Our coal-burning furnace was a big one.  The furnace room in the basement was a closed off, unfinished portion of the basement, about 25 feet X 20 feet with dirt walls, the floor of the big farmhouse overhead, and entered through a big door from the finished portion of the basement, where all of the canning, freezer, cupboards, laundry and old wood stove things lived.

Walk with me straight into the furnace room and past the furnace — and a left turn has  us standing directly in front of it.  When Dad brought coal to the house from the mine south of the river, he would remove a small window just at ground level.  The coal would be shoveled off the truck, and then through that little opening into the basement where it would lay in a great heap between the furnace and the wall, waiting for its day to heat the house.

On a spring day when there was still quite a bit of coal left–enough to finish the season–Dad came and called to us to come to the basement because there was something he wanted to show us. (more…)

Sixty-three years ago, a little country church on the prairie celebrated their 50th anniversary when three generations who had worshiped and matured there returned to sing together, eat together, pray together and remember together.  Our mother’s mother Johanna, along with her husband, was one of the charter members and as such, was asked to write a letter of memories and thanksgiving.  This is her letter.

Dear Emmaus Congregation,

My heartfelt and sincere congratulations on this your fiftieth anniversary.  Greetings in Jesus’ name.

It was in April 1910 that we and our six children came to Ambrose, North Dakota.  Soren Thompson met us with horse and wagon to take us to the home of Pastor and Mrs. Kjoller.  There we found a warm and hearty welcome.  Many times I think of how kind and generous they were to us all.  We stayed with them three weeks while my husband worked on the house that was to be our home in Montana. (more…)

“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”

That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic–on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg–or else he would be the devil of hell.

You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a mad man or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

–C. S. Lewis

Dear Love,

I just arrived home a few minutes ago, and have written to the Clerk of Court to get my mileage, so I am going to send you a chapter right away. The roads to Medicine Lake were enough to break the heart of anyone who loves his Ford. They were really the worst streak I ever bumped over; and how Lizzie can hang together and continue percolating is beyond me; but she did. From the Lake and home it went O.K. real fine road. If there isn’t a change for the better on my next trip I’d be tempted to take the train. Even if the car plugs thru it is a costly trip.

I only used 3 gal gas from Westby and to Froid, so that don’t mean much; but oh these bumps. Enough of this.

I got your fancy work box on a safe place, and am now trying to warm up the house. Tomorrow I have to help Willie haul hay. We are going thru McCabe so I’d try to see Holger Hofman, and get his verdict.

One of the boys who were to Y.P.M. last night waved by-by to me over at Spoklie’s mail box when I went home, but don’t know who he was.

Please tell Mrs J.P. that you don’t want more than 1 pound of pepper. She might see that I get a jar of horseradish and a bottle of olives, as these are the only two things I don’t like. I tasted the former a short time ago and added to the impossible olives. You see I am feeling all right by all this gas. (more…)

Some Holy Week thoughts as Christians consider the death and resurrection of  Jesus Christ

(Drawing from texts in Matthew 27, Mark 15, Luke 23 and John 18)

1.  After Pilate declared Jesus innocent, all subsequent acts were contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Roman Law.  Since Pilate knew that, that should give us some insight into the power of the fear that drove him. Note the role that intimidation and domination play.

2. Jesus’ failure to respond to Pilate is not incidental. The Roman government had no authority over Him, and He would not contribute to any illusion that it did. He was not defiant–He was unresponsive. (more…)

As I’ve been working with MBOB material over the months, I’ve been trying to learn how to do digital management of Dad’s slides and am slowly getting there.

Today’s MBOB is my first venture into “here are some my own fer real photos”–except this first barn!  This is not our barn.  That’ll come down the road somewhere.

All of the photos shared today were taken by my father in the 1950s with his 35mm slide camera, using Kodachrome film.  I am blown away by the stability of Kodachrome film and Kodachrome slides. These slides have just been in storage for fifty years. Two weeks ago I had them transferred to a CD so I could work with them.

It was quite a process back in the day.  Of all the hundreds of slides he took in the just-over-ten-years between his acquisition of the camera and his death in 1962, I doubt there were more than three or four that turned out to be wasted shots.  It was too expensive and too time-consuming to do wasted shots, so he just did the very best he could with regard to composition and getting all the settings right so each picture would be worth something in terms of a record of events. (more…)

This is not a warm fuzzy of an MBOB although it contains lots of good memories.

Disinterest in doing things well or, worse, living in a world where no one expects anything to be done well is where we are these days, to some extent.  Because I’ve had a couple of jolting interactions with employees in stores this week the business of practicing in order to do things better has been on my mind–and as I began remembering all of the things we practiced…….an MBOB emerged.

Practice does not make perfect but it does prepare one to be able to do things well and that was the goal as Mailboxes came and went and Old Barns played their part.

No one expected to be able to do everything well right off the bat but understood that the goal and the process were two different things and that was ok.  So they began–to practice.

Piano lessons were practiced twenty minutes a day at the very least.  There’s nothing private about either practicing or playing the piano. Every missed note, every hesitant bit of timing, every flawed rhythm pattern is apparent to everyone in the house which actually is ok since the purpose for practicing was not to impress, but to get better. (more…)

Today’s MBOB is a repeat: one of my personal favorites.

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Gifts for our mothers on Mother’s Day–a rite of spring in the classrooms of the 1950s.

I hated it because I wasn’t good with dainty things and had no patience for tiny handwork.  The worst of all was in third grade when each girl in the class was given a square piece of linen to be handstitched around the edge with tiny stitches to create “a lovely handkerchief.”

The second worst was the year we were driven through the process of creating hand-twisted paper flowers: white lilies with green sprout-leaves along the side.  Mine were all grubby because we often worked on them right after recess.   Farm girls made use of recess; we did not stand around displaying new socks or shoes or dresses, so recess remainders were transferred from my hands to the paper flowers as I worked hard on them, and when I gave them to Mom the Friday before Mother’s Day, the corners of her mouth twitched a bit.

I knew she had seen right away how smudged they were, but she suppressed the urge to laugh and just said quietly, “How about if we put them in the china closet?”  They sure looked nice laying there…safely behind the pretty glass where folks who might come for coffee could see but not touch. (more…)

Please read this article first which provides context for the book excerpt that follows.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers/

By the way, it didn’t have to be that particular article. There are a thousand other links that could have been used for the same purpose spreading back over the last 60 months since Obama began actively campaigning for POTUS and saying what his intentions were.  That one just happened to be a current update regarding an ongoing situation.

They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-45, Milton Mayer (more…)