~   Hospitality is thriving in Eastern Oregon.  Friends have befriended us on long wedding weekends, fed us incredible crepes (or breakfast burritos, depending on the host) and let us share in their home life; here Xander is hugging on his kitty.

~  To be honest, my garden has been ugly this year.  Curt tilled the ground, I planted, my son watered, and we all ignored both weeds and fruit (exceptin' the luscious raspberries).  Just. too. busy. Saturday was the first opportunity for....well, you decide: is it redemption or atonement?  There were enough tomatoes for a large batch of spaghetti sauce and a large batch of fresh salsa.   We've been eating Swiss chard.  Beans and peas just didn't grow this year.  The beets and butternut squash still need to be harvested.

~  New, fun game to play.  I know some girls who are devastatingly good Blokus players.  It is now my goal to be able to hold my own against these masterminds.  I like this game because it can be enjoyed at different levels of proficiency.  My four year old grandson and I had fun just playing with the pieces. 

~  Aren't birthdays a simple pleasure?  Because life is a gift.  And the best response to a gift is to return thanks.  The recent death of our friend Joe (21 years old) in Afghanistan, is a painful, bittersweet reminder to treasure each moment.  Today is my birthday and I am thankful to God for the beautiful life He's given me.  For daily mercies.  For forgiveness. 

Aging has its compensations.  Now that my husband is older he is more inclined to snuggle than to bounce right out of bed. There is that.

To start the celebration, I'm bringing a rhubarb-apple-pear cobbler to work.

"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it.  I want to have lived the width (*and depth* I would add) of it as well."   ~ Diane Ackerman

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

Curt and I have a history of sticking with an oven/range until its final, gasping breath.  Back in 1981, our $50 used unit succumbed in increments: first the oven, next a small burner, followed by a large burner, then a small burner.  It was Curt's first year teaching and coaching at the local high school; I was working for a CPA.  We had just bought our first house and were living without margins.

I perfected "skillet dishes" until we scraped enough money together for a new stove, the cheapest, stripped-down "contractor's model" the store sold.  It had one large burner and three small instead of two and two; no self-cleaning oven; it was so basic a range the buffalos were still roaming on it.

Call me Dutch, call me Yankee Frugal, call me crazy, but I couldn't justify getting a new stove until this one was worn out.  And blast!  That stupid thing Refused To Quit.  The appliance repairman came back in 1997; I danced in anticipation of a new stove.  Bob put in a new element ($17) and it was good to go. 

That silly $200 stove is Still Working.

Except. The oven door is sprung.  Opening the door is similar to a child safety lock on a pill bottle: push down, twist a little until you find the sweet spot, yank it open.  That works.  But if you actually want to bake, you will want a bungee cord to hold the door firmly shut.

Last night Curt told me my birthday present would be a new stove!   What?  The burners still work! 

Here is the Big Question: Electric or Gas? 

I've never cooked with gas in my life but that is what I'm leaning towards.  We have gas in this house but would have to bring it over to the stove.  I know you must have an opinion.  I would LOVE to hear it. 

Excuse me.

I need to go work on my Hava Nagila.....People!!  I'm getting a new stove!!!

One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help,

gardens to enjoy

and books in the long winter evenings.  

 ~ D. E. Stevenson

Saturday we celebrated the wedding of Julie and Daniel, the fourth and final wedding of the year in our church community.   In this lovely picture (credit: Matthew Hurley), we are dancing a Virginia Reel.  Isn't Julie beautiful?  She is wearing the same dress her mom, aunt and grandma wore with a gorgeous pair of cowboy boots underneath.  Directly behind her is Isaiah (white shirt) for whom many of you prayed to wake up from a coma.  There he is, dancing!  I'm leaning forward, ready to twirl around.

It was a wonderful wedding. I woke this morning through a floodtide of memories...moments worth recording:

~  The groomsmen's toasts were simply amazing.  My friend leaned over and whispered, "If these are the kind of guys Daniel is friends with, it speaks very highly of him."  The masterpiece was the song written by one of the best men, Daniel Went Down to Wallowa, modeled on The Devil Went Down to Georgia. 

 ~  Collaborating with a college freshman on the composition of a violin descant for St. Patrick's Breastplate, the bridal processional, was a hoot! We had more fun isolating a musical phrase and pulling a blues riff from it when we should have been focusing on the descant. Julie entered during the centerpiece of the song: Christ be with me.  My first exposure to NoteWorthy Composer software has me drooling.

~  I looked across the table and said, "Krista, You. are. beautiful."  Her mother, holding with a squirming grandson agreed, "She really is."  Krista smiled and explained, "My husband's love makes me beautiful."  And.  It was so sweet and genuine, not a Sunday School answer, if you know what I mean.

~  The. Kiss.

~   Our Bonnie (mother of the bride, a friend who belongs to us all) displayed extraordinary beauty and serenity.  Hosting a wedding reception in her back pasture was no worry.  She glowed with the light of grace.  It has been five years since she fought Stage 3 cancer.  We are so thankful for God's kindness displayed in her life.

~  The entrance of the cake, held high and carried around all the tables and delivered to the head table by a Best Man (there were two), while a jig was played on the violin.  

~  When I heard the men were wearing Wranglers I was a skeptic.  However. They looked exceedingly handsome in their Chocolate Black Wranglers with cowboy boots, formal vests and, after the ceremony, cowboy hats.

~  It has been a glorious summer.  Glory can be fatiguing but it is a Good Tired.  A Happy Tired.  Looking back with a young friend, we smiled and sighed and took a deep, cleansing breath.  "Well," she said, "I guess it's time to start a new season of love!" 

  There's a saying in Hebrew, he tells her.

No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us,

there's always a thread of grace.

Mary Doria Russell's A Thread of Grace  is a dense book. 

When I read it half-heartedly-dipping in here and there--I just couldn't muster any enthusiasm.  There are many characters and more storylines than a modern novel usually has.  The place names are unfamiliar (many are fictional) and it is easy to become lost, dislocated.  Like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, it takes a while to settle in and get comfortable. 

His face twists, but he holds back the tears,

determined not to commit the sin of despair.

After I finished this story of the Jewish resistance in Italy, sniffling and throat-lumping, I count it in the top five books about civilian life during WWII.  Russell (who grew up in my hometown, Lombard, IL) obviously knows both Jewish and Catholic culture deep down at the roots in this well-researched and well-written story. 

She nods and his glorious gap-toothed grin apears,

utterly transforming the homely face. 

To make a man so happy! she thinks. 

To make this man so beautiful.."Yes." she says, "Really."  

The courtship of Claudette and Santino, written with sparse, elegant prose, remains long after the book is finished.  Santino, a solid man, builds stone walls that will be standing 200 years after he's gone.  Claudia (she Italicizes  her name) is a young refugee who is forced to grow up in a short space of time.  Like any book with Nazis and Jews, there is difficult-to-digest terror and violence.   

The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child. 

Misere mei Deus:

Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.

The other relationship which barnacled my heart was between a Catholic priest, Osvaldo Tomitz, and Werner Schramm, a German Doktor who has deserted the Nazis.  The story begins with Don Tomitz hearing Schramm's confession--who calculates that he has killed 91,867 people--and ends with Schramm acting as a priest to the father.  Don Tomitz wrestles with guilt, forgiveness, atonement and absolution as he ministers to broken people. 

May I share some of my favorite sentences?

~   Shutters open like windows in an Advent calendar.

~   Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet...

~   He could give a lecture on the natural history of terror.

~   He tries to thank God, but can't help feeling like a thug's wife who believe she is loved if a punch goes wide. 

~   Autumn light makes the varnished chesnut bookcases beneath the windows glow.  

Julie and Julia follows the true story to two women: Julia Child in France, 1949, and Julie Powell, who cooked and blogged her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 2002 from her apartment in Queens.  It is an interesting technique to put two memoirs into one film, but it works.

If you like period pieces, you'll especially enjoy the French parts of the movie.  I wouldn't have thought post-WWII Paris could have looked so luscious.  My husband was salivating from the beginning of the movie...over the wood paneled blue Buick station wagon.

Meryl Streep delivers an award-winnable performance as the jaunty Julia Child.  She captures the voice, the mannerisms and the joi de vivre that is signature Julia.  One cannot help but love this woman who is so at home in her own skin.  Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, a cubicle worker and aspiring writer, restless and riddled with angst.  Julia becomes Julie's role model.

Paul Child and Eric Powell, the husbands, play supporting roles.  The film portrays the Childs' relationship as stable and secure, tinged with sadness at their inability to conceive; Julie and Eric's marriage is threatened by the blogging project and her focus on it.  It is refreshing to see a movie with two married couples for whom fidelity is a given. 

The main message that I extracted is that Julia Child was her joyful, unflappable self because she was a woman adored by her husband.  His love "beautified" her.  We admire this woman who is plain and tall, with a voice that grazes the ceiling, because of her passion and zest and joy in cooking. The security of being  loved meant she didn't have to edit the fiascos out of her television shows.  That woman could laugh.

My strongest criticism is that the intimacy of both couples was overstated and brought on screen.  Less is more.  The scene where Julia and Paul exit their Paris house holding hands until their fingertips part communicates their sexual sizzle better than the bedroom scenes.

Oh..the food!  Lots of butter, lots of whisking, chopping, and plenty of eating.  It's delicious.