A Chicken in the Window Well: A Rather Lengthy Epistle

Sept 11, 2024

It’s 7:20 pm and I’ve come out on our little porch to write this.

Mike left a half hour ago to drop Anders off to a deacons’ service activity and to take others with him to the farm to check on the chickens (no geese to check on anymore 😪), so only Summer and Mette are here with me—Summer microwaving popcorn and Mette practicing her cursive on some sort of homemade Halloween decoration (“Summer! How do you make a cursive b?”).

I was sitting at our piano, well, keyboard (the piano didn’t make the move to the rental) when the brown dusk and sound of distant rumbling thunder called me out here. (And it is brown. It’s close to dark, quite windy, lightning [no rain] … and a brown haze over it all.)

Anyway, somehow it beckoned, and out I came.

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Sept. 12, 2024

It’s now nearly 24 hours since I began the above. My typing was interrupted when a few rain drops started to fall and I thought I better rescue several pair of kids’ shoes scattered on the lawn. (Do we consider pasture grass—which is all the yard here is—“lawn”?) And anyway, Mette was calling me in to see her small creation. (It’s a bit early for Halloween decor, I think. But how could one say no to this? Or to the tiny paper-doll-style jack-o-lanterns she taped on my dresser?)

In any case, that hazy brown that so beckoned me? That was actually something. Every window of our house and car this morning was covered in a film of dirty spots.

But it did look cool. (In its threatening haze state. Before it settled itself into spots. A shame.)

And now a few small things:

1. Today the high was only about 64 degrees. Starling and I made sugar cookies shaped like pumpkins. It seemed the right way to welcome the kids home from school on the first fall-feeling day of the season.

I thought to make sausage/potato soup as well, but the evening filled up with: activity days for Summer and Mette, an orchestra registration for Summer, and guitar for Penny. (I’m sitting outside her little practice room as I type—the sound of electric guitar floating through the door. [Does electric guitar float? Can it?]) No potato soup has been made. (No dinner at all in fact.) Likely we will pick up pizza on the way home.

2. I bottled peaches the other day.

No. I did not bottle peaches. The wrong wording tumbled out and made me a liar.

I don’t know how to bottle peaches.

(My having lived 23 years in my mother’s home learning neither to bottle nor to sew is a sign of some underlying character defect, I fear. How many dresses did my mother make for me? [Even my wedding dress for crying out loud!] How often did I begin a project with her (determined I should learn) only to drift away and leave it to her? And how many times was I there helping to bottle apricots and peaches without ever learning a thing? [Oh but getting to write the year on each bottle lid—while the jar was still hot—with wax crayon! That’s a happy memory. Of course, all of it was happy memories. The only fault was in my failure to learn.])

But! What I meant to say was that I froze peaches the other day. (Which included “blanching” them, so, it’s not as if I just tossed whole peaches in the freezer!) It was all very domestic of me (even if there were no bottles). I told Mike I felt half inclined to welcome him home from work with a pair of slippers and the evening newspaper in hand.

Penny has since made us several peach smoothies. (And every single time I get a horrible "brain freeze". I bet bottled peaches would not do that. ...)

3. Zinnias! I didn’t get around to doing indoor starts. I just planted the seeds straight into the ground.

And then they all died of cold.

So then I planted them again several weeks later. And this time they took! But it was so late in the season for something to be starting from seed that I had no flowers until practically the end of summer.

Still. Now? Zinnias!

They might be my favorite flower! (I’m leaving room for some other flower I haven’t considered. Our dahlias in WA were pretty amazing. But zinnias are at least high high on my list.) I haven’t been able to have them for years because our snails got so bad in our Pleasant View home that they devoured every zinnia I ever attempted to grow.

They aren’t perfectly safe here. We do have grasshoppers. And they definitely do damage. (It’s one thing to have them eating the leaves, but I feel indignant when I come out and find a flopped over flower head because some grasshopper ate through half a stem.)

Still.

Zinnias!

4. Mike has been working away on his parents’ tractor at the farm. (I am now several days beyond my Sept. 11th and 12th entries by the way.)

And now he can do things like this!

(It just pulled a fence post from the ground—in case you couldn’t tell.)

5. Abe got called into his singles' ward bishopric. Of course, it seems just wild to me that he should be serving in such a demanding role at his age, but I love that they have begun calling the counselors to the bishop in these student wards right from among the young men in them. What a great opportunity to learn to rely on and serve the Lord more. Of course, Abe is no stranger to that--having served a mission and all. But on his mission that was all he had to do. Now he will need to learn to balance that type of service with work, social, hobbies, and a very intense academic program. When I texted him about it the other night he replied:

"Oh I'll be fine. You certainly can't give the Lord a crumb without getting a loaf in return.

"Something funny was that after lunch I went out with McKay [the other counselor] to knock on doors and meet people in the ward. We did it for about two hours and had a great time getting to know people. After that I said, "Wow we met a lot of people! How many do you think we did?" We counted and it was 14 out of 156 total 😂. Anyway still lots of work to do."

Here we all were gathered around a table in the high-council room waiting to ordain him a high priest and set him apart in his calling. That's a lot of people to just be his family! (And Goldie wasn't even there!) We especially thought it was neat that Abe's grandpa Alma was able to come and ordain him. A cool memory for him for sure--as I don't know that many people's grandpas are around when they get ordained to that priesthood office. (Thank you Alma!)

(There was some joking that the bishop had not called two counselors, rather, ... two bodyguards.)

6. Penny has begun a videography class in school. It's fun to see your kids showcase a talent you (and they) didn't even know they had. She is quite clever and natural in the angles and moments she weaves together for her video assignments. I'm not sure if I can figure how to share them here, but for now ... here Penny is when one of our late storms whisked in on Sunday evening and the two of us ran outside for a minute. (Good call on wearing red that day, Penny. Actually, I think it was I who insisted she wear that dress that day when she worried it was too bold. Kudos to me!)