Debby Tyson

Like most kids I had dreams of greatness that were out of step with my talents and commitment to practice. I loved to sing and act, so of course watching musicals on TV made me imagine myself on stage or in front of a camera. I got to be in five musicals in high school; my freshman year we put on Fiddler on the Roof (I played Chava.) in the fall, and Oliver! (I was an orphan boy and sang in the chorus.) in the spring, the only year Remington has ever staged two full productions in one academic year.  I played a nurse and sang in the chorus in South Pacific my sophomore year; my Junior year in Camelot I played a lady-in-waiting to Guenevere.  My senior year, I got to wear amazing hats and stunning costumes as the carousel owner in Carousel; in addition, I played the female lead in Don’t Drink the Water opposite my life-long friend and classmate of 13 years, John Resnik.

I enjoyed this activity so much that I wanted to major in Theater and Music in college, but my wise Daddy reined me in a bit with a question about the plausibility of my ambition and the practicality of studying something that could support me, say working as a secretary.  Common sense won out, and the skills I gained with my Associate of Arts in Secretarial Studies degree from Bethel College served me well, as I worked for several years, mostly enjoyably, in offices at Prairie View in Newton and the Clerk’s Office for the City of Wichita.  I’m really amused when I think back to the word processing capabilities in those early days.  The first piece of equipment I learned about was a typewriter that would store a certain number of characters so you could go back and change them before you printed them on a paper.  (Does that even seem like a benefit now?)  Then my office got a massive word processor that we had to self-train on for days  (maybe even weeks?) through a tutorial procedure; the unit resembled an entire desk, including a keyboard, some sort of screen, a disk drive which could store entire documents (Wow!) on 5¼” floppy disks, and a printer as well.  PCs were just coming out when I quit working to be a full-time Mom, my favorite job ever!

Having four siblings and dozens of cousins led me to want a large family for myself.  Three biological children and three stepchildren filled the bill.  

“What will be people do when they hear that I’m a Jesus freak? What will people do when they find that it’s true?
I don’t really care if they label me a Jesus freak. There ain’t no disguising the truth.” DC Talk

There’s no getting around it. I was taught about God from my earliest memory and believed what I was taught. My Grammy one day was talking about going to heaven someday, and I wanted that for myself. I decided then to believe in Jesus and follow Him. And I’ve never looked back.

Our family read Bible stories and devotions together and consistently prayed at mealtimes. I loved the stories I learned in Sunday School, summer vacation Bible school, and from my grandparents. By the time I was nine or so, I really wanted to obey God and learn more. I did Bible correspondence classes for a time, which I loved. I would complete a lesson and mail it back. Soon I’d get an encouraging note and the next lesson. When we moved to the farm and lived less than a mile from church, I was so excited to become more involved. Grammy and Grampy, of course, attended Sunday morning services, but they also seldom missed Sunday night or Wednesday night and were happy to pick up any of us Miller kids who wanted to come. I discovered that our church had programs once a month on Sunday evenings for kids with participation by kids. My friend and I once provided special music for the Junior Christian Endeavor meeting, by playing “My Jesus I Love Thee” as a clarinet duet.  On Wednesdays I enjoyed children’s choir and some sort of prayer or teaching classes. Our Bible school was two weeks of mornings where, before we went off to our separate classes and snacks and crafts, all the participants met together in the church sanctuary to sing some songs, hear a short lesson, and be captivated by tales from the visiting missionary whose project became the object of our boys-against-girls offering/giving competition. At least one year I attended, my Grammy was the Bible school superintendent, whose leadership was full of fun backed her own hard work, because churches didn’t have the massive curriculum products available now. I remember learning the hymn, “This is My Father’s World” that summer because she had come up with a cohesive program that led us in studying about God’s creation. Absolutely magical!

Fifth graders at our church had Mrs. Regier for their Sunday School teacher, as well. When my brother Randy and I were in Grammy’s class, we were covering stories in the Old Testament, probably from the books of First and Second Samuel. I’m sure she taught them very completely, but what I remember most was that the Israelites were always battling the Philistines. Those darn Philistines!* I hadn’t, at that time, understood why they were always fighting. Of course, we went into depth on the stories of Samuel, of David and Goliath. In addition, she had contests among us Bible scholars to memorize Scripture and learn the lyrics to favorite hymns.  If we had “extra memory verses” to say, we met her in one of the main-level classrooms after church and recited what we had learned.  Then the next week, we could see how we were progressing on the board showing everyone’s progress to the finish line.  When I was older, she asked me to type up these index card materials she grouped into units and distributed to her students.

*I have to mention here that my grandparents were very careful about their speech.  I remember when Disney put out the movie That Darn Cat, they called it That Crazy Cat.  We grandchildren were taught to be diligent in proper conversation.  For example, improper grammar was caught and corrected; we were redirected if we said, “Huh?” or “um…”  or “yeah.”  Although he was a very funny person, our Grampy deserved our respect, so we were allowed to say he was funny but never silly.

My faith in Jesus Christ has been the one unifying part of my whole life. I have not always been obedient to what the Bible teaches, but I have always wanted to.  The most important truth I trust from the Bible is the Gospel of Jesus Christ, restated by Paul in I Corinthians 15:3-5  “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance:  That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”  Belief in this truth restores our broken relationship with Our Creator and guarantees that we are adopted into His family and will spend eternity with Him.

T-shirts. Is there anything more plentiful in modern America than t-shirts? “I’ve got more t-shirts than Carter’s has pills!” There are other uses for them beyond wearing them, of course, and crocheting them into rugs, as I’ve already written about. They’re absorbent, right? Why couldn’t you make them into cloth diapers? The truth is, you can! What is printed on some t-shirts just has no higher call than absorbing pee and poo. Just sayin’. The diapers don’t really have to be any certain size; serge around the biggest rectangular shape you can make from the front or back. They are one layer and dry quickly on the clothesline–and the sunshine actually kills germs and freshens the diaper fabric. This is not just conjecture. Two littles I know spent their baby days in t-shirt diapers. You can look online for all the different ways to fold them to fit your little’s bottom. There are lots of diaper covers out there to buy, and patterns to make your own. Did I mention free, and environmentally friendly, and just plain cool?!

Those sleeves you cut off need not be thrown away just yet. During the pandemic, one lasting memory we will have world-wide is that people got absolutely ridiculous and hoarded toilet paper! I’m not makin’ this up! So some of us weird folk decided to adopt the policy, No TP for Pee. I know some folks are actually making “family cloth” to be used in the bathroom out of new, cutesy fabric, but it’s washable toilet paper, for goodness sake! We cut t-shirt sleeves into usable sizes which work great! I started out serging the edges, but that is actually unnecessary because they do not ravel. When the plastic ice cream bucket is full, I wash the wipies, as we call them, and–you guessed it–dry them in the sunshine. Reducing the paper waste is good for our lagoon like it would be for the wastewater treatment plants of towns and cities. This is one pandemic policy that has enough merit in my mind to continue!  In addition, strips of t-shirt fabric make great ear loops for homemade face masks.

Two years ago, when our Tip was a puppy, he chewed on everything! One casualty of his teething was some of the wood on our porch. What dog chews on porch railing?! Ugh! Other items he wouldn’t leave alone were the solar lights next to the sidewalk in front of the house. The plastic globes all got broken, though the lights still worked. I just put them in the garage with the solar lights whose unusual 3/4 AA batteries were irreplaceable, even from the vast selection on the internet. It turned out that the glass lids from candle jars were about the same size as the metal part of the solar lights and would protect the tiny bulb and radiate the light. I just took some used copper wire and attached the glass lid to the metal solar light, then hung them by used toilet flapper chains and other miscellaneous used chains. Hooked onto the soffit trim they provide free light to the side of the porch that was blocked from the yard light on the other side of the house. I was emboldened by these nice little lights to think outside the box on the 3/4 AA-size lights. I was able to break the plastic molding that housed the batteries and move the positive and negative leads. A regular AA battery now fits and can be easily replaced when it gets too tired to recharge from the sun.

I didn’t mention when I was talking about laundry that I don’t use laundry detergent. Well, not if I can help it. Most of the time I use Ivory bar soap, placed in a netting bag and agitated on the small load setting until the water is soapy enough to wash the load. When I have it, I use homemade lye soap. The problem is, I just haven’t had any for a long time. I come from a long line of soap makers, I guess, and I have the equipment my mother and grandmother used: an enamel baby bathtub, the plastic utensils and containers for the lye and water mixture (dangerous stuff!). Several times, my mother and I have made the soap, with all its preparatory work and danger. Right now, I have lard and lye–and the time to do it. Sounds like a good job to do on a cooler day, like this Wednesday, when all can be ready and the lye solution can cool more quickly. I’ll report back here on that process.

It didn’t go so well.  It turns out that the lye packaging has changed from when my recipe was printed.  It called for an entire 12 oz. can of lye; I didn’t check to see that the lye cans I inherited from my parents’ basement actually had 18 oz.  That batch had to be ditched.  The second batch seemed to come to the point of complete absorption of the lye into the fat, but when I poured it into the lined boxes, it separated and had to be heat processed.  Hmmm…why did I want to make soap?

Another strangeness I have embraced is in the fencing I use for my sheep. I don’t have many, just three ewes and three spring lambs right now. They often will respect a visual barrier, especially if the pen they’re in has plenty of grass and they’re not hungry for whatever is on the other side. The ewes are not usually ambitious enough to jump over the fence, but will if they feel cornered or especially naughty. The lambs, on the other hand, see places to escape and then complain from the other side of the fence from their mothers. I discovered last fall that for the three weeks the ewes were visiting the neighbor’s ram, my lambs found a great place to sneak under every day and clean up corn left on the ground from harvest. Maybe they saw me out in the field surrounding our place picking up ears to store in big sacks for the chickens over the winter, another odd practice I discovered would have cost more than $150 if I had wanted to buy “wildlife ear corn” at Orscheln. Needless to say, the lambs really grew and continued their naughtiness even after their mothers returned, up until they were taken to be butchered. (I’m told they were delicious.) So then, the fencing needs to be repaired and reinforced to keep them in. As a cheapskate, I want to reduce the cost to…well…nothing. So I look for ways to do that. One type of fencing I’ve discovered takes a lot of time, but uses saplings, which I have millions of. To keep the sheep in my main pen, I’m adding some 24-inch woven wire along the ground in addition to the four strands of barbed wire. But in order to get the wire up to the posts, I have to clear the immediate area of all the volunteer elm trees that my time-starved disregard has allowed to grow like hair. It turns out the saplings have a good use in an ancient practice called wattling. The long, thin wood is woven in and out of upright stakes placed 16 to 18 inches apart to make a strong fence. It is even possible to make individual panels, called hurdles, that are (supposed to be) lightweight and strong, and can be connected to make a temporary pen. I like to put the sheep out in areas that are hard to mow, and corral them with a combination of panels. The metal panels I have used for several years are heavy and cumbersome. Doable, but not much fun. So I have that wattling hurdle project going and will see how that weirdness turns out.

Those sheep were originally bought to reduce the need for mowing the area around the outbuildings.  Any pictures you’ve seen of sheep mowing the White House lawn during World War II have been photoshopped for sure!  These girls don’t to anything close to that level of neatness.  In fact, there are certain types of grasses they ignore entirely.  So then, several years ago, I didn’t have a riding mower for my large areas and thought I could let the grass grow, scythe it by hand, let it dry, and then pack it into bales.  Videos abound on the internet to teach you just about anything, including how to scythe grass, it turns out.  I went out in the mornings while it was cool and cut the grass with a scythe that belonged to my great-grandfather.  As peculiar and time consuming as this process was, it was also lovely to be out in the cool of the day and hear the birds singing as I worked.  I learned how to sharpen the blade, and the scything was good for strengthening my physical core.  When the hay was dry, usually that evening, I used a garden cart and baling twine to make the bales.  They weren’t tightly packed like a mechanical baler, but they did hold together enough that I could stack them in the shed in layers of two bales.  It smelled wonderful and the sheep loved it more than any mechanically baled hay I’ve served since.  And, by golly, we were doing our part to save the planet by not using a gas-powered mower for a couple of summers.

Do all people have the notion that they are somehow different from everyone else?  Unique, special? I think so. And that makes us all the same, right? Hmmm…

I’ve thought from childhood that I was different from my siblings, for instance. They all four wore glasses; I didn’t, and I’m the only one with green eyes. I was probably the best student in school, preferring to read or practice my cursive (honest!) on a rainy day, and am the only one with at least a bachelor’s degree. In many ways, I’m just weirder than they are. I think they are more likely to prepare and eat traditional foods and to be suspicious of stuff like granola (especially home-made) and cutting down on sugar and eating less meat and avoiding prepared foods. If I suggested intermittent fasting as a boon to one’s health, my comments would be met with skepticism. While we all agree that taking less pharmaceuticals than our parents, every one of them has daily meds. I’m goofy enough to not even take regular vitamins. But enough comparison; I’ve always been weird and I’m getting it down to a science.

Most people throw their clean, wet clothes in the dryer and forget about them for an hour or so (or longer if they don’t mind wrinkles). Instead, I’ve been using outdoor clotheslines and indoor drying racks nearly exclusively since 1989 or so, and as often as possible before that. I was steeped in it. When our family lived in Potwin, we didn’t even have a dryer. Laundry was done on Mondays and clotheslines outside filled, weather permitting. When the weather didn’t permit, Mom strung lines throughout the house and we had a wet sauna effect with condensation on all the windows and ice if it was especially cold outside. Sister Nancy and I were tasked with bringing in dry laundry and folding it after school; Mom hung it before she went to work, probably down at Dad’s welding shop. I know the benefits: adding humidity to one’s house in the winter, reducing electrical use by avoiding the second-greatest energy user (the dryer is second to HVAC equipment), the brightening effects the sun can have especially on white fabrics, and bringing the sunshiny smell in from the clothesline. Now it has become a point of pride. It’s not necessarily that I feel better than anyone who uses a clothes dryer; I just enjoy the benefits and am stubborn enough to embrace the added time and inconvenience.

We children drank fresh, raw milk as much as possible growing up. When we lived in Potwin, Dad did part-time chores for a farmer just out of town. He milked their cow and brought in their sheep, among other responsibilities, I am sure but can’t list. He brought that milk home and we kids loved it. When we moved to the family farm, Dad got a cow and we had lots of milk to deal with. (I have to explain right here, that said cow’s original name was Blossom, but our adorable little brother couldn’t remember that. He knew it was something to do with flowers, so he called her Tulip. And goodness knows, everything the cute li’l youngest in the family does or says is precious. Am I right?! So her name was Tulip.) It was our girls’ job to strain and refrigerate the milk morning and evening when Dad brought in the big galvanized bucket. When it had risen, Mom skimmed off the cream, kept the half-and-half skimmings as “cereal milk” and skim milk for us to drink. Whenever there was enough to be worth the effort (maybe once a week?), she got out the electric churn and made butter, which she then washed with cold water to remove any buttermilk, salted, and made into round patties about four inches in diameter on plastic lids, with decorative marks on top made with her butter paddle (’cause who wants boring butter?), until they were frozen, then stored in bread sacks in the freezer. I don’t know what Tulip ate that was different from the poor bovines the dairy industry uses, but her butter was yellow. Not that pale, pasty off-white color that passes for industrial butter; I’m talking the color of daffodils. Did I mention her name was Tulip? And speaking of what she ate, sometimes the milk came in smelling horrible. We kids would turn up our noses because one taste would cure you, too! Dad explained that she got into “wild onions.” It didn’t stink like onions; it just smelled and tasted awful! Interestingly, the cream didn’t have that disgusting smell. Once the cream had risen, Mom skimmed it off and used it just like any other. The milk, however, went back out, as a treat for the hogs, who obviously didn’t have such delicate constitutions as we kids did.

(Did you think that milk thing was a rabbit trail? Ha!) We have been blessed for the last maybe ten years with raw milk available from the dairy around the corner. It comes in plastic gallon jugs, just like second-string, grocery story milk. However, once poured into a wide-mouth, glass gallon jar, that nectar-of-the-gods cream rises and can be skimmed off. We buy the insipid, grocery store butter, because the cream is best used in coffee. I drink a lot of skim milk, which is part of my weirdness; I don’t know many adults who admit they do too. Another weird thing is that we make our own yogurt in the oven. Easy and cheap. I like that!

Never having plenteous financial funding has further augmented my weird tendencies. For example, I don’t like to shop, which I understand lots of women find entertaining. Owing to a predisposition against spending money or to the necessity of avoiding bankruptcy, I just would rather not buy stuff. And I like to find interesting ways to make what I need from what I have. So what do you do with cast-off socks? You know, the ones with holes (’cause who darns socks? Oh yeah. I’ve done that.) or the ones whose mate has up and R U N N O F T. (Did I mention that I love the movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?) Well, you should save them up and make them into something useful, like a braided rug. Don’t worry that it will weigh 30 pounds when it’s big enough for your bathroom floor. You’ll have a warm feeling inside that you saved the planet by keeping those 30 pounds of socks out of the landfill. You’re welcome.

And what about bags from pet and livestock feed? With a little cutting and sewing, they turn into fantastic totes and shopping bags (ok, I do have to get groceries sometimes!) that last a long time. I even went through a phase where I made crocheted rugs out of old t-shirts. Strips 3/4 inches wide can be stretched into sharn (shirt yarn) and made into balls; the rugs need only simple crocheting with a Q-size hook. They have the advantage that crumbs, dirt and such fall through the holes and are contained until you are ready to sweep them up. They have the added advantage that they’re free. When you take on projects like this, everyone you know soon donates their old t-shirts to your inventory, and second-hand stores have scads that they can’t sell. You might even know someone who is storing them in boxes in the garage. (Do you have my phone number?)

The movie Mary Poppins came to theaters when I was in kindergarten. Not that I got to see it in the theater, mind you, but our classmate Machelle did and she taught us the song, “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” which we sang for our kindergarten graduation ceremony. Eventually, the movie was shown on the Sunday evening television show, The Wonderful World of Disney, and our family watched along with probably 95% of households in America. What magic and fun! Later in childhood I learned the song from Uncle Albert’s ceiling tea party, “I Love to Laugh,” which I believe should be considered a life theme song for me. Funny stuff just…well…makes me happy! I love making other people laugh, especially those closest to me. And when they make me laugh, the more deeply ingrained they become in the fabric of my being.

I think I got it from my Grammy and Grampy. Though they were often quite serious, having survived the Great Depression, World War II, and the resulting deprivations of each, they delighted in making us kids laugh. For instance, Grammy had these crazy glasses with holographic paper lenses; when she moved her head slightly, her eyes seemed to be swirling like someone in a cartoon. And all the while she sat there deadpan. Our Grampy had the most amazing collection of funny faces. They had parties with just us Miller kids, once a Black Cat Society party on Halloween; a New Year’s Eve bash with great fun and food. They read us Dr. Seuss and Bible stories.

We kids spent a lot of time with them, experiencing many facets of life in ways only that grandparent/grandchild relationship can foster: responsibility for getting one’s chores and school work done well; the predictability of life’s routines; balance in one’s life–they said, “When we work, we work; when we play, we play.”–with enough of each.

But, I digress.  Grammy and Grampy loved to laugh; me too!

By high school, I had my own radio.  Okay, that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but my big brother, Randy, and I worked at home a whole summer between eighth grade and freshman year (I think), and our parents paid us with these psychedelic and really cool AC/DC radios.  They stood maybe 12 inches high, 8 inches wide and 5 inches deep covered in a reptilian-patterned, glossy brown vinyl.  The whole lower half of the front was a faceted, plastic screen behind which were small multicolored lights that “danced” with the music, according to the volume.  I have just spent more time describing this wonderful radio than you think is warranted, but I’m tellin’ you it was a big deal.  I spent a lot of time in my room listening to KLEO and KEYN play the current hits, learning all the tunes and words to songs that were, in many ways, harmless but have stuck with me to this day.  In the evening on Sundays, Casey Kasem hosted a program, American Top 40, which I tried not to miss so I could know all the best songs and be cool.  Sometime in there, I discovered another Sunday evening radio program, Dr. Demento, which specialized in recordings that were comic, novelty, and just plain weird.  While I should have been learning important stuff, like Algebra and German, I was instead memorizing these goofy pieces.  And I have attached a recording of one such piece I found particularly funny, which will prove to you that I didn’t go off on this radio rabbit trail for nothing.  I love to make people laugh, so I memorized and regaled my family and others with “Them Poems” by Mason Williams.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18aTC21w1SmzdIe-Oi3uNv2C3zqdDTPbD/view?usp=sharing

Starting with today, April 15, 2020, holed up in my home on a little farm in south-central Kansas, I will attempt to put into typed words who I am–and why. First, why do I have time today to write? Why am I not working somewhere outside my home? Oh yeah, you remember, the COVID-19 stay home order that kept people all over the world from operating the way they were accustomed to, in an effort to keep people from becoming infected with the deadly virus? Twenty years ago this would have been mayhem, but fortunately many people began several weeks ago working from home through the internet; many businesses have been able to conduct commerce with a combination of electronic and physical pick up of products. Now, let’s see. How can I hold down my current job of serving others by cleaning their homes on a regular basis, but do that electronically over the internet? I’ll join them on skype or google hangout or even on the phone: “Okay, get out your vacuum and plug it in. Good. Now that little black switch, turn it on and don’t be surprised by the loud noise it makes. Now push and pull it across the floor. Good…” You get the picture. It just isn’t feasible.

Cleaning homes. Not a very glamorous job, but necessary for people who cannot physically handle the work, like the elderly, as well as for those whose busy lives make them want or need help. Shoot, I’m busy enough cleaning houses that I want someone to come clean mine!

To be physically able to efficiently and quickly clean someone’s home, in my late 50s and now at 60, I have to recognize that I was genetically predisposed to be strong and hardy. Having been self-employed for five years now in this way, I have gained muscle strength and muscle memory, intuition, insight, and skill at what most of us do only occasionally and sometimes avoid. I’m doing physical labor because I’ve always enjoyed good health, and I like staying busy, and I can’t make as much per hour at anything else I’ve tried.

A side note here, Busy as a Bee: I always thought it strange that people in the Bible “were” their names. Jacob in the Old Testament was a trickster, as his name connotes. In the story of Ruth, Naomi–whose names means pleasant–recognized that she wasn’t and asked people to call her Bitter instead–Mara. I was in my forties when I realized that I am my name. Deborah (though I’m a Debra) is Hebrew for Honey Bee, which explains why I like to be busy. It may also explain that when threatened, I am capable of stinging!

To be willing to consistently serve others in this capacity takes spiritual muscle that I need to exercise every day. I can’t honestly say that I have ever really enjoyed cleaning house, like one enjoys writing books or constructing buildings or teaching school or selling insurance. I learned from my mother that it was mandatory. I don’t recall actually being instructed how to scrub the bathtub, for example; I was just given the tools and the mandate, then suffered her corrections until I had learned to do it “right.” I was sent sometimes to help my Grammy clean house, and I remember it much more fondly, as with most chores done there. Oh she was exacting, mind you, showing me how to correctly dust a five-panel door, but she made things more fun, as grandparents often discover is possible, too late to teach their own children. It’s the way of the generations.

So doing a job I don’t really like causes me to have to put on my big-girl pants and get to it.  An even greater spiritually difficulty is having the humility to spend my energy and time on a rather unglamorous occupation.  I have two college degrees, but neither secretarial work nor teaching school have brought in enough income to support living here at T’will Du Farm.  When I started working part-time doing cleaning, painting, and the like, I never dreamed it would become enough to pay the lion’s share of my expenses.  It has helped me that I don’t take myself very seriously to begin with, and I truly see this as a way to humbly serve others and make their lives better.  Years ago I decided to consistently be kind to and recognize people who were serving me rather than looking past them, ask and use their name, sincerely thank them for their help and service.  That habit served to remind me that I’m made in the image of God, just like every other human being, with no greater status or entitlement than anyone else.  Although it’s not always easy to help others in such a commonplace way, the profit to my soul is a last-shall-become-first blessing I never anticipated.