Ancient Trees, Essays

Wednesday, April 5, 2006

Wednesday was the usual – the cat crackled at the birds through the window of the patio door, Carrie-Bri reluctantly shared a leftover batch of fried chicken taken home from The Columns in a Styrofoam box, and Frances did his math wearing a forgotten pink satin glove of Carrie’s from the good old English Country Dancing days.

And Collette realized more and more how easy it was to read one’s own context and ideals into Scripture. There were extreme cases, of course. For example, if taken too literally, Exodus 15:3 which read:

“The Lord is a man of war;”

one could ridiculously presume that the Lord was a type of jellyfish. Blasphemous as it was, it really could hardly be counted as a good example, but there were folk who considered such things seriously.

Later in the afternoon, Rose died her pajama pants in a bath of primrose and made a bracelet of turquoise and hematite. Mom read history to Frances and Linnea and they learned of the oldest tree on earth – a bristle cone pine, recently celebrating its 4,700th anniversary. Perhaps it even took seed near the end of the Great Flood.

Meanwhile, Collette had assigned free writing for Joe and Rose to accomplish before breakfast every morning. Joe’s first installment ran thus:

“To fly a kite in the spring.
To shoot a bird to make it sing.
To run and then trip and fall,
To play computer all day long.
Smelling the bread cook in the oven
Could mean your stomach could be hummin
Kitty cats that bite your ear will
Go to jail for 100 years.”

And

“O my gosh.
O my gosh.
I cryed all day.
I screwed things up so what can I say.
I hit my dog for being bad.
Then he died.”

Rose wrote the long-awaited essay on Itch Bugs, entitled: “Itchy”.