Committing to Color

It's fifteen minutes to Wednesday. I am having difficulty falling asleep because of the three children in my bedroom and the biscotti crumbs in my bed.

After six months in this house, I am finally starting to sign my signature on it. I went to Sherwin Williams yesterday and came home with a bucket of Martha Stewart Cameo blue. (Her color chips are not on display but the recipes remain in the computer.) I hate picking out paint. It feels like when I was falling in love with Paul...sick to my stomach and panicky. Lucky for Paul, I have been more committed to him than I have been to some of the colors that have graced our walls. We've been married for WAAAY longer than six hours.

I am painting a hallway. Seven doors, a mile of trim and wainscotting. It takes a lot of Cameo and Extra White to cover up seventies yellow and dark tan. I am compelled to do this during the summer months. I cannot spend another winter wrapped in dark hues.

The children thrive on routine. This painting frenzy has thrown them off kilter. Eating chocolate covered biscotti in my bed was only one of a hundred ways they ran amuck today.

I'm off to scoot a kid over, brush out the crumbs and crawl into bed. Hopefully I'll wake up in the morning and still be committed to Cameo blue.

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Spelling Wisdom

One day while skipping around the internet, I came across these:

And when I clicked on the sample, I knew we had to change spelling curriculums. Again. Goodbye Spelling Power and MacMillan and Sequential Spelling! We've found our true love.

The problem with the afore mentioned curricula is sheer boredom. Memorizing lists of words is mind numbing and as my children don't like their school work to lull them to sleep, they often push spelling to the side in favor of more exciting lessons.

When I found Spelling Wisdom, I realized what has been missing: an idea, something to engage the mind so that learning the difference between than and then occurs almost incidentally.

Sandra Shaffer uses the writings of famous men and women (Helen Keller, Beethoven, Winston Churchill...), Bible passages and quotes from quality literature...poems and novels (Robinson Crusoe, The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, All the World's a Stage...) to teach more than six thousand frequently used word…

Rain

My sister-in-law lugs a heavy bucket of water around her herb garden, gives each plant a long sip. "It's been three weeks since we've had rain," she sighs looking out over the dusty vegetable garden and the shriveled brown grass in the pasture beyond. We help my brother pick beans and pull the weeds around them. The dry ground pulls back and some of the weeds snap off above the roots. We give up in the strawberry plants, sit on the porch, listen to the dogs pant.

We travel home in an air conditioned bubble. The whole length of the Shenandoah valley is crispy brown, the corn stunted. We pull into our Amish county driveway, greener here but the grass is short and the air hot. We breathe shallow breaths, unpack, crank the air conditioning. No rain in the forecast, three weeks and counting.

Saturday there will be a wedding, an outdoor wedding, and finally rain threatens. Stuart is on the phone with the bride. "Pray that the rain holds off," she says. Saturday w…

Until Death...

Kindred spirits, Anne would call them. Two who complete each other, two who are better...best together, soul mates one cannot imagine apart. I can count the kindred marriages I know on a couple of fingers and after last week, that count is down by one.

"You look so happy," Dave says as Stuart and I stand awkward and wordless before him. I bend down to wrap my arms around him and wonder, Where is the good in this? Where? A week before we bumped into Dave and his wife, Deb, down at the Famous Brands. Deb glowed with good health and good news and for the remainder of the day we basked in the unexpected good fortune of meeting these old friends. And now there is Dave minus Deb. How can this be?
"It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live." Mark Twain's Own Autobiography
"You look so happy." We do not look happy but somehow this remark makes sense because Dave has loved with …

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