Pumpkin Guts

 Last year, amid the isolation of COVID, I was reminded of Michelle Lendhart's blog, Scenes from the Wild. (There she talks of raising her five children, all of whom are now adults.) One of the things she mentioned was throwing pumpkins of the roof after Halloween. I decided to have our boys have the same opportunity. And this the 1st Annual Jack-o'-lantern Throw was born 

This year, our throw had to wait a week because the schedule during the week was so busy we couldn't get everyone to the roof before dark.

If you build it . . . sometimes no one comes, and that is okay.

In the movie Field of Dreams, the farmer is cryptically told, "If you build it, he will come." The farmer builds his baseball field in the middle of the corn fields, and then everyone who is supposed to comes. The film ends with a trail of cars winding their ways through the country roads to see the baseball field.

Today the fact that the film's iconic statement is often wrong sticks out to me. Now, nothing has happened: my life is actually going pretty well, and, once I survive end of the semester grading, things are working out as they should. But I realized that effort--even noble effort--doesn't always bring about the desired results: papers aren't accepted, you don't become best friends (or even good friends), thesis committees fall apart, fruit trees fail to provide the promised fruit, youth activities flounder, the boy doesn't propose, your son still doesn't understand math.

When these kinds of moments weigh on me, I tend to think back to a General Conference talk from 2004 by Elder Dennis Simmons. In it, he talks of the moments where things don't go according to our faith--when we face a fiery furnace or a den of lions or the sacrificial altar; when we are murdered for standing up against liars speaking ill of our faith. But I think that sometimes we tend to think of those "but if not" moments, only in terms of our spiritual lives, but the principle should apply to things outside of our faith as well because those are the things that keep us going.

So despite the failed thesis, the single apple harvested, and the tear-filled math lesson, we keep going, hoping that maybe this time they will come, "but if not" you'll keep trekking anyway.

Looking through a glass darkly . . .

Like most of the world--or at least most of the United States--we were captivated by the solar eclipse that happened on August 21, 2017. The community college where I teach offered an eclipse event free to the public, so the boys and I signed up and went. We had pre-registered, so we picked up our special viewing glasses and headed in to the auditorium.


As the room filled, the stage was showing the passing of the eclipse through other areas--Oregon, Idaho, etc. At one point the site we were viewing had so much traffic that it shut down. (I'd never seen that before.) The directors or the Challenger Learning Center gave us a run down on what an eclipse is, why they are so rare, and how to keep ourselves safe while viewing. Then, with a hope for clearer skies than we had going in, we headed outside to view the partial eclipse.

The glasses darkened everything but the sliver of sun and the oscura. It was interesting to think how specialized they must be. The boys were fascinated for about 5 minutes. Then F, A, and N were stir crazy and started wandering around--not that conducive to a positive viewing experience. We lasted until the sliver of sun we saw switched sides and then we headed out.

While in the minute of wanting to view and dealing with three boys who were stir crazy and, frankly, disrespectful of other viewers, I was frustrated. But looking back I wonder if I had blocked out everything but the misbehavior in the same way that the glasses blocked out so much of what was going on in the world around me, letting me focus on what I wanted to see.

My friend Luke

My mom has one of those home movies from the early 80s of my oldest sister tearfully playing with puppies and showing them off to the camera in the kitchen of our California house. The only light for the movie comes from a lamp. She tells the story of a heart-broken 7- or 8-year-old who was losing puppies the next day and couldn't sleep because she would never see them again, and she "didn't even have pictures to remember them by."

Enter Luke.

F and I found a grasshopper in the tomatoes one day (really it was one grasshopper giving another grasshopper a piggy back ride) and he took it to preschool to share and set it free there. S was sad he didn't have a grasshopper to show so he went outside with his papi and caught one. The poor grasshopper lost one of his back legs in the process. But S was so excited, he named his grasshopper Luke and took him to school the next day. Then when he got home, we decided to let Luke go free.

The next day he caught a caterpillar of some kind. And it died.

Two days later, S looked for Luke again, found a grasshopper (who might have lost his back leg in the catching process or he might have really been Luke), dumped out the dead caterpillar, and caught it in the jar he had already labeled with Luke's name. 

While he was working on his homework, I heard the poor grasshopper jumping into the lid and the glass wall, trying to escape his confinement, or maybe trying to get away from the stench of death, and encouraged S to let Luke go back to his family. S was sad. "I never get to have anything little to love," he said.

I told him the story of his aunt, and we decided that we would take a picture so that he could always remember his pet grasshopper, Luke. 

Even with the picture, he cried himself to sleep. But Luke didn't commit suicide trying to escape the wall of his glass house.

Because I think I can fly

So one night, R was playing with the boys. They called to me to come watch as they performed daring feats of acrobatic bravery. First, they tried to jump onto R's shoulders from the bed.

Then they practiced "flying" from the bed into their papi's arms.

I sometimes have to remember that they are just little boys and, as such, need to exert their physical selves more often. I also sometimes wonder if they are just testing out their super powers.

Rader Family Farm

We headed to the pumpkin patch/fun farm last week and the boys had a wonderful time. We were there with friends so the boys took off on their own (with their friends) and there were few enough people there that it wasn't a worry. So here is a happy autumn to you all.

It's Autumn-time . . .

I think I may have used that title before, but since it is 2012, I thought it was perfectly appropriate to use it (again). After such a hot, dry summer, we have cooled down and gotten some rain. I've been pulling down the veggies and preparing the gardening bed for winter (and trying to kill the bind weed that still lingers). I've been trying to eradicate the raspberries and blackberries from the netting that I put on to protect the fruit from the birds (and neglected to take off or loosen). Hopefully the brambles will survive. I've also tried to freeze or preserve whatever remains from the summer harvest.

The past week I've been inundated with green tomatoes. We had four plants, and the summer heat/dry weather meant that we didn't get a lot of fruit. But the plants were fairly hearty, especially the Roma which took over the side of the house and tried killing the lawn. With frost threatening, I pulled the plants out. I was amazed at the root systems. I had never seen tomatoes with such extensive root systems. Even though I threw many a green tomato into the compost pile, we had oodles of green tomatoes. So I canned.

Green tomato salsa.

Green tomato chutney.

Green tomato bread.

Red tomatoes in juice.

Dehydrated red tomatoes in oil.

I couldn't bring myself to try green tomato cake or pie or anything that tried treating tomatoes like apples. (Call me a purist.) I'm glad it is almost done so that I can put everything away and start enjoying the cooler weather.