My Cup Runneth Over (Musings of an Unspecialized Generalist)

A bicycle ride with my daughter? Yes, great! But, we weren't headed for the bike trail, and she said we wouldn't road-ride. “Turn into that driveway.” “Look at all those horses.” It was a great surprise and a wonderful treat. A horseback ride with Melony on a gorgeous fall day. I couldn't remember the last time that I had ridden a horse. What joy to be back in the saddle again. (Gene Autry was one of my boyhood heroes, Roy Rogers too.) I have had a special fondness for horses from my kidhood. I never had a horse as a kid, but my friend Sam and I rode his dad's draft horses often. Sam also had a saddle horse at one time; I took a bad spill from her. The horse turned toward the barn and I didn't; I kept going down the blacktop, face and shoulder first. I had another friend or two who had horses, as well. I am told that once when I was very young I went over and asked Mrs. Crispe, well-off Plainwell resident, if I could rent her barn to keep a horse. I...

On Thursday of this week I completed a chainsaw sculpture on a 201 year old tree that had become an 11-foot stump/trunk in front of First Congregational Church of Otsego. The city was going to cut the tree to the ground, but at our request they left a portion of it standing. (Can you imagine that happening in Detroit or even Kalamazoo?) Tim Lane made the vertical cuts, but I did the sculpting and color staining. It was a labor of joy-- thank you, Lord, for the privilege and the ability to accomplish this. I have done other tree sculptures, but there was something different about this one. I didn't feel that I was doing it for me, as I had the others in our yard on Barton Street. It gave me pause many times to think that this tree was standing when James Madison was the President of the United States, and I was altering -- yet saving it. A line from Joyce Kilmer's poem “Trees,” came to my mind many times. “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God could make a tree.” (In...