by Heather Plett | Jul 22, 2006 | Uncategorized
Last month, when we had our big birthday/graduation celebration, I introduced my friend Suzanne to my friends Michele, Yvonne, and Linda. Shortly after the introduction, I wandered away to greet some other new arrivals at the party. Well, by the time I returned to the conversation, the four women had discovered that they were kindred spirits (they recognized the signs when Suzanne produced a crystal wine glass so she could drink wine in style at an outdoor party) and a dinner party was well on it’s way to being arranged. Since I was the common link, I sent out an e-mail, arranged the date, and voila, it was done. About the easiest dinner party I’ve ever “organized”, considering I didn’t host it and all I brought was the bread!
Along the way, we picked up a couple of other like-minded women (Michele’s friend Glenda was visiting from Ontario, and Michele’s other friend Asha was another natural fit). My sister ccap would have been included too, but she’s traveling right now. Maybe next time.
Well, what can I tell you? It was a hoot! Suzanne has an amazing, character home that she’s put all kinds of beautiful touches into (she’s got style, that girl). It was the perfect setting for the night. We ate amazing food – barbecued chicken skewers, shrimp skewers, mediterranean rice, stuffed squash, mediterranean salad, lemon potatoes, bread, baklava – ummmmm… And the wine was flowing. Glenda brought some from the Niagara Peninsula, and Michele started raiding Suzanne’s wine cabinet when that ran out (apparently Michele has expensive tastes, because she picked the best).
What a night! Seven amazing women, with lots of interesting life experiences (and a little gossip) to share, great senses of humour, lots of wisdom and brilliance – it was a memorable night. Everyone needs friends like these!
by Heather Plett | Jul 20, 2006 | Uncategorized
Tear a page into a thousand pieces. Scatter those pieces on the floor. Some will land with the printing side up, and some will be upside down. You’ll see lots of words and pieces of words, but none of them will be connected, and so you will not make sense of any of it.
That’s how my mind feels today. Scattered.
That’s why today’s post is random.
– I remember when Marcel and I were dating (somewhere between 1990 and 1993). Operation Desert Storm happened, and he became a CNN addict. It was hard to tear him away. That was when I knew I’d fallen in love with a news junkie. Mostly, despite the fact that I sometimes grew weary of pictures of bombing and destruction, it made me happy, because I knew life would be interesting and he would teach me things. I also knew he’d have lots of interesting conversations with my father.
– The reason I bring up Marcel’s CNN obsession is that I’m suddenly finding myself glued to the internet trying to learn more about what’s going on in Lebanon. The political unrest in the Middle East has always baffled me, but this time I find myself wanting to understand what’s going on. Partly because I know a man trapped in the country of his birth and I know a woman waiting for him to return home.
– If/when I become a freelance writer/consultant, I PROMISE I will try to get things in by the deadline, I will get back to you when you call, I will not take off on an extended trip in the middle of an important project without letting you know that it will delay completion of said project, I will listen to you and try to capture the essence of what YOU want rather than what I want, and I will be friendly. Today, I’m frustrated with consultants and my work is stalled and way behind schedule because I am at their mercy.
– Is it just me, or do you find those websites that have sound that automatically starts when you open the site somewhat annoying? Mostly it’s musicians’ sites, and I guess I can understand why they do that, but I find it to be an assault to the senses. When I’m on the internet, it’s usually because I want to SEE things, not HEAR them. I want to be able to choose when I engage the other senses.
– My sister is gone for 2 weeks. I miss her. It feels like part of me is missing when she goes away.
– I’m almost finished a couple of annual tasks that I find to be pure drudgery. The annual report and annual performance reviews of my staff. The end is in site and I couldn’t be happier.
– It’s TV free month at our house. We do this every year – usually in the summer. No TV – not even for Mom and Dad (hence the internet news for the Lebanon conflict rather than CNN). Whenever we do, I find it quite peaceful and often wish we could extend it to TV free year. What’s nice is that the kids often forget after the month is over, and don’t miss it much, so it takes awhile before the TV gets turned on again.
– I am delighted with how much the kids are enjoying the cheap pool we bought. It’s only 2 feet deep and 10 feet across, but judging by the amount of excitement it has caused around our house, you’d think we’d put in an Olympic-sized pool. It makes me happy when my children still take pleasure in small things. Maybe they’re not overly spoiled after all.
– Last night I put together a 3-D puzzle with Nikki and Julie and played a My Little Pony game with Maddie. It was delicious and boring, all at the same time.
– The Franklin Graham Festival (an off-shoot of the Billy Graham Crusade) is coming to our city this fall. The week before the event, they’re getting as many Christians together as possible, cramming them onto a bunch of charter buses, and circling the perimeter of the city, praying all the way. Is it just me, or does that seem cheesy and irrelevant to you too? Not to mention that they’re wasting money and fossil fuels doing it. Maybe they could walk around downtown handing out blankets and sandwiches to homeless people while they pray.
Apparently, there are a lot more scattered pieces in my brain than I thought. I’ll leave the rest lying on the floor for now.
by Heather Plett | Jul 19, 2006 | Uncategorized
One of my colleagues is married to a Lebanese Canadian. His dad died a few weeks ago and he went back to Lebanon to bury him and be with his mom. Three hours after he landed in Beirut, the airport was bombed. Now, like all the other foreigners there, he has no way of getting out.
His mother’s house overlooks the Beirut airport. My colleague talks to him nearly every day, and when they’re on the phone, she can hear the bombing in the background. Always. He has helped his sister escape to her home in Jordan, and has helped other family members get out of the country. He does not want to leave, though, without his mother. The streets all around them are being bombed. They don’t know how much longer they’ll have a source of food and water.
If you’re the praying kind, feel free to add them to your prayers. All of our other worries seem so petty when you don’t know whether you’ll see your family again. It almost seems like too much to bear when you’re in the middle of grieving your father/husband’s death.
by Heather Plett | Jul 18, 2006 | Uncategorized
Dear Dad,
I wish I could talk to you, Dad. I wish I could hop in the car, drive to the farm, pull up a chair at your kitchen table, and talk to you, while you fried yourself an egg, or ate one of mom’s buns with jam. There are so many things I’d bring to the table, Dad – so many things I’d like to hear your opinion about. We’d talk about the kids, the farm, and the state of the world. I’d show you some of the stuff I’d gotten published lately, and you’d smile your sideways smile as you bent your head.
Here’s what’s been on my mind lately, Dad – it seems so unfair that, shortly after you died, I got a job that has so much to do with who you are and how you raised us. It’s all about farming and stewardship and generosity and helping those less fortunate than us. It’s also about diverse faith groups finding a way to get past their theological differences and work together to do what God calls us to do – end hunger.
You would have smiled at me, Dad, if I’d told you what I did last Friday. I went on a field trip – a LITERAL field trip. I visited some farm groups and stood out there in their fields, admiring their crops of wheat and oats and soybeans. I listened to them talk about this year’s growing season – they’ve had too much heat and not enough rain. I let them teach me how, if you rub the husk off a strand of wild oats and then spit in your hand, the wild oat seed will begin to twist in your hand. Imagine that – the child you thought would be least likely to end up standing in a field talking to a farmer, working in a job where farming is part of my daily conversations. I even read farm papers these days, to stay on top of the issues and find out how the crops are doing. Strange, isn’t it?
The farm groups we visited were community growing projects that get together to grow a crop which they donate to our organization so that we can ship food overseas to provide food to people who are hungry. Last year, Dad, I got to go to Kenya and Tanzania to see where some of that food gets shipped. You would have loved it, Dad. It’s an amazing place to visit!
It’s all great stuff, Dad, but there’s something that’s been troubling me a bit lately, and I wish I could bend your ear for awhile and hear what you have to say on the subject. You see, the fields we visited on Friday, well, there was something just too perfect about the crops on those fields. We stood there listening to the farmers tell us about the process they go through to prepare the land, fertilize it, spray it, plant it with perfect seed (some of which has been genetically modified) and then spray it again so that it all dies at a uniform rate and is all ready to harvest at the same time. Maybe it’s all okay, but there was just something so clinical to it – so methodical. It didn’t seem rhythmical, the way nature is meant to be. It didn’t seem entirely natural.
Do you think we’re doing the right thing, Dad, with all these chemicals and genetically modified organisms? Do you think we’re treating God’s green earth the way we’re supposed to be treating it? I think of how you struggled to grow a decent crop, how you spread manure on the fields, how you let the land rest now and then, how you taught us to be good stewards of all that God has entrusted us with, and I wonder what you’d think of all this big-business farming now.
I know there are no easy answers in all of this. People need food, and, the truth is, North Americans have gotten used to perfect, pretty food, so they don’t necessarily want the stuff that’s grown the way nature grows it, with imperfections and all. Beyond that, though, there’s also the fact that we need to share our food, and according to some of the experts, there’s no way to end hunger in the world without the use of chemicals and GMOs.
I guess it just doesn’t sit right with me all the time. God created a bountiful world. God doesn’t want people to be hungry. God wants his people to figure out how to bring balance to the world where all have enough to eat. So wouldn’t God have designed the world to be able to produce enough food without all the tinkering we’ve been doing? On the other hand, maybe God made us with scientific capacity to figure it out with science and not just nature. I just don’t know.
I know you don’t know the answers to these questions, Dad, but it would have made for an interesting conversation, wouldn’t it? If only I could sit at your table and talk with you again.
Heather
p.s. Thanks for leaving behind those pictures, Dad. We all really appreciated them. I’ve got a couple of them hanging on my wall. I guess it’s those pictures and what they represent that makes me think that a man with so much respect for God’s creation (including dandelions) would have a few questions about how much we seem to be acting like owners instead of stewards of the earth.
by Heather Plett | Jul 18, 2006 | Uncategorized
Two great things happened tonight. First of all, we were all sitting around reading when my Mom and her husband pulled into our driveway. “Mom! Grandma and Grandpa P. are here!” Nikki shouted. Doesn’t sound too extraordinary? Well it does if you consider that she has just spent the last two months in Holland, plus a couple of weeks in Alberta. That’s a LONG time to be away! FAR away! I didn’t realize just how much I missed her until I saw their van in the driveway.
Ten minutes later, while we were sitting on the deck and the girls were showing off their new pool, the phone rang. It was Kari – she-who-gave-me the-black-skirt – she’d found out I was trying to track her down, and after she’d recuperated from the birth of her second child, she finally gave me a call! Yay! We’re getting together on Saturday and our kids are going to hang out together and I sure hope that all the years fall away and we are the same old comfortable, laughing at all the silly jokes, letting our hair down, kinda friends.
So now I have at least three things to look forward to this weekend – some time with my Mom, a dinner party with 6 incredible, interesting, talented, beautiful women whom I’m lucky enough to call friends (well, one of them I haven’t met yet, but at the end of the night, I’m sure I’ll call her friend too), and a get-together with one of the truest, most down-to-earth, funny friends I’ve ever had in my life. Throw in a bit of splashin’ in the pool with my girls, a Friday off work, and it has the makings of a perfect weekend. I’m a lucky, lucky girl. Now if only the week would go quickly!
Oh, and there’s other good news – I got a bit of an extended writing gig for another magazine. Two short pieces already accepted with assignments for 4 more. Yippee! Bring on the karma!
