Scruffy

Do you know that Bible verse that tells us not to worry? Where Jesus says to look at the birds of the air, who do not plant food for themselves or reap their harvest or store away their food? Jesus says that God still feeds them. Then he tells us that we who are constantly working or worried about working and planning our futures and how we are going to provide for ourselves (do we really do that? provide for ourselves I mean?) are of MUCH greater value than those birds to our Father.

I have become a bird watcher. No joke...and it is not necessarily my job to feed these birds that come to the farm every day, but I am sitting here looking at these bird feeders and my bird friends who are visiting them right now, and noticing that the birds need more food. So I will be right back.

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Ok. So don't worry, they've all been fed. I put my cowboy boots on over my pajama pants, donned my robe, and went outside. If I had done that in the city, I think that neighbors like Agnes from the TV sitcom Bewitched would have thought that I was crazy.
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Anyway, I have become a bird watcher. In Early Childhood Education we talk about "just in time" learning. This is the type of learning that is not forced or staged, but occurs just when the child is most interested and NEEDS that information. Like rather than forcing a child to memorize measurements from a math textbook, a child might think to himself one afternoon, "Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, I think I am going to make her some cookies. Let me get a cookbook...now which one has cookie recipes in it? This one does not have cookies listed in the index, but this one does. Hmmm...it says to turn to page 85. Ok, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85! Ok, this recipe says I need a half cup of melted butter. The butter is measured on the stick in tablespoons... I wonder how many tablespoons are in a half of a cup?" And then the child has to figure it out, so he is LEARNING, but he is learning the information at a time in which he is most interested because he really wants to make his mom these cookies for her birthday. The child is much more likely to remember that 8 tablespoons equal half of a cup at this point than if his teacher had required him to memorize that information from a book for a test in class.

That is how I have become with birds. I have never in my life been interested in birds, and had you tried to tell me about them through a text book or some film I might have fallen asleep. But I have so enjoyed watching the birds at the farm that now I flip through books to find out what each one is, and I have named a couple of them, and I have become a bird watcher.

Scruffy is a chickadee. He visits the feeders quite often with his friends, and he is one of the braver ones. When I go out to the feeders and refill them, it takes some of the birds a little bit of time to realize I have gone back inside and will not be bugging them at the feeders anymore. But Scruffy, he just comes back almost immediately. What Scruffy and some of his friends have taught me is just how amazing those verses in Matthew 6 that I talked about at the beginning of this post actually are. Birds eat ALL DAY. And they do not sow or reap a harvest, they do not store away their food like bears and such. They just eat when they are hungry. And if you think about it, they are fluttering and flittering and gliding and hopping and escaping from foxes and cats and rainstorms and windstorms all day long, so they work up a huge appetite! God still provides for them. And I don't think they worry about it. I don't think that they stop and say,"Oh man, what is wrong with me? I expend way to much energy so I have to eat all the time...what if one day there isn't enough food left???"

No, they just eat and play and do what they, as birds, were created to do.....fly.

On the farm

Where I live right now: the farm.

And I love it. I live with some good friends, who are really like my second parents, and they have been more than kind to let me stay here and play and live. C & V are out of town right now, so I am responsible for the horses. This morning I woke up around 7:30 and just lay in bed for a while. I got up around 8 and got dressed with Sarah the cat under my feet and on my bed and pressing onto my clean clothes with her paws. I loved it. Then I put a load of laundry in the washing machine. I am pretending that this is my home and sometimes pretending that I am Anne of Green Gables and sometimes Fern of Charolette's Web. I was Fern of Charolette's Web (or maybe I was her mother...) this morning when I put clothes in the washing machine. I was Fern when I walked to the barn to get the horses' food and then walked over to the pasture to feed them.

I am watching 3 dee[r run through the far pasture right now. They must have been hiding in the tall grass. I am also watching C's brother's horses walk and talk with each other.

Misty, one of C's horses, was standing by the water trough a few minutes ago and she just stood there, so I thought maybe she was trying to tell me that she needed more water (I can see the horses from where I am sitting, and they are pretty close to the house, so they might be able to see me...I wouldn't be surprised). So I got out of my chair, opened the door to the screened porch, and walked outside towards the pasture. Actually once I got outside I ran. So I was running over to the water trough, and I know Misty saw me. Horses are so aware of everything. And I got over to the trough and turned on the water and Misty jumped up in the air and got skiddish and shook and jumped sideways and then scampered (yes, I mean scampered, not galloped, because really, I scared her and she did not look like a brave galloping horse) over closer to the hay trough where the other horses were. I just cracked up...laughed OUTLOUD at the silliness. Then May, the Belgian workhorse, walked over to Misty and I imagined her saying, "What in the world are you doing?" Except May is really a gentle horse and I think she probably said something more like, "It's okay, Misty, it was just the water."

Oh, the country. So now I am just visiting with the birds. Of course they are outside and I am inside, but they are just on the other side of this window next to which I am sitting. Toby the cat is napping on the back of his couch, and Sarah the cat is playing in the attic, so they are not very interested in birds at the moment.

I have decided I like being responsible for the animals, and I don't think I ever want to live in the city again.

Snow Day!!

There is something so sound about snow. I woke up this morning and dozed for about 45 minutes, thinking of all that I had to DO today. Then, around 7:30 a.m., I thought, “Oh, the weather forecaster said that there was a chance of snow last night,” and I leaned out of bed towards the window, thinking, “There’s no way…” and then oh my gosh!!!!!! I jumped out of bed and practically ran downstairs to see Vicki. “Vicki!!!” I called. “What in the world??” She said, “I know! Everything is cancelled. We have about 6 inches.” And I bounded around the house, buzzing and flittering from the window to the coffee maker to the window again, and then to the refrigerator, and then to the microwave, and then back to the window, then to the phone, and then to the chair next to the window, where I sat, dumbfounded, for the next hour. I drank my coffee, said hello to the birds, watched Sarah the cat say hello to the birds, and just took it all in. I called my best friends and exclaimed again, “What in the world?!” It was just so amazing to see how God surprised us today!! Most of the day was spent just admiring the snow. I did some school work, and then tonight I flittered outside because it is snowing AGAIN! I stood out under the snow in nothing but my regular clothes and gazed up and stretched my arms out and just soaked it in. God is so good. Tonight I made some Valentine’s Day gifts…cute little fabric scrap bookmarks for my friends. And now I am lying in bed listening to the sleet, and thinking how snow really is comforting. It’s like a blanket across the land, and it silences everything. The only sound is the crunching, and I just feel as though I am in another world. Memphis, Tennessee: second snow day in a week. Incredible. I wonder if we will be out of school tomorrow?