The Best Graduation Gift

I’ve been wrapping graduation gifts and finding cards that can hold a gift certificate or a little cash.  This year graduating seniors are excited to be anticipating an actual in-person graduation ceremony instead of last year’s online or zoom virtual ceremony necessitated by the pandemic.  

Our grandson just finished his first year of college in New York state, but is coming back to Indiana for the great pageantry of Culver Military Academy and a year-delayed ceremony.  It will be a treat to have our daughter Amy’s family gathering in to see Simon “graduate”, even with a year of college under his belt.

We already had his party last year.  I spent the month before we met for a small masked celebration going through tubs of pictures and shuffling through memories of him collected since his birth to make a huge scrapbook of this sweet child.  Maybe this year we can just get it out again and look at it together.

All this “double graduation” makes me remember what my mother gave me for my graduation from high school.  It was a full Webster’s Dictionary that I have used in the years since until the pages started to fall out.  It is now in one of the glass cases in the “museum” section of our recording studio.  It is a treasure, not only because of my life-long love of words, but for a poem she wrote in her own handwriting inside the front cover.

The sheep may know the pasture,
But the Shepherd knows the sheep;
The sheep lie down in comfort
But the Shepherd does not sleep.

He protects the young and foolish
From their unprecocious way
And gently prods the aged
Lest they give in to the clay.

When the young have learned some wisdom,
It is much too late to act;
When the old man knows the method,
He is less sure of the fact.

Ah, the Shepherd knows the answer—
The beginning and the end.
So the wisest choice, my daughter,
Is to take him as your friend.
--Mother

This and many other writings confirm for me, now decades later, that my mother was one of the wisest persons I ever knew.  At 17 I knew she was, but not like I know it now.

Perhaps the line I’ve most thought about over the years is “...Lest they give in to the clay.” 

From the time I was a child, my parents wanted me to be able to recognize and choose the things that last forever.  We had as a family many discussions about what is eternal and what is not, not just when we die, but every day we live.  I remember my mother saying to me as a high school girl, “Gloria, don’t ever forfeit anything eternal for someone whose name you won’t remember ten years from now.”

When we began to have children of our own, Bill and I wrote a song that Suzanne later asked Bill to sing at her wedding.  It was titled “The Things That Last Forever.” Of course, he had a hard time getting through the song that day.

But of all the things my parents made sure I understood, to recognize what is eternal in every moment and to give myself for things that will never die was perhaps the most important— “lest I give in to the clay.”

Now I am in the autumn of my life.  What do I want to have gotten said to our children, to our great-grandchildren, to people who have heard the song of our lives?  It is this: “Think ‘forever’!” because now is forever.  Forever starts here.  Heaven starts here—and so does hell. We’re building forever with the choices we make today.

To all graduates—whether graduating from high school, college, the transition chapter of your life, or from this life itself, think “forever.”  Will what I choose today last forever?  Can I recognize the eternal in this moment, and am I giving myself away for things that will never die?

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Distilling Home

It seems that many are using this time of pause to make some life changes.  One of those seems to be what has been called “downsizing.”  I don’t particularly like that term.  The transition from the spacious family home, filled with children and activity, to a smaller more manageable space is not an easy one. 

Rather than viewing this change as “loss,” perhaps it is better to address it as a “distillation” of a full life.  This seems to me a better mind set, because it is more like the old milk separator my grandparents used to use when the milk was brought in from hand milking the cows. I remember there was a wide funnel with a fine filter in it through which grandpa poured the milk. This funnel sat at the top of the milk container.  The milk was then allowed to sit in the refrigerated milk container until the cream rose to the top, leaving the milk with little butterfat at the bottom.  No wonder they called this “skimmed milk.”  The top milk could then skimmed off and churned into butter.

I like to think of the time of paring down as “distilling” the pure essence of a life well lived, a time for letting the cream rise to the top, and letting the “old blue milk,” as grandma used to call it, go. 

So maybe these suggestions might help in the this distillation process:

• Choose a space (apartment, condo, smaller house) that is open and light. Chopped-up spaces feel cramped, enclosed, and often dark. Paint walls light colors to further add to a feeling of optimism and make the space you have feel bigger, and try to save mirrors and wall pieces that have reflective surfaces:  shiny brass lamps, glistening picture frames, a reflective serving tray.

•  While sorting through furniture, pictures, art, and accessories, choose to keep only the pieces that are of a compatible scale and style to compliment the new space.  Choose favorite pieces or art and accessories that have meaning and also fit the actual wall and display areas available in the new place.

•  Consider sorting and putting all possibilities in separate places (all lamps together, all paintings together, small end tables together, etc.). Choose from this stock objectively the ones that will create uncluttered beauty in the new space and avoid arranging ruts. For example, try a “bedroom” lamp with a “family room” table with a small “hallway” painting arranged in a grouping with a piece of “dining room” pottery or an antique book on the table. Make a collage of smaller pictures or similar pieces like birds, crosses, horse pictures, etc.

• Pare down kitchen utensils, cookware, china sets, linens, etc., keeping only what will be needed for daily routine and smaller scale entertaining.  This is a good time to give things you treasure to the family and friends you most what to have them.

•  There are great causes you can help by giving away what you don’t need:

  • women’s shelters and pregnancy centers, Goodwill, and Salvation Army are great places to take extra towels, kitchen equipment, linens, bed sets, clothing and furniture.

  • consignment stores will often sell for you rugs, draperies, large tables, crystal sets, bedroom sets.  Give the proceeds to education.

  • church libraries, book sales, and street fairs are places that will help pare down your collection of books.  Share children’s books with new parents or daycare centers.

The goal is to make a fresh space for a new chapter of life that honors the past but celebrates the future with hope and expectancy, making the new home ready for hospitality and full of joy.  Keep only what you love and what works in this new venture.  While you can make the decision yourself, pass on things to the people in your life to whom they would be helpful or meaningful.  Don’t be offended if the things you once treasured are not treasured by your children; they need to make their own memories with their kids.  Remember, it’s relationships, not stuff, that matters.  Only people, not things, are eternal. This is the time to let the cream rise to the top!

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Folding Sox

We were on vacation with our son and Bill’s father whom I’ve always called by his first name George.  One morning George found on his dresser the socks I had washed and folded for him with his underwear.  He came out of the bedroom grinning, unfolding a pair.

“Lela used to fold socks like this,” he said.  “But I never learned how to do it.  I just can’t get it right.”

He was pleased and was relishing this small gesture of holding a household together, treasuring a family.  He and Lela had been married 65 years when she died.  I wondered if he ever noticed this while he had her.  I wondered if he ever told her thank you for the millions of socks she folded.

Photo by Angela Kellogg

When Bill and I got married, Bill still lived at home.  His mother changed his bed with air-dried sheets she used to carry, wet and heavy up from the basement where she did the washing – up and out to the clothesline where she carefully shook each sheet free of its wrinkles with a crisp snap, folded it in half, and pinned it with wooden clothespins to the line in the back yard where the sheets were dried by the Indiana prairie wind and the sun.  She would fold them and all the other wash – underwear, dish towels, bath towels, pillowcases, and dozens of socks – and put them all clean and smelling of summer breeze and marigolds into drawers and linen closets.  The dozens of pairs of underwear – boxer shorts and white tee shirts – and the pillowcases and cotton handkerchiefs she sprinkled, folded into themselves into round mounds that looked like bread dough rising, and placed them in a laundry basket to be ironed that night by the T.V.  Yes, the underwear, pillowcases and linen handkerchiefs, white shirts, blue shirts, work shirts and blue jeans, housedresses, aprons, and feed sack dish towels were all ironed.

Gestures of love – touching the clothes, smoothing, patting, folding, patting some more – when sometimes she couldn’t pat the bodies they went on because they had changed from little boys to men before her eyes, or because they were too busy or too “grown-up” or too gone-all-the-time to be touched and enfolded or patted any more.

I couldn’t help thinking about all the nights this family of five had crawled into bed between fragrant sheets and burrowed their heads into sweet-smelling freshly ironed pillowcases, felt the comfort, inhaled the “summer” and caressed their pillows.  Did Lela long to be caressed sometimes too, and patted?  On cold nights did George sometimes burrow his nose into her soft neck smelling of Estée Lauder after her bath, and tell her how much he loved having his socks folded, his shorts ironed, his meals hot, his house clean, his needs met, and a warm body to hold?  Or did he just trust that there are some things that don’t have to be said.  Does he still think that now?

Maybe not, maybe now he knows how important it is to say it.  So he says it to me.  “Lela used to fold my socks like this.  I’ve never been able to do it, but Lela did – just like this.”

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Wisdom From Ann

Our Grandson celebrating his birthday with his friend Ethan and Ann Smith

My friend Ann Smith is well into her tenth decade of life.  She is smart, wise, witty, and perceptive. She is a global thinker and international traveler.  She spends a disproportionate amount of her time with college students, young married couples, and mid-life persons in ministry.  And she has been a close friend and mentor to Bill and me for over fifty years.

 At the beginning of each decade, Ann asks God to show her what He wants to grow in her.  She asks God to give her a clear insight into her deficiencies and a vision of what He is calling her to become in this decade of her life.  Though Ann considers these revelations to be personal, many have turned out to be life-changers for us as well.  Here are a few:

• There is a big difference between expectations and expectancy.  Work on getting up every morning with expectancy and not expectations—of yourself, events, and other people.  With expectations you will always be disappointed.  With expectancy you will see each day as a great adventure and every good thing as a bonus.

• When meeting any human being, ask God to reveal what He had in mind when He made them, then to give the grace to treat them as if that had already been accomplished.

•  Ann and her husband Nathan were long-term missionaries to Japan. On her last three-week trip to Japan to say farewell to the country and people she loves so deeply, she sat alone on a hillside, looking at the mountain in front of her and the flowing river below.  God seemed to be saying: “Ann, I am calling you to be as solid and unshakable as a mountain and as flowing and adaptable as a river.  There have been times in your life when you have been as solid and firm as a mountain, but not as flowing and adaptable as a river.  And at times you have been as flowing and adaptable as a river, but not as grounded and solid as a mountain.  My child, I want you to be both.  Find the balance.”

 How wise are all of these insights!  In these precarious times, God is calling us all to be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”  He wants the trademark of our days to be joyful with childlike expectancy, and like Moses when he and the Israelites were facing the formidable Red Sea, be able to say, “Stand still and see the salvation of the Lord.”

 When we get edgy with others who don’t see things exactly as we do, even people who are contentious and difficult or downright wicked, could we pray silently that God would give us the vision of what He had in mind for them when He made them and give us whatever internal resources we need to be instruments of change for an eternal outcome?

 And dare we strive to be grounded in the things that are deep and unchangeable truths, yet be gentle, flowing, refreshing, and adaptable to the situations and personalities He brings into our lives?  May we “dwell together in love” and dare to trust that we dispel the darkness, not with a sword, but with the light?

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