I was heavily pregnant throughout the holiday season. On New Year’s Day, we spent the day with my in-laws. I had a persistent lower backache. Sometime that night, it became evident that this had been the beginning of labor. We drove to the hospital in what was being called a “polar vortex,” and we barely made it in time. I almost delivered my son in the toilet while waiting for my husband to park the car. It was a very short labor. He was a rather small newborn. We were so happy to finally be able to see our new person.
I am very, very thankful to have been able to have children. I was on the older side when I made this person. He, and his siblings, are God’s gift and mercy to me and my husband.
Now, that person is an adult. We have had eighteen Christmasses with him (counting the one just before he was born). Reader, I need you to understand that this is a very finite number of Christmasses.
What happens now? I don’t know. I am happy with my son’s character. It is far better than my character was at eighteen. But good, newly minted and still very immature adult character does not a future make. What path will open up before him? We are trusting God.
Parenting is nothing if not fearful. When my son was an infant, my big fear was that he would die or come to some physical harm while still a baby. I assumed that, once he was a teenager, this fear would diminish. Wrongo, or only half right. I’m less hormonal now (so the emotions are less intense), and the fears have changed. Now they are things like the draft, car crashes, heartbreak.
I have friends who really only had eighteen Christmasses with their son, because he was killed at the age of eighteen. Praying for them. Eighteen Christmasses is such a small number.
This is a view of my neighbor’s house on a smokey afternoon late last summer. It’s also part of the internal landscape of my mind.
Farmlands are one of my favorite biomes. (Yes, they are a biome. I will die on this hill. They are a part of Naure. They are what nature looks like when people live in it.)
Farms and I go way back. I didn’t grow up on one, but I grew up around farms and farmers.
My early years were spent in eastern Pennsylvania, which is a country of rolling green hills and low mountains. My dad was the pastor of a small country church, and most of its members were dairy farmers. Whenever we visited anybody, which was often, we would first be taken into the cow barn. These were black-and-white milk cows. As soon as you stepped into the barn, your senses would be filled with cow sensations: the chorus of moos, the smell. To this day, when I smell a cattle lot, it doesn’t smell bad to me, just like a clean farm smell.
And even cleaner farm smell was the “milk room,” a little brick building with a large stainless-steel tank of milk in the center, and a drain in the middle of the wet floor. It smelled like coolness, milk, and water.
These are memories from when I was very small. That same family that I have in mind, although they had indoor plumbing, also still had a working outhouse in their back yard. There were bees, and the smell wasn’t so nice, but it was raised up on several steps, not just thrown together but definitely constructed. My brother and I would torment this family’s chickens by pulling backwards on their tails so that they flapped. (Not recommended.) We would sit in corrugated buckets filled with water to cool down in the summer, and drink from the garden hose. This family had Dobermans, and I can remember a black bear hanging up in their barn after the father shot it while hunting. Later, it was stuffed in a scary pose and placed in their study.
The dairy farmers in our church also had fields of crops. Our own house had a yard of about an acre and a half. At the back of this yard was a line of poplar trees, and right beyond them, fields rolling away towards the creek. Beyond that, you could see a mountain. They must have rotated the crops in these fields, but I know that at least one year, they were soybeans. We were allowed to pick the pods, open them, and eat the tiny, hard beans out from inside. There was a lot of milkweed, which was fun to pull open and let the tufty parachutes out when it was ripe. There was a lot of ragweed, which my brother turned out to be allergic to, and one year a plague of tent caterpillars turned the mountainside brown.
My dad had a somewhat free schedule, and he would take my brother and me (and later, our sister) on walks in the countryside. These were probably short walks, given that we were little kids, but I remember them lasting hours. We could walk along the borders of the fields and find new fields, or the creek. This habit set “walking between farm fields” permanently in my mind as a normal thing to do. If it was nighttime during this walk, my dad would sing “Walking at Night,” which, in retrospect, is probably a German hiking song.
When I was eight, we moved to western Michigan. Worse, we moved to a city. I complained hard about this. It was the first remotely tragic thing that had ever happened to me, and I was determined to milk it. By this time, my crush on American Indians was well-developed, and I was keenly aware that it was tragic to be driven off your land.
However, despite that we technically lived in a city, our tiny church there was still about half farmers. There were still many opportunities, on prayer meeting and picnic and potluck nights, to run on vast grassy lawns while the adults sat and talked, to climb trees, walk between fields, and hide in the hay lofts and corn cribs.
The countryside in Michigan was flatter and dryer than it had been in Pennsylvania. Furthermore, my small denomination (the “Michiana Mennonites”) straddled the border between Michigan and its neighbor to the south, Indiana, which is really flat. The summer camp we went to served kids from both states, and we often found ourselves crossing the border for pulpit exchanges and things like that. I have attended church in what was literally a tiny, plain white chapel perched at the edge of a sea of fields with no other building nearby. I have tramped over Indiana farms, again with my brother and usually another farm boy, while the adults sat in the house and talked. And these Indiana farms are truly the farmland biome, because there is nothing there but farms, not even a hill to break up the monotony.
The farmland biome combines the best features of wilderness and human habitation. You can walk for as long as you like in solitude. There is wind, there is the changing sky, there are wildflowers, and flora and fauna on the windrows. You can get lost if you want, and if it’s winter, you can get cold and miserable too. But as the sun goes down, you can see in the distance the lights of houses. Coming back from the walk to the warmly glowing farmhouse provides all the romance that a kid with a big imagination and a copy of The Lord of the Rings could desire.
Farms have always been with us, and, though technology has changed somewhat, the logistics of having fields surrounding clusters of buildings mean that farmlands in every place and time look essentially the same. You have the wide horizon, the walls, canals or windrows carving the space up and giving some sense of distance, and the lights low to the ground. Perhaps one reason I like fantasy, as a genre, is that it naturally includes farms surrounding the town and castle.
Some of my favorite fantasy series start with, and often return to, the humble but honest farming community. O.K., actually I can only think of two, but they are good ones. The Belgariad starts off with Garion growing up on Faldor’s farm in Sendaria. Actually, it starts in one of my favorite parts of the farm, the kitchen. And, of course, The Lord of the Rings. Bilbo is not really a farmer, he’s more of a country squire, but the Shire is definitely a farming countryside. The four hobbits’ journey starts out hiking through the fields, as every journey should. Their first encounter with one of the Nine takes place on an otherwise ordinary country road. Farmer Maggot, a wholesome character, takes the four friends in, feeds them, and gets them safely to the river crossing in his wagon. And, when the journey is over, the four hobbits must come back and rescue from collectivization the ordinary, boring farms that they sacrificed to save. What would we do without ordinary, boring farms, after all? We’d starve, that’s what. And we would go insane, because the farming life, though hard, represents a very basic pattern for the way people were designed to live.
Disclaimer: I write this post with fear and trembling.
The adult Sunday School in my tiny church is reading through the book of Numbers together. Numbers, although it does contain a lot of numbers of the census variety, also has a lot of other stuff too. It covers the Israelites’ journey from Sinai to the Promised Land, their second-guessing of the decision to go into the Promised Land, and then there’s a time skip and it picks up near the end of their forty years in the wilderness. Along the way, they have to deal with a lot of stuff. This is a large population that’s just been displaced and given a new set of laws to live by. They have the dangerously holy Tabernacle, plus their own tents, to manage. They’re in a survival situation, and they need to learn to move through the wilderness in an organized manner, to get along with each other, and to trust their leaders. There is an attempted coup every few chapters basically. That’s leaving aside the enemies they encounter, and the new problems that arise as their nation grows, such as how inheritance works when a man has only daughters. This is the book that has the bizarre episode with the “seraph-serpents” and the comedy/horror story of Balaam.
All this to say, Numbers will land as highly relevant for anyone who’s been in a tense situation with a group of people that you are trying to get to gel. If you’ve ever wondered, “Why can’t my church/school/family get along?”, remember that the people of Israel could not get along, or trust God for more than about a day, even though they had His visible glory cloud towering over their camp every night. This is human nature. As a teacher (not even a headmaster!) at a Christian school, it was hard not to sympathize with Moses, whose life is endangered a number of times, not from outside foes but from fellow Israelites who think they could do the leadership better.
So, in Numbers 25, we see the people of Israel (not all, but some of them) once again get dangerously out of control. This time, quite a few of the Israelite men start participating in worship of pagan gods because they have been invited to an orgy by women of the Moabites and (nomadic?) Midianites. We later find out that these ladies have been put up to this by Balaam, who in a previous chapter found himself unable to curse Israel directly, so he decided to go for undermining them instead.
This is a pretty big scandal, and Moses handles it as the recently given Law prescribes: namely, the death penalty for the offenders.
Not incidentally, a plague was also apparently raging through Israel as God’s response to this incident. The plague only stops when the death penalty has been carried out, but not before 24,000 people die of it. Although I believe this really happened, it’s hard not to notice the symbolism of a plague. That is indeed what sexual sin in an institution resembles. It’s an unclean disease that, if not swiftly dealt with, rages out of control and quickly claims many innocent victims.
I am not arguing for the death penalty for sexual sin in the Christian era (at least, not all sexual sin), but what I got out of this passage was: swift and decisive action.
The passage that struck me was this:
Moses said to Israel’s judges: “Each of you must put to death those of your men who have joined in worshipping the Baal of Peor.”
Num. 25:3
Seems simple, but what stood out me was the assumption that it was possible to find out which of the men had participated. Just that week, I’d read an article by a mom whose daughter was bullied from second through fourth grade. The only thing that stopped the bullying was that the parents pulled their daughter out of that school. As with many instances of bullying, the bullies were former friends whose parents wouldn’t admit to what was going on. The bullied girl was often made by teachers to apologize to the class, as if she were the source of trouble. At the same time, all the other children knew she was being mistreated, and would come home shaken up by what they had seen done to her.
Moses would have had those bullies expelled before the end of the first semester.
Now, I want to be careful here. As a teacher (not to mention a parent), I realize that it can be difficult, at first glance, to tell whether bullying is taking place. Sometimes, it’s friendship drama. (Every girl in fourth grade feels left out by every other girl.) Sometimes, you’ve got a sensitive kid and a rough game. My own kids used to accuse each other of “bullying me” when their brother did something that annoyed them. Almost always, the incident was not witnessed by the teacher. Often, there is a history that was also not witnessed. All that to say, unless you are willing to do a lot of investigation, and have Solomonic wisdom in weighing motives, it is very easy to accidentally identify the wrong person as the prime offender.
But what this passage tells me is that you do have to be willing to do a lot of investigating, and you do need to pray for Solomonic wisdom in weighing motives, and you need to do this as soon as you become aware of the problem. And this means you may need to set aside the original program for that hour or day.
This is what I strive to do. God help me! I don’t do it perfectly. But I know what not to do, which is what organizations naturally tend to do: Postpone, procrastinate, dither, wring their hands, “investigate” forever but never take any action, and above all, avoid coming to unpleasant conclusions. Meanwhile, the plague goes on raging.
In the only episode of Black Mirror that I ever watched (“Nosedive “), everyone can rate their interactions with everyone else on a scale of one to five, using an ocular implant that shows them a screen in their field of vision. Citizens’ jobs, housing opportunities, and so forth all depend directly on their composite rating. Of course this episode portrayed a dystopia, and I have no wish to live there. But this week, for the first time, I found myself wishing I could give strangers “five stars” from a distance, just to boost their morale. You know, what the old-timers used to call a compliment, but without the human interaction that makes it weird.
I guess this post will have to do. So, if you were at Silverwood amusement park in mid-June, know that I gave you five stars.
First, to all the beautiful young ladies in bikinis, short jean shorts, and summer dresses. You are lovely. Five stars.
Then, to all the deeply tanned grannies and the middle-aged ladies wearing racerback swimsuits. To the slender elderly ladies in linen pants and hiking shoes, and to the tough-looking older woman with the very short haircut. I want to be you. Five stars.
To the, possibly Mennonite, girls doing the park in long braids and even longer jean skirts, I love your outfits. I love your outfit, woman with a blue polka dot tiered skirt that echoed the shape of your short, pink-tipped ringlets. Five stars.
Now, about hair. I award five stars to all the ladies wearing intricate braids, hippy braids, or beachy buns. Five stars to the lady with the glossy black curls up in a high bun, and to the girl with touseled, Molly-Ringwald style short bob. Skinny girl with amazing natural hair who looks like Zendaya — five stars to you for keeping your hair in that condition. Redheads, young and old, I love your color. I love your hair, chubby American Indian kid with a true-black ponytail so long you can sit on it. Sikh family, your daughter’s forehead bun is awesome. Five stars.
People with tattoos, two stars. Some of you look cool.
Hairy guy with the nipple piercings … um, three stars. Ouch.
I love you, grandpa with the huge smile riding the scooter. Family applying sunscreen to your developmentally delayed adult son, five stars. He is adorable, because you are taking such good care of him. Five stars to your sweet-faced baby passed out in your arms, and to your excited baby with the very expressive feet. And even five stars to the baby who had HAD ENOUGH on the train ride. I hope you got cooled down or whatever you needed.
Five stars to your curly-headed toddler, and to your toddler in a life vest holding your hand. Five stars to the adorable couple where he was big and freckled, and she was slight, sweet, tanned, and Asian. And to the couple where he was big and dark and had dred locs, and she was short and pale and ginger. Five stars to the pregnant woman in a swim suit who looked like the Mona Lisa.
Five stars to mothers and daughters who look exactly alike, especially those who walk through the park holding hands. Five stars to the cool, bespectacled brunette who sold us tickets to the barbeque tent. And five stars to the tanned and muscled guy with his baby on his shoulders, who was dancing to the classic rock played over the speaker system.
And let’s not forget the beards. The guy with the white, squared-off, excuse-me-miss-my-eyes-are-up-here beard gets five stars. So does the guy who looks like he got up that morning as a starved mountain man, took a bath, and put on a T-shirt and some Bermuda shorts.
Grandmother Zillah had apparently come by for a private word with Ikash’s father.
“Not forever, my son,” he heard her say. “Surely you and the boys can shift for yourselves for one winter.”
Ikash did not want to hear this conversation, but now he was trapped in the bunk while it was going on. He pulled a blanket over his head and tried to go back to sleep. He found his mind skipping over the actual content of his father’s words (this was a tactic that had often helped him to stay sane), but focusing in curiously on the words of Zillah. Had she really said something about Mother going away for the winter? Where could she possibly go?
He heard her say “You remember all the trouble that Ninna had,” and “Sari loves to cook.”
“She’ll bungle it up,” said his father. “She always does.”
“Always?” said Zillah. “No one is perfect, you know.”
“You were, Mother. I remember.”
“I had servants helping me, foolish boy! I had Shufer and Shulgi to help me clean and cook, and a whole farm to supply our house in the city.”
About half these words were unknown to Ikash. “Servants,” “city,” and even “farm” carried only the vaguest meanings in his mind.
(Is the above really the latest Sunshine Blogger Award logo? Looks kinda messy.)
So, Bookstooge sort-of-nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Thank you, Bookstooge! I am so flattered. I think his exact words were, “If you’re reading this, consider yourself nominated, because it means you have a pulse.”
Rules For The Sunshine Blogger Award:
Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.
Answer your nominators’ questions.
Nominate up to 11 bloggers.
Ask your nominees 11 questions.
Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.
Questions from Bookstooge:
Why Would Anyone Consider Cereal to be Soup?
It’s because they are trying to categorize things according to algorithmic rules/decision trees instead of the way the human mind normally works, which is by constructing a schema for the thing in question and then eyeballing it.
With schemas, if the thing mostly resembles the schema, it is considered an instance of that thing, even if it misses checking some important boxes. And if it checks all the boxes but manifestly does NOT resemble the schema at all, then it’s not an instance of that thing.
Cereal is in the latter category. It’s an ungodly modern creation of Mr. Kellogg, who believed that eating meat was morally wrong as well as unhealthy, and sought to banish it from the breakfast table. And I say this as someone who very much likes breakfast cereal, particularly as an evening snack, even though I know it has wreaked havoc with my metabolism (see question #10).
2. Why Do You Blog?
I blog to get you interested in my books. Go buy ’em. BUT, warning, don’t buy the Kindle version of The Strange Land until the end of next week, when it will cost 99 cents because of a special promo.
3. How Do You Justify Your Existence? (I got that one from the Tales of the Black Widowers, good isn’t it?)
“So God created man. In the image of God created He him, male and female created He them. And He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the cattle and the creatures that move along the ground.'”
Edit: By quoting this passage, I am NOT asserting that the only justification for our life is to reproduce … i.e., that your life somehow has no meaning if you are not a parent. I happen to have been given three children, but that’s God’s gift to me, not mine to Him. No, the point of quoting this passage is this: I justify my existence because God made me. He made us. He wanted there to be people. He wanted us to exist as male and female. And, per the latter part of the passage, He wanted there to be a lot of us. If you exist and you are a human, He is happy about that.
4. How Do You Choose Who to Follow?
Unfortunately, I’m a lot like Trump in this way. If you say nice things to me, I like you and then I follow you.
An alternative route is that you posted something that really interested me. This usually means book reviews, discussion about writing, theology, ancient history, and sometimes art.
5. If John McClane and John Wick were tied on a railroad track and you could only set one of them free, which would you choose and why?
O.K., I had to duckduckgo him, but John McClane is the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. I would save John McClane instead of John Wick for the following reasons:
John Wick could definitely save himself.
I only saw the first Die Hard, but in it, John McClane is a family man, whereas John Wick doesn’t even have a dog anymore.
Once when we were in Indonesia, somebody swore that my husband looked exactly like Bruce Willis and now I can’t unsee it. That makes me think Bruce Willis is even more handsome.
6. In a game of Parcheesi, who would win, Spongebob Squarepants or the Doom Slayer?
I expect Spongebob to win in the same way that Bugs Bunny would.
7. Do you feel guilty about all of my oxygen that you are breathing?
Yes. My gosh, don’t remind me!
8. What is your favorite movie?
It’s a tie between The Princess Bride and a little hidden gem called Undercover Blues.
9. If you were going to be “accidentally but on purpose” killed tomorrow, how would you spend today?
I would write long letters to each of my children. If I had extra time, I’d move on to my husband, then other close family and friends.
I might try to transfer the rights to my books so they don’t go out of print, but I don’t think that could be done in one day. If you snooze, you lose, and I guess I snost and I lost.
10. Are mirrors Friend, or Foe?
Friend, but only in the sense of “faithful are the wounds of.”
11. If you could change ONE THING about your blog, what would it be?
Every single visit to my blog would result in a book purchase and then a breathless review on Amazon GO BUY MY BOOKS PEOPLE!
Ahem. I Nominate:
I nominate seven friends (the number of perfection!) plus Bookstooge cause I want to hear his answers too. And I nominate you, Reader, if you want to do it! After all, you are breathing! Which might provide the answer to my first question!
Wow. I have never seen anything go from utopia to dystopia so quickly.
The DuBoses’ school had large, gracious bedrooms, an underground passageway, swimming pool, lake, stables, a bowling alley, laundry, tennis courts, and formal gardens. The public rooms were decorated with invaluable antiques from China. Students’ rooms had ruffled curtains and white bedspreads … which some students augmented with treasures from their homes on the mission field, such as tiger skins on the floor or African spears on the walls.
There were vespers (evening prayer services) every night, a private church service for the school on Sunday morning … The most select female students would be given the honor of hand washing Mrs. Dubose’s underwear and daunting array of girdles, as well as serving her breakfast every morning on a silver tray with a starched white linen placemat …
“We are hand-cutting diamonds,” Mrs. DuBose would explain. Relentless discipline, pressure, legalism, and social pain were evidently her tools for doing so. She would occasionally call errant students to her bedroom; the student would stand, head bowed, at the end of Mrs. DuBose’s big, white bed with its intricately carved eagle headboard. Reclining therein and attired in a pink satin bed jacket, Mrs. DuBose would review the student’s sins. The kids called these “White Eagle Sessions.” Years later, Betty would remember being so stressed during one of Mrs. DuBose’s little reviews that she peed herself.
Becoming Elisabeth Elliot, by Ellen Vaughn, pp. 33 – 35
I am so excited to be standing in front of this bear that my eyes are closing!
Recently, we had Mother’s Day here in America. My beloved children are now getting big enough that they can take the initiative to do things for me. Thirteen heard on the radio that Bear World was letting moms in free, so he decided we should go. Here he is with the bear, face blurred for privacy. My son is the blonde one and the bear is the dark-haired one.
“Yellowstone” Bear World, despite its name, is not at or in Yellowstone Park but actually closer to Rexburg, Idaho, where you can see the foothills of the Grand Tetons but not the Tetons themselves. The day we went was beautiful and sunny:
The way it works is that you first drive through an animal park, and then you access the parking lot and other attractions. You can drive back through the animal park as many times as you like on one ticket. But there is a very stern warning:
The first part of the park has various ungulates like this rare albino elk:
and this regular elk:
… and also bison.
Then you go through a gate where an employee checks your receipt and reiterates the instructions. Beyond the gate, you are in the bear part of bear world, where you can see multiple bears just hanging out. There are, at least in the black bear area, far more bears than you would normally see all in one place. The trees all have metal cuffs on them, I guess to prevent them from being destroyed by all those bears.
There are feeding troughs for the bears,
and shady places for them to sleep. Many of them were doing just that.
But before you get to where the black bears are, you pass an enclosure with a few grizzly bears. The grizzlies are behind an electric fence.
This is gal is pacing the perimeter.
Notice that she has the distinctive grizzly look: the concave or “dished” face, and the grizzly shoulder hump. They are also a lot larger than black bears.
I say “she.” We assumed all the bears in the park were females, because it’s hard to imagine you could keep one or more males in these conditions without them fighting each other.
Back to the black bear area. The black bears were free to roam across the road if they liked, even right in front of your car. Notice the black bear silhouette: straight muzzle, no hump, smaller. I love the curving feet!
At one point, we even saw some employees standing among the black bears! They were photographing a large tree whose trunk had been torn up. The bears seemed unconcerned.
And now we get to my favorite thing! You see, “black” bears (and actually grizzlies as well!) can be any color. (I am learning so much from Bear World!) They can be blond, for example. We did see one that was black-and-blond patches. But this here … is a cinnamon bear! It’s hard to tell from the picture, but its brown coat was almost ginger. The hair also looked thicker and more luscious than on some of the other bears, almost as if it had been groomed.
Also … and I bet you didn’t see this coming … Bear World also has DINOSAURS!
One of them went so far as to eat Mr. Mugrage.
Thirteen, meanwhile, snuck into a dino’s nest and hatched out of its egg:
I have seen better dinosaur parks, but I have never seen more bears.
Out of Babel Books 