Peace

Grandpa’s Crows

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Crow in the tree edited

Crow in the tree at the cemetery

Well, technically for me, they’re “Pa’s” crows, because the man whose crows are the subject of this post is my father…but my kids and the other grandkids (and there are a lot of them…I’m one of seven girls, and we each have between one and four kids of our own) got used to calling them Grandpa’s crows.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it seems to me that crows get a bad name. They’re often associated with death or darkness, they’re maligned for having one of the least pleasant voices of the bird kingdom, and many people consider them pests. But they hold a very special place in my heart, for a variety of reasons, most of them tied to my father, otherwise known to our family as “Pa”. Continue Reading…

The Old Button Tin

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My mother’s old button tin (a reused, 1950’s Christmas cookie tin), a box of threads and some old “Bondex” iron-on material from the 1960’s

When I was little, I was always fascinated, watching my mother sew. She could hand sew or sew on the machine.

To me it was magic. I learned in later years, that it was necessity. With seven kids to raise on just my father’s salary (at least until I was a teen and my mother started a second career in the insurance industry and worked her way up to a CPCU license), it was more economical for my mother to craft many of our clothes and other items by hand than it was to buy them ready-made. Continue Reading…

On Handling Adversity

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The rising sun peeking from behind a red barn

“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.”

~Maya Angelou

An Old Adirondack Hermit

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water pump (2)

The picture here is of the rusty old water pump on the “shallow well” in the backyard at the Homestead…Pa found it in an old Adirondack dump back in the 1950’s and we’ve used it “decoratively” ever since 🙂

When I was just a little kid (before kindergarten-age), there was an old Adirondack hermit living in the woods up and around our area. He had a grizzly beard and looked around 75 or older; he walked with a sort of stooped gait, wearing a cap of some sort over his white hair.

For quite a while he had a “shelter” built deep in the woods, and he camped out there pretty much all year round. We didn’t know his name, but continue reading…

Rainy Day

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Misty rain outside my window this morning

“The rain to the wind said,
‘You push and I’ll pelt.’
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged–though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

                                                        ~Robert Frost

While poetry is not my usual choice of writing form (I tend to write too “long” to craft any good poems, LOL), I enjoy reading it…especially poems that evoke images, both sensory and emotional. Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets because he combines that with another of my great loves: Nature.

This poem seemed fitting to me today. I, too, know how the flowers felt, and yet there is something beautiful in that.

Without the more violent “pushing and pelting” in life, we would never fully appreciate our moments of sun-dappled peace.

Without the bitter we would never taste the sweet.