Author: Sally

Faith

Church

Sally4 Comments

A hush fell over the congregation.

The pastor had asked, “Are there any other announcements?”

A slender older woman at the back said, “I have one, but I’m coming up there.”

We all waited while she slid out of her pew, went around the back, and walked up the center aisle. Nobody said a word as she climbed the few steps up the lectern. She stood, looking at the congregation, her lips pressed in a tight line. Finally she spoke.

“The rumors, the hate mail — it all has to stop. We need to support our pastor.”

My mind went back some 15 or 16 years before — to a different church, a different problem. The pastor had begun a belittling diatribe from the pulpit against individuals in the congregation. One man — a big teddy bear of a man, a former dairy farmer — stood up.

“This has to stop,” he said, addressing the pastor.

A shouting match ensued. I don’t remember the particulars because I had quickly gotten my children out of the sanctuary. We waited in the safety of the nursery until church was over.

Sanctuary. It’s a funny word for what was happening in there that day.

Sometimes church becomes ugly and unsafe.

“And they’ll know we are Christians by our love,
by our love.
Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.”

We sing, but we don’t do.

Until one person stands up and reminds us that we can choose a better way.

Last week we celebrated the resurrection. This week our pastor read from John 21, when the (unrecognized) risen Christ found the disciples fishing again.

How easily we slip back into old ways!

But He has given us a new way to live — it’s by doing the hard work of love.

A to Z Blogging Challenge · poetry

S is for Surprise

Sally9 Comments

Uh-oh

Oh, no!

Surprise!

(1)Boy is from My Dad’s Job by Peter Glassman, illustrated by Timothy Bush

(2)Girl is from Misty: The Whirlpool (from Misty of Chincoteague by Marguerite Henry) excerpted and adapted by Joan Nichols, illustrated by Stephen Moore

(3)Rabbits are from The Bunny Book by Richard Scarry

“Rabbits have large families” (3)
“Maureen felt a stab of fear” (2)
“Dad talked about buying futures” (1)
In rabbits? That wasn’t clear…

Can three divergent books
Be joined in harmony?
Each must accept the others
— And a little absurdity.

Above is a partially “found” poem using lines from the pages from which I borrowed the pictures. Wikipedia says, “Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry (a literary equivalent of a collage)…

So two collages today!

photography

The Good Earth

Sally4 Comments
Planting time

To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.

Audrey Hepburn

The good earth — fresh from the compost

The ground’s generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty!
Try to be more like the ground.

Rumi

1968-69?

The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops,
but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.

Masanobu Fukuoka

Photo Challenge — Earth

A to Z Blogging Challenge · Faith

Q is for Quirky

Sally6 Comments

I often don’t know how to describe my collages, so I use the word quirky. How else could explain this odd conglomeration using a couple of dogs and a Dr. Seuss character?

from The New Century Dictionary, 1948, — a 2 volume set found in the free box at the Endicott library.

A quirk is a sudden twist. I was surprised to read that in the dictionary, because I think of quirks as “unique-nesses” — those things that make you you.

We currently have a cat that loves belly rubs. I consider that a quirk.

Last week our cat disappeared.

The first day, I didn’t think much of it. She’ll be back, I told myself.

But when I went for a walk, I scanned the ditches on either side of the road, just in case she had darted out in front of a car and met her demise.

The second day, I started mentally running through the list of predators in the vicinity. I hear coyotes howl at night. Do they like cats? My brother told me that large owls prey on cats. I hadn’t seen any large owls, but he said there were some in the area. Our neighbor once told us that foxes prey on cats. I know foxes live around here. I was pretty sure that the bald eagles prefer fish from the river, so I ruled them out — hoping I was right about that.

I walked the road again looking for our little black cat, calling her, looking in the fields for her — but the only black I saw were crows.

The third day came and I was worried. I asked my brother, didn’t we used to have cats that would disappear for a week at a time?

Ishibon (1967)

“Ishibon would go off two to three weeks,” he said.

Ishibon had been our first cat. I remembered Ishibon going off and coming back. I felt better.

A little.

But by the fourth day, I felt like I needed to brace Mary for the inevitable.

“If Piper doesn’t come back,” I told her, “we’ll need to get another cat to keep the mice at bay.”

“I don’t want another cat,” she said. “I want Piper.”

Piper, with all her little quirks, was our cat.

It was Good Friday, and I found myself thinking about Jesus’ disciples watching Jesus die on the cross. They had so hoped that He was the Messiah.

“There, there,” the Pharisees undoubtedly said. “We’ll get another Messiah.”

And one of the Marys would have replied, “I don’t want another Messiah. I want Jesus.”

Because for all His quirks — picking grain on the Sabbath and speaking with a Samaritan woman, all those times He behaved in unexpected ways, and then, at the end, to die like that — He WAS the Messiah.

The people simply couldn’t see it at the time.

If He had behaved like everybody else, He wouldn’t have been God.

I know I’m not saying it well, but the quirks made the Messiah.

Your quirks make you. My quirks make me.

And our quirky little cat returned on Saturday, an early Easter gift for us.

I think she wanted a belly rub.

Piper
A to Z Blogging Challenge

N is for Newspaper

Sally7 Comments

Last night, before I went to bed, I found myself looking through all my cards, considering ways to shuffle my A-to-Z plans in order to avoid using this one.

I’m really not happy with it.

This was an early card and has so many problems. Would you like me to point all the mistakes?

First, there’s no background. The characters are just kind of plopped into nothingness, a pale haze of watercolor that’s barely noticeable.

Then, the man reading the newspaper is holding a leash that leads nowhere. Where’s his dog? Why didn’t I include it?

Third, the old man’s right ear — I can’t believe that I never finished cutting around it.

When I’m aware of the mistakes, they become the only thing I see. It’s awful. I need to take a step back.

The story I had in mind for this was one of obliviousness — both the man reading the newspaper and the grumpy man clutching his newspaper are oblivious of the rabbit that’s right in front of them.

And, golly, isn’t that true?

I see the mistakes in the picture — but the “rabbit” that’s in front of me, the one I’m not seeing immediately, is that on this journey of collage, I’ve actually travelled quite a way. It was a bit of a jolt to realize that.

Compare “Newspaper” with this, the most recent collage I made —

The card is laid flat to show that I finally got smart enough to write the books I use right on the back of the card.

Interestingly, the story in this collage was also supposed to be about obliviousness. The boy is so taken with the tiny chicken perched on the piano that he doesn’t notice the baby polar bear sleeping beneath it.

The picture still has problems — but the problems are different. Overall, it seems more complete than “Newspaper.”

Sometimes it’s good to look back and see how far you’ve come.

It’s like a rabbit in the path. Good to notice.

Sort of.

Man reading the newspaper from Wheels on the Bus (a Raffi Song to Read book) illustrated by Sylvie Kantorovitz Wickstrom

Grumpy man from The Old Man and the Afternoon Cat by Michaela Muntean, illustrated by Bari Weissman

Rabbit from ??

family

Easter Egg Hunt in the Orchard

Sally3 Comments
1968? or 1969?

I was insistent that we have our Easter egg hunt in the orchard… because of this picture

Not quite 50 years ago, in that same exact spot, we hunted for Easter eggs — my brothers and sister and I. I don’t think we called it the orchard in those days because it was almost inconceivable that those saplings would actually grow into trees that would bear fruit.

My mother stood in the middle and watched us race around looking for eggs — real eggs, hardboiled and dyed, not plastic and filled with candy.

This year, we filled plastic eggs for Henry. Mary and Laurel hid them in the orchard and on the way to the orchard.

the stone wall on the way to the orchard

Some were placed high in the trees. Henry isn’t up to climbing yet, so his uncle “Fred” helped him reach them.

Getting an egg out of a tree
Dropping eggs in the basket

I know Easter isn’t about the eggs and the egg hunts, but there’s something deeply satisfying about so many generations doing the same activity on the same piece of land.

A to Z Blogging Challenge · poetry

M is for Moo

Sally7 Comments

To laugh is human — but to moo bovine.

I had such big plans at Christmas. I was going to make teeny collages for all my friends.

Anna loves cows so I made her a cow collage (a cow-lage?). It ended up being one of only two that I mailed out.

She sent me a picture of it on her refrigerator.

I love that it’s right beneath the note telling her that she is an amazing student teacher. I bet she is.

A while ago, while trying to work on using metaphor, I wrote a poem about cows, using Billy Collins’ poem, Litany, as a model.

Bovine

You are the map and the Atlas,
the Big Mac and the shake.
You are a javelin held aloft by a strong arm,
and a smooth wet stone in the hand of a little boy.
You are the fresh-mown grass after summer rain,
and the thunder that preceded the shower.

However, you are not the purr of a kitten,
the wag of a dog’s tail,
or kraa-coo-coo-coo of a mourning dove.
And you are certainly not the whisper of butterfly wings.
There is just no way that you are butterfly wings.

It is possible that you are the flock of sheep,
maybe even the laying hen,
but you are not even close
to being the eagle hang-gliding overhead.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the towering pine
nor the creeping myrtle.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the garbled voice in the drive-through speaker.

I also happen to be the blistered toe in a new shoe,
the frayed pink leash on the dog,
and the unmailed letter waiting for a stamp.

I am also the fuzzy blanket tucked around a child
and the hand-thrown mug filled with coffee.
But don’t worry, I’m not the map and the Atlas.
You are still the map and the Atlas.
You will always be the map and the Atlas,
not to mention the Big Mac and–somehow–the shake.

I felt the need to apologize.

Dear Billy Collins,

I’m sorry that I ripped off your poem. It’s just that I don’t put enough metaphor into my poems and this little exercise is such good practice.

I was thinking about the cows down the road. Cows that aren’t cows because I know cows are female and I’m pretty sure these are male, although I haven’t ventured in to confirm my suspicions.

The chief “cow”, a cranky fellow, comes to the fence and shakes his horns at me when I pass. He wants me to know that he’s tough and armed and that I shouldn’t mess with him.

Years ago, when cows complete with udders grazed in that field, they would nibble grass out of my hand and I loved to feel their smooth wet noses.

So I was thinking about cows (that aren’t cows), and the things they are and aren’t, and wrote this.

I hope you don’t mind.