Bits & Bobs and Books & Hope

August 12, 2025

Beloved:

          The command strip Velcro has given out, so the pressboard box I use to organize small desk things keeps falling off the wall.  I tried new strips on the box, to no good end.  I just picked everything up off the floor for the fourth time at least, threw the stupid box in the trash then took it right back out again.  It can live on my desk for now.
          An old friend once told me his camping club had considered changing their name from camping club to guys-who-like-to-buy-camping-stuff club and I knew exactly what he meant.  I am afraid to do the math lest I learn I’ve spent more time collecting and organizing my fabric, yarn, craft and office supplies than I’ve actually spent sewing, knitting, collaging and writing.  Fortunately my habits are not outrageously expensive, bits and bobs my kids will someday donate to the Quilters’ Guild or Teachers’ Warehouse.
          But not books.  Books don’t count.  A new pen* or a hank of yarn soothes, each in their own way ~ fun to hold, look at and play with, to put away and get back out.  While books are friends whose presence in my house reminds me of when and where I was when I read them.  I remember how they changed my thinking, and my heart, which is to say my life.  When I could first read easily, around age six or seven, I’d wonder if I could forget how to do it.  I’d test myself on cereal boxes and billboards.  I felt like a magician.  Half a century later, it still seems a little magical, chunks of inky paper with the power to change a person, a people, the world.
          I sit down to write these Tuesday notes without much plan.  I look around and see the pressboard box on the floor again, so I start there and see where my typing takes me. Halfway around the room to the stack of books by my rocking chair, as it turns out, where the novel I started yesterday lies open.  The Testament, by Eli Wiesel, an interesting companion to the one beside it, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, by Rashid Khalidi, each doing what the best books do ~ changing me.  Breaking me wide open to see and hear and know again the inhumanity of which human beings are capable, to commit and to endure.  I’d like to throw both books in the trash, but take them up again with what faith I can muster, knowing neither will end happily ever after but maybe with an ember of hope.  And if not hope, then awareness.  Accountability for our own time in this world.  For how we speak and act in reference to and toward other people.  People who are as in love with their lives as I am mine ~ here in my little study surrounded by my bits and bobs and other tiny treasures.
          I pray this hot, hot day treats you kindly and you have the chance to pass that kindness along. 

~peace & prayers, pastor annette

          My favorite novel ~ The Glad River, by Will Campbell ; I also love East of Eden, by John Steinbeck.  Everything else is at least a couple of ladder rungs below these two.  Wendell Berry’s Port William novels and stories always comfort me and make me laugh.

          *My favorite pen ~ Rare is the pen that doesn’t smear under the drag of a left-handed writer.  These are my two hands-down favorites.

• https://www.pentel.com/products/energel-alloy-liquid-gel-pen-0-7mm-metal-tip-with-12-refills-custom-bundle?variant=44062545969199
• https://www.sharpie.com/pens/gel-pens/sharpie-s-gel-fashion-barrel-medium-point-0.7mm/SAP_2220962.html