Category Archives: bone

+46 Soulful Saturday: Week 8

+46 Soulful Saturday

This week’s theme thanks to the theme generator on WordPress.

Italo Calvino said, “The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.” Describe the ghosts that live in your house.

Create art or writing based on the above prompt and post a link, if you so desire.
Here’s my contribution for the week:

The ghosts in my house aren’t only thoughts and memories. Some of them are present in physical matter left behind from years past. Holes in the wall from teenage angst, a last minute carpet bought for the floor that I eventually gave birth to my youngest daughter on, an entryway marking the growth of children over the years.

When I was young, we moved around almost every single year until I was 12. There was no time for physical items to becomes markers of past events. There was no time for bonds to be formed among friends or even family outside my primary unit. No ghosts in those houses and apartments at all. The place that held ghosts for me at that stage of life was my mother’s car. Many road trips and moves were spent in her car where each of the three of us had our designated living area… mine was the back window. I laid against the cold of the back window watching other cars drive by and that was my place. Even though we stopped moving after I turned 12 and my Mom remarried, it took me years to feel at home anywhere other than a car. When I turned 15, my Mom wanted to move again, I told her no. I told her she could move without me, but that I was not moving again. And, truly, I haven’t. I may have lived in a couple different apartments before buying the house we have lived in for 12 years, but they have all been within about an hour of each other. Now, I have a home, ghosts and all.

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+38 Baby bird return to the nest

nest

Any mama knows that as much as we want to encourage each one of our babes to fly the nest and pursue their passions as they become adults, we also mourn the loss of the day to day interaction experienced when living together. Today I was granted a rare chance to savor the last few moments of my eldest baby’s transition between child and adult. He decided to come back home to live temporarily until he firms up his plans to possibly move to California. God please grant me the wisdom to use these next few hours, days, months wisely and not to waste them.

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+18 Soulful Saturday

+18 Soulful Saturday

As seems to be the pattern for this year so far, I am still working on my project for last week’s theme. The theme from last week was nemesis and the week before that the theme was intertwined. My project below is a combination of both themes. I figured out this week that time is my nemesis and so I am trying to incorporate the female human form in with the tree branches. I want to show the female form in various stages of life and it’s proving difficult. Part of me thinks this project would be better served in clay three dimensionally which is how I tend to think. Here’s my work, so far:

I am working on the pregnant female form being composed of tree branches. I don't think it's even close to where I want it yet.

Very, very rough sketch of the pregnant female form being composed of tree branches.                                                      I don’t think it’s even close to where I want it yet.

For this week’s theme, I’ve chosen solitary. As always, feel free to join me and post a link as soon as you are done under this post so that I, and hopefully others, can comment on your work. Photographs, paintings, drawings, poems, short stories… whatever moves you, are all acceptable.

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+13 Nuts and bolts

Today was a nuts and bolts kind of day… literally. Jeff and the coal boiler installer, Matt, worked in the basement on the new boiler non-stop from 7:30 am to 6:30 pm. The kind of work they did is just not the same kind of work you’d be doing in a modern house… Jeff had to chip away at the cement to change the opening from 4″ inches to 8″ inches to accomodate the exhaust pipe (I *think*). And, because a metal plate from the new (used) boiler was missing, Matt decided to cut a piece of sheet metal from the old boiler and fabricate it into a usable piece on the new boiler. This kind of work fascinates me and reminds me of times long gone by. I wonder what would happen if our country had to suddenly start manufacturing more of it’s own products again rather than outsourcing to other countries. Would our population know what to do? Would we be able to think mechanically or have the right tools? I realize there will always be a segment of the population that passes on knowledge or studies that sort of thing, but I tend to think that this type of knowledge was more commonplace a hundred years ago. Matt shared with us that he never imagined that he’d be getting calls from all up and down the east coast asking him questions about coal boiler installation and burning coal. I realize that coal is looked upon as “dirty” and damaging to the environment, but the truth, at least for residents of Pennsylvania and nearby states is that burning coal creates a smaller carbon footprint than oil when you factor in that it is local to PA and surrounding states and doesn’t have to be shipped from overseas or very far at all. I am looking forward to burning coal because it will also represent not being dependent on another country for my heating source. I will be paying a little more than 1/3 of what I was paying for oil equaling more money in my pocket and less in the pockets of foreigners. Oh, and I’ve been told that coal keeps houses warmer than oil or gas heat… but, I’ll give you the 411 on that fact once I have experienced it for myself.

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+9 Thank you. I’ll keep my problems, you keep yours

There’s a saying that God never gives us more than we can handle. In most cases, I believe this is true. Today, I am keenly aware that I choose my problems over those around me. I’d much rather be dealing with my lack of heat and generating money for a new heating system, than be looking down the nose of cancer with very little prospects of surviving. I’d much rather be shoveling the dirt out of my 112 year old basement than sitting in a lawyer’s office wondering if I will ever receive justice.

Good things happened today; unexpected breakfast with a friend at my favorite place, enough money in our bank account to make the deposit on the new heating system, sweet texts from my baby girl.

Thank you, God, for not giving me more than I can handle. Please help my friends. Image

My nemesis, the 60+ year old broken boiler in the scary basement.

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+5 God is good

For the past few days I have been preoccupied with the physical necessities of life, mainly heat and hot water. Two days ago, my husband awoke to the smell of oil and went in the basement to discover that oil from our heater was leaking all over the basement floor. We live in a 112 year old house and while it has many virtues, it’s heater is not one of them. The heater is about 60 years old and has been a great workhorse, but it’s time has come to an end. We are faced with fixing it one more time in the hope to make it through this season or to figure out a way to pay for a whole new system now… but, alas, with a 112 year old house, there are always interesting complications. The kitchen of our house is a shoddy addition that was built over the outside entrance to the basement limiting what kind of replacement can be installed. I’ve spent the past couple days researching various heating and hot water options and exploring how to pay for them.

All that to say… God is good. I went to bed and the title for the day in my devotional was, “balancing the budget”. And, the verse that went with it was:

“But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ” Matthew 6:33

I hadn’t really started praying about our heater situation yet, but God was already speaking to me. Some people would say it was a coincidence that the topic of the day in my book was finances and I might agree if this didn’t happen to me regularly over the span of my lifetime. So, take it or leave it. The prayer included for that day touched on trusting God, sharing a portion of our earnings with God for His glory, and putting God first in all things. I had started to come to the conclusion on my own earlier in the day that I needed to hand this heater situation over to God, but reading my devotional sealed the deal. Since I do the books for our business and for our house, I felt I needed to call a family meeting to discuss what I felt God was telling me.

Our family meeting made me feel more connected to my children and husband than I have felt in a long time. With our children all getting older, we can easily get attached to our various screens and go to our separate rooms with very little communication of true meaning. We actually prayed together as a family i.e. we all said something, instead of just me. We haven’t done that in years, if at all. And, we talked about some very difficult subjects.

The unexpected benefit of our heater breaking is our family coming together in a more meaningful way. Again I say, God is good.

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