Things Lost

 

          Sometimes, when I’m making my letter blogs, there are pictures I’ve picked to use and for one reason or another, don’t use them. These, and the little stories that go with them, get lost.

          “I’ll use them next time,” I tell myself, only most of the time, I don’t. A new week happens, with new pictures and new stories and I never go back and record those stories.

          You would be surprised about all of things, events, places, all the small moments that we forget about over time. And the only ones that stay with us are usually the ones we want to forget most! Unless you keep a journal, or a blog, and review it from time to time, things get lost in the everyday clutter of life.

          I guess it’s supposed to be that way.

          I wish, even though I don’t believe in wishing, I wish I had a journal from one of my grandmothers. I’d love to read about their days, the joys and sorrows and challenges that made up their everyday life. I’d get a glimpse of what life looked like back then. Honestly, I’d be thrilled to have anything from any of my ancestors, male or female! But, it doesn’t exist. Maybe it does for some people, just not for me.

          “Life was hard back then,” Momma told me. “They didn’t have time or resources to give to journaling.”

          And so, things get lost.

          None of us do life alone. Our lives touch each other’s, sometimes just a brush, sometimes a full, head-on crash! And knowing me, as you do by now, you have to expect you’ll turn up in my stories sooner or later.

Like when you make me laugh.

One of the photos that almost got lost is this one.

 It’s been a month since my cute little redheaded sister sent this photo on our morning love note chain.

“I’m proud. I dressed myself today,” Diane wrote.

If you’re not paying attention you might not notice that she has two different shoes on.

          I laughed right out loud. Such a great way to start my day. And I could totally relate. It’s easy for me to do something like this. I dress with indirect and very dim light that spills out of the bathroom in the mornings so I don’t disturb the slumber of my handsome mountain man. More than once I’ve discovered my underwear inside out or my shirt on backwards. I don’t usually have a problem with my old-lady stretchy pants, though. If I put them on and they don’t cover my backside while the front goes the whole way up to my boobs, I know they’re on backwards!

Diane got all the way to work before she caught her boo-boo.

          “Did anyone notice?” I asked.

          “I showed them,” she replied. “It’s too funny and harmless.”

          “I would never notice,” our beautiful sister Phyllis said.

          It’s moments like these that make me realize how much of life is lived in the in-betweeny spaces, the ones we never think to write down.

          “In-betweeny?” you question.

          It’s not a typo, it’s actually a bit of an inside joke. Our pastor made up that word during one of his sermons and it got such a laugh out of all of us that I just had to use it here.

          Little moments where our lives brush past each other.

          Another small moment, something that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, was when I snapped this photo weeks ago and didn’t use it.

          “What’s the story?” I know you wanna know.

          Sometimes I think about buying an artist’s glove. Another name for it is a smudge guard or drawing glove. It keeps you from smudging your pencil or transferring oils onto your work surface. Digital artists use them to keep from accidentally touching a part of the screen they didn’t mean to touch. It won’t stop the transfer of paint, but it will help.

          I saw something where someone made a fingerless glove out of a sock. I just happened to have a pair of knee-highs that had a hole in the toe and I was getting ready to throw them away. Perfect timing. I got the scissors and made my own glove — gloves. Two socks, two gloves. They also work perfect for when my hands are cold and I need my fingers to visit with you!             

          The last “lost” picture for this week is this one.

          “What are we looking at?” you ask.

          This is the block and tackle system Mike put up for me. With this I’m able to lift more weight than I otherwise could.

“A block and tackle hanging in your house. Why?”

With this I can put Raini in a sling and raise her all by myself to trim her nails. Mike is very aware that he might not always be here to help me with things, so he tries to make them as easy for me as he can. I, on the other hand, remind him that I might go first. None of us knows our last day on this earth.

When I’m washing dishes, Bondi and Raini think it’s playtime. Bondi brings her little squeaky and drops it at my feet, Raini brings her ball. Then, the whole time I’m washing dishes, I’m tossing toys. Raini’s I toss into the dining room; Bondi’s I toss into the utility room. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve hit that rope! It’s funny because if I was trying to hit it, I wouldn’t be able to. Since I’m not trying to hit it, I hit it about eighty percent of the time. The squeaky hits the rope and comes bouncing back. Bondi, already racing down the hall in anticipation, has to reverse course. Not the end of the world but annoying nonetheless.

“Will you put up a hook or something to get that out of our way?” I asked Mike.

He’s a good husband and fixed it so I can get the rope out of the way when I wasn’t using the block and tackle system. 

Someone who came crashing into my life this week is this pretty lady.

Nancy has been coming to our church for a while now and at some point she mentioned she has critters.

Critters?

You know how to capture my heart, don’t you? Mention critters to me. You know I have a love for all of God’s creatures — even spiders and snakes! I don’t especially want them to live with me, but they all have their place.

“What kind of critters do you have?” I asked Nancy.

“Dogs, cats, chickens...”

I don’t remember what else she said, because when she said chickens, I got to wondering. “Do you want some old noodles for your chickens?” I asked. “Will chickens eat noodles?”

“Chickens’ll eat just about anything,” she said. “Sure. I’ll take them.”

I probably had about twelve or fourteen packages of these fifteen-year-old noodles.

I thought I’d take them to church and give them to Nancy. Unfortunately, Nancy hasn’t been feeling well and missed church a couple of weeks in a row.

“Can we come and visit tomorrow afternoon?” I messaged when she was feeling better.

“I’d love that,” she said.

That day started with a trip to Sayre for a little shopping. We usually go in the other direction but we had to stop at the Fed-Ex store in Wysox and drop off a printer. My printer wouldn’t hook up to the internet anymore which meant that Mike couldn’t use it from his desk. I use a cable to connect to the printer, so it wasn’t an issue for me. The message on the screen said to call Epson support. I called. The tech walked me through a bunch of stuff to fix the issue but it didn’t resolve it.

“You’re out of warranty,” he told me. “But we will make a one-time exception and send you a new printer.”

Cool! But it’s not a new one, it’s a refurbished one.

“Once you get the printer, use the packaging to return your printer. You have seven days from the time you receive it to return your printer or we will charge you for it.”

I’d just filled the tanks, and Epson sent new ink along with the printer, but I still tried to use up as much of the ink as I could.

We didn’t wait seven days because we didn’t want to be charged.

On the way to Sayre I took pictures for you.

I bet I saw five hawks!

“Isn’t it illegal to have the license plate so dirty you can’t read it?” I asked Mike.

“It can be, but even if they stop you they just tell you to clean it off.”

          After shopping, after having lunch at the Chinese restaurant, after returning the printer, we went to see Nancy.

          Nancy has a fabulous place! It was the family homestead and has been in the family for many years so there’s history here.

          She showed us around the house and I was loving all the antique furnishings she had.

          “I love old things,” Nancy said. “I think I was born in the wrong century.”

          I used to think that, too but at some point I realized a few things. First, God doesn’t make mistakes. I was born right when He wanted me to be born. Second, there are so many advantages to living in this day and age that I wouldn’t’ve had back then. Would I write if I didn’t have my computer and spell check? I don’t know. I can see my paper now, full of cross-offs and misspelled words and arrows where I want to rearrange stuff. I don’t have to haul water from the creek, I have electricity, and heat without chopping wood!

          “This is the chest that my grandfather shipped his things home from after the war,” Nancy said.

          How cool is that!

          We had groceries in the car so we didn’t stay too long. I’m looking forward to visiting with Nancy again and getting to know her better. We met the pups but we didn’t venture out through the mud to see any of the other critters. She mentioned the foundation for the old homestead is still there on the property and I’d love to see that as well as the pond that you can’t see from the house. And Nancy knows a lot about herbs and dries her own. I’d be interested to know more about that, too.

          Coming back across the Susquehanna, we see a couple of guys out ice fishing.

          “I wouldn’t be out there now,” Mike said. We saw a warning on the news just the night before to not go out on the ice.

        

          I have two more landscape pictures in my file that were taken on a different day.

          You can see just about forever!

        

          And I have a picture of this historical marker.

          Even though there are a bunch of these markers along the roads we travel, it’s the first time Mike asked, “What’s it say?”

          “Sullivan’s March,” I told him and snapped a picture. Then I read it to him. “General John Sullivan’s army camped on the Sheshequin Flats below, August ninth and tenth, 1779. The seventh and last over-night stop on the way to Tioga Point.”

          I guess I’ve been taking the markers for granted because I thought they all said the same thing. They don’t. So I did a little research on the event.

In the summer of 1779, during the thick of the Revolutionary War, General George Washington ordered a campaign that would come to be known as Sullivan’s March. The goal wasn’t to capture cities or forts, it was to break the British–Iroquois alliance by destroying the network of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) towns that supported British raids on frontier settlements.

General John Sullivan gathered his troops in Easton, Pennsylvania, and began moving north along the Susquehanna River. If you live anywhere along the Northern Tier, Wyalusing, Standing Stone, Ulster, Sheshequin, Athens — you’re living right on the path of that march. The army camped on the riverbanks, moved in long columns on both sides of the water, and pushed steadily toward Tioga Point (present‑day Athens), where Sullivan joined forces with General James Clinton.

From there, the combined army crossed into what is now New York and carried out a scorched‑earth campaign: more than forty Haudenosaunee towns were burned, along with orchards, cornfields, and food stores that had taken generations to build. The number of people killed in battle was small, but the destruction forced thousands of Indigenous families to flee into the winter with almost nothing. The human cost was enormous and the effects reshaped Haudenosaunee life for generations.

These are quiet reminders that this peaceful stretch of river once carried an army on a mission that changed the map of the Northeast.

Sad, but war is never pretty.

And now you know what I know about Sullivan’s March.

Jenn, my friend and editor, proof read what I had written Saturday night and had this comment.

“Something to add to your Sullivan's info...those troops shot a cannonball at the Standing Stone in the river, breaking off the top corner. That entire campaign is why I roll my eyes whenever people get too hyped about how great Washington was!”

Standing Stone was a forty-foot tall rock that once stood right out of the Susquehanna River. It was a major landmark for Native Americans and early settlers.

Shall we go into the kitchen?

This week I did some baking for my best old West Virginia friend. Besides painting a caricature of Trish, I wanted to bake her some treats as her Christmas gift.

To quote my handsome neighbor, “You can’t get in a hurry about these things.”

I didn’t get in a hurry, that’s for sure. Besides, now she’ll have a treat in February instead of having a lot of treats at Christmastime.

Trish, like my Miss Rosie, is a lemon-lover.

          “What would Ben like?” I asked thinking of her son.

          “Something different,” she said.

          Something different than I usually send her it was. For the first time in my life I made filled gingerbread cookies. I had this cookie at a church function and they were the best gingerbreads I’ve ever had! I got the recipe from Mary, the pastor’s wife. That was two Christmas’s ago.

          You can’t get in a hurry about this stuff, don’cha know.

          It takes a little planning to make this cookie because of the chilling time. You have to chill it after you make it and you have to chill it after you cut them out.

          It was mid-afternoon when I started them and the first chill is for one to four hours. I didn’t think I’d have enough time to finish them before recliner time, so I made the dough and put it in the fridge overnight.

          I’ll tell you what! It’s better to read the instructions the whole way through. I read up to the part that said, roll the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap to one quarter inch thickness, then refrigerate for one to four hours.

          Did I do that?

          NO!

          I’ll just roll it out when I take it out of the fridge, I thought.

          The next morning, when I went to finish the cookies, I read the next step. Cut the cookies out. Hmm. It was at this point that I realized my goof. There was no way I could roll out that hard dough! I had to wait until it warmed up a little. I got out my fancy-schmancy rolling pin with the thickness guide and rolled them out. I used an octagon-shaped cookie cutter. If you chill them after cutting, they’re supposed to retain their shape.

Mine didn’t. They all ended up as circles and that was okay. I didn’t really care.

          I ended up with seventeen cookies. I sent nine to West Virginia, ate one (or two), and the rest went to the Kipps.

          For the lemon-lovers I made my beloved Aunt Brenda’s Lemon Bars.

         And I made Lemon Meltaways.

         And I made a new-to-me recipe called Holiday Lemon Dream Bars. I didn’t care for them and I’m gonna pitch the recipe. I’ll never make them again.

 

          I could call this one done. We’ve covered all of the missed pictures and stories of recent memory and we’ve covered what I’ve been up to this week, namely baking, no painting. But something that keeps coming back to my mind is a dream I had. Maybe it’s important, maybe it’s not. Since I can’t stop thinking about it, I might just as well tell you about it.

          I dreamed I was testifying to you, telling you how much God loves you. It was a very short dream and the only thing I remember for sure is I quoted a book, chapter, and verse from the Bible to prove my point. I remembered it when I woke up but soon forgot the chapter and verse.

“What book did you quote from?” I know you wanna know.

Ezekiel.

          The really weird part of this dream is I didn’t even know there was a book of Ezekiel in the Bible!

My first thought when I woke up was just that.

“Is there even a book named Ezekiel in the Bible or did I make it up?”

          Okay! Okay! I realize that doesn’t make me look too bright, and that’s okay! I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know all the books of the Bible. However, I did know that there’s an Ezekiel in the Bible but that was about all I knew.

I did a little research.

So who was Ezekiel, anyway?

In a nutshell, he was a priest who got hauled off to Babylon with the rest of the exiles, and right there in the middle of that mess, God tapped him on the shoulder and turned him into a prophet. He’s the one with the big, wild visions — wheels within wheels, dry bones rattling back to life — all of it meant to tell a discouraged people that God hadn’t forgotten them. His whole message was this mix of warning and hope, judgment and restoration, like God saying, ‘Yes, things are broken, but I’m not done with you.’

If I was using Ezekiel to show you how much God loves you, which chapter and verse would I quote?

          I’d have to say 34:16.

          “I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick; but I will destroy the fat and the strong, and feed them in judgment.”

          It means God loves you so much that He comes looking for you when life pulls you away. He seeks you when you feel lost, strengthens you when you’re weak, and He never loses track of you or gives up on you. And the verse goes on to show that God doesn’t just comfort you — He defends you. He won’t let anything that harms you go unchecked.

          And I want you to know something else — I really do love you.

I care about your soul.

I want you to be saved, and I want you in heaven with me someday. And I’ll be honest, the thought of you spending eternity separated from God breaks my heart. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it. I care about you that much.

Please don’t ever think your sins are too big or too ugly for God to forgive. I’ve committed some very big and ugly sins myself. I’m not going to list them out but trust me — you haven’t out‑sinned me. And if God can forgive me, He can absolutely forgive you. The only thing He won’t forgive is unbelief — turning away from the very One who’s reaching out to save you.

And I know the way the world is going can make you afraid. It feels like everything is out of control and teetering on the edge of war and destruction. But when I look at it through the lens of Scripture, I see it all laid out, not chaos, but the will of God unfolding just like He said it would. And that gives me peace. Because if God is in control of the big picture, then I know He’ll take care of me — and He’ll take care of you, too.

 

With that, we will call this one done.

And remember, you are all in my heart.

Done!