New Year’s Eve on the farm was a time for sledding on the ice-covered roads or tobogganing down the long hillsides in the pasture under the stars, crunchy skiing under a full moon and then hot cocoa just before midnight when all of the kids would gather back at the farmhouse to be together with the larger family as the clock slipped past midnight.

Twenty miles to the east at the State Line where North Dakota begins, it has already been the new year for an hour when we quietly catch up and begin the march through the new weeks and months that would be given us.  By New Year’s Eve, we would have been in the  grip of snow storms and zero/subzero temperatures for six weeks already, with three months to go in those high northern latitudes.  But winter wasn’t so bad . Really. It wasn’t.

We weren’t frustrated by winter because we didn’t try to evade it. Our normal winters featured unheated second floor bedrooms (sometimes with light snow cover on the blankets in the morning); frozen rabbit turd collections in the wheelbarrow, shotguns in the moonlight and kittens in the barn.

We kids occupied the unheated second floor bedrooms with an occasional light covering of snow on our blankets in the morning.  True story. (more…)

Those of you who are regular MBOB readers may be thinking–North Dakota?

Our Montana farm was nine miles out in the country with  three miles of that being narrow two lane pavement and the other six very narrow scoria road.  My 2 years-older brother and I both attended all four years of our high school at a Lutheran boarding school 180 miles away in Minot, North Dakota.

We had much more opportunity to participate in clubs, athletics, music and drama there than we would have had from the farm because there we had deal with driving through winter weather which could frequently be life threatening.  When it was  25 below zero and the wind was blowing, normal country parents in 1956, ’57, ’58, ’59 weren’t really excited about allowing teens to “run into town for the basketball game.”

Now during 8th grade, Dad took me to town for every home basketball game because another 8th grade girl and myself (both clarinetists) had been drafted into the high school band because they were really short of clarinets so it was not that our parents were averse to our participation in school activities.  In fact, they assumed that we would be involved in many things and it was just hard to get it all done and, by the way, we two youngest were the last of seven.  Our parents were just tired at some level, I think…and Best Brother and I being at the boarding school spared them six additional years of monitoring kids out running around the country. (more…)

A Paradigm Shift is needed – Urgently.   It cannot be provided to you, you must develop it within your own mind – and you’d better do it quick; or you will lose.

(* Disclaimer – This post is a collaboration of thoughts from both Sharon and Sundance, Sharon has the keen insightful bits, and Sundance reflects the indignation – any curse words are Sundances’ – because Miss Sharon don’t cuss, ever.)

If you are a regular reader of this site you are generally a person who engages in intellectual discussion on daily events and more than likely a root cause thinker.  Meaning you are able to grasp events at their cause and not at their consequence.   But for some reason, even those who understand big picture dynamics are still comfortable sticking their heads in the sand about “motive”.   Most people are still clinging to actually beliefs around a principle of ‘rule of law’ that applies to National Leadership.

You’d better change that thinking quickly – or you’ll be asking ‘what happened’ far too late.

There seems to be a willful blindness on the part of the American people, a chosen refusal to acknowledge the implications of the unAmerican and unConstititional behaviors, actions and outcomes we are being served on a daily basis.

It can no longer be presumed to be a matter of “I can’t see what’s happening” because a whole lot of normal Americans really are clean and articulate.

“I can’t see it” just doesn’t cut it.

Bullshit!  You can see it, you are just choosing to reconcile the irreconcilable because it is more comforting to ignore the truth of it.   You are scared: (more…)

I don’t remember where I found the artless little story that is today’s Mailboxes and Old Barns.  It is many years since I began saving it and now the paper is soft and worn,  and the creases in the folds almost let the light through.

This is one of those pieces of paper that never gets filed–it never gets “put away.”  It stays, always, with a very small stack of other papers that I don’t ever put away.  Some of them are bits of my own Mailboxes and Old Barns.

This one is someone else’s Mailbox, someone else’s Old Barn.  I don’t know who the author is but like any MBOB, it tells a simple tale of a simple moment from another place and time  that reveals the cure for those days when it seems that we’re just a hurtin’ all over.

Everything was Christmas-wise. (more…)

Dad included this Christmas thought in a letter to Mom dated December 15, 1925, as they were anticipating their marriage in April of 1926:

“Now we are nearing the beautiful Christmas time when we shall pause and see our Christ as the little child who came to save us.  May we be as children and accept Him in our hearts, to dwell there through the years that may come for us.  Christmas always means more to children than to grownups, so I guess we should all be children again for a day or two in order to receive the true Christmas gift.”

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Sixty-five years after he mailed that, I mailed the following to Mom, now 85 years old in 1990: (more…)

When I started compiling word pictures of my childhood memories, I realized they were like the mailboxes along the roads and the old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds that served as landmarks in rural Montana.

The dolls I got for Christmas two or three times were amazing wonders to my eyes and so very much appreciated. The miniature doll bed that was their home had been built for me by my Dad, and was about a foot wide and perhaps 14 inches long, with a little curved headboard.

It also featured a small patchwork quilt with squares of velvet and wool which were leftovers Mom had from a quilt she made around 1950.  The doll quilt is just in the other room here now in 2012.

In the winter, when the upstairs bedrooms were not heated out of a reasonable desire to save on coal consumption, the doll bed and miniature cupboard with all the little dishes were moved downstairs to the large and warm and toasty kitchen.  It really was ok that our bedrooms were not heated in the winter because at night, we’d be buried under piles of blankets, their count in double digits and during the day we would be with the family downstairs or be outside playing.  Children did not retreat to their rooms during the day when it was time to be up and about so our rooms did not have to be warmed all day.  I think we’ll go off on a daisy trail for a moment here— (more…)

Children’s and adults’ birthday celebrations in the 1950s were always full-blown family events and almost identical in their content for any age.  There might be five or twenty-five guests. There were not always presents, although there were always cards.  A child’s card would usually include some nickels, or dimes taped to the inside. On the Sunday closest to a child’s birthday, they would have the pennies (or the older kids would have a couple of nickels and the necessary number of pennies) to put in the birthday bank at Sunday School opening exercises while the group sang Happy Birthday to them.

(more…)

Today’s MBOB is filled with cuteness of cats.  Just because.   

“Sharon ate all the crackers again!” was a complaint lodged against me somewhat regularly when my best brother would go to the cupboard on a winter Saturday afternoon thinking to have a couple of saltines.  Mom nearly always had cookies in the cookie jar–gingersnaps, chocolate chip, thin-rolled sugar cookies–but when we discovered it empty, it was understood that two saltines were the equivalent of one cookie,  so saltines (or raw carrots) were the go-to snacks in our house if the cookie jar was empty.

The reason for my repeat violations on this issue is simply this: munching away on saltines while reading Nancy Drew or Carolyn Keene or The Bobbsey Twins just worked.    I have a glass of cold water drawn from the cistern, a book, and a row of crackers on my lap. Utter contentment that was–supported by complete oblivion to the impact I was making on the cracker inventory. 

(more…)

… and yet as the sun rises, foot must still reach soil.

I have asked Sharon to pen her thoughts, because she possesses a gift and can arrange words in a specifically splendid order, at the most difficult of times.  Like now…. /SD

I’m aware that being on the receiving end of the mercy of God, personally or nationally, does not always mean being spared the consequences

I’m aware that the terrible and real loss that had been suspected is now documented. The reports have now come back on the tests that were done to check for national malignancy. It’s Stage 4. There is no more maneuvering room for yet one more fallback position. There was an ugly line drawn across the page as darkness fell last night and a new chapter is under way.

The broad expansive joys of simply being an American seem to be dust. We know today for sure, if we weren’t sure of it before, that we are no longer the go-to nation. We are no longer a functioning Republic. I am painfully aware today that here in our new home, we are twenty-five miles as the crow flies from the physical “end of the Oregon trail.” (more…)

When I started compiling word pictures of my childhood memories, I realized they were like the mailboxes along the roads and the old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds that 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.  

Money, what little we ever saw, seemed to have an inoffensive presence in everyday life on the farm in the fifties.  This was not a laissez-faire attitude as much as it was a chosen perspective that had both strength and history.

We appreciated what we had and didn’t think much about what we didn’t have.  There was never any connection that I can recall between the amount of money available and the quality of life in our home.

Our Dad specifically trusted God, but he also had an earthy sense of humor about money that was sometimes expressed as “Money isn’t the first thing in life but it’s sure ahead of whatever’s in second place.” (more…)