Gardener

One of the best things about living in a Northern climate is rounding the curve that takes us from winter to spring, from cold to warm, from brown to green, from no flowers to a land lush with flowers.   As we move from May to June, the whole land seems to be in bloom.   Few flowers are more typical of these parts and of rural life in general than the peony. (Most of the farms gardens I have seen—my mother-in-law’s in particular—have had long lines of peonies.) Every year around the second week of June, these gaudy, short-lived beauties burst on to the scene, extravagant in their fragrance, their colors--rich pink, violet, purple and white--their fragile fist-sized blossoms.   The poet Jane Kenyon calls peonies her favorite flowers, remarking that peonies “are not Protestant work-ethic flowers.   They loll about in gorgeousness; they live for art; they believe in excess.   They are not quite decent, to tell the truth.” Another contemporary New England po...

"For daily gifts both large and small, For Jesus, greatest gift of all, For mercies new at morning light, We thank thee God with all our might." For ten or fifteen years now, my wife and I have been saying aloud, in unison, this little prayer before we eat our breakfast.  We love it even though we know the "with all our might" of the last line is trite and could be improved upon.  In fact we did improve it once, but one or the other of us always forgot the improvement as we were saying it, so we just went back to the old "with all our might." This morning I asked her, "Did you think of the meanings of the words as you said them?"   She said she did.   "Do you always?" I asked. "Well, no, probably not.  How about you?" "My mind was on staining the deck," I said. I suppose any of us who speak a memorized prayer regularly would have to confess that sometimes we do not consciously rea...

Below are two poems, one, "Bee Still," written by my son Luke back when he was in college.  The second written by me.  (Yeah, I know, his is better.) Now here's a little challenge:  The two poems are closely related, but how?  If you can figure out the connection between the two, tell me what the connection is by emailing me at dschel@dordt.edu Don't write it as a comment, since that would give it away to others who have not yet figured it out. bee still motionless when he flies he is still in the air pure wing power he flies a million miles an hour and does not move closer to or farther from the flower                                                                 --Luke Schelhaas Ascension Heads tipped back, motionless, they had not quite believed him when he said he was going ...

If you are married and if you are a man, then you are a husband.   But that was not always so in the English language.   Until the 13th century, a male spouse was called a wer .   So a married couple was wer and wif .   Using wer as a designation of maleness has been retained, as far as I know, only in the word werewolf .But by the 13th century, the word husband was used to describe a married man. Husband is a combination of two words, hus , meaning house, and bondi, meaning dweller.   So we have “house dweller.”   But early on husband also meant “master of a household,” in other words, someone of sufficient means to own his house. There is another meaning for husband as well, perhaps several.   We still speak of animal husbandry, and my dictionary defines husbandry as “the careful management of domestic resources.”   Is this meaning of husband related to the male spouse who is a house dweller?   It is, and the connection...

A characteristic of American spoken English from time to time is the emergence of a fad in which one particular word is repeated at the beginning of a sentence or phrase.   For a number of years in the 1980’s the word was “Hey.”   At the beginning of a sentence—especially a sentence that was a response in a conversation—a speaker would say something like, “Hey, I know what you mean” or “Hey, that’s a good idea” or “Hey, you gotta stop thinking that way.”   Almost any opening remark in a conversation could be answered with a “Hey” sentence:   “The preacher had a good sermon this morning.”   “Hey, he hit the nail on the head, didn’t he?”   “Our dog threw up this morning.”   “Hey, that happens.” It became so annoying that a writer for the now defunct Saturday Review of Literature wrote a column titled “Hey Fever” that deplored the overuse of “Hey.” So these days we are afflicted with sentences that begin with “So.”   I think the...

A Blessing Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans.   They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. This is surely on...

Today is Earth Day.   What should we do to celebrate?   I would suggest we do nothing.   Stay at home as you have been doing for more than a month now.   Unless you have a local prairie—as I do; then take a walk in the prairie.    Or take a bike ride on the empty streets or a local bike path.   Don’t go to the store.   Maybe if it’s hot where you live, turn the air down, or if it’s cold, turn the furnace off. Like me you have probably been struck by the fact that one of the unexpected and mostly unacknowledged consequences of corona virus sequestration is the huge drop in the amount of carbon dioxide we are sending into the atmosphere.   Marvelous!   The L. A. freeways, I have read, are virtually empty as are streets in city and town and country all over the United States.   Many factories have stopped production altogether and others have cut way back.   Just yesterday I heard this amazing bit of news: oil on Monday of...