Catalog Illustration -- Me?

Yesterday's mail brought the first gardening catalog of the season, and it's a gorgeous piece of propaganda. John Scheepers does a beautiful job -- color photographs of ripe tomatoes, delicate poppies, and assorted other flowers and vegetables on the cover, with delicate line drawings and colored illustrations inside. Suddenly, I want to order seeds from every page!
But I can't -- a very shady yard and a very busy schedule mean container gardening at most, and that makes me a little sad. It also makes me look at the back yard with an eye to finally cutting down that big tree that is dying -- that would give us a lot more sunny area for real gardening.
The other thing this catalog made me think about is this: what if God published a Fruits of the Holy Spirit catalog? One with lovely color images of love, joy, peace, and all those other fruits of the Spirit? What if they were illustrated so beautifully that our mouths began to water just looking at them?
Then I realized -- we ourselves are the catalog! We are supposed to be living in such a way that the fruits of the Spirit are illustrated beautifully in our lives. We're the image that is supposed to make mouths water, and to make people hunger for that fruit.
So now I'm thinking of what I need to garden in my own life -- maybe mulch a little joy, or cultivate a little gentleness.
I want to look good in the catalog.

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow . . . ?

Last year, I got suspicious: after Christmas, we replaced our Christmas decorations with snowmen. Snowmen are appropriate in this part of the country for January, and they make a nice decorative bridge from Christmas to Valentine's Day.
Once the snowmen were sitting around, it started to snow. Outside. A lot.

Was there a connection? I began to think so.
I noticed that when I put some of the snowmen away, back in their box in a dark part of the house, it quit snowing so much. Suspicious. Just to test my theory, I got the snowmen back out. It snowed.
This year, we've already had a lot of snow, even without snowmen sitting around. I'm getting ready to put all our Christmas decorations away, and I'm wondering if it's dangerous to free the snowmen from their box on a back shelf.



Will we get more snow? Will it stay cold? Is it the snowmen's fault?






Stay tuned.