And one more January photo...

This photo was taken just west of the little yellow house on January 6.  Love our Kansas sunsets.  

Super Bowl Chili Recipe

Someone once said that The Children Are Tender was perhaps "....sort of how you wish things would have been."

Well, no.  I would not have wished for Abby to have to quit her job to take care of her mother with scarcely a blink of the eye on behalf of folks who ought to have been sorry to see her go.  I would never have wished for a little boy to be spirited away in the night by a birth mother who did not have legal custody, and for that boy's teacher never to see that child again.  And I certainly would not have wished for Jeffrey to risk a shocking experience as he did in chapter one.

However, having said that, I must also say that January here in our real-life version of my fictional community of Karola has contained elements I wouldn't include in a book that, while is intended to spur empathy and action on behalf of innocent children who suffer, is also intended to leave readers with a sense of hope for the future.  But for the Lord, I'd not have felt much hope at the end of our difficult January.  

I'll quickly list the struggles we've faced: life threatening conditions that caused hospitalizations for both my husband's parents, several financial surprises of the sort that made our hearts sink and our minds go numb (did anyone else's insurance premiums double?), and last and albeit least, our dog ran away.  Not a banner month.  

I'm happy to report that as of February 1, my in-laws have recovered, we've adapted to our financial status quo, and today, the dog came home. And, last Sunday afternoon I won a chili cook-off at our church!  

You read that right.  God does have a sense of humor!  I've just completed a book on Christian weight loss, but during this stressful January I have spent an inordinate amount of time cooking and...well...I did not lose weight this month.  But I by golly won a chili cook-off. 

The recipe, as near as I can remember (I don't measure ingredients when I cook) is printed below the photo of me with my beautiful gold-spray-painted-tin-can trophy.  And by the way, that book isn't really about losing weight so much as it is about putting Christ first in everything, which will release us from the power of whatever ails us.  You can have a look at it here:  One Hundred Days to Freedom.  

Meantime, try a savory pot of chili for the Super Bowl this weekend.  

Chili, brown sugar/maple cupcakes, and chicken and noodles are some of the comfort food dishes I prepared during this dreary January.  '

Kid-pleasing Chili

(named on the spot to justify all that brown sugar when I was asked the name of my recipe). 

4 pounds ground beef

2 medium onions finely chopped

4 cloves garlic, crushed or finely minced

3 teaspoons salt (less if chicken stock is salty)

2 packages (for four pounds of meat) Williams Chili Seasoning Mix

1 28 ounce can crushed Tomatoes

About 3 Tablespoons tomato paste

About 3 cups or so chicken stock—add it gradually until chili seems the right consistency. 

About 3 Tablespoons red wine vinegar

About 2 Tablespoons soy sauce

About ½ teaspoon or so liquid smoke—go easy, it can make things bitter

¾ to 1 cup brown sugar

1 can cannellini beans (white kidney beans), drained and rinsed

1 can seasoned black beans, drained and rinsed

2 cans dark red kidney beans, drained and rinsed

Tabasco sauce to taste—I like about 4 drops per pound of meat...

Brown the beef with the chopped onion, drain most of the juices/fat.  Stir in the garlic, salt, and Williams Chili Seasoning Mix.  Add all remaining ingredients except beans, stir well. Simmer about 10 minutes to let flavors blend.  Adjust seasonings—too bland?  Add more salt, Tabasco, and/or red wine vinegar.  Can you taste the smoke at all? You can add a little more. Now you’ll probably want to add the last ¼ cup brown sugar if you didn’t earlier.  Add beans, simmer a few minutes longer, stir, can add more stock as you prefer for consistency. 

Grandboys and Hay Bales

It was an early November afternoon of this unusually green, unusually warm fall, and the remaining leaves on the hedge trees were backlit with gold.  Two little boys, big round bales, a big goofy yellow lab, and November sunshine--it doesn't get any better than this!  Logan, age 4, took the photo at lower left as I was trying to get him to return my phone/camera to me.  He is quite the photographer.

November

This has been a gentle fall, lacking the riotous color of other years--but beautiful just the same. These photos were taken November 1.

Fall Roundup

In mid-October we bring 45 cow/calf pairs from a rented pasture to the home pasture, a trip of about 2.5 miles including an always-tense passage over an interstate highway overpass.  Things went well this year and none of the critters decided to balk at the highway noise and strange surface underfoot. See Farmer John exhibiting trust in my driving, hanging on by just one hand while issuing instructions to the other cowboys via cell phone (lower right). 

A Matter of Perspective

My big yellow lab is standing 8 or 10 feet behind this plant, and that makes the plant appear huge! 

Perspective is important,whether in a photo, or in life. In the picture above, my dog, Moose, appears to be standing just behind a bloom of wooly verbena. If so, I should contact the Guinness Book of World Records for having found a verbena plant that is 10 feet tall. However, the plant is actually only about 18 inches high. Moose is standing further away than the photo reveals.

When I wrote The Children Are Tender, a friend said she enjoyed learning more about my life. And then she smiled at me and said, "Or...perhaps your life as you would have liked it to have been?" She missed the mark just a bit; focusing on what is beautiful is not the same as saying there is no ugliness. As I say in the introduction, the characters and settings are fictionalized, but what is absolutely true is my love for my home, family, and profession.

I focus upon the beauty of Kansas as the setting of my book, and allow the beauty in the heart of children to drive the story. There isn't a lack of conflict; although there aren't many accounts of the petty carping and pointless conflicts that sometimes do happen even in the best of workplaces. I don't include discord unless it is important to the storyline. I write of a heartbreaking incident of racial prejudice and I describe the pathos of a child who is spirited away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again by his teachers. I describe the enforced early retirement of a good teacher whose leavetaking is treated with more of relief than regret by budget-cutting administrators, a mother who calls the public school a setting for the emotional massacre of children, and a highly qualified teacher who is demoted to the level of a test administrator. Most of these things happened to me during the course of my teaching career, and trust me, they do not represent my professional life as I wish it had been. But I do focus on love: the love of a teacher for her students, of husband and wife, and the  of the beauty of a place called "home." Whatever we focus upon does tend to loom large in our memories and hearts, and so perhaps my friend feels that no one's non-fiction life could have been so blessed as that of the main character in my novel. In that, she is mistaken.

My blessings may not be so large as they appear to me, but then, it's a matter of chosen perspective.

Who Says I Don't Get Around?

This photo wasn't taken in Spain's third largest metropolitan area. Nor is it on the Orange Coast, and the area pictured does not boast a temperate climate and wafting breezes from the Mediterranean Sea.  Despite the proud proclamation of the sign above, this photo displays the lush grasses and green foliage of late spring in Kansas. 

This morning it was time to move the combine to a neighbor's field in preparation for wheat harvest. Farmer John drove the fuel truck, and I followed in order to give him a ride back to the shop where his monstrous red combine had been readied for action.  When we reached the turn-off marked by the road sign above, I giggled a bit.

In fact, I always smile when I see this sign. Perhaps someone on the county commission had been to Spain. Or maybe a commission member's love of geography got the best of him or her. Whatever the reason, on the day the Osage County, Kansas powers-that-be assigned a name to this single lane gravel road that bisects one of the most lushly wooded sections of our area, they decided to call it "Valencia."

It was a beautiful morning, though hot, and I stopped twice to take photos.  Farmer John was patient, but the third time I braked, enthralled by a huge cluster of sweet-scented, purple-blossomed milkweed in bloom, he mentioned very politely that at some point, he needed to combine wheat.  So the road sign photo above and the lacy Johnson grass picture below were the only two I had time to snap.  I would like to have shared the thick stands of evening primrose that line the road as though they had been planted as borders, and the lacy miniature daisies that bear the ignominious name of Annual Fleabane.

I know Valencia, Spain is lovely because the descriptions on Wikipedia tell me so, but Valencia Road in Osage County, Kansas, has beauty that, in my eyes, is unrivaled.

Johnson grass is so pretty, with its lacy, Christmas tree shaped seed heads. 

Early June

The large photo at left is a view of our east yard, crab grass beautified by morning light, and the rock garden where our grandsons set up mock battles with their plastic soldiers (they nixed the idea of gnome and elves figurines).  Upper right: a cloud formation, the majesty of which I was unable to capture with this phone photo.  Right middle: noonday sunlight bounces off the bright white porch railing, just installed by farmer John.  Right bottom: evening primroses in the road ditch across from the house.  

I always remember my Art History professor, fresh from a summer's sabbatical to France, saying that the countryside in Kansas is very much like that of France. "Something about the light," he said. Years later my nephew traveled to France and returned home to field my many questions about his trip. "Does the countryside look like Kansas?" I asked.  

He laughed and said, "Definitely. We joked that they hadn't really taken us to Europe at all, but that we'd just circled around the ocean and had come back to Kansas.  Everything looked very familiar."  

'These things affirm my deeply held conviction that the beauty of our state is underrated.  The photos above, taken with my 6 year old iPhone, are a case in point: beauty isn't difficult to find here.    And there are all the things my lack of skill with a camera can't capture: cottonwood fluff raining in ethereal, erratic paths against the dark green canopy of late spring foliage; the full scope and majesty of thunderheads piling up ahead of a spring storm; the depth of color of our sunsets...words can't describe it, and my fledgling skill as a photographer can't capture them.  

You're going to have to take my word for it or come see for yourself: Kansas is beautiful in each season!  

Spring Collage

Clockwise from upper left: storm clouds in March--you can see our little yellow house peeking through the trees at left, upper right; a spring pasture fire that escaped a neighbor's planned burn path,  but our ponds stopped the fire, lower right; trees along the "straightaway" in April, lower left; a May sunset reflected in the lake across the road from our house. 

Kansas is not necessarily known for its beauty, and I don't understand this. Case in point, the photos in the collage above. all taken within a mile of the little yellow house this spring.  

Gaps Versus Gates

He makes it look so easy.  

Despite town living during my formative years, I consider myself a farm girl because my roots run deep in the Ozark soil of my grandparents' Missouri farm home. That place became my heart's earthly home; it was at Grandma's house that I learned about the charms of a chicken house with cranky hens who would peck your hand if you tried to rob an egg, cast iron pumps that would yield water only with determined effort, and cane poles that required knowledge of how to pierce the living flesh of an earthworm who hadn't done anything to deserve it. There wasn't anyplace I loved better on this earth.

Grandpa's fields were surrounded by crooked log fence posts strung with four tightly stretched spans of barbed wire; a good four wire fence. His gates were built of hewn boards, later of metal pipe, and a lot of thought and effort went into them. He engineered his gates to swing silently open on well-oiled hinges. They were sturdy enough to climb and easy enough for a child to open. There were a few wire "gaps," on Grandpa's place, but they were considered inferior and Grandpa referred to them apologetically. A gap took time from a busy farmer's day, and Grandpa preferred his well built gates.

Grandpa farmed 80 acres of ground with the help of a Ford tractor deemed tiny by today's standards, and he kept his pastures mown for weed control and appearance. My grandparents' place was my gold standard of all a farm should be.

Then I married a Kansas farmer. In Kansas, there are no gaps, there are wire gates. The first time my husband referred to a gap as a gate, I politely corrected him, whereupon he corrected me: in Kansas, a gap is a wire gate, and gates such as the one Grandpa built are nice for folks who have lots of time to spend on such things, which Farmer John does not. John manages 3000 acres of farm ground and pasture all by himself. He's not so worried about appearances as he is about his bottom line, and he's a manly man. A few strands of barbed wire cause him no anxiety or inconvenience.

Not so, me.  Case in point, the other morning I went for a walk in the pasture across from our house. This requires climbing through a wire gap (I mean, gate), a skill I've honed over the years to the degree that even at my age and although I'm packing a few more pounds than I'd like, I'm proud to say I do well. I can slip through a small space bordered by rusty barbs that would require a tetanus shot if I erred an inch either way, and most times, emerge unscathed. But on this morning I had a problem. John had reinforced this gap, I mean gate, about every 12 inches with vertical lengths of twisted wire, because he has a calf that shares my skill in slipping through narrow places.  

I was going to have to open that wire gate, and I did not like the prospect. I very cautiously inched the restraining circle of barbed wire to the very top of the end post and jumped back, but to my relief the whole thing fell the opposite direction and my yellow lab and I continued our walk. Twenty minutes later I returned and lifted the end post. Five lengths of barbed wire sprang to malevolent life, each wire possessed by an independent directional goal to that of its neighbors. As I clung desperately to the post, it vibrated and jerked itself out of my hands.  My dog moved a cautious distance away as I repeated this effort several times. I finally managed to reattach the top circle of barbed wire, but was unable to fit the bottom of the post back into its smooth wire restraint.

I called my husband, who was working in a field five miles away.

"I can't get the gap shut," I said.

"Which gap? I mean, gate?" he asked.

There ensued one of those marital interchanges that are best not shared with others, but in the course of the conversation I decided to, one handed, slide the top wire down just a bit further for security's sake. Now, I swear to you this is true: the wire hopped about an inch down the post all by itself! When it landed, my thumb was secured between post and wire, and my poor, overworked husband then learned in great detail of my true, deeply held opinion of wire gates.

I extracted my thumb and went home. The cattle did not get out. And no mention was made that evening of my lack of skill in dealing with gaps. 

I mean, gates.