21 Days of Prayer for Sons Challenge

Anne Conder at I Live in an Antbed introduced me to Brooke McGlothlin's 21 Days of Prayer for Sons Challenge, which begins April 1st.  I will be participating and have already purchased my ebook: Warrior Prayers: Praying the Word for Boys in the Areas They Need it Most.  I am more excited than I can say about my commitment to lift up my precious (but angsty) middle-schooler during the month of April. 

To learn more about the 21 Days of Prayer for Sons Challenge, click the button below.  Please let me know if you're in!

Jason Hatfield and the Gift of Snowy River

There is something about the outside of a horse

that is good for the inside of a man. 

-Winston Churchill

Jason Hatfield

Dad bought, first, a gelded, black-and-white Shetland pony named Pepper.  He had a terrible attitude, and we found him more reliable in harness than under saddle.  Our Pennsylvania neighbors felt sorry for Pepper's having to pull Dad in sleigh and sulky, but Pepper was strong: just suited poorly for the trail.  So, next, Dad bought horses: an Appaloosa gelding named Big Chew for himself, a Paso Fino named Daisy for Mom, and--after my borrowing, for a time, a very old gelding named Flash--a registered, Morgan mare named Firefly for me. 

I was nine when Dad bought Firefly, and--thanks to my being ill and weak with a virus--my parents lifted me to the window to see her the day Dad brought her home.  She and I were close to the same age, and she was spirited and would have been entirely too much horse for a nine-year-old girl but for her immediate and profound love for me.  Two years later, she moved with our family to East Tennessee.

I wish I could remember how Jason Hatfield and I came to ride together, but I can't.  I know it happened shortly after my family moved to Tennessee and assume I was yet eleven.  Jason is a year younger than I, and he rode a black gelding named Leroy.  Jason and I had exactly two things in common: our love for Camp Galilee (which deserves its own post at some point), and our love for our horses. 

Jason's and my horses were not pampered animals.  I guess they never saw the inside of a riding ring, and Firefly, I know, never owned a blanket: just a saddle pad.  My family's barn in Tennesee was (and is) really just an open-faced loafing shed.  Firefly ate a small amount of grain every day but hay only in winter, when no green grass grew for her to graze at will.  She was a fat, study animal.  For colder months she grew her chestnut coat shaggy and thick, and her breath became a cloud as it met cold air.  In summer, her tail flicked constantly at flies.  I never knew her to sustain an unrecoverable injury...or any injury at all save the twice a careless rider caused her to fall.  I was the first of these, and she lost the top of her kneecap after we hit, running, a concrete bridge.  Thankfully, she didn't land on top of me.  She stood and waited for me to rise, and we walked slowly all the way home, bleeding together. 

Jason and I rode in dusk, rain, sleet, and snow...up and down Highway 63 and, I guess, on every back road and trail in east-central Scott County.  We climbed mountains and crossed creeks; hitched our horses to a pine post at the Texaco; and ran our animals, hard, in the field behind Straight Fork Baptist.  For almost seven years we rode, and all the hundreds of (nearly wordless) rides run together in my mind and become one experience: the fresh air...the giant, kind eyes of my horse and her thick, warm body...the smiling, steady eyes of my friend. 

I look at my eleven-year-old son and try to imagine his leaving, unsupervised, on horseback for a day...my saying: "See you at dark, Son," and I can't.  I think of riding Firefly as she galloped in fields pitted with holes, clip-clopped along the shoulder-side of highway fog stripe, and I shudder to think of all that could've happened but didn't.  I praise my parents for turning me loose--even if into danger--and know my having Jason as companion relieved their minds and made possible my adventuring.

I sold Firefly just before leaving home for college.  I went to visit her exactly once after selling her; she trotted up to me at the fence, and I cried until I hyperventilated and threw up.  She is dead, now, but I know she lived long, happy years even after becoming someone else's horse.  

I have ridden three times, I think, since selling Firefly.  I do not seem drawn to horses in general; I loved the one animal, my animal.  I guess I must have loved Leroy, too, because--when, about four years ago, I last saw Jason and Leroy--I wept as I stroked the neck of that horse. 

Over the weekend, Jason friend-requested me on facebook, and I'd never supposed I might see him in that virtual space.  I wanted to lay my head over and cry for the joy of it and gushed to Jim how very much I love my friend.  And it's true: I love Jason Hatfield like a brother and always will.  But it's more than that. I love the girl who loved the horse, and no one else knew that girl, or that horse, or that season of my life quite like Jason.  Of the few things about which I never have to wonder, one is this: Firefly and I will always be bound up together in the heart of the man who was once my ten-, thirteen-, and seventeen-year-old companion on horseback.

1987 (13 Years Old)

1991 or 1992 (17 or 18)

My Parents' Farm 1988.  Firefly is on the right.



A Perfect Day - Lee Teter



Potty Adventures with Daddy

Jim got up with Clementine as he does every Saturday morning, and I guess--while I frolicked in Dreamland--Clementine melted down in a big way.  Later, Jim asked: "So, do you let Clementine wipe herself after she pees in the potty?"

"Oh, yes," I answered.  "It's a thing.  She'd been unrolling toilet paper and cramming it in the toilet the entire time she'd been sitting there, so I told her she needs to wait until she goes pee-pee, and then she can tear off some toilet paper to wipe."

"Oh," he said.  "Well, I guess that's where things went wrong, because all I did was wipe her after she peed, and she had a complete meltdown."

Poor Daddy. 

Note to self: I need to better communicate the girls' routines to Jim.

But, in the meantime, here's my favorite potty story of all time:

At a different point on Saturday morning, Jim looked at Clementine and said: "Wait just a minute, MeMe.  Daddy's gotta go pee-pee in the potty."

And Clementine looked at him and asked: "Like a big girl?"

How to Melt the Heart of Your Wife

Earlier, I e-mailed the following to my beloved: "I think I am becoming a glass-half-empty person.  I am so discouraged that we forgot to refrigerate the chicken I bothered to defrost and cook.  Charleigh hasn't gotten up, yet, and I haven't awakened her. Soon it will be time for Clementine's nap.  So I guess we will go out this afternoon around 3:00. Let me know if you want to meet us somewhere after work."


(Just so you have the full picture, my beloved brought dinner home last night; thus, we did not eat what I had baked.)


My beloved replied, today, via e-mail: "Honey, I am so sorry about the chicken!  I should have remembered as I was the last to touch it.  I am so sorry that I ruined it.  I would love to meet you somewhere or I can just come straight home.  I am leaving here at 1:15. I will be home @ 2pm.  Maybe we can all get out and when we are done, go to the store and I can fix a great dinner."


I am getting ready to close this laptop until Monday morning.  I need to spend this weekend trying to make my beloved's heart feel all melty like mine.

The Middle of the Bed

It happened as it can only after Daddy rises
When she and Mommy scooch to the middle of the bed
It happened as it does when there's no stirrin' wiggle
Hardly ever for the baby in the middle of the bed
But she slept like an angel and we cuddled close together
Bare toesies 'n' cotton jammies in the middle of the bed
'Til we heard Sister singin' and we opened eyes together
Smiled mornin' joy at one another in the middle of the bed

My Very Best

Cade



Clementine



Charleigh

Looking for Answers: Please Share

"'Oh, my, my, my, my my,' she sighed. 

'Knowing what you know is sometimes very hard.'"

-the creepy-crawly bug, Sam Swope's Gotta Go! Gotta Go!

Clementine 10/09

As Jim and I were deciding to eat dinner at El Cerro Azul this evening, I commented that Mexican food sounded wonderful, and Clementine--wearing a dress-up pink-and-purple ball gown with several layers of tulle in the hiney-butt area--spun several times in her sparkly, pink tennis shoes and exclaimed: "Go to Mexico!" 

Clementine and I had just read, the other day, one of Cade's old favorites: Gotta Go! Gotta Go! by Sam Swope, the story of a female caterpillar / Monarch butterfly who spends her entire lifetime acting upon her instincts, even though she doesn't really understand her compulsions.  Over and over, she says: "I gotta go!  I gotta go!  I gotta go to Mexico!" Swope writes simply, but I find that--if I allow--his words kick up some dust in my head, especially when paired with a lovely, lively conversation from yesterday.

Yesterday's conversation revolved around this question: how do people find meaningful activities/occupations in this lifetime?

Each of us knows someone who lives out his or her dream every day and, therefore, seems fulfilled, content.  If you are that person, would you care to share, please, how you came to find your meaningful activity and/or occupation?  Were you--like Sam Swope's caterpillar--simply compelled?  Or did a particular set of circumstances lead to your finding your activity and/or occupation?  If so, please share the circumstances.  (Mothers, I am especially interested to know if you have found some measure of fulfillment outside of your mothering, or if you have found a way to interweave with your mothering meaningful activities/occupations beyond your mothering.)  Please feel free to ask these questions of your fulfilled friends and post their answers here...or to direct them to this place. 

Thank you for your time and, in advance, for your thoughtful responses.  I look forward to an enlightening, insightful conversation in this space!  (I will share my answers to the above questions, later, but can't wait to read yours in the meantime!)