Fence Mending

“No man is an island.”  “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Have you ever thought of yourself as a wall-builder?  Recently I was privileged to watch a DVD by Ray Van der Laan produced by Focus on the Family.  It was the final segment of a series focused on how God was training His people, Israel, to be His people.  The setting was a gan (garden) on a hillside in Israel. 

Visualize a respectable-sized hill (see below) terraced with garden areas lined with rock walls.  The outside wall of your garden plot is no more than a foot high but the wall hugging the hillside is possibly 10 feet high.  The rocks used to build the wall are close fitting and obviously took some thought and effort to build.  The stones in these walls very likely go back to the time of Joshua in the Old Testament which is pretty awesome to think about in itself.  

You want to make the soil in your gan as rich as possible because you only have a very small area in which to raise your olive trees or grapevines.  The vital thing about these terrace walls is the importance of keeping them strong.  For instance, what if you come to tend your grapes one morning and discover that 2-3 rocks have come loose from the wall on your section of hill side and come to rest at the base of an olive tree?

You would be wise to fit the rocks back into their original spots, pounding them in firmly.  If the rocks are left dislodged, when the rains come, the water will pour down that break in the wall and eventually the precious topsoil of your neighbor’s gan will come flooding down the hillside as further rocks dislodge.  Not only that, the eroding process could well cause a breach in your outer wall, washing away your precious topsoil.  This could continue and eventually wipe out a community’s way of earning a living.

That long explanation is a description of how God was teaching “community” to His people, Israel. A community should work together so that not only your household  is safeguarded, but also that of your neighbor and your neighbor’s neighbor.  There is more analogy to be had concerning the rich topsoil needed to grow healthy plants, but I won’t I won’t pontificate on that.  The main point is that every responsible member of any sort of community needs to be a wall builder-mender.  Otherwise, the consequences of sticking our heads in the sound could well be fatal. 

Family Chronicling

The role of Family Chronicler seems to be a genetic thing.  I really had not thought much about that until this past week when I was taking pictures of pictures (don’t have a working scanner) for another family member.

The following statement will only make sense to those of you out there who are also Family Chroniclers, but I have at least 25 scrapbooks/picture album spanning 40 years of family life.  Those collections have to do with only the Dean Diehl family.  There are also collections of memorabilia relating to my mother’s family with information going back in time to her great-grandfather who fought in the Civil War as a teenager and as an adult, was an itinerant Free Methodist circuit riding preacher.

The collection of pictures and information on my Dad’s side of the family don’t go back as far but do include an account of his mother’s maternal uncle and cousin being gunned down over a dispute regarding the yield of a corn field.  An especially sad outcome to that story was that the fight left behind a single mother with several children still to raise.

Back to the Family Chronicling—my mother filled that role because she had a camera with her everywhere she went.  I think she had some sort of box camera by the time she was 10 years old.  Growing up, I thought of Mon’s picture taking as a great nuisance.  Every family get-together, she insisted that everyone line up for her pictures.  She didn’t have much of a concept of natural action shots but now, many years later, I am grateful for at least some of those many pictures.

In the present century the gene pool seems to have selected our son, Brian.  He is definitely into taking action shots plus taking the funniest faces he can get people to make.  If I can find one, plus figure out how to insert it, I will do so.  That, of course, will mean that my Learning Curve will once again climb, so wish me luck!

 Woo-hoo, I did it!  However, these are obviously not funny faces.  I guess you could call them funny feet.  And with that, I think I should sign off.

Our mini-adventure

Our mini-adventure started out a few minutes later than planned—which may have led to the whole problem.  We started our journey to Eureka with no problems.  Our purpose was to sit at the Gideon booth at the Eureka County Fair and give out New Testaments to anyone interested, but specifically for 5^th graders through 12 graders.

We drove the first 23 miles or so, traversing Carlin and were stopped at the southbound Union Pacific tracks—many reddish-brown boxcars were sitting there without an engine in sight.  Two vehicles were in front of us staring at the crossing barricade and while we waited 30 minutes or more, at least 10 others were queued behind us.

Dean knew how to get to the Palisade Canyon road which would enable us to travel over the tracks if this batch of cars ever got moving.  We did a u-turn and headed back toward I-80.  After taking the exit for the ghost town of Palisade, we travelled along a well-maintained gravel road.  Soon Dean was saying, “I don’t recognize any of this country.”  I didn’t either, which of course, meant nothing.  We finally stopped and Dean got out his Nevada Gazetteer.  Sure enough, we were on a road maintained by the railroad; not the way to get to Palisade and ultimately, the highway to Eureka.

We executed u-turn #2 and headed back toward a turn-off to a road with a much-less well maintained surface.  It didn’t say it led to Palisade but Dean felt sure it did.  Sorry I did not take any pictures of the sheer cliff sides, but I didn’t expect a rather mundane trip to wander off the beaten path this way.

Fortunately, this bumpy, little-travelled road was the right one and within 30 minutes we were back on the highway to Eureka, traveling at a good rate—until the first road repair sign stopped us.  By this time, I did not dare to check the time; we would get to Eureka when we would get there.

As we followed the “lead car” we came upon the actual work in process and noticed something new to us.  There was a machine “chewing up” the old road surface, then the result was spewed out in a sort of windrow, then another machine spread it out and another, rolled it out, packing the material down.  The recycling process was impressive. (When we returned in the late afternoon, that section was finished and had been oiled.  Voila!  A brand new road surface, ready for the wintry extremes it will see in a few months.)  We had one more road work slowdown and then we were back to regular speed.

The outcome of our 235 mile trip was being able to give out a few New Testaments, visiting with fairgoers and other vendors and being grateful for a safe trip during the miles traveled.

Beginnings

My first blog post slightly resembles learning to read.  When I was five years old or thereabouts, I remember looking at the Folgers coffee can sitting on a kitchen cabinet and recognizing the letters.  Reading C-O-F-F-E-E out loud to my mother , I stated, “That spells coffee .”  Actually, the only reason I knew that those letters spelled coffee was that I had seen my mother spoon it into the percolator (yes, I know I’m old) and that the brown liquid that resulted from the process was what my folks called coffee.

I’m not really sure how that experience correlates to me and the various types of social media, except that it all has to start somewhere.  In my case:  learning to read many years ago and now in the present, posting on Facebook and setting up a blog are both learning experiences

Hopefully, I will enjoy writing blog posts and my readers will enjoy reading them as much as the very act of reading and all that encompasses has brought me joy over the years.

Please feel free to comment at any time and I will reply (as my Learning Curve increasesJ quickly.