Mini-Vacation

Tomorrow and Sunday I'm going on a mini-vacation at my friend's house.  I'll revisit some of the old abandoned farmhouses in between here and there. 

It may be hot, but I'll be refreshed when I step onto her shaded deck and enjoy the south vista where her husband takes off and lands his ultra light.

We'll sip an iced drink beside her Koi pond and take a walk down memory lane--over 45 years of memories since we met at business school in Salina, Kansas.  Our empty nests have been a big plus for us, because now we can meet more often than only once or twice a year!

Moi on the left, Joan, aka Red, on the right.

Sisters in Christ

"There are 'friends' who destroy each other, but a real friend sticks closer than a brother."

Proverbs 18:24

A true friend is one who thinks you're a good egg

even though you're slightly cracked.

CAR! DEER!

I've been tweeking my blogspot the last few days. Take a look around, visit some of my favorite-other blogs and websites. I try to have some fun while I'm online.

I was surprised, when I did Yahoo and Google searches with the title of my blog, that it didn't pop up. It seems there are a lot of folks out there who have the same wanderlust, using wonder and wander interchangeably in all kinds of combinations. I'm beginning to wonder if I have entitled my blog correctly, even though I still like it, especially with it prefacing the Bible verse from I Chronicles. Perhaps I need to stay true to the title though; do a little less wandering and more wondering.

I've liked the word "wandering" since I was a youngster and heard my sister's high school glee glub sing the song, "The Happy Wanderer, " by Frank Weir, for the first time. All these years I've looked for a way to memorialize the happy associations with this word, which is why I decided to use it on the blog.

Here are the words for those who want to remember: (http://www.lyricfinder.org/)

I love to go a-wandering, Along the mountain track,

And as I go, I love to sing, My knapsack on my back.

Chorus: Val-deri, val-dera, Val-deri, val-dera, Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
Val-dera, My knapsack on my back

I love to wander by the stream, That dances in the sun
So joyously it calls to me, Come join my happy song.
Chorus

I wave my hat to all I meet, And They wave back to me
And blackbirds call so loud and sweet, From ev'ry green wood tree.
Chorus

Oh may I go a-wandering, Until the day I die
Oh, may I always laugh and sing, Beneath God's clear blue sky.

Val-deri, val-dera, Val-edri, val-dera Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, Val-dera
Beneath the clear blue sky, Beneath the clear blue sky.

I still get happy chills when I sing it. I loved it because I had never been anywhere outside of Kansas, but I always wanted to sit beside a gurgling stream in the cool mountains. Thank goodness we've vacationed in Colorado numerous times and wandered happily beside a mountain stream.

Did today's blog title pique your curiosity? If you comment or give feedback on blogs than you're familiar with the verification words that need to be mimicked before you can post your comment. I've been having fun making definitions for some of these words and thought I would share some of them with you.

For instance: cardeer is what you get when you cross your car with a deer. Here are a few more:

Locat: cat under the couch;

Menni: plural for Mennonite;

Fentist: professional fence builder;

Moperst: a street where mopers go to live;

Culters: people living around cul de sacs;

Witales: stories about Wi experiences;

Weecider: a tiny drink of cider.

You get the idea. I think I need a life!

Speaking of happy wandering, here are a few things our grandkids love to do as they wander/wonder through childhood.

Every kid has got to do the stretchy smile to get it on camera. I hope I'm around to show it to her boyfriends.

What would childhood be like without a swing set.?

This is what to do when you're bored.....

Anyone up for a game of Leapfrog?

Abandoned Farms and Homes

Here are pictures of the abandoned farms and houses I promised you all a couple of weeks ago. Most were taken in Republic County and, maybe one or two, in Jewel County, Kansas. These two homes, the one above and below, were left to nature's ravages more recently than the others. The one below has curtains still hanging in the windows. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see a lone chair still sitting under the collapsed porch roof.
I love this house (below). It looks like it was a grand farm house for a large family. The land around all these abandoned places is still being farmed. I kept the combine, and large truck that were waiting to begin wheat harvest out of this picture.
There was no house on this abandoned place. Maybe someone bought and moved it, as was the case when my parents sold their farm. I like the way the colors lined up in this picture: the blue sky, the green of a shelter belt, the wheat field ripe for harvest, and the mixed grasses of fallow-land in the foreground. A typical Kansas country scene at harvest time.
I didn't realize I had lined up the V-shaped cloud formation so perfectly with the center of the picture. I think it looks like the wings of a large angel coming in for a landing or flying away from this abandoned farm a couple miles east of Republic, Kansas where my friend lives.
This old house below looks really small compared to the spacious farm houses of today. I don't think the smaller building is attached to the house. My farm home had a little building like this a few yards from the house and it housed our Maytag wringer washing machine with two rinsing tubs, and the milk separator that somehow strained out the cream from the whole milk, or so I thought. We called that little building the "wash-house." I'm still mystified about how the separator worked. Maybe all it did was separate the dust and flies from the milk to make it more salable to Tip Top Dairies who made cheese, ice cream, etc. with it. By the time I would have been old enough to learn to use it, we got rid of all our milk cows except one as our family shrunk down to just my parents and me. My mother painted the separator black and planting flowers in and around it. I've repeatedly heard about the time my sister got her arm in the wringer to almost above her elbow before my mother got the wringer in reverse. Luckily sis didn't have any broken bones.
This isn't a house, of course. But in that spread-out agricultural area in North Central Kansas, I saw these old threshing machines decorating the top of a hill looking like pre-historic dinosaurs. This was the rattling, growling machine that we could hear coming down the road behind a popping John Deer followed by neighbors with their teams of horses and hayracks to help our dad do wheat harvest. I talked about that in a previous post. It was quite scary when I was just a little girl, but also pretty exciting.
The pastoral scene below reminds me of the farm I grew up on. It looks too quiet and serene now. It revived memories in me of waking up to the crowing of the rooster and his entourage of cackling hens, the lowing of the cows as they heard the farmer clanging his way to the barn with clean metal milk buckets. Add to that the clamor of waking birds, cats, and a family of five children, with mother making pancakes and sizzling home-grown bacon in a cast-iron frying pan, and you have the perfect scenario for a 1950's working farm. The memories bring with them the smells of farm life, some of them wonderful, like warm milk, sweet clover, and new-mown hay, and the not-s0-pleasant odors of cow and chicken manure, and the lingering scent of a skunk who paid an overnight visit in hopes of finding a stray egg somewhere. We prayed it had left long before we arrived in the yard.
I particularly like the picture with the windmill next to the barn. We had one that the wind would set to whirling and creaking, but the water it drew up from the well nearby, though refreshingly cold, was fit only for the chickens and livestock to drink. On a hot summer day we would carry water from the stock tank in buckets, up the hill (it wasn't difficult for me to picture the Jack and Jill story) and throw water under the shade trees in hopes that the chickens would stay cool enough not to stop laying eggs, or worse, giving up and dying from the heat.
I hope you've enjoyed the pictures, though they're sad. We've lost a wonderful era to progress and perhaps a lot of greed. I miss the small farm and wish it would still be there to go home to. But, as they say, "you can't go home again." It seems like a dream after all these years.

The Pain of Heat vs. The Heat of Pain

Leaving the cool environment of our air conditioned house and tentively stepping through the door to the outside is like walking into an oversized oven where the oppresive heat smothers each successive breath. I imagine what it feels like to be a loaf of bread as it slides into the hot yawning mouth of my kitchen oven. The temperature may be only 105 degrees but with the added ingredient of humidity it feels more like the 350 degrees needed to bake me a crusty brown. Like that loaf of bread I'm trapped in an oven of summer heat.

I can't believe I grew up on a Kansas farm without air conditioning. We knew better because some business places and a few homes had air conditioning, but we couldn't afford the unit or the cost of electricity to keep it running. Besides, we worked outside much of the time and were used to the heat. I think people suffer from the heat more today because we've become acclimated to air conditioning and don't tolerate the heat as well. We've become slaves to our lifestyles and are driven to work regardless of the heat. I remember lazy summer afternoons when we ceased our labors and read a book or took a nap until the sun began its descent and the evening air became tolerable. We often slept outside on the picnic table or the swing on those nights a cool breeze failed to come through our bedroom windows. If mosquitos, coyotes howling too close for comfort, or a thunderstorm chased us indoors, we would sleep on the cool, hard linoleum of the living room floor. Our upstairs bedrooms which were under the eaves of the uninsulated roof took all night to cool off. One by one we five siblings would stumble sleepily up the stairs in the early morning hours of dawn and catch a couple hours of complete rest on our soft mattresses. A cool morning breeze flirting with the curtains at the open window finally sent a sensuous wave of cooling air over our sweaty bodies. But a few hours of sunshine would heat up the day as hot, or hotter, than the day before.

Most of August we could smell the vegetation scorching. The road passing on the south side of our farm was layered with white rock which had been pulverized into fine dust by car, truck, and farm machinery wheels. Each passing vehicle raised clouds of white dust that would race with the wind for our house and garden and spread a layer thick enough to obscure the distinctiveness of flower and leaf, and create a chalk board on every flat surface so I could practice writing my name. The dust and the packed, cracked earth under our feet had the scent of baked pottery. Cumulus clouds would gather and bump into each other splitting the air with lightening and thunder but nary a drop of rain would fall. Sometimes, a small quick shower would dump enough water to soak our clothes as we ran out and danced with the rain. The heat gave us an excuse to have water fights. Just as we walked past the corner of the house we would suddenly be hit with a blast of cold water from a well-aimed bucket-full pumped up from the cistern. No one was exempt, not even our mother, who took the assault good-naturedly. After the first shock wore off it was a welcome relief and most times we were able to forgive the perpetrator. Of course, we always found an opportunity to retaliate with the same enthusiasm.

Finally, the day came when clouds began to accumulate more frequently until they were heavy enough to dump a respectful one or two inches of rain on the parched earth. It was the first sign the summer heat was abating and we could soon look forward to cooler days and nights. The cows started giving more milk, the chickens increased their egg production, and we were all less irritable with one another. We had survived another Kansas summer.

After a particularly hot summer like the one we're enduring now, my husband and I would talk about moving somewhere else instead of enduring another summer in Kansas. Though we often vacationed in Colorado where the humidity is less and the nights are blissful, we've never pulled up stakes and moved. Our resolve weakens when the next summer proves to be more mild. Family roots are more important than physical comfort. And so we endure the pain of heat, yet not without the comfort of knowing it's temporary. Fall inevitably follows summer.

I remember walking barefoot as a child on our cement sidewalks, feeling the burning heat on the bottom of my feet. Today, I have the same burning pain in my feet, but it's not from walking on sun-baked cement. The burning pain I feel these days is from the damaged nerves of peripheral neuropathy. I'm trapped in this body of pain, and the only relief is the daily regimen of pain medications that make the pain tolerable. I'm living one long summer since there's no cure for neuropathy, and there are no seasons of spring, fall, and winter to bring relief from the burning pain. Half the battle is won since I've accepted this pain will probably be with me the rest of my life, unless the nerves completely die and numbness replaces the pain. But that doesn't seem likely since the pain is as intense as it was when it began seven or eight years ago. I'm not talking about this to elicit sympathy. That's the last thing I need to give me the strength I need to rise above the pain. Rather I talk about it to try and make sense of it, to convince myself that what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. And maybe someone else who suffers chronic pain will read this and not feel alone with their pain.

Everyday, I ask myself, "What am I learning from this pain?" "What is the purpose of pain in my life?" So far I've learned that suffering does teach us about who we are, what kind of stuff we're made of. I don't have to understand why I have painful neuropathy to endure it and learn from it. Perhaps it's been given to me to keep me from becoming proud, like Paul in
2 Cor. 12:7-10, and to depend on God's grace. Maybe, like Job, I'm being tested. Or because of my pain I can be of help to others through understanding and encouragement as suggested in 2 Cor. 1:3-7: "...for when we are comforted, we will certainly comfort you."

Living in the furnace of trial by fire we need not be without comfort, for God has promised to be faithful to those of us who have faith in His love and believe in our friend, Jesus, and the constant comfort of the Holy Spirit and The Word. There are days I feel sorry for myself. But then I read or hear of someone who experiences and triumps over worse adversities than I. (See my link to "Check This Out!") I'm reminded that we are all trying to survive whatever situations or circumstances we find ourselves in this life. Who or what we rely on for strength and comfort can make a huge difference on how we make it through each day, how we endure the Heat of Pain. Earthly pain is temporary and will be gone when this life is over and we move on to our eternal home. Here's a song that expresses my thoughts today:

This World Is Not My Home
This world is not my home I'm just-a-passing through
My pleasure and my hopes are way beyond the blue
Many friends and loved ones have gone on before
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

Cho.: Oh Lord you know I have no friend like you
If heaven's not my home oh Lord what will I do
The Angels beckon me to heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

Over in gloryland there'll be no dying there
The saints are shouting victory and singing everywhere
I hear the voice of those who've gone on before
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

My Lord's expecting me that's one thing I know
I fixed it up with Jesus a long time ago
He will take me through though I am weak and poor
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore

Author: na; Version: na
Lyrics provided courtesy of Bluegrass Lyrics.Com!