Columns & Editorials

Dear Aunt B Readers,

I talk a lot about grief. A very smart person once told me to write the things I knew about and nothing more. I know a lot about grief. So, this column today will hereby be crowned a quilt column. I’m going to sew many thoughts together for you, bits and scraps of emotions, many of which I probably mentioned here before. Then, I’m going to apply a decorative stitch on top to hold the sentiments together. It won’t be one of the quilts you see at the State Fair each year, not a hummingbird with a first place ribbon displayed in the corner or a wedding ring pattern with an intricate border. My quilt is a crazy quilt with random shards of fabric scraped up off the floor and haphazardly and thrown together with no respect for matching colors or proper geometric shapes. After all, that’s one of the things grief does for you. The aesthetics stop mattering as much. Sometimes, for a bit, everything stops mattering as much. When you read this, Christmas will be upon us. Chairs will be empty this year. Some are due to those of us still choosing to social distance. Some are due to deaths from Covid. Some are due to other tragedies. It is a very different Christmas, as has been the entirety of 2020. Sometimes we don’t know what to say to someone in a season of grief. That’s where I become an award winning quilter. Let me stitch you out of this.

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them,” wrote Mark Twain.

This is the first day of the rest of our lives. We cannot change anything in our past at all. We can learn from the mistakes, and remember and use the good to an advantage.

Dear Aunt B Readers,

Have your retirement plans changed because of COVID-19? If so, you have plenty of company.

My Daddy is Coming Home

I’m in worship on a Sunday night and I can barely sit still with anticipation. Tonight, is the night my daddy is coming home.

The current state of education in Texas suggests COVID19 and student achievement should be the number one priority of district administrators.

Our battle between those two lifestyles is still raging. The temptations we face seem to increase daily in our day and time. The good comes from GOD through the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the bad is formed in our minds. Actually the battle between good and evil is fought in the minds of true Christians. One thing that is hard to understand is that the battle is between GOD and Satan. When we try to fight our own battle we fail every time. The reason for that is that we don’t have any power against the devil and his demons. My own pride and ego make me want to win the battle myself, but when I get out of the way GOD just has to speak a word and Satan will flee from me. That leaves us with a decision to make. Can GOD be trusted to fight and win all of our battles here on earth? That leaves us with only one choice really. We can trust GOD and let Him fight our battles, or we can continue fighting and failing. The choice is ours to make.

Dear Aunt B,

Here. We. Go. Again. This is the way millennials write things in social media posts when they want to seem exasperated and they need you to imagine them rolling their eyes and taking a micro-pause in between each staccato embellished word. I know this because I have spent SO MUCH of my quarantime on social media. There are only so many ways I can attempt to teach myself to crochet, after all. Turns out, there’s not a big market out there for yarn knotted in the shape of a trapezoid. But, seriously, here we go…again. Cali has shut it down hard. Governor Cuomo is back with semi-regular briefings. And, unlike the spring influx of Covid, Kaufman County is currently being ravaged this time around. You may not agree with me. You also may not live with a septuagenarian with COPD. We lock up tight around here. With a shiny vaccine at the end of our tunnel, we just need to Wilson Phillips it for a little while longer. But, what is even left to do in this world? Like a mighty mouse carrying an extra Covid 15, I’m here in my too tight suit to save the day. Y’all like murder?

It was decided that they would all spend Christmas on the farm. The best news for Jett was that his Aunt Jane and Uncle Jim would be there too with his three cousins Emily, Russ and Sarah. They brought their travel trailer and parked it under the big Elm tree beside the house.

Educators are working diligently to provide instruction in-person or remotely with the hopes of returning to our normal pre-COVID 19 routines. It feels like a patchwork effort to make sure we are providing some type of education services to our students while we bide our time waiting for our return to “normal.” Outcomes are not likely to be what we want them to be, but we are providing something…or are we?