Spiky Fringe and Destructive Gardening

Perhaps I should beging the day's post the same way some Victorian writers used to title their chapters, you remember...In which our heroine....next time I will!!!

So much for the lovely weather- we are now having torrential rain and almost gale force winds. The broad bean plants are lying flat in the veg bed. I was going to have chard for supper but cutting it in this wind will be quite a challenge, well not so much the cutting as the catching before it blows away!

Yesterday morning I was teaching class music in School so the night before I took the scissors to my rather long fringe, wide peripheral vision being essential when teaching, both in the interests of safety and discipline. I never get it right so I am now sporting a hedge-hog spiky cut, very flattering to a dumpy forty-something. NOT! The children are preparing an end of term concert and were full of mad ideas for amusing each other. It was interesting to listen to them working out how to present themselves and their songs, and exciting also to see the practical application of the term’s music work.

Yesterday lunchtime, on the way in to his shift at work, the Hub stopped off to take the chain-saw to a couple of big branches in the folk’s garden. (It’s called ‘destructive gardening’!) Cutting them down was not a problem, but stuffing all those whippy branches, wet leaves and chunks of tree trunk into my small hatchback to remove them was something else! Mum and I would make good wrestlers, you know, those woman wrestlers from South America I think. Reminds me of the children’s old joke: How do you get Pikatchu into a full bus in rush-hour? Pokemon!
Sad, I know!

In the post yesterday was a letter from some Missionary friends saying that after a year's break back in the States they have come to the conclusion that God still has work for them in Kenya and so they will shortly be heading back there. They have several ideas for reaching out to various peoples, and building support networks. Working out in the Mission Field is not easy, obviously, but I think that sometimes Churches here at home over-look the Mission Fields right on their door-steps. Our present Clergy are working hard at motivating the local congregation to embrace out-reach as a way of life. It’s hard to stick one’s neck out in your own home-place and open one-self to potential ridicule, but it is also so obvious that there are many lonely and needy people here. It is as necessary for people to live God’s love at home as it is to send people out to distant places, and just as hard work, in a different way. And sometimes I just feel plain stupid!

Dilly arrived home at lunchtime today from Dublin, complete with wet laundry, clean but wet. And yes, I am thankful for small mercies! Luckily she has work for most of the summer in Dublin as funding her University studies is proving rather more expensive that we’d envisaged. She and some friends have also found a flat for the coming year and are collecting their belongings from all over the place as they have been staying on friends' floors this past fortnight. Student living at its most normal!

Mum’s god-daughter wants to start hand-quilting so on Saturday morning I’m going to meet with her. She has just recently begun patchwork and quilting and is so enjoying it. I think that it is good to be with people who are just beginning to learn something I love. It makes me remember the joy and excitement when patchwork was new and the possibilities were endless. Well, they still are, but occasionally I get bogged down in methods or colour-ways I feel I should do, rather than my quilts being purely imaginative and experimental. There is room for both.

Well our heroine has to get supper now!