OHHH, Christmas Tree

There, behind my two crazy boys, my undecorated, unstylish tree.

I have a Christmas tree, which if you live in North Africa, is already a sweet thing. They are actually popping up in stores now, around the bigger tourist areas, but when we moved here (16 years ago) they were unheard of. Even now, people will sometimes want to see ours because they know what they are from media but have never seen a “real” one.

The naked tree, in the drive, getting showered. Better a little more rust than a whole bunch of dust.

I wouldn’t say ours is a particularly good “model” for what the West sees as a great tree. I think it was on its way to the garbage when we got it as a gift. It was one step up from being good filler at the dump, but not quite nice enough for a charity shop to take it, so I think we fulfilled a need to find it a good home.

That was fine with us, we had been without a tree for two years, tho we put a green felt tree shape on the wall and hung our ornaments on it.  So after that, this one seemed quite spectacular, being 3D and all! It was brought to us as a piece of luggage (taped up in a box) by someone visiting from England.

The ends of each branch are well mushed together, the person who gave it to us admitted this was her fault, for putting tight bows on each year, and now these were out of fashion. It could not be fixed, but bows could still be fashionable at our house; we don’t follow the trendy magazines.

So we have this tree, have had it for 13 years past it’s dumping date, and some of the branches are falling off or slumping down, though I have found a way to remedy that (since the Prof says it looks just fine to him).  And when the tree is covered in lights, shiny garland, lots of ornaments and BOWS…we sprinkle it with fake snow, and that covers any other blemishes.

It still leaves us with one element of the tree that I love and no one else agrees with. I have a set of older European candles, but not candle holders. I can attach them to the tree with pipe cleaners, tho I admit, they are still slightly precarious.  The whole time I do this (put them on the tree) I am badgered by my children who lecture me about the dangers of lighting candles on the tree (one year I melted a branch. I’m much more careful now).

But that is the limonatadolce about this tree!  If I had a beautiful tree, a new tree that supported the latest styles, and that had perfectly formed branches, I would be on their side, shouting about the dangers of ruining it.

But this tree, with one stumpy leg already in the dump, well past it’s “beautiful-before-date”…well, if this tree burns to the ground, there will be the complaining that accompanies the trials of bringing luggage on airplanes (maybe, or maybe not)…but the tree itself will have come to a glorious end.  So much better than just being dropped into the land fill.

The end result, bows, candles and fake snow. One great tree.

And so, even an old tree can give my life the excitement of limonata.  And it does!  Those five minutes when I light the candles, admire my tree, and ignore everyone in the room shouting at me…those five moments are just one of my best Christmas traditions.

Crazy Love Treasures (Written for M and U)

Children. How well they are loved sticks for the rest of their lives.

“Are we crazy, or is this God?” you ask.  Definitely. Both.  God-sized dreams are usually crazy to mere mortals.  When you follow His dream you need something more than your own personality, but sometimes the road is surprisingly hard.

Maybe this is relevant to your path, you decide.

When Ama started being a nanny, I wisely offered advice when she asked.  Only when she asked.  She was in well over her head with two boys, aged one and two, still in diapers, and big sister, a ripe old 4 year old.  It didn’t take her long to ask for advice, and so I met them to observe.

By lunch time I had my first observation, so I tested the premise.  If the middle child, Emerson, was acting out of a space of not getting enough attention, then feeding him lunch might help.  I invited him onto my knee and he lapped it all up–the food, the conversation, the attention, the love.  One-on-one time was the ticket to his heart.

We were soon friends, one of our favorite pass-times was a good snuggle.  Snuggle and read, snuggle and swing, snuggle and eat lunch.  We had the magic of romance going for us.

It was a love affair where he taught me more than I taught him.

He reacted to being scolded or disciplined, sitting on the stairs for a time out,  so I would even snuggle and sit on the stairs with him for his time out if that was okay with him.

Ama didn’t like that so much, but I got her to agree to try it, if it helped him stay calm and feel safe.

I had one plumb-line: I wanted him to know he was loved.  Good, bad or indifferent behaviour, he was loved.  Unwavering, unchanging, unstoppable. This person loves me.

I began to realize how little I knew about unconditional love. How rarely I had committed to that for my own kids, with this level of intensity and sacrifice.  I hoped it was rubbing off: On Me.

When he threw my glasses across the room and turned around to hit his brother (one rage, two misdemeanors) I grabbed him and told myself, “Think fast.  This time you have to let him know that is NOT okay.”  And, still thinking fast, I said, “HELP” to God.  Into that interval, my daughter said, “Now what? How is your perfect love going to deal with this?”  (She admired but was just a smidge jealous of our love affair.)

I cradled Emerson into my “nook” (the crook of my arm) holding onto him tightly cuz he was wiggling and wriggling like a boy who knew he was now in trouble.  I gave him the familiar snuggle gaze, looking right into his eyes I said sweetly-but-with-a-listen-to-me-tone: “Emerson, I love you.  I love you too much to let you hit your brother or throw my glasses. You cannot do that at my house.  Okay?”  And he agreed, “Okay.”

And really, love triumphed in us both.  When Emerson was impossible, stuck in a bad place, Ama would say “Come work your magic, Mom.”  It was a powerful place to walk out truth.  Sometimes he was too stuck to respond, but I knew the love wasn’t being wasted.  It was just as good for me as it was for him.

And then God began to unravel my heart.

From another century, 4 decades ago, my own memory of being treasured began to sneak up to the surface.

I was 3 or 4 the first time this happened. We lived in a community and our “ancient” neighbor (seems like he might have been 70 or so) brought me a little packet of candies from the shop across the street.  When he put the packet into my hands, and I realized it was just for me, I felt like a princess, a royal guest. I felt, in the sphere of this gesture, treasured.

He would do this from time to time.  Just show up with a packet of sweets, and put them into my hands.  Turns out, I didn’t really like the candy.  But that moment of receiving the paper packet was so much sweeter than what was inside.

I don’t think he spent any time talking to me, certainly no reading together or games or any other interaction. Just a packet of cheap sweets.

During the first months of taking an interest in Emerson, I recalled this memory during a time of prayer, while I was dialoguing with God about how he sees me.  This conversation took place over several days, I didn’t “get it” all in one go.  Like a pot of soup simmering to perfect flavor, my thoughts were being formed and “reduced”.

The slow process brought me to this kernel of understanding:  Deep inside me, buried in an old memory, was this sense of being treasured by an old gentleman.  My ability to feel treasured and delighted in by a grandfather-type wasn’t random or accidental or unconnected.

That snapshot of myself–the feeling that I am a treasure, that was God’s Father heart of love, faithfully deposited into my life by someone who probably had no idea he was doing that.  Yet he, my ancient neighbor, knew exactly what the value of a child could and should be.

As I spent days, maybe even weeks, praying on this…reflecting and absorbing the gift–that long ago feeling of being a treasure… I remembered more and more of it, with added understanding.

I recalled reading a book about the region we lived in.  My old candy-packet friend, Mr. Roberts, had lived as a young man, recently married, in a remote village of South America.  His wife had died there, giving birth to their first son, a baby who also failed to survive a complicated birth.

What I felt, as a child, was that powerful magnetic message that I was treasured (recalling that I didn’t like the sweets, but I never told Mr. R because I loved the gift for its other blessings.)  That message of being treasured came through Mr. R’s heart at an incredible cost to him.  He knew I was a treasure but it was a terribly expensive lesson for he had paid his own price to be someone who could represent God in my, or anyone else’s life.

(Mr. R also put together a dinner plate for a blind man every day at noon–for years.  Everyone in the neighborhood saw this and knew him as a man of compassion. I think he treasured a good many people in his life-time).

And then, during these weeks of prayer, it felt like God actually spoke to me.  Up til now, my prayers had been more like the “dawning” of understanding–the realization that God wanted me to feel treasured, that this was a reflection of His truth, and love, into my life.  I was awakening to the expectation that this feeling of being treasured was God’s “normal” for me.

When God spoke, he seemed to say more specifically–”This is what I do.  I put a picture of my heart into every child’s life.  A picture that tells them– “You are my treasure.”

And I leave it there for future reference because I want to bring each one back to that truth some day–no matter how dark their life has been.

“And that is what you are doing for Emerson. You are anchoring him into that love. You will change the course of his life if he gets this.”

I knew it was a noble moment.  To love an angry, lost little boy until he really understood.  Perhaps this was the most noble thing I was currently doing with my life.  That seemed right.

And then God spoke to me one more time…and one more time after that…

Emerson’s little brother, Reid, had grown into quite the little talker.  Reid was the cutest of little boys, and got tons of attention from every direction, including us. There was no reason for my love affair with Emerson to exclude Reid, and loving him together was part of our magic.  Love just gets better the more people it touches.  So Reid also knew he was very much part of a love circle.

Emerson had by now started to attend pre-school and was very proud of the friends he had made there.   This was just before he turned four, and one day getting into the van, he announced to Reid, “I have two friends, Mitch and Joey.”

Reid, the best of little brothers, was not to be outdone.  He replied with all pride and confidence, “Well, Amamom is my friend.”  (My name is Ama-mom for Reid and Emerson).

Reid and I had been playing a senseless game the day before.  We were dropping word cards into a box, he was standing on a stool to do this. There were no rules for this game, no “outcomes” and no real sense of accomplishment.  It was intended as a speech game for someone else, but we just played it for the fun of watching gravity’s relentless hold on word cards.  Endless, senseless fun and laughter: together.  Joy for no reason other than being together.

And so, for that week, I was Reid’s best friend.  It was my favorite moment of the week: friend to a toddler.

Suddenly it was obvious to me that God gets more joy out of senseless time spent with me, than I get from Emerson, Reid and all my small friends (I have three more).  And that this is His big time thrill.  Almighty and Eternal God, noble in friendship with mere mortals, who have no clue what or Who they’ve got for their best friend.

And I knew, as clearly as I’ve ver known a truth: being friends with a toddler was the most God-like think I could do or be.

Crazy fun, bringing us back to joy.

To reflect God’s love to someone…to let them feel they are a treasure–to plant that anchor in their soul…this is what we were made for.

But to do it well, there may just be an exacting price.

So God brought me back around to Mr. Roberts.  It was midnight, in July.  Packing up our house I found a 40-year-old cassette tape of my mom’s memorial service. I’d never listened to it, but it still played. I had tried it the week before, but I could only listen to one hymn and one prayer on my own.  So I had waited ten days for my sister to come.

We started listening after everyone had gone to bed.  We strained to understand voices muffled here and there, and we worked to figure out who was speaking–voices from our childhood, messages of eternal hope on the darkest day of our lives.  It helped to have the task and work together to remember who said what.

An older, withered voice came on, and instantly we said in unison, “Mr. Roberts”.  We knew his voice through any amount of muffled, cracked, garbled cassette.

And she remembered, though he had said it on the tape, she said reminiscing, “His first words were: ‘Absent from the body, present with the Lord.’  I always remember that.”  I needed to be reminded, she did not.

Listening to that tape was the last time I heard Mr. R’s voice.  I’ll remember him for the two things he planted into my heart.  First he gave me the seed of being treasured, a seed that is slowly growing to maturity, even 4 decades later.

And he spoke truth.  When everyone in my world was floundering around me, a child with a broken heart and a crumpled world…when everyone else was trying to avoid the dark or find the right thing to say, he just spoke the truth.  No words to explain or justify or qualify her death.  Just the simple reality–she is absent from us here. She is with the Lord.

You can trust a man who has given his life’s treasures to God and has lived on with grace and compassion.  And you can trust a man who knows the simple truth; someone who knows truth knows the way to step into the costliest moments life holds.

Where there is truth there is healing and hope.  Mr. R’s life is part of my story of redemption.  I bring my dark shadows with me, into community with others, who often recognize that I know their darkness, but also have hope to walk forward into light.

Nothing, no thing, no time in your life is ever wasted. If you walk into a God-sized dream, there will also be a few nightmares to sort out or wrestle through.  But life without a God-sized dream misses the treasure of the moments He fills with His presence.  We only see the redemption of our darkest valleys when we let him lead us to the places he has planned to let us serve at His side, creating treasures where someone else sees only brokenness and loss.

I pray your God-sized dream will bring you to the full circle of redemption–all you’ve “paid” in your own soul will come streaming through with the message of hope, wrapped in truth.  You will remember and know that your soul is treasured, and you will plant that seed in someone else, to grow there for eternity.

Treasures

My boys! How rich I am.

The best.

Million dollar smiles.

When we had two children, a boy and girl, people said we had a millionaire’s family….so we kept going, two boys, two girls.  Some people asked us why we did that, wasn’t two enough? (Ya, really, they commented like that!).  I said it was now a 2 million dollar family, but I wouldn’t trade them for a billion.

Even more wealth has come my way as I have treasures in other people’s children adding to my own.

Better than winning a lottery. How blessed to have these kids in my life.

Tow peas in a pod, two pearls in an oyster.

These kids are my gold, pearls, diamonds and otherwise best treasures.  Life passes by too quickly, we need to know where are treasures are, and take joy in them.  I wish I had done that more; I’m glad it is not to late to do better.

7 Stories High

The day I met the Prof’s grandma, was before we were engaged—about a month before. We stepped into the elevator in her building and he pushed the button for the 7th floor, and then turned to me and said, “Grandma is going to love you.”

Not, “My Grandma”. Just Grandma, like she was already shared.

I was quite skeptical, he remembers this as I do. I replied with something like, “How can you say that for sure? She’s not even met me yet.”

“I’m sure.” He said.

“I don’t think you can be sure of such a thing. You can’t be sure of that, unless the person has met me.”

“Oh, I’m sure.” He said, again.

And if I argued back or not, we can’t remember, it was a 7-story ride to her floor; he finished the disagreement with this comment: “Well, you haven’t met Grandma yet.”

Which was exactly the point. I was there to meet her.

(She did love me.)

I remembered this conversation last summer while in Calgary, at a place called “Heritage Park”. I was taking care of a small boy, walking him in a stroller so he could nap while his big brother and sister enjoyed the rides (how fun for him!)  I was considering the heritage I had, thinking over some of the family members who are gone, but who created my world of relationships.

My mind went to Grandma, who has not been with us now for over five years, but we still love to talk about her and remember her. It was a long walk with a young lad who was not about to go to sleep easily under such circumstances. As I walked and thought about Grandma some thoughts came to me, perhaps they were drifting down from God’s thoughts factory, I am not sure.

First of all, I recalled that my husband had been right about Grandma that day, but that I had spoken with the same certainty when I took my best friend to meet her, and whether I said it out loud or not, I had the same certitude when I took my sister and her kids to meet Grandma for the first time.

Grandma was the first person I had met in my life who had the ability to be completely predictable when it came to loving people. Love first, get to know them later, was one of her MO’s (method of operation).

On that day in Heritage Park I also realized a few other things. I recognized how incredibly blessed I was to have known Grandma, to have received her love on her own terms—no conditions or terms, just loved as I was.

I also realized that in the 25 years since meeting her I had not met another person who was quite as predictable about this as she was, and that I was now in the transition of life, taking care of children in the role of grandparent (not my own yet, but my “practice” grandchildren) and that if I could leave one thing with them it would be this sense of being loved, on Grandma’s terms: no conditions.

Why do we not get this more clearly, more effectively? We were put here to love each other, not to build empires or even seven-story buildings. We were made with the DNA that requires being connected to each other, because God so wants us to be connected to him. Do we get it? Maybe everyone else walking this earth gets it and I am the one waking up to this truth. We were made to love, and when we do that poorly, we live poorly.

I want to live rich.

Because You Asked… Chairs delivered

Sit back and relax for a minute!

For our anniversary, the Prof and I made a romantic date to go out and look for new chairs.  The romance is that he stopped working on his writing, and we got to be together doing the same thing for over an hour.  We also looked for a piece of artistic ironwork that we still have not found…but that was for my birthday two weeks later, so that was fine (at the time).  Now my birthday has passed by two weeks…not so fine anymore, but this is not about my birthday, it is about the chairs.

The chairs did not work out to be fine at all, either.

I had seen some interesting white, outdoorish, casual chairs, with a stunning design woven into them, and a love seat to go alongside, very attractive.  They were sitting on the roadside we drive along to get anywhere, but the traffic is usually so “fetching” that the Prof notices nothing but the cars and mopeds he is missing.

We stopped in that shop first, and the casual outdoor patio set I had thought looked good was suddenly not so attractive, at a price of 1500 dollars. That should have been enough to get us back in the car and on our way.  But we went in and saw some other nice chairs, so we sat in them, and finding them not too hard, not too soft, we checked the price tag.

Way too expensive.

We moved on to the next store and the next and the next, and if there were any chairs at all, the story was tediously similar.  Chairs seem to be a luxury item here, or rather, furniture, of nearly any kind, is on the luxury end of life.  We had talked about sitting on the floor, on mattresses made into bench-type seating, but even that adds up…we just wanted two chairs, moveable, so we could visit nicely or face them to watch TV when that was the option.

We abandoned the chair hunt.  We had been successful in one second-hand shop, finding a good quality electric kettle, so there was something to show for all that searching, just… not chairs.  We needed to move on to the next anniversary event, finding a restaurant.

We gave up hunting near a town that we used to go to for a day out, so we decided to rely on an “old faithful” restaurant for supper, rather than trying a brand spanking new one.  Sadly, old faithful was looking a little worn on the edges, and when the wind shifted direction, we noticed that cats had made their home in one corner.  While we discussed whether to leave, the wind shifted again, we moved to a new table and we stayed.

Over dinner we did the math. Two chairs, bought locally, could pay for one round ticket to France, where Ikea is located near the freeway, so using public transportation, you could potentially buy the chairs and bring them back for the price of the chairs here.  Hmm, yes, tempting.  At that very moment, one meal in France was quite a bit of temptation, added to the wish for a comfy chair.

We gave it another five minutes of thought (during which a cockroach ran out of the bread basket and we realized old faithful was no longer being faithful).  Even more thought led us to consider: inviting a friend to come for a visit and bring us chairs, could we tempt them with that?

By the time we were driving home our brain power was hard at work, and the Prof suddenly remembered our old friend “John”, planning to come for a holiday in a hotel, in less than three weeks time!

The un-trusty internet was willing to work with us that night and we looked up Ikea’s webpage, found the chairs, and looked up their dimensions and weight…for about an eighth of the price of the local chairs, we could get Ikea chairs that weigh under 9 kilos. Two of those would be equivalent of a medium sized suitcase.

Would John be willing? And then, as we surfed the net for full details, the Prof noticed!  John himself was on skype, and the chat began.  John, being a true friend, actually asked if he could bring us something!  (He’s been here before, he knows what we’re like!)

The Prof had already typed in the request as John made the offer…  And the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Sometimes you get offered things before you even ask.

Sometimes timing is everything.

Sometimes you never know, until you ask.

Are there any hard-and-fast-work-like-gravity rules? I’m still not sure, but I guess it is a popular saying because it has proven itself a few times over many centuries:  It never hurts to ask!

We love these chairs, they are just right for our space and comfier than any chairs we have had in our living room for…maybe ever.

Sea Treasures

“My beach” at sunrise.

I’ve been living by the sea for five weeks now. I call it living on a beach, although the beach is 100 meters away–toward the waves…that is to say, you have to look out the balcony in the right direction to see it, and only on the windy days can you hear it clearly. But it is close enough for me to call it “living on the beach”.

The first time we went walking (my daughter and I), there was a litter…a collection…a menagerie of small smooth pebbles and glass, all of it tumbled in the waves to smooth beauty.  We had not brought a bag along, so I filled my pockets, and it weighted my capri’s down, but not off my hips!  We stopped before I lost them.  When we were done collecting, we sat and had tea in the cafe–sweet mint tea with lime wedges in it.  Such a perfect ending to the day.  (Oh, ay, with toasted almonds too, my favorite tea snack).

We emptied my pockets on the table, and my daughter enjoyed arranging them, a few pretty pictures were made and collected.  We counted the sea glass, the pebbles seemed less extraordinary. Over 40 pieces, which at the time, we had no idea, was a “haul”.

The next day we walked the other way. 62 pieces.

Wow, sea glass is pretty easy to come by.  Now we faced the challenge of “what will we do with it all?” For starters we decided to put some into a dish with a candle–the candle needed some context, and it worked very well.

the sign of a good sea glass day: sand with litter from the sea

 

Me on the beach.

Over the next two weeks, we discovered that a generous collection of sea glass on the average day is 20 pieces, not 40 or 60.  An “ordinary” day is five pieces and an average is about 10.  Anything above 20 is spectacular–how were we supposed to know our first two days were that??

But then came my birthday, and as God likes to do, he surprised me with a little birthday gift.  Have you ever paid attention to God’s gifts on your birthday?  One year He gave me a dream and one year it was a new friend!

This time it was a grand, generous collection of sea glass, over 40 pieces (not the biggest we’ve ever had, but clearly unusual by this time).  And now, with the three weeks of experience behind me, I recognized the signs of a good day of collecting.

The sea has to be nearly still, the waves coming up the beach with a gentle touch, dusting the beach with a collection of debris, sea weeds, stones, and tumbled glass.  And the sand has to be a good angle, not too steep.  Today, in some places, it had built up over the three weeks, so where it was originally a good slope, it was now as steep as a slide. Nothing on that edge, but further down, another gentle slope had collected some stones.  And it helps if you arrive at low tide, tho we don’t see big differences in tide where we live.

And, last but definitely importantly, the stormy weather, the strong waves we had seen on the days of no-treasures, were the ones that had tumbled these stones and glass to perfect beauty.  Tho the big, rough waves left little for us to pick up on our daily walk, they were part of the process, and following their work, there were treasures to be found and retrieved.

So I wrote something to a friend facing a hard time, crashing waves coming up in her life (a tough medical diagnosis).  For some reason I wanted to tell her about the sea, the waves, the glass, the storms…here is what I shared with her.

“I have the gift of the sea behind me, and the gift of time around me. I feel that life has been suspended to a certain extent, and once again, I am left with my own thoughts, which after a few weeks, turn to different depths.  These are funny journeys God puts us on, you also must feel that sense of being suspended, for a whole different reason. I think he does this for amazing reasons, and when I don’t like what I find inside it is so obvious–I have nowhere to go…just before Him I am raw and real.

The sound of the waves gives me such a sense of eternal patience, it has been there for centuries, unending waves in and out.   Yet the walking on the beach shows me that it changes almost daily, the sand banks up high, and nothing stays on the steep edge, then it gets too high and breaks off and is all flat again, and full of amazing rocks and glass… tumbled in the stormy waves to a particular beauty.   sometimes even walking back on the same trail I will find new treasures that weren’t there when I walked outward.

I pray you will have that sense of the eternal patience of God, the God who brings hope in waves, and tumbles his gems to a smooth beauty in the storms, but delivers them to the sand in the quiet small waves…  He is developing even more gems in your soul and spirit, it is not obvious to me that he needs to do that–you already possess so much that is a treasure of faith.  But He trusts you with this lesson, that seems clear.”

And so I listen for that surf that is loud enough to reach my bedroom window, which tells me the glass and stones are being tumbled.  But I wait for the quiet days with the tide out, to go and find them, knowing that they won’t be within reach until the right time.

Week Six: Update

The tide has gone to it’s all time low.  There are “pools” of pebbles along the beach, and “waves” of debris, where you can see how high the water has deposited things.  All along the water’s edge, there is a deposit of sea glass and beautifully tumbled rock.  Yesterday I collected 343 pieces of glass (my daughter counts it), and this morning in half the time, we together collected 243 pieces…that nearly doubles or more than doubles our previous collection. So now we need to start creating some Christmas presents with our new “haul”.  Oh, and tomorrow night, my son (with a friend coming to visit) is going to go out and break and toss in the five wine bottles we have found…replenish the stock.

Ten Week Update:

It is now winter, the storms are crashing the glass, making it beautiful, but then there is the time for stillness.  Now, in winter, WAY up on the beach, there are the lines that are left by storms…many treasures.

Day coming to a close…the painted sky, another of God’s gifts to me.

Because You Ask…the Fridge and Bed Saga

We moved into a rental last month, nearly four weeks ago.  The first time we saw it, there was a house full of people (and a couple of babies). The house seemed crowded and small with all these people, some of them smoking, others enjoying a hot day off the beach.

The house is a bit older, but nice.  Close to the beach, hard to beat that.  On a fairly busy road to the sea…but it is getting quieter and quieter as the summer is fading.  No parking, we worried about that, someone’s car was vandalized nearby.

The old mattress, the old fridge behind it.

We hesitated and when we realized how hard it is to get a good rental here, we made a quick decision to go for it. Without all the people, there was quite a different feeling.

Turns out the house is a gem, cleaned up (without the cigarette butts lying around) it is really “sweet”, and with some colorful curtains and different pictures, the “drab” is gone.  We are enjoying a dream-come-true: the kind of thing you don’t expect will happen more than a couple of times in a lifetime.  Living beside the sea, we can hear it on a windy day.

But, it has a few little pieces of earth, reminding us this is not heaven yet.  There are ants, they think we have taken over their favorite feeding grounds (we have! The battle is on.)

There was some furniture, bulky beds that I called “Mexican Hacienda beds” imposing themselves into the common space, posing as  “living room furniture”. They were impossible to sit on, but sometimes we slept on them…we had the landlord take those away. Problem solved (sort of).

We sometimes slept on those because the mattresses in our bedrooms were …searching the thesaurus… okay, I’ve chosen my adjectives:  exceptionally abhorrent and barbarously off-putting.  My side of the bed was particularly off-putting because it was so worn down, I actually rolled out of it a bit too easily.

I decided the mattress might be like getting used to a futon: just do it for two weeks and it’ll feel right, and you’ll end up getting a good sleep, eventually.  We hung on for three weeks. At the end of three weeks I was (thesaurus, here I come…) scandalously foulsome when I got up each morning.

The trouble was, we also had a dilemma of having to deal with a fridge that was scandalously foulsome–rusting around the edges of the doors, so the seal was loose. Mould and mildew were winning;  that battle was not going my way.

A good look at the old fridge.

And the dilemma (I mentioned):  we had money to buy one of two things:

a new mattress, of excellent quality, orthopedic, best make available.

a new fridge on the lowest price rung–small and maybe not the best make, but new.

If you are wondering how much those items are, the dollar amount is 300.

I urged the Prof (my long-suffering husband) to ask the landlord if he would do something about one or both of these troubles, pointing out that in the summer (high season), there would be other renters who would pay more if the house was better equipped. Not sure the Prof added that piece of wisdom on to the landlord, but they had a long discussion, which ended up with the landlord offering to buy any of our purchases from us at 30% yearly depreciation.  The prof told him the bed was definitely going to be replaced and pointed out the years on the current mattress were beyond that formula by more than a few hundred percent (he said it much more politely, of course).

So after one particularly scandalously foulsome morning, the decision was finalized by the Prof: three and half weeks was long enough to find out we were not going to get used to the ravine-ous mattress.  He scouted around and found a couple of options, came to get me and we bought the white one with the summer/winter feature.  In summer, it has a side that does not reflect your body heat back at you. This is a big deal in a hot country.  In winter, almost all mattresses help  you stay warm in a house that is not built for a winter country, but gets cold anyway.

And so, the mattress was installed and I gazed at the fridge wondering if we had made the right decision.  The mould and mildew for me are more than just and aesthetic issue.

But, the key was…we had asked. We had told the landlord we wanted his help. The conversation had ended with a certain sense of sympathy (so reported the Prof) but not a sense of hope.  We expected nothing from him, and we bought the mattress with the intention of keeping it since his rate of depreciation was too rich for our blood.

So we expected nothing more, and looking at the fridge, with a sigh, I decided my current attitude of avoidance would have to last a little longer.

Come Sunday morning, the truck arrived to pick up the Mexican Hacienda beds and our folded up futon-grand-canyon mattress, and a few old kitchen chairs we also wanted out of the way.  And now came the big news!

The prof came bounding up the stairs with a look of “let-me-amaze-you” on his face.  “The landlord,” he announced, “has decided to let us trade our fridge with the one in the unit downstairs, since it will now be off-season for that rental.  We can have it until June.”  (The unit downstairs is “deluxe”, with a pool outside and a microwave in the kitchen and otherwise equal proportion of ants and dirt).  But, it has a new fridge, which we had envied when we moved in.  Now it was “ours”.  In addition, our kids were able to go down and find the best mattresses and trade theirs for slightly better ones.

All because we asked, or perhaps more precisely, because when he asked, the Prof persisted in the conversation in a way that made it clear to the Landlord that this was important to us.  If the Landlord had gone on without knowing, we would have gone on without.

Our “new” fridge! Squeaky clean!

I know God knows it all already.  We don’t help him out with the information we give in our prayers, though altogether too often we sound like that is what we are doing: helping God figure things out, letting him in on our wisdom of what needs to be done or to changed.

One of my good friends (thanks, SM) recently told me that our relationship with God, with prayer, with this world we live in, is much like a landlord- tennant relationship. God has given us the house to live in, to take care of. He still owns it, but he won’t walk in and re-arrange the furniture or take our distasteful (sometimes hideous) pictures off the wall, to replace them with his images of glory.  That’s ours to choose and to do.

But there are times when he wants us to ask…it’s our home and we need him to do some replacing or upgrading. But we have to ask. Perhaps we have to unlock the door, open it and then ask Him in.

We have a good mattress because we chose to go out and invest in one. We have a good fridge, only a year old, and all the gunk was clean-off-able on this one!  And this we have simply because the landlord was made aware and then in his kindness he saw a solution we had not even contemplated.  He took us completely by surprise, and by the way–

It made my day!

Tony, our friend, our brother

We first met Tony because he had listened to a radio show for many years that taught him about the Bible. He had come to believe that what they were saying and teaching was Truth and he wrote in to the address and got some materials. He wanted to know more, so he went and stood by the post office box for three days til someone came for the mail.

We visited him on his olive farm, he had met my husband a few weeks before that, and just a few days before they met, Tony’s dad had died in a “motor” accident (moped).  So the family was in shock and grieving, we don’t know how old Tony’s dad was. Tony’s grandma (his dad’s mom) had raised tony in the little house that was hers, about two hundred meters down the hill from the family house.  There was no running water or latrine on the property, and no electricity as I recall.

There were a lot of poeple at their house the day we came, it was hard to remember and distinguish them all. They were observing the “fortieth”, the 40th day after his father’s death. There were a group of men chanting from the Koran–it was quite a foreign setting and event, we had not been in such a country home before, and this was our first “fortieth”.

So mostly I just endured this day because there were so many people, so many new things, so little to feel comfortable about…

But it was the beginning of one of our most precious friendships.  Tony would, shortly after this (about three months later?) tell his family he was a Christian, and then things would unravel….we didn’t know that at the time.  

The Up-beat to a Bad Sleep

It seems like there are some things in life that don’t have an upside.  They just don’t.

But some people are more adept at finding the upside, so I am just going to practice that skill today.

The upside to a having a horribly lumpy bed that makes it impossible to sleep in, is that I get up and have some time on the “fast” internet…the internet is slow during the day here, and faster at night.  I get up early, and hey, I can access the web!

The upside to getting food poisoning this weekend (or was it the water? or was it the lettuce?) and having a day of zero energy, was that I read a book on my shelf that I have had for four years.  It was about a young woman in China, a novel, but parts of it  felt like there was a real story in there, disguised as a novel.  It made my life seem like a heavenly dream even with the bad water, bad bed, probably bad lettuce…

So, I am grateful.

And if you have food poisoning, the thing to drink is tea with honey.  Another form of limonatadolce.

Something Beautiful

Last Friday we went to the market to see if we could find curtain material in the cheap stalls.  We did! For about $3 a yard we found some nice material.  

The whole idea of having a curtain here is to keep the mosquitos and flies out, though I think the mosquitos smell your blood and come in anyway.  The old curtain in our bedroom had holes about an inch wide, and it looked like it arrived in a volkswagon van driving in from the 70’s… an invitation to the bugs to come in. I wanted a new curtain with colour included.

So we went to find the market which is normally in a big open field, held one day a week. It’s a roving market, all the same vendors go from town to town, each town has the market for one day. (When we visited Italy we found they have the same system in their small towns.) Here it is held on Friday so it’s called “Friday Market”, and that is all you need to know about it.  You just drive in the right direction and find it…usually.

Not here, not in this town. Here it is hidden away behind some street, but it has a big parking space which we failed to notice and drove on past.  We stopped to ask some guys on the side of the road where it was. One of them offered to take us, so he hopped in and drove there. By the time we got there, he was in a conversation with the Prof (my husband) so he kept talking and walking and took us right to the entrance point.

We found lots of pottery and nicknacks, obviously this first area is for tourists.  All the same things as in the tourist shops, but laid out on the ground, and sometimes with fixed prices, so that could be a big savings if we ever want a piece of pottery. Some of it is quite pretty, we might get to that when our house is functioning. 

Right now we are being practical, trying to get the things we need to live here. Curtains to keep out the flies and mosquitoes. But they should be pretty too, no point in denying that a nice curtain can do two things!

We asked a few people where the curtain material was and they gave the general direction, but this market is so crowded with vendors and buyers, you can’t see ahead.  So we walked in a huge square, I was ready to give up, when we came to them, about 50 meters from where we had started forty minutes before.

And there were tons of choices, lots of colours, and yes, beauty.  We found the one we wanted, with the colours of the sea in it, and a little bit of green to match some pictures we brought from home.  So this was a good day.

Along the way, we also passed a stall with used blankets, some of them looked good, so we rifled through.  I picked up one made of cotton, woven, and said, “This is the kind of thing I like. If it wasn’t so old and ratty I’d be interested.”

The Prof (smarter than me) looked for the tag, and showed me, “Ralph Lauren”.  I have some Ralph Lauren towels someone gave me once. I noticed they keep their value for a long time. I think of RL as “the gourmet” of household goods.  So I looked again–the woven cotton blanket/bed covering now looked mainly grubby, not too worn out, maybe.

Maybe a good washing would pull this back to beautiful, and cover my bed, and keep me warm until winter sets in.  

For the used goods, you bargain. If you are lucky, your husband speaks well enough that they think he is a local, and if you are smart enough, you offer a price that suggests you know what the value of something is, and you get it–for a deal (just over $5).

We were lucky and smart and really pleasantly surprised that our RL bedspread turned out super nice after a hot wash and a hanging in the sunshine, and it matches our floor tiles perfectly, and it looks great with our new curtains and the little throw quilt that adds colour to our room.

Sometimes it takes the long route to find the beauty in the journey.

Another good day, and a good discovery–the market.  Cheap, functional, beautiful. And maybe even quality (who knows if we will ever bump into Ralph again, but even once makes for a good day!)