Episode 273 - Preparing for Community

I haven't had a major social event at my house since COVID. That's about to change. Are prepping and exhibiting hospitality in conflict with one another?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning. This is an emma, and I think today
is the eighth. It is Monday. I am tell I'm
not working from home today since I'm on my vehicle.
According to the temperature on my vehicle, it is fifty
nine degrees on September the eighth, and that's got to
be some kind of record in Texas, maybe a miracle,

(00:25):
because I do not live in the van atdle. So
we're okay, We're just gonna be excited about that. I
might have needed to wear an overcoat. We're not used
to this kind of temperature. Now. According to my phone,
it's gonna heat up this at the end of the week.
Niece and sisters, whether app on their phone says ninety

(00:51):
mine says ninety six. I think I like there's better.
Mine tends to be overly dramatic when it comes to
a weather. I'm not really sure. It's it's kind of
like we're all gonna die whether at I don't know
why that is, but it will always show the extreme is,
which is kind of funny. Anyway, we're gonna talk about
on Monday morning. We're gonna talk about community. I think

(01:15):
I have addressed this before, but we're gonna have at
least a slightly different take on it today. One of
the things that one of the goals I had for
this old house when I bought it and had it
moved and spent twelve years restoring it, was for it

(01:39):
to be a place where we could engage in hospitality,
which is a fundamental characteristic of supposed to be a
fundamental characteristic of Christians. And that is one of the
themes that you will see throughout the uh Mary's Mary

(02:04):
Maverick's memoirs. You see hospitality because there was no such
thing as the Holiday Inn express or the Hampton Inn
or whatever. You had to stay with somebody or you
camped out in the open. And so you know that.

(02:24):
You notice how she said throughout the chapter, this last chapter,
when they were moving from the coast back up to
San Antonio, went so many miles and stayed with missus
so and so went so many miles and stayed with
mississ so and so and so. You see the fact
that people, uh, it was a it was an accepted

(02:47):
practice for people to go stay at other people's houses,
whether you knew them or not. Okay, I went in
and like it wasn't really an old House tour. It
wasn't on the tour. It wasn't on a tour, but
it was an old house on some grounds where there
was like a actually I think I went to an

(03:07):
outdoor quilt show and it was in basically this park,
and part of this park was a house, an old
house that and I don't even remember who it's supposed to,
whose house it's supposed to be, but it was somebody
came as in Texas, and that's vague. And anyway, they

(03:29):
had a room that they built on their front porch
that was not connected to their house, and so they
were able to have I mean, so if people were
traveling through in this case, probably would have been not
families necessarily, but like men, you know, maybe you know,

(03:53):
they had circuit judges and they had uh, you know,
you might have might have been a salesman, might have
been somebody traveling through. Think by mister Maverick. Every time
you turn around, he's going somewhere. And so you had
you had people traveling back then, or you may have
had men traveling alone at that point, or maybe a

(04:14):
couple of them or whatever, and so you were expected
to be hospitable and take in strangers. But this particular
family had I want to say, multiple daughters. So what
the man did is he built this room on the outside,
like on his porch, so the only way into this

(04:34):
room was from the porch, and then there was no
connection between the room and the rest of the house.
And so that way, at night they locked up the house.
You know, the girls were safe, but they were still
allowing strangers a place to lay their head at night.
And you know, for the most part, those strangers would

(04:56):
have been probably back then would have been respectable, maybe
not so much nowadays. So there's a lot of reasons
why we don't do that kind of thing in these times,
mostly because there are places for people to stay. Uh
you don't. You don't go down the road ten miles

(05:16):
and expect to expect to go stay at somebody's house. Now,
we'll say, when I was a child and there weren't
as many like hotels like there are now, like for
oil field workers and that kind of thing to stay at.
You know, we would one time, I'm trying to remember
how old I was, maybe eight or nine nine maybe, Uh,

(05:40):
we stayed with my father, rented a room from an
older couple. They probably weren't as old as I thought
they were at the time in Maheia. He was on
a job in Mahea. Uh and for those of you
not familiar with Texas, that is m e x i A,

(06:00):
but it is pronounced my head. And we stayed and
so he they only had a two bedroom, one bath house,
so we're not talking about a huge house. It was
tiny and especially about today's standards. And he he rented

(06:22):
a room from them, and then on the weekends we
would come stay. And I've always felt very sorry for
these now that I'm an adult, for these two older
people who you know, every weekend, Uh, this woman and
her two children would descend on them, and so the
house was like wall to wall people. Then then you've

(06:44):
got six people sharing a bathroom as opposed to two,
okay three anyway. Uh. The one thing they were very,
very nice people. And one of the things that I
remember is that the like to sew and do different
kinds of things. And so I know it's a thing

(07:05):
now if you go look at different home goods places
there is it's kind of a retro thing now that
people do the smocked pillows. You can see them at
Target and home goods and Wayfair and all those places. Well,

(07:25):
this lady taught me how to make a smocked pillow. Uh,
And she drew a pattern on the on a on
a on a brown grocery sack that dates us, and
then she showed me how to do the smocking. And
so I have the two pillows that I smoked back

(07:45):
then when I was nine years old, and we made
them out of corduroy, because the corduroy, you know, had
lines in it so that you could tell where to
put your smocking. And then you know, you measured with
a ruler to do the all the lines. You put
all your lines. I think we used a pencil on
the back side of it and then you use that

(08:06):
to sew it together and it made smoky. And so
I still have those two pillows and there on my bed. Anyway,
that got off my subject of hospitality anyway, So hospitality
is an expected thing in the Bible that we're supposed
to do. And really and truly, since twenty twenty, we've

(08:29):
not been overly hospital bull at our house. We really
have not had any visitors. I mean I say that
we've had people come over for holidays. I think we
had somebody eat. I think somebody came and had Thanksgiving
with us last year, some friends of ours, and you know,
we've done that kind of stuff, but as far as

(08:51):
having a you know, good size of BND, we have
not done that. In fact, the very last thing that
happened at our house before cod hit that weekend before
spring break in March is for two years in a row.
Now they're too old at this point and into many

(09:11):
extracurricular activities, but back then I worked my people I
work with had a whole crop of daughters and granddaughters
that were all about the same age. They were all
in like early elementary school at that point. They're in
middle school now, and that's been a while. And so

(09:34):
it was the second annual tea party at my at
Emma's house, and so we all got dressed up and
we put on our fascinators our heads and we had
a tea party and so you know, we'd have a
hot We had a whole house full of little girls
and mama's and grandmama's and so it was really fun.

(09:56):
We have great pictures from that, and so that was
the last thing we did. And then first thing, you know,
we started hearing all this stuff about sheltering in place,
and and you know, we've made it through the first
week of spring break, and then all of a sudden
there was more than one week of spring break, and
lo and behold, nobody went back to school. And at

(10:19):
that point in time, the decision was made for us
to go home and work, which we did and then
started doing everything by zoom. And so five years later,
we really haven't done that that much stuff. And in
the meantime, obviously, I have spent a lot of time
and effort on prepping since I saw that, you know,

(10:42):
at least from what I could observe, things were not
getting really any better, and they still don't seem to be.
I swear we're We've entered in twenty twenty winter twilight zone,
wind figured out how to get out of it. So
it really hadn't been much in the world of social

(11:02):
events going on. And the most important thing about community,
which is the point of this, if I ever get
to it, is that it's not about hosting big events.
It's about getting to know people and making people feel
welcome and making connections and relationships with people. In my

(11:26):
line of work, we travel a lot. I don't travel
as much as I used to us to be gone
all the time. But as one of my coworkers says,
relationships are built on the road, and she's right about that,
because that's how you get to know people if you've
had to spend ten hours with them in a vehicle,
in a vehicle going to Amarilla or Edinburgh or somewhere.

(11:49):
Texas is a big state, and so it really it's
that it's the community that's the important thing. So Saturday
we had a community building event. My Sunday School class
got together and went out to eat for lunch and

(12:11):
had a wonderful time. And then as we were visiting,
we were telling some new people in our Sunday School
class about the when we first joined the church and
how we had a Sunday school party, Christmas party at
our house and you know, all the how fun it

(12:33):
was and all that kind of stuff, to which one
of the Sunday School teachers looked at me and said,
have it at your house maybe, And I was like,
and so I sort of side stepped that question because
at this point in time that at least the interior
of my house is pretty scruffy and I have not

(12:54):
addressed just you know, as I have said before, we've
been in South thirty one years. It got restored the
first time. Well, it needs to be repainted on the inside.
It needs just some cosmetic stuff. Now there are some
things bigger than cosmetic stuff that I want to do,
but I want to redo the bathrooms and the kitchen

(13:18):
countertops need to be redone and all that kind off.
So I mean, there's a lot that needs to be done,
a lot of nippicky stuff, but just some things where
we need to touch up paint. Actually everything needs to
be painted on the inside, but if we just touched
it up, that would help, you know, things that just

(13:43):
you know, things that need to be done to keep
things freshened up in whatever. And I'm like, because, first
of all, what precipitated me getting a new roof for
those of you been with me long enough to know
that I got one this last year, is that when
I came home after Hurricane Old, I've been on a
work trip. I came home, there's a hole in my
ceiling in my bedroom, and so I got the roof

(14:07):
or place. I have not dealt with the ceiling yet,
and I need to do that. So I just hadn't
gotten around to it, and you know, it's just being me.
I don't I want it fixed, but it wasn't high
on the priority priority list, and right now a driveway
is and that's gonna be a big check. So anyway,

(14:30):
you know, just I was working more on infrastructure here
in the last few years that I've been working on
cosmetic things. But cosmetic things are important to anyway. So
then lo and behold. If the preacher yesterday didn't preach
on building community and being hospitable, m okay, that was

(14:51):
a message, I thought, thanks lord, I think you really
do have a sense of humor, don't you. Okay? I anyway,
so I told the Sunday School teacher that yes, we
indeed we would could have Christmas at our house. I said.
Now I'm gonna warn you ahead of time. House is

(15:11):
pretty scruffy looking, I said, but you know, everybody is
welcome to come to my house. But that means that
there will be a lot of projects on the plate
this fall that might not have been on the plate
if we weren't having a social event. Uh, but why

(15:32):
is that it's important to do this? Because we do
have new members of Mersunday School class. This gives us
a way to get to know people, become close to
people if you just go to Sunday school or church.
And this was kind of the point of the preacher's
message yesterday, is if you just come to church and
you get back in your car and you go home,

(15:54):
you don't make any kind of connections with people. Now,
why are connections important? Because we're social beings. And one
of the things that people have been talking about prepper
people have been talking about here lately. I think in
the eighties and nineties, which was before I prepping was
a thing for me that it was all about being

(16:17):
a lone wolf and going out and living in the
woods or some such nonsense. Well, that's not gonna really work.
And if you look at how people survived hard times
and catastrophic events in the past, it has to do
with community. And one of the things I can say,

(16:38):
and this is true, okay, so in the country, and
even I will say here in my lifetime, what happened
in the country is people probably were not as close
to each other as neighbors as they used to be,
like when my parents were growing up, and that kind
of things. Everybody started, like women started working away from

(17:03):
home and when you did that, then nobody was at
home for people to visit or whatever, and that made
a huge difference. So a lot of times, and this
is the case for me, I'm not friends with any
of my neighbors, my closest friends, or my people that
I work with that my work friends and so uh

(17:24):
and I'm close to the you know, ladies and Massay
school class. So those things. We're not as close to
our neighbors as we used to be. But if we
if transportation was uh severely curtailed and we couldn't really
travel like we do nowadays, our sphere would have to
get smaller and it have to be the people around us.

(17:46):
And having grown up in the country and you know,
attending until I'm here in the last five years or
seven years a country church, people were very close because
they were neighbors. And you know, we went to a

(18:07):
church and the church was small, and so you knew
everybody and or you were kin to them, one of
the two, and so you had a very close relationship.
You know, the church I'm in now is very large,
or at least large for us, and it is while
we are close to the ladies in our city school

(18:27):
class there's a whole lot of people in our church
I might know, I might know on site, some I
taught with when I back when I taught to high school.
But you know, there's a lot of people that I
don't know or I don't know well, and so that
makes a huge difference. And that's kind of what's the

(18:48):
point of the message, is that it is important for
us to get to know one another. And it really
is because it's hard times that makes us realize how
much we penned on each other. Okay, that that kind
of thing is very very important to have people that

(19:09):
you can depend on. And I have seen you know,
normally think of it as when some one passes away.
I have seen that happen when people had no friends,
had no community, and how sad that was. And I've
seen it where people had a lot of community, and
and it was much It was more. It was more

(19:32):
a celebration of this person's life because all the people
that knew them and had been touched by them came
together to honor that person. Those the couple that I
had talked about, one of them passed away in July
and the other one passed away in August. They were
those kinds of people. There were lots of people at
their funerals. They the testimony that people gave to the

(19:58):
about these people, and they were very hospitable. They were
the kinds of people who built relationships, believed in being
neighbors with people. Uh they had always lived out in
the country, but they they made they they realized how
corn it was to be hospitable and to be a

(20:19):
good neighbor. And so having said all of this, I'm
back to the Okay, So we're gonna be having a
Christmas party at my house. So there's a lot of
stuff to get done before then. So this whole fun
we'll be talking about what's am I to do list?
And have I gotten it done yet. In addition to this,

(20:39):
apparently to lady where niece and sister go to Majong
play Majong, they she's getting her kitchen redone. So we
are hosting Majong next Monday. So that means that there's
a lot of intermediate not big pridject except that ceiling

(21:01):
in my room's not gonna get done, so they're goad
to overlook it. It's a small group, so you know,
it is what it is that we want them to come.
But uh, and that's part of it. If you're thinking
about you can't be hospitable because your house looks like
this or whatever is it's more like, you know, all
of us can clean that we can do, and I
have plenty of that to do this week. Uh, but

(21:22):
things don't have to be perfect, and so they're not
gonna be. But I I am gonna try to get
the inside the house decorated for fall and UH do
some a little bit of deep cleaning so that it's
more presentable when we host Majong on Monday. So I

(21:44):
have arrived at work and I am running late today,
so we're gonna get on with it. Talk to you
tomorrow