The Robin’s Return filled the farmhouse on summer afternoons and early winter evenings.  Like a music-box within the old piano, it came from my sister’s fingers and not from one of those perforated sheets that would be wound into the player piano to be presented mechanically.   (please click to listen softly while you read)

Music was not  just achievement, but everyday fun. The Tennessee Waltz and Beautiful Brown Eyes were part of the sheet music rotation and this was my inheritance — growing up with music from before my time.  Although I would enjoy the music of the 1950s on the radio when I was waiting at the mailbox on a summer’s day, when I was at the piano I was playing the sheet music of World War II and the 1940s (and every song book ever published by Back to the Bible from Lincoln, Nebraska). (more…)

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/category/mailboxes-old-barns/

That link will take to you brief opening lines of all the MBOBs published in the last two and half years.

Would you mind using that as a source today?

I hope you might find one you may have missed earlier and enjoy reading it today.

You can either comment here or on any earlier-published post. Again my sincere apologies for the lapse.

Here’s a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about memories that sometimes move in and out of focus — and become part of the irretrievable past.  (more…)

http://projects.militarytimes.com/valor/

Please click through the link and look at the faces.  Consider the individuals.  

The first page of pictures is of those who died most recently.  This is the first Memorial Day for their families who, instead of thinking of their loved one serving, are still trying to come to grips with the fact that their daughter, their son, their brother, their husband, their cousin, their daddy — is gone.

I think of this as pretty close to the least I can do.  I can look at the photos.  Look at Air Force Captain Mark Voss.  Four weeks ago he was alive.  Now he’s not.

What is Air Force Captain James Steel bustin’ up about?  Something’s going on, off camera, to his right and he’s enjoying it.  Some friends deliberately goofing off, perhaps, or maybe a dog jumping an amazing height to catch a frisbee, and James is just enjoying the sight.

The photo of Army Pfc Markie Sims makes me sad.  He looks sad, don’t you think?  I suppose the photo was taken during basic training, and this was his first deployment.  Maybe he was already wondering what he had gotten himself into.  Maybe he’s just a sad kind of guy and couldn’t brighten up for a photo.

Marine Staff Sgt. Eric Christian looks proud and focused.  At the end of April, his family was just waiting to hear from him again.  Now I suppose they’ve received whatever his last letter was.  They’ve received his personal effects.  They’re not waiting to hear from him any more.

Army Specialist Cody Suggs — what you doing with ear-studs, bud!??  There must not have been a uniform pic available for him, but Specialist Suggs’ life was spent also.  He’s gone.  And I bet some family member will treasure (or wear) Cody’s ear-studs for a long, long time.  Cody, you’re breaking my heart.  You have the goofy ear-rings, like an adolescent who won’t listen to mom — but you went and laid your life down, didn’t you?

Army Sgt Enrique Mondragen, whose shoulder is that you are affectionately leaning into?  Is that your sister? Maybe your girlfriend?  Were they waiting for a call for you on Christmas Day, 2012, when instead they saw uniformed officers walking up to their front door?  Enrique — why Christmas Eve?  Why.  I’m sure the owner of the shoulder wonders the same….why, at all.  And why Christmas Eve.

Air Force Captain Victoria Pinckney, is that your little doll baby leaning in to touch your cheek?  Or a niece?  Whoever that little sweetie is, this photo will be a forever part of their future.

Please go and look at the faces and the names and the dates.  It is, very nearly, the least we can do.

It’s a sunshiny day and I’m up in the garage with Dad.  He’s working at the very long work bench where his grinders are, where the sun floods through the window and shows the designs that hang in the dust of the air.  About ten or twelve years old, I’ve climbed up on the big tractor tire just to sit there and watch him work.

I’ve figured out that Dad is not just Dad, but a separate person who would be living and farming and thinking and reading even if he wasn’t my Dad. And so I deliberately went to the garage, to watch him work and to think about that.  Recognizing that he is other becomes a framework for what comes later: conscious respect and deliberate honor.

Because little girls in those days weren’t supposed to interfere in men’s work, I just sat there on the tractor tire and watched him work.  We didn’t talk, except without words.

If I were an artist, I could draw you a picture.

A shiny day in early April. The surface of the flower garden on either side of the porch steps in front of the kitchen is warm — warm enough that the heat has softened the dirt as it reflected off the south side of the house.  It’s too early by several weeks for any sound of buzzing insects or any trail of ants seeking a likely nest, but the air is still and warm, inviting a youngster to come out of the house and do something. (more…)

Perhaps it was in the evening when Mom said, “Tomorrow you can go up to get the mail by yourself.”

Only once in a lifetime does the day come when a thirteen year old farm girl is first told “Tomorrow, you can go get the mail by yourself” when the farm girl lives on a farm where the driveway is very, very long and this means she gets to drive the car — solo.

The mail is delivered to the wood-post-mounted box that stands along the county road 3/4 of a mile from the house.It’s at the end of the long drive that curves out of the yard,  up and down over several hills, the narrow dirt road running smoothly between the fields and the barbed wire fences, between the ditches filled with wild roses and Indian Paintbrush in the summer, and thistles in the fall. (more…)

DRYLANDER’S DREAM, BY A DRYLANDER’S GRANDDAUGHTER

  “Joannie Girlee” as told by her dear Mother, Esther on July 3, 1993

Fabricated and Filled by Joannie

            The heat from the sun burned down on the parched earth as Fredrick Hansen scanned his once green fields.  For years, he and his neighbors had tilled and toiled this prairie land on the North Eastern corner of Montana.

When these pioneers first began settling here, it was their Christian Faith that gave them courage and hope.  Just over the hill stood the high steeple of their beloved Church.  Pointing Heavenward, it was a beacon to look up, rather than down in the dust underfoot.

So it was at this place of worship that Fredrick and Johanna  gathered with their 13 children each Sunday.  Located just a ½ mile away, it was an extension of their busy home!  Often their friends and neighbors gathered in this white frame church to worship and fellowship.  Truly this was the center of their lives and rural Danish community!

So it was here  that this congregation served as a Mother Hen to all who needed covering of His gentle wings!’

Coming up in the summer was a greatly anticipated annual District Convention of the Danish Lutheran Church.  It was here that all gathered for inspiration and sharing.  These American Danes so enjoyed the opportunity to renew and make new friends.  These yearly gatherings were the highlights!  Also, it gave the congregations a chance to meet and hear the new men who were called into the ministry.  Truly, it was here that much of the Life of the Church was ignited and returned with those who were blessed to attend. (more…)

Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks in rural Montana. These landmarks told us where we were, and how far we had to go. Sometimes they signaled “home”  and the end of the road.  At other times, barely visible through swirling snow, they told us we had miles to go.  Memories from those years — Mailboxes and Old Barns.

On a cold November night with a moon that’s new, it worried my thoughts if I heard a pack of coyotes howling across the pasture hills.  There’s something about their lonely cries that sort of grates at the heart under the best of circumstances, but hearing it in the cold of fall reminded of the possibility that they had some of our cattle on the run.  Even coyotes couldn’t be said to flourish on the hard prairie turf, so we never had multiple packs to deal with but one was enough.

After the crops were in, or in the summer between planting and harvesting, Dad would spent days repairing the fence lines that surrounded a field here, five hundred acres of pasture there or two hundred acres there. (more…)

The Colorado blue spruce in the photo below are about twenty years old.  This view includes about 20% of our tree line/wind break.  These long rows of trees were on the north  and east sides of the big farm yard.

Nothing could stop the howling winter winds that still come across the utterly treeless prairie hills, but these rows of trees — spaced far enough apart so that the tractor and cultivator could be dragged through to keep them clear of weeds — spared us far deeper drifts of snow in the yard, blocking buildings,  in the aftermath of sub-zero blizzards. (more…)

With or without company, Sunday dinner was a little more —  a little more leisurely in terms of the time set aside for enjoying the meal, a little more dressed up, a little more scrumptious on the dessert.

And one of the amazing perqs of acquiring electricity (always called “juice” on the farm) was that when we went to church on Sunday, we left the cook at home.

Dad would start the ’53 Ford about 9 a.m..  Brother and I would scoot into the back seat and we’d all have a few minutes to wait for Mom while she was tucking the last of Sunday dinner in the oven before we left the house.  Dad would have the car radio on with regular Sunday program featuring Percy Faith and his orchestra.  We  thought it was terribly clever of us to say, “That’s Turkey Face and his orchestra” and then laugh ourselves silly until Dad glanced at us in the rear view mirror remind us that our cleverness was limited. (more…)

UPDATE: Expansion on the phrase “Hitler’s execution crews” has been added at the bottom of the post.

On page 338 of Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he comments on Bonhoeffer’s observations of America when he was in New York City during the summer of 1939.

His friends had begged him to “get out of Germany while the getting was good” — they knew what was coming. He was absorbing the American scene and saw first hand the extent to which  “tolerance trumped truth.”  He was “fascinated” by it. (more…)