The hum of the woods tells me it’s late August.
Across the continent, Mums buy erasers, pencils, and tablets,
Dust off lunch boxes or buy new ones,
Take inventory of closets and buy new socks and jeans,
Gather backpacks and pencil cases.

A flood of emotions follows them—
Guilt, perhaps, for the unfulfilled summer dreams,
Or joy because the summer was next to perfect.
Dread of a quieter house or hectic mornings,
Or relief that more structure is about to be enforced.
Or maybe all of these and more combined.

Mums of first graders might struggle with a lump in their throat,
And mums of high schoolers might too
Because it’s all rushing by so fast
And how can we soak it all up, and also, could this hard stage just pass already?

We pack lunches, cook breakfasts, hurry people out the door and down the road,
Give flash cards, quiz for tests, listen to school tales.
And then we do it again tomorrow, and again the day after
Through golden fall days and icy winter days and squishy spring days.

And somehow, in the again and again, a life is shaped and formed, 
And we were lucky enough to participate.

*A respectful nod to my homeschooling mom-friends, whose back-to-school days mean a whole lot more time investment and hard work than I can imagine.

I am not among this number. My life is pockmarked with doubts and fears and the uncomfortable feeling that I might have blueberry seeds in my teeth. I loathe decision making and seldom have advice for anyone, least of all myself.

I have even considered securing a life coach or a mentor. How nice would it be to have someone wiser than I take over my life and tell me how to live it? It sounds luxurious and relaxing, but I have never done anything about finding one. How in the world would I know who to choose?

And now, without warning, my problem has been solved for me.

It turns out that you really don’t need a mentor or a life coach if you have a couple of teenagers in your life. They will supply you with all the insight necessary for self-improvement, free of charge.

Uncertain about which dress/sweater combo is the least cringe? Ask your teen.

Questions about your own personal imbalances, such as a tendency to focus too much on the weeds that are getting the upper hand or the dirt on the garage floor? Your teen can answer them eloquently, with a bonus of providing suggestions for alternate focal points.

Desiring a more accurate picture of the vibe you give off in a crowd? Ask your teen. But make sure you have had your morning coffee first.

Curiosity surrounding your general quirks—the ones you didn’t know you had, like twitching your knee in a weird way, or smiling too big, or clearing your throat too often? Wonder no more if you have a teen in your house. They will screech with laughter over an inelegantly pointed toe that you had no idea existed. (Just laugh too. Trust me, it’s better for everyone.)

Small hiccups in the discipline program with the younger siblings? The counsel will be abundant and unsolicited.

The best part? This wealth of information is free, available 24/7, and delivered with no strings attached.

It’s a beautiful thing.

It also comes with a built-in party. No matter where you go or what you do, you will always have something to laugh about—or improve upon. You choose.

Overheard in our kitchen:

Much moaning and groaning from Teen #1 about an especially large, shiny pimple.

Teen 2: “You’re worried about that ONE pimple? I’ve started naming mine. This one is Lewis and this is Clark. And down here is Sacagawea.”

See what I mean? They make even pimples fun.

We love all of our crazies quite a lot. And at this rate, Tim and I will have our characters and personalities polished to perfection by the time we reach fifty. It’s something to look forward to.

*Posted with permission from The Mentors. They are good sports.

My normal coping mechanism is to abbreviate my time in the kitchen as much as possible. If I have enough cottage cheese on hand to make two lasagnas at once and put one in the freezer for that crazy week I know is looming in July, I do it. I tell the girls to double or triple the batch of molasses cookies so that we don’t have to bake them again for a couple of weeks. If a recipe waxes all nit-picky about unsalted butter and odd temperatures like 340*, I move on or else adapt it to my standards of simplicity and efficiency.

When people post about slow living and making goldfish crackers and pop tarts* from scratch and baking breads that require endless weighing and stretching and folding, I typically make a mental note that someone must not be feeding seven people three meals a day. Chances are high that they are serving their kids Kraft dinner on the sly while they make their beautiful reels.

However.

The other day I was browsing through an old Daughters of Promise magazine, and I happened upon a recipe for sourdough croissants. It included detailed instructions about butter layers and resting times and folding.

So many of our friends have spent weeks trotting around Europe in the last couple of years. They post magnificent pictures of ancient ruins and colorful salads and delicate European pastries, like croissants. Of course we are thrilled for them.

But our own travel prospects look dim. We will not be strolling through castles or swimming in the Mediterranean or treating ourselves to an afternoon pastry in a quaint English village any time soon. And this is fine; really, it is.

But for some reason, this croissant recipe felt almost like a plane ticket. I fed my sourdough starter.

And then I weighed out precisely 175 grams of sourdough starter, timed the many proofings, and measured my dough rectangles to 8x16” with a sewing tape measure. I even bought unsalted butter and set the oven to exactly 430*. I worried about whether there would be real layers in the finished product, and I got all excited when there were. No one else noticed them, which was disappointing, but I still thought they were impressive.

I also read up on making clotted cream and placed a dish of cream into the oven for 12 hours, timed with the oven timer. We made English scones to spread it on and felt like a bunch of queens (even though the scones did not rise to three times their original height like they were supposed to, and the clotted cream was nice, but didn’t necessarily change our lives.)

All this, when I am particularly concerned about pounds gathering around my middle!

In other culinary news, Tim bought me a block of knives that have transformed my opinions on chopping and slicing. I’ve never loved chopping vegetables that much, except that I think they look so pretty on the cutting board. But now my chef’s knife makes me feel powerful, and it’s become one of my favorite jobs. It’s a good thing, because we will need the vegetables to balance out the butter.

What is even happening?

It’s busy summertime. We have purslane to pull and mites to spray and nasty corners to clean. Why am I mixing flour and butter together and thrilling over chopping kale with a chef’s knife? I am supposed to be mature and sensible by now.

But won’t you come over and try an English scone with clotted cream, or maybe a salad made with garden fresh kale?

Or lettuce, if you want to be difficult about the kale. We have that too. But be quick. I expect my fascination to pass very soon.

Happy Tuesday.

*We do make a lot of our food from scratch, and I consider it well worth our time, but I draw the line at goldfish crackers and pop tarts. We mostly survive without them. But if you make your own, I am impressed, not scornful.

Social media may be trying to destroy our minds, but the dirt is still there when we choose to come back to it and refresh ourselves.

The world may be full of noise and confusion, but spiders still quietly spin webs that show up only in the dewy morning.

People may push and shove to be the biggest and the best, but there will always be a few who live and breathe quiet kindness.

We may be turning over more and more land to developers and concrete, but spots like this still exist.

The youth of our day may be on their phones too much, but many of them want to do the right thing almost as much as we want them to.

The world may be a disappointing place, full of decay and decline, but goodness is still there if you look for it.

And it always will be. Please remind me when I forget.

Some moms seem to accept the years with more grace than I. They embrace middle age and are perfectly happy to sit in the cheering section at ball games instead of tearing around the bases. Me? I kinda want to cry about it.

I know. How immature of me. Now that I am really and truly forty, I ought to get it together.

I have learned one or two things over these nineteen years, though. Not that they are particularly revolutionary or anything, just things I didn’t understand very well when we held our first baby. Maybe I don’t understand them well now, either, come to think of it, but at least I can write them down and think they look true.

1. Being a mom does not automatically make me unselfish, contrary to modern philosophy. I have to fight selfishness every single day (and we won’t talk about how often I give in to it).

2. “Caring for others is a form of self care,” Tim said the other day. I found this profound enough to mentally rehearse over and over. In a world where we are counseled to put ourselves first, the truth endures that the way to be happy is to make someone happy. Think about someone else, and your own problems shrink. Probably not vanish, but even shrinking is helpful.

3. Sleep is important. Vital, in fact. Being a mom means losing a lot of it. This is hard, but not unprecedented, and usually not fatal. It just goes with the territory. We do well to sleep when we can and try to not stress about how much we are missing.

4. Learning to carve out small pockets of rest is key to avoiding a frazzled state. When you are a mom, even vacations and nights are full of responsibility. Happy is the mom who can mop herself into a corner with a cup of tea and a good book for ten minutes here and ten minutes there and let that refresh her.

5. Being a mom usually means doing a lot of things that no one notices or appreciates. In the same vein as the sleep deprivation note, this is just part of being an adult. Maybe this would be a good time to thank your own mom for her work if you still have her with you, or others who spend a lot of time laboring under the radar without much recognition (moms aren’t the only ones who do this, and some moms demand recognition constantly; it’s not a one size fits all situation).

6. Taking time to cultivate friendships is hard, especially in the baby/toddler years. Sometimes we feel isolated and lonely. Some of this is probably inevitable, but a little extra effort to connect with a friend can make a huge difference for her and you both. You aren’t alone, even if it feels that way.

7. Watching someone go from newborn helplessness to teenage independence is an exhilarating, terrifying ride. The delicate balance of taking care of the things I can control and trusting God with the things I can’t takes significant wisdom. It’s far too easy to try to control things I can’t (or shouldn’t) and bypass the things I can (and should).

8. My children are not living my life. I should not be trying to live theirs. They will probably have to learn some of the same lessons I have had to, and some of them will be learned the hard way, just like they were for me. I need to prepare them for life as much as possible, but not panic if they don’t have a middle-aged perspective when they are adolescents. (I only understand this one in the daylight. In the wee hours, it’s a lost cause.)

9. Revel in the special moments. Their sweetness will give you strength for the hard or boring times. Keep the gushy notes from 9-year-olds and look back at them when you aren’t sure if anyone loves you.

10. Remember what an enormous privilege it is to raise children. I think we all know this, but it’s surprisingly easy to forget. We can find ourselves charging headlong through life, forgetting to see the beautiful things/people right in front of our eyes. Life won’t slow down for us, and we’d better sit up and take notice while we can still sit up.

A happy Monday to you. May your joys be greater than your sorrows today.

-Emily

Grandma said, “You don’t expect to bury your grandchildren, and for sure not two of them in the same week.” But she was brave, as always, riding many miles through blizzards and open prairies and mountains to attend the memorial services and hug her grieving children.

The first funeral was at Bay Tree, AB (the land of my birth), for my oldest cousin, just a few years ahead of me. He was a kind and gentle person, loved by many. I remember riding with him in his first car on a hot Sunday afternoon with some other cousins and siblings. We were young and free, shooting along straight, dusty Alberta roads with no parents to caution us to slow down or be sensible. He left behind a young widow and nine sweet children/teens. Also a mom and dad and many brothers and sisters and friends.

The second was in Bonners Ferry, ID, for a younger cousin, a brilliant young woman with a promising future. She was known for her lovely tea parties and the way she drew people together. I didn’t know her well as an adult, but to me she was always the fascinating little cousin with springy hair from Oregon who got her portrait taken in a tulip field. She leaves behind a fiancé, a heartbroken mom and dad, and four beautiful sisters.

It all just feels so wrong and sad.

I didn’t know either of these cousins well at the time of their deaths. I cry for the families left behind with empty chairs.

Both sibling groups got up and sang beautifully for us at the memorials. Their singing will be even more moving now, since loss adds depth and meaning, but we will always think of the voices that are missing.

I loved the chance to travel with my brother and sisters and mom and grandma.(Bless Tim, he drove us all over the place.) I got to visit with old friends I hadn’t seen in twenty-plus years, keep my brother and sisters overnight, buy bubble gum and Aero chocolate for my kids at Bay Tree store, sleep at my aunt’s house, go for coffee with my dad, and sing with my cousins.

But it’s been entirely too much going away, and now it’s time to clean out the fridge with the authority that only Mother wields and plant potatoes and weed flower beds.

I will cry when I think of the people I love waking up to the gut punch of someone important missing every morning. I will hug my husband and children a little more often and try to remember how precious and valuable every life is. And we will all more consciously walk that delicate line of remembering what was, looking forward to what will be, and living in today.

I picture another world of ideas and words and beautiful thoughts that only a select pale and bushy-haired few tap into.

In contrast, my life is full of laundry and lunches and labor, and that other world mostly sits on a cloud on the horizon, out of reach.

Sometimes I decide there is no excuse for being so ignorant, so I force myself to plod through a thick book on history or a difficult classic that I hope will transform my life, but I still can’t keep the war generals straight or remember enough other facts to impress myself.

Last weekend my friend Shilah and I drove to Oregon to attend a writer’s conference. One of the speakers mentioned something about spending a few days “hobnobbing with intellectuals.”

Well! This was a new thought to me. Were we intellectuals? I thought of how hard it was for me to admit to wanting to be there at all because am I actually a writer? And exactly how embarrassing is it to be pretending?

But how fun to think that I was sharing a bench with that nebulous group of humans with magnificent minds, even if I was only pretending to belong. I settled in happily to listen and improve my mind.

My phone buzzed in my book bag. “I just don’t know what to do with this yogurt.”

I typed out instructions for straining the yogurt, feeling a little guilty for playing hooky and a lot grateful for the people carrying on without me at home.

My phone kept buzzing throughout the day:

“Anything on the gym?”

“Would this work for pimples?”

“What’s in it? Do you know?”

“Where is that meat you were talking about?”

“!!!!!!!!”

“Do you want both casseroles?”

Between answering questions from home, I wrote notes as fast as I could, soaked up information that I will probably forget, and visited with intellectuals.

And then Shilah and I booked it for home. We ate ice cream when we knew we shouldn’t, and Shilah bought bubble gum when we got sleepy. We blew bubbles like a couple of ten-year-olds, laughed at small things, and forgot to pretend anything.

I’m back home again, content enough to let the intellectuals do their thing without me. I will be here dealing with pimples and casseroles and gyms and yogurt, and I will be happy about it.

It’s the people willing to do the hard work of living who make the world go around, after all.

Those Civil War generals, though. I might still work on getting them straight.

Sue appeared on our front porch a couple of days after we moved into our little brown house eight years ago, bearing tomatoes and squash and a warm welcome. I liked her instantly, but I had no idea that she would become one of my dearest friends.

She invited me to tour her magnificent gardens, which I did with pleasure (I never can turn down a chance to view someone else’s tomatoes). We met her husband Pete, and before long they hired our kids to take care of their pets and water their gardens when they traveled.

Sue came to visit me. We drank tea in the living room and talked about raising children in this scary age of screens and changing times. Her children are grown, but she has grandchildren the ages of our offspring, so we had plenty of conversation opportunities. I learned that in her lifetime she worked for NASA as a projects manager and taught high school English and owned a kitchen shop.

Now she is one of my most regular and beloved visitors. I get excited every time I get a text asking if it would suit for her come over and discuss life. We have graduated to coffee as our beverage, and now we sit at the kitchen table instead of in the living room. We discuss our latest reads, world events, needs around us and what to do about them, and always the children and teens in our lives. We talk about sourdough and homemade noodles and freshly ground flour and our gardens.

Sue has introduced me to other lovely people in the community who have also become good friends. How neat is that?

I am amazed over and over at how much we have in common, when our lives are so different. Sue speaks into my life with a fresh perspective, and I always feel refreshed by the time she leaves. She is a delightful conversationalist, both interesting and interested.

Sue and Pete share their berry bounty with us, so we can enjoy blueberries and raspberries all winter long. We run over to their house often in our garden clothes to pick berries or to return a bowl. Sometimes we pick raspberries together, and we have learned a lot about each other while sharing scratches and hot sunshine.

Quin was born on Pete’s birthday, and has been the delighted recipient of a row of beautiful farm and construction equipment from Pete for his birthdays.

Sue and Pete feel almost like next door grandparents for our kids. They keep track of their activities and are pleased when they succeed at something, which turns out to be one of the sweetest gifts you can give a parent.

Sue and I are planning a bread baking spree sometime soon. She is going to teach me the fine points of grinding my own flour and baking bread with it, and I am going to share my sourdough techniques. Together we should be unstoppable.

How fun to learn that a person doesn’t have to have a life that looks much like mine to be a kindred spirit. I hope when we are older, we will remember to cross the street and deliver tomatoes to the new noisy family and cheer for their kids and drink coffee with them.

But there were some good ones, and here they are for your review:

Some of my favorites were Catch Me if You Can, Becoming Elizabeth Elliot, and Levi’s Will. Of course the Fitzgerald books are always worth a reread. Mayflower and The Path Between the Seas were a touch weighty for my little brain, but I forced my way through and enjoyed them some of the time. The rest of the time I felt heroic, so they were a win/win.

Looking over these, I can see that almost all of them were a recommendation from a friend, and that makes me feel warm inside.

I hope 2026 looks promising for you. I do love a new year and a fresh stack of books. I would love to hear your favorite read(s) from 2025.

Cheers.

-Emily

One of my hangups is related to the suffering that goes on, even though Jesus came to save us. I know—this is an age-old struggle, and there are 1,567 Sunday school platitudes to settle it. But trite little answers don’t always cut it for me, and no number of even good, solid answers stops the babies from starving or the children from being caught in the whiplash of wars and the neglect of parents that check out.

It’s not necessarily my own sorrows that weigh me down, although there is some of that too. It’s the bigger sadness of a broken world where there is so much loss and so much that isn’t as it should be.

So I wrap the presents and attend the parties and make the special food with a heaviness that won’t go away. I don’t know why it comes to haunt me at Christmas time particularly.

But this Christmas season, the meaning of Emmanuel, “God with us” settled into my consciousness. I’ve heard that phrase since before I could talk, of course, and known that God is with us, but it was like God showed me a new picture of Himself, and of the Advent.

This God is not sitting up on some cloudy throne, detached and watching us cry from a distance. He isn’t making arbitrary decisions, or turning a deaf ear, or looking away, even when it feels like He is.

He sees our tears and cares about them. He walks right beside us through the devastation and the grief, and His heart also breaks over the children. Instead of swooping down and erasing our problems, He wades through them with us.

He makes our sorrow His sorrow.

He collects our tears in a bottle.

He has healing in His wings.

He is the God Who sees.

He covers us with His feathers.

He is the God of all comfort.

Someday the wrongs will be made right. And I have to believe that He also comforts and cares for those who have never had the chance to hear His name.

The knot is still there, but joy has joined it, because we get to serve such a great God, Who sees the smallest things.

Merry Christmas to you. May your coffee be strong and your heart joyful or comforted, whichever is more appropriate.

A couple of days ago, I eyed a little box of random chargers and cords that have accumulated over the years and seem to have no purpose in life. Most of them are likely dated and useless, but I don’t always have a good concept of what devices are lurking around the house needing to be charged. So the chargers stay, and my nerves suffer every time I encounter them.

“I’m going to throw them all away,” I decided on a whim, and felt that immediate rush of delight that comes from being daring and brave and a little reckless. Nobody would even miss these wiry little black and white serpents, and we would have an extra cubic foot of airspace in our house. What could go wrong?

But before I accomplished the brave deed, a cry arose for a missing walkie-talkie charging cord. No one knew where the correct one had disappeared to, but I thought of my box of unwanted cords and commenced pawing through them. And sure enough, there was a compatible one, all tangled up with similar slender company. Happy day! The walkie talkies are functional again. Spies creep through the kitchen on missions, their communication devices crackling. Heavy matters are discussed between the basement and upstairs, and between the mailbox and the living room. Someone even sent a walkie-talkie to bed with me the other night to ensure a quick response to any question that might arise overnight. (It was a one-time deal, not likely to occur a second time).

So that is why I have held onto that little box of chargers for so long! I somehow knew it would save the day at some point. I guess I will tuck the box away for future emergencies, and we will do without that extra cubic foot of airspace. And the chargers snaking from the outlets will need to stay where they are as well, energizing our electronics. Now I know for sure who is the boss around here, and it isn’t me.

So, as you can imagine, my yogurt making took a sharp dive after I said that I could make it. Two full batches of too-runny yogurt set me down hard and reminded me of my place in the world.

But today’s batch was back on par, so here I am, setting myself up for future failure once again by acting like I know how to do something. Here is how I do it:

1. Empty one gallon of whole milk into the instant pot.

2. Hit the yogurt button until the display says boil.

   

3. After the boil cycle, let the milk cool to 108-115* F. I don’t worry about using a thermometer, just shoot for about the same temperature I use for activating yeast when I bake bread.

4. When the milk is the right temperature, skim off the skin that formed and add one cup of plain yogurt. I’ve had the most consistent success with Lucerne whole yogurt, but that is probably just me. Whisk well and use the yogurt button again to set the eight hour yogurt cycle.

   

5. After eight hours, your yogurt should look like this:

   

   It’s a good sign if it looks a little separated, and it should have an almost sliceable texture.

   

6. Strain overnight. I set a colander in a big bowl, line it with a tea towel or paper towels, dump in the yogurt, and cover. In the morning, your yogurt should have been reduced by about half, and you should have a bowlful of whey underneath.

   

7. Transfer the strained yogurt into a bowl and whip it with about 1/2 cup of maple syrup. You can use a mixer and beaters or an immersion blender for this step. This was the real game changer for me.

   

I like to jar up the whey that I strained out and store it in the fridge. Then I use it for the liquid in bread baking. I think it would work in place of milk in other baking as well, but I haven’t done a lot of experimenting. I can’t keep up with using all of it, though, so I pour some of it on my garden as well (or down the drain, but please don’t tell that around because I feel a little guilty about it).

There are many methods of heating the milk and keeping it warm to incubate the yogurt, but the part that you want to pay attention to is whipping it with maple syrup. I learned this trick from my cousin Kayla, and it makes all the difference.

Happy yogurt making. I might come eat it at your house if that’s okay, since I will probably never be able to get it to cooperate again after this know-it-all post.

It’s all a hoax, guys. I’m several hours into this forties thing, and the landscape looks the same over here. My joints are fine, and I still don’t feel very mature.

But I have, indeed, lived for forty years, and in celebration of that milestone I am going to burden you with forty facts about myself or shreds of dubious insight that I have gathered in my four decades of life. This may be a preview of long-windedness developing in my latter years. Consider yourself forewarned.

1. I love to ride bike.

2. I love clever wording. I will often remember a specific phrase word for word from a book longer than I remember the story line.

3. Early morning is my favorite time of the day.

4. I’m grateful to have married a man who keeps me from taking myself too seriously. This is an important quality in a husband.

5. I adore babies and small children.

6. I prefer to visit with one person at a time versus always being in a big group.

7. I love eating salads, but I don’t like making them.

8. I learned to knit and crochet and embroider when I was an adolescent and created many lumpy specimens, but I haven’t kept it up. Perhaps I will get back into crafting once I have little reading glasses to complete the vibe.

9. I love feeding guests. The harder part of hosting for me is cleaning out the tea towel drawer and making sure there are no strange objects hanging out under the recliner.

10. I am a terrible clothing shopper, which explains my sorry wardrobe. I can seldom find what I like, and when I do I can hardly make myself follow through and buy it. Or I buy something and realize when I get home that I actually hate it.

11. I have learned to enjoy grocery shopping, though. I am particular about hitting sales and picking out the best produce, and I don’t always want to trust someone else to pick up a head of lettuce or a bag of bananas for me.

12. I love reading to children.

13. I like to be productive and am happiest when I am busy.

14. If I could change one thing about my appearance, I would ask for thick hair.

15. If I could change one thing about my personality, I would ask to be fun and interesting.

16. If I could change one thing about my intellect, I would ask to be able to remember historical facts better.

17. Self-doubt is my constant companion.

18. I spend a big percentage of my waking hours looking for my phone.

19. We almost never dry dishes with a tea towel at our house. They are left to their own devices in the drainer.

20. I hate competitions. Even if it’s something I stand a decent chance of winning, I just despise everything about dividing people into winners and losers.

21. The older I get, the less impressed I am with noise and fanfare, and the more impressed I am with quiet faithfulness.

22. I dislike black tea. I can manage green tea and most herbal teas, but I just can’t with black tea, even when my tea-snob, use-loose-leaf-and-steep-it-just-right kids make it for me.

23. Nobody told me how fun it would be to have a houseful of teenagers

24. Or how many towels they would use.

25. Bragging makes me ill.

26. But be advised that a friend sharing a victory is completely different from bragging in my book.

27. If you really want me to like someone you are introducing me to, please do not spend hours telling me how amazing they are beforehand. It gives me the impression that I am meeting some sort of celebrity, and it makes me nervous.

28. I would rather wear a thick coat and shiver a bit in a car than have heat blowing in my face.

29. I enjoy playing (some) table games now and then, but they really are not my thing.

30. I love a good hike in the mountains.

31. I didn’t think I wanted an instant pot, but now that I have one I use it all the time.

32. I like routines, and spontaneity is not one of my strong points, although I do make an effort now and then.

33. I appreciate friendship more all the time.

34. My favorite Bible verse right now is Isaiah 30:15: “In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”

35. I enjoy studying about nutrition and exercise. Too bad I don’t get quite as enthused about putting my research into practice.

36. Big events make me want to crawl under the couch.

37. I know a clean house and good meals are not the most important things in life. But I enjoy my housework far more if I take the attitude that they do matter quite a lot, so I go with that most of the time.

38. Some of the most influential people in my life have been the behind-the-scenes, quiet housewives who may not have all the answers, but model Christianity and service well.

39. Nobody told me that life would be mostly about relationships, and that they are harder than they look.

40. I can’t decide if I’m going to let my age show by becoming matronly and wise or by not caring what people think and being a bit wild and crazy. Any thoughts on the matter are welcome.

    Now that I have these all written out, I feel silly and self-centered. Who wants to read 40 facts about anyone? But I guess I will post it anyway and remember that no one is obligated to read here at all, although I am delighted with anyone who does.

    I am making a rule. You may wish me a happy birthday only if you tell me which, if any, of these facts resonates with you. Or, if you’d rather, tell me something random about yourself. I get tired of hearing myself talk. Cheers!

Here is what is working right now:

1)Yogurt parfaits. We picked many blueberries and raspberries this summer, thanks to a generous neighbor, a nearby blueberry farm, and good growing conditions. I’ve discovered a rhythm that works for yogurt making, so we can dine on high quality Greek yogurt whenever we please, guilt-free. A little Hope’s Table granola on top makes it a feast fit for a queen.

2)Job charts. I entertained a brief fantasy at the beginning of the school term that we have reached the stage where kitchen cleanup could happen on school mornings without much direction from Mother. This theory was debunked in short order, but it took Mother a long time to recalibrate and produce a job chart. But it is hanging on the fridge now and the nagging and frustration have lessened (which is not the same thing as disappearing, in case you were curious).

3)Getting up with the alarm so that I have a couple of minutes to read my Bible and drink my coffee before the morning rush. I know. How obvious.

4)Embracing the darkness. We live fairly far north and on the eastern side of our time zone, so the sun sets at 4:00 pm right now. This year I am trying to focus on the fact that we have our long, cozy evenings back. We are working on making them worth staying home for, which doesn’t just happen automatically for some reason. Some fails, some wins in this camp, but today we are talking about wins.

5)Tea in the evenings. Sometimes by the end of the day I am tired of dishes and messes and I just want everyone to go to bed already. But a pot of tea is soothing and makes everyone happy, so why not? The dirty mugs and the spilled tea leaves are so very minor.

6)We are using the library again. This summer was full, and I didn’t read much. But I am so happy to be ordering in books again and discovering the wealth of volumes that I have not yet read.

I feel braver already. Thank you for reading here. Tell me win of your own if you would be so kind.

I did not, but I was curious. He told me he needed it to make a more silky pasta. This surprised me, as he did not look like your typical pasta maker. (What should a pasta maker look like? I don’t know either. But not like this guy.) He was bearded and gray haired and dressed in dirty muck boots and a black pullover with pet hair on it. But here he was, searching for the perfect silky flour. So I looked too, and we found it: “00 pizza flour,” it was called. We didn’t know if it was right for sure, so we both googled “00 flour,” and sure enough, it’s an Italian flour especially refined for pizza and pasta.

Well. I learned something new. I might even try making pasta one of these days now that I know to buy fancy Italian flour.

Next I was treated to a speech on how much money you can save when you make all your breads from scratch. He recently made a meat pie with a from-scratch flaky crust in a cast iron skillet divided into sections. The whole thing cost him only $8, since he just had to buy the flour and baking soda and salt and stuff. This savings left him a lot more money to spend on beer that night.

My inspiration was complete when he vanished and reappeared a couple of seconds later looking for sourdough starter on the baking shelves. Perhaps I should have offered him one, since I doubted he would find one there. But I don’t carry sourdough starters on my person, so I left instead. He was muttering something about homesteading as a wheeled past him. I wish him much success in his sourdough efforts.

The world is full of the most fascinating and surprising people. There’s nothing quite like a good hunt for 00 flour to bring them to the surface.

And this is now:

I feel like a queen.

A lot happened in those three weeks while everything was ripped out and reinstalled. We moved our kitchen out to the shop and more or less lived out there.

I had this crazy idea before the work began that life would slow down with no real kitchen to work out of. When my kitchen is where I spend eighty percent of my waking hours, how could I not end up with endless hours to blog and order pictures and sew and do fall garden/yard cleanup?

It came as a shock that everyone still thought they had to eat three times a day. We had a decent setup in the shop, so I had no excuse for slacking. Everything was possible, just more time consuming. Poof! There went all my projects.

And we had good times out there, including Zoe’s fourteenth birthday. The whole thing was an adventure, one that we will probably always remember fondly.

My mom visited last weekend, but I guess I was too busy visiting to take any pictures. I am sad about that. Thankfully my Aunt Twila got this picture of us when we were at her house. My mom is the one in blue, and the other two in green and orange are my dear aunts, Twila and Luci. And I am at the end, combing Erica’s hair for church.

In unrelated news, I decided I’d seen our three faces together in the mirror enough times to warrant documenting. I feel amused every time this happens. I love having teenagers in the house, even though they take up more bathroom space than necessary.

The other day I rang the bell before I read the bedtime story, per instructions. The younger kids and I are reading The Secret Seven by Enid Blyton, and it almost makes me feel like I’m ten again. I’m sad that Enid Blyton’s books are hard to find anymore. They are almost a backdrop of my childhood, and the Dawson Creek library had a whole delicious row of them with crackly plastic jackets. I can almost feel and hear and smell them now. Thankfully my mom has a few copies and she lets us borrow them.

Quin set up a store the other day in the basement while everyone else was at school/work. I was required to visit every time the bell rang. (As you may have gathered, my life is defined by bells these days.) During one visit, I bought a 5x9 piece of yellow metal, which he crawled into a cardboard box to produce for me. He spent a long time finding the “L” and “O” keys on his computer to spell “yellow.” Which makes perfect sense when you think about it, especially when you personally pronounce the word “ello.”

I have good garden help.

We are all sorry about everything turning black and frozen. It’s hard to say goodbye to summer.

A happy weekend to you. Thanks for reading here.

Would you help me make a thankful list? I want a little different kind from what we often do.

I’ve been thinking a lot about redemption. I know God does an infinite number of amazing things, but lately I’m most impressed with His ability to change the difficult, hard circumstances into something beautiful. Sometimes it takes years for us to see His hand in our grief and in the impossible pain that is part of life on this planet. But always He is there, quietly working to soften hearts and create beauty from ashes.

I am looking for readers who would like to share their stories of difficulties that were hard to accept, but in time became something they thanked God for because of the unexpected good that came from them.

The difficulty could be anything from a physical disability that opened the door to new friendships, to the loss of a good job that changed your life trajectory for something even better, to a small thing like missing a ride and being happy about it in the end.

I’m interested in all of your stories, big and dramatic, or small and quiet. If anyone responds, I will plan to compile the stories and post them on October 13. If I get enough responses (I hope I do), I will save some for the US Thanksgiving.

To submit a story, email me at emily12185@gmail.com. Or, if you know me personally and have my other contact information, feel free to get in touch any other way. If you’d rather tell me your story without writing it down, send me a voice message or call me, and I can write it down for you. Try to keep your story under 200 words if you can. If you can’t, please send it anyway, and we can figure something out. You can be anonymous or sign your name, your choice. Please submit your story by October 6.

I’m looking forward to hearing how God has redeemed broken things for you.

Thanks. -Emily

Of freezer bags and blancher overflow,

The land of hodgepodge meals and sticky floors,

Of timers, snapping lids, and lists that grow.

And why? Inquiring minds may dare to ask.

We could be out exploring distant hills,

Or stretched upon the lawn with books and tea,

Or gliding on the lake, or chasing thrills.

I set my coffee down amidst the beans,

And contemplate the value of our toil.

The canner yawns again, unsatisfied.

We fill it with the gold scratched from the soil.

And then I see the poem in the steam,

In gifts of God, preserved and tucked away.

Delight lies dormant under stacks of corn.

The kitchen stove’s my altar for today.

I was dubious at first. Record myself talking and let people listen to it? That did not sound like a good plan. I let several messages from my influential friend go by unanswered because the whole thing seemed so weird. But eventually I got brave and sent a message back. Before long, I was hooked.

I have never been an avid phone conversationalist, so this little switch-up of communication methods changed my life. I could duck into a quiet corner for a minute to send a message instead of making that phone call that would alert every person in the house that I was occupied and a prime target for all the urgent needs of the day. I could quit worrying about bothering my friends with a ringing phone when they were busy putting their baby to bed or entertaining guests or mowing the lawn. They could wait to listen to my message until it was convenient for them, and answer me when they felt like it. Communicating with my faraway friends became a much more doable thing.

It amazed me how quickly my inhibitions vanished about sending a recording of my voice into cyberspace. The girl who would have clapped her hands to her ears and galloped from the room upon hearing her own voice replayed in any way was now sending two-minute-long messages to her friends about everything from her projects of the day to her current feelings on parenting.

Of course I graduated to WhatsApp a long time ago, which has the redeeming feature of the option to delete a message. This is important for me, even though I have friends who protest when I make use of it. They just have to deal with it now and then, when my tongue gets tangled up or I stutter around saying nothing for a minute and a half.

In spite of the great strides I have made surrounding voice messaging in the last eight years, I still have my points of unease. I agree with you that they don’t make a lot of sense, but I wonder if any of my fellow creatures have similar boundaries.

1)I can send you a voice message and then listen to it myself to make sure I got my point across. (It took me years to get to this place, so please take a moment to celebrate with me.) I don’t mind knowing that you are listening to my message. I can listen to it and you can listen to it, but we will not be listening to it together. Nope. It can only be done separately.

2)I can send you a message and feel comfortable with you listening to it, and also send one to another friend and feel fine about her listening to hers. But I will get squirmy if I know that you are listening to hers or she is listening to yours. Please just stick to what is yours.

3)I can hardly bear to send a message in the hearing of another person. I will escape to another room to speak into my phone if at all possible.

4)I have my limits about sending voice messages to groups. I will send the same voice message to twenty different people without flinching, but if I need to message those twenty people collectively in a WhatsApp group, you will find me typing out my speech, thank you very much.

Can any of this be explained, and do you also have personal voice messaging rules?

And who would’ve thought, ten years ago, that it would be a foreign idea to call your friend to ask her for a recipe instead of shooting her a voice message?

At one time I considered myself the queen of my kitchen. It was my own private domain. I personally filled square Rubbermaid containers with leftover roasted potatoes and settled them next to the egg carton on the shelf in the fridge. When I wanted the potatoes for lunch the next day, they were waiting for me in exactly the same spot. When I noticed that the olive oil bottle was getting lighter, I wrote “olive oil” on my shopping list and bought it the next time I was in the store. I made all the decisions about when to send tea towels and dish rags to the laundry room. I choose all the menus, and nobody but me noticed or cared if a meal was heavy on carbs and low on protein. I brought a bunch of bananas home from Safeway and easily kept track of how many were left because I doled them out myself.

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line my position as Chief Everything Officer in my kitchen swirled down the drain. Tall people circle through my used-to-be kingdom, using my immersion blender to mix up protein shakes and my stand blender to make smoothies, stirring up little jars of chia pudding, and suggesting that we switch from cookies to protein balls. They make inquiries about the nutritional content of the food I cook, and mention that we could handle more meat with our meals. They rattle pill bottles and announce that we are out of calcium and vitamin D. They use my favorite recipe books and splatter them and forget to tell me that they used up almost all of the cocoa.

They clean up after a meal while I sweep the floors or putter around watering peppers or take a walk with Tim. The leftover meatballs get sucked into the black hole of the refrigerator, and I forget about them until they go bad because I don’t recognize the container an unknown person chose as a meatball receptacle. They cycle through dishrags and tea towels at an astonishing rate, and prefer the old-fashioned waffle-weavish dishrags instead of the green and gray microfiber ones that I like.

And most jolting of all: the enormous piles of groceries that I buy evaporate almost before they hit the pantry shelf or the fridge, and I find myself staring at empty fruit bowls once again. I stash two quarts of home made Greek yogurt in the fridge, happy to have that job done for the week, and two days later I can’t find any when I want to make a parfait for myself.

These tall people make endless cups of tea, carefully crafted and beautiful in delicate china. They bake lovely golden loaves of bread and perfect pizza. They fry pancakes with cottage cheese in them. They peel and chop my potatoes and other veggies, and make better pico de gallo than I do. They dig out cutting boards and make themselves salads for bedtime snacks, complete with curls of lettuce on the floor and Italian dressing left on the table.

They sing and argue and laugh at the kitchen sink or the stove. They hurt each other’s feelings, and sometimes mine, but they apologize, and so do I. They have turned my kitchen into a hub, a busy, messy place for learning and growing, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

But where is my best whisk, guys??? I really miss it.