Getting Ready for the Hayride

I had to get a picture of the aspen leaves spilling out of my sister Iva's van when she arrived to help me clean, decorate, bake, cook and get ready for the hay ride!

 

Iva and Krissy cutting out orange cookies in the shape of giant candy corn. SHe dipped one end in chocolate and the other in white chocolate.





Our place was awfully drab, but all it took was pumpkins, mums, and jars of corn, popcorn, or candy corn with a candle placed inside to light at dark, and the place cheered up. It also cheered up with Iva coming! Even if one of her sons promptly kicked the garbage bucket all over the back steps in his hurry to join my children who were away across the fields at the neighbor getting water when they came!

I had a choice--I could despise clumsy, noisy children--or I could love them.

I could growl--

or I could hand him a broom and dustpan with a smile.

Our home could be a haven for our own and other eager and energetic children, or they could sneak away feeling like they are just stupid and clumsy and worthless.

Why is it sometimes hard to choose to smile?

I smiled.

But I won't say it wasn't a little-- just a tad-- wry!!

 

Jonathan wasn't able to get hay until the last minute. In the morning we had to get a tank of water from the neighbor, because we only had a third of a cistern full, and with close to 80 people here and cider pressing, we knew we'd have to have more water. Otherwise, we'd have to post "Caution--flush sparingly" signs over the toilets--and really! We didn't want to have to do that!

 

Below, our new pastor Marvin Mosely is pitching in (no pun intended) with forking loose hay from one trailer into the other. We were going to use both trailers, there were so many people.

The spray of beautiful sunshine aspen in the corner of the porch.

Getting ready for the food...

and the food!! One pot of chili after another! Or corn and potato chowder. There would be also French bread with butter and apple butter.

You'd think it would be the boys with the toad!

But it is Cassie Reynolds!



More pictures from Jonathan's camera later, after Kenn arrived and got the apple cider press set up. Iva needed lots of help to wash, sort, and cut bad spots out of apples in order to make the cider. I hope to have more pictures of that whole interesting process later. I need to go now to pick up children (and cousins) from the park. They helped their mothers clean up so well today after the big mess left from last night. But it was worth it!



It wasn't easy to feel like we were doing a great thing for God last night--just making the decision to reach out once again for fellowship, to provide fellowship for other like-minded families who were trying to raise their children for God. It was just hayrides in sun and moonlight, hot chili and sweet cider, a devotional by our new pastor around the crackling fire, singing "Count Your Blessings," and trying to make each person feel accepted and loved--and sitting on the porch step cutting apple after apple.

But when the phone rang this morning, I wasn't expecting what my Ukrainian friend Vera started to say.

She said, "Anna, I have never experienced in America before what I experienced last night!"

She said, "On my way home, I was singing and praising God!"

How she had loved the scent of hay and pine as we drove in the moonlit night through the bluffs! And some of the ones in the second trailer had been softly singing a song praising God for His majestic ways.

She told me she had told her mother all about it, and her mother had been so "glad that in America there are actually people who admire God's creation!" with the emphasis on God.

Jonathan and I shared a hug when I told him about this call.

It was very, very special to us.

So unexpected.

Jonathan reminded me how I had been ready over and over in anxious and overwhelmed moments to ditch this whole ridiculous idea of us trying to pull this off again...How did we ever get started inviting so many people?? We have nothing to show--just a little house on the dry prairie, yard just dirt and little weeds...

But God said He doesn't choose people who are wise, smart, strong, rich and capable.

He picks out the weak and the poor and the despised--
just quaking aspen leaves, lumpy pumpkins, quivering candles in jars of corn,
bear meat and homemade, unpainted apple cider presses,
cold moonlight and the smell of moldy hay,
(manger hay?)
piney woods and turkeys and deer,
a smoky devotional,
loving hearts--
and someone goes home singing and praising God!

 Praise God!

 

 

 

 

 



This Year's Hayride--a Joyful Celebration!

Our friend Tracy Bookman, photographer, forwarded these photos to us that he took of the hayride last night.

All aboard!

The tall young man on the far right is Brandon Byler, who attended Penn View with my youngest sister Kezia, and he is now a pastor in PA. 

 

Tracy got on top of Jonathan's truck to snap a photo of the two-trailer train behind the pickup. There were over fifty people who took the first hayride, and others came later. We were blessed to have sixty-nine guests, and wished we could have invited more but we weren't sure we could manage a bigger number! As it was, everyone was generous, helpful, cooperative, and we had a simply wonderful time.

Pausing to give thanks--singing "Count Your Blessings," and thanking God for the food. (More photos later of the food!)



As dusk and chill set in, Jonathan built a fire, and people began to gather around the welcome heat. Later we realized that we had Mennonites, God's Missionary, Baptists, Grace Tabernacle, Immanuel Missionary, and other affiliations represented. 

Bear Meat Chili

Kenn and Iva's bear meat chili made a huge hit at the hay ride last night! (photos of hayride further down in another post)

 I took this picture before Iva got the chili put together. This is the ground bear meat from the bear Kenn got a couple weeks ago.

 



Here is the ordinary chili I made, and notice there is quite a bit left after the hayride.

 

This is how much was left of the bear meat chili!

 

Everyone--well, almost everyone wanted a taste of this stuff! Even dear Sis. Ruth Runnels dared to taste it! She had to admit with the rest of us, "You wouldn't know it was bear meat!" It took the prize for taste, as far as I was concerned.

Mrs. Amy Delbridge's corn potato chowder was licked clean, too.

Crockpot Apple Butter

Rain and hail kept us indoors for a while this afternoon when we could have been working outside getting ready for our hayride tomorrow. But we are so thankful for it to be sopping wet outside finally! And I am taking a breather for a few minutes, doing office work in between downloading and uploading pictures...A few minutes of blogging is a way for me to unwind in between picking apples, cleaning up the place, teaching school (Rose is sitting beside me so I can help her with her spelling), planning for the hayride evening with maybe 50 or 60 or more people tomorrow, and making chicken soup for supper.

Now to the apple butter:  

 

We were very grateful to find an apple tree in town whose owners offered to split the apples with us if we would pick them. We got a few bushels of very nice yellow delicious apples.

To make apple butter, first you have to make apple sauce, and this Victorio strainer I bought recently made the job so quick! So far this year we've canned 110 or more quarts of applesauce.

Sorting apples! We made all the bruised or bad ones into applesauce and saved the good ones for eating. Timmy claimed he ate ten apples in one day! It was so nice to tell the children they could have all they wanted for a few days! After that, we had to put a limit on!

My sister Iva always has great ideas about cooking. She told me about a very simple way of making apple butter in crockpots. We used two. We filled them to an inch from the top with applesauce and let them bubble at lowest setting for about 24 hrs.

You can see how dark the apple butter got. Rose and Carrie are putting it into jars.

We couldn't decide if we best liked this view of some of the finished product...

Or this one from a higher angle with a prettier background.. So I am putting in both pictures!

Rosie was sick with a headache yesterday, but not too sick to pretend she was making announcements during the hayride, with a microphone the little boys made from tinkertoys! No end of creativity around here!

This last photo is one I snapped at Grandma's flower garden where we went to pick apples yesterday. Thanks to Grandma and pa for lots of apples for Uncle Kenn to press tomorrow for cider at our hay ride. And I always love to look at Grandma's beautiful flowers.

Must go from blogging to slogging--either in mud outside or the common ordinary work of each day--but with a thankful heart! Thank You Lord for the beauty around us, for cameras to catch it, for minds to remember it, for hearts to love it and You, the Creator! 



Mountain Goats!

Here are some snaps of mountain goats we saw when we drove up Quandary Mt. to see if there might be a campsite on our trip that I keep blogging about when I get a few minutes break in the afternoon!

 

   
                                    

Scene at the top of Quandary Pass, before reaching the dam.

A waterfall there.

The goats checking out our van! The kid actually started climbing in!

Ahead of us is Jonathan with truck and travel trailer, driving through aspen...

At that beetle-ridden campground where we camped Sat. night, a life flight helicopter was doing some practice nearby.

Jonathan caught a photo of us all watching the helicopter and rescue team.

Ashes and Stumps--or Sparkling Waves?

After the happy afternoon of fun at Breckenridge, Jonathan thought it would take him an hour to finish up back at the job. He left early to get to it, and the children and I came later. The job was still not done, and the campground we checked out up the mountain was closed for the season. I made sloppy joes back at our travel trailer while darkness set in. Jonathan and Sammy were frantically trying to get the last odds and ends done and trying to get away from people who were talking. It had been well over two hours.

Now it was too late and dark and we were too texhausted to find a pretty campsite in the mountains

by the aspen.

It was the second of our only three nights away and we couldn't manage to get to the aspen. 

Humph.

We made a quick decision to check out a campground by Lake Dillon which was just minutes away. In the van, I followed behind Jonathan's truck and travel trailer.

I was having a lot of thoughts on the way there which I will not attempt to write about.

 It was dark when we got there, but with our headlights we could see that it was barren and ugly.

 

And to top it all off, we had to pay $18 to park in that beetle-wasted wilderness plus an extra $5 for the van. No potable water, and a bunch of ugliness to start off the Lord's day tomorrow. And it was cold.

I stayed in the van a while. All I wanted was to be warm--and to hit the bed to sleep off my disappointment. My feet had been cold almost all day till about 3:30. Also--I wasn't sure what I was going to say if I did get out to be with the family who were hovering about the blazing fire.

*********

The next morning what I first noticed was that the travel trailer was warmer than the first morning. The sun was shining beautifully.

The sun can't reach us through aspen leaves or pine trees.

We didn't get what we wanted last night--but instead we are finally warm! We checked our leftover provisions and had an unusual breakfast by the fire--watermelon, eggs and bacon, orange juice, leftover dried up bread toasted in bacon grease--

so yummy you wanted seconds! We had never in our lives had such a delicious, wonderful breakfast-

all eaten in that beautiful, beautiful sunshine--

the sunshine that we would not have had if we had parked under aspen leaves and pine.





Through all our lives--we have a choice.

Do I focus on the ugly in my life? Do I sit on the ashheap of my broken dreams? Do I stay in the middle of beetle-ridden stumps--the disappointments, the heartaches, the messed up plans?

Or do I crunch through the mess and explore my options for joy?

That morning, after a wonderful family time of worship, we moved away from the above pictured ugliness, the dried up branches from all the pines that had been destroyed by pine beetle blight, the ashes, the wasteland, and we walked about one quarter mile away to see

what was beyond the bleak horizon.

This is what we found.  



Breathtaking beauty!



We just had to look for it, walk to it, hope for it, open our hearts to it, see it!

In the backyard of beetleridden barrenness was the beautiful, blue lake.

 



It takes so little to make little ones happy!

Hannah collects pretty little stones and a feather!



Carrie sets the fifth, or seventh, or ninth feather in her daddy's cap, and they dub him "Chief Nine Feather!"

They walk along looking for flat little rocks to skip.

And then skip them. And everyone cheers.



The waves lap. The sun shines. The hubby whose plans went so awry the two days before invites me to sit on his knee so I don't have to sit on the hard rock. 

And the beautiful yellow aspens smile behind us!

Uncle Kenn Gets His Bear!



Friday on our way up to join Jonathan near Frisco, we stopped for a few hours at my sister Iva's. I loved the pretty flowers in front of her house. (Mine didn't survive around here this year!)

Kenn had gone bear hunting--and got a bear that very morning! He was in the middle of skinning and quartering it with a friend when we got there. What an interesting time! Too bad my boys couldn't have been there.

 Kenn sliced the fat off--which Iva later boiled down. She read on the internet how to use bear grease for pie crusts. Watch out the next time you eat pie at Iva's! It might taste like bear!



Iva cleaning a bear quarter. She wasn't sure she was that excited about eating bear meat!! Kenn was going to scrape the hide and salt it down and have it preserved as a bear rug.