Making more

How much is enough? And what do with it all?

Last Sunday's gospel reading was a parable about talents (Matthew 25:14-30). Given five or two or one talent, should a servant invest to make more or bury the talent and keep it safe? (A talent was a large unit of money in the New Testament.) Make more, says Jesus. "For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away (v.29)."

When this lesson from Lectionary Cycle A came up in 2020 I wrote a blog post titled "Knit from Stash," which is where my mind went again this year. My yarn stash has grown since then, with beautiful, special skeins I've purchased and haven't knit yet, and more substantially, with five bins of yarn left over after a yard sale by the family of someone who had died. It's good yarn — wool, not synthetic, in many beautiful colors, some of it handspun.  

There was a lot of Koigu, a springy, fingering weight commercial wool in multicolors of pink, gold, coral and brown. I love to knit with this stuff. It has energy, it's interesting — and it's not cheap. There was a lot of it, some wound into balls, some in a half-knit blanket, a type of modular knitting that I had no interest in finishing.

All of it smelled of mothballs, and not just faintly — more like instant toxic headache. This was a sign of someone taking care to preserve it, but also a big problem for me. After several internet searches and a Facebook post seeking tips on getting rid of the smell, I ripped out the blanket, unwound the balls, rewound them into skeins, and soaked it all in a vinegar solution and then in laundry detergent. I rinsed the skeins and then hung them to dry in the summer sunshine, strung on a yardstick balanced on the backs of the patio chairs. Back in my dining room, I wound the skeins again into balls, after spending hours working on the tangles created in the soaking and washing. 

I was newly retired and had all the time in the world. Over the next several weeks I knit the yarn into a shawl for a dear, faraway  friend who was going through breast cancer treatment. 

I wish I could ask the original owner of this yarn about her stash, why she bought the skeins of Mountain Colors, who was the intended recipient of that Koigu blanket. Did she spin those skeins of red and pink herself, or did she purchase them? They're irregular — thin in places, lumpy in others, destined for my loom, perhaps, and not my knitting needles. 

Some day after I'm gone someone will have to reckon with my stash of yarn (and also of quilting fabric). Will they wonder about the random skeins of bright sock yarn or the thousand-yard ball of fuzzy Icelandic laceweight that I've had for fifteen years already? Will someone appreciate all the balls of Shetland wool in twenty or thirty heathered shades of the rainbow from Jamiesons and Jamieson and Smith? (Do click on the links if your eyes are craving color on this gray day in late November.) Should my designate a special executor for my stash?

For me, there's a danger point in every project, when it's almost finished and I begin to look ahead to what I will make next. With the feeling of accomplishment come wild ambitions -- many more ideas than I can realistically make happen. These weeks before Christmas are another such time. I want to knit socks, mittens, hats for everyone! I dig through a big basket of random yarn, skeins left over from other projects, skeins bought earlier this year that hold plans yet to be executed. The gift-knitting often continues well into January.

Three nights ago I took a little detour from Christmas knitting to cast on for a baby sweater, a tiny, hopeful garment for a much-anticipated, much worried-over little one. It's made from yarn in my stash, yarn given to me by someone sorting through her deceased mother's belongings. The baby arrived early this morning, a couple weeks ahead of time. I'll finish the sweater by the end of the week, though it will not fit this child until early spring, after a winter of feeding and growing, held in her parents' loving arms.

Investments mature under our fingers. Stash reaches into the future. Hope abounds.

October faith

My frequency of posting here at The Perverse Lutheran has gone down from twice a week in the early days of the blog, many long years ago, to twice a month and lately to once a month. It's nearing the end of October -- gotta put something up here, especially since the weather is warm, the sky is blue and the maple tree over my head here in my backyard is green, gold and orange everywhere all at once. It's good day for sitting outside. There won't be many more.

I've just finished writing program notes for a Bach cantata (BWV 109, Ich glaube, lieber Herr; hilf meinem Unglauben!) that's about faith and doubt -- or better said, doubt and faith, since that's the direction everything is going in the cantata text: an opening chorus, a recitative and an area about unbelief, followed by reassurance.  It's the opposite of the man in the Bible story in Mark 9, the source of the text -- "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" He confesses his faith first before acknowledging his doubts. 

Bach's text, by an unknown librettist, takes Luther's approach to doubt: the solution is to get closer to Christ and trust that God's promises are sure and certain. Luther also said that doubt and the struggles of his Anfechtung (look it up, or read this) were an important way in which God brought him to faith. The struggle strengthens.

I don't disagree with any of this exactly, but I am someone who was born in the 20th century and who lives in the 21st, a time where we doubt the existence not only of God but of absolute truth, where physics includes an Uncertainty Principle, but we as political tribes behave as if our way is the only way and denounce other ideas not just as wrong but as morally reprehensible. Working together to solve problems involves giving up some treasured beliefs here and there, or at least allowing for other ideas to come and out play too. But it's hard to do, worn down as we are by unsolvable conflicts, social media craziness, and everyday complexity. 

The red-orange leaves of the sugar maple against the blue sky remind me of a jigsaw puzzle photo: crisply delineated but made up of so many tiny irregular pieces. Birds are flying in and out of the canopy of the mature tree across the street, participating, perhaps, in some secret bird activity, perhaps a confab about migration. A robin directly overhead just now caught my attention by dropping a liquid gift, splat, on the cement next to my chair. Meanwhile a Monarch butterfly is enjoying the overgrown but miraculously still-blooming zinnias in the flower pot by the stairs. 

Two or three weeks from now the leaves will be on the ground, the flowers will be dead and headed for the  the compost bin. The Monarch might be in Mexico -- I'll never know if she makes it, and it will be time to move the patio furniture to the basement (after scrubbing off the bird poop). 

But spring will come again. I have that much faith. 

Hearts Are Breaking

Shattered. Heartbroken. These words appeared in my Twitter, er, X, feed this afternoon. 

Kelsie Snow posted that her husband Chris, who has ALS, suffered cardiac arrest yesterday with a subsequent catastrophic brain injury from lack of oxygen. He is not expected to wake up. 

Kelsie, who describes herself as a writer, podcaster and storyteller, blogs at https://kelsiesnowwrites.com/ and has a podcast called Sorry I'm Sad. She and her husband have two school-age children. He's an executive with an NHL club in Canada and was diagnosed with familial ALS three years ago (that means other people in his family, including his father, have died of the disease). But his progression was slowed significantly in a drug trial. The story of all this, with the accompanying emotional roller coaster, is told in Kelsie's blog which I have followed, as I follow other ALS stories, in the years since my son Kris died of ALS.

It is hard to watch others go through this, even over the distance of social media. I'm not just watching, I'm feeling and remembering. And imagining. There's the loss to Chris's family, Kelsie and their children now living through what they've long feared. There's the loss to others in the ALS community -- families with fathers and mothers and school-age children, people with ALS who are looking for morsels of hope and find them in accounts of a treatment that worked for someone, even in a small way, even for a short time. 

Instead today, a day when an FDA advisory committee is meeting to review the potential benefits of a new therapy, they are having to think about their own death or their loved one's death, even as they grieve for a fellow warrior. I remember Kris telling me, or maybe Michelle told me, how hard it hit him when one of his friends with ALS died. Loss. Over and over again. I'm sitting with that today. 

But I just spent time glancing through Kris's blog. I thought I remembered reading about that friend who died and I wanted to link to that post, but if it indeed was a blog post, I couldn't find it.

But I did get a lively taste of Kris's voice and spirit. A few more tears, yes, and sadness -- so much hard stuff that he and Michelle went through, and the rest of us, too. 

But also love and grace.

Blessed are those who mourn. 

Hoping the grass will grow

Over the course of the summer my backyard, most of it, has been transformed from weedy suburban wilderness to yard of hope and promise. (And still some weeds.)

Back in June I paid a local tree service to cut down the weedy mulberry and slippery elm trees and grind out the stumps that could be ground away. The ones that remain, too close to the house or garage for grinding, I'll be poisoning, salting and hacking at for the next five years, if I keep at it. 

This week, landscapers removed the old broken fence, lots of tall weeds and some very dead grass and graded, tilled and generally cleaned up the soil. There are new empty beds along the neighbor's fence and the back boundary of the yard, where someday, when I find a contractor, I will have a new back fence. In the middle there's a large area seeded with new grass. 

The last thing the landscapers did before they left for the day was to hand me a sheet of instructions for watering new grass. It's all up to me now. I am to water the new seed for five to ten minutes morning and evening until the seeds germinate, which could take 5 days, the paper says, or 30. After that there's a lot of watchfulness and judgement as the grass grows, and maybe one mowing before winter comes. 

I've been kind of worried about this part. I can remember to do something night and morning without fail for at most four or five days. Currently I am remembering to take a dose of Paxlovid every morning and evening after a recent positive covid test. This is not hard to remember to do because the stuff works great. Also, the bitter, metallic taste in my mouth, a common side-effect of the drug, is with me constantly. I'm counting the doses until I'm done. 

There are no such sensory cues for remembering to water the grass. The pots of zinnias and petunias on my patio tell me with a look that they need water, and bless them, they manage to recover even when I've let them go until they're drooping and dry. But the grass seed just lies there. And watering it requires stepping carefully through the mud as I move the sprinkler from the middle of the back yard to the position needed to water the side yard. I have designated a pair of muddy flip-flops for this operation and I have a new $40 sprinkler from Amazon with adjustable nozzles and guides, but no good overall strategy. 

But once it's going, it is nice to sit and watch the water go back and forth. I think about the green that will fill my yard next spring, and the new prairie flowers and grasses I'll plant along the fences. 

There is work to do, weeds to be dealt with in other corners of my property. My overgrown lilac bush needs some thoughtful pruning. And what about that basketball hoop? The torn net hanging from the hoop has been known to attract gold finches and hummingbirds. They hang there briefly before flying off to find real food. Should I hang a bird feeder from the hoop instead?

 It is an achingly beautiful and fragrant summer morning. The crickets creak on, not yet silent in the sun. A tiny, odd bit of something glitters in the sun shining low on the cement patio. The birds are somewhere else this morning, two or three backyards down the block. 

Yesterday on a late afternoon walk I startled a whole flock of goldfinches out of a bush next to a house on my west-east path. Or rather, it was they who startled me--so small, so yellow and so many. Their excited chirping was decidedly different from the house sparrows I'm used to in the morning. 

I read Better Living Through Birding, by Christian Cooper, recently, and also installed the Merlin Bird ID app on my phone. You hit the button on the app and it listens and records the sounds around you. Bird names pop up. I got an unusually long list this morning (five possibilities) but the persistence crickets are creating interference. Meanwhile I hear a phone alarm going off across the street as a neighbor leaves for work or school. There's a plaintive sound coming from something that I can't see high in the maple tree, while a squirrel on a low bough has fixed his attention on the tree's trunk. He's been completely still for several minutes, stretched from tail to chin to nose. What's he watching for? A juicy insect? A small bird? Something else that's alive? Me walking around the base of the tree bothers him (her?) not at all, though now he's found a new position, alert but upside down on the tree's central trunk. I do not have his patience, this morning, maybe not ever. He watches, I search for words. 

And now he's gone where I can't see. 

Cat on the fence

The black cat is back. 

I don't know that he (she?) ever really goes away, but I haven't seen him since early in the summer. As I settled in this morning, outside with my coffee, my computer, my books and my chair cushion, I looked to my right and saw the cat draped on the fence that separates my yard from my neighbor's. I've seen him there before. What an odd resting place, I thought. 

Sometimes, when I've left the chair cushions out overnight with no concern for rain, I come out in the morning and find grayish-black cat hair on the cushion. If I'm awake very early, I may even find the cat, who looks back at me and abandons the chair slowly. I suppose it's yours, he seems to say. That hasn't happened this summer--I'm rarely out before 8. 

Today the cat is on the fence, and while I was wondering what it must be like to relax and rest and balance on that horizontal board that runs across the top of the fencing, I saw my friend stretch his neck a little bit forward and down. He's watching something. He's hunting, lying in wait for a mouse--or something else--to come out from under the leaves in the garden bed below. When he springs into action that pile of rounded fur on the fence will suddenly have swift legs and a curving tail for balance. I keep watching— I don't want to miss this.

Someone walks past on the sidewalk to my left, a full backyard away from the cat on the fence. There's a stroller and a dog and enough noise that the cat turns his head and trains his green-amber eyes on the intrusion. A car goes past and he looks this way again and then turns his head ever so slightly to stare at me. Or so it seems. He's glassy-eyed and has the advantage here; I can't be sure where he's looking, but I know that he knows that I'm watching him. And he doesn't care. I'm a large human. What am I going to do? Leap across 40 feet of backyard weeds to grab or frighten him?

But it's a long wait. The last swallow of coffee in my cup is cold. He gets up, he stretches, arched-back, full-on cat pose, tail reaching high. Is he done for the morning? Not yet. He settles back down with renewed attention to the foliage below. This time his long tail hangs down this side of the fence. Do tails fall asleep and get tingly, like human feet curled under the sitter? When will the long wait be too long?

A few minutes ago my eyes veered to the left to watch a pair of birds rise up and curl around the peak of my house's roof and then circle into the top of the maple on the corner. Large birds, hawks, I thought -- the Cooper's Hawk pair known to live in the neighborhood. (Thing you learn on Facebook!) I saw them in bare trees last spring, an adult and a juvenile. The brown and white stripes on their wedged tail feathers, stretched and rounded out for flight, are easy to see even at a distance. The arrogance of predators. 

Sparrows have been gathering on the utility wires two and three yards away. I haven't seen any in my yard. They'll stay a safe distance from this persistent, patient cat, who is still there on the fence, almost an hour later. How long must one wait for action below? Has he nothing better to do?

"I see you"

As I came outside early this morning with my coffee, a bright red male cardinal flew at me and landed on the other side of the mesh patio table, just four feet away. He looked even more startled than I was at our sudden proximity and quickly retreated to the lilac bush by the back stairs. 

But he looked back at me. I smiled. 

"I see you," I said. "I see you."

The bird again took flight, this time ducking under the broad leaves of the grapevine that drapes lushly over the ancient chain-link fence that divides our yard from the municipal sidewalk. He hopped along, going in and out, hide-and-seek, looking for something to eat. Maybe some bugs? It's July, so the grapes are still green and hard; he'll be back in September. Finally he made his exit, flying back across my field of vision, to the neighbor's fence and on down the block. 

You can't help but celebrate that bright cardinal red whenever you spot one. And they're not hard to spot. Just now another one sat on the telephone wire; it was a little paler, a little less grown-up, but still not to be missed. 

It may be trite, it may be a little silly — but I let cardinals, the bright red male ones, remind me of my son Kris and his spirit. A little visit from the beyond? If I say so, then yes, it is. 

The summer Kris died I watched a pair of cardinals build a nest in the tangled vines a few feet up from where I sit to read and drink coffee in the morning. The female pulled strips of bark from the grapevine to line the nest. The male brought her food as she sat on the eggs; he sometimes took a turn there as well. I saw little beaks pop up to be fed, and worried and watched intently one Sunday afternoon as a vulnerable fledgling, urged on by bird sounds all around, gathered strength and good sense to hop and fly to shelter in the shrubbery. 

The blog posts I wrote in July 2017 are here and here. A couple years later, re-reading those posts, I saw that I had been writing not just about parenting and raising children but also about letting them go. By the end of July we'd let Kris go -- not that we could have stopped him. After his three-year battle with ALS he found eternal shelter in God's heavenly love, peace and grace. 

So yes -- the sudden appearance of a bright red cardinal, upfront and close, on a Sunday morning is bound to remind me of Kris, to feel like a cheerful visit from him. "I see you, I do."

Image by Megan Zopf from Pixabay