Wednesday, July 2, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Swish
Come, children, hear me;
I will teach you the fear of the LORD.
We drove up and down the nearly overgrown gravel lanes of Mt. Pulaski Cemetery. Aunt Vera told us where to find the graves. Find A Grave showed us pictures of the graves. Mom and Dad, Dad’s mom and dad, and Dad’s dad’s mom and dad are buried in here somewhere.
At last we spied a SANDEL in large letters etched on a red granite gravestones, just like the picture. This first one belonged to my Grandma Bill and Grandma Dora, born in the nineteenth century and gone in the twentieth. We put flowers on their grave – red, white and yellow stuck deep into a crack in the ground just in front of the stone. I think I was walking on their graves.
The picture for Mom and Dad’s grave showed a branched tree near a branched lan, which turned out to be in a newer part of the cemetery. The tree’s branches called us home.
We turned into the lane and, among all the other names I recognized there was a surprise – Lee Hamm, our family doctor whose office was across from the hospital. He reassured us that my neck was not broken when I dove off a friend’s back at Lincoln Lakes. He told me I didn’t need rabies shots when a dog bit me at a birthday party at Gloria Sprague’s house. He tried to sew Dad’s finger back on his damaged bloody hand after the feed grinder ground him. Mary Kay, John and I all remember his wax paper envelopes full of play money, stick of gum, a nickel and two pennies. He was short, business-like, and friendly. His smile surprised me every time.
The cemetery grass had been mown but nasty foot-high lamb’s tongue weeds were everywhere. Its tiny sticky seeds covered my black compression socks. At Dollar Tree Margaret found a Deere-green tractor-on-a-stick, and that went in the ground first, then surrounded by purple, white, red and yellow flowers. They really looked beautiful.
Black clouds slowly headed toward us through the once-blue sky, and the air became very still. We expected a downpour, but it held off. On the way from the cemetery to Mt. Pulaski High School it was easy to remember funerals and be happy that we made this effort to find the graves and do our decorations.. Uncle Don and Aunt Vera made this trip on Decoration Day each year for forty years. I’m glad we could take a turn, before our own stone finds its spot.
The high school parking lot was packed for twelve middle school girls’ basketball summer league games that night. Aly’s Springfield Christian School (SCS) Wildcats played two games. They won each game by 30 points.
Aly, who practices every day, made several three point shots. In the second game she swished 3 three pointers in the first two minutes. I looked down for a second and Chris said, “There’s another one.” A few minutes later after she was fouled, she made all three free throws. When the score was 20-2, Aly had scored eighteen of her team’s points, along with two assists and several rebounds. She’s quiet, and she’s deadly.
And her team is so much fun to watch.
We tried to have dinner during the two hours between games, but the bar and grill couldn’t keep up with the basketball crowd. After waiting 90 minutes we had to take the food away and eat it at the gym. But fried pumpkin blossoms were on the menu, something Margaret and I discovered twenty years ago at an Italian farmer’s market in Vernazza. After our Saturday hike along the Mediterranean Sea we bought fresh pasta, Margaret fried the blossoms, and we had a memory forever, one which caught up with us in the overflowing Mt. Pulaski restaurant before Aly’s second game.
Didn’t matter where we ate them now, we were in heaven.
Those who seek the LORD want for no good thing.
(Genesis 21, Psalm 34, James 1, Matthew 8)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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