Mud. Our spring-like temperatures have exposed a lot more of it the last few days. Thawing snow has revealed things in the ditches that died sometime in the past four months and have been buried in the Northwoods deep freeze ever since. Until now. When we lived in Indianapolis, spring was my favorite season. Blooming dogwood and redbud reminded me of my mother who used to take outings to the family cabin in Brown County just to enjoy the flowering trees on the way. But here in northern Wisconsin spring is more about mud and accumulated debris left by the snowplows. And mud. Did I mention mud? The lake is still solid enough to drive on, but there is a layer of water on the surface—a layer that refreezes overnight as does the layer caught on the walk between the piles of snow on either side.
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One of the things I most love about the family of God is friendships that last over decades and generations. More than twenty-five years ago the Guimaraes family showed up at the door of the house we had borrowed for two months in Maputo while we looked for a permanent place to live (a challenging enterprise in a communist country as Mozambique was at the time.) They were a Brazilian family with two little girls the age of ours, and since ours had just come from Brazil the four were soon dancing and squealing like long-lost cousins. (Okay. Priscila and Eunice had a little brother, Gerson, but he hardly counted at the time since he was only three.) I find that writers, like skaters, tend to be generally creative people with other creative outlets. One of mine is my miniature house.
My husband and I worked on the archeological excavation of Beersheba in south Israel during the summer of 1976. Of course, we visited other sites while we were there. In Bethlehem we marveled at the beautifully carved olivewood nativity sets, but we were on our way to jobs in Ethiopia at the end of the summer. Carrying the pieces with us was not practical, and shipping them to our parents would not have been satisfying. We were young, and I promised myself, “Next time.”
I put up a tree in the family room this year and decorated it with my doll collection and some of the odds and ends we have collected in our travels. I was pleased with the result. I just hope twenty-month-old Alex will understand the need to look with his eyes and not with his fingers. Most of the dolls were given to my sister and me when we were children by the missionaries we prayed for (making them virtually antiques!). I have collected the rest in my adult travels. I have the best mother-in-law in the world. We recently spent a week driving cross-country together. We both have fantasies of a simple RV. “I’d like to be able to stop in a scenic spot, get out my lawn chair and read a while with my cup of coffee and then move on,” she once told me. Both our husbands preferred planned routes, comfortable beds and reservations made well ahead of time. Her husband passed away in 2004. Mine had meetings in California after my writer’s retreat in Monterey. I celebrated a birthday this week. I don’t feel any older. They say your personality is formed in early childhood. I don’t feel any different than when I was young. I’m a little more confident, a little more humble, a little more mature. Hopefully I’m a little more patient with people, but I’m basically still me. I’m still an introvert who acts like an extrovert because… that’s what you’re supposed to be, isn’t it? I still love music and books. I’m scared is not a good enough reason to say ‘no’. There may be perfectly good reasons. (It’s stupid, dangerous, illegal, Jesus would be disappointed in me.) But my fears alone are not a valid determinant of whether or not I should do something. It is that philosophy that has led me to walk on hot coals, travel alone to a village in Western Kenya, or enter a national figure skating competition. At twenty-one I had no concept of what thirty-seven years with one person would be like. I thought love was kisses and romantic dinners and strolling hand-in-hand. I didn’t know it meant moving from continent to continent, learning new languages, and acquiring a taste for churrasco, boerworst and scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam. When we married, May 12, 1973, I was the one who wanted to be a missionary in distant cultures. Steve was a campus minister with Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. He had never been out of the country except for Canada. Long ago in Mozambique during the civil war of the 1980s, I used to break out in a rash at times of special stress. I remember once when we returned from grocery-shopping and R & R in neighboring Swaziland to some particularly stressful news. I woke the next morning with my chest, neck and face covered with rash and my eyes swollen nearly shut. |
AuthorLeAnne Hardy has lived in six countries on four continents. Her books come out of her cross-cultural experiences and her passion to use story to convey spiritual truths in a form that will permeate lives. Add http://www.leannehardy.net/1/feed to your RSS feed.
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