My daughter Sharon called yesterday morning to tell me she’d been asked to be part of a new knitting book which is being written by a famous knitting author, to be published late next year. What an honor this is for her hand-dyed yarn to be recognized like that, and I’m sure I’ll have a post about that in the future. She was tickled about the news, and so was I.

While I was talking to Sharon, she asked me how my visit with my life-long friend Tauni was going, and of course I replied, “Really good! We just talk, talk, talk, talk, talk!” And Sharon said, “Well that’s great! It wouldn’t be very good if you answered,’Tauni flew all the way from California and we’ve been ignoring each other.’ ” And that made us all giggle. I cannot imagine Tauni coming all the way from SoCal and us not talking. And talking. And talking.

This made me think of a Meredith Wilson song from The Music Man — most of the profound and deeply moving lyrics are:

“Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more!

Pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little,
Cheep cheep cheep, talk a lot, pick a little more!”

And that’s the gist of that delightful song. I’ll wait here until you locate a Kleenex.

Now, I don’t think the “pick a little” part of the song applies so much to our visiting. Unless you would call reminiscing about our childhoods, families, friendships, adventures, and heartaches picking. I suppose I could say that we were picking over the details of our past, recounting things to each other and reveling in our memories about how our lives have intersected over the last 45 years.

But talking? Yes, we talked almost non-stop. It was wonderful. Both Tauni and I could be characterized as Word Women, and we both find conversation satisfying.

We sat at the kitchen table over granola, or Muesli and coffee, and talked. We sat out on the back deck while the chickadees landed on the feeder, and talked. We drove up the North Shore of Lake Superior and talked. We picked our way over grass dotted with Canada Goose poops in Two Harbors, MN, so we could find a place to talk. We sat in my bedroom with tea, and talked. We sat in the den in the morning sun, and talked. We sat in the living room right before bed, yawning, and talked. We talked while we put a screen in a window together. We talked while dinners were being prepared. We talked while eating our packed lunches on a picnic table on the shore of Brighton Beach. We talked over a Cobb Salad, a Tuna Steak with vegetables, Blackened Walleye and Cheddar Bay Biscuits. We talked over steak and prime rib with another good friend of mine named Carey. We talked while walking in the wind on the Lake Walk.

Last night before we went up to bed we shared with each other the details of our very different faith journeys, what drew us toward God even at young ages, and we marveled together about how God has seen us through deaths and divorces, lean times and plenty, heartache and happiness. And He has helped us keep our friendship intact all these years.

We both have other good friends, but we’re aware how very few of those friends enjoy the long history we have together.

Tauni and I lived over the fence from each other. We went to the same elementary, junior high and high schools together. We knew each others’ parents. We knew each others’ brothers. We knew each others’ family stuff. And I swam in her pool hundreds of times, which accounts for a large portion of my happier childhood memories.

Over the years we’ve prayed for each others’ children. We’ve exchanged books and recipes, long distance. She has kept some of my old hand-written letters (“Julie, you’re the only one I know who can fill an entire page with only five sentences!” she chuckled) and I have a file full of hers. And now that we’re fifty-somethings, we’re grandmas – although, thanks be to God, neither of us have dentures nor very many gray hairs yet. 🙂

Michael and I just returned from taking Tauni to the airport, and she’s on her way home to her husband as I write this. I wonder when I will see her again. Even if it’s not for many more years, we still have this long and lovely friendship, and this deep and meaningful fellowship in Christ.

I’m counting my blessings today, and one of the best is my friend Tauni…

“The one concern of the devil is to keep Christians from praying. He fears nothing from prayerless studies, prayerless work, and prayerless religion. He laughs at our toil, mocks at our wisdom, but trembles when we pray.”

Samuel Chadwick

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Our stereo is hooked up to an intercom system that plays all over our house, which I love. There are controls in the different rooms so you can turn the music down in the bedroom while someone is resting, and still keep it louder in the kitchen where you’re cutting up jalapenos for the pico de gallo.

Here are the CDs playing over and over in our house and car lately:

1. 

Bob Bennett – A Compilation (especially “Saviour of the World” and “Mountain Cathedrals”)

2. 

Josh Garrels – Jacaranda (especially “The Rabbit and the Bear”)

3. 

Celtic Woman – Celtic Woman (especially “Last Rose of Summer” and “Nella Fantasia”)

4. 

Little Women – Movie soundtrack (especially “Under the Umbrella” and “For the Beauty of the Earth”)

5. 

Jennifer Knapp – Lay It Down (especially “Usher Me Down” and “You Remain”)

6. 

Maron Gaffron – Uptown (especially “Housewives Song” and “Uptown”)

What’s on your playlist these days?

Ever since we moved into this big house, we’ve had lots of company. We have a third floor guest suite than can sleep five, and we have enjoyed hosting friends and family every chance we get. As a matter of fact, I just extended an invitation to a dear Scottish friend who may be coming to our continent soon, and we’re hoping that she and her husband will take us up on our offer.

I like preparing for guests. I don’t buy pricey sheets for our bedroom, but for our guest suite I like having expensive, lush-feeling sheets on the beds. We have a little fridge up there that I try to fill with things I know our guests will like. I put piles of books and magazines around, have a boom box with soft classical music playing for their arrival, there’s a rocking recliner overlooking our woodsy back yard with a creek, and a puffy goose-down comforter on the queen bed for fall and winter visitors. In the summer we put in a window air conditioner with a remote control. For a Minnesota north woods touch, on the wall of the sitting room is a bird clock that sounds a real recording of an owl at noon, a cardinal at three and a chickadee at six.

The decor in the guest suite is a bit plain. Taupe-colored carpet. White chenille bedspreads on the queen and two twin beds, like my grandmother used to have, and a few yellow and green Waverly throw pillows. Dark olive green walls. Angled ceilings, since it’s on our third floor. A couple of very old floral needlepoint pictures hanging on the walls, that my maternal Grandma Oma stitched years ago. Some bookcases, a dresser, an old maple desk, a white crib, a television, a nightstand.

The view above looks out toward the front of our house.

This one above looks out over the back yard and Birdinal Creek. Our next visitor will be able to see that just a few maple leaves have begun to turn red and orange. See the little white fridge? If this were your space and you were preparing for my visit, you would put Golden Delicious apples in there, along with bottles of water, tiny Reese’s miniature peanut butter cups, and some fresh pineapple. You would also put a box of Carr’s rosemary crackers on top of the fridge and maybe a bit of cheese to go with them. 🙂

What do you (or what would you) put in your guest room in anticipation of visitors? I would love a new idea or three. Or is there someplace you go where nice things are done in preparation for your stay? What would you appreciate?

In less than a week, one of my dearest friends will wing her way across the country to come for a visit. Tauni and I grew up right over the fence from each other in West Covina, California. We’ve been friends for over forty-something years now, kept in touch, infrequently visited each other, and prayed for each others’ families.

It’s wonderful how when you share a deep faith in Christ with a friend, nothing really separates you. You can live thousands of miles apart, see each other once a decade, and not really be part of each others’ day-to-day living. But still there’s a bond that is so strong and steady, the passing of years and the distance of miles doesn’t weaken it at all. If anything, I think my friendships built on Jesus just get stronger and more satisfying as the years fly by. Tauni is that kind of friend for me.

We’re both grandmas now. We’ve both seen really hard times, and found God faithful in all of them.

I’m so excited to see her, and I’m happily getting the guest suite ready for her arrival.

The heart that is constantly overflowing with gratitude will be safe from those attacks of resentfulness and gloom that bother so many persons.

A. W. Tozer

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I really am hoping to get this one, and soon…

For several days I’ve been watching an industrious and creepy spider spin her web right outside my office window, two feet from where I sit. She never seemed to be still, and her sinister jointed legs picked their way over the tiny strands with a delicate deliberation that gave me the willies. I am not a fan of spiders. I know how much good they do, eating untold millions of bugs each day, and I’m aware that our planet would be overrun with other insects if it weren’t for spiders, but I still don’t think fondly of them.

My friend Tauni’s daughter Shannon had some spine-chilling spider experiences recently — she wrote about them so well on her blog, here. Watching the spider by my window wasn’t anything like Shannon’s arachnid afflictions, but it still made me think. (You know how strange and off-kilter your life has become when spiders make you think.)

The nickel-sized spider outside my window died a few days after making her home there, and is still attached to her web. She is getting more translucent by the day, and her eight legs, previously eerily jointed, are now relaxed and stretched smooth and long. The fall breezes blow the sad remnant of her little web around, and her with it. I’m wondering if she will still be there when the first snow falls.

This kind of aimless pondering is the result of having too much paperwork to do. Looking at dead spiders in their ruined webs and musing about the complexities of life seems like the most normal thing in the world when you have piles of papers around you that must be tended to daily.

We have a business that is licensed by the State and by the County, and every two years the State of Minnesota comes into our home and goes over our paperwork to make sure we’re doing everything correctly and that we deserve to keep the license we’ve been given. The licensor spends the entire day at our kitchen table, surrounded by stacked notebooks full of my carefully kept paperwork, poring over every single page and issuing citations if something is not quite right. We love our work and are so thankful for it, but the bane of our business is the hours of paperwork, schmaperwork, that is required each week.

So gazing at a dead spider stuck to an old web is an oddly welcome diversion from all this never-ending record keeping.

And, I’ve been thinking about moving. I have always hated moving, because I’m a nester and love settling in and staying for decades in one place. Why try something new when the old has always worked? is the melancholy person’s motto, and up until recently it was most certainly mine. But I’m thinking about moving to a smaller house. Something that doesn’t demand so much of us.

I asked Michael recently what he would think about selling everything and moving to Madeline Island — just getting a cozy two bedroom house on the largest island in the Apostle Islands chain in Lake Superior, and he was open to the idea. He is open to most ideas, though, because he isn’t allergic to change like I am. He loves change.

I think if I didn’t have grandbabies so close by, I would call a Madeline Island real estate agent today. I’ve already looked online at the available houses, and there are two or three I think could work. But the thought of moving two hours away from these sweet children makes my heart ache. So right now, like my contemplation of the dead spider blowing in the breeze, a move to Madeline Island is something that I only think about when the paperwork Alps are getting too steep for me to climb.

Lastly, a few days ago Edith and Millie were outside in the morning, doing their intense sniffing and brisk trotting around the perimeter of the back yard. I heard them start to bark, but it was shriek-barking, not woof-barking. I figured they had spotted one of the eighty-seven bunnies that live in our woods, and I looked out the kitchen window to see. It wasn’t a rabbit at all, but a raccoon the size of an overturned wheelbarrow, teeth viciously bared, chasing Millie and about to attack. Millie kept darting away from the raccoon and then the animal would reluctantly retreat, waddling over the bank of the little creek in our back yard. Then the dogs would frantically sniff and draw close to the spot where the coon had disappeared, and there he would come again, up over the bank, rushing and growling toward our Schnauzers. He was alarmingly quick. I went to the door to call the dogs in, and the huge raccoon, literally the size of a giant, dome-like desert tortoise, chased them close to the house.

I haven’t seen the masked marauder since, but we all know he’s out there. Maybe helping his wife protect some babies? Maybe drawing maps and planning midnight raids to get into our garbage?

All I can say is, don’t try it, Rocky. Take your little baby raccoons and move it on down the creek. If I see you again I will come at you with a towering pile of paperwork that will make you sorry you ever set foot on the banks of Birdinal Creek. You will soon be transparent and lifeless, legs relaxed and outstretched, stuck in a web and wafting in the wind, a shell of your former rancorous raccoon self.

Oh dear. Maybe moving to an island, away from all the stress, really would help after all.

“Ma’am, you should never put water on a grease fire.”

I loved the entries of Deb, Kay, Tauni and Carolyn for the caption contest, but this one, entered by Carolyn, made me laugh the most, and it edged out the other ones just a bit.

This is my grandson Elijah in his fireman costume and I think the photo was calling for a caption.

I thought about not choosing this caption, because Carolyn is my daughter and some might cry nepotism, but if anyone else had come up with this entry I would have chosen it. 🙂

Carolyn wins a Target gift certificate as September’s bloggy giveaway winner! Yay!

Thank you all….

For September’s bloggy giveaway, I’m having a Caption Contest!

Take a look at this picture. This is Elijah David, one of my two handsome grandsons, wearing his happy fireman costume. This photo makes me laugh, and I thought it could use a good caption, but I just can’t think of anything.

That’s where you come in, dear readers. I know you (at least most of you, I think), and I know there are some witty and wordy people out there who could come up with a fitting caption for this pic.

The winner of this month’s bloggy giveaway will win something nice. So far, See’s candies, Target gift certificates, books, CDs and amazon.com gift cards have been won in the monthly giveaways. It’s your turn! Be brave! If you’ve entered before, enter again. If you never have, what, you don’t like books, CDs, candy or gift cards? 🙂

Comments/entries will be taken until Sunday, September 6th. The winner will be announced on Monday the 7th.

Now, name that photo!

My granddaughter Vivienne (age 3 1/2) spent the night recently and we had a great time. We read books, sang songs, and played make-believe doggy. Depending on the day, Vivie says she is a little doggy named either Scratchy, Boney or Shorty.

She came to sit in my lap and snuggled against me. Soon she sniffed the air (she didn’t know I had put on a spritz of “Beautiful” by Estee Lauder a few minutes before), looked puzzled, and then asked me, “Grandma, why does it smell like appley-glump?”

I wonder if I should write to the Lauder Corporation.

Autumn is making itself known now in our little part of the world. Even though the first day of fall isn’t officially until the end of September, when you live this far north, the earth apparently doesn’t consult the huge wall calendar I bought at Office Max to time its autumnal behaviors. The earth just does what it wants. And at the almost-47th latitude, the earth mostly wants to chill out.

The sun’s arc doesn’t reach as high as it travels across the sky now, and the light coming in the windows each day is different, more golden, than it was last week. I could stand in my kitchen, not knowing the date, and tell by the lower sunlight that summer is dying.

Here, summer usually awakens the birds around 4:30 a.m., and the cardinals, robins and chickadees are in their full Mormon Tabernacle Choir mode by 5:15 a.m., which I have always thought is one of the loveliest things in life. Now, things are pretty quiet in the mornings. Some of the birds may have already migrated south, and I’m not sure what the ones who stay for the Minnesota winter are doing. Maybe putting caulk on their windows and otherwise battening down the hatches to prepare for possibly nine months of cold.

When I got up this morning and came downstairs, I didn’t open windows and breathe in the comfortable fresh air like I did last week. I considered turning on the furnace, and then thought better of it. It is August, I reminded myself. But the house is chilly.

Michael and I took a walk yesterday and there are a few leaves beginning to turn color on the trees already. Here’s a photo taken by my good friend Bob King that was in our local paper recently.

Many people in northern Minnesota live a pretty hectic summer. Our summers are so short, maybe people feel they must fit all the warm-weather activities they can into the three warm months out of the year. Picnics, camping, hiking, barbecues, biking, house projects, cabin trips, gardening, fishing…are all squeezed into three months of living because Minnesotans know that by late October it will be dark and cold, and for most people, life will slow down.

There are the hardy ones who go camping and ice fishing in the winter of course. And many have decided to make the best of a long cold winter by learning to ski, snow-shoe and roar through the forests on snowmobiles.

But for me, the changing of a leaf’s color on the maple in our front yard doesn’t mean snowmobiles or sitting on a frozen lake dangling a line into a small hole in the ice. For me, the arrival of autumn means removing our lightweight toile quilt from the bed and pulling out the heavy down-filled toile comforter. It means wearing sweaters instead of t-shirts, and the comfort of SmartWool socks under my Birkenstocks (Carolyn, I’m going to buy you some Birkies and thick wool socks this Christmas to complete your Drama Mom look), and it means pulling out thick and pretty scarves to keep my neck warm in the chill air.

And, the shortening of days stimulates a mostly dormant and atrophied portion of my brain called the cookothalmus that suddenly makes me want to bake loaves of crusty bread, simmer hearty soups on the stove, and stir up pans of spicy apple crisp. Summer’s waning makes me want to take long meandering walks. It makes me want to hunker down with books and sit with friends in front of a fire.

And for some reason I don’t understand, the change in season makes me want to pray. And write in my journal. And sit in my plaid chair, looking over one or two verses and meditating on them until the riches rise to the surface and I sit astonished at the depth and layers of God’s Word. I surely need that.

The change from summer to fall and fall to winter has always stirred up something in me that I can’t put good words to. I only know that it it makes me aware of fleeting life and inevitable death in a more acute way, and it brings on a wistful, yearning feeling that reminds me how quickly my days will pass from this earth, how in no time at all my grandbabies will be adults with children and grandchildren of their own.

Why does this thought make the tears run down my face? I don’t know. It’s a wonderful, terrible sort of ache that comes with the passage of time.