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Whenever I see a grape vine, I think of those days my husband and I went out to a little farm with 100-year-old vines where the woman let us pick grapes for a mere $9 a bushel.
And then of course how exhausted I was that late night when we stayed up making and canning grape juice until 1:30 a.m. in graduate school, and how we still have one jar left in the cupboard (it has lived with us in three states now) waiting for an occasion just special enough to open it.
But mostly when I think of grape vines, I think of Jesus. "I am the Vine," He said, "and you are the branches."
I think of Him, and I hope I bear beautifully delicious fruit by being connected with Him.
I read this week that Jesus taught so often out in the open air was precisely because He wanted the people who heard what He had to say--and all of us who now read what He had to say--to remember Him whenever we see the things He taught about, stopping to think anew about His words, and how they influence our lives.
A brilliant teaching technique, right?
It gives me pause to evaluate and grow both as a learner and a teacher, as I think about how to apply Jesus' words to my personal life, and His techniques to my own teaching.
We haven't seen too many of our tiny lizard friends lately--too cold for them to be out. The temperatures are still up and down, in the eighties for a few days, then in the fifties and sixties for a few days.
I'll admit to looking forward to the warmer temperatures for two reasons: the lizards, and the time of year when peppers, eggplants, and okra grow like crazy.
But right now I really can't complain about our various parsley patches--we're using parsley more as a salad green than an herb these days. The dill patch, too, has finally done superbly well (after a couple of battles with butterflies...battles in the sense that we were trying to keep both the dill and the butterflies alive, of course).
Amazingly enough, while production seems to have slowed, we've still managed to eat something from the garden each day. Except the day during a last-minute trip, but even on that day we ate something from my parents' garden, which I kind of take credit for because we got it set up there a year-and-a-half ago to accommodate my seedlings in the middle of our extended move.
So that means something home-grown has been on the table every day since September 1, 2014. Pretty good record, right?
In November, we met the man in charge of the community garden near our house. We don't grow things there, but I like to walk past it several times a week to get a glimpse of how things are doing. They grow everything organically, and have built up the on-site soil for several years.
When we met the man in charge, we instantly wanted to spend about five days asking him questions. We settled for a few minutes of his time, though. :)
One of the most important things we learned was that most tomatoes in our area succumb to the yellow leaf curl virus spread by white flies. But since he told us which variety he grows with consistent results, we felt armed with knowledge to do better in the future, even though our tomato plants were already beginning to look sick.
What I didn't count on was how difficult it would be to find that tomato variety. It took quite a few Google searches...but the good news is that now we know! It probably didn't need to be such a prolonged research project.
Nevertheless, I'm feeling thankful that I can go buy a six-pack of plants at a nearby nursery for $2.98, which gives me hope to have a few tomatoes this spring after all.
When I first ordered seeds for Blue Seas Statice, I had no idea they would take until the second year to bloom.
The poor things did go through a lot of trauma--poor soil, heat, and being chopped up by the yard care man's weed eater on multiple occasions. Yet they kept growing back, and I kept hoping as long as they kept growing.
Now the first one is just barely beginning to bloom, and I'm completely delighted with the color--as much as I hoped I would be. Which of course means I'd better get some seeds started so I can enjoy them again next year.
We ordered ours from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and you can still find the same variety.
I've never been one to limit my Christmas music to December. As a musician, Christmas always comes in October anyway, and I don't see a reason to force it into the closet on December 26.
After all, I want Jesus to stay right by me the rest of the year, so why not His story?
This particular holiday season was hectic for us beyond the usual programs and concerts, so I ended the year feeling like I really hadn't done the Christmas carols thing this year. Not that I was going to do anything about it, mind you, but I did notice.
Some of my piano students agree with me about Christmas music all year; others don't. The ones who agree get to keep their Christmas music out as long as they'd like--which is why I ended up with one student practicing Christmas through January, and why I started another one on Christmas music in February, for the reading skills, of course.
Is that what led to opening up some Christmas music and playing it during my supper preparations this evening?
Whatever made me do it, those piano sounds turned me teary-eyed pretty quickly.
It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold:
"Peace on the earth, good will to men,
From heaven's all-gracious King;"
The world in solemn stillness lay,
To hear the angels sing.
My heart once more had no words, no words for the dear ones I know who right now suffer fear, worry, anxiety, sickness.
Still through the cloven skies they come,
With peaceful wings unfurled,
And still their heavenly music floats
O'er all the weary world;
Above its sad and lowly plains
They bend on hovering wing,
And ever o'er its Babel sounds
The blessed angels sing.
And once more, my prayer, my hopes for them ascended high, pleading that these same angels would come and brighten the path for my dear ones.
And ye, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow--
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing;
O rest beside the weary road,
And hear the angels sing.
Once more through a hymn words of faith crept into my mind, offering their hope not just to me, but to my dear ones, too.
After all, Jesus still offers rest beside the weary road, even if it's February instead of December.
I'm struck today, as my fingers type out the words once more, writing them in my memory and not just on the screen, by the boldness of John the Baptist.
We think of him as the one who baptized Jesus, who preached in the wilderness by the river, who called Israel to repentance. But did you remember he preached to Herod?
John said, right to the hardened king's face, You shouldn't be keeping company with your brother's wife. In fact, you need to stop it right away.
Which means if John was preaching repentance to Herod, there was hope even for Herod. And if there was hope for Herod? There isn't anybody reading this right now who can't have hope. It's there for the taking.
John's bold preaching cost him his freedom, and eventually his life. But he didn't think about that when he preached, when he invited Herod into the kingdom of heaven.
He simply stayed true to the work God asked him to do, even though I'm sure he well knew it could cost him dearly. He looked ahead to the reward of the faithful, and simply stayed true, through everything. That's how we can be brave, too.
I'll admit it. I'm not used to January looking like this, but I certainly wouldn't dream of complaining about it.
All the zinnias are blooming. We're still eating something out of our own garden every single day. (This is day 137 in a row!) The local orchards (both the professionals and the friends' home trees) are in full swing.
The piano students started coming through the doors again this week, and the closer it came to the time they walked into the studio? I was as excited as a kid before a birthday party. It's fun to like your job that much.
I haven't made resolutions. At least not officially. I hardly ever do. Maybe because I've never felt like January was The Big Start. That happens when school starts in August or September. January is just a little re-start into what should already be a good routine.
So this January, my resolutions go about as far as trying to adhere more faithfully to the bedtime schedule I set for myself in August.
As I told a new little kindergarten-year-old friend of mine in December, I get really tired when I stay up past my bedtime.
"Me, too," she said solemnly.
And as I'm making progress toward managing my evenings the way I should, I'm getting reacquainted with that favorite time of day of mine.
Early morning.
Nothing like it, especially when you greet it with the fresh energy that comes only from a good night's rest, and spend it with Jesus.
Somehow it got to be almost the end of December--two days before Christmas, no less--and I haven't been around these parts for a long time.
Can I just say I'm a music teacher and so is my husband and one pre-Thanksgiving program and five Christmas programs and another Christmas play later I'm still thinking maybe one of these days I'll get out our own Christmas music to listen to some quiet evening? Whew! What a month!
But I can't
let today go by without checking in here for two reasons: One, I am low
energy after donating a substantial amount of blood to the science of my
own health care (don't worry about me--I'm on a great track right now to
getting some things figured out, and I'm really excited about it), and
therefore have a sweet excuse not to be up and around trying to
accomplish my usual whirlwind of life I call my to-do list.
And two?
While I was sitting in the lab waiting, I realized that six eventful years ago today my husband and I had our very first date.
Have
I told that story here before? I don't think I have...maybe today
should be the day. So sit back and relax, because if there's something
I'm not good at, it's making this love story of mine short. Sweet, yes,
but not short!
I had these classmates in my music classes in college. Well, it
started out that I just had one classmate, and he had a twin brother who
was in a different sequence of music classes. Of course it took me
forever to figure out which was which, and so I simply never called them
by their names, offering my cheerful nameless greetings whenever I saw
whichever one.
But since I had classes with one and not
the other, AND the one in my class had a girlfriend, it got easier over
that first year of college.
These twin brothers had a
reputation. They were always singing, they were always having wholesome
fun, and if either of them were in the cafeteria, theirs was the table
with two or three times as many chairs crowded around it--all the fun
people loved being around them, and they could never leave a person
out. The more the merrier.
And a couple of years into
college the twins' younger brother arrived on campus full of just as
much energy and fun as the other two. He soon gained a reputation as
well: plastic-bag-and-straws bagpipe builder, four-person bike
fabricator, the guy who dressed like Martin Luther for some Theology
exam or another, the guy who dressed in a toga for his Greek
final.
Somehow this younger brother and I ended up in
basic conducting class together, and occasionally used our batons as
swords against each other as we "studied" for our final conducting
exam.
And then one day in the spring I ran into said
younger brother and a friend of his, and when I wanted to know what they
were up to, I got the most exciting answer: They were on their way to
the pi contest (where you have to recite as many digits of pi as you can from memory
to win a prize), where they were not only going to recite, but SING the
digits of pi.
Something I had always wanted to do, as
it turns out, and in a rare outburst of extroversion, I asked if I could
join them. I only knew about fifty digits, but we found a good place
with a 5-8 sequence for a finishing point (don't worry if that's as
clear as mud to you), I taught them how to sing in perfect parallel organum, and we were off to steal the show. Which of course we did.
So. If you've been following my potentially confusing story, you've figured out that I had become fairly well acquainted with two of the three brothers via taking the same classes, and knew the other one a bit more casually at a distance.
Over the course of time, the two brothers (one twin and the younger one) got married, and I got acquainted with their wives as well. These two brothers also both did their pastoral internships at a little church I called my home church for five years or so.
Eventually, I graduated and stayed in town, these twin brothers graduated and moved out of town, and that's when younger brother began his internship at my little church. And that's when his wife and I sat down one day after the service and the potluck and figured out we hit it off really well and in our several years of acquaintance just hadn't had a chance to discover each other yet.
I didn't know this until later, of course, but she got in the car afterwards and said, "I feel like we could be sisters! WAIT! We COULD be sisters!"
There was one un-married twin left, after all, and she figured she knew exactly who he needed to marry.
She didn't lose any time getting to work. Her sister-in-law, who by then had moved away from our college town and was working in the same office as my parents, quickly agreed to the plan and began doing her research into my family, you know, to see if we were decent people or not.
Check.
The wives schemed with their husbands. They thought it was a great idea. (I still wonder sometimes if they ever have any second thoughts now that they know me better!) They ran it all by the sets of parents--theirs and mine, too, I think. Everybody seemed to think it was an idea worth pursuing a little further.
Like by informing one of the parties in question that an arranged marriage was in the works.
For whatever reason, they decided I should be the first (out of the last two, anyway) to know.
We girls were out dumpster diving the weekend of college graduation, because people used to leave great stuff out to be thrown away on graduation weekend, and we were looking for a sewing machine. We didn't find one, but she used the time to her advantage.
"We've been talking," she said, "and we think you should be our next sister-in-law."
I had to work a little to get out of that awkward moment. I thought maybe it was behind me when the other one stopped by my house to pick up something to send to my parents (with whom, you might recall, she worked every day).
She complimented my multi-colored dining room chairs, and by way of explanation, I said all my friends encouraged me to try out my crazy decorating scheme before I had a husband to tell me I couldn't.
"Marry a S---," she said, not missing a beat. "They'd let you do it."
I looked at the floor, speechless.
"There's one left!" she said, as if her little reminder would remove my speechlessness and prompt me to pick up the phone and order a wedding cake.
I knew she was right, though. I knew him well enough to know he would let me paint my chairs whatever color I wanted, and I knew there was indeed "one left".
They dropped it for a while, but it wasn't too long before the subject came up again and I had to choose, on the spot, whether it was ok for them to give this brother-in-law of hers my phone number. She presented me with an impressive resume of charms, values, and character traits, and I relented.
But hesitatingly, because if we had known each other for so long already and no sparks had flown why would we think they would now?
Still, I spent quite a bit of time mulling things over. Did he have similar values? Would he manage himself well among the variety of family and friends who made up my world? Would I lose my friends (his sisters-in-law) if it didn't work out?
I talked it over with my mom.
"You don't have to know if you would marry him. You just have to know if you would go to dinner. If you'd go to dinner with him, don't worry about the rest."
I talked it over with my dad.
"Well," he said, "you do have a lot in common. His brother treats his wife really well, and the apple doesn't usually fall too far from the tree."
And months went by. I felt more confident that I would indeed go to dinner with him if he asked, but the phone call never came.
Summer turned to fall, fall to winter. Winter brought a tremendous snow storm, big enough for my parents to cancel Christmas and let me know they didn't think I should come to visit them until the New Year.
Conveniently, a certain someone was in the next town over visiting his brother and sister-in-law, who immediately set about getting the two of us in the same room for a couple of hours. Unbeknownst to me, they hadn't said a word to him about their plans for his future marriage (except a comment by his twin brother that went right over his head). Unbeknownst to him, they were planning his life and finding his bride.
And you know what? The snowstorm worked--God's way of getting everybody in the right place at the right time, you might say.
They unveiled the plan to my Mr. Right, who thought about it for several days before agreeing to go to dinner with me. But that moment they had his approval? They called me right away, set up a double date, and risked the snowy roads for the 45-minute drive to my office to pick me up and take me out to dinner little knowing from that moment forward they really would be stuck with me.
And a little double date in a little Thai restaurant became the launching pad for our "arranged marriage", as they like to call it, six years ago today.
