Transit Tidbits

I was given a body that fails in a few crucial ways and has made life to be a great challenge at times. This was cause for great anguish when I was a child, but now that I am an adult, I live a carefully constructed lifestyle for those chronic health issues.

These include asthma, eczema, food sensitivities and seasonal allergies and are related to breathing, to that lovely covering over our bodies called skin and to what goes into the body as nourishment. Some of them can be addressed by medication and others by careful living. All of them are chronic which means sometimes they are improved and sometimes they are worse. It’s been a long row to hoe to come to a place of acceptance of these diseases in my life. And there was and will continue to be grieving the loss of a more normal life.

Part of that acceptance is taking medication for ongoing issues. Today’s example involves asthma.

I take a drug daily for asthma symptoms called theophylline. I’ve taken it every day for many years and for me this is a maintenance drug for my condition. It is a medicine that relaxes the muscles in the chest and opens up the bronchial airways. When I don’t take it, after several hours, I begin to wheeze and cough and potentially risk my ability to breath, which in turn could affect how long I stay alive. It’s kind of important to me.

I have taken this so long that I often forget about some of the side effects, but it’s good to be reminded of them occasionally. Some of these symptoms are anxiety and nervousness. When too much of the drug is taken, another result is that the heart is thumping faster than usual and this makes it difficult getting or staying asleep. I deal well with the issues that result from this, but a problem comes in when I need to take additional medicines for a brief time, like for an infection. The potential interactions between medications must always be considered.

Recently I had a sinus infection and was given an antibiotic to heal. As is the case with any illness of this nature, part of the drill is to follow standard behaviors as in lots of rest and water, take the medication until it’s gone and take it the same time every day. I know for many people, there exists a love hate relationship with antibiotics and for me, sometimes they really help.

I often will read the list of side effects, just so I am not blindsided by any uncomfortable situations that could arise. The list for this antibiotic was quite intimidating!

I could expect to have diarrhea for the first few days on the new medication and once that effect had passed I could look forward to other more negative issues. These are not for sissies, not by a long shot. Like, how about suicidal thoughts? Or thoughts that life is meaningless? Or the drug could cause a bit of a hair trigger temper? Now that can make one’s home life a little more challenging than normal, don’t you think, not to mention work life? And that is on top of just trying to get well from the illness!

I did find an occasional feeling of malaise when I was on that antibiotic. I didn’t have suicidal thoughts but I did have some dark thoughts about my job, the long commute and the daily grind of dinner making when I was tired after a day of work and whether it was worth it all.

Another side effect listed was “you could have difficulty sleeping”. This is a double whammy as the medication, theophylline, taken for asthma, already has difficulty sleeping as a side effect.

I thought getting good rest was part of getting well…. How can I get good rest if I have difficulty sleeping? Not only that, the effects could snowball when the lack of sleep every night could lead to worse behavior during the day and this medication almost promises you will be challenged in the “keep your emotions under wraps” department. That could really raise havoc at work. I could get a headache just trying to wrap my brain around all those effects.

This recovering from an infection is serious business. I need to hunker down and assess daily, “How am I doing? Is my behavior off the charts or am I cruising nicely?”

Who thought that having a sinus infection involved self-reflection?

Even when there are no drug interactions to consider, it is good to do self-reflection. This is especially true when faced with a temporary or long term set-back in health.

Most of the time, life could use some minor adjustments. Usually, I am not being kind enough to myself or as generous with myself as I am to others, so I sense a need to change my behavior. These positive qualities are magnified in God and I am drawn to His Word the Bible to move forward.

In Jeremiah 31:30, it reads, “The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying: Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with loving kindness I have drawn you.”

God has a forever love for you and me! He is loving and kind.

God is supportive, even more than I am to myself, as in 2 Chronicles 16:9 “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him.” This is such an encouragement to my heart!

So, even when chronic illness assails the body and threatens to undermine the progress made so far, I can rest in the knowledge that God cares and loves me and you.

I got through the drug interactions with the antibiotics okay. It has taken a long time to recover from the sinus infection as there have been some setbacks along the way. But, all in all, I am grateful there is medication available for my need. I am grateful for a caring primary care doctor, and I am happy I can improve.

Having a chronic disease sounds a clarion call to slow down. Not just slow down to take care of the chronic need, but also slow down to look at one’s life, to see the value in living, to enjoy taking a breath and appreciating the life one is given. This life is a blessing from an infinite and loving God. We are not here on this planet by accident. Your life matters. Even with a chronic disease.

A deer stood at the edge of a forest, tail swishing, pulling down leaves from the nearby alder tree. I had heard the rustling sounds while moving to the deck and wondered what was out there in the meadow. I discovered it was who, not what. Two little ones stood near the larger female. They were still sprinkled with spots, as if a giant hand had thrown powdered sugar at their brown sides. Those spots told me the fawns were under five months old, still quite young. A deer could be described as a brown, four legged animal with soft eyes, long triangular shaped head, a small black nose in front and two elongated oval ears. A white tail accentuated the rump behind the brown furred flank.

The family of deer would likely be here for several hours, browsing for tasty morsels among the forest trees and meadow grass. Our laxness in trimming branches back or mowing the meadow benefitted these creatures. In essence, we had created a wildlife habitat. And inhabit, they did.

The deer yanked leaves down from the trees and grass up from the ground, chewing continually. If the quiet continued, they might even nestle down under a tree for a nap. However should a neighbor dog got wind of them, the ensuing bark and chase would move the deer out of the area quickly. Flies buzzed nearby, the warmth of the day hung in the humid air and the slight breeze cooled me.

Growing up in the Midwest, I never expected to see deer up close, let alone several times a year, as we did here in our oasis from city life. I had spotted them time and again while vacationing on the Oregon Coast, traveling through the state parks. The first time I saw them in the wild was at Ecola State Park in Cannon Beach, Oregon. We were driving to the beach and saw a few deer eating near the road. As we zipped past, they calmly munched.

When our kids were small, we dreamed of living away from the hubbub of the city life. At that time, we were living in SE Portland, on a street in the Hawthorne District. It was a great location for those who enjoyed living in the midst of shops, restaurants, and all the amenities of city life. But, now we hoped to raise our kids in a quieter area. So, we went searching for a different kind of home life. We found it in the hills east of Portland.

What we didn’t expect, though, was all the wildlife we would have the privilege of enjoying. At the higher altitude, we observed a different set of creatures. An example of this habitat difference is evident in the great blue heron, a bird we have observed many times at Oxbow Park but not at Dabney Park, though both are along the Sandy River, and have wondered if it was because herons like to live in isolated groups.

We have seen many more varied animals and insects living here than we had ever seen in the city, from deer and raccoons, to woodpeckers, salamanders and even praying mantis. In years past, the only place I have seen salamanders was at Lost Lake, located southwest of Hood River, Oregon, in the Mt Hood National Forest. Woodpeckers were sometimes audible in the deep woods as were great horned owls, but only if a person were to venture into their habitat for a backpacking trip.

We had a front row seat to nature’s finest offerings. I have loved to lie in bed at night and hear the hooting of owls back and forth to each other. Or hear the rustling of deer as they tread their way around the house and along a narrow path down the slope. Many times, these deer would settle under our trees and rest for the night.

Friends of ours like to hunt but luckily for our deer, they could not hunt here. Sometimes I wonder though about some neighbors. I would not be surprised to find out if one or two up in these hills might see those deer as a source of food, if they could just figure out how to surreptitiously take advantage of their proximity. Sometimes there are gunshots in the night, but it’s difficult to hear where they are coming from and impossible to tell the intended target.

There are a few deer that we consider our friends, friends in the sense that they don’t run away when we stand on the deck and watch them, which is about as close as a person can come to being friends with a deer. If we put out a salt lick, like one of our neighbors does, it’s likely they would come around more often. But at present, some neighbors have dogs that like to chase. So, we feel quite lucky when the dogs are in and the deer come close.

One female deer we have seen in years past was one we named Baby Girl. And a few years later, Baby Girl has a baby of her own. It has been funny to refer to the younger one as Baby Girl’s Baby Girl. This year our deer friends have been a pair of bucks we called Gerald and Ferdinand. Ferdinand was older with a bigger rack and Gerald had a smaller rack, but was still quite impressive in appearance. In recent days, they have been frequenting our road for the ripened fruit on nearby trees. They’ll eat their fill night after night, unless we got out first to pick our share. In a few weeks, they will disappear to their own activities in the deeper forest areas. But for now, we have been given the honor of seeing them, taking picture after picture, or just enjoying their presence at our welcoming wildlife home.

I spent my formative years in Oklahoma and then our family moved to Oregon, back to my parents birthplace, and I have lived here since. Oklahoma made a big impact on me, though, because of its hot summers and snowy winters. Recently I was reflecting upon both places and wrote these short pieces. I hope you enjoy them!

We came around a steep wooded hill and rolled to a stop. Stepping out of the car onto a sloped blacktop parking lot, the roar of the ocean assailed my ears with its rush of noise, while the wind whipped through my hair. The water lay flat and blue, reaching to the far horizon. It was the largest expanse of flat anything I had seen in a good long while, not since I had left the Oklahoma wheat fields several months back. Suddenly a wistfulness rose in my heart and a longing welled up within me for another glimpse of those golden waving plants, that sea of wheat, those flatlands, that vastness of land and sky.

But there was no going back. This place of steep hills, deep valleys and dark fir forests was now home. It would take some getting used to, but this new home did have its own gifts and mysteries. Time was on my side.

I grew up on the low rolling hills of Oklahoma, amidst scrub land and wildflowers, scissor tail fly catchers and other birds of the Plains. Used to the song of the cicada with its whirring wings, mobs of them flew through the air to attach themselves to tree branches every spring.

Tarantula migrations a few times a year, creepy as they were, was a sure sign of the seasons changing. Vivid sunsets. Clouds floating overhead that held shapes of elephants, a car or someone reading a book. Plentiful horned toads, garter snakes and crawling turtles one could keep for a pet and feed lettuce, at least for a few days, and then release back into the wild. Snow so deep in winter we would walk right outside and play in the yard for a few hours and then return back inside to warm up and dry off. The snow would stay for a week or a month, as long as the cold lasted.

Summer days that we would joke were hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk, and on one very hot day, we tried it! But then discovered, the sidewalk wasn’t hot enough after all, so that was just a colloquialism. Fun memory though! Nearly every house in our suburb had central air conditioning to ward off the sweltering heat. It was great to be a kid there!

What do you do when your daughter comes home from her job with a head cold and you know she has plans to move three bales of hay weighing up to eighty pounds each and two fifty pound bags of animal feed and the hauling cart has a crack in it? Oh, yeah, and the weather is predicted to be heavy rain all day. Of course, if you are like me, you help out.

I knew my daughter. If she decided the best thing to do was to move that hay, nothing would stop her, not a sore throat, not a bad cough and especially not a head cold. So, helping her was better than trying to convince her to wait a day. Hopefully, I could take some of the load off her so she would not end up completely exhausted.

The destination for the feed was up the road in an out of the way pasture. A crack in the hauling cart was a detriment to moving the hay. Emily had previously worked with that cart, but found that she was constantly fighting with it. She would try to stay on the path, and the cart would try to hurl her and the hay down the slope prior to reaching the stable. She had to continually wrest it back on the path. That was a sure route to exhaustion. And, I did not relish fighting a heavy cart just to move still heavier hay. I have always been impressed with how strong Emily has got to be. She hauls those eighty pound bales on a biweekly basis. It’s tiring work and all for the benefit of a horse and two goats. I’ve moved some heavy things in my day, but I am no match for Emily’s strength.

We used a large polyester tarp and some lightweight rope to move the hay and feed. There was about one half mile to travel from the car to the stable. Part of the trip involved walking through a steeply sloped meadow along a narrow trail and then, most challenging of all, through a sloping, sloppy area that became a river of mud on a rainy day.

The sloping area was not previously the challenge it was now. Emily’s new horse Fabio changed all that. Fabio loved to race around the meadow and then slide his way home to the stable across the slope. He was like a baseball player sliding into home plate, except Fabio stayed on his feet. He had a curiously surprised look on his face for those last few feet, like he didn’t expect to slide but somehow it happened every time! It was funny to watch him. His sliding turned that slope into a slick hill.

It was quite the traverse. We were grateful for sturdy, waterproof boots. Hauling by tarp was a new method for Emily and it took a bit of maneuvering to wrap the hay bales in the tarp and keep them dry during the trip down.

The first two bales were not too difficult to pull and blessedly, the meadow had been mowed the previous summer so there was not any stubble to catch on the underside. The major ick factor was walking through the horse manure. Emily had previously owned a horse, Lacey, who had been very particular where she chose to “leave her business”. But Lacey has died (see previous post in October 2014 “A Tribute to Lacey”). Emily now had a younger gelding (which means fixed male horse for us horse novices – like me!), Fabio. Fabio had no such particularities. He seemed to choose wherever he was standing at the moment, except he did avoid the path, and for that, we were grateful.

The muddy patch near the stable was another matter. This was where we found the most manure leavings scattered everywhere, so that area created a serious impediment to getting the hay to its destination. Mud in our area had a lot of clay in it which, as you may know, created a slicker surface, easier to slide and fall in. It became a little tricky getting down that slope and around the fence to the stable area, especially today with the driving rain flowing in sheets from the sky. The driving rain, the claylike mud, the slope where Fabio slide and the manure all were factors that labeled this spot a danger zone. I was mentally prepared to slip, but I came through unscathed. What a relief!

We got the hay unloaded and lifted into place in the storage area. Then, back up to the car to get the fifty pound bags and the last bale, rain still blowing into our faces, soaking everything else. It was a rough trek.

An interesting thing happened on our way back, though. My daughter began to talk about what we had to be thankful for. And, that changed everything about that day.

We were still wet and tired. The rain still fell heavily across our backs, faces and legs soaking us to the skin and we still had another load ahead of us. But it mattered less because of our focus.

“I’m glad it’s not hotter out,” she said, “Or, we would be really sweaty right now.”

“I’m glad it’s not colder now, or icy,” I countered. “Yeah”, she replied, “because we might be having ice pellets hitting our faces, instead of just raindrops!”

“We only have one more load to go.” I said. “Yes, we are halfway there,” she replied.

Suddenly our tiring adventure had turned into an epiphany of praise to God. We were no longer concentrating on getting this over with. Instead, we were focusing on the good things in the midst of this hard task.

The second load was still there to be done and it was still a big challenge. But we were okay. We were able to find blessing in the middle of the mud.

I belong to a writers group where we encourage each other on our writing journeys. We meet on a regular basis throughout the year.
One of the enjoyable activities we do at each meeting is a writers prompt. This is a device used to spark imagination. Each writer has a chance to practice his or her own writing for about 15 minutes. It’s a spur of the moment exercise and a good tool.

I have found it gives a great view into the window of my mind and heart. I am learning to ‘hear my writer voice’ and this activity helps me see that more clearly.

The way the writers prompt works is that a picture is randomly picked from a collection of photos of a scene or an object, and each writer studies that picture for a few minutes before starting to write. Usually we write for 15 to 20 minutes on whatever comes to mind when we each view the photo. Someone keeps track of the time.

Recently, the picture was of a young boy, a young girl and a small dog in a boat on a very large windswept lake. The water was choppy and the umbrella the young girl held seemed almost to be pulled from her grasp by the wind. There were cows grazing on the distant hills.

After we had our 15 minutes of writing time, each person shared their story.

A few wrote about the two youngsters in the boat, the promise of a picnic and an adventure in the offing. One writer delved into the monochromatic color scheme of the picture itself, and another person wrote from the perspective of an artist painting that picture. I wrote about a conversation between the cows who were feeding on the far off hills. We each chose something interesting to us from that one photo and wrote in our own unique styles.

In my story, one cow wanted to be adventuresome and break out of the humdrum of his routine existence. He was attracted to the kids in the boat, though he was resigned to the idea that in his experience, cows didn’t go boating. The other cow was content with the normalcy of life as they had known it for years.

Each writer shared a bit of him or herself in their writing. Our individual writings were not just sharing facts or weaving a plot around some events, but exploring the unanswered questions within our hearts and minds. I have just in the last few years taken up this craft in earnest, but it is a fascinating medium for conveying ideas, learning new information, being a part of an adventure or traveling down new thought paths.

As far as finding my voice I often fight for the person, or in this case cow, that hopes to break free from constraints or find a new path that is acceptable to follow. It’s fun to see where the imagination can take a writer when unexpected ideas are pondered!

Back in our writers group, we have rarely finished those short stories that began from a writers prompt, but it would be a great idea! I might explore this story just to see what happens to a cow that wants more out of life than eating grass.

Okay, true confessions time. I do get discouraged time and again. I’m a “the glass is half full” kind of person. Hopeful, happy, see the bright side of things, see the funny side of things and do my part to make this world a better place. But I do get discouraged.

I have a few chronic diseases and that plays into the feeling of discouragement. But sometimes, the depravity of man gets to me. How defensive people can be, how snotty or rude, how one-up-man-ship comes into play in an interaction. And I just get sad about it. So when that happens, besides reading the Bible, I turn to hopeful stories.

Back in time, before the internet and youtube where a person can find a host of funny videos, endearing stories and all manner of material to entertain, all we had were books and magazines, TV and movies and of course, each other!

One book I have found that is of great encouragement is Joan Wester Anderson’s book, Where Miracles Happen. We all need hope in this world and these stories give it. They also remind me of Gods great care toward each of us all the time.

Another source of great stories is Guideposts, Chicken Soup for the Soul and Joe Wheeler’s series, Christmas in My Heart. Amazon has many of them for sale for under ten dollars and libraries carry them as well.

If you ever get discourages, I hope you will allow yourself the privilege of finding a hopeful story or two to read.

Happy Reading!

The terror and worry I felt had little to do with a looming danger. It was not from a loud noise, a clap of thunder, or a masked intruder. In fact, the frightening circumstance arose not from a personal sense of impending doom, but from the perceived threat of a creature that crawled along the ground. It was an invasion of tarantulas.

Just like the terror that arose from bad dreams after a viewing of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, or feeling frightened by the furry, flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, so, a sweet little girl was frightened by a migration of spiders.

It was not just any common spider like we have here in the Pacific Northwest. There were no spiders in Oregon that could compete on size and ugliness with the Oklahoma brown tarantula. Just take a quick look on the computer or in a dictionary, and you would be able to see what I mean. The biggest spiders we get in Oregon are trapdoor spiders about one inch in size. Another large spider in Oregon that you may be familiar with is the giant house spider which can be up to two inches in circumference.

No, the kind I am referring to is the Oklahoma brown tarantula spider. It was a large three-inch plus sized, furry brown thing that, at certain times every year, rose up out of its nest in the ground and crawled its way south.

The terror I felt, as a youngster, had little to do with being poisoned, or jumped on, or bitten. The fright was due to the size, up to five inches of hairy spider body and legs. If those tarantulas had been one inch in diameter, I imagined less frightfulness. But they were at least three inches and up to five inches, which included their four to five inch hairy brown legs.

Then there was the crawling, the silent creeping and unrelenting movement forward. It was the number of spiders all in one place, coming persistently forward, through the fields, across the street, into the yard and around the house moving on, until there were no more.

What caused this migration of fuzzy spiders? It is thought to be the male spiders traveling south in search of a mate. And in that case, I would say, please carry on with your migration! Go your way! Forge your path away from here, and I would be happy to see you go there.

It was true that these spiders were not particularly poisonous, or even dangerous. Just frightening to a little girl who innocently played with dolls and made flowers out of construction paper. The spiders were not a threat to society, and that may be why they are not treated with any more alarm than I witnessed growing up. They were native to many areas in the Southeastern United States and migrated in June and September.

We lived on the eastside of town, at the edge of the suburbs. There were open fields just across the road. This openness likely aided the spiders choice of available routes to go. Whatever the case, when school ended in the Spring, and then started back up in the Fall, there was a chance that soon we would again witness the march of the spiders.

As a grade school child going home, I remember picking my way carefully down the sidewalk trying to get to my front door. But, every few steps, there would be a big fuzzy brown spider in my way. Suddenly, my home seemed like the safest place on earth, but I could not get there because there were twenty or more spiders crawling across my path. Cars would run over them and for days afterwards there would be spider legs and body parts in the street where the tires smashed them flat. The debris would eventually disintegrate and disappear. It was never soon enough for me!

I have now lived in the Pacific Northwest for over thirty years, but I still remember the horror at seeing large numbers of hairy tarantulas trekking across the road. When we lived in Oklahoma, there were many critters I enjoyed learning about and adopting as pets. My family even had a pet tarantula in the kitchen. But, when we moved away, leaving behind the tarantula was a bonus.

I have thought about traveling back to Oklahoma, just to see my childhood home. I would love to see a beautiful sunset and I would not mind experiencing a thunder shower, or even take the opportunity to look for lightning bugs at night. But, I would happily avoid the months of the tarantula migration!

Years ago when I was getting my BA in communication, I studied Japanese. I took two years of the language and now, if pressed, can have a limited conversation with a Japanese person, or I can eavesdrop on someone else’s conversation and get the gist of the topic at hand. I’m not much good for directions, but I can say, “Hi”.

Around that same time, I had a one week crash course in Japanese when I was teaching English in Japan for a summer. This was through Asian Access, an excellent mission organization to East Asia. I learned basic skills, key phrases and how to decipher the Japanese language. The goal was to be able to travel in the area and keep from embarrassing myself.

One of the things about crash courses is the emphasis on key phrases that will help get a person through a tight spot in communication. Japanese has several such phrases. Even now, I can rattle off many of them.

Sumi-masen (pronounced ‘sue me maa sen’) means “excuse me”. Right before starting to eat a meal, a person says a phrase that sounds like ‘eat your duck with moss’, ita-da-ki-masu meaning “I will receive”. There’s also a phrase for saying “Hi”, which is kon’nichi wa (pronounced ‘ko knee chee wa’) and means “Good Afternoon”. Japanese has a different phrase for greeting someone depending on the time of day.

Fast forward to today. I work as a scheduler for a medical clinic at an area hospital. I schedule appointments for children so I am frequently on the phone talking with their parents. Many parents who call in are not English speakers. At the hospital where I work, there is a translation center that is manned by people who provide translation assistance for any person that calls in. We don’t want language to be a barrier to providing a needed service to a family.
Spanish is one of the languages for which I get frequent calls. Just the other day, I got a call from a woman who said, ‘Spanish?’ when I answered. I knew I could not help her because of my limited Spanish speaking skills. I needed to get a Spanish interpreter from the translation service on the line with us, so I could find out what the Spanish speaking woman needed. Sometimes this process takes a few minutes, and as I did not want this woman to hang up on me during that hold time, I said to her, Chotto matte kudasai (pronounced cho toe ma tay coo dah sai) and put her on hold while I called the translation service.

One of my co-workers said to me, “What did you say? What language was that?”

And, suddenly I realized what I had done. I had to admit, instead of using the Spanish words for ‘please wait for a moment’, un momento por favor, I had searched my memory, and come up with Japanese! I had used absolutely the right phrase to let the caller know that getting the translator would take a few minutes. Unfortunately, I had used the incorrect language. Instead of embarrassing myself in Japan, I was embarrassing myself back home in America!

Language is a funny thing and so is memory. As it happens, the vowel sounds used in Spanish and Japanese are similar and maybe that’s part of the answer to its use that day. As a result, I now have by my work phone a prominently displayed message un momento, por favor for those frequent Spanish callers. And right on the tip of my tongue, I am ready with Japanese!

As we drove down our hill this morning, through a tunnel of trees, we experienced a magical moment …

At first, we noticed a large profusion of brown and yellow leaves on the pavement, light colored shapes upon a dark background. As we drove further on, a leaf-fall was happening and we drove right through it!

It is a unique experience, watching small objects fall from the sky. The falling of leaves is similar to watching snowflakes fall during a winter storm. They twirl and spin on their way to the ground. The oak and maple leaves fell in random patterns on and around our car creating a carpet of color on the road and on us. It was as if tiny fairies held each leaf and guided them to earth. We marveled at the beauty of God’s handiwork in the various leaf colors and shapes. Perhaps it was a change in temperature or a gust of wind that occurred right at the time we were driving down the road? Whatever the case, we were in the midst of a leaf-fall! They plopped on the car roof and slide along the windows. It was a memory to tuck away and pull out later in the day to marvel over. November 6, 2014 was made special because of this event.

On my return trip, I had been looking forward to a repeat performance. But there were no leaves floating through the air this time. Not a one. There were just leaves on the road and trees. No magical fairies twirling leaves in the air.

Yet we still had our memory tucked away. We were handed beauty on a platter and had the opportunity to appreciate it. We could have viewed those falling leaves as a bothersome reminder that the cold of winter would soon be upon us. We could have viewed those leaves as evidence of death and decay and nothing more. Or, we could turn that thinking around and appreciate the beauty of Fall making its exit this year, giving us an opportunity to enjoy some bright color before the cold and chilling winds of Winter were ushered in.

Nothing earth shattering happened on November 6th, except that a shower of leaves fell on us as we drove our car down the road. It was a small occurrence. But that is what our days are made of, aren’t they? Small occurences happening within a span of time, one after the other and before you know it, they make up a day.

We have the opportunity to see beauty right in front of us, and we have a choice how we each respond to that beauty and to others in this journey we are all on through life.

I saw a leaf fall today. What will you see?

On a shelf, a clear glass jar

Shaped by water, these stones are

Of various colors of the land

White, burnt umber, gray and tan

 

A variety of matter comes from away

Some is white, some volcanic gray

Smooth and  bubbled, cloudy and clear

Glasslike orbs of beauty here.

 

By pressure and storm impaction,

They are crafted by volcanic action.

Now come forth at winter’s morn.

Agates are these treasures born.