These Precious Days by Liz Flaherty

Welcome, September! We're heading into one of my favorite times of year right now, when the view out the west window changes every day, the air is fresh and crisp and smelling of harvested grain and apples and everything pumpkin. (If you don't like apples and/or everything pumpkin, that's fine, but we don't discuss that here.)

I took the title of this week's blog from "September Song." While the song itself doesn't fit, these are indeed precious days. All days are, something we discover when we realize how fast they go.

It's also the season of holidays. While big-box store displays would lead us to think Halloween is in June and Christmas is at the end of July, we know better. However, I admit to looking at holiday fabric and thinking of projects I'm not nearly skilled enough to complete. I print out recipes I'll never bake, although I'll look at the pictures a lot and sometimes I'll buy the ingredients. 

It's the best time of the year at the orchards! McClure's and Doud's are both open and perfect places to while away a few hours. 

It's a giving time, isn't it? Churches will be having soup suppers, harvest suppers, and bake-and-craft sales on their premises. There will be vendor sales  at every available venue, complete with food trucks. Anita's Boutique and Gallery 15  and other local stores will have so many pretty things and things that sparkle and things that you don't know how you can possibly go on without. I mean, things you know someone on your gift list wants or needs. 

It's time for Football Friday Nights, too. Be on guard for fundraisers. Be generous when they catch you. 

Have you noticed yet that I really don't have a subject this week? I do have a question for you. Readership on the Window is decreasing. This isn't a terrible thing; after all, it's been around in one incarnation or other since the 1980s, and I've talked a lot during those years. I'm not ready to stop writing the blog/column, but maybe it's time to write it less often. Or to change it. What do you think? Is it time? All ideas--including Just shut up, Liz; you're boring!--accepted. 

Speaking of the Window, the ebooks of Window Over the Sink and Window Over the Desk are 99 cents this week at all electronic retailers. I still have paper copies and so does Anita at the boutique. 

Then, just giving you a heads-up, Rose Cousins, Joe DeRozier, Debby Myers, and I are having a books signing at Gallery 15. Ryan Record will provide music and there will be light refreshments. The Gallery is always a treat to visit, and Sarah and Ron Luginbill are great hosts.

I hope to see you out and about and that you're having wonderful times on these beautiful, precious days we've been seeing lately. Have a good week. Be nice to somebody.

A 1967 Christmas Story by Amy McVay Abbott

Christmastime brought magic to our rural Indiana town. Citizens visited the brick post office to mail cards and visit Postmaster Clarence Pook. Across the street at the library, Edna, the Story-Hour Lady, dressed in pioneer clothes, read holiday stories to children. The day after Thanksgiving, the volunteer firefighters hung giant red-and-white plastic candy canes from the lamps on State Street and displayed a life-size manger scene at the south end of town.

Snow came early and blanketed the ground until after the state boys’ basketball tournament in early spring. My father bought our real Christmas tree from a local farm every year. Our home lacked a fireplace, so my brother and I hung our red-and-white flannel stockings on the windowsills. Mom used Elmer’s glue and green glitter to paint our names on the furry white part of the Christmas stockings.

My father taught high-school science and agriculture and advised the Future Farmers of America chapter. The FFA chapter bought the high school a real Christmas tree decorated with blue, green, and red bulbs and fragile, sparkling glass ornaments. Students and teachers enjoyed the tree until the semester ended.

Tradition dictated that the FFA boys and my father take the tree and decorations to an impoverished family. Unfortunately, our 1965 Chevy Biscayne station wagon was inadequate to cart the nearly nine-foot tree to the family. So instead, dad borrowed the school’s World War II-era Army truck and told the family they would receive a large, fully decorated Christmas tree.

The three of them—the thirty-something schoolteacher and the two teenage boys in blue corduroy Future Farmer jackets—put the tree in the truck’s bed. They congratulated themselves on the good deed they were about to do for a large family with a father out of work. The truck traveled east on the state highway past well-manicured farms, freshly painted red barns, and white fences.

As the old truck jostled onto a county road, pieces of packed ice and gravel spit up from the truck’s worn tires. Finally, nearing the family’s home, Dad turned around and looked in the truck bed to check on the gift.

No tree. No lights. No decorations. No green and red metal tree stand. Nothing but an empty and scratched truck bed.

Horrified, Dad turned the truck around. He and the students retraced to town. The twinkle of holiday bulbs and the Evangelical United Brethren steeple lights signaled evening. Nothing could be found.

Dad thought about it. “What should I do? Should I go home and get our tree?”

He did not believe that was a good choice, with his two small children enjoying the tree, but he steeled himself for that option. If need be, he thought, his children could learn about sharing.

The gray truck and three not-so-wise men arrived back from the country as darkness fell. A tree lot at the used-car place was closing for the night. Dad reached into his wallet and bought the best tree on the lot. Then, off to the hardware store for lights, ornaments, and a new metal tree stand. The owner was closing his register for the day but recognized my father and let him in.

With a new tree in the bed of the beat-up gray truck, the group headed east again. They could spy children at each window as they tentatively approached the family’s large farmhouse. The older children greeted the group and set up the tree in their living room.

Dad noticed a stack of presents and bags of candy and fruit donated by the Lions Club and other community groups. The scent of anticipation and cinnamon apples hung in the air. The teacher and the teenagers left the family in happiness and wonder. Dad and those high-school students received a huge blessing when they saw the lights in the eyes of those children.

Several weeks after that Christmas, Dad went into the brick post office to pick up the mail and chat with Clarence, the postmaster. A man Dad did not know came in and began talking to Clarence loudly. “Clarence,” the stranger said. “It’s the oddest thing. I was driving east of town a few nights before Christmas, and you would not believe it. I found a completely decorated, beautiful, nine-foot Christmas tree that someone had thrown in a ditch!”

Amy McVay Abbott grew up in South Whitley, Indiana, and now lives in southwestern Indiana.

She's been writing since her late mother lent her her Royal portable typewriter when she was a first-grader. She had stories to tell at age six.

Now retired, she still dabbles in blogs and personal essays. She primarily focuses on books, with number seven recently finished. And there will be more. There’s always another book.

Books on Amazon: Amy Abbott's Books on Amazon
Website: Amy Abbott Writes – Independent Journalist + Freelance Writer

"A Song about Love..." by Liz Flaherty

I read this at church the other night at our Mother-Daughter Banquet. It doesn't all make sense, but you're used to that by now. Thanks to all the moms and to everyone else who does the job. 

Today, I was boiling eggs and wishing I was a better cook. I was doing that because it’s what I always do when stuff I prepare is going to sit on the counter beside food made by women in Bobette Miller’s family and in Mae Dawalt’s family. As the eggs cooked, I watched the 25th Anniversary performance of Peter, Paul, and Mary. I always cry over "Puff, the Magic Dragon." I do okay until I get to the part where Jackie Paper grows up…you know, this one:

"A dragon lives forever, but not so little girls and little boys

Painted wings and giant's rings make way for other toys

One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more

And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar" - © Peter Yarrow, Lenny Lipton

When the song reaches that part, I think of my three little ones sitting on the stairs on Christmas morning, shouting that “she’s looking at me!” from the backseat, and walking up the side aisles of North Miami’s gym in caps and gowns. I remember years spent on bleachers, a few momentous visits to the principal’s office, finding the box of little green army men in my son’s closet when he left for college. I closed the box and the closet and left the cleaning of his room for another day. I remember laughing. Laughing. Laughing.

I think of those things and my already-unmusical voice chokes up and I cry for those behind-me childhoods. While I have never missed my own for a single minute, I miss theirs every single day.

Except, oh, wait, having adult children is so great. They pay for their own cars—complete with gas and insurance, hardly ever have to be picked up after practice, pick up the check sometimes at restaurants. And they give you grandchildren. They may think they’re doing that for themselves, but they’re not.

Another song Peter, Paul, and Mary sang was “If I Had A Hammer.” Like a few of you here, I’ve been singing that song since the 1960s, back when I knew everything. I loved it then and I love it now, and I realized today that the last verse is, at the end of the day, all about motherhood. I won’t sing it—you’re welcome—but I will read it here:

"Well, I've got a hammer

And I've got a bell

And I've got a song to sing

All over this land

It's the hammer of justice

It's the bell of freedom

It's a song about love between

My brothers and my sisters

All over this land" - © Pete Seeger

This is what we as mothers, with the help of our Lord and the women we learned it from, try to give our children, isn’t it? It’s what we try to teach them and show them by example. Those teachings are often incomplete and our examples often flawed. But those words: justice, freedom, love—they cover a lot of territory.

This is a little scattered, it doesn’t have an end tied up neatly, but it is said in gratitude—as a daughter, whose mother and mother-in-law taught me appreciation and about things like justice, freedom, and love. And as a mother, whose several worst days as a mom have been lost in the thousands of good ones. I will always miss their childhoods, always cry over little Jackie Paper growing up, but I will never regret either the laughter or the tears.

Happy Mother’s Day.

If you like my cover... by Liz Flaherty

Sneaking this in here. I so love this cover and this book. A reminder that you can order it, signed, from me here. 

They say not to judge a book by its cover but I need you to do just that. If you liked the cover of my book, Window Over the Desk, please vote for it for the Cover of the Month contest on AllAuthor.com!

I’m getting closer to clinch the "Cover of the Month" contest on AllAuthor! I’d need as much support from you guys. Please take a short moment to vote for my book cover here: Click to Vote!