In our slice of the prairies, we`ve seen the sun so seldom this spring I’ve decided not to waste it. So I’m writing outside this sunny morning, perched on an old willow chair in my favourite part of our backyard.

Birdsong surrounds me, and the wind whispers through this grove of old maples. It toys with the rope swing, sways it east, then west, as though prompted so by an invisible child.

Until just a few days ago, the backyard of Hope House—like many others nearby—didn`t invite hopefulness.

“It`s the wettest year we’ve had in over a hundred years,” I`ve heard, from people who keep track of such things. People whose parents and grandparents likely did the same.

Basements that have never flooded before have decided to try it. Dark patches lay like shadows across the concrete in our own. Backyards feel like wet sponges, and dirt roads and lanes are a sea of mud.

Rain wouldn`t seem half so bad, if it didn`t need clouds to deliver it. Fretting about whether the deluge will hold off long enough to pot or plant, side, paint, or build would be much more fun if we could park our complaining selves in a willow chair in a sweet breeze, surrounded by brightness and birdsong.

But clouds and complaints keep company as surely as sunshine and bright thoughts.

Prairie people aren’t used to long strings of cloudy days. We share our misery like a bad cold. Even the optimistic find it difficult to rise above the clouds. After all, a silver lining requires at least a tiny beam of sun.

Reared on Canada’s wet Western edge, I grew up singing, “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day. Rain, rain, go away, please let all the children play.” Nevertheless, if we wanted to enjoy the emerald coast, we had no choice but to make peace with the stuff that made it green. That meant slickers, rubbers, and umbrellas. From autumn to spring, we rarely left home without them.

Perhaps that’s our problem, we flatlanders. Most of us aren’t equipped for month-long rains.

But here I sit, surrounded by a green as lovely as any of my youth—because of the rain. The sun seems twice as bright as I remember it, and hope fills my heart for my sodden yard and the fields of our farmer friends.

The two-foot, three-striped black garter snake that almost slithered over my foot a moment ago seems happy too. His narrow pink tongue tasted my welcome, and seemed to find it to his liking. He circled me, returning for more. Snakes don’t hear kind words often, I suspect.

God, who does everything well, and who whispers beauty through every weather—thank you for this reprieve of sunshine. Forgive our complaints, and remind us that you’ve given us the ability to choose which side of the clouds to live on.

But help me find a pair of rubber boots, please. It’s clouding over again.

Before he left home, our son Anthony spent a peck of time at the home of one of his friends. I didn’t know that friend’s family, and I wondered when a bill for his room and board would arrive.

A decade later, I’ve finally met that mother. By a happy lack of planning, she sat beside me in church one day.

She surprised me by asking how Anthony was, and explained how she knew him. We chatted about those days, and she told me this:

When Anthony decided to sell his car, she bought it. She paid a hundred dollars for the old Honda Civic, and both her sons drove it for years. “It was a really good little car,” she said. “I never had to do anything with it.”

But one day her youngest son returned home with news. The Honda had broken down beside the highway. He’d left it there, and hitched a ride home. “We should send out a tow truck,” said his mother.

“It’ll be fine,” he told her. “I’ll go back and get it tomorrow.”

But next morning the RCMP called. They’d traced her through the car’s licence plate, they explained. During the night thugs had vandalized the forsaken vehicle, then set it ablaze. Anthony’s old Civic had rolled its last mile.

The insurance company wrote the car off. “We can’t give you more than $500 for it,” the agent apologized.

She grinned, telling me. “That little car was good while I had it, but it was worth even more ruined!”

I laughed along with her—and laughed even harder when she told me about the day she’d bought the aging hatchback. “It was covered in stickers,” she said. I remembered those. The car’s steel blue body barely showed through. Skulls and crossbones, rock band logos, and bumper stickers—our darlin’ boy had decorated his chariot well. Whenever I protested, a new sticker appeared. I learned to bite my tongue.

My companion said she wasn’t stuck on the stickers either. When Anthony delivered the car, she’d looked it over. “Well,” she’d said, “I guess I could take the stickers off.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Mrs. M.” he’d shot back, alarmed. “I think they’re sort of holding the car together!”

She left them on.

We shared a moment of laughter. Of wondrous gratitude that we’d all survived those raisin’ years. But when I thanked her for the free board and room, she tossed it off. “I always loved it when my boys had their friends over. At least I knew where they were.”

I’d love to report that I was that charitable in those days. Instead, I spent less time trying to know my son’s friends than I did fomenting  about their—and his—choices of clothes, music, and activities.

Stickers all. Everyone uses them, and often we’re positive they hold us together. But unlike me, our Heavenly Father looks past those, to the truly important stuff, and invites us home.

Father, make me more like you.

My dearest book, my favourite gift from my sister Beverly, is bedraggled and weary. God’s lively Word, encased in tattered cardboard, is coming unhinged.  Like me, some days.

In case you’ve ever wondered, the Bible is the backbone behind these weekly columns. God uses it to help keep my Sunny Side Up and retrieve it when I’m hard and stepped on. (The Preacher would like you to know how very often that happens.)

I don’t worship the Bible—but I believe it. God speaks life through it, when we listen. And though my copy is old and tired, the words inside remain vibrant, alive, and powerful.

Among other things, it’s the Bible God uses to teach me when I’m ignorant (regularly), caution me when I’m aiming at danger, comfort me when I’m facing loss, restore my creativity when life sucks it away, and bring hope when I’m feeling hopeless.

But my particular volume of onion-skin pages is almost done in. The ends of the bright ribbons that mark my reading places have mostly frayed to fluff. The protective coating on the hard cover has nearly all peeled off.  I’ve scribbled so many notes in the margins of my favourite passages that I can barely read the text. I’ve underlined some verses so often that I’ve almost worn clear through a few of the pages.

Oh, and the spine is missing. Entirely.

Over the last three years, in the upheaval of suddenly changed family circumstances, that pink copy of the Bible has been my lifebuoy. In the worst of times, and often in the best, it’s the book I reach for first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and sometimes in between.

I’ve mentioned here before, the day I noticed my tiny grandaughter flipping through it reverently as it lay on the coffee table. When she noticed me watching, her beautiful face illuminated with joy, “Nana,” she said, “I WUV your Bible!”

Me too, Butterfly Bean. Me too.

But likely not as much as Natan (Anatoli) Shcharansky loved his portion of God’s Word. Imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag for over a decade—for trying to escape to Israel—Russian authorities stripped the dissident Jew of every possession except his miniature collection of the Psalms. His jailers tried often to get that too, but Shcharansky refused to hand it over. That gained him a penalty of 130 days in brutal solitary confinement.

The Psalms kept him alive, he said later. In his autobiography, Fear No Evil, Shcharansky comments, “I took my Psalm Book, and for days on end… recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s Psalms, syllable by syllable.”

Thanks to his family’s tireless efforts, Scharansky gained his freedom in 1986. At his release, the guards tried again to take away his book of Psalms. He flung himself face down in the snow and refused to walk to freedom without it. The guards capitulated.

I understand Scharansky. Some things in life are more important than freedom.

We took to the water recently, the Preacher and I. Bodies filled the indoor pool, sporting a colorful array of swimsuits, in varying coverages. We wore boring, conservative styles, befitting our weathered frames.

A few decades ago, we looked different.

I shrieked the first time I saw the Preacher in a bathing suit—a roaring-twenties-style, one piece, purple full-body costume. He bought it himself, “because no one else had one.” Sleeveless, it flowed almost to his knees and floated clear up to his collar bones. It had narrow green and white horizontal stripes, and buttons down the front.

Even in the seventies, that swimsuit was an anomaly.

The Preacher’s physique has changed since then. He once had the profile of a pencil (with long wavy hair), weighed a mere hundred and sixty-five pounds, and enjoyed the reputation around campus as an academic and sports heavyweight.

Wearing that suit made him dangerous. His well-aimed teardrop dives erupted in volleys of splashes that sent clusters of co-ed girls, myself among them, squealing in protest to the pool’s edges.

My own most memorable bathing suit was only that for me: a rather conservative black bikini with tiny bright flowers.

I’d purchased it in spite of my raising, one that installed in me a deep-seated certainty that only the female lower legs, arms, neck, and facial skin could tolerate direct air. I’d never owned a two-piece, let alone a bikini, and I wore it only once, on a swim date with the Preacher. (At least one of us was properly clothed.)

On another visit to the local pool with my grandchildren, a lovely lady wearing a truly teeny, weeny, eensy bikini entered the pool area. Benjamin’s already large eyes widened even more. “Nana,” he exclaimed, in loud amazement. “That lady is wearing her undies!”

I chuckled. “It sure does look that way, doesn’t it?”

He watched her slip into the water, then turned to me, “Nana,” he said again. This time his voice softened into full-blown compassionate wonder. “Did she FORGET to put on her bathing suit?

Does she HAVE a bathing suit? ”

“Do you think she needs one?”

He nodded slowly. “Yaw. She should get one. Mama should give her one, I think.”

Right there, I felt a pang of sadness. Our sexually charged culture will assault that beautiful innocence. Attempt to batter it on the craggy cliffs of peer pressure. The devil will help.

My grandson looked at a beautiful body, and saw need—hers. Many others would have seen need too—their own.

Pornography, flourishing through easy internet access, has become a terminal cancer among us. The Preacher and I have watched it kill marriages and rot friends and colleagues from the inside out.

Christ grieves those tragedies—many involve his own children.

Nevertheless, like the Preacher’s well-aimed teardrop dives, websites like www.pureintimacy.org , www.covenanteyes.com , and www.x3pure.com, splash a volley of refreshing hope in the midst of the maelstrom.

If pornography has seared you, remember: God is far bigger.

I have phantom fuzz.

“You have WHAT?” said the Preacher, when he walked into the bedroom and found me inspecting my left foot.

“Phantom fuzz.”

Toe jam. You know. Dead skin, sock fluff, sand, dirt. All mixed up with accumulated skin oils and bacteria.  A piece or collection of pieces of something nasty that has, for too long, homesteaded in the crack between my baby left toe and the one that snuggles up to it.

At first I didn’t pay much attention. A nuisance, that’s all. I prepared to evict it. But when I took off my socks, it had vanished.

Well, then. Must have fallen out on its own.

But the next afternoon it came back. And showed up again the following morning. (Come to think of it, it NEVER shows up. It feels up. And keeps doing so.)

It has taken weeks to get to this point. I don’t believe in ghosts or phantoms, but saints above, I do believe my left foot is haunted.

See, I told you. I have phantom fuzz.

In a great gush of words, I explained all that to my sweet husband as he stood there in our room this morning. Watching with great interest as his spiritual and highly sensible wife, chattering like a magpie on steroids, excavated between her toes. Mining for toe jam. Fool’s jam, it seems.

Well, so. And it’s really not as comical as he seemed to think it was. Or you either. In fact, the only positive thing I can find about all this is that my phantom fuzz doesn’t have the fragrance of real toe jam—which at its ripest smells like a rather pungent cheese. Limburger, I think.  Shockingly odorous.

Some people are utterly incapable of recovering from the smell of Limburger cheese. I know such a person, one victim of a college prank played by a friend. She stuffed Limburger cheese in his dormitory radiator. Eventually the college relocated. Whether the two events were related, I can’t say, but the Preacher has never gotten over it.

“A smell likened to rotting feet or moldy boots,” reads one description of Limburger cheese. And since the bacteria that develops cheese is identical to the stuff that grows between one’s toes, that’s not surprising at all.

Which is why I thank God that my fuzz is a phantom. I own nothing of the sort that my traitorous brain tells me I do.

Better that than phantom gold. Numismatist (fellow who knows coins) Patrick Heller makes a well-evidenced argument in an article at Numismaster.com (April 6/10) that most people who invest in gold own nothing of the sort. They do own, however, very costly paper. There’s simply not enough gold in the world to deliver.

Phantom fuzz is one thing. But we all have some version of phantom gold—stuff we imagine keeps us secure and worth something.

Stinks like Limburger to God, I suspect. Shockingly odorous.

Sweet Jesus, exorcise our phantoms.

Mothers do many things. Grandmothers, too.  One of the hardest is explaining death to those who have barely begun to live.

“Nana, wanna come and see a dead robin?” Benjamin asked.

“Sure, I’ll come.”

“Wobbin can’t fwy,” said Dinah Jane.

“It’s in the GARBAGE!” said Tabatha.

Their mother and I accompanied the three pre-schoolers to the death site, just outside large glass church doors. The bird must have seen the sky reflected there.

I imagine its last moments. The upward swoop. An eager rush toward freedom. Toward a mirage. A flight to the death, though it couldn’t have known it.

In the novel Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Fletcher Seagull slams into a cliff while taking flying lessons—and prematurely lands in another world. “The trick, Fletcher, is that we are trying to overcome our limitations in order, patiently,” says Jonathan, who has followed. We don’t tackle flying through rock until a little later in the program.”

Perhaps the robin tackled something she wasn’t ready for. Perhaps it found instead, another world, I thought for a moment—hoped for a moment. For surely the God who sees sparrows fall sees falling robins too. Especially the ones battered by the church.

But today it was my grandbeans who found themselves in another world.

Their father had picked the bird up from where it had fallen. Its body, designed to do things no human being can (though not for crashing through the doors to God’s house), now lay on a platform built for garbage disposal.

“Wobbin can’t fwy!” Dinah repeated, peering through the wooden slats. Benjamin bent a long time over the edge, staring. Tabatha fidgeted, reluctant to look.

The robin lay on its back, a dejected clump of ruffled feathers. Feet extended, eyes half closed, staring with almost a shocked expression at the sky where it should have been swooping. Singing.

We stood beside the little body and talked a bit. About the God who cares about the lesser things that die flying. (And the people who die trying, I think.) For a heartbeat we remained as still as the robin itself.

Then faith brought up a prayer.

I barely know who uttered it. My daughter and I were two mothers together, watching our beloved offspring grapple with an impossible definition. Death: a terrible stillness. That “wobbin can’t fwy” and will never fly again. That kind of lesson demands that a mother talk to Father in heaven—because she knows there are harder ones coming.

“Lord, I think you don’t like seeing your little bird like this. She shouldn’t be here, and we don’t understand why. But we know you see her, and are sorry too. Thank you that other robins still sing. Amen.”

The Beans left, satisfied.

One day, they’ll understand more about death. All they need to know today is that it happens. That God cares. And birds still sing.

Perhaps that’s all any of us need to know. God may tell us the rest—later in the program.

My mother, (God bless her unbuttoned heart) never encouraged me in the kind of relationships that would make me a mother myself.

Consider this entry in my childhood diary. I was ten years old.

Dear fiancé,

I don’t know who you are or even if I’ll ever have you but if I do I hope you like pets.  I have three. One is a hamster.  We could clean out his cage together.

I also hope you would never want to hug or kiss because I don’t like that stuff.

The other day my mommy and me were looking out the window and we saw a couple lying on the grass together kissing and hugging and my mommy said it looked awful and I said that I thought it looked awful too so then me and my three friends got the garden hose out and turned the cold water on and sprayed the couple and got them wet.

What fun!

Sincerely, Kathy

Somehow that diary entry escaped its pages, and almost ten years later dropped in at my wedding. After our emcee revealed this bit of embarrassing literature to our guests, he, clearly relishing the moment, presented me with a gift. A squirt-gun. Then he went into some great length of detail on how I was to use it. In case the Preacher ever became amorous.

I didn’t need the lesson: my mother had already taught me.

Ahem, ahem. Two children, and three grandchildren later, it seems obvious: I misplaced the squirt-gun. Mom forgave me the instant she laid eyes on our babies.

At ninety-one, her mind as sharp as her best paring knife, but her plucky little body ravaged by a quarter century of ill health, Mom prays fervently for all her progeny. She wishes we could live closer, she says. And she urges me to not work too late at night, get plenty of rest, and take good care of the Preacher.

“Are you cooking him good meals?” she asks sometimes, when I visit her in Chilliwack.

“Mother. Does it look like he’s starving?” I ask her.  She giggles.

One day I mix a batch of her favourite cookie dough to freeze. She watches. I leave the room for just a moment. When I return, there she stands, grinning. Rolling the dough into balls, and with a sharp flick of her wrist tossing them onto the freezing-sheet across the table. As though they were pebbles, and she a child on the shore.

She giggles at my laughter. Later, with excruciating difficulty—her shoulders have come unraveled—she raises her arms. Cradles my face in both hands. Looks me in the eye. Says I’m a wonderful daughter and she loves me, and am I eating enough?

My mother (God bless her generous, unbuttoned heart) doesn’t use words much. But for over five decades, she’s been my North Star in life and faith, humour and wit, mothering and grandmothering.

When I grow up, Lord…

Yeah, just like her.

The Preacher and I are filthy rich in our friends. One of them, for love alone, spent ten long days at Hope House recently, helping us develop our cement block basement.

His quiet example of workmanship and generosity made a deep impression on our almost-five-year-old grandson.

Benjamin spent several afternoons here while Todd* worked. One day he burst into my office, face aglow. “Nana, LOOK! Todd made this for ME—wasn’t that NICE?”

Almost reverently, he held out a simply constructed birdfeeder.

Another afternoon, the Titanic floated upstairs. “I made it, Nana. Todd helped.” We filled the tub so he could launch the 2×4 ship. It leaned obligingly, but refused to sink.

On Todd’s final afternoon of work, I took our afternoon coffee downstairs instead of making our friend come up. The walls were erected, insulated, and sheeted with drywall. Very little remained to do.

We sat in the laundry room, surrounded by those walls, raised with love and grit—and hands still bleeding from a nail puncture.

When I noticed the blood, I fetched an alcohol swab and a bandage. Benjamin watched the repair with interest. But back upstairs, he had a question.

“Nana,” he asked, “How long did it take God to make Todd?”

I said the first thing that came to mind. “Oh, a very long time, I guess. There’s not many people around like Todd, so I think it must have been very hard to make such a good man.”

That evening, the Preacher and I accompanied Todd to the door. His shoulders stooped. He’d put in another long day, and it had taken several trips to lug his tools to his truck.

“Todd, we don’t know how to thank you,” we said. I don’t know why, but he had tears in his eyes. So did we.

“Pastor,” he confessed. “It didn’t look good at first. I didn’t think I’d ever finish—but I did!”

Benjamin, busy in another room, didn’t get to say good-bye to our friend. When he noticed Todd’s absence, he said, “When’s he coming back again?”

“He’s not, honey. At least not for a while. He’s done working in our basement now. The walls are up.”

 Tears—large as fat raindrops—filled his eyes. My heart hurt. As a child, I too formed attachments to adults who unconsciously made deep imprints—then left again. I remember that emptiness.

After Todd left, I swept up the fresh sawdust. But first I ambled through the rooms, admiring the walls, telling God how grateful we were for Todd and his marvelous gift. Asking him to bless our friend as he had blessed us.

Benjamin crouched on the floor, working on his latest project—nailing small pieces of drywall together. Suddenly, as naturally as could be, out came a heartfelt, “Thank you, God, for making Todd.” That’s all.

A little time. A little care. And a child remembers forever. We will too.

But I wonder…how long did it take God to make me?

*(not his real name)

When I opened the burgundy binder, I sensed God was trying to get my attention.

I began writing Sunny Side Up in March of 2001. Within two years, requests started arriving. They came by email, card, word, and in person. They said basically the same thing:

“Won’t you please put your columns in a book, so we don’t have to go fishing through our drawers to find the one we’re looking for?”

So I compiled the first year of columns into one manuscript and sent out a few proposals. But traditional publishers love column compilations about as much as yesterday’s congealed oatmeal, I learned—and stopped trying.

“My family can publish them after I die,” I told my daughter. She grimaced and rolled her eyes.

One day I received a call from a lady who had the responsibility of sifting through a friend’s belongings after her death. “Kathleen, I’ve found something I think you should have.”

The “something” was the burgundy binder. Inside, I found years of yellowed Sunny Side Up columns.

God nudged me in that moment. I dug out my manuscript and began reworking it, trusting God to direct me to the right publisher.

But another book raced to publication first—West Nile Diary, the book a mosquito started, the Preacher lived, and I wrote. Not until after its promotional tours and interviews finished, did I return to the column collection—and finally I understood the requests for a Sunny Side Up book.

Since I had last read the manuscript, a mosquito had flipped our lives around. My husband’s sudden disability had sent us into exile from home and community for six months. When we returned we found the Preacher’s job no longer his job, our church no longer our church, and our home no longer our home.

We’d moved to temporary low-income housing, living on a disability income. I took a magazine editing job, but lost it when the company downsized eight months later. With a sudden spike in housing costs, we had no idea where we would live following our temporary situation.

Nevertheless, our life was bright, compared to the stories of many of my readers—the people who had written, phoned, and emailed to thank me for the inspiration they’d found in Sunny Side Up.

As I re-read those first columns from a very changed circumstance than when I’d first written them, they encouraged me too. In the words God had inspired years earlier, I found hope. Reminders of life’s truest wealth—God’s unchangeable, constant love. And I knew I must do all I could to honor my readers’ wishes and “get Sunny Side Up between covers.”

We’ll launch Practice by Practice, the Art of Everyday Faith—the little column collection that could—tomorrow—Thursday, April 22—at the Yorkton Public Library (back door) from 7 – 9 p.m. If you can’t make that, I’ll be signing books at the Yorkton Golden Rule on May 4^th, from 2 – 5 p.m.

I’d love to meet you there.