Plain Wisdom (25 page)

One Christmas craft they enjoyed for a long time was making dough ornaments. (I’ve shared the recipe below.) After the holidays you can pack them away with the rest of the ornaments, and every year when you pull out that box of decorations, you’ll have a delightful time recalling fond memories.

We had other traditions throughout the year—fireworks and swimming on the Fourth of July, carving pumpkins in the fall, staying up late playing games on New Year’s Eve, making special candies and cards on Valentine’s Day, hosting Super Bowl celebrations and family birthday parties. But as my sons became teens, they no longer looked forward to our family traditions.

Gathering teenagers to make memories takes an extra bit of creativity
(and patience!), regardless of the season. My solution to extending their joy of making something Christmassy was to use food as the craft time. I allowed them to decorate their own gingerbread-men ornaments—one year it was a demolition gingerbread man with a jackhammer in his hand. Other years I let them create gingerbread houses and then munch on their little homes as the holidays progressed.

Whatever your kids’ ages, be imaginative and free spirited in your family traditions. They’ll love you for it … eventually.

When my daughter, Amanda, was about seven years old, she seemed to be constantly underfoot. I never made much headway in the housecleaning with her around.

One day, in an attempt to channel her overabundant energy, I asked if she’d like to bake a cake for her brothers. To my relief she responded with interest. I set out all the utensils, measuring cups, bowls, and ingredients she would need, told her to follow the directions on the box, and instructed her to call me before putting the batter into the oven.

From the time Amanda had been old enough to push a chair up to the counter, she’d been at my side while I baked, watching and helping me. So by now I trusted her with the task.

I hurried upstairs in hopes of getting some work done. I had barely started when Amanda called up to me. I walked to the top of the stairs. “What is it?” I asked as patiently as I could.

“How many cups of the cake mix do I use?”

“All of it, dear.”

“Okay,” she said. “This must be a
big
cake.”

All was quiet for some time, and I accomplished a lot. When my little girl called me to help her put the cake into the oven, I tried not to notice the messy kitchen or the bits of eggshells in the bottom of the bowl. Most of them clung to the sides as we scooped the cake batter into the baking pan. This time it was my treat to lick the bowl.

Later, as her brothers ate the cake, they found more eggshells, along with the plastic Amanda had snipped off the top of the bag and a piece of the box. That’s my enthusiastic girl! But with five brothers, she will never live it down.

Today she works at a bakery two days a week and can make a recipe like the one below without any inedible items jumping into the bowl.

From Miriam

Loretta, an English friend, was diagnosed with colon cancer and immediately had emergency surgery, but the prognosis wasn’t good. She’d always loved my homemade vegetable soup, so after she came home from the hospital, I made a batch and took it to her. We had a lovely visit, and as I left her house, I decided to maintain communication with her while she recuperated.

We stayed in touch mostly by phone, and she kept me posted on her condition. She recovered from the surgery and began chemo treatments.

As time went on, I became busy with gardening, canning, yard work, and tending to my small craft business. When my two school-age children went on summer break, my schedule became more full. As the heat began to fade, the children returned to school, and I felt bad that I never followed through with my intentions to visit Loretta. We rarely even spoke on the phone.

Then one day Loretta’s daughter, Elizabeth, stopped by to say her mother was getting worse.

I prepared Loretta’s favorite soup and fresh dinner rolls and took
them to her, along with a few jars of homemade goods. As I sat with my friend, guilt washed over me. Loretta had lost her sense of taste, so none of my fresh-baked or canned food really blessed her. I remembered a saying from my childhood: “One little deed done in time is worth more than a thousand good intentions.”

Before leaving her home, I prayed for a new way to help my friend. I begged her daughter to call me if there was anything I could do. The next day she stopped by, asking if I’d make her mother some loose-fitting nightgowns. I hurried to the task, thankful for this new opportunity.

A week later Loretta passed away. At her funeral I was humbly honored to see that my friend had chosen one of my homemade gowns for her burial.

Thanks to God’s grace, and in spite of my procrastination, my work had blessed Loretta and her children after all.

When I was in my late thirties, I started my day hours before daylight and ended it well after the sun went down. I was raising three sons: one preschooler, one homeschooled seventh grader, and one high schooler who’d just begun honors classes. My days were a tangled array of meeting needs.

Tommy worked sixty hours a week, and my teens needed my help with their schoolwork and with getting them to extracurricular activities. In addition, our preschooler had digestion issues. I have a brother who had the same problem, and he sustained permanent damage because of it. The stress never eased.

By May of that year, I was longing for the seven-hundred-mile road trip we always took in June to visit my parents. I needed to feel my mother’s arms around me, hear her words of encouragement, and soak in the sense of respect she radiated. To everyone else I was just Mom doing her best. But to my mother, my value had no limits. I knew I’d leave her home feeling refreshed and strong again.

One night my husband and I stood at the sink washing dishes while our preschooler sat on the floor zipping Matchbox cars across the linoleum.

“Mom,” Tyler said, “you should call Grandma.”

“I just talked to her a few days ago. She’s busy making plans for planting her spring flowers.”

He returned to playing with his toys, and I continued my conversation with my husband. When I tucked my son in that night, he repeated his suggestion. Again I waved away the idea.

As Tommy and I were heading out the door the next day to run errands, Tyler came into the foyer. “Mom, you should call Grandma.”

My husband looked at me funny. “Maybe you should.”

I picked up our youngest son. “I talked to her a few days ago, and we agreed we’d talk again on Tuesday. It’s on the calendar. I won’t forget.”

When Tyler mentioned it again on Sunday afternoon, I was neck deep in helping my oldest son study for finals. And Adam had been diagnosed with a severe case of chickenpox, even though he’d had the vaccine. He was running a fever and was covered in little red blotches.

On Monday night I attended an awards ceremony at my oldest son’s school while Tommy watched our preschooler and the teenager with the pox. At the ceremony Justin won five awards—local, countywide, and statewide. Having worked so hard to prepare him for public school, I felt as if I could breathe for the first time in quite a while.

As we walked back into our home, I heard the phone ringing. My husband answered it. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say, “but I can’t understand you. Who is this?”

A few moments later I heard him speak my dad’s name. The horror on my husband’s face made my legs go weak.

Tommy hung up the phone and told me to sit down. Then he informed me that my mom had died of a heart attack while planting her spring flowers.

I’d been given several nudges to stop what I was doing and call her.
In my busyness I missed that chance. I’d never once considered that Mom might die in her sixties. Her mother and her mother’s mother had lived well into their nineties. She and I had always talked of her and my brother Leston moving in with us when Dad passed. He wasn’t sick, but we were going with the probabilities—women usually outlive men.

I’d assumed too much, and my only solace was that we’d taken the time to build and maintain a good relationship over the years—after I was out of my teen years, of course. Back then, she was my safe haven if I needed to complain, whine, or pitch fits. When I matured, I saw her strength and value.

Because her death caught me unprepared, I do my best never to take any relationship or any parting words for granted. As cliché as it sounds, we truly don’t know what tomorrow holds—except that God will meet us there and be our strength, our hope, and our
nevertheless
.

Sitting in Miriam’s yard, I sipped a cup of coffee as I watched sunlight peek over the mountains and fill the valley. Sunlight sparkled off the dewy grass. The steady
clop
of horses’ hoofs against the asphalt softened as the rigs pulled onto the gravel driveway.

It was a day I’d looked forward to for a year. The annual Amish school sale. It’s a bustling auction with at least four auctioneers selling various goods at different stations, two makeshift kitchens, a few special-event tents, and several commercial-sized grills filled with chicken.

Delicious aromas fill the air, as does the sweet sound of families and friends greeting one another. There is an ocean of Amish men, women, and children milling about—cooking, helping the auctioneers, bidding, and eating as time allows. The youth play volleyball and baseball out in the fields away from the auction area.

The sales from each year’s auction support Amish schools in the surrounding districts. So on that beautiful spring day, several districts of
Amish people were attending the school sale, along with hundreds of Englischers.

Cars are parked in a freshly mowed hay field on one side of the road. Buggies sit in a different field with a fenced pasture holding the unharnessed horses. On the far side of the warehouse-type building, several portable potties and sinks are set up.