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Nancy Parker Brummett

Nancy Parker Brummett

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Find Your Friends

July 21, 2022 by Nancy 21 Comments

A needlepoint sampler I inherited was stitched by a great aunt in 1933 and reads, “To a friend’s house the road is never long.” The road my husband and I took from Colorado Springs, CO, to Montrose, CO, to see my friend Betty is 230.9 miles long, the estimated time extended by construction delays in the Black Canyon. It felt long that day. So when we pulled into Betty’s driveway and saw her pretty home with the hanging flower basket and manicured yard, I breathed a sigh of relief. When we stepped inside to be greeted by Betty sitting in her favorite recliner, the road no longer seemed long at all.

Elizabeth Van Liere (Betty) and I met many years ago at a writer’s conference although neither of us can remember exactly which one. We just remember that we immediately “clicked,” having our love for writing and our love for the Lord in common. She published her first book, Dare to Live, Devotions for Those Over the Hill, Not Under It!, in 2011 at the age of 87. Her second book, Dare to Laugh, Devotions for Those Full of Years, was released four years later.

Available through Iron Stream Media or Amazon.com.

Yet Betty had been writing and publishing articles, poems, children’s stories and devotions in periodicals for at least 60 years before venturing into book publishing. “The first little story I wrote was about a rooster,” Betty recalls, “and I sold it to Jack and Jill Magazine.”

I knew Betty to be a faithful attender of writer’s conferences, but when I asked her if she’d ever had any formal education to prepare her for her life as a writer she quipped, “No. I was born smart.” Clearly, that’s true. God also gave her the gift of laughter making her a delight to be around. Her witticisms have often appeared in the comments she consistently adds to my blog posts, and she’s encouraged me in my writing time and again. Recently she shared news of my new book, The Hope of Glory, Volume Two, with ladies at her church.

When I told Betty that we wanted to stop in to see her and gave her the date she said, “OK, I’ll try to hang on.” We’re so glad she did! It was a joy to just sit and visit about her life, learning things I never gleaned from the warm relationship we’ve developed over email and Facebook these many years. I learned she was born and raised in Holland, MI, and that she and her husband Chet visited Germany, lived in Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon, and wintered in Mexico for years before his death from cancer in 1991. Her family now consists of their four grown children, 10 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. She and her daughter Joanne share the home in Montrose.

While her husband pursued a career in the automotive industry, Betty often worked in high school libraries in towns where they lived, and I can’t imagine a better fit for her. When I asked her what’s next, she said, “I’m going to go up, that’s what!” pointing up to heaven. She will be 99 in November.

I recently read a book by Jennie Allen titled Find Your People. In it she encourages readers to experience the power of friendship as it was meant to be; to go out of their way to find and maintain friendships. I’m so glad I found Betty.

Filed Under: Take My Hand Again Tagged With: aging, authors, Books, friends, Friendship

Books-a-Bazillion

May 7, 2015 by Nancy 23 Comments

Antique book stack isolated on white backgroundAh, spring! Time for tulips, green grass, baby calves frolicking in the fields, and spring cleaning! My husband and I have been in the process of downsizing for a while now (or “rightsizing” as we Baby Boomers prefer), so spring cleaning is sort of an ongoing thing at our house. I’ve had no trouble at all sorting through clothes, linens, dishes, pots and pans, and even jewelry. So many items have found new homes or been relegated to the recycle bins. But there’s one problem. Our house is chock full of books, and I can’t seem to let them go.

My husband and I once fantasized about selling everything we own and buying a sailboat to sail around the world. We figured we could generate enough income via the internet to keep the galley stocked, and we could stay in touch with friends and family via e-mail. Only one thing—well, besides the fact that neither of us knew how to sail—was stopping us. What would we do with all our books?

It’s not that we never give a book away, sell a book at a garage sale, or take a stack of books to a used bookstore. We just don’t seem to have done any of those things frequently enough. Hardbacks, paperbacks, pocket-sized volumes and coffee table tomes…our house is full of books.

Even with all the moves over the years, we both still have textbooks from college courses we took in the late sixties. I saved valuable texts like the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Harbrace College Handbook. He, on the other hand, has texts titled (I’m not making this up) Engineering Economy, Applied Regression Analysis, and Principles of Operations Research with Application to Managerial Decisions, copyright 1969. Now, excuse me, but William Blake will always be William Blake and the tiger burns just as brightly “in the forests of the night” in 2015 as he did in 1967. However, any manager needing advice based on what was known about systems operations in 1969 is probably managing a push broom—if that!

In addition to nonfiction titles and novels, we have a complete library of children’s books. Now I’m reading Dr. Seuss favorites like Hop on Pop, Mr. Brown is Out of Town and The Foot Book to a second generation. I suppose I could forgo the set of 1975 Encyclopedia Britannica Junior (minus Vol. 16, which one of my sons left at school), but I couldn’t abandon Tuggy the Tugboat for the most luxurious sailboat made!

We also have travel guides to every place we’ve ever been or dreamed of going. Those would come in handy on the sailboat, but where would we put them? At least I could toss overboard those for inland locations, like Beijing: An Illustrated Guide. We would need one whole foot locker to hold those classics we plan to read some day, including the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and the Complete Novels of Jane Austen, and another for the books we bought but haven’t read yet. We’d need all the books we’ve saved from foreign languages we’ve taken so we could look up how to ask directions to the post office in every port, and I’d need my full supply of cookbooks in the galley, with titles spanning trends from fondu to gluten-free.

You may be wondering why we don’t just read books on an electronic reader like a Kindle or Nook. Well, we do. But somehow that hasn’t replaced the joy of holding a book in hand and turning the pages one by one.

Although we do own a book titled Sailing for Dummies, I doubt we’ll opt for the sailing fantasy. Far more likely is that we’ll move to a smaller house with a lot less stuff—except for the books stacked floor to ceiling in every room!

Filed Under: Back Porch Break Tagged With: Books, Downsizing, rightsizing, sailing, Spring cleaning

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