{"id":967,"date":"2013-07-02T01:10:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-02T01:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kandynolesstevens.com\/?p=967"},"modified":"2013-07-02T01:10:23","modified_gmt":"2013-07-02T01:10:23","slug":"blossom-and-bloom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/?p=967","title":{"rendered":"Blossom and bloom"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Nowatzki<\/a>

Nowatzki Family Homestead by Neil Nowatzki (All Rights Reserved)<\/p><\/div>\n

Twenty \u2013 two years is a relatively long time to spend with one person by\u00a0some standards.\u00a0 Over the course of those years, I am so glad that we have lost some of the formality of titles.\u00a0 At some point, I just started calling his people \u2013 MY PEOPLE!\u00a0 When I\u00a0talk about\u00a0my cousins (like Ellen or Amy) or sisters (Mary, Rita, or Lori), I don\u2019t mention the words in-laws any longer. First of all it is exhausting and complicated to explain the relationships, and second, in God\u2019s eyes we are all family.\u00a0 Frankly, I don\u2019t like to say, “Well this is so-n-so and she is married to Daniel\u2019s cousin”, because honestly we are closer than our husbands; therefore, we ARE the cousins! Along with my own people, I quite possibly have one of the biggest families around.<\/p>\n

Woven into the fabric of families are traditions and treasures.\u00a0 I recently finished the memoirs of an adopted grandma (Here I go again! My FAMILY is HUGE!), and cradled in her words were examples of those sweet time-honored\u00a0traditions like the ebb and flow of life on the South Dakota prairie.\u00a0 While it might get missed by the careless reader, one such tradition shared over and over was that of lunch twice a day.\u00a0 (I could write a whole book on colloquialisms of the word lunch, but on the prairie that meant coffee about nine or nine-thirty and again at two. Just roll with it, if that\u2019s not your definition of lunch.)\u00a0 When I read her words, I was surrounded by the warm cozy feeling you get when wrapped in a favorite old quilt.<\/p>\n

On Friday, I had\u00a0my\u00a0own blessed\u00a0encounter \u2013 shared with my beloved – regarding a treasure that originated in his family.\u00a0\u00a0 Said treasure is a rose bush that started out on the family homestead in Wales, North Dakota. This was the home where my other Mom and her siblings were raised in the backyard of the Canadian border.\u00a0 As my understanding goes, cuttings from the rose followed the family into town, and later into the yards and gardens of the children and grandchildren of Grandpa\u00a0and\u00a0Grandma Nowatzki.<\/p>\n

A few years back, we asked Mom if we could have a cutting for our front yard garden.\u00a0 She said that we could, but the time of year wasn\u2019t the best to make one.\u00a0 Unbeknownst to us, she and Rita lovingly and tenderly drove the cuttings down to Minnesota later that summer.\u00a0 Promptly, we planted it right outside our bedroom window, where we nursed, fertilized, and generally loved on that plant.<\/p>\n

More than once, I was moved to tears because she never looked like she held much promise. I felt like such a failure when it came to the Wales rose (clearly not her trade name, but as my sister Mary says, it\u2019s her name now). \u00a0\u00a0In fact, one time a friend came to help me do some landscaping and declared our family treasure \u2013 a stick.\u00a0 I vehemently argued that she was, indeed,\u00a0NOT a stick.\u00a0How could she think such a thing?\u00a0 I explained it was a family heirloom and exhorted that I was disappointed that she couldn\u2019t see its beauty inherent.\u00a0\u00a0The slight shrug of her\u00a0shoulders indicated she wasn\u2019t convinced.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, we were a demolition crew, home remodelers, landscape architects, and home organizers, all wrapped into one big team.\u00a0 During the landscaping portion of our home improvement, I was beckoned to come quickly by \u00a0my sweetie watering the garden bed between our house and the neighbors.\u00a0 There was urgency in his voice that I don\u2019t normally hear.\u00a0 I jumped up and came running.\u00a0 Upon arrival, all I saw were some zinnia cotyledons and beautiful clematis flowers (both of which I had seen all week).\u00a0 My perplexed eyebrows must have given a hint at\u00a0my annoyance of\u00a0being called away from Reed\u2019s garden.\u00a0 A quick head nod indicating around the corner of the house to the front garden changed my outlook.\u00a0 I moved over a few footsteps and was stopped breathlessly in my tracks.\u00a0 There were two of the most beautiful blossoms on our prized Wales rosebush.<\/p>\n

\"wales<\/a><\/p>\n

I smiled in the middle of happy tears at two thoughts.\u00a0 We finally did it \u2013 loved her enough to blossom!\u00a0 Followed by how much love one man could give, fully knowing that simple sight would make my day!\u00a0 He knows this because he also knows that none of my childhood favorites would survive the harsh winters of Minnesota; therefore, I had to adopt one of his.<\/p>\n

Later as I got ready for bed, I saw those beautiful blooms outside my window.\u00a0 I felt my heart stirring. \u00a0I\u2019m probably a whole lot like that rosebush to God.\u00a0 When, at times in my life, I have been the stick, He just kept on coaxing and nudging \u2013 hoping that I would bloom.\u00a0(If you have ever read\u00a0The Shack<\/span>, the Holy Spirit as a gardener fits here perfectly.) \u00a0He didn\u2019t give up when others declared \u2013 she is just a stick with thorns.\u00a0 Nope! He saw the potentiality, the promise, the HOPE he had for me and my future.\u00a0 I definitely needed pruning (don\u2019t we all?) along the way, but there, at the core, was God\u2019s beauty just waiting for the perfect timing to bloom.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty \u2013 two years is a relatively long time to spend with one person by\u00a0some standards.\u00a0 Over the course of those years, I am so glad that we have lost some of the formality of titles.\u00a0 At some point, I just started calling his people \u2013 MY PEOPLE!\u00a0 When I\u00a0talk about\u00a0my cousins (like Ellen or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[81,110,207,208,239,254,412,542,580],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realsweetgrace.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}