with his Lord Admiral.  Mr. Lee, finally graduated from West Point and has been in St. Louis dredging the Mississippi River for three chapters.  Hamilton is occasionally interrupted by James Madison and John Jay as the three of them campaign to sell the country on the new constitution.  Patchett’s essay on plant life in Tennessee is poetry in paragraph.  

I’m not nearly as smart as my book list suggests which is why I read, to know stuff.  But only partly.  The process  is sacred to me.  Someone had a thought in his brain.  He channeled the thought through his arm into his hand which pushed it out through a pencil onto a sheet of paper.  He sent the paper to someone who launched it through a factory and a book popped out the other side.  The Churchill book lived hither and yon for 59 years before landing in the Bloomington Antique Mall where I found it and carried it home in a grocery sack. And while I don’t much care which ships carried fourteen and sixteen pound guns, how amazing is it that I get a front row seat to that conversation!   

I can’t remember my kids’ phone numbers but I remember things I read in books  when I was in 4th grade. Writers are my heroes.  I’d rather lose an arm than lose literacy.  I’m grateful not to have to choose, of course, as arms and literacy are endlessly useful and so essentially human.  Like eating and breathing.   I’d like to high five the Mesopotamian who first thought of it.  But that thought has me wanting to read about linguistics now and I simply must let the dog out and feed the chickens.  Alas . . . .

peace & prayers, pastor annette