Lake Arcola 2011

My not-quite-annual picture of the "lake" in town, close to its peak (I believe) on April 12th, when I just happened to be in town to go with James to the music festival. He thoroughly impressed me at that, with a lively clarinet solo and a lilting duet with a flute player from the next town.

On the way home from the festival, we had to drive through water flowing over the highway between Arcola and Carlyle. I've never seen it flood there before.

The water in Arcola was very high as well, but I think it might have something to do with the new culvert they put in where there used to be a drainage ditch across a vacant lot. Now there is a very long culvert with a house on top, and that culvert just doesn't seem to be doing the same job that the ditch did.

Parsnip - unedited

Remember "Rootabigga"? I think this root is actually bigger. Mom and Dad have a great garden on a spot where they used to feed cattle. That fertile soil combined with the non-stop rain this year produced some sensational parsnips (and carrots, and beets, and lettuce that kept producing all season instead of bolting in July).

The boy is definitely bigger. In about a year he went from shortest in the family to tallest. I don't think there was anything special about growing conditions that year; it was simply time to grow.

Be Patient - They Really Do Have Brains

I browse and blog; Mom watches TV and passes tips on to me. With this one, I believe she has in mind the survival of her grandchildren. Now, I'm not talking about vague, hypothetical grandchildren surviving an ecological crisis. I'm talking about those two specific grandchildren of my mother that happen to live with me, and their chances of surviving their own adolescence and its effects on me.

Letting Kids Be

Madcap Mum has a post up about her frustration in trying to find local children's programs that aren't infested with nastiness among the children. AnvilCloud commented:

Those kids can be depressing. They are trying so hard to be something, but they're nothing at this point. It's so sad.

I think he nailed it. They are "trying so hard to be something."

At bible study this morning we were talking about changes in the church, and wondering what has changed in the community and the world, that it has become so difficult to get people involved. A couple of things came out:
1) people no longer think that God is taking care of their lives; they make their own lives
2) family life revolves around an exhausting round of kids' activities
3) the time for an individual to take a place in the community has been pushed later and later in life. Whereas a child used to begin to find a place and a role as soon as he or she could lift a basket or a hoe, that time gradually moved to sometime when the child started thinking "I've had enough school, I'm ready to work." Around that time, they would begin to try to impress the elders of the community with their strength or their smarts. Now it's pushed off even farther, and community involvement is just another thing to add to a resume to try to get a scholarship. Everything is focussed on getting into college, and few students even begin to think about their place in a community until they're suddenly convocated and job-hunting and trying to learn to "network." (The effect on the church is that there is no continuity, from Sunday School through confirmation class to a valued role in the church community. After confirmation, the young people leave, and maybe, maybe, they come back to bring their own kids to Sunday School.)

With all the focus on "what will you be when you grow up?", there is a backlash saying "let kids be kids," which translates into a lot of entertainment and recreational events. But there is very little acknowledgement that kids want to be something, now, today. They want to be listened to, and they want to contribute. That is the great gaping hole in their lives, and sadly, many of them don't even know it's there.