Hey, friends,
How has your Tuesday gone?
Mine has been pretty interesting. This morning at the newspaper office, I wrote a story for today's paper about the library expanding into a next-door building. To get a photo to go with the story, I walked around the Square to the library, where I met the director and shot a photo of her outside the new building.
Oh, and on the way over there, I shot a photo of one of the county's master gardeners on her hands and knees in a flower bed on the corner of the Courtpark. It will run in the paper one day soon when we need a feature photo.
I proofed a couple of stories for today's edition, and wrote another story for tomorrow's paper about the sheriff's new program in which misdemeanor convicts are put on work crews to clean up trash around the county.
I ate lunch at the downtown cafe' with an older lady from my church who introduced herself to me after church Sunday, and we got to know each other a little bit.
This afternoon, I worked on my column for tomorrow for a while, then interviewed the local director of CASA (court-appointed special advocates for children) and the chairman of their board. I'll write a big story about how what they do, and how badly they need volunteers and donations, for a Sunday edition later this month.
After work, D and I cooked supper together - chicken chalupas with fresh avacado and cilantro - yum!
I also had a long visit with my Colorado son on the phone. I haven't seen him since last June, and am really getting homesick for him. He's a chef at the Mediterranean Cafe' in Boulder. D and I are hoping to get out there late this summer to see him.
Now it's time to sit down and rest a little bit!
What have y'all been doing today?

We
sing a song at church called "Be Not Afraid," written by John Michael
Talbot, our neighbor over at Little Portion Hermitage near Eureka.
Every time I hear the music and the words, they speak to me. You know,
the kind of song that brings tears to your eyes because it strikes a
chord way down deep inside.
"Be not afraid. I go before you always. Come, follow Me, and I will give you rest...."
Maybe this resonates so strongly with me because all my life I've struggled with fear.
I
know the exact day when fear really got ahold of me. My boys were about
two and four, and we were living out in the country on their daddy's
family farm. It was a Sunday afternoon, and both my little boys were
taking their afternoon nap. I’d had a sick headache all day, and
decided to take an over-the-counter headache pill and lie down.
I
dozed off, but within minutes woke up because the palms of my hands
were itching like mosquitoes had bitten them. Then I started having
trouble breathing, and realized I was having some kind of severe
allergic reaction — something that had never happened to me before, but
that I'd read about. I ran into the kitchen and saw a big bottle of
liquid Benadryl sitting there, a prescription the doctor had given my
baby after he’d played in a sandbox full of fire ants.
I
grabbed the bottle and ran next door to my in-laws' house, where I
slugged off several big swallows of the antihistamine. My mother-in-law
sent her husband to go bring the car around to the front, and she
called the emergency room at our little hospital, 10 miles away, to
tell them we were on the way.
I walked toward the front
door of their big farmhouse, feeling weaker and weaker, then everything
started to get black, just like when you'd turn a 1950s television off.
My father-in-law told me later that as he walked up the front sidewalk,
I said to him, "A.B., I'm dying," and then crumpled to the ground. He'd
been an Army medic in World War II, and he said he was sure I was dead.
But
within minutes, I started to come to, hearing my mother-in-law's voice
crying over my head: "Lord Jesus, please don't let her die! She has two
little babies!"
They somehow got me into the car, and
A.B. drove me to the hospital. I continued to improve on the way, and
was soon fine. My doctor told me I'd probably saved my life by drinking
that liquid Benadryl. He explained I'd had an anaphylactic reaction to
the headache medicine, the same kind of reaction some people have to
bee stings — one that can kill you very quickly.
The fear
didn't invade me until a day later, when my aunt from Memphis called me
and told me her doctor husband was very worried about me and he wanted
me to see an allergist to find out exactly what component of the
headache pill I had been allergic to. "John said you need to know that
reaction was very serious, Celia, and it's possible that if you have
another one, it could kill you."
I was standing in my
tiny kitchen, holding the phone to my ear, and I promise you, I can
still remember feeling the physical feeling of the fear entering my
body. It felt like icy water running through an IV into my veins. And
even after battling it for 25 years, I've never completely gotten over
it.
Right at that moment, I developed a true phobia
about taking medicine. Because the specialist was not able to pinpoint
what it was I had been allergic to, I refused to take even a single
aspirin or Tylenol for about 10 years, because I was so terrified of
having another allergic reaction.
 And, as phobias do,
that fear grew, and I developed other ones, mainly claustrophobia that
manifests itself in a variety of ways — I hate elevators, and I can't
stand to be in any enclosed, stuffy spaces, especially when I know I'm
not in control of when the door opens. Like being on an airplane, of
which I am really, really afraid. I know it doesn't make sense, but
that's how fear is — totally irrational. Logic has nothing to do with
it.
Over the years, I've overcome some of this fear.
I've memorized Bible verses to help me when I'm struggling. "Fear not,
for I am with you. Be not afraid, for I am thy God" is one of my
mantras. Prayer, especially the Rosary, helps a lot.
 Now,
I can take aspirin and other medicines that I have to take, but when I
have to take something new, I have to fight panic. I can ride an
elevator, but I’m never comfortable. And I have flown when I just
couldn't avoid it. Fear has been pushed back, but not overcome.
I
don't tell you all this because I'm proud of it. I hate my fear, and
I'm ashamed of it. I don't want my life to be limited by it. I want to
be free to get on an elevator without my heart pounding. I'd like to be
able to get on a plane and fly to Colorado to see my son Alex, or to
Virginia to see my sister Cissy, or to the British Isles with Doyle.
But my fear keeps me from doing those things.
I’m
struggling to really take to heart the words — "Be not afraid....I go
before you always" — so that I can walk out into a wider place in my
life that's not fenced in by fear.

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times 2008
Published May 7, 2008

Hey, friends,
Our biggest news of the week has been saying goodbye to my faithful Toyota Highlander, which has been with me for 91,000 miles, ever since I was a single magazine editor in Sarasota.

We exchanged the Highlander for a year-old Toyota Prius, which Doyle and I will share for now, until we can trade his Dodge Ram four-wheel drive diesel truck in for something that gets good mileage. He's driving to Springfield, Mo., many days out of the month for his new job as publisher of the Springfield/Branson Builders' Journal, so he needs the hybrid more than I do most days. The newspaper office where I work is on the town square,  only about a half mile from our house.
We LOVE our little Prius -

and we especially love the mileage we're getting. Check out the bottom of this info screen from the dashboard:

We are grateful consumers this weekend!
How are the gas prices affecting YOUR lives? Share your stories!
(PS - If you have time, check out my new slideshow of Eureka Springs at the top right of this page. If you click on it, it will enlarge to full size so you can read the captions.)

Hey, gang,
I just added some new photos to my previous post, and a new slide show at right.
Please go by and say hello to an old friend of mine who is new to Xanga -
She's at www.xanga.com/ritalstewart
She'd love to hear from you!
Thanks, friends. Y'all have a good Sunday.
Celia

In the old King James version, Psalm 65 is so lovely:
"Thou
makest the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice....and the
little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with
flocks... they shout for joy, they also sing."

Have you ever seen the sunset through the white lace of dogwood trees in full bloom?
Last
night I went out into the sun porch on the back of our house, plugged
in my laptop, sat down on the couch to write, and looked up. This is
what I could see framed by the old-fashioned three-over-one sash
windows that line the west wall: dogwood branches at the peak of their
April glory, looking almost like they were covered in snowy goose down
— and behind them, the pink sunset burning itself out.
Totally unexpected, a wash of beauty across the end of a long, busy day.
A
gift — and I almost missed it by choosing to sit inside at the dining
room table to write instead of going out to the porch where it's so
pleasant with the windows open to the evening air — even with the dryer
humming at the other end of the room, and the Great Dane at my side
barking periodically at the dogs he can hear yelping from the
neighbors' backyard down the street.
I'm glorying in this
mountain springtime. All my life I've thought of fall as my favorite
season, but I'm about to change my mind. Springtimes in Mississippi are
pretty, azalea-decorated seasons,  but our Ozarks springtimes are
something even lovelier. They're more tender somehow...not quite as
showy, but sweeter.
When we first moved here to the hills,
I read a story about a good old north Arkansas farmer who died and went
to Heaven. When St. Peter was welcoming him in, the old man said he was
right happy to be in Heaven. "But I’m just tellin’ you now, I’ll have
to leave for a while every year,” he told the heavenly gatekeeper.
“I'll have to go home to the hills every April, because I just can't
miss the springtime in the Ozarks."
I can almost see how a person might have to leave even Heaven to come back home to the hills so as not to miss the springtime.
The
piercingly sweet joy of it lifts our spirits after the solemn grays of
winter, even though the hills are still beautiful to me even in their
starkness.
First to appear in my world were the little
crocuses, purple and yellow and white, springtime's vanguard. Then the
daffodils laughed their way up all over town, and the purple hyacinths
and paper-white narcissus, that smell like Heaven must.
I've
delighted in the Bradford pears, and the redbuds, which always make me
think of needlepoint branches on a canvas, carefully stitched in purple
thread. And now the fragrant lilacs are blooming in the dooryards, and
the regal iris are flying their purple and yellow flags.
But
its the sweet bridal beauty of the dogwoods I’ve been waiting and
longing and hoping for, especially after missing them last spring. I've
watched the trees carefully over the last weeks, since the limbs were
completely bare, noticing that the ends of the branches are always
upturned toward the sun. First, the ends of the little twigs started to
swell, and finally one day I saw tiny pale-green flowers opening. The
miniature green flowers slowly transformed, and as each day went by,
the blossoms grew larger and whiter until they finally reached their
joyful summit just in the last few days. Full and fluffy as wedding
dresses, glowing white, reaching up toward the sun.

Yes,
there are problems, real, pressing, painful problems, all around us.
Gas prices are pinching us more every day. All across our country,
people are worrying and praying over the war, and gangs in schools, and
people ruining their lives with drugs, and the falling dollar, and
rising unemployment, and the economy and the presidential election. And
folks around here have worried and argued and hurt each other's
feelings over annexation and school millage increases and the alcohol
sales issue and   the new Oxford House. Every morning when you turn on
the news, or we open the Associated Press wire here in the office, we
read about murders, or parents who hurt their kids, or children who
want to blow up their schools and take their own lives.
But
let's never forget, friends — God's still in charge. This is still His
world. And as we all learned as little children around our mothers’
tables, God is great, and He is good. And He loves us.
He reminds us every April when His dogwoods sing sweetly on the hillsides.

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
April 23, 2008

Many delightful adventures await those of us who are smart enough to make our home here in God's Country, the Ozark hills...
but one of the most wonderful of all is a springtime float trip on the Buffalo River.
The entire 150-mile length of the Buffalo is a National River - owned by the National Park Service. It's a free-running stream..no dams. No commercial activity - no docks, no homes along its edges, no motor boats. Just kayaks, canoes, small flat-bottomed fishing boats. And happy people drinking in the April sunshine, the fresh breeze, the stunning bluffs along the river. I wish you could have gone along with us. I always think that what we are seeing is just what the Indians saw hundreds of years before us. Spring woods full of dogwood. Eagles floating on the thermals. Turtles sunning on logs. A beaver family watching us from their lodge under a bluff. Scissortail flycatchers. Hawks. Blue sky reflecting in the river.
I'd like to share some of my favorite photos from the float we (Doyle, his daughter Erika and her fiance' Mike from south Florida) made yesterday from Tyler Bend to Gilbert. I'll put one below, and later put up a web album on the top right-hand corner of this page.

What is the underlying theme of your life? What is your guiding purpose? What motivates you?
If
you had to really boil it down, what do you think God put you here on
this earth to do? What are you supposed to be doing with the talents
and gifts that you have? What is your life’s passion?
I
don't think about these things very often. Most of the time I just kind
of float along, from one task to the next. Write a story, wash some
clothes, vacuum the floor, check my e-mail, wash some dishes...and
before I know it, another day is gone.
It helps me to stay
on course when I stop to re-evaluate what I'm really supposed to be
doing with the hours and days and weeks and years I have left.
I
read something the other day that really made me stop and think. It
compared the normal human lifespan of 70 years to the hours in a day
that we're normally awake, from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., and if your life
were that span of hours, where you are on the clock at your age now. At
my age, 52, I have reached the time of about 7 p.m. in my life. Wow! I
don't have too much time left until 11 p.m. gets here — and that's if I
live to be 70. It makes it seem pretty important to be sure that I'm on
course for the rest of the "evening" of my life.
When I'd
take a turn at the tiller of Daddy's sailboat, there would be a point
on the shore that I'd aim at, and keep the bow pointed in that
direction to stay on course.
What am I aiming at?
Well, Heaven, of course, is my ultimate goal.
But what am I trying to accomplish while I'm still here?
What I long to do, what I think I'm supposed to be doing, very simply — is loving.
When
I was in high school, we used to sing a song at guitar Mass that
condenses it quite well: "And they'll know we are Christians by our
love..."
Would someone who didn’t know me, but just
observed my actions and listened to my speech and read the words I
wrote, be able to tell that I’m a Christian?
Do my words
and actions help comfort and heal, do they bring light and joy, or do
they dampen the spirits and discourage or even hurt those around me?
I fail miserably much of the time. I often criticize and find fault and act selfish and self-absorbed instead of loving.
All
can do is try to correct my course, get my bow pointed in the right
direction, and keep on sailing. The Wind that fills those sails is
quite dependable, if I can keep my boat on course.
I've
been looking think back over my years as a teacher a lot lately, in
light of the recent death of one of my best-loved students. There have
been some times when I’ve had the great privilege of knowing that I had
some kind of positive impact on a kid's life. There's not much in this
world that gives me more joy, validates my being here, than being told
that my life has meant something good in somebody else's life. Now, as
a writer, if a person tells me that something I wrote encouraged them
or lifted their spirits or brightened their life, I am happy. I feel
like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing.
I think I'm
supposed to be showing people what Love looks like. I think I'm
supposed to let God's love shine out of me to other people. To be a
conduit for His Love — whether it is as a teacher, or as a mother, or
as a wife, or as a friend, or as a writer, or as a co-worker.
I
need to ask myself often if anyone could look at me in my daily life
and say, "Oh, that woman must be a Christian. I can tell she is by how
much love (kindness, patience, helpfulness, compassion, empathy, good
humor, joy) she shows to everyone she comes into contact with."
Oh,
I quite often fail miserably. Sometimes, instead of letting God's love
shine out of me, l let grouchiness or self-pity or sarcasm or fear or
anxiety or lots of other negative things seep out instead. If someone
interrupts my train of thought while I'm trying to write at work, I'm
liable to show impatience instead of patience. If I have to do
something on a weekend for somebody else that's not exactly what I
would choose to do with my spare time, I'm liable to show resentment
instead of kindness.
You know how the old lighthouse
keepers had to polish the glass so the bright light could shine from
the tower out to the ships on the dark, stormy sea? I think my job is
to polish my own personal glass so the Light can shine through — and
maybe even help light someone else’s way.
What it all
boils down to is — what will matter in the long run in my life? Looking
back from my deathbed, what will I be glad that I did? What do I want
to be remembered for? What kind of legacy do I want to leave for my
children? And most important of all, what will I be able to take with
me when I go?

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright 2008 Harrison (Ark.) Daily Times
April 16, 2008

Hey, friends,
How are y'all?
For some reason, I'm thinking about egg custard pie.
 My grandmother's wonderful cook, Mary Kate Joiner, back in Mississippi when I was a child, used to make the most wonderful custard pie. There are millions of recipes out there on the internet. I tried one I found in a Fannie Flagg cookbook over the weekend, and it just wasn't it. Called for canned evaporated milk. Yuck.
What I'm looking for is a recipe like Mary Joiner's, which I'm pretty sure had only milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, maybe a pinch of salt, and was sprinkled with nutmeg on top. It also might have had a little butter. It was brown on top, and the inside was creamy and perfect, pale creamy yellow, just liked flan or the custard in a creme brulee. DELICIOUS! Comfort food to the nth degree.
Do any of you  have a recipe like that?

Edit: My friend Jane here in town just e-mailed me this recipe that was, ironically, in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette's food section today. It's a recipe from Frankie's Cafeteria in Little Rock - it sounds exactly like what I'm looking for...can't wait to try it . I'll let y'all know. And if you try it, please report!

Written in late April, 2007:

Grief is a hard freeze of the heart.
Somehow they're all mixed up together in my mind — my mother's death and the killing frost.
 My
memories of this spring will be of Mama's death on April 5 in Sarasota.
This was the spring I missed the dogwoods blooming in the Ozarks — the
year the azaleas started blooming while I was gone. This was the spring
my little Mama died on Holy Thursday — the year we had her memorial
service in south Florida, where even in the subtropics the wind was
bitter cold as we sat outside that afternoon. This was the spring that,
back home in the hills, the hard freeze came and blighted the azalea
blossoms and the dogwoods and the peaches in mid-bloom.
I
came home from Florida after Mama’s funeral hoping for comfort,
stricken to find the azalea blossoms in my front yard like wet,
faded-pink tissue paper, drooping over the burned leaves. I came home
to find the dogwood blossoms beige and withered.
I came home with a frozen heart.
Now
it's late April in the Ozarks, and the springtime is winning. The
browned trees, whose new tender leaves were burned by the freeze, are
turning green again. The crape myrtle at the corner of my porch, the
one that I was afraid was dead, is putting out tiny little leaves.
No,
the dogwoods won't bloom again this year. But I can promise you, if the
good Lord's willing, they'll bloom again next April.
Dylan Thomas called it "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower."
But on some days, my heart feels as limp and empty as those shriveled dogwood blossoms.

April, 2008:
And now it's April again. The wheel of the year has turned all the way around.
This
time last year, I was in Sarasota, taking my turn at the vigil by my
mother's bedside. And up here in the Ozarks, the flowers were blooming,
and then enduring the shocking freeze and turning brown.
This
year, I'm at home in Harrison. The cheery daffodils have blossomed, the
Japanese quince and the yolk-yellow forsythia have spray-painted their
colors on the landscape, and now the redbuds are just beginning to
needlepoint the town in their delicate purple stitches.

 I
pulled down a dogwood branch yesterday and took a close-up, hopeful
look — and saw tiny pale-green blossoms like miniature cups, turned up
toward the sun. In just a week or two, the delight of our hearts, our
Ozarks dogwoods, will be glowing like white fire in the yards and on
the hillsides. Triumphantly back. Blooming again.

And the
azaleas will come back, too, and bloom pink at the edge of my front
porch. This new springtime seems safely underway, with no threat of a
killing frost on the forecast. God’s green Love is diligently calling
forth new life in His world.
And what about the hard freeze in my heart?
Just
like the resurrection I see played out all around me on Nature's stage,
my heart is coming back to life. The pale, withered blossoms of sorrow
have fallen, and new hopeful buds are swelling.
An
old-time Mississippi farmer told me one time that pecan trees bear
better crops in years that they've suffered through harsh
thunderstorms. The west winds that whip through their branches in
summertime storms make the trees stronger. Some of the more brittle
branches break off and fall, but the bigger, more supple ones stay with
the tree and flourish, and later in the season bear heavier crops.
Like
our peach trees and our dogwoods and our azaleas, some of us have
suffered hard freezes over the past year. Just this week, I heard of
the death of one of my best-loved students from back home. Gabe was
just 32. I taught him English in our little school from the time he was
in the eighth grade all the way through high school. He was not just my
gifted, artistic student — he was my friend. His mama and daddy and
brothers’ hearts are broken. They’re suffering their own hard freeze of
the heart, an icy pain I can't even begin to imagine.
But
this I know, because I've seen it to be true over and over again in my
52 years on this green Earth: the wheel of the year will gently turn.
The faded blossoms will fall. The healing summer and bracing fall and
restful winter will roll by, and one day, the piercingly beautiful
springtime will come again.
And the dogwoods will bloom again on the Ozarks hillsides.
I promise you it's so.

By Celia DeWoody
Copyright Harrison Daily Times 2008
Published April 2, 2008