Today I was wandering the house in search of  inspiration when I decided to write about the first two things that caught my eye.  One was a dirty crock pot.  Kicking myself, I realized it held yesterday’s dinner that I had left to cool off before refrigerating and then promptly fell asleep, leaving the contents to spoil.  The other was the bright red hummingbird feeder dangling from a hook outside the back kitchen window.  Both items, unrelated, except by proximity.  And now that they have my attention, both represent the fact that there is a nudge of guilt and condemnation associated with each vessel.  I think to myself, hmm … these would normally be bringing me joy.

First the crock pot.  A marvelous invention for working Moms and because stay at home Moms are also working their tails off,  I include in my definition of working Moms, all Moms.  We all work hard and crock pots are an emblem of multi-tasking on steroids if there ever was one.  The ability to say “I’m washing my hair AND also cooking a healthy and inexpensive dinner for my wonderful family” is like no other.  The fact that we’re probably washing the dog, the floor, the car mats, and yesterday’s baked on crock pot container notwithstanding, crock pot cooking makes one feel good in a way clean hair alone never could.  And an added bonus is that no matter the quality of food going into a crock pot, it’s usually going to make your house smell candle-scented, pot-roast fresh, unless of course, you fall asleep and forget to remove the contents until the next morning.  Even as I write this, I’m thinking of my next crock pot, “fill the house with great smells”, chicken dinner. 

Great.  so on to the hummingbirds.  No, I have not discovered a way to mix hummingbird food from natural ingredients and let them simmer to perfection in my crock pot.  But I am pretty sure someone, somewhere out there, has done just that, and they probably have a Pinterest page devoted to it.  Well the first thing I’ve learned is that my pretty red hummingbird food is probably KILLING the hummingbirds or at the very least subjecting them to red dye # (fill in the number) poisoning.  I can already see John Travolta starring as the dynamic and passionate lawyer defending the birds:  ” … and when did you first learn about red dye”, and “where did you purchase said dye”, ” please remember you took an oath!” ,  “..  did it ever occur to you that you were harming the birds?”, and me replying, humbly, with my most effusive tactics: “sir, it’s not that I don’t disagree with you, but I really thought that the red dye of my youth was a problem they solved back in 1984,  uh, June, to be exact. I seem to recall reading about it in the uh,  Post, yeah, the Post …” . This ought to send every paralegal in my imaginary, made-for-TV movie scrambling, I think, smiling.

Crock pots and hummingbird feeder guilty verdicts aside, I normally find an abnormal amount of joy in both vessels.  Crock Pot dinners usually do turn out great and make the house smell good, and have plenty of  hearty leftovers for freezing.  Hummingbird feeders are a delightful addition to the back yard and when I follow the directions and correct timing, I can see the great migration as the birds travel to past my house along the Mexico to Canada highway. Its marvelous to me that hummingbirds and butterflies seem to have discovered the best way across north America long before the rest of us did.

So  I see the connection both stationary items have to inner joy.  With little prep time, and good timing, both the crock pot and the feeder, bless their little non-existent stationary-object hearts, make the world a better place, make MY world a better place. They are two minor, unrelated, well, maybe a little related, items that make our house feel like a home.  They are vessels representing the good things in life,  especially in the joy you get as a result of filling them with the best ingredients. I laugh to myself, thinking how unrelated these two items  are and yet how much alike in the role they have in my home. I don’t have a clue how hummingbirds find the feeders or how the food particles combine when simmered to make things more flavorful.  I don’t have a clue about Heaven either. But I secretly hope should I be blessed to arrive there one day, that there will be at least one simmering crock pot and plenty of hummingbird feeders.  I imagine the hummingbirds have already discovered the best way there.

(lwr Oct 5, 2017)

My wise mother used to have some very wonderful one-liner sayings that seemed to make things better no matter the situation. Once when I was playing along in Jeopardy,  I surprised myself by acing the Proverbial Sayings category because her expressions were so ingrained in my mind.  Too bad I never had the guts to try out for the show.  I realized that my mother’s sayings were mostly from Proverbs, or at the very least were historical idioms that had stood the test of time. She always said she was quoting her own mother who at one point, down the generational line, had a proverbial Irish grandmother. 

One of my mother’s sayings was “a day late and a dollar short”.   In her world, you never wanted to be either of these things. I am still trying to find out who first coined this clever expression but the practical application is “you are late”  and “you are providing information that is late and less than helpful”.  Today’s expression might be “arm chair (or Monday morning)  quarterbacking”.  Providing someone practical advice a day late no matter how sage or well-intended, rarely makes them feel good.   From this oft-expressed maternal wisdom I learned to be on time and under budget, a quality which helped my work life when I was asked to manage projects and keep them within 10% margin.  A micro-manager was born!

Enter the 31 day writing challenge and already I’m two days behind (more than 10%) and probably overspent to get the blog up and running.   So this pressure should bring out the best in me – nothing like some pressure and a deadline, public embarrassment, loss of credibility, etc, to get the creative juices flowing.  And what do I come up with?  “You are a day late and a dollar short”  says my mother’s voice in my head.   

So what do we do when a project is a day late?  Reprimand the person in charge,  light a fire under the workers,  ask why?  In my experience, asking why is the fastest and most reliable path to resolution.  There is usually a logical and important reason for being late.  The “dog ate my homework” excuses aside,  life sometimes takes us down different paths and we encounter obstacles we were not expecting, before being late.  Shortly after 9/11,  NPR interviewed people who were running late that day.  The premise was survivor’s guilt, but the end result was how grateful they were to have missed the train, stopped at their kid’s school for the birthday party, or paused their schedule because the dog barfed just as they were leaving the house.  This show made a lasting impression on me.  How many times did I stress out about being late for something?  I had good habits, but was far from perfection in showing up on time.  Of course we all have that friend who is “notoriously late”  and we usually learn to stop waiting on them.  But do we stop to ask why?

So the next time I felt like I was a “day late and a dollar short”  was during the recent hurricane cleanup efforts in our neighborhood.  I would head out enthusiastically with donations in the trunk and fresh arms and legs all ready to help, only to discover they needed a bigger shovel, a  bigger person, a bigger heart, or a bigger bank account.  Once I figured this out, I was able to help in a more scaled back, timely, and reasonable fashion.  In other words,  “a day late and a dollar short” didn’t mean I was letting God, or people, or myself down,  it meant my project plan needed tweaking.  There was an obstacle I was not considering, I needed to open my eyes to understand what type of help was needed, when.  If I didn’t have the skills or desire, I would let the A team run things.  If I couldn’t help but knew who could, then I would get that person connected to help.  I also stopped apologizing to myself, to God, and to others for not being heroic enough, or strong enough, or just plain enough “enough”.  If I was tired, I would go back to my non-flooded house,  say a prayer of thanks, shower, and rest.  After all, I reasoned, I am not helping out of guilt, I am helping because its hard to watch people going through something difficult and not help. Others have helped me,  therefore I should help others, was my driving mantra.  

Somewhere in there I let  go of  being “a day late and a dollar short” as a character flaw.   I needed to look at it more as a fact of life.  I needed to turn the adage into an “ask why”  moment, an opportunity to change course, downshift, tweak, resolve to find a better way.  I needed to realize that sometimes being the right person , or the wrong person with the right skills, or any of those fateful combinations are not something I can contol.  Just as a traffic jam makes you late even when you left early, sometimes being a “day late and a dollar short” is a sign to change focus, to look up and ask God, why?   Sometimes it makes all the difference.

(lwr Oct 4, 2017,  but it’s really Oct 6)

I have always had the desire to see the world.  This started as a young child when I would listen to my grandmother’s stories of her travels.  My grandmother was a traveler and artist and progressive for her time.  She visited the seven wonders of the world.  I remember her telling me about a hotel that was an actual tree house where she stayed in Africa,  and about her visit to the Taj Mahal in India.  She traveled every year to Arizona and when she returned would tell me about the beautiful rocks and colors in the landscapes there.  Outside, a cold and dreary Michigan winter day would be gray with flecks of blue and brown.  My grandmother would tell tales of  places where the sun was shining and hot in the winter.  I admired her ability to compartmentalize and relay these tales over Sunday dinner while snow fell outside the window.  I caught the travel bug while dining surreptitiously on pot roast with carrots and potatoes on these wintry Sundays after church, before I was told to go upstairs to study. 

My parents also fueled the interest in the world outside our windows. My mother was a teacher and every road trip was a teachable moment and an opportunity to learn about new places.  My father was a physicist and encouraged us to have boundless curiousity about all matters of matter, so to speak. He also insisted that we end every debate with a trip to the study to consult the Encyclopedia. How marvelous it is to have Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge (albeit  occasional misinformation) at our disposal today.  

After college, I had a couple of jobs which fueled the wanderlust even more.  One was a job in western Colorado which involved pinpointing water sources using USGS quadrangle maps and satellite images to locate springs and intermittent streams.  My job was to field check the locations and if I encountered real water, to test it for nitrates and sulfates, and also measure the pH.  It was a fun job, taking me to places like the Black Canyon of the Gunnison where I would eat lunch and bask in the glory of the scenery. Following that summer of bopping around Colorado, I worked as a cartographer for a small mapping company in Minneapolis.  It was a far cry from field work in the mountains, but I learned to hand-scribe contour maps and within a year we were converting those same photo-rendered maps to digital elevation models, using early scanning technologies.  I loved the maps, especially the ones from different places in the world.  

Studying geology and mapping afforded me the opportunity to see some interesting parts of the country and world.  I have hiked in most of the mountain ranges in the US, set foot on seven continents, and visited forty-nine of the nifty-fifty United States, (with apologies to Delaware). I have also seen obscure places such as an elaborate Grotto in western Iowa, the Corn Palace in South Dakota, and Prairie Dog town in Lubbock, Texas. While making maps in Texas, I found out there is a city named Ding Dong, in of all places, Bell County.   There is a tiny little town named Unadilla in Michigan and a place called Pike’s Peak in Iowa, the original Pike’s Peak, discovered presumably, by John Muir, on his way to the real one in Colorado.  There is a road in Houston, a notorious speed trap, perhaps the only road in the city where people obey the speed limit, named Buffalo Speedway.  Thinking about all of these fun and interesting places makes me thankful to the person who thought of the clever names and who also worked meticulously to put them on the map.

Not everywhere is picturesque or delightful to visit but the maps are always beautiful pictures of possibility.  Even in the most desolate or destitute places I have found something  to appreciate, whether it is a planned or unplanned stop. My grandmother used to tell me “the world is your oyster”. Well I am happy to report that indeed it is. I am very grateful to have seen much of it, am thankful to God for the beauty of the world around me, and glad I have had a chance to be guided by many maps and fellow mapmakers along the way.

(lwr Oct 2, 2017)