A Grandmother's Time

A grandmother is a little bit parent, a little bit teacher, and a little bit best friend.  ~Author Unknown

Time - it's been on my mind this week because of Daylight Savings Time. Mom can't adjust to the time change very well because while she's forgotten many things, she hasn't forgotten that meals come at certain daylight times. Manipulating the hands of a clock doesn't change that overnight. And the numbers on a clock mean little to someone who has spent years on a farm ruled by sun time instead of artificially legislated time. My father refused to observe Daylight Savings Time and just did the math when it was necessary to deal with the world.  

Time is also something a grandmother understands well and by the time she has grandchildren, she knows how quickly time slides past. She has walked through the garden of life gathering experience and wisdom. And patience and love. A grandmother is a gift and a joy and for many of her grandchildren, a lesson in fortitude and hard work. Tonight we have a couple of stories that show that. First from R.D.

 
"My grandmaw lived for 98 yrs at the home she went to as a bride at 14. She could outwork most until a few years before she passed away. We all called her Maw. She dipped snuff. Was a tiny little thing. She could tell you about more history in the area than a  book...she would call the area the trail. The Indians would cross that area. Many people found buckets of arrow heads,and artifacts. She picked cotton,had ten children; the youngest (85 now) is still living there and never lived anywhere else. He had 8 kids. Some others had 8-9-10 kids. Some 2. Her only daughter living is 96 and still lives at home with a great mind and still cooks her pintos and fried taters. Maw used to stay with us some growing up. We loved it. She was quarter Indian,and we loved that we were kin to Indians. Maw was so special. We always visited her,(and all our grandparents)but she was the one that I keep in my heart close. She gave me a very ugly whatnot and I’d never been prouder of a gift. It was special to her, thus to me. I miss her."

Holly also had a special grandmother who made it through some hard times. Here are some memories she shares of her grandmother.
 
"My grandmother was a hard working woman who raised 5 children during the depression by herself.  My grandfather passed away when my Dad was only 4 years old. She took in laundry, babysat, and worked however she could in order to provide for herself and the children. I remember her as a happy person who tried to find the good in everything. She knew how to make do with what she had.  I know that she has a beautiful mansion in heaven now!"

The good Lord knew what he was doing when he provided us with grandmothers. Helpers. Teachers. Friends. Dispensers of pure love. 

More grandmother stories are on the way. And if you haven't entered my Scent of Lilacs Giveaway Celebration, you still have time. Just leave a comment here with a way to contact you or send me an e-mail from my website. Great first prize of a Grandmother's Bible. Jocie told a grandmother story on her blog post on her Hollyhill Book that I think you might like. She loved her Mama Mae the way so many of you loved your grandmothers. Please keep sharing your stories. I love hearing them and hope you are enjoying reading those stories I've been able to share forward. 

  Grandmas hold our tiny hands for just a little while, but our hearts forever.  ~Author Unknown

Making Time

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."  (Henry David Thoreau)

How we do talk about time! We save it. We waste it. We beg for it. We need it. We wish for it. If I only had more time, we're wont to say. With time, I could do so much more, we promise. Where did the time go, we ask. And the truth is time hasn't gone anywhere different than it has since the beginning of time. It ticks by. Each second irretrievably gone as it makes way for the next second to follow.

Leonardo da Vinci said, "Time stays long enough for anyone who will use it." He certainly used his time to make a place in history. Perhaps that was part of his genius - the mastery of his time.

But these days, we are so sure we can make time that we even add and subtract hours. Last night we added back the hour we subtracted last spring. That's what has me thinking about time. That and the fact that lately a question surfaces in my mind several times every day. How much time do I have? Not the big question of how many days I have left here on earth, but the little question of whether I have enough time to do this or that task before I must do this or that other thing.  

Time has been something I've seemed to have in short supply lately. Of course, that's not true. The time in my days is the same. It's the use of my time that is giving me troubles. Perhaps this quote explains my problem. "Time is like a handful of sand - the tighter you grasp it, the faster it runs through your fingers." (Unknown author)

I don't have as much available to work time as I did before my mother began walking through her confusing valley of dementia. But I still have time enough if I could only reach for that time with determined patience and not worry that it won't be time enough. Then again, who among us knows if we'll have time enough? And time enough for what? Perhaps that is the question we need to answer first. What is it that we want? Tomorrow when we look back on today are we going to be pleased with our spent time?

I know you've heard people say use it or lose it. But with time it passes whether we use it or simply let it slide past. So here's one last quote from A.A. Milne that I'm hoping will inspire me as I come up with a new schedule for working in the weeks ahead. "Time is swift, it races by; Opportunities are born and die...Still you wait and will not try-A bird with wings who dares not rise and fly."

Do I have enough time? I suppose only time will tell. But I don't want to be the bird with wings who dares not rise and fly.

What do you think about time? Do you have time enough for the things you want to do? My wish for you is that joy will fill the hour glass of your life. Thanks for reading.

The Best Gift

My daughter and her dog, Sumo

"Time is free, but it's priceless.  You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it, you can never get it back." (Harvey MacKay)

Time - sometimes it seems there's never enough time to get everything we need to do done. That's certainly been true for me this summer as I struggled to get a new Shaker story out of my head and typed into my computer. Part of the reason for my struggle was that for about a year now my mom has needed someone with her around the clock due to heart problems and worsening dementia. It hasn't always been easy, but I did find out a few things about myself and writing.

First I discovered I'm not as fast a writer as I'd like to be. Second, I need a lot of alone time with just me and my computer to get a story out of my head. Third, I am an expert delayer if the words are not coming easy. And last but certainly not least, I can't do it all anymore. Maybe I never could, but for sure, I can't now.

Then again, maybe the best thing I learned is that I am loved. Of course I already knew that, but sometimes actions prove it all over again. My daughter gave me a week of her time. She used some of her vacation time and came home to sit with Mom in my place to allow me that alone time to finish my stubborn work in progress. That was not only very touching, but also very motivating.

I could hardly twiddle my fingers and find delaying trails to follow when she was here expressly to give me time to write. I had to write. And I did. I got to the end of the story. Not exactly finished completely, but the story is out of my head and down there on the screen paper where I can cut and polish. That doesn't take as much alone time. That I can do in the midst of distractions.

Time. These last few months the refrain in my head has been "How much time do I have?" That was how many hours before I needed to go to Mom's or cook dinner or turn in for the night. Or how many months, weeks, days before my deadline for the story. Not happy questions.

Time is such a gift. Both the time the Lord gives us each day and the time we share with one another. Thank you for spending a few moments of your time with me.

The Gift of Time

Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back. (Harvey MacKay)

That's a great quote for a day when we were gifted with an extra hour. Of course most of us slept through our gift as we got back that hour we lost last spring to Daylight Savings Time. Some people love DST. Some people say they'd rather be more in tune with nature and live by sun time. But gaining the hour got me to thinking about time and how our lives are so regulated by this or that clock. Then as I was looking through my pictures to come up with a clock or watch, I saw these trees. And they seemed timeless to me. Some of them have been growing in that place in California before California came to be. I was thinking time might strip away some of their limbs or turn their bark a ghostly gray, but the trees aren't worried about the minutes and hours ticking past the way we are. No wristwatches on their branches.
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But then I stopped in my thought tracks and realized that trees do tell time. They mark their age by the rings of growth and show the change of the seasons with their leaves. The sea too as it pounds into the rocky shoreline is measuring time with its waves. Tides in and out can be predicted with the same precise timing as the sun rising and setting. Time is at the very center of nature.
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"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven." Ecclesiastes 3:1. That has to be one of the most well known verses in the Bible. Time is part of our lives whether we ease along in life stretching out the hours and enjoying the ride or if we rush and run and think we must use every minute frantically getting something - anything - done. I'm afraid I've been in the rush and do time lane too much. I don't know that I want to stop doing. I just want to note the moments as they pass. Enjoy the time. Unwrap the gift of time I've been given.
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I put a poem in our church bulletin today that I'm sure many of you have probably already seen in some pass along e-mails in the last few years. It is supposedly a poem written by a terminally ill girl. Now whether that is true or not, I don't know. No name or source was given in the little pamphlet where I found the poem. But these are the last few lines.
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When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift...thrown away.
Life is not a race; do take it slower.
Hear the music before the song is over.

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Hear the music and savor the minutes. Oh yeah, if you're in the area you can savor some of those minutes next Saturday enjoying a great day at the Kentucky Book Fair in Frankfort. There will be over two hundred authors there - including yours truly - and it's a great day to do some Christmas shopping. An autographed book makes a fun gift. Come by and say hi if you come. I'll be smiling and doing my best to enjoy the moments. It won't be hard surrounded by all those authors and books. You can check out the author lists and books at www.kybookfair.org.

VBS and Finding Time to Get It All Done

Hi again, everybody. Are you like me and not finding enough hours in the day to do everything that needs doing? Truth is, I've been letting a lot of things that need doing slip by not done. I'm going to have to get going on cleaning my house soon or well, I guess it'll just get more in need of a dedicated housekeeper. I'm not dedicated to housecleaning. But I used to do a better job when all the kids were home. I had more of a routine then. Saturdays I cleaned. Now Saturdays are always busy with some other activity. Darrell's singing and I get to go along or Darrell's singing and I think wow, I don't want to waste a perfect day to write on doing chores. Maybe the grandkids have slept over or are coming to visit or I'm going to visit them. Or I want to go somewhere with my sisters or help Mom out. Or the wildflowers at Panther Rock were in bloom and a person has to stop to smell the roses, doesn't she? There is always something. That's for sure and when those kind of choices come up, I don't pick washing windows. Maybe I should, but I don't.

And now next week I have the best excuse ever -- Vacation Bible School. Talk about a gobbler upper of time. That can do it. First you've got to come up with lessons or study the lessons in the books you have. Second, you have to do crafts and plan activities that will keep the kids interested. Have you noticed that's harder to do than it used to be? I've been teaching Bible School for many years. Many years! And the kids aren't as easy to settle in to Bible study as they used to be. Of course, at our little church we don't have any electronic stuff to show movies or slides or whatever. We depend on the Bible and have an old fashioned Bible School that fits our little church best. The new programs are great, but we don't have the room at our church or the volunteers to lead that sort of program. So we just go back to the Bible School style of old and most of our kids have the most fun ever. So next week promises to be a whirlwind of activity. I'm hoping I can keep somewhat to my goal of getting a set number of pages of my new book written every week, but I might not have the proper time. Especially since I have to take Mom to the doctor one day and my dog to the vet the next day. Plus we bought a new fridge and that means I have to empty out the old fridge and get the spot ready for the new fridge. I'll take me half a day to take all the grandkids' photos and art work off the old fridge. :) The new fridge is not going to be as art display friendly, but we'll have to work out something. The side maybe.

Darrell and I took one of those Saturdays off the way I was talking about earlier and went to a play "As It Is in Heaven" at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill. It was not as good as I'd hoped. I've been doing a lot of Shaker research and there were several things that were just wrong according to the books I've been reading. They had the Shaker girl having a pet cat. That was not allowed. The little girls couldn't even have dolls. The Shakers did have a few cats late in the life of Shakerism in the late 1800's and early 1900's after the rules of conduct had relaxed quite a bit. But the play was set in 1837. No pets then. However the actresses did a great job and I liked hearing the Shaker songs they sang. They were definitely authentic songs. I hope to go back to Shaker Village for a full day of sightseeing and absorbing the atmosphere soon. The Shakers were interesting people, but not very easily understood in their time or even now. They had a lot of contradictory ways.

My new book, The Outsider, about the Shaker girl and the frontier doctor will be out in August. Publisher's Weekly reviewed it. Not a great review. I always hope for a great review, but I don't always get what I hope for. I met one writer who said she never read reviews. I'm beginning to thing that might be a good idea. The review wasn't really that bad, just not great. Oh well. Maybe the next one will be better and I know me. I won't be able to keep from reading it, good or bad.

I do appreciate all of you who may have put a review out somewhere for me. Terri put one on Amazon.com last week and I really appreciate that. I also really appreciate every time you recommend one of my books to a friend. Word of mouth reviews are the best kind. If they're good, that is.

The ACFW Southeast zone newsletter had me as their featured zone author this month. It was a fun interview and I enjoyed talking about my writing to all the other writers in the group. Every day I get a digest of messages where the members of the loop tell about what's going on in their writing lives and that's always fun to read about. You can visit the ACFW (Amercian Christian Fiction Writers) on the internet and if you're a writer of Christian fiction you can sign up and enjoy all the perks. (For a membership fee, of course. But part of the site is open to anybody who wants to click on.) I haven't been taking advantage of all the information out there on the site because, well, I have to get my new book done before my daughter-in-law has those twins this summer.

Yeah, I know. We're right back to that not enough time for everything bit. Hope you have the time to do all the things you most want to do. I love teaching Bible stories at Bible School so I'll be sure to make time for that this week. Ann

Time in May to Enjoy

Here it is May already and such a beautiful May day here in Central Kentucky this first Sunday of the month. Yesterday was Derby Day and while the weathermen threatened rain and storms it turned out to be a beautiful afternoon for everybody who takes part in Derby activities. The night before wasn't quite as nice for the Derby parties as rain dampened a few hats. I'm not a Derby partier although I have had the church out for picnics on Derby Day just because it was the only day we could agree on for the most to be able to come. I used to have a picnic here every Spring but then Darrell started being on the road singing most weekends and I have a hard time finding a Saturday when he's going to be around to help host the event. But in years past, we always had fun. Our church has a small congregation, but we like to think of ourselves as a big family of God. And we are definitely part of the family of believers.

Back to Derby Day. I have never been to a Derby. Don't really have any plans to ever go to a Derby, but there are those who say every Kentuckian should experience it at least once in his or her lifetime. I do enjoy watching the race on t.v. Of course now the coverage goes on all day and I wouldn't mind seeing the crazy and the extravagant hats and hearing all those human interest stories about this horse or that trainer or owner, but I don't have time to watch t.v. all day. I usually just watch the 6 p.m. Run for the Roses. You know I never saw those roses yesterday. Big Brown was being so fiesty after the race, he would have probably eaten them. Of course it was sad with Eight Belles being put down. I've researched horse racing for a couple of books in the past and that's always a sad part of racing. Some horses want to run so much, have such a big heart, that they break down trying too hard.

Anyway, as I was saying, I don't have time to watch all the race coverage. How often do we say that? We don't have time. Our pastor used to correct us when we said that we didn't have time to do this or that. He told us we all had the same amount of time in the day the Lord gave us. It was just how we chose to use that time. Like now I'm blogging when I could be walking in the sunshine or cleaning up my kitchen or reading a book. I could be doing a lot of things and some of them are things I really should be doing. I've been putting off doing some chores like cleaning out my closets for so long that my closets are reaching critical mass point where I may very well end up under an avalanche of clothes I should have taken to the Goodwill Store months ago. But there are so many more interesting things to do and so many more "I said I would do it" things to do. I have another speech on Thursday night. They're expecting me to show up with something to say. All right, those of you who know me -- I know what you're thinking. When doesn't she have something to say? But I want it to be something that people will enjoy listening to for thirty minutes or so. I want to come up with some fun trivia questions. I want to get some good doorprizes together and I will do my best to get it done. But in order to do that I'm going to have to put those closets off a little longer and hope I survive the avalanche when it comes.

My talk to the Administrative Assistant luncheon on Thursday went okay and I had fun meeting some of the women who keep the churches going in the Frankfort area. The luncheon was sponsored by the Corinth Christian Bookstore in Frankfort. They are so supportive of the area churches and of writers like me. They always let me have a book launch at their store and have other writers in as well. In fact Beverly Lewis is going to be there for a signing on May 16th. They're excited to have such a well known author at their store. So go by if you're in the area and you're a Beverly Lewis fan. I've been told she's a super nice person. I may meet her on the next day at the Blue Grass Festival of Books at Joseph-Beth's Bookstore in Lexington. I'll be signing books there on Saturday, May 17 from 9 to 5. I hope some of you will come by and talk to me so I won't be tempted to wander away from my post and spend all my money on more books I don't have time to read. See there's that "I don't have time" again. It pops up everywhere.

Maybe I should think about how I'm spending my time. Is it the way the Lord wants me to spend it? Is it the way I want to spend it? Am I just letting the hours roll past without thought and those hours are rolling into days and then weeks and way too fast becoming years slipping by. "I don't have time." You know, one of these days that's going to be so true. Now while I do still have the time the Lord has given me, I need to make the best use of it. I need to squeeze and shove all the minutes together and make time for work and family and friends, but first I need to make time for the Lord, the giver of all time. The closets can wait.

Hope you have all the time you need this week and every week.