Chris Loehmer Kincaid's Blog, page 148

How do you choose your king?

“One day the trees decided to choose a king to rule over them. The trees said to the olive tree, ‘You be king over us.’
“But the olive tree said, ‘My oil is used to honor gods and humans. Should I stop making my oil just to go and sway over the other trees?’ (Not an Olive Tree)
“Then the trees said to the fig tree, ‘Come and be our king.’
“But the fig tree answered, ‘Should I stop making my good, sweet fruit just to go and sway over the other trees?’ 
(Not a Fig Tree)

“Then the trees said to the vine, ‘Come and be our king.’
“But the vine answered, ‘My wine makes men and kings happy. Should I stop making my wine just to go and sway over the trees?’ (Yeah, I found a Vineyard)
“Finally, all the trees said to the thornbush, ‘Come and be our king.’
“But the thornbush said to the trees, ‘If you really want to make me king over you, come and find shelter in my shade. But if you don’t want to do this, let fire come out of the thornbush. Let the fire burn even the cedar trees of Lebanon.’ Judges 9:8-15 Easy-to-Read Version
(A Thorn Bush in Africa)
What do these verses mean to you? I have my own thoughts, which I feel best to keep to myself. All I will say is that when I ran across these Bible passages a while back I was once again blown away that God came up with this stuff thousands of years ago and yet we seem to be living this out today.
Lord, help us to wisely choose who will allow to rule over us. Let us always remember that you are the ultimate ruler and King. Amen.

Photo Challenge - Portraits

This month's photo challenge was "portraits". I reached way back in the archives for these first pictures. They are ones I took of my daughter for her senior portrait in the fall of 2007. I took them with my Yaschica 35 mm SLR camera and had the film downloaded onto CD right away so that I could tweek the photos on the computer. I like my simple, light-weight digital camera, but sometimes I still miss my bulky ancient 35 mm.
This would be the most recent family portrait. I took this with my Nikon Coolpix of the grandkids with my mother-in-law for her 80th birthday this May.

I had this sudden realization about family portraits just this week. Whenever my kids come over I always want to get a nice picture of them (they have been over several times since this portrait was taken), and they always give me a hard time so I don't get many decent shots. It just dawned on me why this is such a big deal to me. Coz there just aren't that many pictures of me when I was growing up. My dad had his 8mm movie camera and those grainy films are the majority of the photographic record of my childhood.

My advise: take as many pictures of the family as you can, restore as many of the old pictures as you can, and save them ALL.
My mom and my sister, Pat, at my first wedding in 1985. Aren't they both beautiful? My sister is gone now and my poor 87-year-old mom is a fraction of this size. 

The Streets of Hatchet Creek - Day 5

Finally I have my map together. The streets I walked tonight are highlighted in yellow. The ones I have already done are in green.

Since it was my writers group again tonight, I started out at the library, headed south on Railway Street, then meandered my way back to Dairy Queen. Unfortunately DQ was swamped because every Wednesday night during the summer they have “Music on the River”, which is right across the street from DQ. Even though I don’t like crowds I really need to go to one of these outdoor concerts in the Park sometime.

If I continue my zig-zagging path, I will be re-walking a lot of streets. Oh, well.  The parking lot on the back side of the Tomahawk Public Library.
 The back side of a building which has been sitting empty for years. A while back they had a haunted house in here. Way back it was a boat factory, and I think before that it was a casket factory. I always thought it would make a great community center.
 Flowers on the end of Main Street. How pretty.
 This was the Old Train Depot back in the day. It was the Sears catalog store for a long time, and before that a gift shop, the name of which escapes me.
Currently the American Legion. Had been a day care center for a while, but back when I was a kid it was Dr. Henderson's office. Can't say that I have a lot of good memories from inside this building.
I guess it goes without saying who this guy was.  Proud home of the Tomahawk Volunteer Fire Department
 Another sign that states the obvious, or so one would think.Check out their website here. I never knew.
 I always liked this fence wall. Oh, look I can buy it, but I guess I gotta take the house too.
Wagon on the north side of the Barber's Closet. There really are a lot of people in this town who want to make it look like a special place to live. 

Where are you sitting?

I no longer enjoy being around big crowds of people. But I still needed to get out of the house this Fourth of July and go downtown around 10:30, before the crowds. How interesting that people put their chairs out the night before to save their spots for the big parade.  Yup, all the chairs are lined up on Main Street. More chairs on the corner.
More chairs in the street.
And if you don't have lawn chairs or camp chairs, dining room chairs from the seventies work too.
“When you are asked by someone to a wedding supper, do not take the important seat. Someone more important than you may have been asked to come also. The one who asked both of you to come may say to you, ‘The important seat is for this man.’ Then you will be ashamed as you take the last place. But when you are asked to come to the table, sit down on the last seat. Then the one who asked you may come and say to you, ‘Friend, go to a more important place.’ Then you will be shown respect in front of all who are at the table with you. Whoever makes himself look more important than he is will find out how little he is worth. Whoever does not try to honor himself will be made important.”  Luke 14:8-11 New Life Version
I’m not saying that it’s not ok to save the best spot on the street from which to watch the parade. I think it’s actually very cute that so many people save the same spot year after year. It becomes a family tradition.
The question is would you give up your spot for someone else? And what would it take? Would you give up your spot to a veteran? To a single mom with several toddlers? A homeless person?
Which reminds me of another Bible passage. Then He will say to them, ‘For sure, I tell you, because you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ Matthew 25:45 New Life Version

Walking the Streets of Hatchet Creek - Day 4

I had today off so I went for a serious walk for a change. I didn’t cover a lot of streets, just one long one – Theiler Drive. The hubby dropped me off at the Armory and I walked from there clear out to Kaphaem Road. I couldn’t stop there, I had to walk another two miles to get back home, which according to Google maps, is a total of five miles. Good thing I had Dino the wonder dog walking along with me.  Finally have my map scanned. The green lines are roads I have already walked and the purple lines are where I walked today, and more. I didn't feel like rescanning my plat book to show you the entire road I walked. But I probably walked to somewhere left of the flagpole and halfway to the roof in the picture below.   The National Guard Armory in town.   Another tank  Description of the tank, I only shared this picture because Dino got in it.   The Assisted Living Center they are building in town on Theiler Drive. I can't believe how far they have come with this.   Stop?   This is along Kaphaem Road. I remember once when I was in school - probably junior high - we went down here doing road clean-up. There was not a single house out here then.   School buses taking the summer off.  This bus is really taking off more than the summer.   Looks like the corn will be knee-high by the fourth of July.   Wildflowers in a field along the side of the road.  I drive by this sign all the time. It never fails to make me snicker. 

"Standing Stones"

I love to read good historical fiction because I love to travel to other places and other times, but in so many books, if the setting is accurate the story falls flat or vice versa. 
In “Standing Stones”, author Beth Camp got every just right. She actually takes the reader to that time and place, where you feel the cold and the ache that the characters feel, where you smell the things they smell and taste the things they taste. For the price of a book, I feel as if I got to not only travel around the world, but I did it in a time machine! Not only that, Beth tells the moving story of the McDonnell family with such skill that I feel as if I have met each and every one of them.

Caring as much about the main characters as I did meant this saga was sometimes painful to read. Yet I couldn't put it down. Set in Scotland during the mid-1800’s, Moira and her brothers are only one family affected by the new Lord, whose mission is pretty much to run off all of the locals so that he can raise sheep on the land where they have lived for hundreds of years. It's hard to imagine that other human beings could inflict such physical and emotional pain on others. I conjured up pictures of how hard life had been for my own father living in Germany in the early 1900s before his family moved to America.

And finally, believe it or not, 30 years ago I went to college with a girl of Scottish heritage who had siblings named Moira and Colin, just like two of the McDonnells. Beth certainly did her research! I cannot wait to read the next in her series, “Years of Stone”. 

Stomp out Cancer

Fifteen years ago on June 18, my sister and best friend passed away from cancer. People will say that someone lost their battle with cancer. But I don’t see it that way at all. My sister lost her hair, she lost a lot of weight, she lost living 50 more years on this earth with the rest of us, but she never lost the battle. Never. She never gave in to cancer and she never gave up to cancer. After waging war for seven years, it was just her time, and God called her home.
The following year, I started a team for the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life.  Team PALM (for Patricia Ann Loehmer Memorial). I know, ingenious of me wasn’t it? But I’ve blogged about that before.
Yesterday was the Relay for Life here in town. I haven’t been formally involved in the Relay for years, but the hubby and I have continued to faithfully show up and walk a few laps, buy a few raffle tickets, write a few luminaria bags. A month ago, the woman who heads up Kinship asked for volunteers for the Relay and I said I could put in a couple hours helping out wherever they needed me. Which turned into eleven hours, but that’s what happens when you don’t wear a watch.
I ended up in charge of the luminaries. If you are not familiar with what that is all about, for five dollars people will purchase a white bag on which they can write a message in memory of or in honor of a loved one. A candle is placed in each bag and at dark the candles are lit and all the participants walk around reading the bags and it is very touching. Or that’s how it’s supposed to work.
It had been hot and humid all day, but luckily a wind blowing kept things comfortable. There was a chance of thunder showers in the evening, so we kept watching the sky, wondering if and when it was safe to put out the luminaria bags.
We finally said the heck with it and set out all the bags on a path along the river. As darkness began to settle, we settled into lighting the candles in each bag. And the wind continued to blow. After a dozen or more bags caught on fire, we gave up, extinguishing the candles we had already lite.

Was it a failure? Let my pictures of the day answer for you.  Some times cancer seems like a long tunnel and you don't know if you will get to the other end.  But with help from family and friends, you can come out on the other side.   You may feel like your wings are damaged and you can't fly straight -  Or that life is out of balance -   Or that you don't know what to say -   Or you are just plain too tired to finish the job -   but a smile always helps.  You may also feel like it is all an uphill battle -   but sometimes the sun comes out and it all looks better from a different perspective.   You may feel like your heart is ripped in half -   Or that part of you is completely missing.  Then things can seem completely out of control and what do you do?   YOU STOMP OUT CANCER. 

Not really the streets of Hatchet Creek

I haven’t walked any streets this week, but I walked some roads nonetheless.
I’ve written before about how cemeteries fascinate me – the stones, the names, the stories I imagine in my mind. But with all my traveling, I have neglected the cemeteries in my own hometown, thinking that there was nothing fascinating among those stones. Wrong.
My hubby was the grounds’ keeper for Greenwood Cemetery for, I think, seven years. He shared lots of stories about those stones. And loved to say that it was the perfect job – he had a thousand people beneath him and none of them complained. (That’s a very good thing.)
There are a few old stones in main part of the cemetery.

But if you go straight back and into the woods, you find these.

 
The hubby says that it used to be the catholic cemetery but years ago they moved the catholic section to Calvary south of town. Families who couldn’t afford to move the graves of their loved ones, or if there was no family left, those graves got left behind.
In October 2003, Chris Erickson cleaned out this section as his Eagle Scout project. Too bad that it has mostly gone back to the woods.

I would love to hear from you if you know whether the story of this old part of Greenwood is true.

That's what friends are for.

Saturday, we held our first “friend-raiser” event for my daughter’s nonprofit organization, Tumaini Volunteers. Last month, I blogged about what I thought a “friend-raiser” is, so I won’t explain it again. I will tell you that getting together in the park with a group of family and friends is always a good time, whether you make new friends or not.   The weather started out pretty dreary, very overcast and cool, even though the forecast was for highs pushing 80. Suddenly at 3 pm, the sun came out and I bet the temperature went up by 15 degrees. 

 Our team members wanted to be sure that no one driving by could say that they missed where we were at.

 And to be doubly sure, we put up lots of signs.

 I put out my display of Kenyan arts and crafts. That blue suitcase under the table? My daughter has taken that to Africa three times now, but it feels as though I have put more miles on it dragging it from one craft show to the next.

 We even had some unexpected live music. 

These two little girls put a lot of effort into pounding this stake into the ground.


They got the job done, though, by working together. 

Coz, after all, that's what friends are for. 






(OK, they really were sisters, but you get it.)

Walking the Streets of Hatchet Creek - Day 2

I’m on a roll now. Or at least I hope so. This week I started my walk of Tomahawk at Memorial Park, heading back around Riverview Nursing Home and south towards the old Sacred Heart Hospital. I tripped coming into the parking lot, which put a damper on my travels, so I walked west on Lincoln Avenue, back to Fourth Street and then north to the Park. I promise that by next week I will post a map here. I just need to get it together (as in my head, and not necessarily the map).  This is the back side of Riverview Nursing Home. This would be where Dr. Henderson’s hospital was many years ago. That was where I was born, and I won’t tell you what year that was.

 The army surplus store called this its home for many years. A while back the surplus store moved into the old Tomahawk Drug Store building and this one became the Jester Studio. Last time I was by here, there was a lot more activity. It looked pretty desolate; I will have to investigate this further.

 I remember when Family Dollar was the IGA. Was it Jack’s IGA for a while? There used to be three grocery stores in town, this one, Hanke’s and Nelson’s. Mom always shopped at Hanke’s, but I will have to write about that another day.
   And back to Memorial Park.
 This is the M4A8 Sherman Medium Tank which has a special place in the heart of my family. And here is why.
 Some may think that this was some kind of vandalism (and I am so thankful that no one has vandalized this tank), but they are the initials of the kids who painted this tank back in 2003 as part of my son’s Eagle Scout project. His would be the initials “NC”. He sure had us sweating back in those days, as he got his Eagle requirements turned in just days before the cut off (his 18th birthday). He still leaves us wringing our hands in worry sometimes.