Barefoot Lily Lady

Putting Away Christmas

I had planned to keep my Christmas stuff up well into January because it just felt like this year needed a little extra sparkle for just a bit longer. I’m not a perfectionistic white-glove housekeeper (by any stretch of the imagination), but I do like a certain level of tidyness and order. Before I knew it, the niggling longing for order won out and those green and red plastic tubs were making their annual trek back up from the basement storage area so I could begin putting back all those pretty Christmas-y decorations.

Each ornament goes back in its original box, or gets wrapped in newsprint or tissue and placed in a protective box or tin. As I carefully stacked those boxes filled with fragile baubles into one of the three larger bins, there was a sense that I was, in a small way, packing up and setting aside some memories that would be unwrapped and remembered once again in the hope of next Christmas.

“Putting away Christmas” is theologically impossible. Christ’s advent, God’s gift to the world, cannot be wrapped up in tissue paper and set aside the day after Christmas. Emmanuel, God With Us, cannot be stuck in a box to be forgotten about until unwrapped again next year. When I “put away Christmas,” it is our somewhat clouded by glitz and glitter attempt to remember his advent each year that we are really putting away.

As I filled the third bin with my tissue-wrapped baubles, I noticed the corner of an envelope hiding in the bottom of the bin. It was tucked under a box of lights I haven’t used in years. I pulled it out and discovered a gift I hadn’t opened this year. It was a letter addressed to me in my mom’s familiar cursive script.

Years ago, Mom had taken the time to write out the words to the poem “My First Christmas in Heaven.” I’ve read it many times before — maybe you have read it too. I know that a few of you, my friends and loved ones, experienced the fresh sting of grief in your heart because a loved one was missing at your celebration this Christmas, so I will include an image of the poem here for you.

It says “Author Unknown” but I think most sources now attribute the authorship to Wanda Bencke, whose daughter died just after Christmas in 1997.

The postmark on the envelope was clearly stamped 10 DEC 2009, so it was fitting that when mom copied the poem’s title, she neatly crossed out the word “First” and wrote above it, “Second.”

Mom’s little personal post-script penned beneath the poem sheds light upon the reason why.

Last Christmas, I kept running the last line through my head but could not remember the rest of this old poem. This year in Reminisce Magazine it was printed in their December-January 2010 issue.
Love, Mom

I just love this little find, yet another of God’s little grace gifts in my life. You see, she sent it on my dad’s second Christmas in heaven, and here I was re-reading it 12 Christmases later, just after she celebrated her first Christmas in heaven.

An ornament commemorating my momma’s last Christmas on this side of Heaven

A Family Story Found in an Unexpected Place

According to my Facebook post on January 1^st of 2015, on that date in history I found one of my mother’s memories from January 1^st of 1955!

How cool is that?

I had been going through mom’s jumble of paperwork, trying to find the important documents I would need as her power of attorney. Mom’s once neat filing system was a jumbled-up mess, due to the confusion of her mind caused by Alzheimer’s. I recall I was making good progress taming that paper tiger and that I found a few delightful surprises in the process.

One such surprise was a file folder labeled “Peet Family.” This file contained many treasures. Old black and white photos. Letters and cards. Newspaper clippings. Obituaries. Genealogy timelines. Tucked into this file category was a simple green pocket folder. I flipped it open, fully anticipating that it had something to do with the Peet family genealogy.

And it did – sort of.

It was a cookbook filled with favorite family recipes which had been compiled for a family reunion in 2000. I had fun taking a break from my sorting project to page through the recipes. The faces of family I had only seen when I was a young child came to mind as their names popped up on the righthand corner of each page. It was exciting to see the name “CHARLOTTE PEET-BOYLES” pop up here and there.

“Charlotte’s Layered-Spinach Salad” was in there, as it should be. It was one of those salads she made often for potlucks or when family would gather at her house for birthdays or holidays. Another family favorite was “Charlotte’s Dream Whip Torte”! My sister would often request that dessert for her birthday. It was not a surprise to find her “Never Fail Pie Crust” recipe was in there too. She never liked making pies until her friend from work shared that recipe with her.

As I flipped through the cookbook, I noticed that some of the recipes had a family story included. Once I realized this, I went back through the recipes attributed to mom to see if I could find a recipe where my mom had contributed a story. And there it was included under a recipe called “Clara Gall-Peet’s Upside Down Cake.” Clara was my grandma, so I felt like I had found a double-treasure with this recipe and the giggle I received as I read the sweet little story mom told about her early baking attempts.

The date confuses me a little, as mom and dad were married in July of 1955, but, at the bottom of the cake recipe, my mom had reminisced,

“My Mom was a good cook and if you arrived unexpected at dinner-time she always had room for you at the table and enough food to go around. This is the first cake I tried to make after I got married. In fact, the date was January 1, 1955. Total disaster for there was no cake – all bottom or top, depending which way you look at it. I had copied 1 ½ tablespoons flour instead of 1 ½ cups. It took me three tries before I got it right.”
Charlotte Peet-Boyles

A Childhood Christmas Memory

Three ears were listening to the voices and metallic clinking sounds coming from the basement. Picture three pajama-clad siblings, Cindie, Brad, and Vivian, each with one ear to the 12-inch opening to the clothes chute in the hallway outside of our bedrooms. Judging from Dad’s frustrated comments about missing parts and lousy instructions, we knew SOMEONE was getting a bike for Christmas (and assembly was not going particularly well).

Our parents didn’t know that we were secretively listening to the bike assembly endeavor. After all, it was Christmas Eve and we were supposed to be ‘nestled in bed while visions of sugar-plums danced in our heads’! Hearing mom’s footsteps coming up the basement stairs, we each scrambled to our respective beds feigning sleep. When the three of us finally succumbed to sleep, I am sure the sugar-plums in our dreams looked more like a bike parked next to the tree with OUR name on the gift tag.

Imagine our great delight when Christmas morning dawned and three bikes sat perched on kickstands around the tree! If we didn’t live in snowy Wisconsin, we three kids would have been riding up and down Milwaukee’s Stark Street in our pajamas ringing the bell or honking the horn Dad had attached during his after midnight assembly project. For today, our Dad would drag those bikes back down to the basement and our bike-riding adventures would begin.

1963, Cindie Vivian and Brad with our beautiful mom

The Christmas Photo

It’s the last Five Minute Friday blog link-up of the year 2020. Join me and this beautiful community of writers and bloggers who gather on Fridays around a single word prompt to freewrite for five minutes. This week’s writing prompt is Conclude (check out the other posts here). I suspect most of us are really looking forward to the conclusion of the year 2020, which held no shortage of disappointing losses. I could write a few chapters about losses myself, but let me instead share with you about a special lesson I learned…a lesson from a Christmas photo.

Christmas is coming, so I take my cherished photo from the drawer where I keep it the other eleven months of the year.

It seems like just yesterday when I found this photo. In reality it was about five years ago. As I recall, I was busy helping my dear mom sort through life’s accumulation of things, when I found a shoebox tucked away in the corner of the laundry room near the place where mom would iron the wrinkles out of my dad’s shirts. Removing the slightly dusty lid, I found this box to be filled with fascinating photos of years gone by, each filed standing on edge waiting to one day be added to a photo album. As I thumbed through each time-worn photo, I concluded that Momma had at one time been busy putting the years of her life in order, one loose photo at a time.

That was before Alzheimer’s. Before her mind could no longer put anything in order.

My treasured photo, filed under “Christmas 1957”, captured a moment in my life and a memory I was too young to keep without it. We were a family of three seated in my great-grandparents’ living room. A well-tinseled Christmas tree was in the background, and I was sitting in 3-month-old chubby cuteness on my beautiful momma’s lap. My handsome daddy was seated on the floor next to us, arms casually crossed around his knees. If you look carefully over my dad’s left shoulder, you might spy a portrait of my mom in her wedding dress.

Gracious reader, you probably recall that Jesus took my momma home to heaven this year, which makes this photo more meaningful than ever. Now, as my fingers trace the little gold frame on this precious keepsake, something hits me straight in the heart, making me pause and think about the brevity of life.

I was young like my momma in this photo, just 22 years old when my own daughter was born. Except for the years I spent in junior high school, those first 22 years whooshed by in a flash, and the years from then until now are a blur too. Doing the math, if I live to be 86 like my mom, I conclude that I have 23 years left to spend (a mere 13 years if I live to be as old as my daddy).

The Bible speaks figuratively of our lives being like a mist or a vapor – here one moment and gone the next (James 4:14). It’s so very true. How will the story of my life conclude once the last chapters of my life have been written?

As I set my special photo down in a place of Christmas-y honor, my heart wells with gratefulness for this photo’s poignant reminder to invest these final years God has in His plan for me in what matters most: loving people and pointing them to Jesus for the glory of God.

Winter Wonderland

We have a saying here in Wisconsin.

“If you don’t like the weather, wait 5 minutes.”

Five minutes may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Here are a few photos I captured on a little walk in my neighborhood park on Thursday. [I blogged about that little excursion here.]

Thursday was a sweatshirt or jean jacket sort of day with walkers, runners, joggers, and pet-walkers streaming past our home on their way to or from McKee Farms Park. We Fitchburgians all had one thought in common: enjoy this gorgeous weather now because we’re going to be shoveling snow tomorrow.

The sun hid its face on Friday morning and the temps had dropped to the 30’s. When I looked out my window in the afternoon, it seemed like someone just shook my backyard snow globe and giant snowflakes were falling willy-nilly. The snow wasn’t sticking much, but our crabapple tree looked like it had been decorated for Christmas with a dozen or more red cardinals looking like feathered ornaments, along with a few crazy robins who perhaps didn’t receive the migration memo.

But here’s what we woke up to in our backyard this morning.

It’s beautiful.

That’s my little #SixOnSaturday thing for this week! Thank you to Jon the Propagator for hosting this fun little weekly photo sharing gathering of gardeners around the world. You’re invited to join in on the fun and give us a peek at what’s goin’ on in your little corner of the world.

Grace Awakened Eyes

Thursday, December 10, 2020

Counting our common everyday gifts – our grace gifts from God – is the challenge I have accepted as a discipline of the heart. My current Bible study is encouraging me to take notice of God’s grace in the minutae of life and giving thanks.

Eucharisteo. To be grateful, feel thankful, give thanks.

It’s probably the last day in 2020 where the sun will feel so very warm and the air so beautifully crisp. Today was a good day to take a walk in “my park” just down the street. Today I step off of the paved path and take the lesser traveled pathways worn in the tall grasses in little patches of the park.

Today I take notice of the small things. The glimmer of sunshine low in the sky, streaming through the trees, forming halos around what remains of summer’s flowery offerings.

I thank God for the sun. It’s there every single day, even when I don’t see it, reminding me that God’s grace surrounds us, intricately involved in our ordinary days – even on the darkest and most difficult of days.

My wandering feet cross the expanse of grass still green which not so very long ago hosted soccer games, picnics, and kites. A distant patch of color lures me to explore the paths that other feet have created. Such beauty. I thank God for placing me in a community that has such a wonderful place for families to play and explore. Even now, in the midst of the sickness that stubbornly refuses to loose its grip on humanity, people enjoy its respite and calm.

A colony of milkweed punctuates the wind-flattened grasses. I step into their abode to explore the spent pods which have long since burst open to release next year’s seeds. The fruit pods are dry now, grayed like me with age, yet the outer capsule still bears a design and texture placed there by the Creator. I marvel at the intricacy and find joy of heart when I find one lonely pod still not quite open. The cottony fluff feels like silk to my touch.

I thank God for this herbaceous perennial that beckons the Monarch butterfly to lay her tiny eggs in the shelter of its ovate leaves. One tiny egg for each plant, if she can, so as to make sure the babies she may never see will have food enough to grow, yet not destroy the hospitable host. [Read more about milkweed here.]

I spy Queen Anne’s Lace framed by amber colored grasses tipped in burnt orange and a band of blue sky. She sways tall in the breeze over the meadow grasses, her skirt drawn up and around her as though bracing for winter’s nip. As my aging eyes seek to see more, her Designer’s sage attention to detail reveals a gentle beauty, even though stripped of her ornate white petaled robe.

Somehow, this stately queen of the meadow makes me think of my mother’s gentle beauty. Many have remarked that there was something about her skin that was so lovely and fair – even in her 80’s. But what made her truly beautiful was the beauty of Christ in her. No beauty serum could impart more radiance than my momma’s beautiful reflection of Christ as she imitated Him in life’s ups and downs. Alzheimer’s could not steal that beauty.

I stand in the meadow and thank God for reminding me that this beauty can be mine too. Her faithful example still lingers, pointing the way. Momma’s life still touches mine, even in her absence. Today, I thank God for taking my beautiful momma home so gently. Though she went through many difficult days with Alzheimer’s, years actually, I thank God that now she knows fully they were truly light momentary afflictions when compared with the glory of her heavenly home for which she longed.

Tomorrow the snow will begin to fall and soon it will hurt just a little to take in that first breath of air when we walk outside. Yet, even in that, there will be countless reasons to thank God, be reminded of His grace, and experience true joy in the bounty of His grace upon grace.

Eucharisteo. To be grateful, feel thankful, give thanks.

The Gift of ‘Present’

Well, it’s Tuesday already, but this post is part of the Five Minute Friday blog link-up ( check it out here) where I’m joining up with a community of writers and bloggers of all ages and stages who gather around a single word prompt to freewrite for five minutes without editing. This week’s prompt is [Present}.

Facebook has a feature I enjoy called “Memories.” One click on the memories tab gives me visual reminders of things I have posted on that site a year ago or more. It’s a virtual photo journal reminding me of special times in my life like birthdays, vacations, Bible verses that spoke to my heart, time with the grandkids, or what was blooming in my garden at that time. Many of the photos from the past decade feature my sweet mom. Those photo memories of my mom generally bring a smile, or a hearty laugh, and (only sometimes) a few tears sprinkled here and there. But this week, the fact that I was able to take so many photos of her served to remind me of the amazing opportunity God gave me to give my mother a very special gift in the last years of her life.

The gift of being present.

Momma loves Pastor Jeremy and his family!

Present. The gift I’m thankful I could give.

Grandma’s Wonky Christmas Tree

My Christmas tree is a little wonky-looking. A bit oddly shaped, no matter how I fluff it, stubbornly refusing to stand up straight in the rotating base. It has a bit of a wobbly jewelry-box ballerina pirouette going on as it twirls round and round slightly askew. But I love how my wonky tree sparkles as it does its little lopsided twirly dance.

Thanksgiving Bloomer

Vacation Garden Hopping

Long after the colorful petals have fallen, a gardener at heart can see the beauty that was and envision the beauty yet to be.
Barefoot Lily Lady

My hubby knows that one of my favorite things to do while on vacation is to stop and stroll through various public gardens. On this late October trip, we knew the gardens would likely be past their prime. That’s okay though, for long after the colorful petals on flowers have fallen, a gardener at heart can see the beauty that was and envision the promise of beauty yet to be.

Thankfully, as we pointed our car toward our destination of visiting good friends in Louisiana, with each mile we seemed to leave the cold Wisconsin weather in our wake. I’m so grateful my hubby didn’t feel the need to conquer the road; instead, veered off the interstate on several occasions so we could take the scenic route. How delightful to see lovely autumn flowers still graced the roadside, spilled from pots in public places, and dotted the flowerbeds of fellow gardeners along these back roads.

We did a little road trip antique-ing too. We certainly don’t need more “stuff”, but enjoy little stretch breaks. With both of us being on the plus side of 60, it was easy to find memories of our own childhoods tucked in amongst vintage stuff in the nooks and crannies of the antique malls. Wayne even found a bit of nostalgia from his years as a signalman in the Navy back in the early 70’s.

Our first overnight stop was at Benton Park Inn, a quaint B&B in a historic section of St. Louis. Benton Park was right across the street from from the B&B — a lovely park with paved pathways meandering throughout its acreage. It was the perfect place for us to stretch our legs after our day of driving. We were also within easy walking distance of Frazer’s, an excellent restaurant our gracious host had suggested. The meal was super delicious and the shared piece of key lime pie made me wish I had ordered my own slice. We enjoyed both the inn and the restaurant so much that we returned a second time to both establishments on our trip homeward two weeks later.

Stop #2 on our journey south would be Memphis, Tennessee. We stayed at the Double Tree Hilton Hotel (excellent!), enjoyed Corky’s Memphis style BBQ (oh, my, YUM!), and then walked the nearby Memphis Botanic Garden. With 96 beautiful acres, there was much to explore. My favorite discovery was a very aptly named plant known as Cat’s Whiskers.

Intriguing ‘Cat’s Whiskers’ (Orthosiphon aristatus) at Memphis Botanic Garden

Cat’s Whiskers (Orthosiphon aristatus) is a herbaceous perennial and member of the mint family that blooms all summer long in the south. It reminds me a little bit of Spider Flower (Cleome), which I am able to grow in Wisconsin. Cleome is more orb shaped and has spidery looking stamen, while Cat’s Whisker’s snowy white stamens look very much like the namesake feline whiskers. You can see it growing here and there everywhere in Tennessee and Louisiana — it flourishes in full sun, but seems to appreciate a bit of afternoon shade. I should have brought home some seed, as I think it would grow as an annual in pots in my growing zone.

With every place that I roam, flowers lure me to explore the intricate beauty of God’s creation just a little bit more closely. His handiwork is clearly seen in the minute details of earth’s splendor.