We had some unexpected and unfortunate excitement here last week. When I got home from school on Tuesday, there was an ambulance at the Shillig’s house. Miriam was standing outside their house and waved for me to go over. She told me that Kurt had had a stroke. I rushed into their house. Kurt was on the couch. Julie asked me to give him a blessing, which I did. The paramedics came. They took him to a hill outside Ulysses where a helicopter came and flew him to Geisinger Hospital in Danville. Miriam drove Julie there to be with him. They treated him and he began to recover immediately. But we were really scared there for a while. Kurt and Julie’s children, Shay, Chase, Kohl, Kale and Dax and his wife Jillian and their two daughters Phi and Freyja, flew in on Wednesday to be with them. They released Kurt to come home on Thursday. Kurt is recovering quickly. If you didn’t know he’d had a stroke, you’d never guess he’d had one. It is miraculous. Their family is enjoying some time together. We appreciate all the prayers offered on his behalf. Great blessings were received.
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| The helicopter taking Kurt to the hospital. |
After seeing Kurt fly away on a helicopter, not knowing then what would happen, everything seemed to come into sharper focus for me. As the week went on, I was hyper aware of everything around me. I was very cognizant of the fragility of life and the way the world can change in an instant. I could see blessings where I had overlooked them before. I felt grateful for all the little things that fill life with beauty and stability, transient though they may be.
We had another spell of unseasonably mild weather that lasted most of the week. On Wednesday the temperature hit 65°, a thing most rare for February. All but the most stubborn patches of snow vanished. The snowdrops, newly freed from the snow that had covered them, began to bloom immediately. Posey, our peacock, seemed to think it was time to begin spring courting. He spent the afternoons displaying his regrowing tail for chickens that completely ignored him. We need to get him a few pea hens soon.
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| Posey displaying for his indifferent friends. |
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| Newly emerged snowdrops. |
I took advantage of the warm spell and began the process of pruning the orchard when I got home from school on Wednesday afternoon. Moving through the trees, inspecting them and imagining how they will look when they wake out of dormancy made me feel deep gratitude for the promise of fruit later in the year. Last year when I did my pruning, I was severe. Several of the trees needed some serious surgery, taking out dead wood, removing low limbs, reshaping overgrown trees. This year I will go easy, just some light trimming out of water sprouts and suckers, and a few small branches judiciously removed. Last year we hardly got any apples – this year I’m hoping and praying for a bumper crop.
The weather has been very changeable. On Friday when I went to school it was 50° and breezy. When I walked out of school that afternoon, it was 26° and snowing. Saturday when I went out in the morning, it was 14° and the world was white with snow. By the end of the day it had all melted. Today it is 50° again, but in the week ahead it looks like we’ll be flipping between rain, freezing rain, and snow. But we are entering the last week of February and that’s a consolation.
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| Saturday morning. |
After bingeing on Italian Opera for a while and then romping through Russian Composers, last week I decided to go Scandinavian. Scandinavia, in its current geographical usage, is made up of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. When I looked at the list of composers from those countries I was shocked to see how many there were – dozens from each country, even a hundred or more from some of them. I decided to limit my exploration to the ones generally agreed upon to be the most significant. As I explored, I found that I really like most of this music. There was some flash and drama, but not the sort I found with the Russians. It was more introspective. I was especially taken by the music of Edvard Greig (1843 – 1907). I already knew some of his more famous music, his Piano Concerto in A minor and the Peer Gynt Suites 1 & 2. During the course of my explorations, I found that I have a tenuous connection to Edvard Grieg. During the summer of 1858, when he was 15 years old, Grieg met the famous Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, who was a family friend. Ole Bull’s brother was married to Grieg’s aunt. Bull recognized Grieg’s talent and persuaded his parents to send him to the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany, which helped him on his way to becoming a performer and composer.
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| Edvard Greig |
Ole Bull toured the United States and his violin concerts were a great success. In 1852, he bought 11,144 acres of land in Potter County, Pennsylvania, for $10,388 and founded a colony that he called New Norway. The colony consisted of four communities: New Bergen (still here but called Carter Camp now); Oleona (a tiny village still here); New Norway (no longer exists); and Valhalla (no longer exists). Bull called the highest point in Valhalla, Nordjenskald, and he began construction of a castle there, which was never finished. His colonial scheme did not work out and he soon gave up on this venture and went back to giving concerts. Today the site is the location of the Ole Bull State Park, 33 miles to the south of Gold, down in remote Stewardson Township.
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| Ole Bull |
My connection with all of this goes one step further. Many of the facilities at Ole Bull State Park were constructed during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC provided jobs for out of work industrial workers from throughout the United States. At Ole Bull State Park the CCC workers built outhouses, pavilions, camping areas, and the original dam on Kettle Creek where the swimming area is. My grandfather’s cousin, May Erway, was married to Norman Goodenough, and they ran the CCC camp at Ole Bull in the 1940's. When my father was a teenager, he came up from New Cumberland several years during the summer and stayed with May and Norm at the Ole Bull CCC camp. He used to tell us stories about his summers there. When I was young and we came to visit Potter County, my father would take us swimming in Kettle Creek at Ole Bull. Since we moved here, we’ve gone down there several times. Maybe we’ll make a trip down there this summer. It’s a beautiful park. You can still hike up to the ruins of the castle. So that’s my convoluted connection to all of this: me → my father → Norm and May Goodenough → Ole Bull → Edvard Grieg.
A big but somewhat expected change occurred for us today. When we moved here twenty-three years ago, we began attending church in the Wellsville Branch, in Wellsville, New York. It is the closest church unit to us, only twenty-five minutes north of us. But according to the official boundaries of the church, we should have been attending at the Mansfield Branch in Mansfield, Pennsylvania, an hour’s drive to the southwest of us. We got permission from the proper authorities to attend in Wellsville and that’s where we’ve attended all these years. But we always wanted to be officially part of the branch. After 23 years of waiting, that finally happened today. After much negotiating and discussion between three stake presidencies, two missions, and other leaders in Salt Lake City, our boundaries were realigned today. Most of Potter County has been added to the Wellsville Branch. I am currently the Branch President of that branch. The geographic area of our branch has doubled in size because of this realignment. We have gained 48 new members, though none of them are active. As part of this realignment, our branch has been moved from the Palmyra New York Stake, to the Jamestown New York Stake, and from the New York Syracuse Mission to the Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Mission. We are closer to Jamestown by half an hour. All this realigning and boundary changing has come about because the Howes and then the Shilligs moved to Gold. If we hadn’t moved here, nothing would have changed. I’m glad to be officially living in the area over which I preside, but I am sad that we are no longer part of the Palmyra Stake. Even though we’ve lived on the farthest outskirts of that stake, we’ve formed many friendships with its members over the years. I’m sure we’ll make new friends in our new stake too. It was also nice to be part of the Palmyra Stake where the church began and where there are so many church historical sites – the Smith Farm, the Sacred Grove where the First Vision took place in 1820, the Hill Cumorah where the Book of Mormon plates were hidden, the Grandin Press where the Book of Mormon was first published, and the Whitmer Farm where the church was officially organized in 1830. Jamestown is famous too as the birthplace of Lucille Ball and Roger Tory Peterson (of field guide fame), but that’s not quite as impressive to members of the church.
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| Our new branch boundaries. |
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| We love Lucy. |
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| My field guide hero, Roger Tory Peterson. |
We’re home from church. We’ve had lunch. This afternoon all the Shillig children and grandchildren are returning to their homes out west. Tomorrow is Presidents' Day and there is no school. I don’t know what I’ll do with my free time yet. Not having any plans is actually a little exciting. And then we’ll slog through the last week of February. Every day brings us closer to spring.
