Monthly Archives: June 2012

When Safe Means Sorry

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My earliest cooking experience resulted in pancakes that were three and a half inches in diameter and as hard as a rock. I don’t want to tell you about that time.

My next cooking experience was bound to be better. At least I convinced my dad that it would be. It turned out to be one of the most memorable evenings our family talks about.

My mom was out (probably grocery shopping for supper), and my dad was working upstairs on the addition he was adding on to our home.

I climbed the wooden stairs and stuck my head through the opening. There was my dad, framing in the rooms with the two Bible college students he had hired to help him. Continue reading →

Today

Outdated garage sale signs are one of my pet peeves. Not just any sale signs, but the ones that simply say “Garage Sale Today.”

If you put a date on your sale sign, you can leave it up for years, and it won’t bother me a bit. Leave it nailed to the telephone post until the poster is ripped and the corners are yellowed and curling with age—I won’t care.

But leave the date off your sign, lead me down a trail of undated signs to a two-week past garage sale, and I’m not a happy camper. So much so that while I love garage sales, I’m unlikely to follow undated signs. It doesn’t matter how fresh they look. Unless I see someone posting the sign, I’m assuming it’s old. Continue reading →

When Impossible Isn’t

When I was growing up, we actually had “the Joneses” living next door. Only, it was just Mrs. Jones—a sweet, elderly widow who had cookies and Kool-Aid for the neighbor kids.

I didn’t know anything about the cookies and Kool-Aid, however, until the day that my sister Michele and I were riding our bikes near her house and ran over her yard decoration. It was a wooden cutout of a redbird on the top of a wooden stake painted red. One of us (I won’t say who because it might make Michele feel bad) ran over the cardinal, and the stake broke.

We quickly hopped off our bikes and examined the broken decoration, hoping there was some easy fix. Nope, the wood was unmistakably broken, and the splintered top half was too short to stick back in the ground. We propped it up against the bush and sadly rode home to tell Mom. Continue reading →