Charm Quilt Wedding Gift

This is a 1157 piece charm quilt. I collected fabric for several years to accomplish this quilt. I enjoyed making this for my daughter's wedding. I will make several more of these.

These triangles are made by beginning with two squares facing one another - drawing a line diagonally down the center, then sewing on each side of the line 1/4", cut on the center line. Now you will have four triangles making two squares of two triangles. Do this a million times, then arrange the way you like and begin putting them together. Make sure those points meet and waalaa, you have a great quilt.

Accept and Persist

I am a fan of planning. I plan everything. Before I go to bed at night, I already have a plan for the next day. I even plan the order that I will do those things. Sometimes I get into bed and realize that I have forgotten to put something on my list and invariably I must get up and write it down so that I won't forget it.

It is probably a good thing that I am a planner; nine children made me a pretty busy mom and planning helped me get everything done and on time.

However, there are things that happened that I did not plan, nor did I even think these things would ever be an eventuality. The most devastating thing that happened is the fracture in my family - and instead of getting better (like I planned) it is getting worse. Never in my entire life did I think that we would have anything but a close-knit, loving, united family.

Satan had other plans. Fracturing families is his specialty. Destroy the family and for generations the repercussions will be felt. We do not just get away with allowing the family to divide. Our children will see it and respond to it and be cursed by it, no matter what we call it.

What can we do when the actions of others affect us? Accept and persist is my plan. I have learned that I can plan, but mostly I must live my values, obey the commandments to the best of my ability, anchor my life to eternal principles and pray and know that the Lord has THE plan. If I live eternal principles then I can be assured of the eternal outcome.

Accepting is essential when things are not going my way. One of the greatest gifts we have been given in this earth life is choice. Everyone gets to choose their own way, although the consequences of our choices are not ours. The consequences to our choices come without restraint and often with pain and struggle. This pain and struggle develop our character and school us in how to further conduct our lives. Sometimes learning the hard way is the only way. Of course when we choose the right path (or follow God's path for us) the consequences far exceed any plan we could have ever thought up for ourselves.

Persisting in relying on the Lord and His promises gives me hope. I would much rather be submissive to God and his promises and blessings than to Satan when his only promise is fleeting moments of pleasure in selfishness and an eternity of regret. I know when I do what is right, I am happy and full of peace and contentment; when I do not do what is right I am not happy, a simple concept really and amazingly easy to do once you've set you mind to it.

Mortality is only a sliver of eternity, we must think in an eternal timeframe. What we become by our actions and desires, will shape our eternal destiny. We must stand ready to accept the Lord's plan for us along with accepting the agency of others and how they affect us. We must focus on the eternal view, not on the view we see in mortality. Yes, timing is everything.

Faith in God is my only defense, my light and hope, and knowledge that what Christ promised us in the Garden and on the cross we can trust as He does not break his promises. Satan is the author of broken promises.

My Life as a Cranefly

My Life as a Crane Fly

I have lived a scattered life.

Recently I decided that since my marriage, I have been like the Crane Fly, sometimes called a Mosquito Eater or Mosquito Hawk. These insects act like they are eating mosquitoes, hitting and missing the mosquitoes on the surface of the water, making little rings spiraling outward, but actually doing nothing. You see, Crane Flies don’t eat at all, they pretend, and they only live long enough to reproduce and then die quickly thereafter.

There. You see, just like me, flitting around, doing nothing, pretending to be a mother, reproducing and then being of very little use otherwise. It is not that I want to do this, but it seems this is the intellect for raising children that I have been born with. Some overriding software in my brain, made especially for Crane Flies and me, just reboots me into not knowing a damned thing about being a mother. I am of no use.

Nothing to cry about, really, seems I come by it naturally. I spoke to my father today about how he did it: raised children without taking everything they do personally. He said “After they were five and they went to school, I couldn’t tell them anything anymore. I didn’t like what I heard when they came home from school, but I just let them go doing what it is that kids do and let them be who they wanted to be.” Maybe that is what I have been doing, being too brainless to know another way. My dad said he learned how to be a parent from his parents. I believe that. Oh, dear, hopefully my poor children have improved upon my flitting parenting behavior, although my sister and brother and I have turned out the way we wanted to turn out – and we are happy and productive human beings. On some level that may have worked.

I guess I expect too much. I have this idea that things should be like Heaven all the time, all connected and mushy and fuzzy and warm with that mixture something holy and the happiest thing you can think of, both at the same time. This is totally unrealistic and I am in that Crane Fly mentality again, not functioning normally.

I have decided that I focus too much on the negative things happening in this ecosystem I call a family, and I probably I shouldn’t worry, that is, unless the little ones begin to eat each other. (This isn’t a digression, I’ve actually worried about this occurrence.)

As I begin this trip on Route 62, I think I will just skim the pond, act like I’m looking for mosquitoes, and let the little ones fend for themselves. After all, there is nothing I can do anyways, I am useless, a Galleynipper from back East, just flitting around, not even knowing where I came from and where I am going or why I reproduced and didn’t die yet.

Living "Alone"?

Living Alone

Sadly, I could say that, in some ways the end of my husband’s life was the beginning of mine. It wouldn’t have been my choice to change things in this way and do not misunderstand, I had a full rich life with Dale and our nine children, but I’m not certain I really knew how to live at all for myself, or maybe even think for myself before my husband’s death. Every plan I made, every meal I cooked, every list I penned, every household chore I did – even the order I did them, every errand I ran, every trip I took, every decision I made, every thought in my head revolved around the needs and desires of my family. I liked it that way, obviously, as I lived and loved that life for forty years.

I never spent a full day at home alone for forty years; I home-schooled most of my brilliant children, the first being born in April 1965 and the last graduating from public school one week exactly before my husbands death in June 2005. Alone was not something I ever wanted or yearned for. I wanted my family with me forever. It was the object and design of my existence. There was no other greater, more important goal in the world as far as I was concerned. Being alone was not an interest of mine.

After Dale’s death, I did find myself alone, however, and it necessitated me actually doing things such as changing a light bulb (which made me cry the first time I had to do it because Dale always changed everyone that burned out for decades), banking and balancing the checkbook, and earning a living. I lived by myself for a few months, then with one of my daughter’s for eight months before I set out on my own and decided to make a new life for myself, even though it was a different kind of life than I had ever known before.

Not long after Dale’s funeral, I had an epiphany that helped me overcome the urge to just sit in my chair and slowly dissolve into nothingness. I was afraid. The epiphany was a conscious thought that I was afraid; afraid of trying to take care of myself and see to it that the bills were paid, afraid I wouldn’t know how to keep the car running and kept up, afraid I couldn’t clear the sink of a clog, afraid of sleeping in the house alone at night, afraid I didn’t have a reason to continue living, and afraid I couldn’t keep my family together. An amazing stubbornness arose within me and I made a conscious decision that I would not live my life through fear. I decided that anything that I felt compelled to do, that was out of some fear, I would not do, no matter what. Fear became synonymous with failure to me.

I was fifty-eight years old; an age that didn’t seem to help matters and being the mother of nine children who never saw me take much of a stand on anything didn’t inspire much confidence in them or respect for me for that matter. No one ever said anything to my face; it doesn’t happen that way in my family, but there were rumblings that got back to me now and then that some children thought I had a weak character in one way or another. That stubbornness told me that I had I gathered a few strengths along the path of raising my children and being a “good” wife. I decided to put them to use.

One day on a fluke while out of town visiting my son, I applied for a job. Now I had worked outside the home at selected times and had many stay-at-home jobs over the years. The job I applied for was a cashier at Wal-Mart. Lo and behold, I was called in for an interview within a day or two and hired. This was very interesting.

My organizing capabilities rose to the occasion and I began networking with my new church in Pendleton, the town where I applied. Within a few days I had found a house, a Baptist parish house and a reduction in the rent if I cleaned the church and mowed the grass. My kids and my church helped me load the truck and I moved within the week and even had my new ward help me unload the truck.

It didn’t take long to discover that I really did have something to fear. I had been sitting a lot, not doing anything very strenuous for several years taking care of my husband until he died and then tending house and grandchildren for the previous eight months. The job got the best of me. I was so tired when I got home that I had no strength at all and the bed was the only thing I was interested in at night when I came in from work.

After I had been working for a week or so, Lucy, Cara’s little dog that I was taking care of wrapped her leash around my legs, and though she was only 14 pounds, whipped my feet out from under me leaving me shocked and lying on the grass by the sidewalk. Her leash had also wrapped around my little toe, breaking it and I skinned it on the rough sidewalk. This was the beginning of two weeks of torture that multiplied the fatigue of getting used to the job. My toe became infected and was swollen and purple. I couldn’t keep it wrapped close to the next toe because of the pain, so I freed it and when I wasn’t working I wore sandals in hopes that it would heal.

One day visiting my son, he looked at my toe and told me I had to pierce the skin and get the infection out. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of that and when I went home I did release the poison that had built up in there. By the next day, it felt much better.

During those painful weeks, I prayed a lot, mostly after falling into bed, dropping my clothes on the chair and not getting on my knees in supplication for fear I would not be able to get up again. Most of my prayers during this time began with tears, but were never ended as I cried myself to sleep before I finished them, but in every one I pleaded for help to endure or the strength to look for another job that wouldn’t require standing on my feet for eight hours at a time. I promised Him for days that I would begin soon looking for work, though I discovered that “God works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.” (Hymn by William Cowper 1731-1800)

On a Wednesday at the end of April on my way to work I passed the Rugged Country Lodge and remembering my stays there when I came to town to visit Andrew, I made a promise to stop there as soon as I had the strength to walk in with a spring in my step which had been fading daily under duress.

Later that day when I was checking out a long line of customers, trying to be patient with one, smiling and apologizing to those waiting, Heavenly Father sent Becky walking right up to me, saying “I want you to come and work for me!” While I was worshiping her, “I want to work for you!” She retorted with, “I’m not kidding.” She had no idea how much I was not kidding.

As the days have passed into years and my job changed from a front desk position to manager, I have been thankful for the vow I made never to live through fear. Fear inhibits the whisperings of the Spirit of God – Becky and I both had a need for one another and we responded to those whisperings. I am thankful for the circumstances that made me ready and available for this great opportunity to work in a job that I love.

I continue to practice not letting fear get in my way. I look for things that make me a little uncomfortable and seek after those. I want to learn and grow and develop myself in ways that I have never even dreamed of in the past. I have discovered that acknowledging fear can be a good thing; it makes me aware of what possibilities there are for me to achieve more in my life.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Family is everything, so it must come first. I have known since I saw my first child that family was everything. This knowledge led me to The Church and to learning how to be a mother. Being a mother has been the best thing I have ever done. It is the most rewarding job on the earth. I am grateful for the blessing my family has been to me. I am still learning.





















Soap making:

There is just something so wonderful about mixing ingredients exactly to the recipe, watching the soap become soap from lye and oils and various other natural ingredients, getting the temperatures just right in both the oils and the lye, having the molds ready and knowing when saponification occurs, and working in the kitchen all day and then NOT eating what you made. Cool, huh?


I love the company when I make soap with friends along with the banter we carry on. I love the smells and beautiful colors. It is all just so rewarding!





























Vegetables fresh from the garden.


Apples falling on my head from the tree above.


The smell of tomato plants when I'm weeding.


The look of the garden when I'm finished working in it (for the day)!


The feeling of rain on my face and what it means for the plants.


A sweet cool breeze when I've been in the garden too long.



The way the garden grows better when you "love" it with how you feel and the work you do there.


Yes, and I even like the mud on my shoes and the dirt under my fingernails when I go inside for the much needed shower.

Mind-Stuffing

The dance of life consists of being who we are, conveying who we are to our children, generation after generation, with the intention of bringing every good thing to them that will carry them throughout their lives with the benefit of wholesome values which will bless them with personal health and happiness. All this done with no handbook of instruction provided to parents upon the birth of a child, but only our own life experience to use as a pattern of how-to or how-not-to behave and much of it done with little intention at all, just by living and being.

Parents can only hope that their influence on their children will take precedence over the questionable intentions of the media, pornography industry, music, entertainment and video game businesses, drug and alcohol producers, and any other person or persons interested in obtaining some benefit from advertising to our youth. Entertainment and ease, alcohol and drugs, sex and violence, money and music, steroids and selfishness versus the values of family and education, hard work and service, optimism and gratitude, loyalty and integrity, responsibility and confidence, all wrapped up with moral culpability; well there is just one choice of how to proceed – certainly you must agree that mind-stuffing is in order!

This is war, a war that has been waged from the beginning of time, a war of good versus evil, a war our children’s lives depend on, and we must tie it all up in a bow so that we don’t live with a daily loading of guns to be on the attack or hiding in a bunker in the fetal position waiting to be overtaken by the enemy.

This is a silent war that is waged largely in our living rooms, the television on our right and the computer on our left. Video games heard from every furthest point in the house, hard music assaulting our sensibilities, the sounds loud and lonely as family sits in a trance forgetting what it means to have discussion and connect on an intimate level. Time is forgotten, wasted and used up; if we let it be. The acquaintances move in and out of our children’s lives exposing them to the refuse of our society and its dangers. We must not tie this all up with a bow so tightly that we just pretend that all is well because everybody is doing it. We must use faith and hope and love, teach strong values that will bring happiness and joy, and seek after all good available in life, shunning those things that distract us from our path.

Growing up, the culture I lived in was my family. There was a lack of communication in our home with an alcoholic father and an enabling mother. They loved us and we loved them, but it was a vacuum. Dreams and goals didn’t exist there. All time was spent trying to make life ok for my father. My mother taught us to work and after the work was done, we had fun playing Canasta. The only words I remember my mother using that would point to a goal or plan, and I heard them a thousand times over, were: “You must graduate from high school.” Her wish was so passionate, that to me it felt like graduating would be an ending instead of a beginning. I do not ever remember thinking I could go to college, have a career, or be something other than a wife and mother. I remember singing in grade school, having a lead in a high school play and my parents never attended those functions. It seemed like we wanted to keep a secret that we didn’t even know we had, so we just stayed home in what we were used to, the air that we breathed.

I wanted life to be different when I had children. The pendulum was swinging wildly. I am sure I did not accomplish all I would have liked due to my own ignorance, but you might say that as a child I had learned some of what I didn’t want to do as a parent. My husband and I embraced a new religion which was a whole new cultural experience for both of us opening the world to our view. Family and family values became our main focus in life. We were teetotalers, no smoking, focused on good health habits and stuffing the kid’s heads with what we felt was valuable for their lives. We spent time with our children; we supported our children in education, music lessons and sports and we taught them how to work and be anxiously engaged in a good cause; a better beginning than we had, it was a good start for each of them. I read to the children from the time they were born. We traveled and provided our children with ideas and activities that opened their minds to possibilities. We made many friends in many places.

We stuffed heads daily, hourly, minute-by-minute by the way we were, the things we did, the places we found ourselves, and the things we didn’t do. Every moment was a stuffing moment, or a teaching moment as we called them.

Now the kids are gone from home and my husband died a few years back. I am still thoroughly steeped in Christian culture and do not regret all the stuffing we did. Our family has benefited from it, although some feel hampered by it. But that is the dance of life. My parents were probably hurt by the fact that I chose not to live the same kind of life that they did. I am hurt sometimes by my children choosing not to live the same kind of life that I chose. And so it goes. I watch my children and see all the stuffing they are doing, and they don’t even know they are doing it in most cases. I love seeing my grandchildren, and now my great-grandchildren, and I am anxious to see all the stuffing that will be going on with them. Life is a dance. I think I’ll name that dance “The Mind-Blowing, Mind-Stuffing Dance of Life.”