The Night a Preacher Got Me In BIG Trouble!

Every Halloween our four girls come home to take their kids trick-or-treating, one of them even driving 3 1/2 hours in order to know her little ones are receiving candy from people she has known all her life.  The logistics of taking thirteen children including eight who are four years old and under makes for some very happy little cousins but some awfully exhausted mommy's.  But last year it was soooo much better thanks to our bus.  MaMa and PaPa strung orange lights on the inside of the bus, blew up orange and black helium balloons to tie on the back of each seat, and a plastic pumpkin lit up with electric lights peaked out the back window, saying hello to anyone driving behind us.  I was the official driver leaving the mommy's to the task of helping little ones get their robot box back on, their princess dresses in order, their candy bags back in each hand and lead their little goblins down the steps and out the door.

After a couple hours we adults and the little ones were getting tired and ready to call it a night. My three and a half year old grandaughter, Maddie Mae had come to sit on my lap as we drove slowly around town, her little face snuggled into my neck.  We tell the big kids we will go around one more block.  Up ahead we see one of our town's ministers handing out candy from his front porch.  He has been a minster in this town for a couple decades, knows everyone, everyone knows him and everyone just calls him Tom.  We pull up to the curb in our lit up bus, Tom sees us and brings the candy bag out to us to see what/who on earth this is.  When he sees and recognizes us he greets us all in his usual enthusiastic friendly way.  In his "preacher who loves everyone way",  he reaches down and gives me a quick kiss on the cheek.  Maddie Mae's little head popped up and stared at me, then at Tom and back at me again.  He gives all the kids candy then heads back to his house, us hollering goodbye and thank you and him hollering goodbye and your welcome.

  As I pull the door shut Maddie Mae with the most concerned little voice asks me, "MaMa, why did that man kiss you?"  I assure her that he was just Tom, and he loves everyone so he just gave me a quick kiss to say hello.  She laid her head back down, but soon, lifts up her head and again asks, "MaMa, why did that man kiss you?'  I laughed and tried again, I said, "Honey he is a person who loves everyone, just like Jesus loves us and so he just gave me a kiss on my cheek to say hello".  Down laid the little head again, for about ten seconds than popped back up with the same question.  I laughed and hollered at her mamma that this was really bothering her so Karen came up to the front to explain the same thing to her, that it was just Tom and Tom kisses everybody on the cheek when he says hello.  Maddie Mae looked at her and then at me, and laid her head down again, but it was quite obvious that she wasn't buying it.  As we drove on, I thought maybe Mommy had finally convinced her, but when we were almost home, her little head raised one more time, but this time she didn't have a question, she made a statement!   She looked me right in the eye and in all seriousness told me, "MaMa, PaPa needs us!"  I thought, Oh my word!  What is going on in this little childs mind!  "Honey," I told her, "You don't have anything to worry about, I love PaPa, and Tom was just saying hello.  Tom has a wife and he loves her, he was only saying hello, ok?"  She said a meek little okay and didn't say anything else.

 In all the excitement of getting home and the kids piling out the door, rushing in to dump, look over and count their haul, I forgot all about it.  But when I walked in the door, there was Maddie Mae standing beside PaPa in his recliner telling him all about it.  He said she was the first one in the door, ran right up to him and cupped her little hand around his ear and said "PaPa some man kissed MaMa!"  To Maddie Mae that trumped all the candy in the world and she took her duty to tell PaPa what had taken place very seriously indeed!  PaPa acted dutifully shocked and Oh so glad that Maddie Mae had let him know what had taken place in town!  We all cracked up as Maddie kept looking at me with such an accusatory look on her face.  PaPa thanked her over and over again for letting him know and he would take care of it and make sure that it NEVER happened again!  That seemed to reassure her, she went and joined the other kids and we never heard about it again.  But you better believe, I know how closely I'm being watched and I better not ever try pulling anything off on PaPa!   He has his very own little private detective ready to report my every move and if I do ever step out of line, I'm going to be in very big trouble indeed!

Water Shedding Dust

About a year ago I read the first Psalm and was struck by these verses:

Blessed is the man who's delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Psalm 1: 2 & 3

I remembered how in the few days prior, I had let my garden plants go too long without water and they had wilted down, looking like they were done.  But I watered them anyway and to my surprise the next morning they looked great and went on to produce more veggies.  I realized how the Psalm speaks to this very thing, not about plants, but to our hearts.  When I neglect time with God, (which I seriously had for months and months on end), never opening his word, my faith, my relationships, my everyday life became a dry shriveled, lifeless shell.  But once I made it a priority in my life to read his word and spend time in prayer, I felt alive again, full of life, hope, and renewed energy.  Bible reading and prayer, except for a few exceptions over the past year have been a wonderful beginning to each morning.

But lately, I have felt a restlessness, a critical spirit in my heart towards Mark and others, a mini-pity party taking root in my heart.  My bible reading for the day again took me to Psalm 1. As always, I am left in awe of God's timing, and his gentle rebukes as he uses His word to guide me back to the right path. Again I saw a "garden analogy".  We have about two acres west of our house.  The first half acre we use for our garden, west of that is a sparsely wooded area with no vegetation on the ground, just bare dirt.  Back in the corner of this area is where our turkey pen was.  When Mark and I watered and fed them each day we watched as the hose would hit the powdery dust on the ground and just run off the top.  It amazed us how when the dirt had gone for so long without rain, it would literally shed the water instead of let it soak in.  As I read the psalmist words above, I saw how that is exactly what I was doing.  I was reading God's word, but instead of letting it soak into my heart, I was letting it shed off my back.  Thank you Lord Jesus!  For opening my eyes to the way I have wasted your precious words!  I have been using them for entertainment, as a "feel good tonic" instead of for the precious life-giving resource that they are!  My new prayer is:

Lord, help me not be like the dust that sheds water,

When I read your word, let it penetrate my heart.  Amen

I Had It All Along!

This year I can finally quit figuring and re-figuring a number in my head to see where we are at.  This month we will have lived at our current house longer than we lived at the farm, where we lived our first 18 1/2 years of married life.  A place that was so full of memories, a place we brought all six babies home to!  A place that for our oldest ones contained all of their childhood memories, for our youngest, it is just a place they hear us talk about with hardly any memories of their own. Our oldest moved to this house just one month before her high school graduation, our boys were just five and six years old.

Like just about everything else in life, there were good things and bad things about life on the farm, but over the years, the bad memories faded and they were replaced with idealized memories.  Forgotten was the living seven miles from town and all the driving that entailed when raising six kids.  No longer did I remember driving the tractor for hours on end while Mark was working in town trying to feed our eight hungry mouths!  All I remembered was the sunsets I could see from my west windows, the peace and quiet, watching it rain from the porch swing, and the countless rainbows we saw on that same swing. I remembered hearing the birds sing in the morning, the frogs croak at night, and the coyotes howling at the moon.  Heck I even missed the way our old farmhouse would shudder and rattle in the wind!  I would complain that this house was so tight you couldn't even tell what the weather was doing outside!  

I spent several years mourning the loss of those scenes and those sounds and that peace and quiet.  All I saw here was the countless trucks Mark worked on and all I heard was the traffic on the highway our house is close to.  I would daydream about how nice it would have been if we could have kept the farmhouse as a weekend getaway.  Mark always assured me that it would have been a disaster trying to keep another house, keep the grass mowed, keep it insured, keep people out of it during the week if no one lived there.  And I could see his logic, but Oh, how wonderful it would have been to get away from everything and everyone, from all the noise of this place, to just go out and sit and watch the sunset.  More and more years passed and every now and then Mark would ask if I still missed the old farm and I would answer "Yeah, I do, I miss living in the country and the peace and quiet out there."

Late in the summer, about five years ago, we got in the habit of sitting in a lawn chair as the day came to an end, visiting with each other and our son who was still at home.  I saw that I could see the sunset very well from where we were sitting, and the few trees in the way didn't take away from the view, in fact, it seemed to add to it!  Every evening we would take a glass of tea and watch the sky turn orange and pink until the big red ball dipped below the horizon.  I also loved hanging my clothes on the line outside and that summer the locust serenaded me as I hung every basket.  And then we found an old hammock at a yard sale and put it up in a couple close trees in the back yard.  Although I must admit it doesn't get laid on very often (who has time?) one Sunday morning, I laid down in it, and looking up through the pine tree above me, I watched a couple birds playing on the branches and listened to the wind gently blowing through it's needles.  The sound reminded me of what you hear when you are hiking in the Colorado mountains.  I realized I hadn't heard a single vehicle drive by all morning, all I had heard was the soft wind and the birds twittering.   "Wow Lord," I thought, "look at all the years I have wasted pining away for what was no more, when what I so desperately thought I missed was right here in front of me all along!"  

It was an eye opening moment - a "what an idiot I am" moment, and a moment that helped me see the ways I had wasted precious days of my life wishing for something different then what I already had, not seeing that God had already given me all I thought I wanted and then some.  My idealized longings of life on the farm faded into the place of realistic memories that they should have occupied all along.  And now, when Mark and I are out for a country drive, and he asks me if I still miss the farm, I can honestly answer, "Nope! Not at all!"  Now I don't see the trucks and the highway, now I see what I've got, five acres to plant a huge garden, a massive yard with big shade trees for the grandkids to play in, big enough for an impromptu football or softball game, a big clothes line to hang my clothes on, a place for my chickens and turkeys - I'd say that's just about as peaceful and quiet and country as one can get!

Four of a Kind was Just Fine!.....then Surprise!

Although I ended up with a family of four girls and two boys, I can still very much relate to the mother's of all the same sex.  For eleven years we were the parents of four daughters.  We thought our four little girls were wonderful, but I well remember the comments of others and expectation of family every time we were expecting.  I know people just didn't stop and think before they spoke, but some of the things that came out of people's mouths were downright cruel.  Here are some of the ones I remember the most:

"Oh, I'm sorry!  I bet you were trying for a boy"

"Oh Darn!  Mark needs a boy!"

"Oh, another girl?  Well, better luck next time."

"Oh, I bet Daddy was awfully disappointed"

"Another girl?  Well, maybe you guy's need to just give up."

"Poor Dad"

"I beat you, I got a boy the first time!"  (Mark just rolled his eyes at this bundle of intelligence!)

When people heard we were expecting again, they always assumed we were "trying for a boy".  Nope, we actually weren't trying for anything.  Only one baby was planned out of the six, the others just happened.  I especially remember two times.  I remember who it was, where I was at, and how we were standing.  One was in a restaurant when they looked at my precious little baby I so proudly was showing off and said, "Oh another girl, well better luck next time".  I tell you, it was like a knife in my heart!  I finally got my wits about me and said "We are very lucky this time!  The second one was in the grocery store when again, I was so proudly smiling down at my sweet baby girl, showing her off, when the person said, "I bet Daddy was awfully disappointed"  Taking a deep breath I managed to smile and say"No Daddy is awfully proud of her!"

When you have four little girls and are expecting again, you just assume that you will have another little girl.  The thought of it being something else even seems a little foreign to you.  So when #5 arrived and the doctor said, "It's a boy!", I remember having to lean up and check for myself!  And sure enough, something definitely looked different!  I had only packed a little pink dress to bring the baby home in, but the girls came to the rescue, going through our baby clothes at home and finding a little white sleeper that they cut the lace off of!  Of course we were excited to have a boy, but it was not the ultimate goal of our lives as so  many people thought.  Again, people would speak without thinking, right in front of the four big sisters.  Then we heard things like "Finally!  Now you can quit!"  or "Oh I bet your're so happy you finally got a boy!"  I was so proud that Mark always answered, "Yes we are, but no happier than we were when we had our girls!"  And man, it really blew everyone's mind when nine months later we were expecting again.  Then we heard, "Oh, Wow, I figured you guy's would be done once you finally got your boy!"

Well, that boy we got, the one that we brought home in a white sleeper with the lace cut off, and the one who along with his younger brother introduced us to a whole new set of hormones, toy guns, bows and arrows, endless ballgames, and living room wrestling matches, turns twenty five years old today.  And although he is no more special than his sisters, he still holds a special place in all of our hearts!  Happy Birthday Bryan Mark Ricke!

Fall Cucumbers

  Because of the extreme heat this summer, our cucumber harvest was virtually nill.  Still hungry for the taste of fresh picked cucumbers I looked up our state extension recommendations for planting cucumbers for a Fall harvest.  Much to my surprise, there was none!  It said cucumbers should be planted in the month of May for a July harvest, and although there was lots of other vegetables suggested to plant for Fall, the cucumber was not one of them.  I decided to ignore what they said and give it a try, All it would cost was the price of a packet of seeds.  I planted at the end of August and this is what I picked today, with many more coming on!  Sometimes you just gotta go with your heart instead of your brain!

Delivering Miss Jamie

Twenty nine years ago today, I gave birth to our youngest daughter Jamie.  Her birth was one of those where I can really impress people with my "strength" and "courage" and "stamina"!  Not the labor and delivery, but what I was doing before that point!

We were still back in our farming days and I was driving the tractor working the ground ahead of the wheat drill.  As I went around and around I started feeling those old familiar twinges and realized that we were going to have a baby that night.  It didn't seem too serious so I wasn't overly concerned.  It was back before cell phones and although the tractor I was in had a cab and a two way radio, the one Mark was driving didn't.  I knew within a few rounds I would catch up to Mark and let him know.  Then I saw Mark drive his tractor over to the corner of the field where the trucks that held the fertilizer and wheat were, he backed up and filled the drill up.  I stopped at the corner waiting on him to come back, but instead he climbed into the truck and drove off!  I couldn't follow because the cultivator I was pulling had to be manually folded up to get through the gate to go home and I dang sure didn't want to walk the three miles home so I kept working the field.  I was getting a little nervous when I fianlly saw the dust flying on the road letting me know he was on his way back, but his cousin was behind him.  I saw them both get out and start talking.  I know it was dumb, but I was embarrassed to go over and say anything in front of the cousin, so again, I kept going.  Finally he headed over.  He came up to my tractor, climbed the steps to see how I was doing and I told him.  Being it was number four, neither one of us were overly concerned.  I said I don't think I'm that close but I am going to go home and take a bath.  He said alright, he would just finish cultivating with the tractor I had been driving, because there was only about twenty minutes left, then he could bring that tractor home.  Sounded good to me.  He drove me over to the trucks, I climbed out of the tractor and into the wheat truck and drove home.

 But,once I got home and was on my feet walking around, taking a shower, getting dressed, I realized things were moving along a lot faster than I thought!  I called him on the radio to say "You better hurry home, this is a lot more serious than I thought"  Of course he had to raz me saying, "You've waited nine months, you can wait another few minutes for me to get done".  "NO MARK!" I stressed, "YOU NEED TO GET HERE!"  Of course he was already heading home full speed ahead.  Once home he took a quick shower and we headed to town.  When we got there the doctor did a quick check and said I was ready to go to the delivery room!  "Wow", I said, "I just got off the tractor thirty minutes ago"  Fifteen minutes later we met our little Jamie!

 Again, I would love to end saying something like "Yeah that was back when women were women!" or something equally as dumb, but the truth is it only shows how very easy birth came for me - but it still makes a great story!