Going Off the Grid

I've already had notes from disappointed readers that I didn't write about my trip to Linda's house over the weekend.  My bad. 

Linda Terpstra and her husband are building a house in Oklahoma.  They are kind of in-between homes right now.  Linda has found a church she likes and thinks that might be a sign that she's settled but she hasn't taken that final step of finding a hairdresser.  I contend you haven't really moved until you change beauty shops.

They found land they liked a few years ago but it is so remote that there are no utilities.  No water, electricity, telephone or gas lines run out there in the wilderness. This didn't stop them.  Since they are building the house with their own hands they just built in solar panels while they were at it. The stove is propane.  The fridge draws very little electricity.  It doesn't even have alight bulb inside that comes on when you open the door.  They have a well with a generator to pump the water periodically.  They have a lot of windows.  And heat the house with a wood stove.  Linda says summer will be the acid test.  They have an window A/C unit but it draws a lot of electricity so they try not to use it.  Linda will only admit that she gets a little "grumpy" when she gets too hot.

Visiting the house is like being inside a housing exhibit at the Home and Garden Show.  It's also just about the most peaceful place I've ever been.

We checked out her garden and found a tiny but beautiful frog.

The green beans have been doing great, the tomatoes not so much.  The strawberries are so delicious I suspected she might be sneaking into the garden and injecting grains of sugar.  Asparagus season is over.  She has a bunch of other vegetables but not potatoes or onions.  She says the soil is too rocky for those kinds of vegetables.

The thing I wanted to see most was their new sawmill.  It's a portable thing you can hook up to your pickup and drive around but don't let the word "portable" make you think "wimpy."  This sucker is huge and will handle logs over 20 feet.  Linda and Denny are cutting all the cedars because they are trash trees to start with and useful only as lumber and also because they're going to use them for flooring on the deck and kitchen.  When I said they are building this house themselves I'm not kidding.

We went to the pond to feed the fish.  She has a huge Big Mouth Bass that has been eating all the catfish.  It turns out Bass are carnivores.  We took a walk in the woods.  Got in the car and drove around.

By now I was an expert at staying with Linda and was better at conserving electricity.  When darkness arrived we went to bed.  When the sun came up we woke.  I don't think we even used any candles. And she has found some of the most amazing gadgets that run off batteries. 

But the best part was also the all-too-brief three hours when my visit overlapped Melanie and Miatta's.  The minute they arrived on Friday afternoon we started talking like it was a limited time giveaway at Russell Stovers Chocolate factory. Before I had to leave and go home we had just enough time left to run by the Hateful Hussy restaurant in Talihena to get some Indian Tacos.  (Just like regular tacos but made with Indian Fry Bread.  This is Oklahoma, after all.)

I came home with four book suggestions and a soul that was four times lighter.  Good friends are like that.

Keep scrolling for today's original post. Now I have to get on with cleaning before the cleaning lady comes.

Cooking and Cleaning

I do not have time to mess with writing a blog today. The grass is growing faster than I can keep up with it. And the chickens are growing out of their lodging so I need to build a bigger chicken coop. Plus, the cleaning lady is coming tomorrow and you know what that means: I have to clean the house. People always laugh at this idea but it’s perfectly rational: In order for her to clean anything she has to be able to actually find a surface first.

After all my parties (plus dinner for the neighbors on Saturday) my life has calmed down to watching other people’s news on facebook and folks I have to tell you, even that hasn’t been too exciting: you people need to step it up a bit. We even had an uneventful Memorial Day weekend. Holidays are always so tame when they don’t call for fireworks.

About the biggest event this week is that our Bible Study leader broke her foot. One of the other ladies in the class organized meals for Linda and called me. That gave me chance to test my casserole skills, which are basically nonexistent at best. I have never been a casserole woman.

I also know deep in my heart that Linda and Henry don’t have real meals at home. Nobody does anymore, especially when it’s just two people. Seriously. After all those years of trying to provide healthy meals for growing children we have just flat run out of steam at this point. Plus, the only growing folks my age do is the bad kind so we try to eat as little as we can hold ourselves to. People my age have about two choices for their evening meal: cereal or popcorn. Sometimes we’ll throw on the feedbag and have both. Otherwise, we go out to eat.

So I knew Linda and Henry are going to be eating much better than they usually do for while but that’s the way we play the game here in the South. One of the many things I love about being a Southern woman is the way we will cook a complete meal for somebody at the drop of a hat. So we all are signed up to cook for Linda and Henry whether they want us to or not.

And did I mention that Henry is a Methodist minister? No pressure or anything, but you can only imagine how many casseroles Linda has seen in the last 40 years. So we’re all dragging out the recipe books and cooking like there’s no tomorrow.

After much thought I finally came up with Chicken and Dressing casserole. Then that great old Southern specialty for this time of year: some fresh green beans (from a friend’s garden) with new potatoes (from my garden) with onion and bacon and topped with about half a stick of butter.

By coincidence the lady coming to clean my house also cleans Linda’s house. And that reminds me of a blog I wrote a while back about Cleaning the Pastor’s House. Pardon me if you’ve read this before.

Our pastor’s wife once had a horrible asthma attack, so bad she ended up in ICU. There had been a horrible dust storm in Oklahoma and the dust was blowing as far south as Texas. The hospital told Ron they were having such a rash of asthma attacks from the dust that Wanda got the last ventilator in the hospital.

When I called him to ask what I could do to help, his request was for me to assemble an army of women to check his house for any allergens that might possibly be triggering her asthma. This is also known as “dust.”

Yes, dear hearts, we had permission, indeed, a specific request—to examine the preacher’s house for dust.

I always refer to this incident as “The Church Ladies Go to Heaven.”

We loaded up dust rags, vacuum cleaners, mops and bifocals and headed out determined to find every speck of dust in that house if it hare-lipped Hades, all the while knowing we wouldn’t find anything because we knew Wanda was a better housekeeper than any of us. But it was an exercise in love more than cleaning.

And we didn’t even need to use the “drop and glance” method where you reach down to the floor like you’re picking up your purse then glance up close and sideways at the coffee table top to see if it’s dusty. No, no, my friends—we had permission to look for dust. Boldly, bluntly,  in the open light. 

The sole moment of excitement was when someone yelled out “Oh My God!” and we all scurried into the kitchen expecting to find a dried up dead mouse or maybe some mold or an old Pop Tart. We found Dana standing on a kitchen chair in front of the refrigerator: “Even the top of her refrigerator is clean!”

Let me tell you, I have never in my life known anyone who regularly cleans the top of their refrigerator. I suspected that was what caused the asthma attack. All that cleaning stirred up enough dust to bring it on. Just another reason for me to hold off on a lot of heavy-duty cleaning. It’s hazardous to your health.

I will leave you with that today and go post my casserole recipe to my food blog.

Frozen in Time

Nostalgia reigns this time of year. We went to Sarah’s 7th grade band concert last night and I remembered her aunt’s senior band concert- the last school concert I thought I would ever attend. Afterwards I watched the Three Amigas, Elizabeth, Shelley and Kim, who had known each other since first grade, running around back-stage in their black concert dresses wearing propeller beanie hats. They were thoroughly enjoying the idea of graduating from high school. This month Shelley’s son will graduate from high school and Kim is expecting her fourth child but they are both frozen in my mind’s eye in those propeller beanies or around a Girl Scout campfire.

The kids on Glee graduated last night. Facebook keeps us posted on everyone’s next step.  Susan’s daughter will graduate from college next week (What? She was four years old that last I noticed.) Darby, Leanna, and Landon are taking their last walks through Sachse and Rowlett High School. (I remember your baptisms, girls.) Jennie is finishing up her freshman year of college and going to Africa this summer. Madison is spending the summer at UT in Austin taking Organic Chemistry (huh?) Everyone is moving on to the next step.

And Betty Sue has graduated to heaven. And like the current kids in my life I have frozen Betty in my heart forever young.

She and I roomed together in a two bedroom apartment on Live Oak Street in Dallas when we were in our 20’s. Live Oak and Gaston were parallel streets with about a mile or so worth of apartments built in the same design of a horseshoe around a swimming pool. They were both notorious for the party life but Gaston was much wilder. They never had to call the cops on the Live Oak people.

Betty watched Beaven and I fall in love. Neither of us had a car but Beaven did. Part of the mating ritual was taking us places in his car. When he took us to the grocery store and waited so patiently I knew what a catch he was. Betty was my maid of honor. A year or so later she moved back home to West Virginia and married a coal miner.

Any time Beaven balks that I’m taking too much time at the store I remind him he could have married Betty Sue and that always shuts him down instantly. He has seen Betty shop.

She had been to beauty school and would cut my hair once in a while. One memorable Saturday we stirred up a pitcher of daiquiris and Betty commenced to cutting my hair. When we got to the bottom of the pitcher and managed to stop laughing Betty decided that it would be in my best interest to abandon the haircut. I had to live with half of a haircut until the next day when she sobered up enough to finish.

When she moved back to West Virginia we turned into Christmas card friends. Then, a few years ago we started emails but soon discovered to our mutual horror that while we weren’t looking, the other one had fallen prey to the wrong political persuasion. The emails became awkward and I seldom opened them. But even in the rabid, foaming-at-the-mouth Tea Party multiple-times-forwarded ones, Betty would enclose some good natured note to the effect that she hoped I would someday see the light and wake up to her view. I could feel the earnest love in her efforts.

She called me on the phone a couple of weeks ago to say she had terminal cancer and asked for my prayers. The cancer was in her liver and lungs and I could tell it was hard for her to talk so we kept it short. We told each other “I love you” and goodbye. It seemed like only a few days later when her sister called to say Betty had died. I found the obituary on the Internet.

But there was some mistake. The photo in her obituary was of an old woman. A white-haired woman with a soft grandmotherly face. A very gracious looking, matronly woman. This was definitely not the Betty Sue I lived with for two years. This was not the woman who spent the summer of 1969 in a bikini on a quest for the perfect tan.

I wish I had a picture of her from 40 years ago but we were too busy having fun to take pictures. The sounds and images are burned into my memory, though.

She was perhaps the least complicated person I’ve ever known. She was just a simple, good-natured, gal who grew up on the side of a mountain in West Virginia. Nothing bothered her--until you messed up her kitchen and then she could be indignant as hell.

She could spend all night dancing to Aretha Franklin or the Supremes and then cook Saturday breakfast for the guys in the apartments if they wanted to stop by. We had a deal:  they bought the food and we cooked it.

Our apartment was robbed once while we were at work. Apparently the thieves had lots of time because they went through our stuff, taking what they wanted and leaving the rest. To my embarrassment, they took most of Betty’s records and only a couple of mine.

One sad Valentine’s Day we were between boyfriends and took ourselves out to the International House of Pancakes (pre-acronym) for a miserable, full-blown pity party and talked about what losers we were and would never find Mr Right.  She was Laverne to my Shirley.

We lived with each other for 2 years. And 40 years later she is still frozen in my mind as the lanky, good-time gal dancing in the living room wearing the perfect tan.

Isn’t that the way all the graduates today want it to be? The Madisons and Darbys and Leannas will always be young to some of us. Frozen in time.

The Talk

This might be brief today because I’ve got a lot going on. I am dividing my time today between making a new foot bridge across the creek and sewing a dress. I can’t remember the last time I actually wore a dress. Wait, yes I do—at Emily’s wedding about 15 years ago. And judging by the way I look in this dress you may never see me in it. Lately, I’m a lot more accomplished at carpentry and brush-clearing than dressmaking. The rustic little foot bridge should look great. The standards for a foot bridge are much lower than a dress and that’s a big help.

I’m also planning my biggest party of the year. Actually, two parties. But one is almost too small to call a party and I’ve decided to just serve the same food at both parties to make it a lot easier.

But the big party…..Oh, yes, the BIG party. It’s my favorite party of the year. I’ve done this party for going on three years now. When I hit 15 years of sobriety I wanted to recognize the day in some meaningful way. I’ve never been one to mark the day and, in fact, I’m not totally sure the exact date of my last drink. Things from that time in my life are a little fuzzy as you might expect. But I do know it was the last of May. So about three years ago when I hit 15, I cooked a huge elaborate dinner for the ladies at Morgan’s Mercy Mansion, the drug and alcohol rehab here in Winnsboro—we just call it the Mansion. I go to bible study with them every Monday and prayer on Thursdays so we are good friends. Every year I perfect the dinner a bit more and now it’s just so much fun I could die on the spot. I’m expecting the 12 ladies in the center now plus any of the graduates that want to come celebrate with me; oh, and their kids. I’m going to just cook my fool head off. So I don’t have a lot of time to write today.

But I do have a topic for you today besides the party: We had “the talk” at my house over Mothers Day weekend.

It wasn’t the sex talk; it was the talk where you show your kids where the will and medical directives are. It started out with a little fine-tuning to our wills for what our lawyer calls the Doomsday Scenario. We are taking a family vacation that requires every single one of us to be on the same airplane and we are such a small family, there’s no one else. Hence we made a little adjustment to prevent our stuff from ending up in the hands of our esteemed state officials. God only knows what they would do with it and I don’t even want to think about it.

One thing led to another and Mothers Day was the perfect time to get all four of our current descendants together to talk to them about what they will inherit when we die. Beaven immediately decided he needed to go to church even if the rest of us didn’t. So it was just us girls.

First I got out all the paperwork and showed them where we keep it. This amounts to nothing more than the wills and medical directives (or the “Pull the Plug on Mom” papers as the girls like to call it.) There’s also paperwork to will our bodies to Southwestern Medical School. This is almost a vanity move on my part to think that someone will be interested in my body at this age. I take what I can get wherever I can get it.

Then we moved on to my favorite part: the jewelry. I had gone to the bank and taken the family jewels out of the safe deposit box to show the girls and the grands. I’ve never been much on jewelry but my step-mother was and Daddy liked to make her happy.  So I do have a lot of diamonds and, even though I don’t wear any of them, I still get a kick out of looking at them once in a while. And there's plenty of gold also. But, to me, it’s more about the stories than the actual jewelry. It’s all family heirlooms that came to Beaven and me by way of each one of us being the only surviving child in families who kept up with stuff and never threw anything away.

It’s really a lot like the Crown Jewels: The Queen wears them once in a while when she’s opening Parliament but she can’t sell any of them. They're priceless because they will never be sold therefore there’s no price to be considered.

Most of this jewelry the girls have never seen and I really wanted to tell them the stories of where each piece came from. There was my grandmother’s cameo and I have an old black and white photo of her wearing it as a young girl. I also have almost the same shot of my mother wearing it AND a color photo of my wearing it. There’s Beaven’s great-grandmother’s gold pin, my great-grandfather’s award from dental school dated 1881, and a variety of watches on both sides of the family with engraving to show who it belonged to. One of the watches was given to my grandmother in 1901 on her 18th birthday and I can vividly remember her wearing it. Every Friday she would dress up (including gloves) and take the streetcar to downtown Dallas to have lunch with her friend. I would watch her little ritual as a young child: the corset, the watch and the gloves. Every Friday.

The girls were fascinated that anyone would engrave their name on a watch. Nobody even wears a watch nowadays; you have one right there on your phone. And nobody keeps anything that long anymore. We live in a disposable society.

By now I was on a roll. I led them through the house and explained the furniture and where it came from. I’ve ended up with not just one but three dining tables of my grandparents and parents. Like their watches, they kept them in good condition and never saw a reason to dispose of them. I have had two of them cut down and rebuilt to use as occasional tables because I couldn’t bear to part with them. A fourth one – Grandmother Stuart’s kitchen table-- sits in storage waiting for another generation to bless it with family stories, to sprinkle laughter over it and soften it with their tears. I don’t need it right now because I have my mother-in-law’s dining table.

Blanche only used the table once in all the time I knew her because she was afraid that by using it we might do something to hurt it. I feel strongly that there is a big difference between taking care of something and protecting it to death. Furniture was designed to be used. So I feel a personal obligation to just use the hell out of it.

We ended up sitting around Blanche’s table, finishing up a carton of ice cream and telling our favorite family stories, the stories that will make up who Sarah and Essie are every bit as much as their DNA.

Stories. It’s all about the stories.

Good Words

The end of the school year is coming and there are just a lot of things we need to discuss. In fact, I have two blogs for you today.

If you are graduating: In return for your oath that you won’t do anything stupid like getting drunk the night of the prom I am giving you my special “How to Write a Thank You Note” kit. The great thing about this kit is that you can use it for wedding and baby showers. You can use it for thank you notes and for invitations. You can even use it for Christmas cards.

In this package you will receive instructions on how to create your own personalized note cards and a fool-proof template for writing thank you notes.

Here’s the link to my other blog called Really Cool Stuff. The complete set of instructions are there. You don’t need to go there right now you can do it later.

If you are graduating from high school this month, you will draw a line in the timeline of your life and divide it into the Before and the After sections. It’s called Commencement because the theory is that you are commencing a new phase of your life. No longer preparing for life, you are sent out to get yourself to class on time and pay your own bills. You enter the Real World.

So advice abounds. Everyone from your class valedictorian and commencement speaker down to old ladies like me want to tell you “The Secret to Life.”

The secret is that it’s complicated. Except it’s also simple. And that’s what makes it complicated.

The “secret” can’t be imparted in one set of words and you will spend the rest of your life figuring it out. You’ll have to keep your eyes and ears open, sifting through the words you want to listen to and the ones you avoid.

“Come on, we’ll never get caught” is a good example of the kind of words you will want to avoid.

So, here is my first advice: You will always get caught. Always. And if not by authorities, then by your own conscience.

In the meantime, here are a few sets of good words to remember and take with you as you make your own journey.

One set of words I’ve grown to like more and more every year are from Rachel Naomi Remen, the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom. Try these words on for size:

Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company.

So that’s one bit of simple advice: Find good company to keep.  People who will ask the unanswerable questions with you.  And wait with you for answers.  Choose your friends wisely. Choose friends who will lead you to think more deeply and who won’t get you arrested. Find a community of faith where you feel comfortable. Listen to what they say.

Your very first community of faith might have been on television. It might have been Mr. Rogers or Barney. What did they teach you? You are my friend. I love you. You love me. We’re a happy fam-i-lee.

Here’s something you never heard Mr Rogers say on his show but he often wrote it in letters to his friends.:

“I feel very strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex”

Now that’s a set of words you can keep somewhere important and revisit over and over for the next 90 years or so. Gnaw on it like a dog gnaws on a juicy bone then hides it somewhere and goes back to it later on.

Our church has a grand piano we got when some old lady died.. It is a great piano and we had a concert to show it off after we polished it up and had it tuned. Our organist at that time was Carol Taylor, a really accomplished pianist. The first song played in that concert, played on the piano, was the most stupendous arrangement of Jesus Loves Me I’ve ever heard. Wasn’t it the first church song you learned as a child? Don’t we always go back to the basics? And, in this case, it was musical notes instead of words.

The arrangement started out child-like, slow and simple, then worked its way up to eloquent and amazing. By the end we were all in awe of Carol’s skill at the piano and also with how such a simple tune can be stretched into a majestic marvel of music. Faith is like that.

No matter how fancy you make it, at its core, the message is still simple. No more. No less. Jesus Loves Me.

I would like to share some of my favorite benedictions with you. Benediction comes from Latin and means” to speak well.” I like to call it “Good Words.”

I sifted through a file I keep called Great Quotes. There are the standards in there like Desiderata and the prayer of St Francis of Assisi. If you don’t know them, you should look them up on Google.  My space here is limited and  I can’t do everything for you, you know.

One of my favorite benedictions came from Rev. Mona Bailey. She delivered this on her last Sunday at Corinth Presbyterian Church in Parker, Texas. I was fortunate to be there that day and brought home a copy of her words. Good words to take with you to college:

Remain in awe of mystery.
If you come to your senses and notice that you are in a far country hanging out with swine, get up and go home.
If your cupped hands are full of blame, drop the blame and hold out your empty hands to receive a blessing.
Live life fully, trusting God to weave wonders from whatever mistakes you make.
Don’t squander your life being too cautious.
If you think you’ve got it made, you don’t.
If you think it’s hopeless, it isn’t.
Jesus welcomed and ate with sinners.


Here's a benediction from William Sloan Coffin:

May God give you the grace never to sell yourself short; grace to risk something big for something good; grace to remember that the world is too dangerous now for anything but truth, and to small for anything but love. And my God take your hearts and set them on fire.



 My hope for today’s graduates is that they will risk something big for something good.  Just remember to think before you risk.  Make sure the cause you risk your self for is worth it. If you do get arrested for your principles, try to make it something that will be really easy to explain when you run for political office.

And here’s one little gem you've probably never seen because I can’t even remember where I found it.

Is life too short to be taking shit?
Or is life too short to mind it?
     --Violet Weingarten

And one of my  favorites from Patrick Overton:

When you have come to the edge of all light that you know
And are about to drop off into the darkness of the unknown,
Faith is knowing one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on
or You will be taught to fly

To everyone moving to the next phase of their life this spring:  May you learn to fly.

Ownership

One more word about the Ubuntu house.  I promise it's only one word-- and it leads us into a totally different subject:

Harvey did a sneaky thing with the rig he invented to make the compressed plastic blocks. Unlike his other inventions, he did not get this one patented. He put the plans for making the rig on the Internet as open source.This act assures that no one can ever claim the idea for themselves and make money off of it. Harvey will never patent it and no one else will be able to either. No one person will ever own this idea.

Coincidentally, there’s an open-source software called Ubuntu. They operate on the same principle. It’s free to anyone who wants it. Beaven likes it because it stays below the radar and nobody has come up with viruses for it. He thinks he’s getting more for his money and that’s true since he didn’t pay anything for it to start with.

Who came up with the idea of “ownership," anyway? How do we “own” something?

We may “own” the house we live in because we paid for some men to build it. But the idea of “owning” the land it sits on is starting to make me think

 How do you “own” land?

Doesn’t the earth belong to God? God created it. Did we pay God for our acreage? No—we paid somebody else and they paid somebody else and someone was the first to “own” it which really just means they “claimed” it.

Historically, because we couldn’t figure out a way to “acquire” land (from God or the people who were using it) we just stole it. Or maybe we just squatted and grew a garden and put a fence around the crops and told the neighbor to keep his sheep out of our corn. Maybe we gained the rights to the land by working it and taking care of it. But that’s not always the case.

Just about every speck of land on earth is now claimed by someone. Maybe a couple of icebergs at the North Pole are still up for grabs. But even the farthest back acreage of the jungles is part of a country. And this “ownership” is usually gained by either fighting a war to get it or by overpowering by wits. Maybe we purchased Alaska from Russia but where did Russia get the right to call the land theirs to start with?

And what was the first thing we did when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon? Yeah…we planted a flag, a United States flag. Does that mean we own the moon now? If Russia went there and started building houses would they have to pay us?

I own stuff like a TV and some cheap shoes from Walmart. I paid money for someone to make them and hopefully they paid laborers a fair wage to glue it all together for me. But where did the manufacturers get the right to take possession of the oil or sand or ore that went into plastic, glass or metal that made up the raw ingredients?

When we bought our land out here in East Texas they told us all the mineral rights in this part of Texas had already been purchased by someone else.   Someone else who sucked up all the oil there was and moved on so it wouldn't have done us any good to own the mineral rights, anyway; there isn't any oil left.  Mineral rights?

Will we eventually have to buy water rights?  Or sunlight rights?

What gives anyone the right to take dirt out of the earth I share with you and extracting oil, glass, coal, and metals from it? Who owns the planet? And who decides how we use it? If we mistreat it who is there to tell us to stop?

Someone , someday, needs to introduce a “Crimes Against the Planet” law. What’s to stop the nutcases of the planet from blowing up their side and sending waves of toxic stuff over to my side? Or drilling enough holes that shifts the tectonic plate that I live on? We’ve turned the planet into Swiss cheese with all our drilling and digging. It’s only a matter of time until it starts to collapse, which- come to think of it-- it has already has (Fracking, anyone?).

Give me a few seconds to wipe the foam off my mouth and I’ll finish up, I promise. I know this is unattractive.

I can buy raw milk from a local dairy called Jersey Girls. It’s tasty milk. The cows live off the grass that grows in their pastures. The milk goes straight from the cow to me without any money spent to pasteurize or homogenize it. It’s tasty milk and it comes to me almost straight from the cow. Jersey Girls is a small family operation. Sometimes when I go to get milk there isn't even anyone in the office.  There's a note telling me to just put my money in the box on the desk and get the milk out of the refrigerator.   This is the kind of food I’m growing to like.

Jersey Girls is about as pure as an organization gets. The land is there, the grass is there-- and somebody needs to be stewards of these gifts God has given us. Jersey Girls Dairy is a good steward.

Uh Oh--now I’m into the concept of Stewardship. And every Presbyterian knows we don’t talk about that until September so I have to close now.

I will leave you with the same scripture I used a few weeks ago. Remarkably, I used it last year at this time. I swear I don’t remember it but I did. I think God is trying to tell us something. My new favorite scripture:  Acts 4:32-35

The community of believers was of one heart and mind,

and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own,

but they had everything in common.

With great power the apostles bore witness

to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus,

and great favor was accorded them all.

There was no needy person among them,

for those who owned property or houses would sell them,

bring the proceeds of the sale,

and put them at the feet of the apostles,

and they were distributed to each according to need