Yea, the first dozen ears of Sugar Buns sweet corn was picked and consumed last evening. It was substantially under ripe but I was rushing it for our guests who are leaving today. But we enjoyed it despite that. Maybe it needs another week.
With all this celebration I want to acknowledge the tragedies that have blossomed over the last days. We will pray for all those families and pray for us. Our summer is marred. Togetherness is called for.
Here are a few pics from dinner last night which beside the corn featured pesto and green beans from My Rebecca’s garden:
Soaking the ears before going on the grill.On a wood fire.Freda and Osian, naked kids at the dinner table.Corn!And more corn!Watching an owl at dusk, Tesia and Freya.Owl moon, high summer.
Just in case you are not local or you are not a FaceBook friend My Rebecca has published her first book! This is tremendous exciting and fun to witness. My wife the author.
The local book store is out of copies but wait there is Amazon! I just looked it up and it is appearing by searching for “Rebecca Graves”. For some reason the title That One Day in August will not get you there. But that is less typing, look at it that way. And by the way it is being published by Raven Ranch Press, new and up and coming.
I’m calling her the new Betty MacDonald who lived on Vashon back in mid twentieth century and wrote The Egg and I and Onions in the Stew. They were both about small town Pacific Northwest life. Oh and by the way Betty’s house is now a bed and breakfast place and you can stay there. Just in case you want to come and visit us and have that experience.
All pretty exciting stuff. Summer continues on here also. I am keeping a close eye on the corn waiting for a half a dozen ripe ears to arrive. Went to Mass this morning a came back with a gift zucchini. We had our first red tomato. The blackberries have started. Pickles are being made. The whole cornucopia of August is about ready to gush.
Well, lunch time for me. And we have a walk at 1600. Very cool and alperfect.
There were ten of us this morning that showed up for our Teleios Bible Class or Bible Guys as I call it. I gave the lesson which was guiding my friends through a chapter which was First John chapter 4. We are working on some of the shorter books which were originally letters, communications.
I’m pretty proud of myself because the guys thought I did an “excellent job”. Well OK! I do spend hours preparing so that is a good payoff. Well, another payoff is that a guy really gets to know a chapter after preparing and worrying about it.
I have to break in on this to say that an old high school buddy just called me so I had to talk to him. He found me on FaceBook. I hadn’t talk to him since 1965 or ‘66. Wow!
Back to First John. This is an area that Rev Bonnie Barnard preached on several weeks ago. It is about the ins and outs of love, God loving us first and then our love for each other. It is if as John now an old man has distilled this down to the really important stuff.
Well, it’s lunch time here for Felipé. I’ve got a haircut and an archery lesson this afternoon so time to get in gear. Thanks so much for checking in here.
William our CCBC is here with more pics of his travels.
Rainy days in August are extremely rare but here we are. Must have been some temporary breakdown in our standard weather pattern. Not that the corn doesn’t need some more moisture. I am a total cornhead this time of year, just ask My Rebecca. Corn is my world. And gang we are getting so close to opening day on that.
I have to tear myself away from that and get my studies done for my Bible class tomorrow. I need to pray about it and tie up my grab bag of random thoughts and put them in order. I’ll have to admit that this ins’t the easiest chapter that I have ever covered. But I have a whole day, a rainy day.
In local news we have a construction project happening along the trail here. It is located next to our wood shop next door at Wiley’s. His good friend James (The Most Interesting Man In the World in Training) is building a “tiny house”. And of course we are all lending a hand. It is an 8×28 foot structure on a trailer base so it can be moved around. You can’t miss this when you walk the trail. You’ll be able to yell comments over the fence. “Hey, you missed a nail” or “Here, let me hold your beer.”
Charlie and Nick, guys that walk here came and spent hours weed whacking and trimming the greenery back along the trail. So, it is looking pretty civilized. All waiting on you to get here for the Veranda gathering.
OK, I have to evacuate the area, the phonograph with the inane kid songs is being fired up. OK, off I go to my day. Inane loves, Felipé.
I volunteered to lead the study of First John chapter four for tomorrow morning’s Bible class. We take turns in our class and I get it maybe once every two months. I don’t mind doing it although sometimes it is more of a challenge than others. Sometimes that is because of me and sometimes it is the material.
Usually I enlist the help in a couple of different areas. One is that reading an introduction to the whole book gives context to the chapter. And another is employing a commentary to help with understanding meaning and by seeing how it fits with other happenings and ideas in other places in the Bible.
I got interested in this particular chapter because the Rev Bonnie Barnard was talking about it when I heard her several weeks ago. It was good then and maybe I could learn more. That is one thing about giving a lesson is that you always learn more by doing it. That’s the payoff for the work.
This chapter is all about love. In short it’s first about God’s love for us and how we love Him back. We need to realize that the only way to love Him back is to love each other. Well sounds good but how does that work?
Face Book to the rescue. I’m friends with Pope Francis and I get his messages. And today’s message was about how love is work. How most of the time love equals work. I can verify that right here in our house with my daughter visiting and how much work she puts in caring for her twenty month old daughter, our granddaughter. It’s endlessly demanding. I am watching it at this very moment. I can tell you that in this case anyway that love is definitely work!
Off I go to our 9 o’clock walk and then archery. We have a chance of rain in the forecast. Well, we’ll see.
I am back with more thoughts about my sister. It is an instance of longing this quest of mine. And somewhere along the line I have discovered that is what we humans do oh so well, longing that is. We endlessly long for this or that. That doesn’t in any way diminish the vision of my sister but it does say to me to relax about it and it will work out in it’s own time.
The idea of dreaming came up yesterday. About how dreams can help us connect. And I had this very weird disturbing dream last night. Not to go into detail but it was about dealing with beings that are weird and ugly, dream beings. Disturbing maybe is the word. But is that enough to doom them, just being weird and ugly to me. Don’t they get to exist just because… Somehow I needed to see/experience this before moving on.
I really just wanted to dream about my sister but I get this one about strangeness. Oh well. Must need this lesson somehow. I am trying to lean into it to make peace with it ultimately.
OK, well that is more than you really want to know maybe. But sometimes things are not straightforward, or easy or pretty. We have to deal with stuff that we are dealt. That’s what is happening today.
There was an article in FaceBook this morning about the benefits to a family when there is a sister among the siblings. I read it and got all weepy. I don’t know if this is the right wording or not but I was supposed to have a sister. As time goes on I miss her more although I have never met her except in dreams.
This paragraph is sad but I can’t get around it. My dear mom had a late term miscarriage before I was born. We never talked about it, one of those deals. Then when I was going through my folks’ bank deposit box I came across the autopsy report all neat and clean and doctorlike. It was only read once.
I’ve always said that I was an only child or thought that way too til that moment. The hair was standing up on my neck to realize that that wasn’t true. It was a surprising moment after getting to fifty years old. And I have grown to look at her as a full entity, as a for sure someone.
But again I need your help. My parents never really talked about this and I never got a hint of what her name might have been. She died when most parents would have had something in mind, right? Help me name her. I don’t seem to have the least idea and have had no luck with this. Although I have used the name Patience at times. I look forward to meeting her and I thought Patience tied into that.
Wow, that was heavy duty. Thanks for sticking with me through that. I have to run. Charlie one of my walkers and his friend Nick are out trimming and weed walking along the trail for a Veranda spruce up. I should be getting out there to help. I can still hear them with their power equipment.
Love you guys. Who else am I going to get to help with something like this?
Well, I don’t know about blasting but trotting maybe. Hey, another week to prep for the Veranda. I am getting caught up on my work and the mowing around the ranch. Time to start getting organized for the pilgrims coming.
Going to fertilize the corn again today. This is high priority. It is coming on fine out there. Sort of pedal to the metal right now with that project. All we need is butter and salt.
Here is a thought for you guys that are going to camp out here. Nights in the Northwest are cool. It gets down in the 50’s over night sometimes. Certainly there are no hot muggy nights that you might be used to. Pack that medium weight sleeping bag.
Also we are organizing a visit to the Most Merciful Savior Monastery which is located close by. They have a dress code for visitors. Here is a copy of what they say:
“We ask that all visitors dress modestly. Men should wear long sleeved shirts and pants. Women should wear long sleeved blouses, long skirts or dresses. Additionally, women are asked to wear scarves when attending services. Children are expected to be kept close, and not allowed to roam freely. Smoking and pets are strictly forbidden.”
Wow, “strictly forbidden”, we’ve never had one of those on Caminoheads blog that I can remember. Well, they are pretty mellow there at the Monastery but they have their rules.
Hey gang off to the Monday morning walk. No clouds in the sky here on Vashon. Come by when you can.
In his homily today Father David talked on persistence. He was reminding us and himself maybe about the value of stick-to-it-ness. God is patient with us and is not bothered by our insistence in our prayer life. And he is persistent with us, following our bumbling trajectory day after day.
It was reminding me of the once popular practice of “throwing” the I Ching the Chinese Book of Changes. You were supposed to realize how things were in constant flux and if you were having bad luck well then it was only a matter of time for it to be better. Or if things were good, enjoy it while it lasted. Something like that. It seemed like I was always “throwing” persistence furthers no matter what. I was stuck in the world of try again or try harder. I finally gave up on that, too depressing maybe. How about an easy one once in a while.
But I guess there are a lot of things in life that require this kind of patience. Persistence being a kind of patience. Sometimes it is such a long haul, a certain thing that we are called on to do. Or something seems to be a burden like an endless chore that is repeated over and over again. Something we have to eek out.
Maybe God looks at us so. “What a rookie!” He says when we screw up endlessly. I‘ve never quite thought of it like that. Maybe that is one thing we are supposed to learn.
Today is the day of St.John Vianney’s annual Salmon Bake. I have to go up there to help out serving and will grab a bite to eat while I am at it. It is a summertime thing!
Well, it sounds like Sunday around here. I’ll have to hurry back to walk the trail at 4 this afternoon. Oh, and tapas, my favorite thing in the whole world.
