Teach me to walk with tender feet, as the wild ones do. Let me be the cinder-glow of the fox in her burrow, wreathed around the honey-spark fur of her sleeping kits.
Let me be the shaded pools of the doe’s eyes in winter, when the snow falls, when the stars lean down to listen, when the world is darker and softer than rain.
Let me be the swallow after flight, when she is perched upon the branch where the petals of the lilacs used to be, and she is just still, and quiet, her downy head inclined, as though she is praying for their return. ~Kimberly Beck “Tender Feet”
As the weather changes, softening in the mists of autumn, I walk each step with careful feet, my tender heart singing songs in the rain. I pray for peace in this troubled land, for protection from harm until spring comes again.
May God grant a gentle night’s sleep for all His creatures.
video by Harry Rodenberger
Lyrics for Aragorn’s Sleepsong: Lay down your head and I’ll sing you a lullaby Back to the years of loo-li lai-lay And I’ll sing you to sleep and I’ll sing you tomorrow
Bless you with love for the road that you go May you sail far to the far fields of fortune With diamonds and pearls at your head and your feet And may you need never to banish misfortune
May you find kindness in all that you meet May there always be angels to watch over you To guide you each step of the way To guard you and keep you safe from all harm Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay
May you bring love and may you bring happiness Be loved in return to the end of your days Now fall off to sleep, I’m not meaning to keep you I’ll just sit for a while and sing loo-li, lai-lay
May there always be angels to watch over you To guide you each step of the way To guard you and keep you safe from all harm Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay
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The meaning of marriage begins in the giving of words. We cannot join ourselves to one another without giving our word. And this must be an unconditional giving, for in joining ourselves to one another we join ourselves to the unknown. ~Wendell Berry from “Poetry and Marriage” in Standing By Words
Our vows to one another forty-four years ago today:
Before God and this gathering, I vow from my heart and spirit that I will be your wife/husband for as long as we both shall live.
I will love you with faithfulness, knowing its importance in sustaining us through good times and bad.
I will love you with respect, serving your greatest good and supporting your continued growth.
I will love you with compassion, knowing the strength and power of forgiveness.
I will love you with hope, remembering our shared belief in the grace of God and His guidance of our marriage.
“And at home, by the fire, whenever you look up, there I shall be–and whenever I look up, there will be you.”
(our wedding vows for our September 19, 1981 wedding at First Seattle Christian Reformed Church — the last line adapted from Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd”)
Sometimes our life reminds me of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing and in that opening a house, an orchard and garden, comfortable shades, and flowers red and yellow in the sun, a pattern made in the light for the light to return to. The forest is mostly dark, its ways to be made anew day after day, the dark richer than the light and more blessed, provided we stay brave enough to keep on going in.
We enter, willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy. ~Wendell Berry from “A Country of Marriage”
…Marriage… joins two living souls as closely as, in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love, and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity. ~Wendell Berry from Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community
We married forty-four years ago today in our Seattle church with Pastor Peter Holwerda officiating, with a small group of family and friends as witnesses.
It was a wedding of two frugal people with little to spend – I sewed my dress and Dan’s shirt from muslin, we grew our own flowers, our families helped potluck the lunch afterward and our tiered carrot cake was made by a friend.
Yet our vows to one another were not frugal and held nothing back. They were extravagant and comprehensive, coming from our hearts and spirits. The music we asked our amazing organist to play (versions below) inspired us by its simplicity and complexity – very much like the families that raised us and the God we worship.
Our vows have taken us from the city to the countryside, to the raising and rejoicing in three amazing children and now six grandchildren. We both served more than forty years as a public-employed attorney and physician. We have laid down those responsibilities, and picked up the tools of farm and garden along with church and community service for as long as we are able.
We treasure each day of living together in faithfulness, respect, compassion and hope – knowing that how we love and find joy in one another mirrors how God loves and revels in His people.
We pray for many more days to fill us with what endures.
A pot of red lentils simmers on the kitchen stove. All afternoon dense kernels surrender to the fertile juices, their tender bellies swelling with delight.
In the yard we plant rhubarb, cauliflower, and artichokes, cupping wet earth over tubers, our labor the germ of later sustenance and renewal.
Across the field the sound of a baby crying as we carry in the last carrots, whorls of butter lettuce, a basket of red potatoes.
I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures. ~Peter Pereira from “A Pot of Red Lentils”
Here are versions of the organ music we selected for prelude, processional, recessional and postlude
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Summer is over, the old cow said, And they’ll shut me up in a draughty shed To milk me by lamplight in the cold, But I won’t give much for I am old. It’s long ago that I came here Gay and slim as a woodland deer; It’s long ago that I heard the roar Of Smith’s white bull by the sycamore. And now there are bones where my flesh should be; My backbone sags like an old roof tree, And an apple snatched in a moment’s frolic Is just so many days of colic.
I’m neither a Jersey nor Holstein now But only a faded sort of cow. My calves are veal and I had as lief That I could lay me down as beef; Somehow, they always kill by halves, — Why not take me when they take my calves? Birch turns yellow and sumac red, I’ve seen this all before, she said, I’m tired of the field and tired of the shed. There’s no more grass, there’s no more clover; Summer is over, summer is over. ~Robert Hillyer “Moo!”
Something inspires the only cow of late To make no more of a wall than an open gate, And think no more of wall-builders than fools. Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit, She scorns a pasture withering to the root. She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten. She leaves them bitten when she has to fly. She bellows on a knoll against the sky. Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry. ~Robert Frost “The Cow in Apple Time”
I have lived among cows, our own and our neighbors’, dairy and beef, most of my life. Given their status as a food source, cows aren’t always granted a long life, but I do envy those who spend much of the year chewing cud outside in pastoral settings.
We’ve owned some aged cows. They can be set in their ways and don’t particularly like a change in routine. They prefer a communal life, bearing calves, surrendering their milk, and ensuring the herd hierarchy is maintained with a minimum of fuss.
I remember my dad curing a cow’s habit of eating apples directly from a tree branch. She had the apple lodged in her esophagus as it had slipped down her throat unchewed, but too large to pass through to her rumen. She was foaming at the mouth, breathing fine, but the apple was a visible lump palpable mid-way down her neck. My dad grabbed a short two by four board and a hammer, placed the board on one side of her neck lump, and with the hammer, hit her neck precisely over the apple, crushing it. She was immediately cured and sauntered over to grab more apples, off the ground rather than the branch.
Cows can experience various health issues, sometimes relating to infections in their udders, but not infrequently, trouble with their hooves. They can get abscesses which are quite painful until emptied, as well as sharp rocks or gravel wedged into their foot. This sometimes necessitates hoof work done by a specialist who visits dairy farms on a regular basis.
I confess I (along with a million or so other folks) spend an inordinate amount of time watching YouTube channels of cow hoof trimming. I have no desire to do the job myself, but restoring a limping cow to a comfortably walking cow is a skill that must be very gratifying.
As an aging female myself, I know all about aches and pains. I too feel the sadness of summer coming to an end, when the grass and clover grows sparse in the field, and when chilly nights are best spent in the shelter of the barn.
But I’m not yet ready to give up on this sweet pastoral life. There are still some days left, and apples to pick up off the ground, for this fading old cow…
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And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wives– Followed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step they followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished! ~Robert Browning from “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
photo by Nate Gibson
It was 27 years ago in the middle of a hot August much like this one. With no air conditioning then, as now, we used fans and at night hoped for comfort from any cooling breeze drifting through the window curtains.
Sleep can be elusive when one is busy sweating all night.
I remember waking suddenly from a fitful sleep in the dark of night, startled by a sound I could not readily identify. I lay still, my eyes wide open staring into the black space of our bedroom, discerning the sound of intermittent splashing in the adjacent bathroom.
What the heck?
Our five year old daughter’s bedroom was the next room in the hallway on the other side of the bathroom. I called out her name, wondering what she could possibly be doing in the middle of the night, making splashing noises in the bathroom.
No answer. More splashing.
Now I was worried. I got up, walked into the hallway, peered into the dark bathroom, unable to see anything amiss. I flipped on the light switch. As my eyes tried to adjust to the sudden illumination, I was able to see one thing that most definitely did not belong in this picture: a rat’s hind end and long tail disappearing back down into the toilet. I gasped, shut the bathroom door quickly and gathered my wits.
There is nothing that will turn one’s stomach quite like seeing a rat in a place it absolutely should not be.
I checked my daughter’s room, flipped the light on quickly to scan the floor and her bed, and she was soundly sleeping and all seemed fine. I shut off her light and shut her door quietly.
Then I woke the man of the house, the only reasonable thing to do in such a situation.
I’m not sure he believed me. Maybe I had only imagined I’d seen a rat? Maybe it was all a dream? Maybe the heat was getting to me?
I went and got a broom and handed it to him. He opened the door to the bathroom a crack, and saw little puddles on the bathroom floor and dirty wet marks on the toilet seat. He quickly closed the door again and looked at me.
There definitely had been a grimy little something in that bathroom. But where was it now??
He opened the door again and went in, getting the broom handle ready to clobber the varmint. He peeked into the toilet and there was nothing to be found except some scummy debris floating in the water and scattered on the seat. He flushed. He flushed again. Nothing.
It was really hard to believe that a rat would voluntarily dive back into a toilet bowl and swim into the pipes …. unless it was headed for another toilet bowl. We quickly closed the toilet lid, piled books on top and went to check the two other bathrooms–no signs of disturbance, wet paw prints or other ratty evidence of invasion.
There is little rational thinking that goes on in the middle of the night when a rat has swum up your pipes into a toilet. I admit to being a little emotional. That’s when we went for the bleach and poured a gallon down each toilet bowl, flushing a dozen times each, thoroughly disrupting all the healthy bacterial flora in our septic drain field. It did make me feel better momentarily. We closed all the toilet lids, closed all the bathroom doors and didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night. When we inspected the toilets in the morning, one of the other toilets had been “visited” as well, but with the lid shut, the rat had disappeared back down the pipe.
In the morning, we coolly told lies to our three children. We told them two of our toilets were plugged up and they had to use one only, and always put the lid down afterward. We decided if we told them about a rat in the bowl, they would never feel safe about sitting on the toilet again. There is the potential of a real psychological PTSD (post-toileting stress disorder) entity. I certainly didn’t feel safe about sitting on the toilet and kept furtively looking down, which doesn’t make for a very relaxed bathroom visit. It can be positively constipating.
We did a search under the house, around the house, trying to figure out where rats could have found access to our septic system. Finally, we discovered that a pipe previously connecting the septic drain field to our temporary single-wide trailer living quarters during our major farm house remodel the previous year had not been completely sealed off when the trailer was removed. It was an open invitation to rodents seeking a cool dark (and wet) place to hide during a hot summer.
It wasn’t the end of our rat woes, but it was the last time they breached our plumbing. We later had a major invasion of our barns, requiring the ongoing services of expert exterminators as well as super duper barn cat defense. I’m proud to say we’ve not seen evidence of rats or their homely furry selves for nearly three decades now. I wish I could say the same for their field mouse cousins, but that’s another story for another time…
We never told anyone about this little middle-of-the-night episode. In fact, our children thought for years we had sudden massive toilet failure at our house.
…until I blogged about it a few years ago because it is a good tale (tail??) to tell…
Sorry, kids. We lied to you – sort of.
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There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end.
It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage.
I won’t have it.
The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright.
We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain,or Lazarus. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Other than a few exceptional circumstances in my life, I have always played it safe: living an itsy-bitsy life being a down-home, don’t rock the boat, work hard and live-a-quiet-life kind of person, growing hay and tomatoes and a few other things…
My grandparents lived that way, my parents lived that way. I feel like it is bound in the twists and turns of my DNA.
I do know a thing or two about sulking on the edge of rage, lost in a morass of seething bitterness about the state of the world. Yet if I were honest about it, the discontent I feel is all about me, always about me.
I want to have accomplished more to deserve taking up space in my days on earth. But that’s a problem we all have, isn’t it?
We’re unworthy of such unmerited grace as has been shown to us, raising us from the holes we dig for ourselves. It is such a pure Gift I wait for, borne out of God’s radical sacrifice deserving from me a life of radical gratitude, even when I choose to live it out a little quietly, making hay and raising tomatoes.
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Through sere trees and beheaded grasses the slow rain falls. Hay fills the barn; only the rake and one empty wagon are left in the field. In the ditches goldenrod bends to the ground. Even at noon the house is dark. In my room under the eaves I hear the steady benevolence of water washing dust raised by the haying from porch and car and garden chair. We are shorn and purified, as if tonsured. The grass resolves to grow again, receiving the rain to that end, but my disordered soul thirsts after something it cannot name. ~Jane Kenyon “August Rain, After Haying” from Collected Poems
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here with a gust of rain rustling before it…
but in the stillness after the rain ends nothing is to be heard but the drops falling one at a time from the tips of the leaves into the night and I lie in the dark listening to what I remember while the night flies on with us into itself ~W.S. Merwin from “Nocturne II” from The Shadow of Sirius
A long-awaited August rain arrives in the night and like the ground and plants, I look skyward letting the clouds weep on me, cleansing me of dust.
Will I restore like the brown and dying blade of grass, turning green and lush in a matter of days?
Is there enough benevolence from the sky to cleanse and settle my grime, yielding yet more harvest?
I thirst for what I cannot name. The mystery is, when I’m drenched, thirst and dust settled, I’m aching for more.
AI image created for this post
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O! for a horse with wings! ~William Shakespeare from Cymbeline
photo by Bette Vander Haakphoto by Bette Vander Haak
Be winged. Be the father of all flying horses. ~C.S. Lewis from The Magician’s Nephew
photo by Bette Vander Haak
photo by Bette Vander Haak
One reason why birds and horses are happy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses. ~Dale Carnegie
photo by Bette Vander Haak
When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; ~William Shakespeare from Henry V
We all need someone along for the ride with us, blessing us with their company — a precious friend who has our back and scratches it wonderfully – helping to keep the biting flies away by gobbling them up.
It is symbiosis at its best: a relationship built on mutual trust and helpfulness. In exchange for relief from annoying insects that a tail can’t flick off, a Haflinger horse serves up bugs on a smorgasbord landing platform located safely above farm cats and marauding coyotes.
Thanks to their perpetual full meal deals, these cowbirds do leave generous “deposits” behind that need to be brushed off at the end of the day. Like any good friendship, tidying up the little messes left behind is a small price to pay for the bliss of companionable comradeship.
We’re buds after all – best forever friends, trotting the air while the earth sings along.
And this is exactly what friends are for: one provides the feast while the other provides the wings, even if things get messy.
Be winged. Be fed. Cleaning up together.
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Who loves the rain And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes, Him will I follow through the storm; And at his hearth-fire keep me warm; Nor hell nor heaven shall that soul surprise, Who loves the rain, And loves his home, And looks on life with quiet eyes. ~Frances Shaw, “Who loves the rain” from Look To the Rainbow of Grace
Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day that comes, young, to disappear forever, and yet remain unaging in the mind. Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away. ~Wendell Berry from “There is no going back”
What a wonder I was when I was young, as I learn by the stern privilege of being old: how regardlessly I stepped the rough pathways of the hillside woods, treaded hardly thinking the tumbled stairways of the steep streams, and worked unaching hard days thoughtful only of the work, the passing light, the heat, the cool water I gladly drank. ~Wendell Berry “VII” 2015 from Another Day
Love is a universe beyond The daylight spending zone: As one we more abound Than two alone. ~Wendell Berry “VIII” 2015 from Another Day
Thinking out loud on this day you were born, I thank God each day for bringing you to earth so we could meet, raise three amazing children, now six wonderful grandchildren, and walk this journey together with pulse and breath and dreams.
The boy you were became the man you are: so blessed by God, so needed by your family, church and community.
You give yourself away every day with such grace.
It was your quiet brown eyes I trusted first and just knew I’d follow you anywhere and I have.
In this journey together, we inhabit each other, however long may be the road we travel; you have become the air I breathe, refreshing, renewing, restoring~~ you are that necessary to me, and that beloved.
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Now a red, sleepy sun above the rim Of twilight stares along the quiet weald, And the kind, simple country shines revealed In solitudes of peace, no longer dim. The old horse lifts his face and thanks the light, Then stretches down his head to crop the green. All things that he has loved are in his sight; The places where his happiness has been Are in his eyes, his heart, and they are good. ~Siegfried Sassoon from “Break of Day”
My husband and I grow old along with our horses – we are now past 70, just as a couple of our horses in “horse” years.
None of us, horses or humans, need to climb in the harness or put on the saddle to pull or carry the heavy loads of our former work lives.
It is a good life – each day treasured for its ordinariness.
Our retired horses feel the morning sun on their withers and the green blades under their feet, they scan the pasture for the sweetest tender patch to munch in the fields they know and love so well. They nap more now than in their younger years, taking breaks to let their heads hang relaxed and nodding, their tails slowly swishing at flies.
This morning was not so ordinary.
Waldheer van de Wortel (Wally), imported from Holland as a foal 27 years ago to be our herd stallion, let me know he wasn’t feeling well. He repeatedly pawed at the ground and the pasture gates, biting at his flank, trying to lie down and then get back up, not eating – clearly experiencing colicky belly pain that was getting worse.
I wondered if Wally’s time had come to bid him farewell. I had made a promise to my geriatric horses that I would not allow them to live in pain just because I didn’t want to let them go.
The vet came quickly and we talked about Wally’s options. She remarked about how he didn’t look his age, was holding weight well, his coat so sleek and shiny, his long-lashed eyes still bright and curious. But she said an older horse could often have repeated bouts of colic before the end, even if they temporarily improve with medical treatment.
I decided it was the right time to let him go to Haflinger heaven on a sunny summer morning, nibbling a mouthful of clover I offered him.
He was laid to sleep where he had lived nearly three decades.
He leaves behind two sons who were his pasture buddies, a couple dozen offspring scattered around the country, and people who loved his ambassadorship for the Haflinger breed. In his younger days, he was an enthusiastic eventer in the northwest region, ridden by his trainer Jessica Heidemann. They both had an enthusiastic fan-following.
In his later years, Wally was patient and loving with our grandchildren and with us. He lived a good life in his place of happiness. I wanted him to die peacefully at home, without a worry.
It just doesn’t get much better than that.
Waldheer van de Wortel, 1998 foal in Holland27 year old WallyArt work made by a fan of Waldheer
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I’m sorry I won’t be around a hundred years from now. I’d like to see how it all turns out. What language most of you are speaking. What country is swaggering across the globe. I’m curious to know if your medicines cure what ails us now. And how intelligent your children are as they parachute down through the womb. Have you invented new vegetables? Have you trained spiders to do your bidding? Have baseball and opera merged into one melodic sport? A hundred years…. My grandfather lived almost that long. The doctor who came to the farmhouse to deliver him arrived in a horse-drawn carriage. Do you still have horses? ~David Shumate “A Hundred Years from Now” from Kimonos in the Closet
When the local obituary notices lists someone who had lived nearly a century, I stop to think what societal changes have taken place over those 100 years.
Over the past century, our melting pot country has absorbed a panoply of languages and nationalities, in addition to being the source of plenty of political swagger.
There have been many new medical discoveries and public health measures resulting in longer life expectancy and lower child mortality rates, despite what our swaggering politicos currently say.
Although neither of my parents lived past 90 years of age, when they were born in the early 1920s, rural transportation was primarily horse and buggy, most babies were born at home, antibiotics had not been developed and only smallpox vaccination was routinely administered to children.
Everyone wrote postcards or letters to one another to stay in touch, and photographs were done by professionals.
The moon had not been visited, the web was something your face ran into on a foggy morning, and nuclear referred to a center of a cell.
Oh, and yes, we still have horses.
Not many horses still labor on behalf of humans as they did on a daily basis 100 years ago. Ours have a pretty sweet life here on our farm, living well into their thirties – a century in horse years.
Thinking ahead to a century from now? So much more will happen that we can’t begin to imagine.
But I hope there will always be horses…
Aunt Lois, nearly 100Aunt Betty, age 99
Great Grandma Elna, age 88
Great Grandpa Harry holding baby Emerson, photo by mama Abby MobleyGreat Grandma Emma, granddaughter Andrea, great-grandson Zealandmy paternal grandparents in the early 1910sAI image created for this post
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