The Big Snow

On Wednesday morning, Jan. 28, we awoke to about 6 inches of snow, cold and sunny. The tops on the trash cans tell the story. This is the back yard from the back steps.

Our maple shows its bare branches against a welcome blue sky. It was about 13 degrees, wind chill about 4, when I took this picture.











Looks like we forgot to bring in the front porch furniture cushions when we brought in the plants! Well, they have snow cushions, now.


The wind sculpted the snow on the steps to our neighbor's deck. I hurried out to take a picture before Raymond and a friend arrived to scoop all of our walks and driveway. Boy, were we glad to see them.


The front step and mailbox are also snowed in. The footsteps belong to our snow shovelers, who were about to get to work.

Later on Wednesday afternoon we left on a winter retreat at one of our favorite places, Pere Marquette state park lodge on the Illinois River, just north of its confluence with the Mississippi at Grafton. I'll have pictures and an account of that trip after we get home and I can recharge the battery on our laptop! Meanwhile, stay warm, everyone.

Quilts for Charity

A couple of weeks ago, my quilt guild held its annual January meeting quilt-a-thon for charity. For some reason, I lost my mind and volunteered to coordinate the event. It was a very cold night (almost 0 degrees F) and we had fewer members than usual, but we managed to finish and tie 4 crib size quilts and 3 that are between sofa throw and twin size.

Last year we donated more than 20 quilts to an agency called Voices for Children, which helps children in foster care have a voice about where they are sent by the courts. Since they often move from one foster home to another at short notice, sometimes everything they own fits in one large plastic bag. The director keeps a closet of colorful quilts and each child gets one to take along on this journey.


Another agency works with pregnant teens and helps them care for their babies after birth and get settled in the community, and some of our crib quilts will go to them. This year, we learned of a family of six that had been burned out of their home, losing almost all their possessions. Through the church where we meet, we have made a connection to donate 6 twin-size quilts to this family when they move into subsidized housing in about a month. So we have more stitching and tying to do! Some of us will meet on Saturday to work on finishing more quilts. It's a very satisfying project, one I enjoy every year.

And One for Us

After Christmas I put my newest quilt on our bed. It's a double Irish Chain that I started, um, about 1990. It's the last of three quilts that I made in classes taught by Phyllis Bennett, one of the founders of the Flower Valley Quilt Guild. The top had been finished for about a decade, but I didn't have time to hand quilt it and I haven't yet learned how to machine quilt. I found a group, the Spanish Lake Quilters, who quilt to benefit a non-profit civic organization. They did a wonderful job of hand quilting it in about 4 months. This quilt is lightweight, but very warm and just right for the cold nights we have had this January.

Yes, WE Can

Every four years our country feels the stirring of new beginnings, and this year the sense of a crucial point in history is even more profound. I remember watching the inaugurals of John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. I've read about those of earlier presidents. I have to confess that I'm of that generation first inspired by Kennedy's "ask not" admonition, and I'm also the first to confess that my generation, the pre-boomers, eventually lapsed from idealism and bought stock in Lehmann Brothers to pad the retirement account--like millions of others. That is, I know that in the coming days, inspiration must meet pragmatism and that the forces of inertia, especially where our dear government is concerned, can begin to drag down the loftiest dreamers. After all, I grew up hearing all those priceless Will Rogers one-liners like "every time Congress makes a joke, it becomes a law." It's easier to be a pessimist than a dreamer.

But today, I'm standing with the dreamers. It feels almost like old times (think Class of '61) to hear rhetoric that lifts us above the ordinary fears of failure and the doubts about our direction. It gives me chills to see the Washington Mall, where Norm and I tramped around in the rain a little over a year ago, filled with people of every color and inclination who took buses, trains, Cadillacs and even mopeds from everywhere so they could be there and wave their flags wildly. At this point, I am ready to believe that as Americans, we can think of our neighbors as well as ourselves, defend our ideals of freedom, seek justice and love mercy as Hosea admonished us. The most important word in that three-word campaign slogan that has become a mantra for the next administration is the middle one: We.

May God bless our new president and his family, and humbly, let us pray that God will bless America.

An Owl on the Window Ledge

We continue to have avian visitors from the suburban wild. This morning I was watering geraniums in the upstairs window when I saw a rust-colored feathery heap on the window ledge outside. With that color, size and ear tufts, it could only be an Eastern screech owl.

Later, when Norm went outside to warm up the car for an errand, he came in to get the camera. The owl had moved down to the stair landing window ledge (above photo) and was just looking at him. (A closeup of its fuzzy image is below.)

This morning the air temperature was about 6 degrees when I first spotted it outside. We assume it picked the ledges for their warmth. This old brick house does exude warmth in winter, as our natural gas bill attests.


We don't know if this visit is rare or if it has roosted on our house before in cold weather and we just didn't notice it. We are near a park that has some large great horned owls. Norm has heard owls calling early in the morning from down the street when he goes out to get the paper, and this may be one of them. Certainly owls hold a special place in Native American beliefs. Often, they are harbingers of bad or serious news, or warnings. We'll just have to wait and see if it returns, or if we hear it calling in the night.

One thing is certain, between the hawks and the owls, we shouldn't need to worry about small rodents!

Blooming Inside

Brr, it's cold outside, although even from the back window I can see tiny green shoots where the surprise lilies and daffodils are starting to peek through the soil in the garden. Silly plants. We are headed for the coldest weather in a decade, the weather people say, later this week. As in zero and below.

This is what last summer's geraniums looked like a week before Christmas, and most of them are still there today. It helps on cloudy, snowy, drizzly days to be able to look at them. And to think for a while I thought about not wintering them over!

Norm has been putting out acorns for the squirrels--to keep them off the sunflower seed feeder, mostly. This past fall there was a total acorn drought in our neighborhood. We had raked up a lot from the bumper crop in 2007 and stored them in a metal container in the garage, so now we can put out a squirrel buffet. When these are gone, they will have to subsist on sweet gum balls (of which there are loads) or else go back to raiding our feeders!

A Hawk in the Garage

Well, here's a first for us. This afternoon, Norm was taking down the garland and bows and lights outdoors, and he said (as he came into the house all festooned in fake greenery) that he thought something had crashed in the garage. Maybe the side door blew open and hit the car.

He went back outside after depositing the greenery and was back immediately: "Judi, do you want to see something?" Now that's a question that's hard to avoid. "There's a hawk in our garage," he added.

I thought the dear man was losing it, but I grabbed the Olympus (gotta get something better than a 3x digital zoom!) and followed him to the driveway. Sure enough. A full grown red-tailed hawk was just sitting there next to Zip the Mazda. Norm said when he first saw it, it appeared a little stunned, and it just watched him as he walked up the driveway to within about 20 feet of it. As I tried to get close enough to photograph it, it got a little leery and shortly after the second picture, it spread its wings and took off, low, toward a tree two houses south.

Norm looked around inside and found a few marks in the dust on the window of the side door. Our best guess is that it was cruising for food (perhaps eyeing a squirrel enjoying the heated birdbath--blue cord goes to it--or even some of the small birds around the feeder) and miscalculated its glide, crashing into the garage. Of course, we'll never know, unless it happens again. Hawks are much more plentiful over the parks and other open land (cemeteries and golf course and airport) in our vicinity since the crow population was reduced by West Nile a few years ago. Supposedly they subsist on small rodents, but I think they also prey on small songbirds as well. I'd rather not see them hanging around my feeder, scaring all the cardinals, juncos, chickadees, wrens and other neat birds away. They can have all the English sparrows and starlings they want--it won't hurt their numbers! Not even the blue jay piped up to scold this surprise visitor.

But it has to be a special day when, in the midst of a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people, you can walk out to your garage and find a hawk sitting there, staring at you!

Epiphany: The 12th Day of Christmas

Before the Season closes, here are a few of the nativity scenes we have acquired over the years. I realized as I was looking at the photos that very few of them include Wise Men, who traditionally arrived on this day. The scene at right was my mother's, and it has three traditional kings and two camels, in addition to two shepherds, a sheep, a dog, a donkey, a cow, Joseph, Mary and the Babe. And an angel. All in a paperboard stable, purchased from Woolworths' in the 1950s. Mother added one or two new figures every year. The price marked on the base of the Big Shepherd, the last she bought, is 29 cents.

The first nativity that Norm and I acquired is this one, the three original figures of Joseph, Mary and the Child were found at a Christmas Market in the Rocky Mountains at Georgetown, Colorado, in 1970. I've had to touch up the gilt paint twice. We found the simple wood shelter at another shop, I don't remember where. Various small angels and other figures sometimes stop in for a look.

The three Mikasa china pieces were given to me by a church friend who collects nativities and has several hundred of them. The angels also came from women friends in my CWF circle.

We found this simple cedar cutout at a store in Kansas where we often stop on our trips to see the family out West. It is made by a man in Hays who has a developmental disability.

Years ago Norm found these clay figures from Peru at an interna- tional shop in St. Louis that specializes in fairly traded items from the developing world. These are just a few--more will be featured next year.

Just as the wise men returned home by another road than the one they came, we are getting ready to put away the outward signs of Christmas and look for the path we are supposed to travel this year. Thanks to our many friends and all of our family who have made the journey with us this far.

Just a Little More Christmas-11th day

When I was writing my Christmas memories in ornaments over on Thursday's Child blog the other day, I forgot to include this picture. Handed down from my Granny McElyea to Mother to me is a small box containing some dozen glass ornaments, made in Germany, that predate WWI. They are in the shape of lanterns and bells. Although very fragile, they go on the tree every year because I remember them from a huge tree that filled the corner of my grandmother's L-shaped living room when I was a child. I've never seen anything like them anywhere else, in flea markets or antique stores.

Today's adventure was getting the garage door fixed. The company that installed it a couple of decades ago for the former owner is still in business, and had a technician at our door in a couple of hours after Norm called them. Last night the door kept refusing to stay down; it would just pop back up every time we tried to close it. The fix was simple; a dislocated hinge. We went ahead and had a full service done (since we know it had been at least 8 years since anyone looked at it) and it is amazingly quiet now. Good for a few more decades at least.

My cold is about gone and the sinus infection is reluctantly giving ground to an onslaught of a generic antibiotic my doctor prescribed last Friday. Unfortunately, my intestines are giving ground, too, but yogurt and acidophilous pills seem to have restored order and calm tonight. Once this next stretch of nasty weather (freezing drizzle tonight and in the morning) is past, I am looking forward to getting out of the house and hopefully doing some shopping. I need yarn and fabric!

Keeping Christmas in the New Year

A few days ago, niece Debbie in Hutchinson showed some of the Santas in her mother's collection on her blog. So even though it's the New Year, I thought I'd share these before I put them away. Sometime in the late 1950s or early '60s, my mother found these felt figures in a Christmas shop in Branson. She named the elf Elvee and the reindeer Rudolph. They appeared first of all each year, long before the tree and other decorations were put up. Elvee and Rudolph were the harbingers of Christmas. Now they are the same at my house. This year they joined a tiny tree on the windowsill on our stairway landing.

This year I put most of my Santas on the fireplace mantel, except for a few of them that decided to join Daddy's train on the piano. The second from left was a tray favor when my dad had back surgery, at Christmas, in 1963. Others came from craft shows. The one at right was a ceramic I painted in an Advent workshop in Colorado while Norm was in seminary.


The Santa riding the loon on the left is a souvenir from our vacation to Minnesota 8 years ago. Others came from craft shows, including the uncommon blue Santa at right.



At the center of the mantel is my mother's Santa scene that came out every year. The little house is thin cardboard. The reindeer are some kind of transparent horn-like material. The Santa is a second generation; the original one is lost. My dad made the thin cardboard sled when I was a little girl, and the bag of presents. But the reindeer, trees and house were already around when I was born.

Santa was always explained to me as the Spirit of Christmas--giving to others. I always limited my list to three wishes. After all, there were a lot of children in the world that he had to take care of.

I have more pictures and stories of family heirloom Christmas tree ornaments on this post on my other blog, Thursday's Child. You are invited to visit.