meditation – Page 6 – Plain and Fancy

A Grief Observed – Missing Mother

August 15, 2014August 15, 2014 marianbeaman62 Comments

We’re having lunch at Mother’s house today: home-grown tomato sandwiches, Silver Queen corn on the cob, and fresh tossed salad with a wrapped-up cucumber found left in her refrigerator. There is also a boiled egg she cooked recently, but Mom is not here. She is gone, left this life on July 28 just five days after her 96^th birthday.

We (my sisters, brother and I) were together in June and had a high old time with Mother, eating out, making butter, playing Uno. In her boxy, blue l989 Dodge Spirit she drove herself to the July Christian Women meeting at The Gathering Place in Mt. Joy, went to the drive-through at her bank and wrote out checks to pay her bills. She attended the Metzler Reunion at Lititz Springs Park shortly before her birthday. A church bulletin in her Bible is dated July 20, 2014. Mom was even up to having lunch on July 23 with Nan Garber from church, who shares the same birthday week. But after that, she began feeling un-well, attributing her sickness to possible food poisoning. However, a pernicious bacteria was taking over her body, which no medical treatment could touch. Her death has stunned us all. We are in shock.

Yet we are grateful that after a long life of good health and sound mind, her suffering was brief though her influence eternal.

Indeed, the quality of her life was A+ up until the very end. Some snippets from her 3-day hospital stay:

Optimism: “We are having a sunny day today.”

Acceptance: “Whatever the good Lord wants for me . . . . I am ready to go.”

Wit: As she is moved from her hospital room to ICU she quips: “I want my glasses on, so I can see whether I’m going in the right direction.”

Gratitude: “It’s nice to have a loving family.” And finally . . .

Love: “I love you too!”

Among the songs sung at her funeral a cappella in 4-part harmony at Bossler Mennonite Church was “The Love of God,” a song she requested as she planned her memorial service years ago.

For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8: 38, 39

* * *

Psychologists tell us grief involves several stages. According to the Kübler-Ross model, they include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance–eventually. These stages are not always experienced in linear fashion, and they are usually recursive, cycling through body, mind and spirit in relentless waves, unpredictable and strong.

But the death of a father or mother hits its own particular nerve in one’s psyche and heart as I observed traveling to see Mother for the very last time in this life:

“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” notes C. S. Lewis in A Grief Observed.

Jane Howard, in A Different Woman probes the pain inherent in one’s separation from a beloved friend, partner, father or mother:

The death of my mother made me feel like a deck of cards being shuffled by giant, unseen hands. Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the facts of our mortality; we can still be innocent children. Something, some day will replace that innocence, maybe something more useful, but we cannot know what, or how soon, and while we wait, it hurts.

How about you?

Have you experienced loss, gradual or sudden? How have you adjusted to it?

Home-made Butter: 3 Easy Steps

June 28, 2014June 26, 2014 marianbeaman47 Comments

This week at Mom’s house, I attempted to re-create a scene from my childhood – in the same house, on the same chair, with one of the same Ball-Mason jars from the mother’s stash in the cellar. The kind with tiny bubbles crystallized within the glass of the jar. Mother says these jars are valuable.

The cream of bygone days for butter-making came from one of the Holstein cows that Sam and Mabel Hoffer kept on their tiny farm down the road from us on Anchor Road. For this re-enactment, I buy whipping cream from Giant Foods up the road toward town.

Did I mention that my sister Jan and Mother are both skeptical that store-bought cream will yield real butter.

Janice says, “You’re probably wasting your time shaking that jar back and forth with cream from the store. Think about all of the additives and preservatives they put in.”

Mother doesn’t say much but looks skeptical. I’m out to prove them wrong.

I stop the shaking long enough to notice that curdles of cream are clinging to the jar’s insides. That’s all it takes.

First, sister Jan and then Mother get in on the action, now past the 12-minute mark.

Without a shadow of doubt, real honest-to-goodness butter lumps are forming.

And voilá . . .

Fifteen minutes later, more or less, we have two fat butter-balls!

Did you catch the steps?

Pour cream into 2-quart jar.
Shake until you rattle and roll.
Remove the congealed mass from the jar. Add a pinch of salt.

* * *

What scenes from your past have you tried to re-create?

Face to Face Encounters: The Very Best Kind

June 18, 2014June 19, 2014 marianbeaman46 Comments

Author Kathy Pooler invites her readers to gather “around her kitchen table” for weekly discussions on her blog post. Readers of Laurie Buchanan’s blog know she usually posts on “Tuesdays with Laurie.” Most bloggers publish posts on specific days of the week which their subscribers have come to anticipate. It is a call for intimacy among kindred spirits in the often impersonal environment of cyberspace.

Yes, there are helpful forums available online that attempt to add sight and sound to the interaction. For example, author/writing coach Sonia Marsh and writing organizations like NAMW (National Association of Memoir Writers) frequently schedule Google Hangouts and tele-seminars that combine live voice and Skype-inspired imagery, adding another layer of intimacy to enhance the exchange of ideas.

Social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterist all allow postings of photos with text. Facebook often seems like a picnic with “likes” for yes’s, and sometimes offers back and forth conversation like a game of ping-pong. And I think of Twitter as a kind of hors d’oeuvre party with guests flitting like bees from one cluster of flowers to another, sipping nectar here and there.

Yet it’s true. Without the internet, I would never have even met writers whose friendships have been cultivated from countries all over this planet– Australia, Canada, Sweden, South Africa, or the Philippines. And unfortunately the chances of meeting these fine folks for coffee or tea any time soon seems pretty remote. When possible though, face to face encounters add a three-dimensional quality that is hard to duplicate online.

This past October, I was invited to share breakfast with Shirley Showalter, famous for her memoir BLUSH, in her home overlooking the Shenandoah Valley near Harrisonburg, VA during Homecoming at EMU.

This past Saturday in June I met blogger Traci Carver, teacher and writer extraordinaire, as she breezed through Jacksonville on her way further south, meeting for lunch at Cozy Tea in the Riverside area of Jacksonville. Though a generation apart, we found common ground discussing teaching English, Downton Abbey, European travels, our families, other shared interests. Her award-winning blog claims she is from the cotton pickin’ South, yet she has an international world view having lived in Southeast Asia for several years. A story-teller extraordinaire, she spin tales from the cotton of everyday life into pure gold.

In each case, the encounter was only an hour or two in length, but a level of intimacy develops in face to face encounters that online encounters are hard-pressed to duplicate. Obviously, non-verbal cues and nuances of personality and facial expression are often masked by the limitations of tiny pixels on posts.

Despite claims by science fiction writers, the phenomenon of transmogrification seems a long way off, probably a good thing! Thus, many writers find writing conferences in glamorous cities a great way to meet, greet, and even bond over coffee or lunch.

In the meantime, we can hope for serendipitous encounters along the way with our fans and fellow writers. I know I do!

* * *

Have you had a face-to-face encounter with someone you have known only through the internet?

Someone whom you’ve known for a long time, but haven’t seen again until recently? Any other special encounter?

Blog Tour

June 16, 2014June 15, 2014 marianbeaman26 Comments

Here is my study. When the magic happens, it happens here. Actually, it might happen in the flower garden just outside my window in the form of a thought or image which gets transferred from my head to my fingers at my desk. . . .

Every once in a while, fellow bloggers alert me to a writing challenge, many of which I pass over for lack of time or interest. This time, Traci Carver invited me to participate in a Blog Tour. I couldn’t turn her down. Why, just last week we had lunch together. Besides the “tour” is an intriguing way to play tag and learn about other writers’ habits and sources of inspiration while sharing my own. So, a big shout out goes to Traci, story-teller extraordinaire, who turns the cotton of her everyday experience as an English teacher into pure gold. A true Southern belle, Traci is a master of the anecdote. Her stories derive from the small Georgia town she grew up in, the fishing villages of Southeast Asia where she lived for 7-8 years, or from European travel. Now to the questions:

1. What am I working on now?

Three unrelated things at the moment: Preparing for a trip to Pennsylvania soon where I will mine more stories for this blog, purging clothes from the spare bedroom closet to make space for a long-term guest, and writing every single day. My blog has taken shape from 8-9 journal scribblings along with a set of paired stories written with my friend Professor Carolyn Phanstiel before we both retired from teaching.

There is a .doc on my computer desktop where my memoir is taking shape. Right now, it doesn’t have enough structure to “roll it through a printing press,” as Traci wisely observes.

2. How does my work differ from others in the genre?

According to Jerry Waxler, a Memoir Revolution is in full swing. Each year thousands of new memoirs pour onto the shelves. Millions are writing memoir right now. Even in the Mennonite sub-culture, hundreds of memoirs have been published since Canadian Mennonite Katie Funk Wiebe’s publication of Good Times with Old Times, touted as “an egg with a double yolk” because it is part memoir, part how-to-write-your-own-story book.

So how is my writing different? Well, my world view has been tempered by time and place. No longer a Mennonite, I still identify with many aspects of an Anabaptist vision. Also, I was transplanted to Florida as a newly wed which would affect my perspective. Then too, I have a large set of artifacts and some living relatives that connect me firmly to my past. Like other memoirists, especially of the academic variety, I tend to weave the literary with the familiar. Sometimes readers say they can detect humor in my writing voice, which I hope makes my writing appealing, if not unique.

3. Why do I write what I do?

What motivates me to write is my compulsion to leave a legacy for those who follow, particularly my family. Beyond that, I write what I know and to find out what I don’t know. Many stories are nostalgic, some reflect strong feelings of embarrassment, surprise, endearment (Search the “Moments of Extreme Emotion”); others are historical or hysterical.

4. How does my writing process work?

I was asked that question a few months ago, and the answer turned into a post on the blog of Kathy Pooler, whose memoir launches in this July. A legal-size pad, colored sticky notes, WORD docs, and photos are often part of the process.

Like Traci, I will tag two innocent bystanders, Merril Smith of Yesterday and Today: Merril’s Historical Musings, and Judy Berman of earthriderdotcom.

A published author of encyclopedic proportions (and I mean that literally) Merril’s blog posts frequently become meditations on the mundane, for example “Airing Out Some Thoughts on Laundry.” Her About page describes her as writer, editor, independent scholar, focusing on the history of women, sexuality, and culture. She has published consistently since 1997 with a forthcoming book with the titillating title: Cultural Encyclopedia of the Breast.

Judy invites you to travel down the corridors of her mind as she narrates stories she heard growing up, from her travels, her family, and experiences in various jobs as radio and newspaper reporter and English teacher. Judy has received numerous blog awards, including The Versatile Blogger Award and The Sunshine Blog Award. In a Father’s Day tribute, Judy included a photo of Dad and her stranded alongside the road trying to fix an over-heated motor.

Merril and Judy: You’re “it”!

Home-grown Miracles: See, Taste, Touch

May 31, 2014May 31, 2014 marianbeaman33 Comments

EGG

Reader, in your hand you hold

A silver case, a box of gold.

I have no door, however small,

Unless you pierce my tender wall,

And there’s no skill in healing then

Shall ever make me whole again.

Show pity, Reader, for my plight:

Let be, or else consume me quite.

– Jay MacPherson

All poems from Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Poems About Small Things, selected by Myra Cohn Livingston, HarperCollins, 1994.

* * *

Barbara Kingsolver, author of several New York Times best-sellers including The Poisonwood Bible, published her first work of non-fiction, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food in 2007, which makes the case for eating local. Here is an excerpt from the book:

“This is the story of a year in which we made every attempt to feed ourselves animals and vegetables whose provenance we really knew . . . and of how our family was changed by our first year of deliberately eating food produced from the same place where we worked, went to school, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air.”

The blurb from GoodReads website entices to read more:

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that’s better for the neighborhood and also better on the table.

Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Depending on where you live, you are enjoying some fresh fruits, vegetables, or flowers this time of year.

What appeals to your senses right now?

Purple Passages and a Laugh: May 2014 Edition

May 14, 2014May 23, 2014 marianbeaman23 Comments

Miracles & Problems

Uncertainty & Faith

The opposite of doubt is not faith. It’s certainty. Faith based on certainty is no faith at all. Anne Lamott

Embrace the present. Uncertainty is no excuse for paralysis. Do not wait for good to happen for yourself in order to do good for others. Leymah Gbowee

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1 NIV

Tea and Books

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me. C. S. Lewis

Mothers & Mother’s Day

This year has celebrated its 100th anniversary in America

Mother jivving to "Turn Your Radio on and Listen to the Music in the Air" — Mother jiving to “Turn Your Radio on and Listen to the Music in the Air” on my iPod

A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Honore de Balzac

I am sure that if the mothers of various nations could meet, there would be no more wars.

E. M. Forster

Roses and Love Life

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall. Eleanor Roosevelt

Laughter is carbonated holiness.
― Anne Lamott

* * *

Add a quote or comment on one you’ve read. Please do!

And you can be sure I’ll join the conversation.

(Coming next: “Where the Magic Happens” showcasing author Mary Gottschalk)

7 Things I Do that Remind Me of Home

April 30, 2014April 30, 2014 marianbeaman35 Comments

Over forty years ago I left Lancaster county and my Mennonite life. Though I have visited dozens of times since then, Jacksonville, Florida, has been my home. Nonetheless, every single day I notice myself repeating rituals that reveal the imprint of my early training.

1. Eat pickled eggs – Usually reserved for Sunday dinners and picnics, I eat them for breakfast almost daily now.

2.“Outen the light” – I don’t use that Pennsylvania Dutch expression any more, but when no one is in a room, I make sure the light switch is turned off. “Don’t burn a hole in the daylight” is a saying that has burned into my psyche.

3. Wash dishes – Mother never had a dishwasher, except her own hands. Though I’ve had a dishwasher most of my married life, I often wash dishes by hand: fine china, big kettles, forks. Sometimes warm, soapy water is soothing.

Daddy drying dishes - Only on Sundays after church! — Daddy drying dishes – Only on Sundays after church!

4. Re-use aluminum foil – I never use Reynolds Wrap only once. It is cleaned off, folded and stored for multiple uses. (But I don’t scrape the residue from the wrapper of a stick of butter anymore unless it’s a big hunk. )

5. Tidy up – After retiring from full-time teaching, I dismissed my cleaning lady, so cleaning the house is in my domain once again. Dusting is the bane of my life, but I can’t abide dirty floors. Mother’s house was cleaned stem to stern once a week on a Friday with deep cleaning heralding the spring and fall seasons.

6. Water the maiden-hair fern – Grandma Longenecker loved ferns. She loved the misty, floaty, lacy aesthetic of ferns. My sister Janice has kept alive some off-shoots of Grandma’s. Here’s my maiden-hair fern:

7. Go up and down stairs – The Longenecker home place has 2 floors and an attic. The staircase between them has 18 steps. When it was time for bed, Mother would say, “It’s time to go up the wooden hill!” Now at almost 96, she still uses her stairs, once in the morning and once at bed-time. Bowed with age into an L-shape she ascends, fiercely defending her independence.

Our tri-level has a pair of stairs, 7 steps each. Good for keeping those calf muscles in shape.

If you don’t know what to do, just take the first step. “To take the first step in faith, you don’t have to see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Are any of these points similar to those in your life?

What can you add to the list from your own experience?

Picture this!

April 19, 2014April 19, 2014 marianbeaman10 Comments

Resurrection Rendition: Artist Susan Jenkins

Purple Passages: A Dragon with a Gift, April 2014

April 12, 2014April 14, 2014 marianbeaman26 Comments

LILACS

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots and spring rain.

T. S. Eliot The Waste-Land

When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with every-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

Walt Whitman, elegy commemorating the death of Lincoln, 1865

EASTER

Easter is very important to me, it’s a second chance. ― Reba McEntire

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. ― Pope John Paul II

LAUGHTER

Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life. (Unknown)

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects. ― Arnold H. Glasgow

WORK

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. ― J. M. Barrie

When you can’t figure out what to do, it’s time for a nap. ― Mason Cooley

CHALLENGE

Challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth.

Tame the dragon and the gift is yours.

Noela Evans, on persevering through problems, endurance

Shakespeare says it another way, but with a toad: Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.

READING

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. ― Mason Cooley

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since. ― Beverly Cleary

THE FUTURE

The best thing about the future is it comes one day at a time. ― Abraham Lincoln

* * *

Do you believe a challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth? A story about this that comes to mind . . . ?

What category can you add a quote to?

What other topics would you like to see in this monthly feature, Purple Passages?

Coming next: Mennonite Flashback III: Rabbits and Rings

Purple Passages with a Fish & a Kiss

March 22, 2014March 22, 2014 marianbeaman16 Comments

Purple Passages with a Fish & a Kiss, March 2014 Edition

Winter

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. Willa Cather, My Antonia

If winter comes, can spring be far behind? Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ode to the West Wind”

Gardens

The garden is one of the two great metaphors for humanity. The other, of course, is the river. Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Grief

In God’s garden of grace, even a broken tree can bring forth fruit . . . . The greater the grief the fewer the words. Pastor Rick Warren on The View: Friday, Dec. 7, 2013

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost. G. K. Chesterton

When a loved one becomes a memory, the memory becomes a treasure. Author Unknown (viewed on Kathy Pooler’s website, January 27, 2014)

Einstein

(Quote on education attributed to Einstein but disputed by some sources.)

SUCCESS and HAPPINESS

Success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing you will be successful. Dr. Albert Schweitzer (Quoted in Daily Devotional: The Word for You Today, Dec. 2013–Feb. 2014.)

Dear Reader: You may have noticed I have included only one garden quote today.

Can you add a quote or a thought about gardening or beauty?

Can you add any other quote to the themes this month?

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