Bittersweet Farm

Bittersweet Farm

Ken

Bittersweet Farm Journal (Number 60)

Filed Under: Bittersweet Farm, Current Thoughts

Out on Bittersweet

When Lucy Maud Montgomery put the words; “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers…” in the mouth of her character Anne, I wonder if she laid down her pen, sat back, and smiled for a while. I would have. It’s a wonderful line. When October comes I’m always glad to live in a place like Michigan. It’s hard for me to imagine another place I would rather be.

Jerry Dennis, a northern Michigan author, wrote that springtime advances north at about 15 miles a day, about the pace of a steady walk. I wonder how long it takes the color to creep south in the fall? I think about things like this on short autumn evenings. Tonight the deer were grazing in the near north field, as they do every night year-round. Bats were flitting about over the back meadow in the cool dusk. I puttered around in the carriage house for a while. I have a project I’ve been planning there. When it is done it will make good writing so I’m sure I will tell you all about it, maybe even share pictures.

But thinking about October is getting ahead of myself, which one should never do in the fall of the year, the season of all seasons which we hope lingers well into November.

If you are tired of bad news all the time keep reading:

The Northern Michigan Relief Sale

This summer my friend, Paul Gardner, the director at Camp Barakel, attended the Northern Michigan Relief Sale at the Oscoda County Fairgrounds.

I attended the sale with a couple of my grandsons and was rewarded with warm, fresh, homemade cinnamon donuts and a first-edition hardcover of a Vance Havner title I didn’t have.

My friend, Paul attended the charity auction. He bid on a chair made of old camp skis. He won the bidding for the chair. He then bid on a coat rack made of additional parts from the skis but he was outbid by a group of young Amish men. After the auction was over he went to collect his chair and the young Amish men came over, claimed their coat rack, and then smiled and handed it to him.

“We want you to have it. It belongs with your chair.” They chuckled among themselves and walked away to tend to a booth where they were selling things.

My friend Paul, warmed by the gesture, bought a cold bottle of Pepsi for each of the young men and thanked them for their gift.

If you look for bad news you will find it everywhere, but all the news in the world is not bad news, especially if you live with an open heart.


Bittersweet Farm
September 16, 2019

Thoughts on an Early Autumn Evening

Filed Under: Current Thoughts, Pondering His Creation

In the morning (as I write this) Lois and I will leave for Holmes County, Ohio to celebrate forty years of marriage. Sunday night we drove down to Camp Selah to give testimony four decade of the goodness faithfulness of God to us. Tonight I’m gathering my thoughts out on the east-facing porch enjoying the quietness, the crickets, and a soft breeze in the golden hour and thinking about you all, Bethel, my parish.

Cars pass tonight with their widows open to the country air. Across the road the the Maples are already showing some color inter uppermost branches. The trees that line the near north field blushing with a hint of autumn color. The ditches and unmowed meadows are yellow with goldenrod. The big Elms shed bright yellows leaves a few and a time when the breeze moves the branches. The Elms will not lose all their leaves until the first few days of November, but soon and very soon they will be bare as will the Maples and Oaks that surround our beloved Bittersweet Farm.

Autumn is upon us. Like life, it will come and go too quickly. The leaves we so longed for in the spring will blow down and gray clouds will blow in on cold air followed by winter snows. Let’s just say it the way it is.

There will be cool, golden October afternoons of college football. There may be hayrides and trips to the pumpkin patch and there will be maidens laughing and talking with pumpkin-spice drinks. Maybe there will be a bit of warm Indian summer, but the cold and the snow are sure as death to come. We will need to top-off the anti-freeze, check the furnace, get the mower deck off the tractor and the snow blade on and ready ourselves for winter.

The seasons turn. The years come and go. Today I talked with a lady from Kentucky who will have a memorial gathering for her son on Saturday. He was only fifty-five.

“He told his son he would not live long and he didn’t. Somehow he knew,” she said with great sadness in her voice.

Life is uncertain but it is certain that it will end one day and none of us knows that day, so it’s good that the seasons turn and remind us that the things we love and cherish will one day die. And one day we will die unless the Lord returns first. And while we can we warn and we witness, serve and we love, and we live with all our might and all our spirit until the last light of every day falls beyond the trees and fades into night.

Wise people are not unprepared for these things. Wise people take note of the turning seasons and they take care of what needs to be done.

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