Jotting Joan

Making cookies with grandpa

jottingjoan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:35:20 +0000

I refused to even look at the half price clearance sales on Valentine items last week. My husband looked.
I did not think we needed a thing. My husband saw a few things he thought we should have.
I did not want to have any candy in the house. My husband selected two packages of candy, brought them home and set them on the counter.
I did not need another heart-shaped cookie cutter. Last fall I winnowed out several of my rarely-used cookie cutters, but my husband saw a set of increasingly larger sizes of hearts. He wanted them, so he bought them.
Walking through the grocery and department stores, I disciplined myself to turn my face and walk past the marked-down cake mixes with Valentine themes and pink frosting with heart-shaped sprinkles. We are trying to eat sensibly now that the holidays are over. Fruits and vegetables have dominated the meals around here. But, the holidays never really end for my husband. He came home with a couple of sacks of candy, two cake mixes, a tub of frosting and some Valentine pencils.
“We can always use pencils,” he said as he placed them beside the two dozen other pencils on top of the refrigerator.
I shook my head in disbelief. When he left, I put it all away in the cupboard to use some day – or to discretely give away during a food drive.
I never had a chance. Four days later he looked at me and asked, with some urgency in his voice, “Can we make sugar cookies?”
I looked at him. I had other plans for my day. But he looked so pathetic, I agreed. “Okay. I guess if I can’t make heart-shaped cookies with the grandchildren, I can make them with the grandfather.” Besides, if we made cookies, it would ensure we had a dish of food to carry to the church gathering that evening. I looked for a quick, less messy way to fulfill his wish.
I pulled out a cookie recipe book and picked up one of the cake mixes. It said it included pudding and gave a recipe for cookies. I used the mix as if it were all the flour, sugar and leavening agents listed in the cookbook, added half a cup of room temperature butter and about the same amount of butter- flavored Crisco and one egg. Using a fork, I stirred it into a smooth dough that looked like sugar cookie dough.
It rolled out neatly for cutting like sugar cookies. It baked like sugar cookies. The samples tasted like sugar cookies. I turned the dough over to the man who wanted to make heart-shaped sugar cookies.
He tried all of his cookie cutters and settled on the two smallest hearts. He rolled out the dough, slid the stone cookie sheets into the oven and arranged the cooling racks.
An hour later we stood at the counter working together, slathering on pink frosting and decorating them with red and white sprinkles and red sugar.
I was finished, but not my husband.
“Do we have a box to carry them in?”
“We can use that big plate,” I said.
That was not good enough.
He found a square box, cut square cardboard to make layers, added dark chocolate hearts to the cookies in the corner so the cardboard would not touch the frosting and arranged layers of cookies with wrapped candies placed between the cookies.
They looked quite festive and he had a box of Valentines to carry to his friends this year. He loved every minute of the attention and the compliments it brought to him.
I bet we do it again next year.

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)

Leaky roof part 2

jottingjoan — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 17:59:24 +0000

I wrote last week’s column pointing out the leaky roof at Champagnolle Landing …. it is time now for the rest of the story regarding the collection of buckets, tubs and containers scattered around the exercise arena.
Yes, the buckets have increased since the original leaks three years ago. But, the leaks have not gone un-noticed.
After I expressed my surprise and dismay at seeing the number of water catchers still at the senior center, Mayor Frank Hash sent me the following e-mail.
“The entire roof for the Senior Citizens Center will soon be replaced. Mayor Dumas started this effort many months ago and it will soon be accomplished. We just received the engineer study yesterday (Feb. 7) and it will soon go out for bids for actual replacement. The entire process has been long coming and Mayor Dumas deserves full credit for securing funding. Mayor Dumas has continued to work on the project and will soon see it completed. The design took awhile as additional slope has to be incorporated. The original roofing was too flat and did not drain well, speeding up the deterioration.”
Dumas is the ideal person to tackle this problem. He not only brings his years of experience of working with government agencies, Dumas himself is one of the many senior citizens who use the center for exercise.
Since 2009, when he noticed the problem, he has been working on a solution to get a dry roof on the Senior Center. But it has not been easy.
“I would think sometimes that someone pushed it to the corner of the desk and it fell in the trash can,” he said. That did not happen. Red tape did. But, Dumas has patiently persisted in poking the papers for repairs along through the process.
“We applied to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission back in 2009. We submitted the application for the new roof on the Senior Citizens Center seeking funds that the state had received for disasters that had occurred. This is FEMA money. We could use for it for repair of damage that might have been caused by wind and rain,” Dumas said.
“It was approved before I left office. We received a letter in the latter part of 2010 and we started the process, with the approval of grant pre-application with Southwest Arkansas Planning and Development District Inc. that serves this area. I turned it over to them to process it.”
“Mayor Hash took it over in 2011 and we went back and forth all of last year. Sometime in the latter part of 2011 we finally got approval to proceed. We received an agreement that the grant would be coming around Christmas 2011. Because it exceeds $100,000 we had to secure an architect. We contracted with CADM Architect (a local architect).”
The current flat roof has not kept water out of the building, so “they had to develop a design of a roof to put on the roof. They completed that last week. We are waiting on their approval, which is a formality. We look for that any time now and then we will go to the bid. That takes about four weeks,” Dumas said.
He said that the architects expect by the first of April to have a contractor.
Then, as is always true with roofing, “we will need dry weather for the 18,000- square-foot built-up roof. It has been a long process because we are dealing with all the government agencies and have to jump through a a lot of hoops,” Dumas concluded.
If all goes as expected, the roofer could be at work by April.
Dumas said that the grant is for $226,000. If there are any leftovers from that amount, it will be used to repair water damage inside the facility.
Thanks to Mike Dumas and the expected initiation of repairs, we have yet another reason to look forward to this year’s spring.

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org)

leaky roof at gym

jottingjoan — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:39:11 +0000

The time had come to get serious again about food and activities that raise the blood pressure, do a number on the cholesterol levels and leave me courting my family history of diabetes.
I cleaned out all the holiday foods. Either someone in our house ate them or I took them to share with co-workers – the point is the tasty stuff is gone. I filled up a grocery cart with lots of fresh and frozen vegetables, pineapples, apples, oranges and pears.
All I needed now was some exercise. I dusted off my home equipment intending to use it. I found a lot of reasons to do something else in the house.
The time had come to renew my acquaintance with the excellent facilities at Champagnolle Landing.
Having officially passed my 60th birthday, the cost fit my budget. If I left right after work the exercise time fit my schedule and I did not have to worry about competing with cute young things in snug fitting gym clothes working feverishly to shed that horrible last couple pounds.
No, I would just be hanging out with other folks who have heard once too often, “And when do you plan to retire?” or “And how long have you been retired?”
Long past the age or height for being a cute young thing, I need to shed more than a couple pounds. I resolved to wear myself on the elliptical exercisers, the treadmills, cycling machines or collection of contraptions for weight lifting to improve one or another parts of the body. Sometimes I opted to walk the path that winds around the exercise machines, the sittercise arena and the tables of jigsaw puzzles.
I felt pretty good about it until the winter rains descended. I understand rain on the trees surrounding Champagnolle Landing. I do not understand rain anywhere near the artificial trees inside Champagnolle Landing.
But something mighty wet had invaded Champagnolle Landing.
Enough moisture that a couple signs announce, “If you exercise early in the mornings, please be conscious of water that maybe on the floor. The janitorial staff does not arrive until 9 a.m.”
Being in my dotage and a bit unsteady on my feet in the best of circumstances, I took a look around. No water on the floor that late in the day, but there sure were a lot of buckets, pans and other plastic containers. I counted more than a couple dozen containers arranged in an obstacle course through the exercise arena.
For sure more buckets than the three or four than I encountered the last time I exercised regularly at Champagnolle. At that time the leaking roof had stained a few ceiling tiles. Other ceiling tiles were simply removed to let the water fall into a bucket.
While I was away getting lazy and stocking my fridge with all the wrong foods, the collection of “rain catchers” multiplied.
Back then, I heard some discussion about the cost for repairing the roof to stop the leaks. Evidently it was pretty high and nothing was done. If it was, it was not effective because the buckets have multiplied.
I don’t mind a shower now and then, but I want to choose when and where I get one. I don’t mind sitting down in some water now and then, but I don’t like the possibility of a surprising descent into water as a variation in my exercise routine.
I go to Champagnolle Landing because I can afford it and I like the folks I meet there. I like to see careful use of my funds – and of public funds. Resolving a leaky roof with a collection of buckets seems about a logical as resolving to get healthy while maintaining a secret stash of snacks.
Sometimes painful, expensive choices must be made.
With the overflowing parking lot at Champagnolle Landing attesting to its popularity, it looks like it is time to find some deep pockets, clear away the buckets, take a few sunny days and re-roof the facility.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. She can be reached by e-mail at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)

Family Sewing Circle

jottingjoan — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:37:14 +0000

I packed three sewing machines and all the extras for the family gathering along with my ideas of what to sew. But the young women and granddaughters had their own ideas that came out as soon as I lifted my Featherweight Singer out of it small black box.
First, I had to deal with the crowd of curious little folks.
“What’s that? How does it work? Can I try?”
“Sure,” I removed the spool of thread and the bobbin, set the foot pedal on the table near the machine and reached for a piece of paper.
“Come here and sit on my lap and we’ll sew.”
We dropped the presser foot on the paper, I controlled the pedal with my fingers and the needle precisely punched a row of holes across the page. For the 2-, 4- and 5-year-old pre-schoolers, a few minutes in front of the machine sufficed before they hopped down to play.
The older girls and adults stayed with plenty of plans for the seven sets of sample fabrics from the fabric shop.
“Can we make doll quilts out of these Strawberry Shortcake pieces?” my daughter asked.
Within an hour, we had two small quilts decorated with strips of lace covering the dolls – and three other block quilts taking shape. The 14-year-old granddaughter chose the sophisticated floral fabric. My daughter pieced a top for the long-promised Halloween quilt to accompany her son’s yard of fabric printed with Halloween candy. His quilt lacked a filler, but it pleased him immensely, “Thank you. This is awesome. It looks super cozy,” he told me.
The 7-year-old granddaughter took the bag with seven strips of farm animals, fields and hay and disappeared. The strips became quilt blocks which she arranged in rows. She even wrote down the sequence of pictures for each row. Her mom began chain stitching the blocks together. Before she went to bed that night, a large hunk from a brown fleece blanket backed her quilt.
As we folded up for the day, the 17-year-old granddaughter sidled up to me, “Is that hard to do?”
“No. Sewing is easy. I can show you next time.”
The next time we pulled out the machines, the 14-year-old agreed to make the Beatles fabric into a table topper for her St. Louis aunt. She mostly worked alone while I coached her 11-year-old sister on the techniques for strip quilting to make a colorful Marie Engelbreit wall hanging. She amazed me with her ability to sew quarter inch seams and the precision of her lines of blocks. She finished it with a bright yellow seam binding.
The 13-year-old wanted to make a pillow. She chose fabric from the small stash I brought, cut out a square pillow and sewed the pieces together. A rarely used car neck pillow provided stuffing and she sorted through the decorative buttons to finish it.
Opening that tin of buttons caught the attention of every girl from 7 months to 17 years. With pacifier in her mouth, the baby grabbed fistfuls of buttons to inspect and drop. Her older cousins shouted out their finds, “Look, an elephant.” “This flower would look neat.” “Wow! Look at this one.” “I want that one.”
The four-year-old granddaughter pawed through the lace and seam bindings. The stiffness of the bias strips proved to be perfect for practicing her skills with the scissors. She reduced the bias tape to scraps. The two-year-old climbed up on the bed and practiced poking pins through fabric. When she had two pieces attached with the pins hanging down, she slid off the bed holding the pinned fabric over her dolls.
“Be careful, don’t poke your babies,” someone said.
“I’m going to poke my dollies,” she assured us and laid the fabric over them.
The 17-year-old negated quilt making and made a colorful shoulder bag with a strap of quilt binding finished with an embroidery stitch.
As we began gathering up the scraps, threads and machines, the 15-year-old appeared, “I want to make a pillow, but not one like hers. I want to make a round pillow.”
Thinking of the trick of constant turning for a round piece of fabric and the late hour, I said, “I think a square pillow is a better starting point.”
She picked out fabric and buttons and quickly finished her project with the help of her now experienced cousin.
As she proudly showed off her pillow, we gathered up dropped pins, buttons, snippets of binding, fabric and threads and put away my machines until the next sewing circle – it can’t be too soon for me.

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter for the News-Times. She can be reached at jhershberger@eldoradonews.com.)

Wow! factor of Black-out

jottingjoan — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 20:11:41 +0000

Wow! That’s all I could say Jan. 18 when Wikipedia went black to protest proposed, anti-piracy legislation in the federal government. At midnight, Wikipedia switched off ready access to nearly 4 million web pages and gave searchers a dignified explanation in shades of dark gray.
Wow! It really happened. The world’s fifth most popular website pulled the shades on Jan. 18 and provided information on just one topic: anti-piracy bills before the United States Congress: The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate. The proposed legislation focuses on the monitoring of every electronic link from any website that might take a reader to another website in the world where they might be able to purchase pirated, intellectual properties.
And Wikipedia did not protest alone. According to Wikipedia’s report of the day, 115,000 other websites and tens of millions of individuals around the world protested the proposed laws.
Wow! That many. I had no idea.
The idea for the blackout began back in December as legislators studied the bills, held hearings and appeared to be aiming to get a quick and early vote on the bill. Seeing a major threat in the proposed bill, Wikipedia management, and others, began discussing the blackout.
On Jan. 18, as websites around the country went black, most offered links for visitors to register their protest with their federal legislators.
And wow, did people protest! More than 8 million people looked up their representative on Wikipedia, a petition at Google recorded over 4.5 million signatures, more than 1 million email messages were sent to Congress through the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for several hours Twitter received over a quarter million tweets per hour concerning SOPA, lawmakers collected “more than 14 million names – more than 10 million of them voters,” according to Wikipedia’s most current entry about the day.
With so many “participating in the protest against SOPA and PIPA, 15 U.S. Senators (including sponsors) have dropped support for the proposed SOPA and PIPA acts. Real notice was taken when Wikipedia, Reddit, Newsboiler, BoingBoing, WordPress, Mozilla and other sites suddenly went offline as part of the overall plan of protest. Many people, including college students, were forced to find out more about the proposed acts after their essential services went all black,” reported the Internet website whatshawt.com
Let no one assume that a one day of protest will suffice. Internet watchdogs continue to follow this issue. Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia and hundreds of other Internet providers continue to study and pass along information, news and updates about the anti-piracy laws. They speak for everyone who has come to depend on the Internet such as the 25 million people who view information on Wikipedia every day … except Jan. 18, when the blackout left bewildered students and teachers wondering how they could do their homework without the online encyclopedia. How could instructors teach without this valuable, free resource supported by donations? How could anyone research a topic without the Internet?
Wow! How quickly we have become dependent on the Internet for communication, entertainment, information and digital storage.
Less than 15 years ago, Wikipedia did not even exist. Students still roamed through library shelves with note cards, paper, pencils and pens to research a topic. Twenty years ago, few had heard of e-mail – although the U.S. Post Office realized and addressed its potential financial threat as early as 1977. Thirty years ago, very few individuals could even afford the luxury of personal computers. Today young children carry cell phones with Internet connections.
The Jan. 18 blackout was a shot heard around the world as individuals, corporations and governments took a stark look at the extent of their dependence on the Internet and its ability to generate a massive public response.
Well entrenched in the age of the Internet, the impact the one-day blackout still left me repeatedly gasping “Wow!”

(The awed Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. Joanh@everybody.org)

Wikipedia has protest black-out

jottingjoan — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:28:01 +0000

Researching and writing this week’s column took me time and again to the fifth most popular website, Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia which started in 2001 with 3,848,878 articles in English. Wikipedia attracts 25 million visitors daily, according to ComScore.
“Wikipedia is written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers who write without pay. Anyone with Internet access can write and make changes to Wikipedia articles (except in certain cases where editing is restricted to prevent disruption or vandalism),” explains the Wikipedia web page. To date, more than 82,000 volunteers have written for Wikipedia. Every day, hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world collectively make tens of thousands of edits and create thousands of new articles for the Wikipedia encyclopedia.
And yet today, if I want to do any research using Wikipedia – that will be impossible. At midnight, eastern time, Wikipedia drew its shades for 24 hours as an electronic protest against anti-piracy bills before the United States Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House and Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate.
“It is the opinion of the English Wikipedia community that both of these bills, if passed, would be devastating to the free and open web,” wrote Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation executive director, on the wikimediafoundation.org site.
Normally, like most folks just logging into the Internet or checking information on Wikipedia, I might not have known about the blackout until I tried to use it.
However, my son, Mark Hershberger, who works for Wikimedia searching and fixing glitches in their many free online resources, sent out a Facebook message alerting his friends and followers about the blackout.
Wikimedia made the decision over the weekend and Monday, although it was a holiday, the support staff volunteered to work to institute the temporary shutdown.
According to Mark, “By going dark, the editors of Wikipedia (not the foundation of Wikimedia) will demonstrate the impact of stepping into regulating the Internet. The many editors of Wikipedia will voice their concern for net neutrality with 24 hours of blocking accessibility to Wikipedia.”
“Oh, and just to clarify: it isn’t the Foundation that is doing the blackout. This was decided by the editors (people other sites call ‘active users’) of English Wikipedia. We’re helping them accomplish their goals, but much of the infrastructure is already in place so that they can achieve their goals.”
Piracy of music and movies is a major issue. However, the current legal solutions being considered have generated protests of more than 700,000 tweets and a million emails – enough that the San Diego City Beat reported there may no longer be the legislative will in the House to pass it, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, one of the bill’s most vocal opponents.
For today, though, Wikipedia and “an estimated 7,000 websites are planning to go dark Wednesday as part of a mass protest against a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills — and opponents of the measures say the number is likely to increase,” reported politico.com.
Mozilla will join the virtual protest.
Reddit will also hold a 12-hour blackout.
The popular Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr sites chose other means such as Google’s link explaining how these bills “are smart, targeted ways to shut down foreign rogue websites without asking American companies to censor the Internet.”
The Wikipedia blackout and protest were not entered into lightly.
“Over 1,800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation,” Gardner wrote.
Gardner did not make the decision, the volunteer editors made it, “but I support it,” she wrote. “We want the Internet to remain free and open, everywhere, for everyone. We hope you’ll agree with us, and will do what you can to make your own voice heard.”

(Just doing her part, Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)

Birthdays mark the difference

jottingjoan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:43:41 +0000

Birthdays provide convenient markers of progress and changes in life. A few reflections on the eve of leaving middle age.
At 10, kindly adults would enter conversations with me by asking, “What are you going to be when you grow up?”
At 60, folks wonder, “When are you going to retire?”
At 16, my parents had to ride with me when I drove.
At 60, my family offers to drive for me.
At 20, I wanted to have a dozen kids.
At 30, I had half that and said enough.
At 60, I am happy to have more than that many grandchildren.
At 10, my grandparents were so old.
At 60, my middle-aged sons are so young.
At 20, I really liked our fixer-upper first house.
At 60, just looking at a fixer-upper leaves me shuddering.
Before I turned 10, I proudly anticipated the decade.
Before I turned 60, I dreaded the decade and reminded myself frequently of its advent.
At 20, friends wondered how many children my husband and I wanted to have.
At 30, they wondered when we would quit having children.
At 50, they were surprised that I had grandchildren!
At 60, they are astounded that we have so many grandchildren.
At 20, I dropped out of college to marry.
At 30, I wanted to return to college to finish my degree.
At 60, I rarely use any of the skills or classroom information I studied for my degree.
At 50, I was insulted to receive an invitation to join the AARP.
At 60, I ask if I qualify for the senior discount.
At 30, I quickly lost 20 pounds after the baby’s birth.
At 60, the 20 pounds – and more – have returned time and again.
At 20, I sat and listened politely when older folks talked.
At 60, I work hard to sit and listen politely when younger folks talk.
At 20, I blithely promised my husband for better or for worse, for sickness and in health.
At 60, I remember the effort it took some days, even some years, to keep that promise.
At 20, I figured I was more than ready for marriage and a family.
At 60, I realize how little I knew then and how much I have yet to learn.
At 20, I had no clue just how much money it took to feed a family, keep them healthy and in a warm house with clean clothes.
At 30, I knew how to can fruits and vegetables, how to sew a three-piece suit and how to stretch a dollar 10 different ways.
At 40, I suffered sticker shock at the price of college for my children.
At 50, I looked in astonishment at the ways God provided for college.
At 60, I thank the Lord we can still afford to travel to visit our far-flung family.
At 30, I smugly said “I don’t need glasses.”
At 40, I admitted readers made it easier.
At 50, I began yearly visits to the eye doctor.
At 60, I reach for my bifocals and wear them every day.
At 10, I figured I would live forever.
At 20, I saw my grandparents’ health fail.
At 30, my parents became the oldest living generation.
At 40, my mother passed.
At 50, my family began arranging a home for my father.
At 60, my husband and I talked about final arrangements.
At 10, I asked my grandmother to teach me how to knit.
At 60, I ask my granddaughters if they want me to teach them how to knit.
At 16, I moved across the country and wrote dozens of letters every month to keep in touch.
By 60, my children had moved across the country and keep in touch with Facebook, email or Twitter – and rarely send me a letter.
At 10, I proudly celebrated when I blew out all the candles.
At 60, I wonder who has that much breath?

(The aging Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)

Mom AND Dad are needed

jottingjoan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:06:25 +0000

At the time “Octo-Mom,” a single woman, announced her artificially-induced pregnancy of eight children, she said she did it because she “needed to have children.” Reflecting on that statement, my son Mark commented, “I would counsel any woman who thinks she doesn’t ‘need’ a man but she ‘needs’ to have children, to think, instead, of her children’s needs before she gets pregnant.”
“Children deserve a resident father. Here in America, men and women feel the right to pursue their desire to have children, without intending to have any sort of relationship with the child’s other parent.” He wrote to express his opinion that “anyone, man or women, who sets out to have children by themselves, intentionally depriving them from the start of their other parent, is wrong. Going into parenting intending to shortchange your children by eliminating one parent is not in their best interest and is an avoidable decision.”
I responded with an observation that men and women approach life differently and each gender offers children another perspective on just about everything.
Then, as I sorted through an accumulation of papers, I came across this piece my son Merton wrote one year for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.
“I learned how to make money from my dad;
I learned how to save money from my mom;
and as a family we share the treasures we have with each other.
I learned how to work hard from my dad;
I learned how to take it easy from my mom;
and as a family we love life: In the easy and the hard times.
I learned how to trust God from my dad;
I learned how to pray to God from my mom;
and as a family we watched the Lord hear us as we called on His name.
I learned that God created the world for us to study and enjoy from my dad;
I learned that God revealed the Bible for us to study and enjoy from my mom;
And as a family we watched the seasons change and we memorized Scripture after Scripture.
I learned be faithful from my dad;
I learned to grateful from my mom;
and as a family we worshipped in the Lord’s House.
I learned that discipline means you are loved from my dad;
I learned that generosity is how you love from my mom;
and as a family we inherit the blessings of our Father.
I learned to see that God is good from my dad;
I learned to taste His goodness from my mom;
and as a family we feasted at the Lord’s table.
I saw the footsteps of Jesus in my dad’s life;
I saw the handprint of the Lord in my mother’s;
and the Holy Spirit led us forward as a family.
I studied the growing humility of the Lord in our dad’s way of life;
I observed the steady honor of the Lord in our mom’s way of life;
and as a family we hosted the Lord in our homes when the poor, the confused, the rejected and those of us kids who tended to stray were given shelter.”
That pretty well summarizes our past 40 years as a couple and family. Neither my husband nor I will say it has been easy. We each have our own personal way of approaching family life, but somewhere between his ways and my ways, we worked our way for four decades.
Happy Anniversary, Joseph.

First you work, then you play

jottingjoan — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:41:15 +0000

Yeah, yeah, the kids hated it, but I loved my rule when we had perfectly healthy, minor children around the house: “First you work, then you play makes my life easier any day.”
I’d like to say I initiated the rule, but in all reality I lived under the same mandate as a child.
First, I had to do my work, then I could go play. I never thought too much about it until my sixth-grade teacher gave us an assignment to write a friendly letter. I wrote one to my cousin. The letter included the sentence, “After we finish doing the dishes, we can go out and play in the woods” or something like that.
The teacher read it out loud to the class as a good example.
Like I had any other option.
Our parents expected the work to be done, the play time (this was long before play dates existed) could be fitted in after we washed the dishes, swept the floor, cleaned our rooms, made beds, fixed meals, helped dad with farm chores, including working in the hay fields in the heat of summer or whatever other job my parents dictated needed to be done that day.
Having learned this rule from early childhood on, I assumed every child automatically jumped up and did what needed to be done without being told. Then I married a man with a couple of able-bodied children and discovered the reality of all children.
Children (and teenagers) like to dawdle and play. They like to avoid doing work or do it at their own speed and in their own time. Children assume vacations are a great time to sleep in, play outside and hang out with friends.
Sounds good on paper, but since I am a morning person, my sleep-in time ends around 7 a.m. Therefore the kids’ sleep-in time lasted until 7:15 a.m. As my dad said, “you can stay up as late as you want, but you will be here helping with the work early in the morning.”
So I yanked my children out of bed early, even during vacation. I wanted to get my chores done so I could do what I wanted to do.
That and long, long ago, I looked at our family of many children and declared myelf free from slavery. I say this because mothers, inevitably, have to be near-slaves to newborn babies and toddlers. Then it’s time to press for interdependence.
My old rule came roiling out of me a couple of years ago after we opened our home to several immature people for an extended stay.
I had to work during their stay, but I also had to go home from work and the last thing I wanted to see when I walked in the door was a chaotic house.
I talked it over with my husband. Pointing out that children behave much better when they have definite activities and responsibilities to complete before they can get the privilege of doing what they want, I suggested he come up with ideas of tasks to keep them busy.
I told him – and the expected guests – I would not be acting as the genie of the magic hamper – going around and gathering up dirty clothes and washing them late into the night after everyone else has gone to bed.
I would not be performing feats of magic with food and presenting wonderful meals 20 minutes after I walk in the door after a day of work.
I would not be coughing up a bankroll of cash to pay for their entertainment.
Yes, I would find ways to entertain – ways that began with a list called “helping around the house.”
We decided that they could help power wash the house, clean up yard debris, take care of the dishes, do their own laundry, prepare meals and work on memorizing verses before they earned permission to do what they wanted to do.
And yes, once the work was done, we did play games, watched videos, read books, explored the neighborhood, went shopping or just hung out and visited … just like I did when I was a kid in a large family.
Turned out to be a rather pleasant visit and I actually looked forward to a return visit.

(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. Email her at joanh@everybody.org.)

Hard time at Christmas

jottingjoan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 18:45:09 +0000

Time and again, I have met folks who believe and practice, “If we are faithful to God, He will be faithful to us.”
But no one said it was always easy as my co-worker said, “I have always tithed,” she said. “Even when I did not know how I could do it, I tithed … and it always worked out. I don’t know how, but I always had enough money.”
As with any family, she experienced times when the money was tight, as she did the year her husband had been off work for six weeks with medical problems .
“We were not starving, but it was tight,” she said. “I did not know how I would be able to buy any Christmas for the kids that year. I was a stay-at-home mom with a two-year-old at home. The older children were 7 and 19 at the time.”
“I was talking on the phone with my really good friend. I was standing at the kitchen window when I saw a white truck pull up that said something about the Bell Phone company on the side.”
“I told my friend, ‘A white truck just drove up.’” She paused and watched as the driver opened the door and got out.
“There is someone here with a red shirt, white beard and gray hair. He looks just like Santa Claus,” she half laughed as she told her friend.
“Keep me on the phone,” her friend urged.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” she said, but stayed on the line anyway as the man walked up to the house and knocked at the door.
The stay-at-home mom went over to the door, opened it and asked, “May I help you?”The man in the red shirt with the white beard said, “I heard you were having a hard time this year at Christmas.” He reached in his pocket, pulled out a white envelope and said, “This is for you.”
She took it, and before she could open it or even say “thank you” he turned, walked quickly back to his truck, climbed in and drove away.
Her friend’s voice came over the phone, “Who was it? What happened?”
“He looked like Santa Claus, that’s all that I can tell you because it happened really fast and quick.”
“What did he do?”
“He came up to the door, said ‘I understand things have been a bit tight this year’ and gave me a white envelope.”
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t opened it. I am kind of afraid to open it,”
“Open it! Open the envelope and see what it is,” her friend insisted.
Okay,” She slipped her finger behind the flap, opened the envelope, pulled out five one hundred dollar bills and began screaming.
“Oh my! It’s five one hundred dollar bills,” she half cried and half screamed.
Her friend screamed happily with her.
“And, I never had a chance to ‘thank him’,” she said.
“Did you give him my address?” her friend teased.
The family never did find out who had brought the cash – although one person did try. “They called the phone company and asked, but no one there fit that description.”
“Some people say that Santa Claus visited me,” my co-worker said. “But, I do not think it was Santa Claus, I believe it was an angel.”
“It is like I heard at the Bible Study the other night, ‘Jesus is Sweet.’ I have heard that He is good. I have heard that He is real, but that year, Jesus was sweet. He was so sweet to us. We had a nice Christmas dinner. It was just amazing,” she said.
In the years since that event, her children have all entered full time ministry.
Yes, Jesus is good. Jesus is real – and when times are tough He is sweet, so sweet – as my co-worker discovered the day when a man who looked like Santa Claus gave her an envelope with much needed cash.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org.)