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Dan built this rustic raised bed for my parents, and in exchange we will utilize another garden bed that is in another location on their property.
I thought that even though it is an unusual compilation of materials, it turned out to be quite nice, in a rustic sort of way. Just imagine strawberry plants spilling over the edges of those blocks…
And it’s a great way to make use of available resources!
Both of my brothers (the ones remaining at home) assisted in their own ways.
Zion regaled Dan with stories of his turkey hunts on the property, and Jacob…
He beautified the scene with dogwoods,
while watching for signs of good luck and a bountiful harvest to come 
So, it’s a she, not a he – but photos of Sophie almost always make me think of this quote.
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.” C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces
A testament to my, umm… less-than-thorough-cleaning, becomes an impromptu, hands on science lesson.
This is the view I grew up with. Minus Dan, of course. This is the valley that my parents bought when I was fifteen. All eighty-two acres are just as lovely.
When we moved there, the valley was filled with scrubby trees. We cleaned it out, dug a whole out of the hill, and put in our house. For the better part of a year, we lived in the shell of that house while we continued to work on it. We didn’t have running water or electricity at first.
We read books aloud to each other by lamplight in the winter evenings. We watched the fireflies as they filled the valley in the summer nights.
We hauled water up from a spring on the property and heated it on a wood burning stove. Dishes were washed by candelight. Showers were taken outside in a little solar heated shower, often at night, for privacy – not from neighbors because there aren’t any.
For a while, there were no windows on the main part of the house, but my siblings and I insisted on sleeping out there anyway. In the winter we heated stones on the wood stove, wrapped them in towels, and put them at the bottoms of our beds to keep our toes warm. In the summer, bats often joined us in our “bedroom” at night. We drifted off to sleep watching the fireflies glowing softly below us.
We loved ever minute of it! It was my parent’s dream come true… a piece of land, and a fairly self-sufficient home. We poured our sweat and blood into that land, and we love it. Those of us kids who have left home, look back on it with a fondness that we may never feel for any other piece of property. The siblings still at home may not feel that attachment, but that’s because they were still essentially babies while we were taming that bit of land.
Mom used every bit of daylight to plant her cottage garden in the front of the house, and for years she has nursed it along, and now it rivals many botanical gardens in it’s variety and beauty.
Dan and I sat on that very bench in my mom’s garden, under neath the fragrant blossoms of the crabapple tree and the sparkling canopy of stars, nearly every evening during the spring of our courtship. We watched the otherworldly dances of the fireflies that filled the valley below us. Many times since, we’ve commented that that valley must have the most amazing firefly display in the world. It’s incredible.
Because of the lessons which we believe Kinsley has learned, we accepted the offer from my parents and siblings, to purchase a new pet fish for Kinsley.
Allow me to introduce you to…
Stuart Little. Kinsley named him. Sophie calls him Stupid Little.
Kinsley was thrilled when she saw the new fish. Her grieving for Lyle was instantly completed, and she accepted the new fish whole-heartedly.
Though she did tear up while observing “Lyle Junior”.
Then she hugged Marme, and pronounced it “…a very nice fish!”
With the death of Lyle we would like to think that Kinsley learned that her parents do know what they’re talking about, and that we do tell her not to do things for her own good, since Dan had told her not to touch the fish less than an hour before the accident. We are afraid that lesson may not yet be learned, but we have hope that there were several other important lessons learned.
Lyle’s death showed Kinsley for the first time the permanence of death, and the loss that is felt even from the death of a lowly fish. It’s a loss that transcends the mere physical, even when it’s a pet. Experiencing that death showed the value of life. Seeing the value of life, makes us see that it is infinite, and should be eternal. Kinsley believes us without skepticism when we tell her that people can live again, in a better state, and that it is possible that even their pets will live again with them. We had talked about Heaven with her, and she did not understand why the fish could not come back to life. Now, she knows there is a waiting time, in this life, for all things to be made perfect, and meantime, that these losses cause pain.
We wish the loss of her fish could be her only loss in life, but there are sure to be more and deeper losses for her, as part of being alive in this difficult world, and because of that we shed tears of our own with her as she was weeping in mourning for her beloved fish.
Though Lyle was smaller than other fish which Kinsley has enthusiastically participated in catching, cleaning, and cooking, Kinsley has learned that sometimes it falls to us to protect innocent creatures in our lives.
Life is strange and often painful, but good because it is leading ever onward to perfect, eternal Life, of which we see glimpses now.
Today was a very sad day at Gentlewood Cottage. Through an unfortunate accident, Lyle met his maker today. If fish meet their maker.
The accident involved Kinsley removing Lyle from his comfortable home to examine him – unbeknownst to us. By the time Aunt Paula happened upon the scene, it was too late for Lyle.
It was pretty traumatic once Kinsley had comprehended that Lyle was dead. She wasn’t able to grasp what had happened, until I told her that Lyle had depended on us to feed him everyday, and watch him swimming in his nice bowl. Then she went into the living room and looked into the fishbowl – then began to cry.
She wailed for a long while for him, wishing that she could feed him again, and not wanting to bury him – but after a while, she gave in and led the funeral procession, with Lyle in his tiny casket in her hand.
She chose a spot under the clothesline, and after Glen dug the grave, Papa said a few words about Lyle’s life, and she carefully placed the Altoid casket into the hole.
Then she cried some more.
Then Marme and Grandma both called with their condolences.
As we were headed into the house, she asked Dan if he could read the book Lorenzo the Fish “in honor of Lyle”. Those were her words, by the way.
And so they did. She asked if Lyle had brothers and sisters and a mom and dad. Dan told her that Lyle had been pretty much alone in the world, and she wanted to know if it was because he was a little baby…
Goodbye Lyle. Thanks for being a good fish.
