Catching Up -- At Least Trying To

Life seems to be moving at an accelerated pace these days. I have been working the past 3 days at Metigoshe Ministries, where we lived for almost 2 months after it become too cold to live in our pop up camper and before moving into our basement. They have a summer camp for children, and I helped another lady clean up in the kitchen area. Talk about heavy duty cleaning! I am still sore from scrubbing and painting. It sure was beautiful out there, though, as the camp overlooks a lake.

Life didn't stop here while I was gone ... The boys continued to plant and water in our garden areas, as well as working on other projects. Today I got home about 6 p.m. to discover our friends from an hour or so away had brought their tractor with an attachment to break up enough land to double our garden areas! I think we will then continue to work on that land so it will be ready to plant next year. This family consists of Chris (24), and 3 of his younger brothers, and also Chris' sister and family. It's so amazing to me how people are willing to bring a tractor from that far away to help us out with our garden areas. We then all ended up at our friend Paulette's (she knows this family as well) for supper. We all contributed to the meal.

Another friend showed up today to help Jim check our bees. She came from an hour away. Linda has her own hives, so is very knowledgeable in bee keeping. They discovered that one hive was gone. Jim suspects that something happened to the queen bee, so the rest just moved into the other hive. He is going to try to figure out what happened, but we may never know. We are very thankful for Linda's help.

North Dakota is a very interesting state. I was reminded at supper tonight that the population is somewhere around 600,000, which isn't much for a rather large area of land. One of our discussions concerned how interconnected so many families are, in spite of large distances separating us. When we lived in the city we started getting to know other families in the state that would be considered Christian agrarians. Most of these families homeschool and live in rural areas. Knowing one family leads to getting to know other like minded families, and this is how the network began developing for us. Our goats came from friends that live about 4 hours from us. Much of our bee keeping equipment came from another family living almost 4 hours from us. Our German Shepherd came from a family living 5 hours away. And yet, we keep in touch and it doesn't take much for the families to find a reason to get together.

Last summer friends put together the Bottineau Gospel Music Festival in town, and many of our networking friends attended and even played and sang at the Sunday afternoon event (lots of us are into bluegrass music!). Quite a few stayed overnight at Metigoshe Ministries so we could have times of fellowship, and in the morning there were 65 of us eating breakfast at our friend Paulette's health center! I don't know what is going to happen this summer now that the gas prices are skyrocketing, but I have a feeling there will be the same desire for fellowship and people will continue to meet.

On Saturday Jim and everyone but our youngest and me will travel 3 hours to Bismarck to the homeschool graduation ceremony there; Jim will speak and the boys will play a few songs. I will stay home to milk the goat! We have a couple coming on Sunday from at least 4 hours away to visit with us (they sold us our goats), and more from the Bismarck area may arrive on Monday. Fellowship is so sweet -- and so necessary! I guess I may have to wait a while longer to try to catch up on things.