Our Squirrel Saga

Last summer I was looking out the window of my office and noticed a squirrel sometimes disappearing into the storage side of the garage. (My husband Dennis remodeled our detached garage into 2/3s office space for himself and 1/3 storage. We covered most of the large garage door opening with plywood and put in an old door composed of 15 small panes of glass,.) At the time, our yard man Gerardo was gone for a week. A pane of glass in the lower right hand corner of the door is missing. Normally Gerardo leaned an old child’s gate up against the door and secured it with a sandbag left over from the flood to keep the door from blowing open. But he forgot to put the child gate and sandbag in place, and the squirrel discovered the open pane. I was afraid to cover the hole in case the squirrel was a mama with a nest of little ones inside.

Smashing Pots

I was revising an old poem today and decided I’d post it. Here it is:

Smashing Pots

In darkness Gideon stood
above the conqueror’s camp
with his few men.
Each gripped a horn
in his right hand,
while in his left
he held an earthen pot.
And each pot hid a torch.

The signal came.

They blew their horns,
and shouted victory;
they smashed their pots,
and glory blazed;
they shattered brittle clay,
they lit the night
and threw their captors into panic
by the sudden noise and light.

And what a bargain
those men made!
And what a modest price
they paid for victory!
They traded broken pots…
for peace,
a pile of shattered shards…
for liberty.

I have pots, too –
my expectations
dreams
habits
schedule
What I Want –
my earthly things.

Am I in another battle
that requires
a shattering?

© Becky Cerling Powers 1999

Chinese Translation: Faith Journey

Faith Journey is the Chinese translation of my upcoming book Laura's Children: the Hidden Story of a Chinese Orphanage

A day to celebrate! Monday I received a few copies of my new book translated into Chinese. The English language title is Laura’s Children: the Hidden Story of a Chinese Orphanage. The Chinese title is Faith Journey: Laura Richards and the Orphans of Canaan Home in China. It’s ironic that the Chinese translation wound up being printed ahead of the English original.

Laura Richards was my mom’s quiet, shy first cousin, and I grew up hearing stories about how she started an orphanage in China in 1929 and how the Communist government forced her to leave the children in 1951.

A glimpse of Laura’s remarkable, hidden tale of wild adventure fell into my keeping in 1983, two years after she died at age 88, in a collection of her memoirs and old letters, plus notes from my Aunt Jean’s interviews with her. Reading these, I decided to try to find out Laura’s story. At first I thought I’d just try to get the story for my children, but as I worked, and as Laura’s story began to change my thinking and my life, I decided that I needed to write the story for a larger audience. Eventually my search led me to the orphans themselves, inside China.  Altogether it took 24 years to get the information I needed to tell Laura’s story fully.

I am hoping to publish Laura’s Children and have it available by late fall or early January.

Psalm 90 – for writers, parents, craftsmen…

A number of years ago I set aside a morning to ask God to give me a faith vision for my writing. How should I pray for my writing? Where should I focus? I felt the Lord directed my attention to Psalm 90. So over the next weeks I memorized this psalm, and I have meditated (reflected) on it through the years in the process of reviewing and reciting it.

Right away I noticed that it ended with this benediction: “May the favor of the Lord our God rest upon us; establish the work of our hands for us, yes, establish the work of our hands.” That was what I wanted. I wanted the work of my hands – the articles and books I scribbled and typed – to have staying power, to be a positive influence to people not only today but in the future.

Then I found out that the man who wrote these words was an astonishingly famous writer: Moses, one of most widely read, most widely translated, best selling authors of all time. This man wrote or dictated the first five books of the Bible. These books, and this psalm, have been translated into thousands of languages.

Lastly it dawned on me that this remarkable prayer by this remarkable man was answered over and over again. People have been reading Moses’ works for over 3000 years in every corner of this planet. Entire civilizations have been built upon his writings. Truly the favor of the Lord rested on him. Truly God established the work of his hands.

So I began to call Psalm 90 “The Writer’s Psalm.” It’s a great psalm for writers from one of the greatest writers of all time. But it could also be called “The Parent’s Psalm,” because don’t we parents want the love and labor we expend on our kids to endure through generations? It could also be called “The Builder’s Psalm” or “The Artist’s Psalm” or the “The Scientist’s Psalm.” Really it is a psalm for anyone who wants to leave behind a positive legacy.

Friendship

Speaking of my friend Lee reminds me of a poem on friendship that my mom used to quote when I was a teen.  Today I went online to see who wrote it and discovered that it is a quotation from George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) [1819-1880]. Apparently it was not originally written as a poem, but I prefer it that way. So here it is (as a poem):

Oh, the comfort – the inexpressible comfort

of feeling safe with a person,

having neither to weigh thoughts

nor measure words,

but pouring them all right out

– just as they are –

chaff and grain together,

certain that a faithful hand

will take and sift them,

keep what is worth keeping,

and with a breath of kindness,

blow the chaff away.

All the Blessings of the Light

There is a wonderful old hymn that I like to use to put myself to sleep at night. It was written by Thomas Ken (1637-1711) and is the source of the Doxology that we sing in church to the tune of Old Hundredth (see final verse). It is also sung to the Tallis Canon, which is the tune I prefer. But at night, I just recite it mentally, then go back to the top and follow its wise suggestions for meditating on the day. It goes like this:

Laundry tip

 

Some of you may have been wondering what would happen if a piece of wrapped chocolate somehow got into a load of your white washing. Well, now I can tell you. The chocolate doesn’t do much damage in the wash, but when it goes into the dryer with the wet clothes, it melts into the clothes as they warm and smears all over the warm metal insides of the machine. The chocolate stains are permanent, having been set by the heat of the dryer. And it will take you a while to scrape and scrub the chocolate out of the dryer’s insides so that the next batch of clothes isn’t subjected to a second Hot Chocolate Treatment. Underpants come out looking particularly gross.

Just thought you would want to know.

Fenugreek Tea & This Week’s Blog Excuse

I am still getting the hang of blogging. Obviously I have let my blog languish too long without new entries. Partly the fault lies with me – I have to get into the groove of setting myself regular, frequent deadlines. Partly the fault lies with the bugs my body has been trying to fight off all week.

Pinecone Art, Crummy Neighborhoods, and Other Elements of a Successful Reading Lesson

The Southwest Homeschool Network asked me to give a presentation for parents of Reluctant Readers for their conference last weekend. I don’t live with a reluctant reader anymore (he turned into a book-lover, grew up and left home) so I am lucky to have one who comes and visits me to remind me all about it. J is a first-generation American 12-year-old from a Spanish-speaking home, and he recently had to make the switch from a bilingual program at school to all-English. He told me once how discouraged he felt with it, so I said he could come once a week and we’d see what we could do.

J spent the whole evening here last Wednesday. A lot of that time didn’t seem to have a thing to do with reading, but as I recalled that evening in the light of preparing for my presentation, really it ALL had a lot to do with reading. For example, when J’s mom drove him to my house, she had most of the family with her – four kids and her 80-year-old father. She and her teenage daughter needed to talk to me in the kitchen, so Grandpa stretched out on the grass under the mulberry tree in the front yard, and J ran off to the back yard with his two little sisters. There they found our granddaughters’ abandoned makeshift sandbox, their plastic containers, and a bucket of water. So they made a fancy cake out of wet sand in one of the plastic containers. They smoothed it and decorated it with pinecones – very artistic. And then of course, they had to show it to me when I finished talking to their mom. And of course, we conversed about it.

That’s where the first reading connection came in.

Bladder Moments

I was telling my hairdresser today about our visit with our granddaughters. “You can tell that Tweety (age 4) has two scientists for parents,” I told her. “I was taking the two little girls to the back of the property to sit in Great-Grandma’s glider, and I told Tweety we had to slow up for her little sister because I can’t pick up Doodle (almost age 2).”

Tweety: Why can’t you, Grandma?

Me: Well, the doctor told me I shouldn’t pick up anything over 20 pounds, and Doodle weighs more than that.

Tweety: Why, Grandma?

Me: Well, my bladder is in the wrong place.

Hairdresser: So she asked you what a bladder is?

Me: No, she didn’t. She knew. I just said my bladder was in the wrong place and the doctor tried to fix it with surgery, but the stitches pulled out. She didn’t say another word about it, but she must have been thinking about it through the afternoon. That night at supper time, we were all sitting at the table eating and talking, when there was a little lull in the conversation, and in the silence Tweety asked in a worried tone, “How do you pee, Grandma?”

How many 4-year-olds would know what a bladder does, and then put two and two together that way? Scientifically informed or not, though, all 4-year-olds do seem to have an exquisite sense of time and place for asking really personal questions.