Posts Tagged ‘Love’
Berry Farm
On Saturday morning, I helped Cyndie deliver her baked contributions to White Pine Berry Farm for their Trifecta Weekend event. This is the time of year when their three main berries: Strawberries, Raspberries, and Blueberries are all available for picking on the same days.
Cyndie had everything bagged and labeled for individual sale.
Farmer Greg was thrilled over the arrival of the treats he had sampled days before. If he was around to pitch the product all weekend I don’t know how customers could resist.
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With the combination of organic berries from White Pine Berry Farm and Cyndie’s special baked delicacies made with oodles of love, I think we have the makings of a new superpower.
The berry farm started their venture just half a year before we arrived to create Wintervale. It has taken us years to find each other, and now fills us with excitement over unknown possibilities for future collaborations. They have space to host weddings and other events in addition to a new building under construction for future offerings.
We have quickly grown very fond of farmers Greg and Andy. It serves as inspiration for imagining greater possibilities of how we might be able to spread more love in the world through participation in their events.
At the very least, we might learn some valuable tips and tricks about growing better organic berries and produce at home.
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Just Love
Certainly, there could be worse things to keep coming back to, but my mind has begun to develop a healthy habit of naturally settling on thoughts about sending and receiving LOVE amid the swirl of good and bad circumstances that wash over us with unrelenting regularity.
We learned last night of an unexpected death among our extended family, all too close to the time of Cyndie’s dad’s passing that has everyone already raw with grief. The increasing infection rate of the coronavirus pandemic is pressing firmly against the frustrations of being locked down for months and disrupting dreams of resuming some previous activity.
Plans for the fall are far from settled as to whether schools will be able to open safely and entertainment venues will figure out a way to host events.
It is almost becoming a physically painful thing to not be able to hug people, on top of the ever-awkward absence of a genuine handshake.
Still, we are showered with ongoing blessings that become more precious with each pause for acknowledgment. The gestures of condolence that have arrived in the last two weeks have warmed our hearts.
Last Sunday, Cyndie and I worked on preparing the brooder for the anticipated arrival of 12 new day-old chicks this month. As hard as the loss of birds is on my tender wife, she couldn’t stop herself from ordering more. New life is coming to Wintervale again!
Summer is in full swing in all its glory around our land, regardless of the recent loss of some big trees. We’re preparing to host travelers we’ve not met before from my virtual community, Brainstorms, in the days ahead. We offered a free parking spot for their small RV on their trek home that is taking them right past our neighborhood on the interstate.
I keep imagining how pleasant it would be if the news media took several days off from mentioning anything a certain person says or does and simply focused on news that matters without any distractions or fabricated drama. I do struggle to muster enough love to offset the disturbance that rolls out of the nation’s capital like the irritation of a lingering dead skunk smell.
The high heat and excessively oppressive tropical dewpoint temperatures are hanging around lately even longer than skunk odors, which is definitely exacerbating the angst of those who lack artificial cooling in their homes.
There is good and bad roiling around in a weird mix. What can we do to cope effectively but love?
Just love.
It sure can’t hurt to try.
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— special love goes out to Carlos today for his sorrow and loss —
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Many Feels
Time moves fast and time moves slowly even though it is always moving at the same pace. Our feelings are doing the same in the days immediately following Fred’s passing. Grief processes slowly, but comes on fast and furious in waves. Luckily, laughter comes just as fast. The Friswold family has plenty of laughs. In fact, I would say they are predominantly laughs.
Cyndie and I have been sleeping at her parent’s house –I hesitated writing that, avoiding the change to referring to it as her “mom’s house”– along with Barry and Carlos. Other immediate family have been showing up throughout each day and we have enjoyed the trials and tribulations of crying and laughing our way through the essential steps of what all families face after a death.
Hugging. If only we could hug all the precious people who have been stopping by with gracious gifts of sustenance and well-wishes, and more importantly, the shared sorrow of loss at the thought of no longer being able to hear Fred laugh again.
Curses to the coronavirus.
I truly hope we will be spared the tragedy of inadvertently experiencing a rash of COVID-19 spread among any of us in our moments of weakness when we give in to our emotions and reach out to touch each other, be it ever so briefly.
We’ve got the obituary figured out and submitted to run in Sunday’s Startribune newspaper and been in communication with the reporter who is also writing a feature remembrance.
Much energy is underway to populate a specific website we have created for Fred. See Fred Friswold Memorial.
Planning some manner of memorial service or celebration of life is proving maddeningly difficult under the current health constraints of the pandemic.
So many feelings all at the same time. Very happy-sad.
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Incredible Person
There are some things I find difficult to write about, even though writing my thoughts is what I am most often inclined to do. It’s been on my mind for some time that I should consider writing something to honor my father-in-law, Fred Friswold, but the task seemed too daunting. How could I do justice to such a heroic specimen of a human being? Especially when I know some of his flaws.
Well, in the end, I understand that attempting to do justice counts about as much as actually achieving it. And, his flaws are few and rather frivolous.
I’ve already written about the fact I won the jackpot in the in-law lottery. That tells much about the way I feel to have had the privilege of being granted the highest honor of becoming a member of the Friswold family.
Fred Friswold was an incredible person. Often, the first thing people think of about Fred is the robustness of his greetings and the reverberating heartiness of his laugh. It seemed an incredible injustice that his voice was taken from him in the last months of his life. However, not once did I witness him give in to self-pity or anger over the loss.
Suddenly we found ourselves needing to quiet down and look to him in order to hear what he had to say. It became an endearing thing to process the sound of his whispers. It has made the sound of his raucous pronouncements and booming guffaws all the more precious in our memories.
In the absence of my own father, who died shortly after I married Cyndie at my ripe old age of 22, it was Fred who became my reference for figuring out how to be a husband and a dad. It didn’t make things easy for me. When I struggled to navigate challenges that required repair around the house, realizing I didn’t know how to fix things the way my dad did, Cyndie would suggest we do what her dad did. Look in the Yellow Pages.
The man knew his limitations. Not that he didn’t tackle a few of his own do-it-yourself projects. He painted their house once. And, accidentally, a little of the neighbor’s house next door, too, using a sprayer. He must have liked spray painting. Late in life, he enlisted my labor to do a quick job of painting a new baseboard around their deck. Wouldn’t take long. He had all the stuff necessary for the job.
A can of spray paint. I spent 90-minutes taping up newspaper to protect the light-colored siding from the dark brown deck for the 10-minute job of painting.
One thing Fred never did was make me feel like I didn’t belong or wasn’t meeting his expectations, despite his high regard for academic achievement and career accomplishments. I didn’t receive the frequent queries seeking to hear what the 5-year plan was. Maybe a few “What did you do for your country today?” queries, but if my answer was that I rode my bike a respectable distance, he found a way to work with that.
Of course, we are absolutely heartbroken that his life has reached its end, but it pains us even more that it has happened at a time of the pandemic when we are unable to gather the throngs who also knew and loved him in order to process our shared grief.
Fred Ravndal Friswold was a truly incredible person for whom my words are insufficient to adequately describe.
He was an endearingly loud person who went out in a whisper.
We will, and do already, miss him in the extreme.
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Return Appearance
It is challenging to chronicle the uncertain timing of the otherwise inevitable end of the life of a family member. In-person, a question often lingers over whether the latest departure salutation might actually be the last goodbye. Cyndie and her brothers have been rotating days of tending to their father in his hospice-care phase of life for several months. The task is now being transferred to professionals at a nearby hospice facility, unfortunately, under the current constraints of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
It appears we have reached timing now measured in a matter of days, possibly even hours.
A hospice facility is a precious place. I had a great experience at a home where my mother spent her final days and our family was able to gather around her. It breaks my heart that we will be unable to do that for Cyndie’s dad. Visitation is very limited to protect everyone from the coronavirus.
I scanned some of my past “Words on Images” posts to see if something might grab me in this moment and chose “Appearance” from just about a year ago.
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Sending F.R.F. to a higher plane with beams of love and peacefulness…
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Coping Skills
It’s getting hard to miss the memes questioning what the deal is with 2020 so far. There is one showing the frame for a couple of swings installed next to a brick wall. Yeah, it kinda feels like that. I guess with a global pandemic for a backdrop, any other situation which arises can feel like a slap in the face. The clear video of a white police officer slowly and arrogantly suffocating a black man was a serious gut punch with reverberations riling up centuries of prejudicial inequalities.
It’s getting hard to cope.
I am not surprised to have read somewhere of a trend toward moving from inner cities to the suburbs. I am truly grateful and totally aware of the precious benefit we enjoy in having acres of green space where we can stroll to breathe in the calming balm of all that nature offers.
There was a hint of a break in the cloud cover yesterday that teased of blue sky on the way but in classic 2020 fashion, it disappointed. The sunlight never broke through a gauze of dirty white that mysteriously found a way to hang around.
Our endurance is being tested. I see it as a challenge to how we frame our perceptions. There is no beginning or end when it comes to the span of time. There won’t be a single day which can be measured as the end of the coronavirus pandemic, just as there isn’t an identifiable moment when it began. Same thing for racial prejudice.
We are on a continuum. Life is a big, long ride. Figure out a way to cope for the long haul.
I suggest we mind our manners, take care of ourselves first before helping others, but by all means, seek to help others. Maybe release our urge to so vehemently control outcomes and discover a deeper awareness of what unconscious fears are actually coloring our perceptions.
Put a little extra effort into loving ourselves and in turn, nurturing greater love for others and the world we all share.
What a lovely way to cope with the challenges of life: coping by loving.
Group hug! [after the pandemic, I mean.]
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Just Clinging
We have arrived at the week with the earliest sunrise in our location and the weather is at its most wonderful summer-est. Our doors and windows are open and the ceiling fans are turning, yet the warmth hovers around the edge of too much. Tank tops and loose shorts, bare feet and a tall glass of ice water put things right.
The cut hay in our fields was raked and round-baled on the same afternoon yesterday. If you look close, Cyndie captured a lone deer crossing the image view as the field became draped in the shadow that was replacing the disappearing sunlight.
For as much as we are forbidden to wrap our arms around our fellow friends and family, we are striving to wrap the summer up in a grandiose hug of epic proportions. Despite the chaos of a political circus, a global pandemic continuing its invisible spread, and citizens bellowing for justice against centuries of systemic racism against indigenous peoples, immigrants, and the entire spectrum of non-white human beings, I am just clinging to the precious moment of a few glorious quintessential summer days for their faint distraction of nature at its finest.
We are doing so without a rambunctious picnic of music and food and a hundred of our favorite people. I am doing so without my annual week of biking and camping somewhere around Minnesota with hundreds of friends and brilliant like-minded adventurers. We are doing so without concerts enjoyed among thousands of similar music-loving fans or sports competitions with hoards of supporters cheering on the efforts of athletes at every level of skill.
There will be no county fairs and ultimately, no Minnesota State Fair. Graduations have already been morphed into sometimes blessedly shorter shadows of the usual pomp and circumstance, and weddings and funerals constrained to unrecognizable whispers of the emotional extravagance they deserve.
Navigating the days that turn to weeks and then months of the COVID-19 pandemic is dragging us all into a marathon of paying heed to the best-practice precautions of constraining the spread to manageable levels despite our preference that it just be a short duration fast-walk competition among friends.
My dentist’s office called and left a message that they are now accepting cleaning and checkup appointments scheduled for the fall. My rather feeble home plaque-scraping exercise since my appointment in March was canceled is now going to need to suffice until autumn. Thank goodness I won’t need to waste a beautiful summer afternoon splayed back in the reclined chair getting my teeth cleaned and inspected.
The best medicine I have right now for the pandemonium of current events is the natural summer surroundings of our little paradise. I love it. We love it.
It helps fuel our ability to nurture and grow that love for beaming out into the great big world.
Here is Wintervale LOVE to all who are willing and able to receive it… <muwah>
Cling to that.
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Flowing Again
Problem solved. A full day in operation and the water level is holding. It was indeed the orientation of the waterfall that was contributing to the surprising loss of water every day.
The peaceful meditations of splashing water have returned to grace our idyllic surroundings once again.
Pretty good timing, given the visceral angst boiling over in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in the middle of a global pandemic that had seriously derailed the economy while killing vulnerable people with abandon.
With such a wallop of bad vibes unceasingly resonating far and wide, people understandingly are reacting with a protective perspective of wondering what more awful situation could be around the next corner. If we expect the worst, maybe it won’t hurt so much when it arrives. I remember that mindset from my years of depression.
Thinking like that may come across as protective on the surface, but it doesn’t actually work as well as the alternative. We can hold space for best possibilities.
Neither method can entirely control outcomes, but it is hard to argue that they don’t have some influence. Consider how strongly people feel about the power of prayer.
I no longer brace myself for the next possible calamity to befall us. I have grown more inclined to visualize the best possible outcome humankind can achieve. It is easier for me now that I have narrowed my focus to the power of love. Love is the answer. Love can heal all wounds.
It is time to get love flowing again, equally among all races, all income levels, all orientations.
Let the love flow and splash down over everything and everyone.
Amen.
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Birthday Squared
In a classic demonstration of Cyndie’s gift of thinking about others, the planned driveway celebration of her birthday this year was secretly morphed into a surprise celebration of her brother, Steve’s 60th birthday which occurred in April when the family was unable to gather. Cyndie collected thoughts about Steve from all the family and a list was made of the top sixty things we love about the new sexagenarian.
Each thought was numbered and randomly distributed to those present so we could read them aloud to the almost safely distanced tribe.
It was a lovely display of family love on a fabulously lovely June evening that became a birthday squared celebration.
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