Why I Need to Write Every Day

It's an interesting factor in my life. Writing something every day helps. Whether I'm finding balance by writing, or whether it is the cognitive exercise, just the act of choosing words and stringing them together into something that makes sense is beneficial for me.

I started an Instagram account (I'm @wjeichler on Instagram) in mid February. Instagram, as many of you know, uses a square format photo, one that can be artful or insightful or playful or totally off the wall, to convey a feeling. Kind of like a poem, each Instagram post can be accompanied by words. 

I find that I really enjoy framing those words in my posts. Sometimes I use a sentence; sometimes I write a paragraph. In a way, Instagram has become my micro blog presence on the web. 

Lindsie Brown Verma, fellow blogger and native of Michigan's Thumb, commented on Facebook the other day about not finding time in her busy schedule to do the writing that she loves. I totally know what she is talking about and tapped out a little encouragement for her.

That's where the quote in this meme came from. I am realizing that the act of putting one foot in front of the other one, or, in the writer's way of saying it, putting one word after another, creates an energy that nourishes the day. Maybe it even nourishes the soul. 

Writing helps me focus. It gives clarity to thoughts. It brings purpose. 

Instagram's short format has taught me that, again.

Seed Sorting

Marigolds, with their bushes of feathery foliage, volunteered a place in our garden last summer. More than prolific and dotted with hundreds of orange, pungent blossoms, the plants occupied more territory than some of the seeds that I intentionally selected and planted.

Apparently the marigolds, whatever variety they are, like the lake house garden because the volunteers germinated in droves. So we transplanted and moved and pushed them around on the south end of the garden.

Late in the fall, Ed noticed that the seed heads had matured and harvested a bucket full of flower heads, all populated with the long, tubular seeds typical of marigolds. He laid the flowers out on the garage floor and let them dry.

In January we broke the pods with the seeds, sort of a head, sort of a pod, off the rest of the plants and tossed the dried stems. The seed heads were dumped into a box and I've been sorting out the stems and chaff and leafy structures so that only the seeds remain.

So now we have handfuls of marigold seed to plant this coming summer. Certainly the gardens at the lake and at the farm this summer will have rows of bright orange marigolds guarding the vegetables and waving their festive flowers in the summer sun.

Stepping Back

Willow Blog is about to take another big step. I'm thinking about my digital life as a very crowded room with lots of screens. Mobiles. Laptops. Desktops. Tablets. Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts. Well, anyway, I'm ready to step to the back of the room and lean against the wall for a while.

So, as of January 1, 2015, Willow Blog will be published once a week, probably toward the end of the week. I am finding that I could use some extra time and I know that I can gain it by four less deadlines per week.

"Deadlines!" you say. "But, gee, you are only writing a blog!"

And that is true. It is just a blog. But even a blog with short paragraphs requires careful writing and editing. And, as those of you who follow the blog know, there is always the photography. Each photo takes a minimum amount of time. All of that is time that I am planning to use in another way.

Some of those "other ways" will become more apparent as the year moves ahead, but for now, dear readers, know that I am writing and photographing and sketching and gardening and knitting and, yes, reading, as those minutes become a gift that I am giving to myself in the new year.

As always, thank you, thank you for reading. Your enjoyment and comments have been a huge boost to me.

Happy New Year, from under the Willow that shades us all.

Baby Jesus Is Back

Once upon a time, many years ago, maybe thirty years or so, the mother in the family spotted a tiny wooden manger scene in a holiday catalog. The carved figures, none taller than an inch and a half, were brightly painted. "This set would be perfect for my children to play with at Christmas," the mother thought. 

And verily so, she ordered the toy crèche and throughout the children's growing up years the miniature figures became a part of the family's holiday times. The children would set up the manger scene on the kitchen table or under the tree, and, in so doing, the Story was told again and again. 

But the children grew to be adults and one Christmas, in setting the tiny figures out in the kitchen windowsill, the mother noticed that Baby Jesus was missing. "Lost," she thought. "We have lost the baby." Like all mothers, when their children leave home, even though mothers know that children must grow up, the mother felt the loss of the tiny carving for the little creche had found its way to the family's Christmas celebrations.

She knew it was just a representation  of the Christ Child, just a piece of painted wood, yet every Christmas she would take out the little figures and, fingering them and remembering, she would wish that they would somehow or another find the tiny painted figure somewhere in the big empty farmhouse. 

Christmas after Christmas came and the mother became a grandmother. The little toy crèche moved to another house. By now the grown up children talked about how Jesus must have been tossed out with wrapping paper some year. Jesus was probably in a landfill, or worse, incinerated. But maybe, the mother thought, the little wooden piece is stuck in the cracks of the oak flooring in the old farmhouse. 

Finally the mother thought and thought about the Story. Baby Jesus was still in the manger. The problem wasn't that Baby Jesus was gone. The problem was that the tiny painted piece of wood was gone. The mother knew a famous woodcarver and a talented Artist. "Maybe I could ask the Carver and his Wife if they could make a new baby for the very old manger scene," she thought. 

And so she dared to ask the famous Carver if he would gently carve a new Baby Jesus. And she asked, too, if his wife, the Artist, could paint the baby so Mary and Joseph would have their baby back.

And it came to pass that the Carver and the Artist, using their magical talents, created a new manger and in that manger they fashioned a Baby Jesus for the Holy Family. When Christmas time came, they bundled up the little creche with all of its brightly painted figures and packed them safely into a postal box.

The Mother, upon opening the box, carefully pulled out the figures, one by one, until she came to the Baby. Yes, a new Baby, but still the Old Story.

And so the figures returned to the kitchen windowsill where they remind the Mother, when she pauses in a day's work, that Baby Jesus really isn't lost. In fact, Baby Jesus comes back every Christmas, making the Old Story into a New Story, again.

Rain in the Desert

While out golfing this afternoon I took this photo of raindrops on the windshield of a golf cart. The clouds had been heavy all day but the rain just would not start.

Finally, on the back nine, there were a few minutes of rain, just enough to see the rounded patterns of drops on the cart paths and these few on the windshield. Sometimes, here in the desert the rain struggles to reach the ground, but today it finally made it. Even the scent of the air changed as moisture freshened the atmosphere.

Tucson hasn't had rain for over a month and a really good rain would feel good. It is hard to imagine how dry California and other drought areas must be. I just know that even these few drops felt good as today there finally was rain in the desert.

Election Day Squash

Since I voted absentee before today, I could take Election Day as a quiet time. I've been knitting and listening to classical music on MSU's WKAR, I cued up an interview of Carlos Santana that I missed on NPR earlier today, and I baked a big garden squash, one of the improved blue hubbards, for lunch. 

The squash, almost seven pounds, presented a splitting quandry. My largest chef's knife barely split the surface. After a few whacks, I stuck the knife soundly into the cucurbit (you can look that word up), raised the knife, and, using two hands, with the squash impaled on the blade, slammed the whole thing on the countertop. (I want all of my Dem friends to know, too, that I did not think bad thoughts about Kentucky senators as I smashed the squash. I was a good person. And I was hungry for squash.)

The squash split with surety. Seeds scooped out, brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with Mrs. Dash seasoning, the flesh roasted in a 350 degree oven in less than an hour.

That was lunch, two bowls of yummy mashed squashy goodness, with light butter and fresh cracked pepper. The rest of the massive veggie is frozen, ready for a soup or bisque recipe later this fall. 

I marked the freezer cartons "Election Day Squash" and know that it will be a delight to pull those boxes out of the freezer to make soup some fine day this winter.

And, yes, I saved some of the seeds. 

Harry Truman's Voting Advice

Go to the polls tomorrow and vote your convictions

 -- your hopes -- and your faith in the future.

 If you do that, under God, we can lead the world to freedom and security.

Harry Truman

November 1, 1948

These are words that Harry Truman wrote for his last speech of the 1948 campaign. Truman prepared his remarks for a radio speech to be given on the night before the election. Campaigning was done and he had returned home to Independence, Missouri.

His handwritten notes were transcribed, the speech typed up, and the president must have tossed the notes into a wastebasket. A White House reporter retrieved the notes and, after some years, Harry Truman's discarded speech has ended up at the Truman Library.

I happened upon Mr. Truman's speech when I was doing some reading on the Truman Library's website. I was born in February of 1948, so I would have been almost nine months old at the time of the election. My mom and dad lived in Appleton, Wisconsin where my Dad was serving three small churches and finishing his undergraduate degree at Oshkosh. I have always been interested in the events of 1948, the year of my birth.

My parents, born in the 1920's on dairy farms in eastern Wisconsin, had already experienced the Great Depression and World War II. My older sister came along in 1946 followed by me in 1948. We were born touching the post war years -- baby boomers, we would come to be called -- to parents who knew only FDR as president for most of their years as teenagers and twentysomes.

Truman's election in 1948 was pivotal. His administration would carry out the integration of the armed forces. He would keep the social contract that FDR and many others forged to bring the country out of economic disaster. It is Truman's presidency that spanned the years when manufacturing turned from warplanes and tanks, to cars and refrigerators.

But on that election eve in 1948, Harry Truman's words rang with commitment. In his handwriting, you can even glean a bit of nostalgia, maybe even homesickness, as he arrived home and gave that final speech. Thomas Dewey was seen as the favorite. Harry Truman had come home to vote.

His discarded words, retrieved from history's wastebasket, stand for tomorrow's election. Vote your convictions, your hopes, your faith. Things will work out.

It's good advice.

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Today's blog post is a repeat of a blog post from November 5, 2012, before the last Presidential Election. wje

Game 7

The popcorn is salty good and my Vernor's is fizzing. I'm watching the last night of baseball and the Royals (my pick this year) are behind by one run. 

As a Detroit Tiger fan, I definitely don't want to see the Giants win. That would be another bittersweet moment for the American League Central Division. 

But even more bittersweet is the end of baseball for this year. Those 162 games bring continuity to the spring and summer months. Like golf, there's always another inning, or another hole to play. 

So tonight's game is the end of the season. And it's only five more months until spring training. 

Ah, baseball. 

  

Missing K Mart in Bad Axe

Big bath towels. Bowls and dishes from the Sandra Lee kitchen line. An occasional bottle of nail polish. Office supplies and drug items. Clothes for kids and teens. A lawn table and chair set that is fourteen years old. Martha Stewart Christmas items. And toys.

These are some of the items that I purchased at the Bad Axe K-Mart store. Since that store closed last spring, I've had to adjust my buying and, in some cases, shift to another retailer or find another K Mart.

Now I know that I could start doing the Walmart thing, but I was so influenced by Dr. Ken Stone's presentations in Huron County before Walmart opened in Bad Axe that I'm still not a WM shopper. Ken Stone, an Iowa State University economist, conducted studies in the 1990's that showed the effect of a Walmart on surrounding towns. He theorized that people drove to the bigger town and left their dollars there, not in their own smaller community.

Looking back, it pretty clear that small towns were in a decline for a long time before Walmart came to town, but it was that boost of getting everything in one place that took even more retail businesses away from the little towns and handed it to the bigger towns that hosted a Walmart.

Now it is a different day and a different era, with the advancement of internet buying and the ubiquitous brown UPS trucks and Priority US Mail that allows us to order diapers and coffee and books, delivered to our doorsteps.

Back to K-Mart. The corporation announced this week that even more Michigan locations will be closing, including the one in Bay City.

The Bad Axe store was a dandy. The aisles were wide. The floors were sparkling clean. The staff was helpful. The inventory rotated regularly. It was darn good competition to WM.

And I miss it, that big Bad Axe K-Mart store.

Just A Handful

The Fall Gold raspberry bushes in my garden are producing big yellow berries with a hint of blush pink this fall. There aren't a lot of berries. Yesterday I picked a handful.

I took those few berries and washed them. Then I stirred them into some cranberries. I always keep a mason jar of cranberries in the frig. I like them on yogurt and use the simple recipe on the back of the Ocean Spray package (using less sugar) to fill the jar about once a month.

Greek yogurt (I like the honey flavor) topped with that handful of raspberries and the staunch cranberries made a luscious addition to breakfast.

Still, it was just a handful of berries.

I like that metaphor of how just a few of something can change everything.

Just a handful of people, a few thoughts, a bit of money, a couple of votes, scattered prayers, a few berries. All in time, a handful adds up to something good and delicious.

Tech Tip: Green (Or Red) Dot

Those doggone polarized plugs, you know, the ones that you almost always get the plug in the wrong position and so you have to rotate it in your hand, quite uncomfortably? Well, here's a tech tip that involves green or red nail polish. Put a dot on the upper face of the plug and you can always aim that plug at the socket the right way.

Micro USB plugs have the same characteristic, only they are so very small to see clearly. Now I mark my devices (Kindle here) with a dot of nail polish and I'm ready to go.

My little tech tip doesn't even save me a minute of time each day. What it does save me is the frustration of playing 50-50 with electrical outlets and teeny, tiny plugins.

I use red or green for these dots, but, come to think of it, nail enamel comes in some pretty cool colors. I may have to haunt the cosmetic aisles this October and find some really weird shades for my tech dots.

Meet & Greet Mark Schauer

Liesl Eichler Clark, Ed Eichler, Mark Schauer, Wanda Hayes Eichler

A whole lot of people joined Ed and me and our daughter Liesl at Cedar Bluff lake house today as we sponsored a meet and greet reception for Mark Schauer, Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan. Liesl has worked with Mark in goverment in Lansing. Through her we have come to know Mark as a person of integrity with high leadership skills and great drive. He will be a tenacious and committed governor.

So a bunch of us from Huron County (and other parts of the state) enjoyed some good food, got to shake hands with Mark and hear his vision for our state, and (get this) even had a bald eagle do a fly-by for the event.

How cool is that? Friends and family, the next governor of Michigan, and one of our resident shoreline eagles -- all in a summer's afternoon!

Little Stuff

For the fun of it, I photographed some of the little stuff that makes life easier. There's a split ring marker, the white plastic almost-circle, that knitters use to mark stitches. The open end slips through the knitting to mark a stitch. Golf tees are indispensable, almost, for most golfers. Little chunks of wood or plastic, they keep the ball ready for that first big swing on a tee box.

Jumbo paperclips hold all my paperwork together. I even throw out the little average sized ones, that's how much I favor these big clips. Office clips, this one in purple, fasten everything from potato chips to nut bags in my kitchen. Occasionally they end up used as office supplies. Most often, they are in the kitchen.

Last but not least is the glass head silk pin, my straight pin of choice for sewing and quilting. I use these little puppies, fresh out of the box and super sharp, to pin quilts into drywall, too.

All of this little stuff solves problems and makes life better.

Another Month Is Whacked

I had great plans for my bike riding this month. The goal was 62 miles, two per day. 

Well, the month is whacked and so is that goal. So, tomorrow becomes the reset day when I roll out the goal again and get riding. 

Life is like that. You hit a goal; you miss a goal. It's a little like the game of golf where there is always another hole and another day. 

Last night, at my knitting group, one knitter proclaimed how lucky we are to be able to do even mundane tasks. "I think of that when I'm doing something so routine that I wonder why I even bother," she said. "But then I remember to be grateful for the strength and agility to clean windows or sweep a floor." 

On the eve of another month, I can celebrate the whacked goal and my sixties-plus agility. So I set the goal again.  62 miles in August. Here goes. 

There Must Be A Poet

There must be a poet somewhere who could describe in a language, possibly not one that I could understand, this magnificient sky.

All my words fall short, as if they come to the edge of a brink and tumble down into some unknown. My words, so ill kempt and trite, those kind of words come up short as the setting sun illuminates this set of clouds that never was and never will be again.

But I'd like to think that somewhere, there must be poet, maybe the Grand Poet, who could write in some language about this beauty.

Old Camp Shirt

I pulled my old corduroy camp shirt from the back of the closet over the weekend. Decorated with a mosquito, a moose, poison ivy, a loon, and other north woods images, the shirt is a fun reminder of summers past when we would go camping.

The designs are from a quilting pattern that I liked way back when. Each image is cut from cotton fabric and fused onto the purchased corduroy shirt. Then I took pearl cotton and stitched around the shapes. Some of them have beads and silk ribbon embroidery that complete the figure.

I made the mosquito big and buggy-eyed. Mosquitoes, as everyone knows, are the absolute scourge of camping. It seems as if we were always reaching for bug spray during our several camping trips in the Upper Peninsula, Canada, and Wisconsin.

I'll probably pull on the camp shirt for a few campfires this summer. Since it is the end of July already, it feels like a campfire would be a good idea before fall and football and really cool weather set in.

June Reflections

One of the really fun things about writing a blog (or a newspaper column, as I used to do) is looking back to see what you wrote in previous years. I took a few moments today to look back at the last three years of posts from June 30th.

In 2011, U.S. soldiers were still getting killed in Iraq and I wrote about the death of a young medic, Army Pfc.Brian Backus, a son of Harbor Beach, and what that seemed like to honor a fallen hero right before the Fourth of July.  June 30, 2011 -- Before The Fourth of July

Two of my planter boxes were the focus of the 2012 blog post for June 30th. We had traveled in Great Britain that spring and I was inspired by all of the garden pots that I saw in England.  June 30, 2012 -- British Boxwoods

Our grandkids have been regular visitors to our lake house during the month of June and in 2013 there were ice cream cones and lots of fun times to write about.  June 30, 2013 -- Grandpa's Waffle Cone

I can characterize June 2014, for me, as the time of geraniums and sunrises. And, most of all, after the dreadful cold winter, June has been the month of welcoming back the warm days of summer.

Long Summer Days

I try to keep track of the times for sunrise and sunset in my daily art journal. A lot of the weather apps on mobile phones show those times routinely. Right now, at the end of June, the sun comes up before 6 am and goes down after 9 pm, making the days extremely long. All of that light is what makes things grow so fast in late June. Beans that were just showing on Monday have four leaves by Wednesday. The cut-and-come-again lettuce seems to always need cutting. It's a vibrant time of the year.

I always find that I get really tired this time of the year, too. I attempt to do way too much. With long days I figure that I should be able to get something done before breakfast and after supper. So I'm painting in my art journal before 7 am, working on my website in the morning, doing correspondence in the afternoon, and then weeding a garden bed at 8 pm.

Even long summer days require lazy time for a good book or watching a baseball game. As a matter of fact, that might be the best thing about summer days, that there is time for some lazy moments.

Smiling Pile of Poo

Youngest grandson Finn likes the Emoji keyboard on Apple Iphones. The emoji characters, also called emoticons, are little cartoon images that are based on the punctuation strokes on a standard typewriter. They have charm and they send a message that words sometime cannot convey. Finn usually includes the smiling pile of poo in any of the emoji text messages that he sends to me.

FiveThirtyEight, the data/sociological/sports/policitcal website that we should all be reading, listed the top one hundred emoticons in a post earlier this week. Writer Mona Chalabi says that emoticons have come a long way since :) and she is certainly right about that.

Her colleague, Walter Hickey, who is one the lifestyle writers for FiveThirtyEight, tweeted that the smiling pile of poop was actually the best emoji. Check out his tweet. It looks a lot like the text messages that I get from my six year old grandson. Very cool that adults see the value of emoticons, too.

And just to give FiveThirtyEight a bit more of a plug, here's Nate Silver and the In Search of America's Best Burrito project. Nate, the founder of FiveThirtyEight,  is from the Lansing area, so we Michigan people can be rightly proud of his success on the grand marketplace that is known as the internet. And Anna Barry-Jester, the Decider and burrito correspondent for FiveThirtyEight, is from Michigan, too.

Back to the poop. When I saw Walt Hickey's tweet, I knew that I would have to include FiveThirtyEight in this blog post, since I had already completed my watercolor version of the smiling pile of poop and wanted to feature it on the blog.

And, for those of you too lazy to read Mona Chalabi's article, smiling pile of poop is Number 88 on the list of top one hundred emoticons. But you will want to look up the list in her article so you can see what rank your favorite emoticon has.

Anyway, some days are like a smiling pile of poo.

End of sentence. End of week. After all, this is being posted on a Friday.

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NOTE: To install the Emoji characters on an Apple Iphone, go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards and choose Emoji.

Colorful Pipedreams Day

Day 4: Pipedreams Tour in Switzerland

Pipedreams travel can be quite colorful. Today's most colorful delight was the golden orange of the back walls in the sanctuary at Holy Trinity Church in Bern where we heard two organs played, including the Italian organ at the front of the church, an instrument that was built in 2008.

Yesterday's colorful highlight was the blue organ in the Jesuit Church at Porrentruy. The church is now used as a concert hall and the acoustics were sharp and specific to the tonalities of this organ. Some of us liked the blue casework on this organ, and some of us were not so sure that we would have chosen this color.

Ed and I spotted this pink trombone while window shopping and strolling the streets in Bern at supper time today. At first I thought it might be a spray painted window decoration, but it was a brand new trombone.

And for today's final color, here are the erdbeeren that I had for dessert tonight. My mother always commented that in German the word for strawberry, erdbeeren, means "earth berry." Mom, who grew up speaking German, thought that was appropriate since you crawl along the earth to pick strawberries.

From orange church walls, to a blue organ, to a pink trombone, and red strawberries, Pipedreams travel is colorful. And the strawberries tasted good, too!