Fall is leading into winter. Today there was a skiff of ice on a pot which has filled up with water on the porch outside the bedroom and the ground had a layer of white. It snowed on and off yesterday most of the day mixed with hail. We have a fire in the woodstove every day now or are uncomfortable. We let the chickens out to peck around in the woods and the garden this week one day and watched the ducks waddle around the yard and then down to the creek which they were really excited about.

The landscape now is mostly grey and brown. The leaves are down and I find myself noticing how interesting the shapes of the trees are and trying to imagine the view when it turns all white and everything I can see now is coated and covered. It's time to gather up  the remains of fall and summer and stash them. Song and I have been doing some cleaning and hubby brought in some furniture from the shop which happens to be white and will make the house brighter during the darker days of winter.

I'm getting to the end of my enthusiasm for canning and freezing and have been thinking about how to make room for venison in the freezer. Although it has been so busy  which leaves not much time for deer hunting and quotas are low and rules are strict about what you can get and where and how so we are wondering if we will have any venison for the freezer this year besides the one we are currently enjoying. We might get a pig instead! As soon as the young hens start to lay I plan to butcher some chickens and I'll probably can that meat.

It feels amazing to me that the two grandbabies are born and have settled into their families quite well now. My father in law is still in critical care and is inching his way towards recovery so we are still getting and giving daily reports on his up and down health. I talked to a friend this week who poured out his story of his own mother who is a diabetic and has been in and out of hospitals for his whole life. He talked about watching her have a medical crisis when he was six years old and how that has flavored his life. I found myself thinking that it can be a bridge between people when they share something like a family member who is weathering storm after storm after storm. God uses these kinds of things which we would not ask Him for in many many ways. I can see  a little of how He works them together to make a good fabric.

I'm reading a book about the Bible's Psalm 23 written by Max Lucado. I like it a bunch as I have most other things I've read that he has written.One of the best parts in it so far is his description of how people make their lives more difficult than they need to be by changing God into a geni you pull out and demand things of when you want something, a sleepy Grandpa who is not much use to you because he's usually asleep but he doesn't make anything hard or painful either becasue he's asleelp and hard to wake up for much besides a period hug or two or into a very busy executive Dad who is mostly at the office, on the way to the office and only has a little time for us on Sunday when he takes a few hours off from his hectic schedule of running the world and will listen to us for a few minutes.   It both made me chuckle and made me sad. I see people all around me who have those concepts of God and who live less of life than they would if they could push those ideas aside and see a loving powerful personal God who is not baffled by yesterday, today or tomorrow because He's already there and has infinite understanding but still loves each of us and has what is best for us in mind all the time.

Max also talks about all the baggage we insist on taking through life that we don't need at all. It reminds me of a passage from one of Corrie Ten Boom's books. He says we need very little but we take along an immense amount of things like fear, shame, pride, lust, sorrow because we don't trust God enough to hand those things to him and let Him give us what he wants us to carry and concetrate on. Good writing and good stuf to ponder. So that's what I'm doing. It's making me rather absent minded but that's a good balance for the task oriented mind set I've been in of late. Time to get ready for winter and in some ways it's already here.

"Rain rain go away. Come again some other day! " goes the childhood rhyme I have playing in my head. Our chickens are so tired of their wet henyard they hardly poked their heads out of the henhouse yesterday!! Today it is not raining yet and I've been enjoying this overcast day.It has rained so much lately that the creek is roaring below the house. I'm ready for a bit of a break so that I can enjoy the outside and more easily get a bit of the outside work done.

The leaves have turned to the road into a series of giant bouquets. The chickadees are busily emptying the bird feeder and stashing the seeds in all the little nooks and crannys they can find in our woods. I feel like the chickadees. There is a vague uneasiness that comes to me about this time of year. I want to store up and shore up before the winter storms come with their swirling gusts of snow to bury us in our valley.

It's interesting that the Bible tells us not to worry about tomorrow because God takes care of the birds and not to concentrate on building bigger bigger and barns but it also tells us to be like the ant and to get ready for the future by storing up as the ants do and not being lazy.  So there is supposed to be a balance in our lives. We should  not be like Ebeneezer Scrooge  in the famous Christmas tale storing up for the sake of storing up. Then again we need to take care of our families and take care of our possessions. It's quite a balancing act sometimes.

When I am copying the ants I like to freeze and can in the fall. Song and I froze a couple of bushels of corn last week. Yesterday I was busy cleaning and organizing our very dirty messy basement. It's a good fallish thing to do now that it's cold enough to need a fire in the woodstove! I was putting the peaches, peach jam, and cans of kidney beans I bought on sale on the pantry shelves.It's part of basement organizing that is lots of fun to do. Then I was pulling down cobwebs, tossing out trash, putting things back in the right places and sweeping up dirt.  It's always amazing to me how dirty and disorganized the basement gets in the summer when I am not down there very much! It feels good to have cleaned up some of that dirt, organized a bit. Now I can  see how much produce is lined up waiting for winter in the pantry on the shelves and is filling the freezer.

Next I need to take a load of stuff to the second hand store and a load to the dump and a load to the burning pile. I sorted things acccording to put away, give away and throw away as I made my way across the room.

I brought my pots of impatiens in the house along with plants my biologist daughter left here when she moved. It's too cold for these to be outside now but the flowers will keep blooming in the house till Christmas with some tender loving care. I still have an herb garden to bring in too. I noticed my Rosemary I was given for Christmas has been happy out in the yard. I used a sprig of it on a pork roast last week!

We went on a breathtakingly beautiful hayride this past Sunday evening and were given pumpkins by Son's employer who hosts a fall picnic and hayride through his hilly farm for his employees and their families. So now we have four pumpkins to decorate our porch with instead of the pots of flowers I had there all summer. I'm slow to make the shift from summer to fall but I'm getting there!

 

I just came back in from the henhouse. Song pulled the partition out between our young chicks with their broody hen mamas and the origianl flock. I filled the youngsters feeder, shook down some feed in the circular feeder hanging in the center of the old henhouse for the laying hens and watched for a while. Our hens are part pet part farm animals. Song and I both like to watch them. The new hens are a real rainbow of colors because I got Aracauna chicks this spring which makes them interesting to watch but the other interesting thing to see is how they observe their pecking order. The young hens are skittish because they know they are the lowly newcomers and don't deserve to eat. The older hens often will stride over to a young hen and peck her for no reason but just to get a rise out her. It works too! The young hen will jump straight up and out of the way. Often the old hen will just take a mouthful or two of feed and then stride off.

Obviously she wasn't hungry. She just wanted to let the youngster know she is above her in rank. Most of the older hens aren't doing much of this pecking they are just ingnoring the young hens and that half of the henhouse and the long low feeder Song moved out of the newer half of the henhouse which holds feed for the youngsters. And so far none of the young hens have ventured through the old henhouse and out the hole in the wall to the outside yard. I'm finding myself wondering how and when they will begin to venture out that far and what kind of fighting will ensue. Sometimes there can be quite a bit of fight and flee when the young ones get inquisitive! I've seen this all before of course but it's still interesting. I stand ready to intervene if the old hens or rooster get too aggressive. After all the time and money we've used to get this new flock going I'm not willing to let the old flock peck the new flock to death. It can happen too. Which is why I had Song wait till this week to mix the two batches of birds. This week we are done with wearing out the road to our nearby towns for a bit and have returned from visits downstate. So we can keep an eye on the chicks and hens and rooster. We're taking turns going out to see how they are doing. So far so good.

It reminds me of people.

God doesn't say "Feed my sheep. Feed my lambs." lightly. It takes more than food  in a dish to feed God's flock. It takes the kind of thing we are doing with these chickens. Lots of prayerful supervision, encouragement, a bit of entertainment, reassurance, sometimes some patching up the wounded, and at the very least carefully checking for injuries. It's ok for a little friendly jostling for positons. But when it turns into serious fights it's time for some intervention and it's time for the more mature folks who are able to use some self control to be present.

I notice with the chickens that they settle down and behave better if Song or I go out into the henhouse. Even if we don't actually do anything but just stand around in there. Sometimes a frightened chicken or chick who is getting picked on will come running over and stand right by us and the bully will back away a fade into the flock.

When I'm dealing with people I notice the same thing.

One of the most effective things in our kid's club or Sunday school is just to have more adults and older children scattered in among the kids as they sit in a big group. The volunteers don't have to do anything other than just sit with the children to cut down on the poking, hair pulling, pinching, making faces at each other that kids do to establish their pecking order.  Of course some silent prayer helps a bunch too! Since that seems to help to spread God's spirit among the group!

We were talking about that this weekend at my daughter's house. Sometimes when another adult walks in the room the kids sit up straighter and take notice. A calm seems to descend from above. Nothing has to be said. It's just comforting to everybody to have another adult walk in the room and stand there with love in his heart for those kids.

It's a good thing to keep in mind when we feel like we don't, can't and won't make much of a difference. All you really have to do is go and stand there with love in your heart and you have made a difference. The atmosphere in the room can change allmost instantly.

I remember when Hubby and I were a young married couple and we were sitting in our house praying for our neighbors who we knew were having a terrible time but we didn't know what to do to help them. An older couple came over to our home for a visit and said, "What are you doing?" When we told them. They said,"That's nice. Now why don't you go over there and be the answer to your prayers for them?" to which we answered that we couldn't do that. They asked why. We answered that we didn't know what to do or say to them. The older couple said, "Oh you don't need to do or say anything at all. Just go." So we did. And when we got there we found lots of little things we could do like washing their dishes and we spent a couple of hours listening and then we came home. We still didn't know what to say to them. But we knew we had managed to do what God wanted us to do.

I've thought of that incident many many times. It was good lesson that I hope I don't ever forget and which I try to share with others. I guess another way of saying it is that when I get empty of myself and full of God I can go make a difference in other people's lives. All I really have to do is listen, go and listen. And sometimes there is something to do that God whispers to me when I go.

Oh and I'm reading a book again by Florence Littauer called Making the Tough Times Count here are three  links to a site about her.