A pair of Bushnell 7 X 15 X 35 binoculars hangs over a chair-back near our front window—the better to spy on the new neighbours. They don’t seem to mind the paparazzi, and appear oblivious to our inspection. (Then again, perhaps they’re watching us.)

 The robin parents hatched three chicks in the front-yard maple in late spring. The Preacher and I have never had such an intimate look at avian domesticity. Standing well back from the window, I peer in with fascination.

 Faultlessly loyal in his role as fly-in provider, papa robin coaxes his mate up to the edge of the nest so he can feed the triplets. Mama huddles there, supervising—seemingly glad for the break.

 For three’s a crowd, indeed.

 During my first pregnancy, our neighbour expected her second child. Her tummy grew unusually cumbersome. My last pregnancy, she vowed. Never again. But I’d like a big family, at least four, said her husband.

In colossal humour, both got their way. Fatima—two weeks overdue—gave birth to an unexpected set of triplets. She wore pyjamas for a solid year. When she took the babies for a walk in their triple stroller, she added a housecoat.

The robins’ nest, an almost weightless, neatly swirled circle of grasses, rests in a crotch of bark two limbs up, about ten feet off the ground. I worried plenty about it during the series of severe storms that recently battered our area. An umbrella of leaves doesn’t protect much.

During the worst, a gale that threatened human life, I grabbed the binoculars and sat down in front of the window to add a little watching to my worrying. There sat Mrs. Robin, unmoving, wings outstretched over her offspring. When the wind lifted the nest almost at a right angle to the tree, she clung tight. Drenched to her pinfeathers, her beak ran water-droplets like a leaky faucet.

Whenever the blow took an intake of breath before its next big gust, in darted the sodden male, bearing take-out. To my astonishment, he first fed his mate. She ate, then lifted herself off the nest just high enough for the chicks to thrust their gaping mouths out from under her wings.

That storm chased over a hundred people from their homes near here. Many houses sustained irreparable damage and have since been condemned. Yet my avian neighbours’ small circle of grasses remained intact—and so did the little family.

These are difficult times to keep a home together. Marriages have never before collapsed at the present rate. Battered by sundry storms, partners flee commitment, sacrificing future joy for present relief or passing pleasures. I grieve the brittle spirits, the inevitible from-bad-to-worse years, the wounds festering in childrens’ bewildered hearts.

Two weather-beaten people I love celebrated their fifty-eighth anniversary this month. They remind me of the robins. They held hard to Jesus, fought storms together, and survived formidable enemy attacks. They even survived raising me.

Lord, give us robin-spirits. Our neighbours are watching.

Bones have fascinated our son from his childhood. I remember the day that began.

At three, after a bad case of whooping cough, he needed weeks of physiotherapy in the hospital clinic. After one of his sessions, I stood discussing his progress with the therapist. Tired of our talk, Anthony hopped off the low table and disappeared around the corner.

Seconds later, he dashed back into the room. “Mommy, come here!” He tugged my hand and demanded I follow. We flew down the corridor and rounded the corner. He pulled me into a small dark room, weirdly lit by the light from the hall.

Pointing straight ahead, trembling a tad, he shouted. “WHAT IS IT?”

My eyes followed his finger and met the vacant gaze of a life-sized skeleton. Gulping, I explained what it was, and that nurses and doctors used it to teach people about our bodies.

Our boisterous son remained quiet all day. The next morning he doodled with his breakfast, then put his spoon down firmly and looked me in the eye. “Mommy, when I’m off my bones, where am I going to be, and where are my bones going to be?”    

Bones at breakfast. Every mother’s dream.

The “after death, what?” question slices through history. Every major religion includes an afterlife belief. Humans have a built-in sense that we are each part of something much bigger and longer than our few years on earth. We long not to end at our finish lines.

And indeed we don’t. Right over our cereal, I gave my child a crash course: Biblical Beliefs about Death 001.

“When people who love God and live for Jesus die, their spirits leave their bodies, honey. They don’t need their old bones anymore. Jesus said we’ll have new bodies in heaven.

He thought a moment. “But what happens to people who don’t love God?”

Cornflakes almost shot out my nose. I should have expected our intuitive child to point out the elephant in the room, the one many Christians ignore.

I can’t remember the exact words I used, but I told him what I learned as a child. That the Bible talks about hell, a lake of fire where Satan and his demons will get their due. And that though it makes God very sad, people who don’t love and obey him will end up there too—by their own choice.

Now that I’m older, I believe fewer things than I once did, but the more firmly I believe those few. And I still believe that God, in love, allows us to choose what happens after our earthly finish lines.

I recently attended a funeral for someone with a known passion for God and Biblical truth. The officiate talked all around the elephant in the room. I left there thinking we need a skeleton at every final service. And a tiny child, to ask in a voice clear and innocent: “When I’m off my bones, where am I going to be…?”

As our family drove home from Canada Day celebrations, the day rapidly changed moods. Since morning, we’d enjoyed sunshine at a heritage site about an hour southwest. Now, in stark contrast to the blue and gold, the afternoon sky became a collage of bizarre cloud formations. Some, blinding white and shaped like colossal cauliflowers, grew rapidly larger.

In the back seat and looking skyward, Benjamin Bean told cloud-stories. “That one’s a dragon, see? And there’s its baby. It looks HUNGRY!”

The sky lost its friendliness, blackening fast, until only a fist-sized clear spot remained. Then that disappeared too.

Rain comin’, we said, cruising through the city of Yorkton, our long-time home until we moved to a bedroom community a few miles north last year.

We’d been invited to a barbeque that evening. Guess the barbecue’s off, I thought. Noah came to mind too. With what would you have us build an ark, Lord? No gopher wood in this part of the prairie. And can we forget the pair of mosquitoes?

Moments after we arrived home, a storm of biblical proportions descended.  The rain started and the power quit. Thunder reverberated. Lightning zipped across the horizon.

Over the next several hours, over six inches of water fell on Yorkton and area—most of that in one twenty-minute period. According to those who know such things, that’s 894,321,540 gallons of water, spread over 6, 570 acres of city. It rushed off concrete and asphalt, found the lowest places, filled them up, and kept rising.

One person, standing in a basement apartment living room, noticed something strange on the wall. Sudden cracks appeared and raced floor-ward. A second later, the entire wall caved in, followed by another wall—rushing water. Swimming out was the only alternative. And waiting for rescue by canoe.

Up to seven feet of floodwater filled over half of Yorkton basements. It poured into hollows in the lowest parts of town. A sudden sea sprawled over farm-fields between our home and the city, necessitating livestock evacuation.

Thank God, no lives were lost—but multiple homes and businesses were destroyed. Local history books will mark Canada Day 2010.

Rain keeps coming, though the deluge has stopped. The sea has diminished—mostly. Felled trees have become firewood. Roofs sport colorful tarps. Basement windows wear boards. And waterlogged furniture and carpets hunker curbside, waiting for pickup.

But the storm continues in the lives of our neighbours. Faces remain wet with tears, electrified by shock. More than possessions were lost—lifestyles swept downstream. Speaking from experience, new normal takes years to find.

Many local initiatives have started to help the flood victims. The Preacher and I attended one less than a week after the flood—a hastily organized chili supper at the local Mennonite church. The chili, made by church members, was delicious. So were the buns—large, fluffy, and homemade.

I sampled, too, the best rhubarb dessert I’ve ever eaten, a square, topped with meringue.

Hope House, when we arrived, had two large rhubarb plants out back. We plowed one up last month. Now we have three. Always looking for new recipes, I inquired as to who had made that divine dessert.

One of the organizers told me its story. A community member had heard about the fundraiser and called to ask if she could bring something for dinner. She baked that dessert, and ALL the buns. No one seemed to know her name.

Here’s the best recipe I heard that night: When faced with need, take the thing you do best, the thing you enjoy doing most. Ask God to plug it in somewhere. Then start watching for open doors. Just as he did with the buns and the rhubarb, he’ll find a spot for every willing giver who wants to share his love with those in desperate need of hope.

And it really doesn’t matter if people ever know your name.

This morning, simply to celebrate the sun, I hung our wash outside to dry. Strung each piece against tree and sky. Threaded them like odd-shaped beads on a high wire.

Shirts and towels immediately began flirting with the breeze. Slacks and capris danced jigs in perfect time with the wind. And in clear view of the raspberry patch, the pretty things made indescribable moves.

When we bought our house, I didn’t pay much attention to the clothesline. But four-year-old Benjabean noticed its old rugged poles immediately. He saw the nearest first, silhouetted against the white and blue autumn sky. Then he noticed the second. It towers over the shady grove at the bottom of the yard. The secret place.

He stood. Thought a moment.

“Nana, you have two crosses in your backyard. Why?”

“They hold up the clothesline.”

“What’s a clothesline?”

That surprised me. I’m a first generation mostly-dryer-user, so the memory of the family laundry flapping in frequent coastal blows remains vivid. (As does the rush to haul it in before the typical washday rains.)

I’ll have to make sure to use the line when the grandbeans are around, I thought, as I clamped the wooden clothespins over the Preacher’s pyjamas. But suddenly I wondered something: was I doing right by my family textiles this sunny morning? Some say there’s a protocol for hanging clothes.

The people who live in Singapore’s high-rise apartments don’t seem to follow any protocol. In glorious freedom and unsorted array, their clean laundry sways high above the streets, dangling from poles telescoping straight out their windows.

I’ve seen that myself, and wondered how often Singaporeans lose laundry to the wind. What a shock it would be to find, while pedaling bike ten stories below, that the heavens have delivered a new shirt. Pasted it on as you rode.

Pinning our damp clothing to the line, I wondered about Western protocol. About whether I’d done it right, or if any lurking hanging-out-laundry-police could fine me for unlawful and disorderly handling of wet things. Later, I did a little research online. Sure enough, I’d broken almost every dearly held laundry law, except this one:

“Throughout the hanging of undergarments, it is best to check that degenerate neighbours are not feasting their eyes on the personals.”

Trees border our backyard. No neighbours, degenerate or otherwise, have feasting opportunity. Only a pair of agitated wrens observed me this morning. Their shrill buzzes warned me to steer clear of their house, hanging high on the east cross.

I’ve thought long about laundry today. About how beautiful clean is. How fragrant. About how much sweeter the world would be if everyone hung their wash out under sunny skies sometimes. And about how often in my heart I’ve stood in the shadow of another old rugged cross. Bowed low before Christ there.  And  humbled by forgiveness, felt my freshly washed soul flap about in delirious, glorious freedom.

No laws there either. No slaps on the wrist. Just grace. Just grace.