Homemade Pasta Sauce and Player Piano

Last week in between one medical appointment after another in Colorado Springs, this mama got to spend a day with my daughters helping to can homemade pasta sauce.

It did my heart good to be with my middle daughters again, just working together like in old times-

-only this time they were in charge and Mom was helping!!  

I was so proud of how well Rose and Carrie have learned to do things such as cooking and canning and preserving. 

They even dried a bunch of mushrooms recently!  

I love seeing evidences of what my daughters are up to--such as an invitation on Carrie's refrigerator to a pro-life event. 

And while this photo is anything but flattering, (I think I needed a daughter to style my hair!) it does show my son getting a haircut. It does my heart good that my sons like to catch up on haircuts when they come around. I am so grateful my boys still like to look like a man instead of like a woman.

I told Sam he needs to find someone to give him a professional haircut, and he reminded me that I have told him that every time I have given him a haircut for the last how many years!

And I crow with laughter--and hope it is the chemo.

It couldn't possibly be anything wrong with my brain or anything like that.  

Wednesday evening right after my brain MRI, the girls and I stopped at Jonathan's dad's place where Grammy Ruth listened to Daddy Lucas's old player piano for the first time. 

The girls knew she hadn't ever heard anyone pump that player piano and that she'd been wanting to hear it. 

So they dashed back to where they knew Grandpa kept some player piano music rolls and appeared again in short order and began to pump. First Hannah played "The Bumblebee," and then Carrie pumped for "The Holy City."

That song wafted me back to the years of my family singing together--my next brother Elon singing "The Holy City," as a solo, one of my favorites, along with "Somebody Bigger Than You and I." 

I sat there, weak after a stressful day of two medical tests in a row, willing myself not to cry as I heard the familiar notes 

of a song of a beautiful city, new Jerusalem,

where there is no more pain, no more cancer, no more tears, no more uncertainty, no more worries.

And no more sin.

That city is holy. And no unclean thing shall enter.

Jesus, cleanse me, always and every day, that I may be worthy to enter there,

and to walk with You in white.