Heirlooms

One more day outside and then the garden and flower beds will officially be in hibernation for the winter.  Tomorrow I'll be raking and tucking, stacking and stashing all the implements of my summer labors along with the seeds I've collected for next spring's rebirthing.  

I buy my vegetable seeds from SeedSavers Exchange, a group in Iowa that is dedicated to the preservation of heirloom varieties.  Seed saving was always a part of farm life and so I can't pass by a cosmo or calendula that's gone to seed and not reach out to pull the shriveled,  brown husks from each stalk.  The garage is full of plastic containers and tins brimming with the harvest and sometime over the winter, the kids and I will spend a day separating grain from chaff.  

But for now, I must make that final push toward the edge of winter.  There are clay pots to turn over and bean poles to stack in the shed.  As we head into the drab hues of winter, these rainbow heirloom photos will serve to tide me over...

I don't think I have good carrot soil.  We never get a bountiful crop and I'm not sure why I keep trying.  Maybe because they're so bright and hopeful looking when you dig them up.  The kids don't enjoy them much...too earthy compared to the store-bought ones they're used to.  But it's good for them to know where carrots begin. 

Pictured here is my wedding china, Lenox's Hannah Gold, along with some vintage textiles I found at the local thrift shop.

I tried something new this year...growing our own popcorn.  It's a miniature "strawberry" variety and we got about 25 stalks to grow, each with about 3 little ears.  I shucked them in October and now am waiting for the kernels to dry out a bit more.  I've read that if they aren't dried enough, they won't pop enough to enjoy.  So hopefully over the winter, we'll have a movie night while snacking on our own backyard popcorn.  

I found this pretty daffodil plate at a thrift shop some years ago.  I thought it would be a nice pattern to collect to use in the springtime.  But so far, I haven't found anymore piece to add!  I love the crazing. ~~~ And more vintage textiles that I couldn't pass up. I have a thing for hand-worked cross-stitch designs.

One of our favorite harvests...the durable cucumber.  I was thankful that not many cucumber beetles made it to the vines this year.  Must have been the bottomless pit winter we had that killed them off.  We got a decent crop and the chickens enjoyed a lot of trimmings as a result. 

This is my everyday Pfaltzgraff pattern, Filigree.  I'm so glad I picked a simple white...never have trouble matching it to whatever decor I'm in the mood to work with in the kitchen. ~~~ And more vintage textiles from the thrift store. I'm enthralled with the tiny knots at the center of these flowers.

We grew bush beans on the farm, but my piano teacher grew pole beans and that's where I got my first batch of seeds for this variety.  She lived in an apartment over the drugstore in town, so she had little space for gardening.  But a few buckets on the roof and she was in the bean business!  These easily reach over 8 feet tall and are robust producers.  The kids love to run out to the backyard and grab a few to munch on.  

 The pink glass plate is from my collection of American Sweetheart Depression glass.  I inherited a stack of butter plates from my grandmother.  She had no other pieces to the set.  But I soon fell in love with them and now have all but the most elusive pieces in my collection.  ~~~ This vintage linen is actually a pillowcase. I have plans to someday make it into a tea towel. 

Peas hold a special place in my heart. Since we first learned we were expecting them, the triplets have been my "3peas." I just love seeing how they nestle inside their pod...I can relate!  Peas are also a rabbit's favorite, so I bought a "pea tunnel" this year which allows them to safely grow inside the garden fence, away from nibbling foes. 

This green plate is a singleton in my cupboard. I only have an educated guess that it once belonged to my great-grandmother.  It was found on the loft of our barn many years ago in a box of other kitchenwares that had been stored there after Grandma passed away. I love it's simplicity and soft hue and like to wonder about that chip and who in the family was responsible for it.  ~~~ This vintage linen comes from a friend whose mother made it when she was young.  I marvel at the time time and skill it took to make those white flowers. 

It was a rough year for tomatoes in my garden this year. I'm not sure what the culprit was...poor soil, a wetter-than-usual season, late seed start...but it made me sad because I love nothing more than a good juicy BLT on Sunday afternoon.  We didn't get many tomatoes this year, though the chickens got quite a few green ones after the first frost killed off the vines. I'm thinking I'll move the location to the opposite end of the garden next year and see if that helps. A little more sun would be helpful, too.

This plate stirs strong emotions for me.  I found it at the thrift store (can you tell I spend a lot of my free time there?) and over the years I have picked up a few other pieces in the pattern as well. At Grandma's house, this was called the "George and Martha" plate.  Grandma had bowls, too, and I used to love getting to the bottom of my Cheerios to see the dancing couple under the milk. Grandma's set didn't have the gold edges or filigree design and I think the pattern was quite faded by the end. No matter. As we say here, "The more tattered shape it's in, the more loved it's been." 

~~~ The vintage linen was a must-have when I saw it this summer.  I'm using it right now on a bookshelf with my autumn pumpkins and crows. 

I'll end with the humble zucchini. What can I say about this vegetable? I struggle with knowing what to do with them but feel obligated to grow them nonetheless. It's a right of farmgirl passage to have a bucket of surplus zucchinis in the car at all times, like my mother did, for dropping off at neighbors' houses and the dentist's office. I will admit to loving a good loaf of zucchini nut bread and am looking forward to making a few of those over the winter.    

This plate coordinates with the Depression glass though it's not from the same pattern. My mother-in-law gave it to me after cleaning out the leftover dishes from her mother's house. It makes a perfect cookie tray for Easter sweets. ~~~ The vintage table runner was another thrift store find. It reminds me of the first needlework I attempted as a child.  Nothing fancy, but something to show Grandma and hopefully get her nod of approval. 

 Au revoir for now...

The Passover

To Joshua

I’m writing because I want to remember this day for you.  This day when the ordinary trajectory of dust-bound life glanced off the fingertips of the divine.  This day when we got to see the glittering bokeh of Heaven, so often relegated to our daydreams and childhood construations, fall right here in our backyard.  

You talk of it now, with the fervor and delight and peacock-proud strut of your 9-year old self.  How you were sure she would come around.  And how those beetle grubs you went and dug up for her were the tipping point, for sure. How you never doubted and always knew that our prayers and those grubs would surely do the trick.  

I’m writing, too, because I want to recall that night for you.  That night you didn’t see while you were tucked in snug, high up in your bunk, with fingers woven through soft crocheted strands and a sleepy smile cambering across your lips. That night when I took the flashlight and walked with heavy steps through the back yard, fully expecting to find an even darker scene on the other side of the wooden gate. 

I never told you of it.  How I talked steel into my whimpering heart.  How I told her it was OK to go and would she please go before I had to make the hard decisions about how to waft the dust moat of her ordinary life into the realm of ones we once knew.

I had watched her for over 2 weeks grow increasingly more still.  More swollen in her belly and pained in her movements.  Less eager to eat and paled by sloshing breaths that she pulled through her filling lungs like a child sucking up the last bits of a milkshake through a straw.  I had spent several nights searching for online solutions and found only death warrant diagnoses for this type of thing.  A “water belly” was irreversible, caused by one of three conditions:  heart failure, cancer or something called internal laying where the process of egg production got reversed and the eggs were deposited inside her abdominal cavity where they eventually piled up into a mound of septic infection.  It was a matter of when, not if and I began to prepare myself for the inevitable hour of decision when I would have to judge that enough suffering had been borne.

I watched her carefully, those long stretches of dying days.  Going to the coop in the morning and hoping to note improvement but seeing that her bright red comb had turned a darker purplish hue and was cold to the touch.  Taking the leftover apple cores and cucumber skins for an afternoon snack and hoping to see her eyes perk up but sighing at the sight of watery droppings and an empty craw. Checking on her at night and hoping to find her settled comfortably on the roost but finding her hunched over in the corner, belly too bulging to lower herself for rest.

I decided to tell you after school on a Friday that Rebecca wasn’t feeling well and she might not have much time left with us.  That evening, we spent a few hours with her in the back yard.  I made sure you had a picture with her and we talked about whether God takes our pets to Heaven for safe keeping and what cancer would look like if you could see it and what makes a 3-chambered heart suddenly start to stutter and fail.  You came right up on the edge of death, turned it over in your mouth and examined it from all angles but never traded it for the hope-filled words of recovery to which you had decided to firmly fix yourself.

Rebecca wasn’t moving at all, despite the freedom of having the whole backyard to herself and even the bits of chickweed that you offered her were of no interest.  Hunched and puffed out like a soft, black tumbleweed blown up against the fence, she spent most of the evening with her eyes closed and I knew there wasn’t much time left.  Years on the farm with their  countless goodbyes have engraved on my heart a sundial about such things and so I marked shadows of many shades that crept longer toward dusk.

You smoothed her feathers and spoke quietly to her and asked if we could pray over her and, of course, I said surely, yes.  It was telling more than praying, really.  Telling Jesus about your sick hen and how you wanted her to be well again.  Telling Rebecca about Jesus and how everything His hands ever touched was made better.  You never wavered, never hesitated in telling the story both ways, to the brilliance of Heaven’s throne room and then back again to the burden of earth’s dust, even though you’re well aware that avian lifespans are normally counted on one hand and Rebecca’s had already reached your index finger.  

Eventually you wandered to the compost pile thinking that perhaps a worm would cheer her.  You found a beetle grub instead and plopped the wriggling larvae in front of her with high hopes that it would spark a bit of instinctual fight in her body. 

Remember how she devoured it with zest? I was taken aback to see her even attempt to eat one, much less gobble the next half dozen that you found for her.  After all, she hadn’t eaten in days, hadn’t moved more than a shuffle the last week. But in spite of the momentary verve, her breaths were still terribly shallow and clotted with the pressing fluid.  As I gently picked her up for the return to the coop, I felt through my hands the sputtering reverberations of fading life.  With my own heart quavering, I accepted that we wouldn’t likely see her alive again.

That night after you had gone to bed, full of certainty and Heavenly hope, I scanned the internet once again, this time searching for the exit ramps of life that were most humane.  Surprisingly,  the usual path through the vet’s office really isn’t an option for birds. But there were plenty of other exits to choose from.  The kinds I knew from my childhood as I watched my father and grandfather handle end-of-life duties for an ailing cow or Thanksgiving turkey.  Others that seemed bizarre and unnecessary and unchoosable.  All points, however, of departure when the decision had been made to steer away from needless suffering and pain.

I settled on one that I thought I could handle and then I seeped onto the couch in a puddle of tears.  Daddy was comforting and compassionate, knowing how hard this final act of caretaking would be for me.  Even though I’m well-aware that every new pet comes wrapped in a shrouded nod, a day when life comes to the chasm and must pass over, it’s never easy to concede that such a moment has arrived.  Yes, even for chickens. After draining my eyes, I took the flashlight and made my way through the night toward the coop for a final visit though I wasn’t even sure I would find her alive.

That was the night I told her she could go, almost begged her to go before I had to decide her timing.  I made her comfortable as best I could in the straw below the nest boxes and smoothed her feathers for what I surely felt would be the last time.  And I reminded her, just like you did, that Jesus would make everything right and if there were chickens in Heaven, I’d find her on my farm when I got there one day. 

Seems silly, right?  To talk to a chicken about eternity.  To dissipate so many hours lingering on the sentimental instead of marching through the practical.  To maintain hope for reprieve when every single member of the jury affirms the judgement.  I rolled those words around in my mouth as well.  The ones that left a bitter taste in yours.  Cancer.  Heart failure.  Disease. They were like a crushed aspirin on my tongue. Choking like a breath of chalk dust, pungent like a sip of vinegar.  But somehow (I thank God it’s yet true), you knew to spit them out, to refuse them.  And predictably (I pray God teaches me otherwise) I held them in under the weight of a hundred past memories, a dozen search engine results, a single expectation of sure defeat.

That’s how I left Rebecca that night.  Wishfully hoping that she might pull through but conceding in my heart that the death warrant was already being signed and the following day, if she survived the night, would entail a burial after an escort over the chasm.

Because you didn’t know about that night, you’ll never fully understand my shock, my utter disbelief, when I saw Rebecca come slowly stepping down the ramp from the coop the next morning.  Still swollen and somewhat hunched, but alert and curious about what the scrap bucket contained.  She didn’t make an effort to push her way to the front with the others, but more importantly, she didn’t linger in the back corner as she had done the last several days.  Over the next week, she continued to improve, began to scratch and peck about in the dirt and regained her slimmer profile.  The water belly slowly but surely receded and her lungs cleared.  After two weeks, she was back to fighting with the other hens over choice scraps and had returned to roosting with them at night.  She regained her sweet clucking sounds and restored her place in the pecking order with a few swift jabs at bully Charlotte’s comb.  By the end of the second week, it was as though she had never been sick and you crowed rightfully true that your grubs and prayers had done the trick.  Like doubting Thomas, I know you’re right and yet a month later, I’m still in disbelief.

I want you to remember that death passed over the coop that night, Joshua. Just like in the story that you love to read from Exodus where the reaping shadows recoiled at each lintel bearing the lamb’s blood. I want you to scratch our story deep into your heart and make for it a comfortable expectation there, a wide nest of space for gathering more victories of life in the face of death, more confidence in spite of incredulity, more surely, yes in a world of just surrender.  I want you to recount the story over and over to yourself and for others, too. Because all too soon, even now, the press will be upon you to abandon it all.  To join the trudge toward the inevitable.  To swallow the bitter pill.  It happens slowly but surely and rarer than a hen’s tooth is the one who remembers how to only believe. 

To just believe.  Him.

Keep honing your heart, Joshua.  Realigning your vision to the crosshairs.  Choosing the words that sow life.  Rejecting those that sponsor death.

Remain in the wisdom of a child even as you stride toward your crown.  Your unreasonable, scoffable, inscrutable faith lights wide the path for those of us clamoring in the battle to believe. 

The words of King Solomon, given as wisdom from God:

Death and life are in the power of the tongue
and those loving it eat its fruit.

Proverbs 18:21

In the Garden

My Dad was never a gardener, per se, though I always picture him in my childhood memories as somehow working the land...on the tractor baling hay or raking out the stones from the topsoil before we planted the new front yard.  And he didn't make a living making music, though I can't remember a day when his fingers weren't pinching a guitar pick or pressing a string against a fret.   

He's the headwater from which springs both my love of the land and my love of music and so today, I'm sending back a little of both to him.  Flowers from the gardens I work around our house.  And lyrics from his favorite church hymn.  

Happy Father's Day, Dad!  

Love you bunches,

Jen

In the Garden

by C. Austin Miles 

Composed 1912

Work of My Hands

Each year I read this blessing over my gardens as a way to dedicate them to the Lord's care and to recognize His provisions for our family.  Today is my blessing day and I plan to add the chicken coop in as well.  Here's to a bountiful summer ahead!  

Chippy

To Matt, Josh & Lauren,

Every summer we seem to find a wild animal in the yard that needs to be rescued.  The box turtles that wander aimlessly through the grass after climbing up the hill from the creek or the robins that build their nest on the front door wreath where comings and goings are sure to disturb or the Monarch caterpillars in the milkweed patch at the side of the house that are waiting to be picked off by marauding wasps.  Whether your father likes it or not, you’re all drawn to helping creatures in need and really, it’s not your fault.  The rescue gene runs deep through your Durandetta & Frisk bloodlines.  Your great-grandma Mia had a pair of pet raccoons named Nanette & Pierre. Uncle John tells the story of the baby blue heron that rode the sewing machine treadle in Grandma Durandetta's kitchen.  And I had BeeBop the robin whose untimely demise is cemented lore in our family’s collective memory.  Wait til you hear that sorrowful tale one day!   

My own first wild animal rescue actually happened before we moved to the farm.  I was about 3 or 4 years old and our family was living in a little house on Filbert Street in Curwensville.  There was a small backyard that led to a steep hill, thick with trees and brush.  Along the back perimeter was an old stone wall and chipmunk families used to make their homes among the crags and gaps.  

Grammy remembers how one morning I came into the house with my hands cupped together to show her what I had found while playing in the yard.  All she could see was a thin tail hanging out from under one thumb and she immediately thought I had captured a rat.  But as I opened my hands to show her my prize, she saw that it was a baby chipmunk that had fallen from its nest.  Realizing that its chances of survival were very slim, she allowed me to tuck a washcloth around it and place it in a shoe box while I kept vigil over the next several hours. 

Hours turned into days and amazingly, the little orphan survived and began to acclimate to being held and fussed over.  Soon, he was running around on the couch cushions and end tables and Grammy and Grandpa began to concede that I had adopted my first pet.  In no time at all, Chippy was living the high life in a hamster cage by night and charming everyone with his spunk and joie de vivre by day.   

There were pillows to climb and grapes to peel and pockets for hitchhiking and guitar strings for high-wire acrobatics.  Grammy even let him ride around on her pregnant belly as she grew round with Uncle Jason in the fall of 1977.  

By the following autumn, we had bought the Reynold Bloom farm in Olanta and were packing up the little house on Filbert Street.  I don’t have any memories of leaving town, but I do recall the first time we walked into the empty farm house and how the smell of paneled wood steeped in the smoky gauze of coal dust filtered through my nostrils.  I remember running through the lower field and pulling the dried seeds off the ragweed stalks and marveling that as far as my eyes could see, there wasn’t another house in view.  I recall walking into the attic for the first time and thinking that I was going to be swallowed up into the deep dark corners that seemed to press around me like towering curtains of black velvet.  So many memories of those earliest days on the farm, but all tales for other tellings.  

Uncle John reminded me recently about Chippy’s first day on the farm and how we almost lost him.  In the bustle of packing up the house, someone had set the hamster cage to the side, out of the way, but in the direct sunlight.  For hours, Chippy baked in the late August heat and by the time Grammy realized what had happened, he was limp and unconscious.  Fervent prayers and a series of dunks in a bowl of cool water brought him around and he survived to climb another couch.  How many rodents can boast of being saved not once, but twice, in their lives?  

Life on the farm brought new and exciting adventures for all of us, Chippy included.  While I discovered the dizzying joy of climbing to the top of the hayloft, some 30 feet above the barn floor, Chippy discovered the thrill of climbing up the drapes in the dining room and flinging himself to the rug below.  While I learned how to squeeze out the sweet autumn insides of Concord grapes from the branches of the arbor that stood like an old hunchbacked woman trying not to totter down a hillside, Chippy learned how to stuff his cheeks with the leftover watermelon seeds from a late summer picnic and then stash them for midnight snacking under a pile of pine shavings in the corner of his cage.  As I soon realized that catching a chicken on the run involved zigs and zags and turn-on-a-dime reflexes, none of which the human body is well suited to make, Chippy realized that the braid rug under the dining room table was a perfect racetrack which his slender, streamlined body was well suited to exploit.  (He even had built-in racing stripes!)  

Grandpa and I were recently reminiscing about him and laughing how he seemed to especially enjoy racing when the barn cats were at the glass patio door waiting to be fed.  All they could do was watch in maddening defeat as a perfect bite-sized snack made defiant laps around the rug just inches from their reach.   

As animated as he could be, he was also inclined to nesting.  He had a favorite washcloth that he pulled around him at night and spent many hours napping in Grammy’s bathrobe pocket while she percolated through her early morning chores at the stove or sewing basket or writing desk.  For more than five years, Chippy lived this extraordinary life with our family.

Perhaps it was the onset of old age or maybe an incipient disease provoked the change in behavior, but around the fifth year, we began to notice that he was shunning interaction and was turning his tiny claws and teeth against us with purpose.  Eventually he became too difficult to handle and the decision was made that we would take him to a place where he had the best chance of living out the life he would have known, had I not saved him from the stone wall all those years before.  

I still recall the day when we drove down to Irvin Park at the bottom of Bloomington Hill.  (You have been there several times on our visits back to Curwensville…remember how we found the wild animal tracks in the mud and skipped stones at the edge of the river?)  Grammy was driving our periwinkle blue station wagon and Chippy’s cage was in the back while Uncle Jason and I were belted into our seats ahead of him.  We parked near the walking path and then carried his cage to a shady spot under the towering oak trees which reached 40, even 50 feet above us.  The air was filled with the sounds of his wild-growing nature…birds calling to each other and leaves rustling on the forest floor.  As hard as it was to open the lid, I knew, even at that young age, that whatever time he had left, he should have the freedom to spend it there.  

We were all crying and hoping that he would shun the open door, but almost immediately he raced across the path and up the nearest tree.  Higher and higher he went as though he were scaling the grandest draperies he had ever known.  And then to our utter disbelief, he flung himself off like an adrenaline-crazed base jumper to the earth below.  He crunched into a pile of dead leaves and lay immobile for a few moments before finally racing off into the woods and out of our view for the last time.        

The third time a charm, Chippy needed no rescue during the last chapter of our lives together.  He bounded off into the forest with the same joie de vivre that encompassed all his days with us, days which we were the better for.  And that’s why today, when you come to me with cupped hands around butterfly wings or squishy frog legs, I can’t protest or demand an immediate release of your captive treasure.  I want you to gather and relish and laugh out loud at all the life around you.  And then I want you to know when and how and why to send it out again.       

A Hymn for Dreamers

Help me, Lord, to hold my dreams,
the dreams I've dreamed in days gone by…
Help me Lord, to hold my dreams
with open hands to Heaven high.

Teach me, Lord, to trust the dreams
you've dreamed for me from ancient old…
Teach me, Lord, to trust that dreams
no matter time, can still unfold.

Remind me, Lord, to see this life-
these mother's struggles, sacrifice-
as once the dreams I prayed to live
and waited on Your love to give.

So help me, Lord, to hold my dreams
in cords of three as breath slips by.
Help me, Lord, while holding hands,
to turn their hearts to Heaven high.


For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord.  
Plans to prosper you and not to harm you.  
To give you a hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11