Victoria typed up the names of all of you who entered the giveaway for Dorcas Smucker’s book, Tea and Trouble Brewing.  I cut them carefully into strips and mixed them up and put them into a bowl.  Andre closed his eyes and drew a name.  And the winner is #writersblock02!  Congratulations, Andrea!  I’m excited about mailing a package all the way to Lancaster, PA, for you.    And for those of you who didn’t win, see previous post for how to order the book.

And thanks to all of you who entered.  I enjoyed hearing about what you like about where you live.  I started my own post on a day when I was feeling sad about  how long winter stretches out before us.  In writing it, I again realized how attached I am to the Great White North.

Post below:

They were off to school in a flurry of skates and shin pads and elbow pads and hockey pants.  The insanity has just begun.

The car thermometer showed -23 degrees Celsius on the drive to school.  I`d left my gloves at home in the craziness of getting out the door and the steering wheel was cold long after the suburban warmed up.

Last night I went on a walk after school and the sun set at 4:30-ish. It doesn’t get very high in the sky on the shortest days of the year.

And it wasn’t up yet at 9:00 this morning, but the sky was blue and pink and promising.

Our neighbors saw this grizzly this fall.   Its unusual to see them here, but they seem to travel through occasionally.

I know the spot to look for the cow moose in the bush beside the road on the drive to school.

Last night I burst into unexplainable tears because the overhead light in our bedroom seemed so dim and the four walls of the house were coming in on me, even though I went out to play with Liesl and Andre in the morning and took a walk later in the day.

Dan took us to town for icecream after supper because he knew I was blue.

I dream of the days in Belize when the children put on their flip flops and got on their bikes and went off to school.  I dream of Florida, of Paraguay, of Kenyan sunshine beating hotly down.

Our neighbor, Mr. Sadlier, shot a record book elk last week.

 

The aeriator on our dugout isn’t working right and only a local can understand what dugout water is like that’s not getting air.  Hold your nose and close your eyes while you take a bubble bath at my house right now.

Winter afternoon sunshine is glorious.

In town there’s this northern camaraderie that I can’t explain.  Big diesel pickups idling.  Tuques (US stocking caps—and yes, wikipedia told me to spell it that way!)  and scarves and boots everywhere.  People walking quickly to their vehicles.  Long lines at Tim Hortons drive-thru.  No size 10 boys’ coats to be found.  Snow stamping and shivering.

Oh land of my birth, you have captured my heart.  You hold it tightly and don’t let it go.  Sometimes I know that I will not survive you.   I cry quietly on my winter walk because winter has only begun, the water smells bad, and everywhere I look there is a semi doing oilfield hauling.   The tears freeze on my cheeks.  (I do not exaggerate for effect.)

*note:  Some of my friends absolutely LOVE winter here.  Long snowy days make them happy, busy in their cocoons of sewing or crafting or cooking or feeding their cattle and chickens.*

 

Then I catch my breath at your frost and your wide spaces and your wildlife.  I bask in the crackle of the fire and the falling snow.  I am proud of our red-cheeked hockey players.  I drink a chai latte and talk with my friend at the coffee shop.  There is lots of time to read a bedtime story.  Maybe I will even start to blog in earnest.

We will survive another winter.  We will even enjoy it.  Chinooks will breathe over us when it feels like we can’t stand another day of cold. 

And then the spring mud will come.

Soon the wild busyness of summer will be upon us.  Planting and haymaking and picnics and weddings and camping and DOING.

 

I will smile again, breathe in warmth and light, and forget about vitamins and anti-depressants and SAD lights.

I love where we live because it is where we’re supposed to be right now.  I love it because of the people we share life with here.  I love it because it’s beautiful and free. 

Today it’s white and cold in Alberta, while in Oregon it’s raining.  Today is Thanksgiving if you are American and here in Canada we’ve already celebrated back in October.  Today is also Giveaway Day, a first for me from this remote corner.   I am honoured to announce that Dorcas Smucker is generously giving away her newest book, Tea and Trouble Brewing, via this blog. 

I quickly jumped in and said I’d do a book review when Dorcas was looking for bloggers for her blog tour.  But then I got nervous because I’ve never done a book review before.  As number 11 on a list of 18 bloggers doing a review, I wondered if I could do it without shamelessly copying the others.  And (horrors!!) what if I don’t use commas correctly?

But.  After someone has kindly mailed you 3 books- one to keep, one to give away on your blog, and one to quietly slip to someone as a gift- you need to keep your word.  You want to keep your word.

Here I quote someone named Bevy who introduces Dorcas:

Dorcas is the wife of a Mennonite Minister, the mother of six children and author of several books/memoirs.  She is a once-a-month columnist for the Eugene Register-Guard, on Facebook and is blog host for Life in the Shoe. (end of quote)

After joining the online world just three years ago by getting a Facebook account and then discovering the wide world of blogland, I was quickly drawn to Dorcas Smucker’s writing.  I had heard vaguely of her before, but when she left a thoughtful comment on one of my first faltering blog posts and I followed her to her blog at Life in the Shoe, I knew I had happened upon a gold mine.

Dorcas writes well of real life.  She is articulate and funny.  And with her there is none of this rambling what-does-this-mean-and-where- is-it-going” discomfort that I can almost feel through the computer screen when people read what I write.  Succinct at its best makes me happy.  There is also none of the Sunday school paper stuffiness that you might mistakenly expect from  a Mennonite minister’s wife.

Here I quote Crystal on Dorcas: 

Her writing is impeccably genius. This isn’t some random blog with a few funny stories thrown together. These pages are chock-full of carefully-crafted beginnings, middles and endings. One specific reason I love Dorcas’s writing? She ALWAYS connects her final paragraph to her first in a way that perfectly ties up the package. That takes serious talent and years of work.”  (end of quote)

Tea and Trouble Brewing is Dorcas Smucker’s fourth book.  Like her other three books, it is a compilation of the Letters from Harrisburg that she writes for the Eugene newspaper column.   In her fourth book she addresses truly winning, clotheslines, harvest time, pregnant cats, football games, and joining face book.  Among many other things.

My favorite paragraphs include these in the chapter “How Little Girls Become Moms” when the sweet family kitten suddenly becomes a mother. 

Cleo was like a different cat.  Skinny, tired, preoccupied.  She no longer had time for lounging on laps.  Most of the time she was in her box, curled into a crescent, the patient curve of her body completely filled with pawing, seeking, demanding kittens, a mass of black and gray and yellow.

“It makes me sad to look at her,” said our oldest daughter, Amy.  “She’s like these girls that get married and have all these babies way too young, and they just look so harassed and tired.”

I didn’t tell her that Cleo reminded me of myself. 

And later on in the same chapter, Dorcas writes on how motherhood has changed her: 

I could, if I wished, go back to worrying about matching this belt and these shoes.  Instead, I agonize about war and orphans and tornadoes and injustice.  I meddle shamelessly, asking the guy in the wheelchair if he needs help reaching that cantaloupe at Fred Meyer and offering to pray for the weeping young woman hiding out at the back of the Goodwill store.

I dispense advice and listen a lot.  I hope people can look at me and tell that I care and if they need it, I will drop my work to make a pot of tea and talk.

I have a restless, seeking nature and struggle with contentment.  I think the biggest appeal for me in Dorcas’s writing is wrapped up in this excerpt from the chapter “Rethinking Life Choices” in her latest book.

I seldom question my major life choices.  I have few regrets, and I like where I live and who I’m with and what I do.

And later:  Who knows, the future may find me stitching up wounds on little heads in Africa someday.  Or not.  But right now I need to sew pretty dresses for my daughter and take good care of the wounds that show up in my household, and I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing, now and here.

Yes and amen.

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For a chance to win a free copy of Tea and Trouble Brewing, please leave a comment on this post.   Tell us what you like about where you live or who you’re with or what you do—or all 3.  Since a lot of the people who read this blog are not bloggers and I know how annoying it can be to sign in to some foreign site, your Facebook comment will count as well.  (I hope this is considered kosher.) Since this is a busy time for many of you, I will draw the winner’s name a week from today.

Per the Author’s request – the following information is made available to you:

To order a copy, for yourself, go to

Amazon , to pay by credit card.
If you would prefer to pay by check (cheque! , please send $15 (postage is included in this price) to Dorcas Smucker, 31148 Substation Drive, Harrisburg, OR 97446.

**Dorcas also has a special on right now. All 4 of her books for $40.00. Again, postage is included.

(Note:  I have read all four of these books and they make wonderful gifts.)

Happy Thanksgiving to my lovely American friends! 

They were Tyler and Betsy, off on a hike to find new parents because theirs had died.

She wore her princess dress with polka dot pajama pants underneath it and her “cozy brown mocassins”. (i.e:  big sister’s boots that are 4 sizes too big for her)  In Betsy’s “packpack” were six apple slices, salt & vinegar chips, a marker, and 2 coats for good measure.  Tyler said he had Bryant’s Bible and snacks in his.  He was carrying a little bear that he found in the woods.  They pretended that they lived in a town with white grass because there’s still snow out there but they wanted it to be summer.  And to settle the dilemma of leafless trees he decided that “a million people came and chopped off all the leaves”.

They hiked for quite a while and I cleaned up the kitchen.  When I went to tidy the bathroom this is what I saw.  They’d been using bubble bath to wash the play dishes.  And a very dirty motorcycle. And other things. {Please do not turn me over to the decor police.  WHEN I start to redo this house, this bathroom will be where I start.}

 

These are the beautiful, terrible days.  The days of bad smells that I can’t find the source of in the suburban and 8 people to have pressed and ready for a wedding.  The days of flu making its rounds and smashed skittles in the carseat.  The days of finding a little diary to God written by someone who’s six.  “Dear God,  Your so good But sumtims Life dosent seam so entresting” and “Dear God, i Love you.  Your so good your so loveing your so kind and you make life faer and you love us all so you should have a treet and I’m so triying to do a treet and I’m going to tel you wat is is on the nekst paje.”  Next page: “Dear God your so good so I’m going to tel you wat the soapris is.  Ok hear it is.  I’m going to tri to do the best I kan do.  I’m going to try to be nic to evrebode els in the world. Love, Natalia.”  These are the days of rushing off to piano lessons and brushing 3 sets of teeth before bed at night.  They are the days where I cook huge pots of food and it’s gone before I have time to sit and enjoy my own plateful.

I want to hold these days tight. Sometimes I can’t wait till they end.  These are the terrible, beautiful days.

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We just had a family wedding in southern Alberta.  It’s a 12 hour drive south for us.  Down through the First Nations reserve near Valleyview, on to the bleak landscape by Whitecourt, on south through Alberta’s capital Edmonton, down to Calgary’s rolling landscape with mountains in the distance, and on still farther to booming Lethbridge and then the flat, treeless farmland near the little town of Raymond.  My parents and a sister live there, and the rest of the Peachey siblings (minus Carol in Virginia–and Kevin in heaven) met there for a brief and noisy weekend.

We stayed the nights with our friends the Maldaners since Mom & Dad’s house was too full.  I didn’t get any pictures of our stay with these friends, but here’s a picture of their beautiful livingroom that I stole from Mrs. Maldaner’s facebook page.  (Thanks, Kathy.)

 Their boys and ours stayed up late laughing and horsing around, shooting guns made out of pvc pipes with soft darts for bullets.  They skated and played hide and seek.  Kathy had fun crafts ready for the the girls to do.  Gingerbread men to decorate with glitter glue.  Puffy paint made out of shaving cream and white glue.  We discussed dress patterns, friendships, and fellowship dinner organization in the evenings and mornings we had together while the guys talked work and used Google maps on their I-phones and took care of rowdy children.

Dan preached the wedding sermon, “Choose to Love” and Grandpa Peachey married the beaming couple.  There was a bag of chips for each wedding guest, which pleased Liesl to no end.  There was fresh salsa.  With cilantro!!  There were coffee bean and burlap decorations, and swirls of pretty girls in lime green dresses.

The cousins aged 11-14 had a high time together. (below)

The Peacheys got together to talk and eat before and after the wedding.  We sang Dad’s favorite songs together on Sunday evening.  Our niece Hannah sang a lovely descant on “Unto the Hills” and we tried unsuccessfully to get Linda to sing her “We Are Not Alone” solo.  Carefully we skirted around discussing the recent election when we were all together, in a very un-Peachey-like avoidance of controversial issues.

Some dear elderly woman wanted a photo of Dad & Mom and their children at the wedding. Here we stand in order.  Excuse the poor photo.  My radically non-Menno brothers still wear white shirts to weddings.  Oh.  I guess David doesn’t.

Dramatic Veronica entertained us and took pictures with whatever camera was available. Here she is below.

 

The nephews played on Grandpa’s remote controlled recliner.

 

We ate leftover rice and beans and recado chicken from the wedding meal. A few of us left Raymond with the stomach flu.  I slept nearly the whole way home and ate nothing.

And my pictures to document the occasion are not very good.  But the memories are sweet.  I am back to baking cookies, making soup, doing laundry, and catching up with online friends. 

~Love, Luci

 

 

 

30 minutes until time to go pick up the four school children in their little basement school at Bay Tree Mennonite.  That is minus the time it takes to start the suburban to let it warm up on this wintry day.  It was -27 degrees Celsius this morning, which translates to -16 F.   I know.  Don’t fall over.  It feels leisurely to be sitting here by the stove in the big chair with my french vanilla mocha made in the classy black SMS cup from the school reunion we went to in Sparta, Wisconsin this summer.  Confession:  I love luxury.  I have a post I want to write about all of that which includes this line:  “But I don’t want to live in mediocrity, sipping life away on $5 starbucks coffees.”

It didn’t seem fair when Dan dressed up in his full line of winter clothes after lunch and I stayed here where it’s warm washing dishes. 

The dogs love to spend cold mornings in the porch and we humour them along.  The magpies are back to eating all the dog food like they do when it snows.  And it’s the time of year when it’s not unusual to see moose and elk in the fields on the way to church or school.

I introduced Andre to tomato sandwiches not long ago and he’s had one for lunch every day since. 

We had a special weekend with sweet company from Idaho and a very good communion service at church.  Small church life has its pros and cons.  I love the hearty, honest folks that make up our little group.  But  a few more hearty, honest folks would be altogether lovely.  Conservative Mennonite style, we have communion twice a year in the interest of keeping it a reverent, soul-searching time.  After communion we wash each others’ feet, taking the words of John 13 literally:  “If you know these things, happy are you if you do them.”

Two burnt coral dresses for Natalia and Victoria to wear to my niece’s wedding next weekend are slowly being completed.  I  also hope to sew a black dress with a white pin stripe for myself.  Aside from putting a sleeve in backwards and having to adjust patterns and trim and measure and losing my seam ripper every time I turn around, I’m kind of having fun.  Sewing has never been my forte, but maybe I can get okay with it yet.

Life with just the two preschoolers at home is hilarious lately. They’ve  been playing a game where their names are Hillary and Samson. I think it’s from watching a Berenstain Bears episode, “The In Crowd.” This morning they were playing doctor and Andre told Liesl to pretend she was pregnant.  She laid on the couch with her baby on her belly and then he said, “Ok, when I say 1, 2, 3, POP then the baby is born.”  I watched and she flung the child off of her stomach at the right time.  Then the doctor took it in hand and fed it water out of a medicine dropper.

Later they were playing Cinderella and the prince.   He picked her out of the crowd at the ball and later they were married and eating noodle soup for lunch.  She said, “Pretend that I made this noodle soup and you think it’s the best noodle soup in the world.”  He was Prince Tyler and I heard her telling him that she will always stay married to him because he’s the most handsome man in the world. 

They fight a lot too and get terribly silly  One great pastime is to sing This Old Man and say, “Give a dog a lamp…or a pizza …or a couch”— instead of a bone.  They get louder and louder and crazier and crazier.    Or knock on the fridge door and pretend that the Ranch dressing or the carrots answer you.

When Alec bought a new 4 wheeler this fall I told him that he had to read classics all winter to counteract  the quadding/snowmobiling craze that’s so huge in this country.  I was kind of joking but he thought I was serious.  And I love seeing his room light on late while he reads Jane Eyre.

I’ve been seriously beseeching God every night to wake me up early enough to spend some time with Him and it’s so cool because He seems to honour that.  I read Donna Kauffman’s book The Treasury of Careful Planning again and was inspired to try more of a schedule. Again.  It’s  been far too lax for far too long around here…and it’s serious business, this making of a home for so many people.   Of course this is only Day 4 of reform.  But it’s a start.  I used to be a perfectionist.  Hard times and babies and laundry and life have taught me flexibility.  But it seems like I struggle to find a middle road.  I’ve been honing my flexibility for so long that it borders on haphazard laziness. 

If you should visit us, the deep tracks in the ditch at the bottom of the lane are mine.  I forgot that it was winter and brakes don’t work well on snow covered roads. 

Coming soon on this blog:  The Day the Glasses Fell Down the Toilet Hole ( a story from my childhood) and my first giveaway later this month.  The giveaway makes me laugh because I remember when I first started blogging and I wondered What in the world giveaways had to do with blogging.  I still don’t really know the answer to that.  But I think you will like this one.  I’m excited about doing it.

Day 2 on this bit of writing.  It’s dull.  Must publish or forget it altogether.    Prayers and warm thoughts for all the good Americans suffering the effects of Hurricane Sandy.

That concludes my winter thoughts for the time being.  Bring on November!