Rebecca Henderson

A little update on the Quinault Community Garden here in the Tri-Cities…

You can read previous essays from “God in the Garden” at these links:

God is Good

God is Faithful

God Works in His Time

God is in Control

The days are growing longer, and our community garden is at the stage for planting seeds. Spring seemed so distant when we first began work on the garden space last October, but now the land is cleared, the boxes are in place, and the soil is full of rich nutrients from our compost bins. All is ready for the seeds and starters we’re going to plant — the main attraction of this garden we’ve been imagining since last year.

Many people have put in a lot of work to make the garden possible to this point — we’ve had donations of supplies, discounts from local businesses, gifts from members of the church, an immeasurable amount of labor and sweat to dig holes in rocky ground and move, literally, tons of soil. Who knew dirt was so heavy?

The reason we’re willing to go to all this is effort is that we expect an abundance of produce in summertime. We trust that getting this ground ready for little seeds and little green shoots will lead to cucumbers and lettuce and watermelons and tomatoes and peppers and cabbage. A lot of it. Enough to help local families who might not otherwise afford it be able to have fresh produce for a change, this year and in years to come. It’s hard to know right now what all the implications of those vegetables might have in the lives of those who eat them, who might experience the goodness of Jesus because of this garden, but we pray big prayers that God would draw people into His community and help them to know Him through our lives and work. We believe the truth in the Psalm of Ascent, Psalm 126:5-6:

Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy!

He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing,

shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.

As the seeds go into the ground at Quinault Community Garden, may we also join in prayer that God will give us opportunity to plant seeds of His Word in the hearts of our neighbors and friends. He has wonderfully provided everything we need in the form of material goods and services to make this garden a reality — we can trust Him also to cultivate relationships and provide the seed that will bear good fruit in the lives of our community.

At some point on my birthday/Easter road trip with my friend Jen — I think it was somewhere after wine tasting but before going crazy on cheese and fudge at the Tillamook factory — one or the other of us asked the question, “What is the difference between clams and oysters?”

Is there a difference? Seafood varieties are an important question when you’re on the Oregon coast. And we needed to know if clams and oysters are basically the same creature with two names, or if there’s really something else going on here in the mollusk world.

To satisfy our curiosity and put an end to this conundrum, Jen pulled out her iPhone — because, really, what’s a road trip these days without an iPhone? She googled “What is the difference between clams and oysters?” and was led to this brilliant page on the Big Site of Amazing Facts: “What is the difference between oysters and clams?” Slightly different from our original question, but as you can see, more or less getting to the gist of our quandary.

Now, the true brilliance in the link Jen discovered is not just the answer given in the brief article: “Both clams and oysters are a class of mollusks, called bivalves….

“One big difference between oysters and clams is that the oyster spends all of its life except its first few weeks attached to one spot. The clam moves itself around throughout its life by means of a foot, a hatchet-shaped muscle which protrudes from the shell.

“The clam pushes its foot out, hooks it in the sand, and pulls itself along. Oysters have a foot like this when they are very young, but it disappears when the oyster finds a place to settle.”

This answer was perfectly adequate to cover what we wanted to know: yes, in fact, there is a difference between clams and oysters. However, the true joy of the link is in the comments. I’ll let you scroll down on the site to read them all for yourself, but suffice it to say that people are amusing. And demanding of their anonymous internet sources.

Getting past the whiners, there are a couple of priceless comments that helped sum up part of the lessons Jen and I had been discussing as we read Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s The Wisdom of Stability (see my review from last year) during our road trip. I know it’s a leap to get from mollusks to a book by Wilson-Hartgrove, but hang with me here.

“Oysters are much cooler than clams. Oysters know what they want from life and are comfortable just the way they are. Clams are always running around seeking an identity. The only good place for a clam is in my chowder. Who’s with me? Oyster supporters unite! Oyster crackers rule!”

And then another commenter: “by the way for the clam vs. oyster, i think clams are MUCH cooler than oysters. i mean, who likes sitting around in the same spot all day? not me! though i agree the clam’s right place to be is in my chowder.”

Right there you have a nugget — a pearl, if you will, haha — of telling insight. Some people are oysters, some people are clams. Wilson-Hartgrove makes a fair case in favor of oysters. There’s something to be said for being certain of your identity, settling down and sticking to one spot, finding stability within a place and a people.

Yesterday I spent about an hour online and on the phone trying to figure out where my parents were as I heard reports of a tornado on the ground within a couple of miles from their house — but no worries, they were in an airplane scheduled to land at the exact time the storm system was supposed to hit the DFW airport. I couldn’t find their correct flight information in my email, couldn’t get hold of my sister who was teaching a class at the time, and was getting all of my up-to-the-minute storm information via Facebook and my cousin, who was perched with her children near their newly installed storm room (she herself was waiting to see if they should take cover).

The whole thing brought back a horrible memory of almost this exact time last year, when tornadoes hit Raleigh, North Carolina, as I was driving there from West Virginia to visit my sister’s family. I got a phone call from my sister telling me to pull over and not drive any closer to Raleigh because tornado sirens were going off in their neighborhood. It was raining pretty hard where I was, somewhere in Virginia at that point, but I had no clue that it was severe enough for tornadoes. I tried to find a radio station with local weather, but the reports ended up not being all that helpful — weather reports are announced by names of counties, not cities, and I have no idea where any counties in Virginia and North Carolina are. At one point, though, they announced a tornado was on the ground on the street where my sister lives — that information, I could recognize.

I ended up seeking shelter in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, along with another stranded family from South Carolina on their way to D.C., and we all watched the local weather reports and wondered when it would be safe to get back on the road. For 45 minutes I tried calling my family in Raleigh again and again to see if they were ok. They didn’t pick up any of the phones I tried calling — no cell service in the space under their stairs, and the power was out, so their home phone wasn’t working. It was a terrifying 45 minutes until they were able to come out from under the stairs and get in touch with me again. (They were fine, but I saw quite a bit of damage as I drove into the neighborhood.)

All of this has me thinking about accessibility. We have become trained to expect to reach people whenever we want, via phone, email, Facebook, whatever. And if we can’t get in touch with them or they don’t return a message right away, we (ok, I) begin to get nervous. Or in some cases, freak out slightly. Or not so slightly.

The ironic part is that I personally have a tendency to go offline or without a cell phone for long periods of time while I’m traveling. Well, for longer than 45 minutes to an hour. And I don’t get worked up thinking about people trying to reach me. Maybe I should. Or maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a moral to draw from all of this, or what conclusions I should come to. I just felt like blogging about it.

All of that having been said, I’m leaving for vacation in Oregon, so if you don’t hear from me for a few days, you know why.

Earlier this week I sat down with a Somali lady and her daughter to listen to their story of fleeing their homeland in the early 1990s. After 19 years in a refugee camp in Ethiopia, the two arrived in the Tri-Cities a little over a year ago. The mother was one of my regular ESL students last year, and the daughter is enrolled in the ESL program at our local college. Though I had been around the two ladies on a weekly basis for several months, I’d never been able to talk to them in depth because of our language barrier. I finally was given that opportunity, however, when our local World Relief office asked if I’d be willing to work with the Somali translator to talk to them and help them write their story.

I wish I could sit with every refugee in the Tri-Cities and hear their stories. They each need to be given the chance to tell them. To have someone listen. Hopefully sometime in the near future I’ll be able to post a link to the story I write for World Relief from the interview this week.

As our interview came to an end, the daughter served us a meal of beef curry with potatoes and peas, along with a spongy flat bread called enjera (pardon my spelling, if that’s incorrect) and hot chai with cardamom. Through the translator, the mother and I talked about our ESL class from the previous year — she recited a few of the vocabulary words she remembered I taught her, hand, eyes, nose, head. She was apologetic throughout the interview for not learning any faster than she has, but explained that her memory isn’t the same, nor her ability to speak — she is just different than she was before the war. After hearing her story and all that she went through, all that she lost, I marvel that she is able to speak at all.

The translator took the time during our meal to tell a story to encourage her in her learning, and I will share that story with you here.

Which is stronger, a rope or a stone? It seems obvious that the stone is the stronger of the two. But take a water well as an example. A rope lowers a bucket over a stone into a well to draw out water, day after day after day. Eventually the rope wears a groove in the stone. If you repeat something over and over again, keep trying, keep at it, you will eventually wear down what you’re trying for. In the end, the rope is stronger than a stone.

May we all be encouraged to keep trying, keep learning, keep pressing on in whatever difficult endeavor we face today.

I am hopelessly uncoordinated. In the past I’ve been accused of exaggerating for effect (and what writer doesn’t at times?), but I am not making it up when I say that I cannot move my arms and legs at the same time. One or the other, take your pick, but both together just isn’t going to happen. This is part of the reason why it was such a big deal for me to discover running as a sport — at long last, something athletic that I could do easily, mostly because running requires me to do very little with my arms, besides wave at my neighbors or click “next” on my iPod.

I am so uncoordinated that I never could learn how to swim. When I was a kid, I learned to tread water, but beyond that, I quit trying. Several years ago a friend challenged me to attempt learning again. She started by giving me a foam kick-board to practice moving my legs. No problem — I could kick my way back and forth across the pool all day long. Then she showed me how to move my arms and coordinate my breathing with the stroke. I suddenly lost all ability to kick. It really is too much to ask for me to have my arms, legs, head, and lungs all doing something different at the same time. I flopped around for a while longer that day, called it quits, and decided I’m more of a lounging-in-the-hot-tub person than a swimming laps person.

Last fall when a friend asked me to join a Zumba class with her for a few weeks, I quickly said yes (loud music and Latin dancing, what’s not to get excited about?) before I realized that this class would require me to move both my arms and my legs. And my hips. In front of other people.

First class, I was on the back row. I get really swept away when there’s loud music and when there’s a crowd, and this classroom was crowded — so I danced my little heart out and had a blast. Second class and third class, I made sure to arrive in the room early enough to get a spot in the middle row so that I could see the instructor better. For the fourth class, attendance was down, and there was a spot wide open on the first row. “You’re all going to need extra energy tonight, to make up for the ones who are missing,” the instructor yelled over the warm-up music. The class was definitely missing its usual vibe, and we were dragging our feet to get started.

I moved up to the spot on the front row. Now, I don’t know about other classes, but at this Zumba class the people on the front row know what they’re doing. They’ve been in the class the longest. They’ve memorized the routines. They have rhythm. They are not like me.

But on that night, our teacher was asking for energy. It’s more or less what she’s asked for in every class — “even if you can’t get all the steps, just keep moving to the beat and have a good time.” I decided that it didn’t matter that my steps aren’t perfect, that my arms tend to flail instead of looking smooth, that my hips just don’t move the same way the teacher’s do. I would get out there and flail my arms and shake my hips and keep doing the steps with enough energy to warrant a place on the front row. I samba-ed like we were at Carnival and mambo-ed like I grew up in Havana.

I was much sorer the day after class than I had been after the previous lessons. Soreness is an indication of how hard you’ve worked. In Zumba and in life, I want to be the kind of person who helps give the group energy by putting my heart into every step, not just mumbling and stumbling through the movements, but dancing all out even when I know I’m not going to be perfect.

(This essay is the latest in the series on the Quinault Community Garden — previous essays include God is Good, God is Faithful, and God Works in His Time.)

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” Genesis 50:20

With snow and ice covering the ground, it’s hard to imagine that anything can be happening in the garden plot behind the building at 5400 W. Canal Drive. The soil is frozen, not even visible, much less able to produce a green sprout from a seed. Winter time seems useless where gardens are concerned.

Many of us begin a Bible reading plan at the first of the year, in the starkest point of winter, and the stories of so many people from those early books in the Old Testament remind us of the long, cold, dark periods of life where the days and years seem to pass without any evidence of God’s life-giving work. Abraham, Moses, Joseph and others experienced years — decades — where they waited for God to keep His promises. They waited. And waited. And waited. Don’t you know Joseph more than once must have looked around his Egyptian dungeon and wondered if he would ever experience life and joy and the sunshine again? Surely at least once he wondered how things could have ended up this way and whether God really knew what He was doing after all.

The end of Joseph’s story tells the conclusions he drew from the evidence around him when all was said and done: God was in control all along and He was working out a plan to bring life to many people. God never stopped being in control, never stopped working in His creation, even in the deepest winter of Joseph’s life.

Even now in our garden, God is in control and He is at work. The ground rests and waits and produces no growth for the time being, but it is for a purpose. The compost pile appears to be a mess of limbs and leaves and coffee grounds and eggshells, but eventually it will become good black dirt, ready to give nutrients to the seeds we plant. God is in control of this whole process, and He will bring about life through this cold waiting season.

Chinese New Year is January 23 this year, and since I’ll be in Texas doing research at that time, I decided to celebrate a little early with my friends here in Washington. We’re entering into the Year of the Dragon, the year I was born in, so I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to make a ton of food and a pot of eight treasures tea and enjoy the evening with my friends. The celebration was a bit inauthenthic in that we didn’t set off a barrage of firecrackers outside the neighbors’ doors, but hey, we’re within city limits in the U.S., what do you expect?

When I made nacatamales with my friends for Christmas Eve a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d been wanting to teach them how to make dumplings. You can buy them frozen at Costco or wherever, and they’re really pretty good — but I still have a mental block that assures me anything I buy in a bag from the freezer section can’t be as good as what I make from scratch. It just can’t be. Yes, it’s time consuming and labor intensive to put together 120 dumplings for a dinner party, but what’s a little time spent in the afternoon compared to the yumminess of homemade dumplings?

Here we are, filling the wrappers. You can buy packages of the wrappers at the grocery store, usually in the section where you’ll find tofu. If I were a good little Chinese grandma (which I’m not, on several counts), I would roll out my own wrappers from flour and water. But that would be just silly.

We made dumplings with two different fillings: pork and cabbage in one, beef and carrot in the other. The filling also has all sorts of other wonderful ingredients, like garlic, ginger, soy sauce, and scallions. A small spoonful of filling is lovingly nestled in the center of each wrapper, before the edges are sealed and the tiny pocket of deliciousness is tucked in its spot in the row to await the pot, where it will fulfill its dumpling destiny.

Some of the dumplings went into a large soup pot. Once the water comes to a boil, you put several dumplings in, bring the water back to a boil, and then cool the water off again by adding a cup of cold water. You bring the water to a boil again, add more cold water, boil, add cold water, and by the third time the water comes back to a boil, they should be done. Adding cold water keeps the outside of the dumpling from cooking faster than the inside, which would result in a tough wrapper.

We also did a few dumplings in true potsticker style by pan frying them. It’s a less healthy cooking method, for sure, but who doesn’t enjoy a little oil now and then?

Thank you, Jane and Andy, for letting me take over your kitchen to make dumplings! (Jane and Andy aren’t in this photo, but this is their table and place settings with our dumpling feast.)

Lately I’ve been on a quest to overcome my dread of the cold. When I spent the summer in Alaska in 2010, I wrote about resigning myself to the fact that I’m a wimp in the cold. I’m not ashamed: I get cold easily and have to bundle up a bit more than the average person in Washington.

But I’m not going to let the cold stop me. (I will, however, let snowy and icy roads stop me.) I cannot let the four or five months of temperatures consistently below or around 40 degrees keep me from leaving my house everyday. As a full-time writer who works out of a home office, I start to go a bit crazy when I can’t get out for breaks to exercise or talk to people, to see something besides the four walls of my apartment. In Texas you can hunker down and not leave the house during the coldest days of the year — because they last for about four days. In Washington, though, I’ve come to terms with the realities of wearing wool underwear and socks, boots with fuzzy lining, scarves, and hats every day until Easter. I invested in cold weather running tights, so freezing temps don’t keep me from putting in a few miles a week. Long wool tights, socks that come up to my knees, and warm boots allow me to wear dresses and skirts year-round, something I never imagined possible. That one little consolation is helping me endure this winter — I love skirts and got used to wearing them year-round with flip-flops in tropical Yunnan, and I feel distinctly unfeminine if I have to wear jeans for months on end. I’m making the best of it and improvising with cold gear so that I can keep dressing and looking like a girl.

I’m trying not to let circumstances stop me in other areas, as well. At this point in life I don’t have the home furnishings or space necessary to have big groups of people over for dinner or to hang out. Having an open house is important to me, and I want my home to be a place where I can entertain, serve meals, show hospitality to people who might need a place to stay. Right now, I only have enough space around the table for six, and two of those people will need to sit on a patio chair or bar stool. Depending on what we’re eating, I don’t have enough place settings to serve those six. But I’m making do. I’ve determined not to be embarrassed about the little I have and to invite friends over now — not wait until I have a larger kitchen and table and plenty of bowls and plates for a big dinner party. I’m not going to let my limitations stop me. If I don’t invite folks over for dinner now, what makes me think I won’t find another excuse to prevent it in two years?

Writing is another example. It’s easy to wake up each morning and look at all the things I need to get done for my bill-paying freelance jobs, or the chores to be done around the house, and think to myself, “I wish I could be completely care-free and have all the time in the world to write each day.” But that kind of care-free scenario is the stuff of dreams. I can arrange my life so that I have as much writing time as possible, but ultimately I have to just sit down and do the writing, stop looking at all the obstacles, get down to business. I can’t let any number of hesitations or fears or distractions keep me from doing the tasks that will lead to my end goal: completed essays and stories and books.

And now I ask, what about you? What are some areas where you catch yourself saying, “One day when the stars are perfectly aligned, I would love to start doing this or that.” Could you take a small step toward preparing for those possibilities, not letting the present circumstances stop you from enjoying today what you desire for the future?

Is Texas part of the South, or the Southwest, or its own culture?

This is not a border area militia Rick Perry secessionist question. That kind of talk irritates me to no end, almost as much as hearing jokes about Waco and the Branch Davidian compound when I tell people I went to Baylor (sic ‘em Bears and RG3).

I started thinking about this question again over the holidays, as I made black eyed peas for dinner in keeping with the southern tradition. FYI, all-knowing online sources state that black eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day are a token for prosperity in the year to come, although I’m pretty sure when I was little and asked my mom why we eat them, the answer was “because we do.”

Black eyed peas on New Year’s is a decidedly southern tradition, not solely a Texas one. But I find that since moving to Washington, I don’t often claim to be from the “South.” I make a clear distinction that I’m from Texas and that it’s different from other southern states. I say this not out of Texas pride — I never say things like “everything’s bigger and better in Texas,” I don’t call it God’s Country, and you will never hear me say “hook ‘em Horns.” I am proud of Texas, but I also like a lot of other places I’ve been.

I think I’m making a cultural distinction here. In a lot of ways, Texas isn’t like the rest of the South (the Deep South, which I guess is really more accurately the Southeast). I grew up eating way more tamales and sopaipillas than someone from Georgia or Alabama. And yes, my family actually has a ranch, and my dad, uncle, and grandfather are honest-to-goodness cowboys, though some say that’s a stereotype of Texas. Stereotypes have to come from somewhere, right?

I started making the distinction in my mind that Texas belongs more to the Southwest than the South a few years ago when I was hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China, of all places. At a guesthouse in the gorge I met and hung out with a couple from Arizona, and the guy said to me, “You’re from Texas? Then we’re cousins from the Southwest.” (He also later told me he loved me, right in front of his girlfriend, because I was traveling with only a small backpack while she had a large suitcase — but that’s another story, let me get back on track, we’ll talk later about guys who’ve declared their love for me while dating someone else.) That casual comment about the Southwest really caused me to think (you have a lot of time to do that while hiking through a gorge and riding long haul buses across Yunnan), and since that time, I have associated myself as a Texan more with the Southwest than with the South. Maybe that explains part of my reasoning behind wanting to write West Texas Interlude — a desire to head to the desert and deepen my connection with the Southwest.

Yet, there are still some things about Texas that are more southern than not. Like black eyed peas on New Year’s. And Bible Belt culture. And the word y’all. I can’t say that sweet tea is one of those things, though, because you’re just as likely as not to find unsweetened tea in the pitcher in my family’s fridge.

Opinions?

I don’t know that it qualifies as making New Year’s resolutions, but I do like to take the time at the end/beginning of the year to reflect on the year past and look ahead to how I want to walk through the coming year. Last Friday I spent the morning doing just that — pondering, praying, reading, reflecting, resolving. I came away from the time with peace and joy and hope for 2012, as well as a right understanding of how to say goodbye to 2011, a year that was at the same time both difficult and enjoyable for me.

Rather than making one list of resolutions, I ended up writing out a couple of separate lists: Things I Can Do in 2012 and Things Out of My Control in 2012. Under the column for Things I Can Do, I wrote stuff like keep running and hiking consistently, learn to garden, read poetry, transition back to saving money rather than spending my savings, grow in my giving, start making kefir. I’m not setting any goals, per se, but writing down the list is a good reminder of a few habits that are important to me and a few things I want to try out this year.

The list for Things Out of My Control was much shorter, but in a lot of ways more important to me. Getting a book contract is something I would like to see happen, but I honestly can’t make it happen. I can do a few things to help it along (fine tune query letters, network, research agents and publishers, etc), but ultimately it’s out of my control. I can do everything all the experts say I should do, but still find myself at the end of 2012 with my manuscript in hand and no contract. Same with the other couple of items on the list. So, I spent some time praying over this list, submitting all of my hopes and desires to God (once again), and walked away from the time without any guarantees for the future, except the wondrous guarantee that God is in control of the Things Out of My Control.