Tag: Stewardship

Blessing My Day

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Praise be to the not-nearly-a-girl anymore
clerking at our local grocery outlet
since junior high. Single mom, moved up
after a decade of customer service
to manage four well-ordered aisles
of hairsprays, lipsticks, and youthful glow
in glittering squeeze tubes. Familiar
red-headed, brown-eyed, gap-toothed
smile. Willing to put aside her boxes of chores
to chat with each of us she names by heart.

I forget if she’s Mary or Alice or Jane.
Fine, I answer after she asks, How’s
your day? And driving my sacks
of next week’s meals home, I wonder
why she rises from her labors to greet me,
why she straightens her smock
where it’s pulled up a bit and rides her hips.
Tucks in place a loose wisp of curl.
When I walk by, what does she want to know,
when she asks, How’s your day?
I wonder why so seldom I’ve asked it back.
~Lowell Jaeger “Praise Be” from Or Maybe I Drift Off Alone.

Did you find everything you were
looking for? Julie, the magenta-haired

checkout girl, asks, and no, I think,
I didn’t find inner peace, or answers to

several questions I’ve been mulling,
like are we headed for nuclear war and

does the rest of the world think America
has gone bonkers and also, by the way,

I could not find the tofu bacon, and
the chocolate sorbet shelf was empty

(I did find canned pumpkin in aisle four)
but I am silent and smile at Julie who

seems to know what I’m thinking anyway
so I hold back and muse on the view

of the bay this morning when we walked
the dog and the parsnip soup we’ll

make for dinner and realize that total
fulfillment probably jades the senses and

the bagger asks if I’d like help today
carrying my groceries out to the car.
~Thomas R. Moore, “Finding Everything” from Red Stone Fragments

He was a new old man behind the counter, skinny, brown and eager.
He greeted me like a long-lost daughter,
as if we both came from the same world,
someplace warmer and more gracious…

…his face lit up as if I were his prodigal daughter returning,
coming back to the freezer bins in front of the register
which were still and always filled
with the same old Cable Car ice cream sandwiches and cheap frozen greens.
Back to the knobs of beef and packages of hotdogs,
these familiar shelves strung with potato chips and corn chips…

I lumbered to the case and bought my precious bottled water
and he returned my change, beaming
as if I were the bright new buds on the just-bursting-open cherry trees,
as if I were everything beautiful struggling to grow,
and he was blessing me as he handed me my dime
over the counter and the plastic tub of red licorice whips.
This old man who didn’t speak English
beamed out love to me in the iron week after my mother’s death
so that when I emerged from his store
    my whole cock-eyed life  –
    what a beautiful failure ! –
glowed gold like a sunset after rain.
~Alison Luterman from “At the Corner Store”

This week as I shopped in one of our local grocery stores, I witnessed a particularly poignant scene. As I waited in the check out line, the older man ahead of me was greeted by the young cashier with the standard
“Did you find everything you were looking for?”
He responded with:
“I looked for world peace on your shelves, but it must have been sold out…”

She stopped scanning and looked directly at him for the first time, trying to discern if she misunderstood him or if he was mocking her or what.
“Did you try Aisle 4?” she replied and they both laughed.
They continued in light-hearted conversation as she continued scanning and once he had paid for his order and packed up his cart, he looked at her again.

“Thank for so much for coming to work today – I am so grateful for what you do.”
He wheeled away his groceries and she stood, stunned, watching him go.

As I came up next, I looked at her watering eyes as she tried to compose herself and I said to her:
“I’ll bet you don’t hear that often enough, do you?”
She pulled herself together and shook her head, trying to make sense of the gift of words he had bestowed on her.

“No – like never,” she said as she scanned my groceries.
“How could he possibly have known that I almost didn’t come to work today because it has been so stressful to be here? People are usually polite, but lately more and more have been so demanding. No one seems to care about how others are feeling any more.”

She brushed away a tear and I paid for my groceries, and told her:

“I hope the rest of your work day is as great as that last customer. You’ve given me everything I was looking for today…”

And I emerged from the store feeling blessed, like I had scored a pot of gold like a sunset after rain.

Today a while it rained I washed the jars
And then I lit a flame set the water to start
And at the end of the day lined up to cool and seal
Twelve pints of spiced peach jam twenty jars of dill beans canned
From an old recipe that my mother gave to me
Because it’s good to put a little bit by
For when the late snows fly
All that love so neatly kept
By the work of our hands

Lay hands on boards and bricks and loud machines
With shovels and rakes and buckets of soup they clean
And I believe that we should bless evеry shirt ironed and pressed
Salutе the crews out on the roads
Those who stock shelves and carry loads
Whisper thanks to the brooms and saws the dirty boots and coveralls
And bow my head to the waitress and nurse
Tip my hat to the farmer and clerk
All those saints with skillets and pans
And the work of their hands
Work of their hands

Laid out on the counter pull up out of hot water
The work of our hands so faithful and true
I make something barely there music is a little more than air
So now every year I’ll put by tomatoes and pears
Boil the lids and wipe the lip with a calloused fingertip
And I swear by the winter ground
We’ll open one and pass the thing around
Let the light catch the jar amber gold as a falling star
It’s humble and physical it’s only love made visible
Yeah now I understand it’s the work of our hands

A Better Steward of Holiness

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Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Romans 12:2

We live in an imperfect world, with imperfect characters to match.
Our imperfections should not keep us from dreaming of better things,
or even from trying, within our limits, to be better stewards of the soil,
and more ardent strivers after beauty and a responsible serenity.
~Jane Kenyon from “A Garden of My Dreams”

Holy is right outside my back door, whether it is growing in the soil, unfurling in a misty dawn moment or settling beneath an early twilight rainbow serenade. 

As a steward for serenity, I want to find beauty in all things and people, aiding its growth and helping it flourish.

I’m not giving up the search. 

Even when things get ugly,
I’m determined to keep trying,
searching out holiness wherever I look
and in whoever I meet.

Perhaps that might change my little part of this world.

A Muck Shoveling Singalong

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He (the professor) asked what I made of the other students (at Oxford) so I told him.
They were okay, but they were all very similar…
they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies,
and they thought they would always win.
But this isn’t most people’s experience of life.

He asked me what could be done about it.
I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year
to do some dead-end job
like working in a chicken processing plant
or spreading muck with a tractor.
It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. 

He laughed and thought this was tremendously witty.
It wasn’t meant to be funny.
~James Rebanks from The Shepherd’s Life
(how a sheep farmer succeeds at Oxford and then goes back to the farm)

In our barn we have a very beat up old AM/FM radio that sits on a shelf next to the horse stalls and serves as company to the horses during the rainy stormy days they stay inside, and serves as distraction to me as I clean stalls of manure and wet spots morning and evening.  We live about 10 miles south of the Canadian border, so most stations that come in well on this radio’s broken antenna are from the lower mainland of British Columbia. This includes a panoply of stations spoken in every imaginable language– a Babel of sorts that I can tune into: Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, French and of course, proper British accent English.  But standard issue American melting pot genetic mix that I am, I prefer to tune into the “Oldies” Station and reminisce.

There is a strange comfort in listening to songs that I enjoyed 50+ years ago, and I’m somewhat miffed and perplexed that they should be called “oldies”.  Oldies used to refer to music from the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, not the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s and (heavens to Betsy) the 80’s and 90’s!   I listen and sing along with a mixture of feeling ancient and yet transported back to my teens.  I can remember faces and names I haven’t thought of in decades, recall special summer days picking berries and hear long lost voices from school days. I can smell and taste and feel things all because of the trigger of a familiar song.   There is something primordial –deep in my synapses– that is stirred by this music. In fact, I shoveled manure to these same songs 55 years ago, and somehow, it seems not much as changed. 

Or has it? One  (very quick) glance in the mirror tells me it has, and I have.

Yesterday – I Got You, Babe and you were a Bridge Over Troubled Waters for this Natural Woman who just wants to be Close to You so You’ve Got a Friend.  There’s Something in the way I Cherish The Way We Were and of course Love Will Keep Us Together. If You Leave Me Now,  You’re So Vain. I’ve always wanted it My Way but How Sweet It Is when I Want To Hold Your Hand.  Come Saturday Morning, Here Comes the Sun as we’re Born to Be Wild

Help! Do You Know Where You’re Going To?  Me and You and A Dog Named Boo will travel Country Roads and Rock Around the Clock even though God Didn’t Make the Little Green Apples to grow in a Moonshadow.  Fire and Rain will make things All Right Now once Morning is Broken, I’ll Say a Little Prayer For You so just Let It Be.

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction from the Sounds of Silence — If— Those Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.  Stand By Me as It’s Just My Imagination that I am a Rock, when really I only want Time in a Bottle and to just Sing, Sing a Song.

They just don’t write songs like they used to. I seem to remember my parents saying that about the songs I loved so well in the 60’s and 70’s. Somehow in the midst of decades of change, there are some constants.  Music still touches our souls, no matter how young or old we are.

And every day there will always be manure that needs shoveling.

Please Don’t Take My Sunshine Away

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My father climbs into the silo.
He has come, rung by rung,
up the wooden trail that scales
that tall belly of cement.

It’s winter, twenty below zero,
He can hear the wind overhead.
The silage beneath his boots
is so frozen it has no smell.

My father takes up a pick-ax
and chops away a layer of silage.
He works neatly, counter-clockwise
under a yellow light,

then lifts the chunks with a pitchfork
and throws them down the chute.
They break as they fall
and rattle far below.

His breath comes out in clouds,
his fingers begin to ache, but
he skims off another layer
where the frost is forming

and begins to sing, “You are my
sunshine, my only sunshine.”
~Joyce Sutphen, “Silo Solo” from First Words

Farmers gotta be tough. There is no taking a day off from chores. The critters need to eat and their beds cleaned even during the coldest and hottest days. Farmers rise before the sun and return to the house long after the sun sets. They need a positive outlook to keep going – knowing there is sunshine somewhere even when the skies are gray, their fingers are aching from the cold, and their back hurts.

I come from a long line of farmers on both sides – my mother was the daughter of wheat farmers and my father was the son of subsistence stump farmers who had to supplement their income with outside jobs as a cook and in lumber mills. Both my parents went to college; their parents wanted something better for them than they had. Both my parents had professions but still chose to live on a farm – daily milkings, crops in the garden and fields, raising animals for meat.

My husband’s story is similar, with both parents working on and off the farm. Dan milked cows with his dad and as a before-school job in the mornings.

We still chose to live on a farm to raise our children and commit to the daily work, no matter the weather, on sunlit days and blowing snow days and gray muddy days. And now, when our grandchildren visit, we introduce them to the routine and rhythms of farm life, the good and the bad, the joys and the sorrows, and through it all, we are grateful for the values that follow through the generations of farming people.

And one of our favorite songs to sing to our grandchildren is “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,” a song originally written about a horse named “Sunshine.”

For the farmer and the rest of us, it is the Sun that sustains our days and its promise of return that sustains our nights.

You’ll never know, dears, how much we love you.
Please don’t take our sunshine away.

Watching the Birds Watching Me

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I have been trying to think of the word to say to you that would never fail to lift you up when you are too tired or too sad not [to] be downcast. When you are so sad that you ‘cannot work’ there is always a danger fear will enter in and begin withering around.

A good way to remain on guard is to go to the window and watch the birds for an hour or two or three. It is very comforting to see their beaks opening and shutting.
~Maeve Brennan in a letter to writer Tillie Olsen

My window is a book of birds.
I draw back the curtains
and there they all are,
scribbling their lives in the trees.

Bird in the holly tree,
invisible mentor,
your cheerful philosophy
is a glittering chain of light
slung between us,
drawing me ever closer
to the source of your joy.

The silver thread of your song
guides me through the dark
as surely as the night
I first heard you,
improvising on a theme
of beauty and truth
in the holly tree out there.
~Hugo Williams from “Birdwatching”

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
~Emily Dickinson in an 1885 letter to Miss Eugenia Hall

The windows are dressed in feathers where the birds have flown against them,
then fallen below into the flowers where their bodies lie grounded, still,
slowly disappearing each day until all that is left are their narrow, prehensile bones.

I have sat at my window now for years and watched a hundred birds
mistake the glass for air and break their necks, wondering what to do,
how else to live among them and keep my view.
Not to mention the sight of them at the feeder in the morning,
especially the cardinal in snow.

What sign to post on the sill that says, “Warning, large glass window.
Fatal if struck. Fly around or above but not away.
There are seeds in the feeder and water in the bath.
I need you, which is to say, I’m sorry for my genius as the creature inside
who attracts you with seeds and watches you die against the window
I’ve built with the knowledge of its danger to you. 
With a heart that rejects its reasons in favor of keeping what it wants:
the sight of you, the sight of you.”
~Chard deNiord, “Confession of a Bird Watcher” from Interstate

I made the terrible faux pas of running out of suet and bird seed this week. My little feathered buddies fly up to the feeders by our kitchen window and poke around the empty trays, glance disparagingly in my direction, then fly away disheartened. There is no free lunch today.

I am no birder; I don’t go out looking for birds like the serious people of the birding community who keep a careful list of all they seen or hear. I don’t even track every species that comes to visit my humble offerings here on the farm nor do I recognize the frequent visitors as individuals. I just enjoy watching so many diverse sizes, colors and types coming together in one place to feast in relative peace and cooperation and I’m the hostess.

Birds are my visual and tangible reminder that the good Lord provides, buoyed by the help of hospitable humans who set out irresistible treats next to big windows. These delightful creatures have such autonomy and genuine glee in their daily existence until they forget their boundaries and slam headlong into invisible glass, too often falling to the ground for good. Then the farm cats are gleeful.

I know all about the warnings to stop doing communal bird feeding: spreading bird diseases too easily among multiple species who come together to feast, attracting vermin and assisting their burgeoning population growth, assisting predators like my aforementioned farm cats in their decimation of the wild bird population, encouraging wild birds to ignore their usual migration urge to seek better feeding/breeding climates so they often die prematurely.

As a trained scientist in animal behavior, I understand it all. As a human observer seeking to enjoy feathered friends during long gray winter days, I ignore it all.

Pardon me now, as I better head to the farm store to replenish my bird feasting stash. See you all later.

To Recover the Lost

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The songs of small birds fade away
into the bushes after sundown,
the air dry, sweet with goldenrod.
Beside the path, suddenly, bright asters
flare in the dusk. The aged voices
of a few crickets thread the silence.
It is a quiet I love, though my life
too often drives me through it deaf.
Busy with costs and losses, I waste
the time I have to be here—a time
blessed beyond my deserts, as I know,
if only I would keep aware. The leaves
rest in the air, perfectly still.
I would like them to rest in my mind
as still, as simply spaced. As I approach,
the sorrel filly looks up from her grazing,
poised there, light on the slope
as a young apple tree. A week ago
I took her away to sell, and failed
to get my price, and brought her home
again. Now in the quiet I stand
and look at her a long time, glad
to have recovered what is lost
in the exchange of something for money.
~Wendell Berry “The Sorrel Filly”

I am reminded at the end of a week
of dark and wet and cold
with chores not done yet,
and horses waiting to be fed,
of the value of decades of moments spent
with long-lashed eyes, wind-swept manes, and velvet muzzles.

True, it appears to others to be time and money wasted.
But for a farmer like me, sometimes deaf and blind
to what is in front of me every day,
not all valuables are preserved in a lock box.

Golden treasure can have
four hooves, a tail, with a rumbling greeting
asking if I’d somehow gotten lost
since I’m a little later than usual
and they were a bit concerned I’d forgotten them.

Only then I remember where my home is
and how easy it is to wander from the path
that somehow always leads me back here.

Only Here and Now

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When I work outdoors all day, every day,
as I do now, in the fall, getting ready for winter,
tearing up the garden, digging potatoes,
gathering the squash, cutting firewood, making kindling, repairing
bridges over the brook, clearing trails in the woods,
doing the last of the fall mowing,
pruning apple trees, taking down the screens,
putting up the storm windows, banking the house—all these things,
as preparation for the coming cold…

when I am every day all day all body and no mind, when I am
physically, wholly and completely, in this world with the birds,
the deer, the sky, the wind, the trees…

when day after day I think of nothing but what the next chore is,
when I go from clearing woods roads, to sharpening a chain saw,
to changing the oil in a mower, to stacking wood, when I am
all body and no mind…

when I am only here and now and nowhere else—
then, and only then, do I see the crippling power of mind,
the curse of thought, and I pause and wonder why
I so seldom find this shining moment in the now.
~David Budbill “This Shining Moment in the Now” from While We’ve Still Got Feet.

I spend only a small part of my day doing physical work compared to my husband’s faithful daily labor in the garden and elsewhere on the farm. We both celebrate the good and wonderful gifts from the Lord, His sun, rain and soil. Although these weeks are a busy harvest time preserving as much as we can from the orchard and the garden, too much of my own waking time is spent almost entirely within the confines of my skull.

I know that isn’t healthy. My body needs to lift and push and pull and dig and toss, so I head outside to do farm and garden chores. This physical activity gives me the opportunity to be “in the moment” and not crushed under “what was, what is, what needs to be and what possibly could be” — all the processing that happens mostly in my head.

I’m grateful for this tenuous balance in my life, knowing as I do that I was never cut out to be a good full time farmer. I sometimes feel that shining glow in the moments of “living it now” rather than dwelling endlessly in my mind about the past or the future.

Thank the Lord, oh thank the Lord. I am learning to let those harvest moments shine.

Original Barnstorming artwork note cards available as a gift to you with a $50 donation to support Barnstorming – information here

As Much Serenity As Yearning

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Last night I walked the woods
lit by the final moon of the month.
Days don’t count here
beneath the centuries-old pines
where my grandmother took her solace
on hard farm days, passing up
the washboard or jam-making
for the eternal whooshing
of the forest as much serenity
as yearning.
~Dave Malone, “Walk in the Woods” from Tornado Drill

My grandparents owned the land,
worked the land, bound
to the earth by seasons of planting
and harvest.

They watched the sky, the habits
of birds, hues of sunset,
the moods of moon and clouds,
the disposition of air.
They inhaled the coming season,
let it brighten their blood
for the work ahead.

Soil sifted through their fingers
imbedded beneath their nails
and this is what they knew;
this rhythm circling the years.
They never left their land;
each in their own time
settled deeper.
~Lois Parker Edstrom “Almanac” from Night Beyond Black.

My husband and I met in the late 70’s while we were both in graduate school in Seattle, living over 100 miles away from our grandparents’ farms farther north in Washington. We lived farther still from my grandparents’ wheat farm in Eastern Washington and his grandparents’ hog farm in Minnesota. One of our first conversations together, the one that told me I needed to get to know this man better, was about wanting to move back to work on the land. We were both descended from peasant immigrants from the British Isles, Holland and Germany – farming was in our DNA, the land remained under our fingernails even as we sat for endless hours studying in law school and medical school classes.

When we married and moved north after buying a small farm, we continued to work full time at desks in town. We’ve never had to depend on this farm for our livelihood, but we have fed our family from the land, bred and raised livestock, and harvested and preserved from a large garden and orchard. It has been a good balance thanks to career opportunities made possible by our education, something our grandparents would have marveled was even possible.

Like our grandparents, we watch in wonder at what the Creator brings to the rhythm of the land each day – the light of the dawn over the fields, the activity of the wild birds and animals in the woods, the life cycles of the farm critters we care for, the glow of the evening sun as night enfolds us when the moon ascends.

We are blessed by the land’s generosity when it is well cared for. Each new day promises another chance to treat it with the love it warrants.

Now forty-some years after that first conversation together about returning to farming, my husband and I hope we never have to leave the land. It brought us together, fed our family, remains imbedded under our fingernails and in our DNA.

Each in our own time, we will settle even deeper.

The Heart’s Need

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About living in the country?
…peace can deafen one, beauty surprise
No longer.  There is only the thud
Of the slow foot up the long lane
At morning and back at night.
~R.S. Thomas from “The Country”

…once when he was walking
Along a lane in spring he was deceived
By a shrill whistle coming through the leaves;
Wait a minute, wait a minute-four swift notes;
He turned, and it was nothing, only a Thrush
In the thorn bushes easing its throat.
He swore at himself for paying heed,
The poor hill farmer, so often again
Stopping, staring, listening, in vain,
His ear betrayed by the heart’s need.
~R.S.Thomas from “The Lonely Farmer”

I must not forget my heart’s need:
my utter astonishment
at the beauty around me
even on the hottest and sweatiest of days,
even on the grayest and wettest of days,
while trudging the darkened barnyard path
to attend, although weary, to chores.

If ever I fail to see
what is right in front of me,
this grace-given gift
to my eyes and ears and heart,
I do not deserve to put on boots
or hold a pitchfork.

Farmer with a pitchfork by Winslow Homer

He knows every stone that’s been struck by the plow
There’s a pile by the barn by the sweat of his brow
The land has his heart and he rarely complains
And it holds his knees when he prays for rain

He’s a dusty old carhartt and the light in the barn
He’ll work the late hours and he’s up before dawn
Every man has a story and the story goes on
From grandad’s eyes to a new born son

Why I farm is in my blood, like the sunlight is on my skin
Is who I meant to be, is who I’ve always been
Is more than just a living, it’s my way of life
And it grows like seed inside my heart
That’s why I farm

We always pull through when we thought we would break
In the flood ’93, in the draught ’88
The Lord has his timing ’cause only he knows
That when next year comes the crops will grow
Find more lyrics at 

Tough the world may shake around me, still I am stable
For as long as I am able, I’ll work this way
‘Cause when heaven comes this close to what you’re holding
This life is but a moment in a bigger plan
~The Henningsens

Summer Nap

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In the afternoon of summer, sounds
come through the window: a tractor
muttering to itself as it

Pivots at the corner of the
hay field, stalled for a moment
as the green row feeds into the baler.

The wind slips a whisper behind
an ear; the noise of the highway
is like the dark green stem of a rose.

From the kitchen the blunt banging
of cupboard doors and wooden chairs
makes a lonely echo in the floor.

Somewhere, between the breeze
and the faraway sound of a train,
comes a line of birdsong, lightly
threading the heavy cloth of dream.
~Joyce Sutphen, “Soundings” from Naming the Stars

As a young child, I remember waking from my summer afternoon naps to the sights and sounds of our rural community. I could hear tractors working fields in the distance, farm trucks rumbling by on the road, the cows and horses in the fields, a train whistle in the distance and the ever-present birdsong from dawn to dusk.

These were the sounds of contentment and productivity, both together. Surely this is how heaven must be: always a sense of something wonderful happening, always a reason to celebrate, always a profound sense of respite and sanctuary.

Even now, there is that moment of awakening of my heart and soul from a summer nap when I try to listen for the chorus of angels outside my open window.

photo by Harry Rodenberger