Tuesdays With Jo

Dear Mother Jaskey, 

It has been another delightful week in summer. This last week we went from the hot plus thirty days and nights above 20C to cooler evenings, crickets chirping and caragana seeds popping. I am always a little sentimental about fall.

One evening we had our neighbors, Rudi and Cindy Dueck and their four children, over for supper. I did my typical company meal which is grilled chicken (marinated in white sauce this time), baby potatoes with toppings (garden potatoes this time), corn, lettuce salad (I did the BLT one) and oreo dessert (I don't have a set company dessert 😅). I truly don't mean to have a company menu. Its just happened enough times that I tend to make fun of myself. 

I've canned 24 quarts and 32 pints of beans this last week. Do you think that will last us for a year? I hope so, as I have now lost interest and have given away the last picking. I used my pressure canner on my corn cooker on the back deck. That is some fast cooking! I can do two layers of pints in there, so 16 jars at a time. 

I am absolutely thrilled that your dear daughter Karen and her two dear daughters, Em and Trish, are about to arrive in the land of living skies! We are hosting a mini teachers prep here tomorrow and Trish is coming to attend. I shall immerse myself in much sisterly-ness.

Are you interested in the school cleaning evenings, the food prep, the shopping days for the aforementioned? I kind of think not. And so I shall close this epistle. 

Love, Jo

P.S. Wyatt has been asking for an Encyclopedia set to read.

P.P.S. Only 1.6 more weeks until Colby comes home.

P.P.P.S. I have been thinking a lot about Genevra. I imagine her with dark hair, blue eyes and a huge imagination at age two.

Tuesdays With Jo

Dear Mother Jaskey, 

Wyatt is cuddled in under my left arm reading the Adventures of Bobby Coon. Zach is reclining bareback on the couch. The flies are buzzing and my house is actually cooling down. Pat is gone for night, on the truck, hauling coal from Edmonton. 

Yesterday we got home from folks after camping for two nights in their backyard (definitely a story for another time) and our dogs met us with mouths full if quills. It consumed most of our day removing them, including a dose of relaxant from our neighbor Merle. They are a subdued pair. 

I've been working outside these days, trimming trees, fixing sprinklers, spraying weeds, picking beans. Every once in a great while Pat n i have a moment on the back deck and install another railing post. We are excited to announce an estimated finish date of June 2032, in which case we hope to have all the family down. 

I have been thinking about making a baby quilt for Diana's baby. Do you think she has plenty already and would prefer something else for a gift? 

Also, what makes King Tut turn brown? Could it actually be from neglect or lack of water? Asking for a friend. 

Love, Jo

P.S. Tonight Wyatt announced at the supper table that the Lord willing, Zach was going swimming with him tonight. Surely God understands. 

P.P.S. Are you serious about getting a letter from me once a week? My life seems awfully humdrum at times.

P.P.P.S. Will you write me back?

P.P.P.P.S. I love you

Blogging 101

Are you all going to start blogging again? Now that we have so much time on our hands? Ha, ha.

I'm loving, loving, loving having my family home around me. This is absolutely amazing. Almost magical. With a whole lot of real involved.

We're lucky people to have a large 'harvest' on our hands. Our shop is hopping busy, all hands on deck. So we truly are not going squirrelly together in our house. My men are being fed exotically, ((cough)) I mean, we're having a lot more fresh cookies and bread and buns than usual. I'm also spending an exorbitant amount of time in the shop answering phones for Pat so he can occasionally do some welding.

This week is officially spring break but the plan is to keep having school at home next week. Wyatt and I set up a neat little spot in the office. His desk is against the coffee table. We hung his school charts along the west wall close to the whiteboard. I write shop lists on the whiteboard, fill out the shop calendar and then I have the alphabet lined up neatly along the bottom. We also found a file shelf in storage and have it in the corner of my desk, one file for finished books, one file for spare-time projects and one file for tests and answer keys.

I have lists and lists of things I want to accomplish in the next while, lists that exist only in my head. We have books and books and books that we would like to read together. We have things to finish and fix and honey-do lists galore. We shall see. Yes, we shall see.

We've only had one day so far in which it appeared that some of us were quite and altogether housebound. That was on Sunday. But we went for a ripping drive in our pasture, where nary a soul is, usually. We saw a few people and quite easily kept on social-distancing.

Talking about social-distancing. My husband says he's been doing this all his life. Ha, ha. Me? Only sometimes.

What are you making for supper tonight?
What books are you currently reading?
What's on your to-do list?
What's on your fun project list?

If I have time, I hope to update often here.

Supper tonight: Fresh buns made into ranch burgers, veggies & dip, chips, fresh cookies
Books: Just finished reading A Spiderweb for Two by Elizabeth Enright - my family loved this series!
To-Do List: Make chocolate syrup for chocolate milk
Fun Project List: Sew another bag or quilt

P.S. We're living a history lesson, am I right? I'm thinking about writing a Covid-19 diary.

Poetry Day

One cousin messaged on our chat this morning; Today I'd like to invite everyone to write a little poem on any topic. Must be two lines or more....

Here's what I wrote first:

Colby and I are home today;
He got bit by the coyote-trapping-fray.
I'm teaching him knots and stitches too
As he stretches the hide and heals the few
Little holes in the luscious fluff.
I could bury my head in the fluffy stuff.
But coyote fur? I back away...
A mother's job is hard some days...

And then later this:

Keep 'em coming. Write, she said.
And so she stopped and scratched her head.
Should she write about how much she'd consumed?
Of coffee; hot, flavoured and bloomed?
Or should she write of her laundry room?
Where pile upon pile of laundry loom?
Sheets from company, blankets from sick,
The piles are growing, but not so quick,
As the few weeks when the fevers and colds
Spread like spots on grandfather toad?
And underneath the loads and piles
She finds the sewing spread miles and miles.
The quilt she started in twenty-nineteen,
Cuddled up close to her old machine,
The box for home-ec class piled high,
The teachers box is sitting nearby,
The denim patches are neatly stacked,
Inside a box for Wyatt to attack.
Shh, it's his, but don't breathe a word.
He thinks a boy shouldn't quilt. He's heard.
But can't stop here. Piled in the back
Are pens, paper cutter, a drawing stack,
Empty cartridges, paper weights,
Birthday cards from last year's dates,
A family motto, a quilting book,
Kleenex boxes, a vinyl hook,
The paper shredder, mighty full,
Scraps of satin and crepe and wool,
A sewing box, a serger - old,
Pins and thread  and scissors gold,
Mat and cutter, ruler too.
Oh, the things she finds, it's quite a view.
But on she must press, the work can't wait,
Thanks for listening for five minutes straight.

I would love to post some of the others poems. It has been a rich day!

Quiet

Welcome, January. Welcome, 2020. Welcome, new year.

It has been quite the January, so far. We had a lovely Christmas. And then we came home and had sickness. The kind of sickness where everyone is down for a week with fever and chills and aches and colds. And we've overlapped somewhat but it has really been a long drawn-out affair, which has launched 2020 as one of the most remarkably stay-at-home, relaxing years. I'd like to focus on the scent of homemade brown bread wafting through the house, the hours and hours of reading stories (welcome to the Melendy quartet) together as a family and playing game after game of Cover Your Donkey (as Sasha likes to call it).

Slow waltz. That's us, foggy-brained, hoarse-voiced, each at our own pace of rest and relaxation.

And lest we forget to impart important details, we must add that we've had very little school and many days of -50ish windchill. A walk across the yard holds coughing fits and chilled fingers.

And then the day that Pat felt himself getting progressively worse and joining the ranks of sick, Zach played hockey and scored a ten-stitch scar on his temple. It was late in the evening. Those things always make all-night ER trips. Colby came with me to bring him in and the wait was phenomenally long. I found out later they were keeping him for a six-hour watch because it was a head trauma. When it was finally time for stitches I fled the room, Colby fled the room and the doctor had to get Zach to press the call button for help because she had a surface bleed which filled his ear and sprayed her shirt. We came home in the wee hours, relieved, exhausted, and one with a serious headache.

We have so much to be grateful for.

Back to my word. Quiet. I'm in a writing group with three lovely ladies and our topic for January was 'your word for the year'. I pondered and thought. Self-denial? Most definitely needed. Joy? That's what I want. Hope? Always. I had this idea going through my mind. I've been on this journey for a while now of deepening/strengthening/growing in self-denial and quietness. When Karen suggested quiet I knew that explained what I was trying to say. The word quiet can have so much more self-denial and grace than the word self-denial. And quiet to me means a quiet heart, a quiet spirit but not necessarily being quiet and not saying anything, which for me could be more rebellious than anything.

Quiet.

So beautiful; like the snow-flakes drifting down outside my window, like the sound of my little boy breathing hard as he sleeps his fever and sore throat away, like the concentration on Zach's face as he does one more lesson in math.

Quiet.

So self-denied; like the man of the house arising early and heading out the door on the coldest day of the year, operating at 70% as he quietly stated to me, willing to give anything for his family.

Quiet.

So gifted. So humble. So gracious. Like our teachers at school, giving their time and selves again and again and again.

I want to be this.

I long to grow in Jesus, in quietness and in strength. For in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.

Christmas

Christmas time was not very dramatic at our house when I was growing up. My mom and dad were very poor, for sure when I was a preschooler. But I remember distinctly one gift mom made Bren and I. They were beautiful homemade dolls with yarn hair, black for Bren and brown for me. Those dolls had almond shaped eyes painted perfectly on their face and dimples in their cheeks. Plus, they each came with two gingham dresses, a slip, and pantaloons. My mom made us loads of peppernuts at Christmas. We helped roll out the logs to just the right size and then she froze them. Then we’d all cut peppernuts and bake many a panful and freeze the tiny little cookies in an ice-cream pail until Christmas. Of course, mom let us snitch a few. My mom and dad were never big on giving gifts at Christmas but we always read the bible story out of the Egermeier’s bible story book and everyone sang Christmas carols. My mom sang like a bird, all the Christian Hymnal Christmas songs plus all the songs she heard in town, because she could hear a song once and sing it.

Christmas family gatherings were the very best as a child and even a teenager. We would drive a few hours when I was young to get to Grandpa and Grandma Isaac where I had oodles of boy cousins, the baking was decadent and Grandma’s jar of hard candies sat free and open to everyone. I remember gift exchanges and men playing crokinole and lots of loud boys in the basement. We also went to my Grandpa and Grandma Eidse for gatherings with oodles of girl cousins. We adored our ‘Grandma Eidse’ sleepovers where we would eat chips late into the night and look through Aunt Esther’s Stuff and play games of Pit and Life and Blitz and all manner of dress-up. We always brought special songs and poems and verses at both family gatherings and everyone loved it except us kids.

Christmas in my teenage and youth years was the best; those pretty new dresses, school party days, candies and gifts and singing. Singing has always been special to me, but when I got converted I would cry (I still do) over the beautiful messages of hope and cheer and Jesus birth. Bringing Christmas programs out when I was in youth was the highlight of all time. We took a full Saturday every year and all the youth got on a bus and drove to High Prairie and McClennan and brought the program to four different old folks’ homes. We also got to go out for pizza when we were done. We brought our program to two or three homes in Grande Prairie and two places in Valleyview, our Home in Crooked Creek and finally to church on the 25^th where half of the group was neighbours. We were such a big youth group, between 40 to 60 youth, that the program always went well and it didn’t really matter if one or two people were missing.

After we got married, I realized that Christmas time doesn’t always mean huge drifts of snow and layers of white on evergreen trees. I realized that some places didn’t go Christmas Eve carolling and that the strong winds of Saskatchewan were actually colder than the northern stillness of Alberta. For the first time in my life Christmas became wistful. Nostalgic. I cried with lonesomeness. I missed my cousins. I missed my people. But I got to know new people. I got to celebrate Christmas on the second Sunday in December by new friends in a little church where the youth group was tiny and everyone was gone on Christmas Day.  I got to travel to new places over Christmas time and meet large groups of people who I knew nothing about.

Our family’s little traditions are mirrored after both our parental homes. We like to have a special meal together and read the bible story about baby Jesus as a family. We sometimes exchange gifts but not always. We get together with Pat’s family and my family but rarely with the larger Grandpa/Grandma families. We listen to the school Christmas programs and dress our boys in new button-front shirts for the occasion. We have candy bags drifting around the house, peanuts in the garbage and stacks of peppernuts in the freezer. We often travel at Christmas, with loads of winter gear piled up the back window, hockey sticks and skates in tow and coolers of food arranged under pillows and backpacks. We sing Christmas carols; we hug our Grandpas and Grandmas and we wait.

And in the stillness here and there we meet Jesus. Love. Good will. Joy. Peace.

In Which Mrs. Brown is Resurrected In Obscurity

It has been some years since Mrs. Brown has made an appearance here. Fear not. It is not that Mrs. Brown has not been thriving, only that she has been living in obscurity.

A lot has come and gone since Mrs. Brown's last appearance. The little Brown boys have grown into strapping young men, taller than their mother. Baby Brown is no longer a baby, in fact, a lively grade one boy. Mrs. Brown herself has aged and sagged and blossomed into a ripe age of forty. Mr. Brown is the only one who appears much the same as the bygone years with only a sprinkling of grey in his hair and beard.

Mrs. Brown has many days worthy of 'Mrs. Brown Stories'. The only problem is a chance to record them. Like most forty-year-old mothers, Mrs. Brown has found that her once busy, lively life has morphed into a rendition of everything turned up to the speed of time and a half. The days fly by. What she once thought was busy now appears in memory as only a snail-paced leisurely stroll.

If Mrs. Brown thought babies up all night was something, she can now listen for her sons to get home from youth long after she's in bed. If she thought rousting grade five boys out of bed and making sure they brushed their teeth was a good workout, she can now wake to the smell of coffee made at five am when one son leaves for work or listen for footsteps when another son arrives home off the combine at two am. If Mrs. Brown thought being youth-leaders with toddlers was challenging, well, she was right. It was. But with older boys and one preschooler she managed six months of school board duties and Villa board duties, simultaneously.

There are myriad problems with the whole concept of stories about teenage boys; teenage boys do not care to be part of stories, Mrs. Brown or not. Teenage boys need a lot of privacy and respect.

And here we shall part again with Mrs. Brown, hoping to meet once again, soon, even in obscurity.

Harvest

Harvest

Harvest has come and gone once again. Snow covers our deck but the green grass still peeps through. This year was our first year being involved with actual farm land harvesting. Colby is working for Jason Regehr, running grain cart and other assorted jobs. Pat ended up helping Jason out. And Zach even did a couple weeks of grain cart when they got another combine. We’ve run crazy hours and sleepless nights. It’s good to have the combining done and the rush over.

Harvest and fall have always made me feel nostalgic and sad. Summer is over. The warm days are gone. I can hardly love the long fall days well enough just because I know winter is around the corner. Which is kind of odd, considering I like winter.

I love the garden harvest days, when bowls of ripe tomatoes grace my entrance floor and peppers fill my fridge. I love the stacks of dusty onions and the sink rounded full of washed carrots. I love rows of newly dug potatoes and the stack of corn stalks off to the side of the garden where the cats play.

This year Pat used his tree spade that he made and moved another good bunch of trees from our large tree patch to their rightful spot, a neat row down the shop driveway. Talk about instant gratification.

One evening we all went over to Jason’s for supper with the harvest crew and a large luscious harvest moon hung low on the horizon. One lone black tree spread its barren branches against the moon and dug its feet low down on the horizon.

Rows and rows of brightly colored jars line my pantry. Layers of dust accumulated over the summer need to be washed away. Half my windows are clean and shiny and the other half have spots and dust. Fall always brings me up short with the cleaning and I want to dig deep into the kitchen drawers with rags and water. My freezers are full to almost bursting with bags of sweet corn and large packages of raspberries and saskatoons.

My storage room has huge piles of camping gear that just needs to be put away and sorted and the winter tubs of clothes open and spilling out in the center of the room where the boys have dug frantically in their time of need. Empty jars are stacked all mish-mash, needing sorting as well.

It’s funny how fall can bring a flood of memories just by seeing last years tiny winter boots and the toys and trappings of yesterday's little boys turned men. It’s just life, this time of endings and changes. And there’s so much to be grateful for in these best days of harvest.

Harvest

Heads of wheat with a golden crown

Large round bales of palest brown

Lawns of green and leaves that dance

Garden bare in large expanse

Harvest moon, a large round plate

Barren trees on horizon straight

Geese a-flying overhead

Sunset glimmers a scarlet thread

Bugling elk sound echoing

Moving cattle bellowing

Empty pastures, empty nests

Hoes and wheelbarrows laid to rest

Harvest time has come and gone

Snow resplendent in morning dawn

Ah, the winter days are mine

Goodbye, goodbye sweet summertime

In Which Life Happens

I went to Grandma Lily's funeral on Friday in Saskatoon. Grandma Lily is Arlen & Jodi's foster boys Grandma (Brandon). She was 79 and the pastor of her church said she had been a believer of Jesus since 2004. They spoke of her thankfulness and happiness in times of sorrow and hardship. It was a blessing and a reproof to be at her funeral. I'm glad I got to know her and I'm glad I could go be with Arlens there.

I came straight to school on my way home from town. The teachers wanted to practice their skit for the school meeting this next week, so as many school board as possible tried to be there. That turned out good. I had bought a bunch of subs at Subway on my way home to feed my men supper and found out almost right away that Pat and Colby would be in the field and then Wyatt ended up going to Rennies. So I left a foot-long with the teachers for coffee break.

Then I headed to the Villa where I helped put on a bridal shower for Jessica Wohlgemuth. It turned out so pretty and fun. It was truly a pleasure to be part of it. And a lot of work. (Hiding my head in my hands.) I feel like a rather old lady at times. We set up lots of trees and greenery and strung light through the ceiling of the Villa basement. Then we set up many chairs in groups, kind of swagging between trees and it made for cozy visiting. Shani and Missy did 'toilet paper brides' which was a fun ice breaker. We did lots of cactus in terracotta pots and white taper candles and white tea lights in glass holders. We served veggies in tiny brown ribbed cups with a bit of dilly dip on the bottom, bruschetta and mini lime cheesecakes on footed glass cake plates. She got a heap of gifts and the whole thing was truly fun.

Then on Saturday Pat & I decided to go to Casper & Janalee's reception in Carrot River. Colby was working and Zach was with Karlos and Caleb. And Wyatt stayed at Pat's folks. So, just Pat & I went. Finally had some time to visit just us. It was glorious. We had about a four hour drive. We all of a sudden came upon the Bronco crash site. There were so many crosses. It makes the devastating loss feel real all over again. The reception was good. It was a pretty low-key affair at the Carrot River Community Hall. Brent met us at the door and told us right away that we had a place at the family table with them. We sure hadn't planned on that but it was fun to be with them all again and connect. Uncle Harold & Kathy were there, as well as Tannis and Tamara. Rona had made chokecherry pies especially for the family tables, so that was quite something to get in on. The youth sang. Wayne & Bonnie brought some good thoughts. And so did Lars & Shari. And then we ate a taco stack up meal with pies & icecream for dessert. I enjoyed meeting so many old friends and lovely people. And we drove back home yet when we were done. It was a late one but we're so glad we could go.

Today was literally a day of rest. We had toast and wheatlets porridge for dinner. Truly, not my general fare. Colby got hungry in the afternoon for 'meat' he said. So he grilled a bunch of venison and ate it all himself. I got him to grill the fish I had thawed in the fridge, as well. I made Wyatt playdough today and read him lots of stories. Pat stayed home with him tonight while the boys and I went to council meeting. Then Colby went to Shane's to practice youth Christmas songs and Pat went to school meeting.

And this is only a few days.

How has your life been going?