Janet's Blog

Dad had been out working in the field on that sunny, spring morning, when he stopped to come into the house, and called me over to see what was in his pocket. At three or four years old, I was curious about everything, so I hurried over to see what he had brought me. Carefully, he reached his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a tiny, fluffy, brown, baby bunny, staring at me with its beady, black eyes. I reached for it eagerly, and he taught me how to hold it gently, while Mom went to find a shoe box. We lined the box with grass from our yard, then placed the bunny in the shoe box when I tired of holding it. For the next few days, my nameless bunny lived in the box, behind the cookstove, where it was warm. After the chores were finished on Sunday morning, we all got ready for church and Sunday School, leaving the bunny safely in his box behind the stove, while a savory beef roast, and pared potatoes and carrots, cooked in the oven. We only lived a mile northwest of Bloomf...

It was a whole year before Brinks planned to move their family to Michigan, when Bill and I joined our friends, Bonnie and Gary, and their three young children, and moved to Michigan without jobs or homes, and with just a few hundred dollars. For a few months before we left Nebraska, we had subscribed to the local Michigan newspaper, the Traverse City Record Eagle, so we could acquaint ourselves with our new home territory. The Brinks had made arrangements for us to stay with some friends of theirs in Manistee, about an hour south of our ultimate destination of Interlochen, so after driving for a couple of days, and staying in motels along the way, we finally reached our first stop on the third of July. I don't remember the names of the people we stayed with, camping out in their living room for a few days. They graciously asked us to accompany them to their community's bi-centennial celebration, so we didn't miss out entirely on that year's fabulous Fourth, and they ...

When Bill makes up his mind to do something, he usually finds a way to accomplish it. When I first met him, he had a few goals in mind: he wanted to build and live in a geodesic dome, he wanted to move to Michigan and help our friends, the Brinks, with a ministry for young adults there, and he wanted to get married as soon as he graduated from Milford. I guess accomplishing two out of three of those goals isn't too bad. Bill and I were married a few days after he graduated from Milford with a degree in electronic engineering. We lived in Lincoln for the next year and a half, while I finished college and Bill worked for Notifier, installing and inspecting fire and burglar alarms. A few people in the area were living in geodesic dome homes at that time, so we drove by several of them, and even toured one. Bill eagerly read any articles he could find about domes, pouring over his Popular Science magazines and Mother Earth News for anything he could glean from their pages. And we p...

I guess it all started the spring when Meagan was 12. She came home from her first day of junior high track practice and informed Bill and me that she had always wanted to pole vault. That was news to us. Until that year, it would have been an impossibility, but that was the year when girls' pole vault first became a sanctioned sport in Nebraska. So, Meagan attended track practice faithfully, and figured out several innovative ways to practice at home. She was not a natural pole vaulter, but she worked hard and, by the time she was a sophomore, people were beginning to take notice. To make a long story short, I'll just mention that she vaulted 12 feet, 8 inches when she was a senior in high school, and won the state class B championship in spite of vaulting with a stress fracture in her ankle. As a college vaulter, she vaulted 13 feet, 2+ inches, and won the national NAIA championship when she was a senior. This article isn't really about Meagan, but you can  click here...