A Blessed Day

        Today, I feel truly blessed. I’m not talking about the usual blessings we pause to think about around Thanksgiving, like health, family, friends, a house that’s paid for and a decent amount of money to live on. Today’s blessings came from knowing that at last I have some help with the chores around my place.

Living alone means all the work falls on me. That includes cleaning the inside of the house and maintaining the outside, feeding my critters, cutting fallen trees off my wooded trails, and pasture work such as bush-hogging, seed-planting and fertilizing. When you add to that the fact that I write, serve as contest director for my professional media organization, serve on my county library board, spend oodles of time with my grandsons, ride my horses, and keep my horse trailer, truck and car serviced, you might understand why I always feel so tired and overwhelmed.

       Today was the exception. It started with a good night’s sleep, a rarity for me. When I got up this morning, I felt almost refreshed, and the cold that has had its grip on my head for a week seemed to be receding. But the day just kept getting better. First the two women I hired to clean my house showed up. I’ve had house cleaners before, including one of these women. I usually suspend the service after a few months, primarily because of the preparations I have to make, like putting things away and locking the dogs in their outdoor pen. It seems like house cleaners just get in my way after a while. But I’m keeping these ladies, at least for once a month.

       Shortly after the pair arrived, a youth from my church showed up to finish blowing leaves from my driveway and to clear the cocklebur bushes from around the pond. Those burs get caught in the fleece of my goat and llamas and I have the devil of a time combing them out. I piddled around in my office while the house keepers worked in other areas, catching up in some bookkeeping in Quicken and tidying my desk so they could get to the top to dust it. Then I made myself a cup of tea. As I sat on the front porch sipping the tea, looking at the sun highlighting the gold and rust colored leaves, the most peaceful feeling washed over me. I felt liberated, without a care in the world. Usually, I’m in a state of panic, especially the day before Thanksgiving. Just knowing I had some help gave a calm, serene feeling. 

       Next week, I’ll have even more help, the thoughts of which added to today’s serenity. An old friend named Floyd is coming Monday to pressure-wash my log house, stain and seal it, then to paint the outside trim work and facia boards. He’ll also handle several other minor projects that have been bugging me for some time.

       When Floyd gave me his price for these chores I nearly fell over from shock. He’s charging me a third of what another painter had bid, and half of what it cost me a year ago. And those were pretty good prices, too.  He also pointed out that my front gate needs painting, something I’ve been keenly aware of, so we’re adding this to my “to do” list. How can he do all this so cheap? He’s comfortable in retirement, and considers it part of his Christian ministry to help widows. God bless him!

       I cannot express how it feels to know all of these projects and chores are being taken care of. I’m now free to handle some of those that only I can do, such as digitize my old home movies. That one has been needling me for several years.

Thanksgiving will truly be a day for giving thanks this year.

Don't Drink the Water, Do Hug the Children

        You’ve heard the axiom, “Don’t drink the water,” when visiting foreign countries. I have another one: “Don’t brush your teeth with shower gel.”

That's what my roommate did on our second morning in Zacapa, Guatemala, last month. "It foamed real good," she says, "but it tasted like soapy yuk.” To add insult to injury, she rinsed the toothbrush under the faucet water. Fortunately, she had brought a pack of six. 

It's easy to become discombobulated on a mission trip. Your "stuff" isn't where it's supposed to be, especially in a hotel room that has no towel bars and few shelves. This was her second trip to Zacapa, my seventh, but I still came home with a list of a dozen items to take next time in order to make the stay more comfortable, like those temporary plastic hooks you can stick up anywhere. 

We were there as part of a team of 18 from several Baptist churches in Alabama and one in North Carolina. “Real Love,” based on 1 John 3:16-18, is the name of our ongoing ministry to improve the spiritual and physical lives of people in the impoverished Zacapa village of Conevisa. Our primary purpose on these trips is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. But even Jesus recognized that the sounds of growling stomachs can drown out the voice of the messenger.

Although recently incorporated as a non-profit, Real Love dates back to 2009. That’s when mission teams from three Baptist churches in Alabama started knocking on doors and inviting folks to Shalom Baptist Mission in Zacapa. But it’s a long, arduous walk from Conevisa to Zacapa. So the First Baptist churches of Ashville and Moody, along with Thomasville Baptist Church, furnished the funds to buy a piece of land to build Shalom Jireh Baptist Church in Conevisa. Seven churches contributed money and labor for the actual construction. Many of the men and boys from the village provided the labor, along with some Americans.

The church is strategically located next to Conevisa Elementary School. We started a breakfast program that feeds school children cereal and milk at the church weekday mornings. Last month, our team gave out 132 Blessings Bags filled with commodities such as corn, black beans (a Guatemalan staple) and rice. The men built 30 raised vegetable-garden containers. (See photo.) We left money with the church in Conevisa to buy dirt and seeds for those planters, which have now been distributed throughout the village.

         While the men were building the planters and a one-room cinderblock house for a local family, several of us women accompanied a missionary couple on their weekly trip to the town dump. There we gave out more rice, beans and corn. Some people earn their meager living combing through that dump for recyclables to sell, a dangerous occupation considering the filth, broken glass and used hypodermic needles dumped by local medical clinics. We also had a couple of Spa Days, where we painted fingernails and cut hair. Each of us hugged children and encouraged hurting adults.

But the area where we’re making the biggest physical difference is in education. In Guatemala, public school ends with the 6th grade. Only 20% of the children actually make it that far. They drop out to take care of younger siblings, work in the fields or sell items in the market. So we established a partnership between the church, the elementary school and Elim Christian School in a neighboring village to provide scholarships for students who graduate from the 6th grade with at least a “C” average. Fifteen students attended Elim under this program in 2011. We now have 48 students, each with a U.S. sponsor who has pledged $600 per year through the 12th grade. This covers tuition, books, supplies, three uniforms and transportation.

       Some folks wonder why we bother with one little village, when the needs are so great throughout the country. We believe in doing what we can where we can, regardless of how small the contribution. Jesus said in Matthew 25:40: “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” 

Sleeping With Gene Bear

Gene presents me with his namesake.

       Quite often, I don’t get a good night’s sleep. It’s not going to sleep that gives me problems, but waking up several times during the night and not being able to go back to sleep. Usually, my bladder awakens me, and I lie there trying desperately trying to ignore it. That's like trying to ignore an itch in public. I know if I get up to use the potty, I’ll have trouble shutting down my mind when I get back in bed. But an urgent bladder keeps me awake, too.

       An article in the November issue of Prevention magazine has some sleep-inducing suggestions. Keeping your thermostat between 60 and 67 degrees helps because lowering your body temperature is a precursor to falling asleep. But that’s something I’ve done for years, so no change needed.

       Another sleepy-time suggestion is a no-brainer — read a good book. Prevention says you should avoid computers, phones and tablets for an hour before bed, because light-emitting devices suppress sleep hormones and disturb deep sleep. “People who read printed books before bed drop off faster and are sharper the next day,” the article says. So I stopped playing crossword puzzles on my iPad right before bedtime and started reading in bed. That combination helps me drop off quicker, but does nothing for my middle-of-the-night wakefulness.

       I’ve decided that the key to getting a good night’s sleep lies buried deep in our childhood psyches, in the form of a stuffed animal. In my case, it’s a teddy bear. For the past two or three nights, I’ve slept with one that my brother gave me for my 60th birthday. It’s one of those “build-a-bear” toys that you stuff and dress the way you like. Gene dressed this one in bluejeans and a red shirt, and wore a matching outfit when he gave it to me at my surprise party. Thus the name, “Gene Bear.” He also put a recording device in each paw, then recorded four greetings. Press one paw and Gene says, “Hi! I’m Gene Bear, and you’re old,” while another announces, “I have gas.” The third one says, “Don’t forget, you share more cooties with me than any other person on the planet earth.” My favorite, though, is, “Let’s make some brownies and watch a horror movie.” 

       
       Gene Bear decorates my bed during the day, propped against my pillows. At night, I usually shove him aside or put him on my dresser. But two nights ago I grabbed him and hugged him, listened to one of his greetings, then cuddled him all night. I still woke up at least once during the night, but squeezed him tighter, smiled, and went right back to sleep.

       
       If you’re having trouble sleeping, try ditching the meds and buying a teddy bear. Any child will tell you it’s the best sleeping pill on the market.

The Tundra Isn't Always Frozen

  

    

        The Wilderness Tour Companion booklet that guides hand out calls Denali National Park and Preserve “A Living Tapestry.” The majesty and color of this richly-woven fabric, with its alpine tundra, wild moose and grizzly bears, more than made up for the clouds obscuring our view of the High One.

      In September, I had the pleasure of visiting Denali on a National Federation of Press Women (NFPW) pre-conference tour hosted by Alaska Professional Communicators. About 50 NFPW members and their companions watched through the bus windows as bears foraged for soapberries and the ungainly-looking caribou nibbled exposed lichens. 

Grazing caribou

Originally dubbed Mt. McKinley National Park when established by Congress in 1917, It was renamed in 1908 and expanded more than three-fold. At six million acres, it is now larger than the state of New Hampshire. The tour bus system limits the amount of traffic in the park, which helps preserve its delicate ecosystem.

The vast taiga, or northern boreal forest, cloaks the lower elevations, including the first dozen or so miles through which the 91-mile park road meanders. Its acidic soil allows only a few plant species to grow. White spruce reach a timid 50 feet tall, about 150 feet shy of their Alaskan coastal brothers. Pockets of aspen, paper birch and balsam poplar grow alongside these modest evergreens. 

Where the ground is soggy, black spruce dominate the taiga. Many are stunted, no taller than six or seven feet. Some “drunken” trees lean at crazy angles, struggling against the wind and cold to attain their modest heights.

By contrast, in the tundra small plants and lichens hug the ground. During the 100-day growing season, pink fireweed, purple lupine and yellow cinquefoil color the landscape like a Monet painting. Alpines grow at some higher tundra elevations.

Dall sheep

Wildlife in the park includes many species of animals, such bear, caribou, moose, Dall sheep and wolves. We saw the first two roaming the taiga, and spotted several clusters of Dall sheep on wind-blown ridges. Some of them mooned us, as if to say, “Take a picture of THIS, you camera-laden intruders.” A wolf sighting, we were told, is quite rare, but the rarest sighting of all is the wolverine. Some folks at the front of the bus did see a lynx at the side of the road, though.

Sounds are important in the park, especially to predators listening for their prey. So we strained our ears, but never heard a wolf howl or the purring sound baby bears sometimes make while suckling their mothers.

Visitors who plan to hike through the park or to camp there are given an orientation that includes what to do if they encounter a bear. The first rule of thumb is to stay several hundred feet away from them. But if the encounter gets too close for comfort, you’re supposed to make a lot of noise. A bear standing up doesn’t mean it’s about to attack, either. She’s probably sniffing the air to determine whether you smell familiar. Your scent and your verbal qualities tell her you aren’t something she ordinarily eats. It was comforting to know that the park has had but one human fatality involving a bear.

As I mentioned, we didn’t get to see The High One, as the Athabascan Indians call Denali, due to a cloud cover. But the rock-studded, snow-streaked mountains we saw reminded me of rocky-road fudge drizzled in marshmallow cream. I must have been hungry that day.

Our guide pointed out two types of valleys among the hills, the V-shaped that were formed by shifting mountains, and the glacier-carved U-shaped valleys. For the life of me, I couldn’t differentiate between the two, but it didn’t matter. Both types made even National Geographic pictures pale in comparison. 

       My tundra experience was somewhat surreal. It was as if I were in a foreign country. But Denali, like Alaska, belongs to the USA, and I wish everyone here could fly up for a visit.

Lost & (Sometimes) Found

        I have a bad habit of misplacing stuff. I’ll have something in my hand, walk into another room, turn around, and poof, like the rabbit in a magic show, it disappears. Sometimes, it will turn up in an unexpected place. Other times, it’s gone for good.

Take my black slip, for example. I gathered some items from upstairs, including the slip, came downstairs, and lost the slip. Somewhere between my second and first floors, it disappeared. My staircase has but 13 treads. Ahh, you’re thinking, therein lies the problem. The cursed No. 13.

After a few weeks, I gave up the search and bought another slip. Several months later, while preparing for a summer beach trip, I pulled out one of my beach bags and there it was. Apparently I had used that bag to carry stuff down the stairs, but forgot about the slip when I placed the bag in my closet. 

A few months ago, I was taking off my earrings after church, when I realized I was wearing only one. “Oh, no,” I thought. “It must have come off when I took off my sweater during Sunday School.” I searched under my bedroom furniture with a flashlight anyway, and spotted something shiny among the dust bunnies. I went for my broom. What I swept out was my lost earring. It had the back on it, which means it never actually made it through my ear lobe, but fell from my hand after I raised it to my ear and put on the back. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, why no one at church had noticed that I was wearing only one earring.

Another lost-and-found was an expensive electronic dog collar. My two dogs each wear one, keeping them inside the boundaries of my underground fence. When I returned from a short trip one day, Maggie wasn’t wearing hers. Figuring she had snagged it on a fallen tree branch, I searched the woods immediately around the house as best I could. With all the forest debris, however, it was like searching for pirate’s gold buried in the sand. I borrowed a friend’s metal detector, thinking it would pick up the metal in the battery case. No luck. About a year later, my tenant found the lost one when he was walking through the woods behind my house and got off the trail to the barn.

Usually, when something goes missing, it’s because I set it down in a place that it didn’t belong. I wear glasses around the house, but take them off frequently to read or work at the computer. A few days ago, they skipped town. I searched all the logical places: my bedside table, the end table next to my sofa, the window ledge in the bathroom next to my commode, my computer desk. Remembering the “Most things turn up eventually” axiom, I gave up the search. Next day, I opened a desk drawer, and there they were!

I misplaced my drill battery once, but found it a day or so later on top of my hot water heater. Doesn’t everyone keep her drill battery there?

Unfortunately, some things defy the law of “most things turn up.” I haven’t seen my spare car keys or good binoculars in several years.

I often think I’ve lost my mind. It could be anywhere. If you happen to find it, please send it home. It comes in handy when I’m trying to find things.

Denali and the Name Game

       

       When President Obama changed Mount Mckinley’s name to Denali, my first thoughts were, “What gives him that right?” Then I heard the background story from some Alaskan friends, and I changed my tune. Now, I’m singing, “Right on. It’s about time!”

        In truth, it wasn’t really Obama who changed it anyway. It was Sally Jewel, Secretary of the Interior. She did it under authority of federal law, one that permits the head of the Department of the Interior to name geographic features if the U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not act within a reasonable period of time. I agree with Jewel: 40 years is more than reasonable.

That’s how long the name of the highest mountain in North America (20,320 feet) has been a subject of dispute. It was in 1975 that the Alaska legislature asked the U.S. federal government to officially change the name from Mount McKinley to Denali. It had been unofficially named in 1896 by a gold prospector who liked the Democratic presidential candidate, William McKinley, because he favored a gold standard for the U.S. currency. The name became official in 1917, in honor of the president who was assassinated in 1901.

Denali, which means, “the high one” in the tongue of Alaska’s Koyukon Athabaskans, is the English spelling of the native name for the peak. Part of the Alaskan Range, it was always commonly referred to as Denali by mountaineers and natives of our 49th state. But every time the state would petition the federal government for the name to change back to Denali officially, the Ohio delegation in the U.S Congress would block the petition, because McKinley was born and raised in Ohio. Never mind that he never set foot in Alaska, or that Ohio has no business trying to tell Alaska what to name their mountains.

In 1975, the Alaska Board of Geographic Names changed the name of the mountain to Denali, and at the governor’s behest, the state’s legislature officially requested that the U.S. Board of Geographic Names (BGN), the federal governmental body responsible for naming geographic features, change the name. Under BGN policy, the Board cannot consider any name-change proposal if congressional legislation relating to that name is pending. So every time the idea surfaced, an Ohio Congressman would either introduce language into Interior Department appropriation bills, or introduce a stand-alone bill, that directed that the name should not be changed. This effectively killed each Denali name-change proposal.

After a January 2015 bill submitted by an Alaskan senator re-proposed the name change, Secretary of the Interior Jewel took matters into her own hands. On August 30, she announced the name change, citing the board’s failure to act on the state’s four-decade-old request. President Obama sealed the deal during his trip to Alaska in September.

Surely most states can identify with Alaska on this subject. After all, “home rule” is a sore topic in each state, and no one wants  the federal government, much less someone in another state, telling them what to do.

Regardless of its name, Denali’s beauty is beyond belief. Next week, I’ll write about my trip through the national park and preserve last month and show you more photos.

Making Lists

     I’m an inveterate list maker.

     I make grocery lists, Christmas gift lists, farm projects lists, who-to-call lists, and so on. But my all-time favorite is my to-do list. 

     I make to-do lists almost every day. The best part of making one is getting to check the items off as I complete a task. It gives me a sense of accomplishment. My happiest days are those when I can strike off each and every item from my to-do list. It’s rare, but it does happen. Too often, I can't complete all the errands and tasks I outline for myself, because my expectations are greater than the number of hours in a day or my energy level. That’s very frustrating. If i don't complete a to-do list in one day, i'll carry leftover items until the next day...or the next...or the day after that.  Did I mention i'm also a great procrastinator?

     I used to use the Franklin Planner paper system, and then went to the Palm electronic system. With each of those, I was able to rank my tasks according to importance, so I could do the really necessary ones first. Too often, the urgent replaces the important, something Christian psychologist Dr. James Dobson calls, “the tyranny of the urgent.”  I haven’t figured out a way around that one.

     My iPhone has a built-in app called Reminders. But I find it cumbersome to type the items on my iPhone, and I don’t feel that tingling pleasure I get when checking something off a piece of paper.

     At the top of my list for the past three days has been, “Write and post blog.” At least I can check that one off for this week.