The View from Rockriver Hill

  During Pregnancy #4, I’ve been thinking a great deal about Surrender. During my first few pregnancies, I spent energy trying to fight the symptoms and drawbacks of pregnancy, trying to control and manage something that is, I have discovered, uncontrollable.   Fighting against pregnancy and its limitations is easy to fall into. On my Pinterest feed the other day this headline caught my eye, “How to Have a Belly-Only Pregnancy.” It was a work-out/diet program sold by the author that would ensure that you only gained just enough weight for the baby to grow and would keep that ugly pregnancy weight away from the rest of your body. The writer of the post looked slender, beautiful and fit at 9 months of pregnancy.   Part of me wanted to click on that link. Maybe she knew a secret I didn’t? Somehow I didn't think it would be a good idea for me.  There are lots of lies about natural childbirth out there, too. Usually, it is because someone is selling you a program or an ideolog

  In January, I posted about The Dishes and my personal philosophy/strategy in trying to tackle this never-ending task. At the time I wrote that The Dishes, “can be frustrating, especially when you are surrounded by tiny children who aren’t quite old enough to help with The Dishes, but are very good at making more dirty dishes.” Over the past few months, I remained the primary dishwasher in my household. However, I began to question whether my children really were too young to help. Was I perhaps doing my children a disservice by not including them in this important task? My oldest already takes out the trash and empties the compost pail for the family. He does a variety of complicated tasks on the computer and at school. He can ride a bicycle, clean his room, pick up the living room, load the washing machine, hang up his laundry, and watch out for his younger sisters- would dishes really be that difficult to master? Last week I informed my oldest that today, he would be washing

  If you’d been on our property on Sunday, you might have felt concerned.  There I was, seven months pregnant (SO pregnant!) shoveling mulch, digging dirt, and pulling a wheelbarrow up and down our hills. If you were concerned and perhaps tried to take the shovel or wheelbarrow because you’re uncomfortable watching an extremely pregnant woman doing manual labor, I would have assured you that this is a normal thing for me to do, even at seven months pregnant. (Also, I only fill the shovel part of the way.)   Why all the digging?  We were planting potatoes! We’ve planted a few tubs of potatoes every year for the past few years. We never get much of a crop (probably because I don’t really know the best ways to plant potatoes), but it’s usually fun for the children to watch the leafy green plants grow and dig their little hands into the cool, dark soil to find the new potatoes.                 In a few months, we’ll have new potatoes sitting in our pantry to cure, and then the chil

  I recently watched an online conference where one of the speakers mentioned his love of cooking. He waxed eloquent about his joy in the planning, execution, and presentation of each dinner he makes for his family. He even went on to say that if a recipe calls itself “fast,” “simple,” or, “easy,” he won’t make it because he wants to create something complex and creative. I had a very difficult time relating to that particular speaker.   After a long day of child-wrangling, creating a complex and creative culinary masterpiece to put on the dinner table for my family is not exactly my primary goal. I am not at all sure that I enjoy cooking . This is unfortunate, as food planning, shopping, storage, preparation, and clean-up constitutes a large fraction of my job as a stay-at-home-mom. The food must taste good, be easy for tiny fingers to eat, must be nourishing and fresh, must be as inexpensive as possible, must be ready reasonably quickly, and it must be plentiful. It is my job to

  Taillight at the Piano One of the strangest things I've noticed about my cats is how they react to the piano.  Our former cat, Moonlight, would jump up onto the brown bench next to me, stare at me for a while, walk right across the keys (and my hands) while I was playing, then jump to the top of the upright piano and knock the metronome right onto my head.   I miss that cat.                 We lost Moonlight in November. We had adopted her as a kitten in the first few months of the COVID shut-downs, and she gave us joy and laughter in the middle of a difficult season. She was exotically beautiful with jet black short-hair and big green eyes, and she lounged around the house like a miniature panther. Moonlight was also remarkably tolerant of my three children and allowed herself to be carried around the house like a rag doll without complaint (until I could intervene.) Moonlight Tolerating the Children                 We finally got Moonlight spayed in the fall. In my communit

Sarah glanced at her bullet journal and her list of ten daily goals.   She thought, Bed made. Check. Remember to clean the bathrooms today. They look disgusting.  Sarah sliced open two pink grapefruits as the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse theme song played in the other room. Don’t let the kids watch more than one episode, she reminded herself . If they get off schedule, they will misbehave all day long.    A gleaming stainless-steel pot of oats bubbled on the stove.  Sarah smiled. Oats are so healthy. Maybe I’ll add a little cottage cheese for more protein.  Sarah turned on the hot steaming water and it slowly began to fill one side of the sink. She washed and rinsed two Ziploc bags and hung them to dry. Two fewer bags in a landfill.   That was when Sarah made her first mistake of the morning.  She glanced at the photograph of sunflowers framed on her kitchen wall. Before she knew it, a poem had struck.  Don’t do it. You will never get the bathrooms done if you sit at that computer, Sarah pl

  The orchard is blooming, and the sunflower sprouts are bursting through the soil, but it snowed in the hills last night, so there are no (live) pollinators to be seen this morning. Sunflower Sprout- Will it Survive the cold?  Did I plant my sunflowers too early? If it gets too cold, the newly sprouted plants will die. And if the pollinators get hit too hard by the snow and miss the almond, plum, apricot, and peach blossoms, we may have a small crop this year. See the black Carpenter Bee? The cold may have killed it. Or maybe it is just sleeping...upside down?  Despite the risks, in a few months, we’ll probably still have more apricots and plums than we can handle. Few peaches though- our peach trees are not thriving. My husband has been working on a new retaining wall. When people come to visit our property, one of the first things they notice are the rock, brick, and concrete walls. Most of them were built long before I came here, and my in-laws have spent years transforming the

                  Helen* mouthed the words to the songs. She sat quietly in the second pew from the front with a hymnal open on her lap. Like many of our elderly church members, sitting near the front helped her to hear the music though she was now partially deaf.                 I was very happy to see her at church that Sunday evening because she had recently been in the hospital. Sometimes our church members in their 80’s or 90’s go to the hospital and never come back. But Helen had returned.                 I was not the only person relieved to see her. After the service, Helen was surrounded by well-wishing friends who wanted to know how she was doing, and how they could help. I stood near the edge of the crowd.                 “It’s good to be back,” she whispered. “ I just wish I could sing . But I have no breath anymore because of my lungs. I loved to sing to Jesus. And I can’t anymore.”                 After I hugged Helen and told her I’d been praying for her, I gathe

  Every Garden Needs a Cat                In the middle of the winter, when the days are short and the air is chilly, I have little desire to garden. Everything has been cut back, cleaned up and pruned, and the plants look stark, hopeless, and a little sad.                 Right around Mid-February and March, we begin to have more sunlight, the rain-barrels fill with rain, and the temperature becomes deceptively warm.                   Suddenly, something deep inside me starts wanting to work in the garden again. I can usually tell this is happening because I start to sing, “Wick” from The Secret Garden to anyone who will listen.  The Clean Iris Bed- Ready for new Growth!  Culled Irises- Do you need any?  This week my family has been working to clean out the iris beds (a job that hasn’t been done in years!), and planting sunflowers. The Sunflower Bed Only one narcissus bloomed this February, so we are moving the other bulbs to an empty garden bed where they might just flower more