Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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40 Days Till Easter

   Springtime is high season for me. This is when everything greens up and things start to bloom. This is when the house is cleanest and my mind freshest. My birthday rolls around. And Easter approaches. I love Easter even more than Christmas, for a million reasons. Do you?
   Easter is when promises are kept. Easter is the fulfillment of hope and the answer to hard wrought prayers. It is a wonderful time for healing and forgiveness. It is the time of every single year of life that we can celebrate the light that follows darkness. Without fail, and independent of anything we do, springtime warms us up and gets our hearts thumping again. And Easter is the culmination of all the waiting, all the spiritual dormancy, all the deadness.
   This year I want to be ready. In yet another bizarre way, God is whispering to my heart a hidden meaning behind our childlessness… that I should be redeeming my time more wisely, not just filling it up. Not just comforting myself or wishing the weeks away. The hours that might otherwise be spent on coloring eggs and shopping for frothy Easter dresses can be spent studying the Word and preparing my heart for miracles.
“God is eagerly waiting for the chance 
to answer your prayers and fulfill your dreams, 
just as He always has. 
But He can’t do it if you don’t pray, 
and He can’t do it if you don’t dream. 
In short, He can’t do it if you don’t believe.”
~ Jeffrey R. Holland 

   I am not sure I agree with Mr. Holland’s word choice here, saying that there’s anything God can’t do, but I certainly agree and believe that the Lord wants a relationship with each of us, privately and permanently and apart from worldly tethers, and so we need to seek Him. That’s our part. Praying, dreaming, hoping, trusting, believing in His goodness above all else, far beyond pain. And in doing so we are assured that He will be there with strong, capable, powerful, merciful, loving open arms.
   And by the way, YES. God has already answered so many big, incredible prayers for us! Why would I ever stop believing in Him? So many dreams are already fulfilled, I get chills to reflect on where we are in life, on how much love already surrounds us. These yet unanswered longings, these fears which remain, are only scabbed over by my own limitations. He has the power to heal all of it, to work miracles I cannot even imagine! Same goes for you and your heart, whatever it is that you’re hoping for or against, He already knows.
   As late winter stretches and yawns herself into the dawn of another springtime, the life giving tremors of Easter are very real to me. Regret over wasted time and spiritual deadness is finally evaporating under the warmth of hope. The busy-keeping activity of recent months, trying to work away pain and over and over again struggling to make sense of things in my own weak ways, is being replaced with a craving for spiritual activity, seeking what He wants me to seek and discovering His power again.
“Let the past sleep, but let it sleep 
on the bosom of Christ, and go out into 
the irresistible future with Him.”
~Oswald Chambers from My Utmost for His Highest
   Lest we get too awfully serious this morning, below is a photo of Tomato the rooster. You know, spring chickens and all. He was only a few weeks old when this photo was taken, and my nephew Zane (well, Zane is *sort of* my nephew, and I love him so much) named him not knowing this feathery creature’s gender. I think it’s a perfect name. You may notice that Tomato got a bright red talon polishing that day, too, which may or may not have affected his personality in the long run. That was two years ago.   
   Nowadays Tomato runs free and wild when the sun is out. His rooster comb is a little wonky, which helps me tell him apart from the others. This is good because his full grown talons have lost their red glamour and we have several white and black roosters. Tomato can be a trouble maker, but we think he’s cool.
   However you observe Ash Wednesday, whatever your rituals are for preparing for Easter, springtime, or just another fresh new day of being alive, I wish you the very best. I wish you a long, wide view of the world, a closeness to Love,  and renewed hope for the biggest miracles you crave! Paint your talons red if it thrills you, and be happy. You are loved, and big things are waiting.
“I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears.”
~Psalm 34:4
xoxoxo
   

Karma Has a Mic and it’s Switched On

   This morning we had a pared down Christmas service at church. Lots of family circumstances are different this year, and not just in our little corner of the world. Seems like every household is enduring something difficult that, collectively, has changed the landscape of our church. Without quite enough people to put on our traditional Nativity production, we gathered today for preaching, cookies and juice, and singing. Lots and lots of singing.
   We sang so many songs.

   At the top o’ the mornin’ my husband was called up to the pulpit to sing some traditional tear-jerkers with his Uncle David, a fellow preacher. This duo was intended to, well, elicit those much anticipated holiday blubberings.  You know, hearing the old songs in reverent, baritone voices,  feeling those decades-old holiday memories swirl around us, and getting all caught up in the salt water magic. Help us purge the pain by candlelight.

   But guess who was not ready to cry Christmas tears? Who was, instead, ready to break it down Elvis style?

   My Handsome. 

   He sauntered up to the microphone and openly referred to his mother, our organist and Pastor’s wife, as “Little Lady.” He shimmied his voice and curled his upper lip at every opportunity. He cheerfully complained about every key in which she played said organ, completely interrupting the flow of the service. But somehow this festive anarchy drummed up smiles instead of sneers. Tendrils of laughter began to smoke up from the congregation, everyone relaxed, and pretty soon my guy was in full on Christmas Elvis mode.
   For the record, lots of people were laughing. 
Let’s establish that early on.

   But an old friend, Beatrice, who was seated with her fiancee behind me was laughing a lot. Way more than me, just so you know, although I was laughing too.

   Eventually we were kind of laughing with inappropriate volume and energy for a church service. A Christmas church service. A Christmas church service that was supposed to be sad, or at least somber. It was wrong, but I could not stop.

   And you know how a good belly laugh takes on a life of its own? Well, that definitely happened, and on top of that, Handsome’s inner comic totally fed off of our unbridled goofiness. My friend Beatrice and I may or may not have crossed the line from “entertained” to just plain “rude,” but let’s not judge.

   The point is that about halfway through the singing, the Little Lady called Beatrice and me up to the microphone.

   To sing.

   Neither of us is a singer by nature, so we froze like startled fainting goats. We even let out those pitiful little terrified moans before our stiff little goat legs sprang up into the air.

   Unwilling to suffer the consequences of not only interrupting service but then rebelling against the sense of singing teamwork, Beatrice and I righted our goat selves from shock and tiptoed reluctantly to the pulpit. 

   Handsome, the guilty instigator but crowd-approved victim of heckling, was way too happy to thrust microphones into our mortified faces. And he was still Elvissing! S-E-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y.


   My giggling came to a screeching halt and my face was hot like lava. Hot like Elvis. Hot like not heaven. We proceeded to fake like we were singing until we realized nobody else was singing with us, just watching. We were busted lip syncing to nothing, relying on the guys to smooth out our nonexistent tones. 


   Let me just say that if I am wrong here 
and Beatrice was in fact singing, 
she was as quiet as a butterfly. 
A scared, mute, sleeping butterfly.

   We were on the hook for way more than one song and the microphones were not leaving, so verse by verse I tried to muster up a Christmas groove. I probably sounded like a donkey going through prepubescent voice changes, but I pressed out every word. Beatrice gradually sang too but physically retreated inch by inch away from the mic.

   Her backwards scooting became so pronounced that eventually Uncle David exclaimed on it loud and clear, “If you push us back anymore we’ll be off the platform!” Laughter exploded at this point, and that might have been the final song. Our punishment was evidently fulfilled.

   I am not sure if there is a clear lesson to be learned here, but the anatomy of karma cannot be overlooked. I will say that the mood was lightened and brightened far past our gloomy expectations for today.

   And for me it was worth it.

Wishing you some MERRY for your Christmas…
And cheers to living with no regrets.
xoxoxo

Fridays are for Cooking

   I have visited two wonderful grocery stores in two days and have finished all of my truly important household chores for the week. I have scoured our calendar and my recipe collections for fabulous ideas and excuses to enjoy them. And tomorrow I have exactly ZERO reasons to leave the farm. To paint the picture a little better, let me say that I have a pantry and refrigerator packed with delicious ingredients and a Friday, in a clean house, all to myself.
   It’s almost like Christmas.
   Wait…
   Okay. So, there are at last count nine incredibly tasty dishes on the Lazy W horizon this weekend. 
   Tomorrow Handsome is taking the ole stand-by apple tart to an office food day. The fine ladies up there organize nearly a month of festivity every December, including Dirty Santa games and “Days of Christmas” food days. YUM and FUN. Everyone up there works so hard; no one deserves an extended party more!
  The apple tart is from Edie’s Life in Grace blog, which is a beautiful place to land for a thousand reasons.  The only thing I do differently is skip the glaze. We like it on the crispier side of life, and the glaze makes it less crisp. I can make this in my sleep now, Handsome requests it so often. 5 apples, 4 cups flour, 3 sticks butter, 2 cups sugar, spices. Bam.
   Then for a Christmas party we’re attending Saturday night I’ll make our fave chocolate fudge cake and a big batch of roasted olive dip. Maybe I’ll try to nail down that olive dip recipe and a few photos in case anyone’s interested. It is purely addictive. Salty, creamy, tangy, garlic-ish, olive-ish, and mouthwatering whether warm or cold. Addictive.
   For dinner Friday night I’m trying a toned-down Lazy W version of Giada’s minestrone soup. Naturally this calls for crusty bread and green salad. Please, if we are truly friends, do NOT warn my husband of this menu plan. Let him be surprised. I promise to tone it down. Way, way down. And I promise to have a back up plan like Fettuccine Alfredo. I have a feeling if he balks at the soup, it will be divine enough for me to finish all by myself. I’m a good sport like that.
 Also a batch each of these browned butter cookies and some chocolate-chip walnut biscotti. It seems we are a week away from Christmas and I have lots of shopping still to do, so having cookie dough ready in the freezer will be nice.
   Three quickly deteriorating bananas tell me we’ll also have banana bread in the oven tomorrow. And a special young man at church keeps reminding me to bring peanut butter cookies. 

 
   My Grandpa Stubbs once told me over the phone how to make the world’s easiest and most delicious peanut butter cookies! You can do this in a snap anytime, and I have the sneaking suspicion that being flour free will tickle some fancies. Here ya go:

Mix together with a wooden spoon 
1 cup of PB, 1 cup of sugar, and 1 egg. 
Scoop up the shiny, grainy dough by about a tablespoon at a time
 and roll each ball in a bowl of sugar. 
Dip a fork in the sugar and criss-cross each ball of dough. 
Bake for about 20 minutes at around 350 degrees. 
Cool on pan for a minute
then on a wire rack completely.
Dunk in milk.
   I will not even need Scentsy tomorrow, you guys. It’s gonna smell so good in here. I plan to finish the outdoor chores super early, take a shower, and put on some good music. By lunchtime this place should be aromaticizing. Lilting with fragrance and warmth. 
   If and when you do need Scentsy, though, my gorgeous and dry-witted cousin Jen just started peddling the heavenly stuff! You can order online here and I think if you order by December 19th you can count on Christmas delivery!

   Is it healthy to be this excited about a cooking day? If I finish when I expect to, there will just enough Friday left for me to finish a really special sewing project for an old friend. Then the frivolous, calorie-laden weekend will begin!
Three Cheers for P-90x!
xoxoxo

 

Less Pomp than Circumstance

   Our Charlie Brown Christmas tree is now in full regalia, and my heart is overflowing.

   Three days ago I mined through a heap of decorations while smarty pants blogger M Half, in town for a birthday surprise for a mutual friend and staying at the farm, sat in my living room doing professional things on her laptop and reading aloud to me wonderful, witty blog posts and articles. I listened and chattered out my thoughts, she read to me her own carefully crafted responses, and we laughed. I continued decorating Charlie, drank copious amounts of perfect coffee, and sometimes made her yummy things to eat. Together we resisted the melodious urgings of Bobby Pacino, our resident blue and gold macaw. This bird is very seductive. And distracting.

   M and I might have solved a few social crises. At least betwixt us two. We mostly luxuriated in the mellowness of the day. We definitely shared an appreciation for the hopefully mythical flavor of hotdog-water herbal tea. Periphery, did you make that up? 

If you have never had an intelligent friend sit captive in your home 
and read to you mind-nourishing bits and baubles,
please find a way to make it happen. 
It helps if she has a pleasant voice and similar gastric appetite
and can follow your errant trains of thought nimbly. 
You can borrow M Half now and then,
so long as her Hubs agrees.

   As mentioned last week, Handsome and I decided to take a milder path with Christmas decor this winter, starting with our tree. What we did not predict is the friendly debate that would be sparked by the culling of a live tree from our forest. If you missed it, check out the comments on this blog, following my December 6th post and then chime in! I’d love to hear what more people think!

   This is one of the best byproducts of blogging. I am so thankful to have a reader like Nadya who will share her feelings like that, just as I am grateful to have a husband and girlfriend who are both willing to defend me, although I never for one millisecond felt offended. Nadya raised excellent questions which need to be asked and regularly. Namaste. By the way, I’d sure like to learn about Christmas traditions in South Africa! 

   Onward.
   Our chosen tannenbaum, sparse in branches and very slender at his trunk, offered up lots of space for fillers when first we propped him up in the living room. But his branches are on the weak side of strong, so while I craved to wire up pruned boxwood, Bradford pear, and dried oak tree branches, that was simply not possible, The poor little guy would have toppled.

   So I collected from around the house as many dried flowers and ancient rose bouquets as I could find. I also added broken up bits of tumbleweed, dried hydrangeas, crispy golden gladiolus leaves, and feathers from our own birds. You know, lightweight pretty stuff. Things that evoke romance and warmth and life. Things that glow with my favorite colors, too. Plus maybe seventeen store-bought ornaments in only three colors.

   In lieu of an angel or star for the tree topper, this year we’re enjoying something we find equally beautiful and equally meaningful. I twined up a bunch of tumbleweed from western Oklahoma (where the Lazy W ranch brand was originally registered by Handsome’s great-grandfather) dried sage (a wild herb used by Native Americans in purification ceremonies) and tail feathers from our beloved, recently deceased Tom turkey, Sir Clark Grievous.

   So our Christmas tree is symbolically crowned with family and state heritage, delicate natural beauty, a yearning for purity, reverence for other cultures, and  affectionate nostalgia. Clark’s feathers in particular represent all the precious people we continue to love and miss desperately. More importantly, though, his feathers prove that our home is still made beautiful by love even though some of the people we love are not here right now. 
   I am not trying to make you sad. 
We are actually less sad than I expected to be this month. 
We have very strong faith and hope 
that things are as they should be for now 
and that the future is still brimming with miracles.

   Of the eight boxes of tree, mantle, and house decorations I excavated from the attic after Thanksgiving, I have used less than two. The rest is now either back in the attic or waiting at the top of the stairs.

   The restraint feels amazing.

   We are still surrounded in lights and colors and holiday mood; we’re just not drowning in it. Instead, we have room to breathe and love. We have room for new memories. And maybe for a few of those longed for miracles.

Hoping your tree is meaningful to you
and that you fill your home with your own beauty.
Merry Christmassing
xoxoxo

Christmas Parade in Cowtown

   Nestled just off the heart of OKC is a part of town called “Historic Stockyards City” or, as lots of locals call it, “Cowtown.” For more than a century, ranchers and cattlemen from around our beautiful United States have been delivering their delicious cargo here for distribution to hungry, carnivorous people like me.  
   Oklahoma is, after all, at the crossroads of America. We are where four major interstate highways intersect. And we have a lot of cows. And we are the Horse Show Capitol of the World. And I love parades and anything we can do to reinforce the atmosphere of Christmas frivolity without spending a thousand hundred million dollars. I also really like excuses to cuddle with Handsome in the cold. All of that is the background for today’s story. 
   Okay.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for our state’s blue flag.
Learning about the symbols was my favorite part of fourth grade.

   Every December the good people there in Cowtown erect a tall, festive Christmas tree (you can see it in the background in the photo below) and host a really fun, really different sort of parade to kick off the season. Handsome and I have grown attached to this little local tradition, and that is exactly how we spent this beautiful wintry Saturday morning.
   The air was cold enough to keep our toes numb and our cheeks red, but the sun was so bright and the sky so clear that we felt just perfectly comfy. We cuddled together at the front of an elbow in the parade route and soaked up the Christmastime mood. And let me tell you, there was plenty to go around.
   Longhorns also cuddled as they tiptoed through the bricked streets, unrestrained and unconcerned. These gentle behemoths seemed unnaturally calm in the shadow of a well known steakhouse, Cattlemen’s. 
      A little steam-punk style for Christmas, anyone? This costumed cyclist looped around to wish me a Merry Christmas!
   This sweet creature posed for a moment so we could snap a photo of her equine reindeer antlers. It took no more than twenty seconds for me to start formulating horse decorations for back at the Lazy W. The chicken coop is being entered in a Christmas decorating contest, of course, so why not let the big animals join the fun?
   I almost wet my pants laughing when a baker’s dozen of llamas, festooned to the hilt in Christmas finery, came strutting past. Seriously? They were all wearing hats and carrying teddy bear passengers. Because that’s how llamas roll. I cannot get enough of their skinny little legs and arrogant faces. Awesome. Merry Christmas, Sirs.
   The silly hearted llamas were followed by a very serious pair of saddled up longhorn steer. I have been daydreaming about saddling up our lone buffalo for a while, and after talking it over with Chunk, he is mostly okay with it. 
   This photo above gives me a pretty good mental image. Theoretically. In my imagination. But probably not. Not because I couldn’t do it; I just choose not to.
   The General Lee made a surprise appearance, garnering more whooping and hollering than even the Jolly Old Elf himself. If you happened to see my car show post from summertime, this is the same car. Gyoog-gyoog-gyoog!
   Speaking of General Lee, we saw a small Union group too. During the Civil War, of course, Oklahoma was still Indian Territory. Handsome thinks we would have sided with the Confederacy. I am less convinced, given the fierce cultural conflicts with Native Americans at the time. 
   This gentlewoman and her horse were dressed so elegantly, so festively, in their red and silver and holly garland and feathers… that I felt ridiculously under dressed in the same clothes I wore to a hockey game last night!
These blue eyes caught our breathless attention from a far distance.
   Of the many spirited and creative parade entries this year, my onlooker’s heart goes out to this little girl. She was dressed in cowgirl pink from head to toe. She waved and smiled at every single person watching. She yelled “Merry Christmas” to me. And she kept tight, gentle control of her horse the entire time. Merry Christmas, sweet nameless girl.
   The very last piece of the parade, of course, was Cowboy Santa. This is me waving frantically to get his attention. 
   Never. Even. Looked. At. Me. In fact, his wagon seemed to speed up a bit as they wheeled around the bed where we stood watching.
   Chances are that wasn’t the real Santa, anyway. But it did hurt my feelings a little.
   As the parade wrapped up, we joined the happy crowds walking around the shops in Cowtown and Handsome bought me early Christmas gifts, because that’s how he rolls. We talked excitedly about entering next year’s parade ourselves, and I relished the feeling of Christmas coming to a rolling boil in my bones.
However you celebrate, 
Whatever your local traditions,
Wishing everyone a mid-month dose of easy fun!
Merry Christmastime!
xoxoxo