Peonies and Love

My dearest Grandma,"Bib" to all her friends, Vivian to acquaintances, died 20 years ago on April 1st. Even in her death she had something fun to say. She was always fun and ready for a laugh. She was a Nebraska farm gal through and through, who was always generous with gifts and love. She played an amazing bridge hand and all sorts of card games. When I visited the farm in the summer you would find her plunked up on her big high feather bed doing the puzzles, crossword and Word Tease in the morning paper - with the sunlight streaming in on her bed. She would tell me to, "jump up and help her", and then she would point out the funny's that really hit her!! Then it was down to the breakfast table for some home cooking, and boy did I have an appetite, especially being a city gal. The farm made me hungry. I remember walking down her long driveway with the big Elm's on each side to the neighbors house across the dirt road. They had just gotten a big load of baby chicks and I really wanted to see them. We got some eggs from them, and they were fresh eggs, I was a city gal in dangerous territory for sure. Or going to the garden she always had and picking something she called "new" potatoes, red, small and delicious. There would be big heaping bowls of potatoes. I love red potatoes! Also, I remember going out to the back field of 100 acres, behind the family farm house, past the unused chicken houses and old outhouse with my grandpa Henry, who looked 10 feet tall up until I saw the corn that we were about to pick, which was really 10 feet tall! That corn was so sweet, I can still taste it, with the fresh killed and fried chicken that " Bib" would have cooking on her counter in multiple electric fryers. She wore billowy cotton dresses and a big smile. She was always ready to teach me a new thing and I was a sponge.

And Grandma loved peonies. And I loved my grandma. She had two sons, no daughters - so she loved her granddaughter's extra special- and I knew it.

Each winter after they were married Grandpa would ask Grandma what wall she wanted him to knock out of their one room home until they finally had a three bedroom farmhouse with the original furnace and fireplace stuck in the middle ( Grandpa was an architect by training, and he loved to use his creative skills. He always took great care to see that his rows were straight and his farm was well kept). Grandmas would say, " lets get some beans!", and we would go down a rickety basement stairway to a cool/cold cellar and get a couple of jars of canned beans. It was such a different world to me.

It was little house on the prairie to me and I loved it. Grandma being gone this long stills my heart. As I walk around our farm I can't help but think that she would love our place, and our dozen children, our ducks and chicks and milk cow. She would feel honored that I want to be a farm girl and will always be a farm girl at heart. She would be so proud to see the walls of books about farming we have in our home and how nothing keeps me from trying a new things, like soap making or taking care of a new type of animal. The Nebraska pioneer spirit is still alive in me.

Grandma helped make a beautiful museum in Plattsmouth Nebraska. I would visit it often as a kid. It was a testament to the people who followed the Platte river west to their new homesteading adventure, sometimes, most times, with great peril and hard work. It was for a better life, a quiet life. A life where they ate what they grew and caught. Where they slept on a homemade mattress after a long day of adventure and work. They enjoyed the simple act of living in the beautiful world that God made for them. Grandma thought it was very important that we not forget how Nebraska and the great mid-west was founded.

God is a farmer. He started out putting us in the beautiful Garden of Eden, and we blew it. He wanted us to just obey him and have all things given to us freely that we needed. But we had to have it our way, and now the gardening is hard work. He wanted us to have a life of ease and plenty, but we chose the way we wanted to go, with everything in creation fighting with us. Weeds and briers, they are now our way of life. But God had it all worked out, even our disobedience. One of the reasons that life was so beautiful in many ways for the pioneers, is that it was so hard to live day to day that they appreciated, or had the potential to enjoy all the little things in life. There was much for them to complain about, and I am sure they did, but today we have so much to be thankful for and we complain much too much.


I named my 7th child after my grandma, Vivian. It was so perfect. Grandma was the 7th child in a family of 8 children from a big Scottish farm family from Plattsmouth. Her name means Lively and my daughter is as beautiful and lively as she. She is also great with her hands, can do puzzles and make things that few can do. She will probably be a great gardener too!





Here is photo of my great grandma and grandpa, my grandpa and grandma, my mom and dad and I think my sister, although it could be me, 4 generations.

Above is a photo taken at my Uncle Towner's 50 wedding /anniversary celebration with grandma "Bib" and my oldest daughter Ann when she was one. You don't see these big family celebrations much anymore, that it too bad.

My grandma loved peonies so I am planting some more this week in remembrance of her, and her flowery personality. Thanks for a such a wonderful grandma, God.

The Problem of Pain

{A friend loves in all times}

I am not one to have a lot of close friends. I am really too busy doing the work the Lord has laid on my heart to raise my children up to be godly soldiers for the faith, and being a helpmate to my dear husband. But what I do know is that my dearest friends in my life are the ones who have shared painful times with me. Anyone can enjoy good times with a friend, but only few are the true blue who stand through thick and thin and encourage when you are going through the darkest of times. That is where the true rubber hits the road. I have always joked that I need air conditioning and a pool so I will have a friend but truly, it is when you are in a fiery furnace and in the desert alone that you truly know who your friends are.

I am enjoying a book my best friend Jewels suggested to me, it is called Learning of God, readings from Amy Carmichael, by Stuart and Brenda Blanch

pg, 99: PAIN "But to what end is pain? I do not clearly know. But I have noticed that when one who has not suffered draws near to one in pain there is rarely much power to help: there is not the understanding that leaves the suffering thing comforted, though perhaps not a word was spoken; and I have wondered if it can be the same in the sphere of prayer. Does pain accepted and endured give some quality that would otherwise be lacking in prayer? Does it create that sympathy which can lay itself alongside the need, feeling it as thought it were personal, so that it is possible to do just what the writer of Hebrews meant when he said, "remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body?""

This quote really hit home. Many times in my almost 30 years of marriage and parenting I have gone through serious physical pain and severe loneliness. I just need someone to say, keep the faith. But many have never hit this heartbreak hill I have been climbing and they seem to be calling me a baby, or a complainer, when I have been going through severe pruning and pain, and reaping much fruit in my dependence on God and his plan for my life. That is where a great friend comes in handy.
They tell you not to quit, that you can make it over the hill, with the Lord's help. They say it will be worth it all, even if the fruit will be many years off. That is when you need to surround yourself with people who have endured through tough circumstances and excelled, even if it is only through biographies or movies of great events and people.
Too many people today are only concerned about the convenient, the easy, the doable, not ruffling too many feathers, not the eternal long term goals of God. God has called me to a tough race, I want to win it for him, and I want to win it for him Big,and for the future generations, I want them to look back and say, Gods hand was really on her life and I am inspired by her faith and endurance. She went into the fiery furnace and was not burned.
Jesus is your best friend, sometimes he gives you ones with skin on, so you can get a glimpse of what heaven is like. I am thankful for my friends who were there when life hurt more than I could bear.

The most beautiful skies come after a storm; this is our sky tonight, it is a gift from God.

Whom the lord chastises he loves, he who did not give up his own son but gave him for us all, he is the one I worship.