For the last few years, I’ve had this same number in my head. I don’t really know how I came up with the said number, but I try to keep my weight at or under it. It’s the number that I don’t want to let myself cross. My line in the sand- well, for right now, at least. When it requires me to start spending 5 hours a day on the treadmill and eating mostly watercress to maintain it, well, we’ll likely have to revisit.

Holding the numbers down has gotten harder as I’ve gotten into my 40’s and 50’s. You, ladies, know how our metabolisms seemingly hand in their notices about this time in life. With a little arithmetic, I figured my weight is now 38% higher than it was in high school. I suppose that’s about the equivalent of me at 18 with a kindergartener strapped to my back- well, actually, strapped around my waist. 

When I graduated from high school, I was a wisp of a girl. I didn’t even weigh enough to donate blood. One of my many nicknames was Bony Joni, but that one has since fallen by the wayside. When your hip bones no longer protrude almost through the skin and your knees and elbows don’t bulge out like knots on a log, the name kind of loses its relevance. 

Just so you know, this isn’t a post about weight or weight loss. It’s not about the number on your scale versus the number on mine. I just felt drawn to write about something and this was the first example that came to mind. 

So, a couple of weeks ago, the scale went above my line in the sand. Not by much- just a pound. And you know how we do- I stood there and thought about what I’d eaten unusual in the last week to see if I could find an explanation. Then I wondered if I’d just been consuming more salty foods than usual and thought drinking more water would probably help. Then I went to the most comforting explanation that I’d been walking longer on the treadmill, as of late, and it could just be that “muscle weighs more than fat” thing. Anyway, I rocked along a few more days and that number came up again and again and all of a sudden- it wasn’t as startling as it had been just a few days prior. I was almost used to the new number like it was becoming my new line in the sand, but I knew deep down it wasn’t. 

What the heck are you talking about, Joni? Are you in some kind of pyramid scheme of diet supplements? No. But, we all have lines in the sand in every part of our lives. Sometimes, we move those so gradually that we don’t even realize the change until we look back and see the difference. Sometimes, we can see an alarming transformation- for better or worse. 

It’s like when we see someone on a regular basis or when they see us regularly, we don’t notice the changes in each other physically. They happen so slowly and gradually. We’re fed the change in indiscernible increments. But, when we see someone after a long separation, that’s when the changes are most obvious and sometimes jolting for us and them- Joni certainly has aged! 

If I’d been in a coma since I was 18 and woke up today- boy, would I be surprised! Having to digest the changes all at once would be too much for anyone to bear. For starters, I’d be horrified when I went to put on my red and white striped bikini to head to the pool. I’d wonder what the heck happened to my rich coffee brown hair. I’d be beyond disturbed as to where my deep, dark golden tan had gone. I’d have to get an explanation as to how these lines got on my face and why my eyelids are drooping. And what this fur is growing on my chin- that, I’d demand to know. 

But, more important than those kinds of changes, I’d probably be most dumbfounded by other things. Why churches are only half full. How patriotism and history became bad. Why radical ideas are normalized and given so much credibility. How families got too busy to enjoy life. Why so much corruption is tolerated. Why Americans have turned on each other. How government got so big and powerful. Why God has been removed from public places. How right became wrong and wrong is celebrated as right. Why people are more interested in their phones than the people around them. How people with so much can be so unhappy. How simplicity was swallowed up by excess. 

Things like that didn’t happen from one day to the next. Those kinds of changes don’t occur overnight- on the bathroom scale or in life. They happen by accepting a small change- one time and then again and then again and again and again until we don’t even recognize what we once were. Compromising the line in the sand over and over and over. 

As Christians, women, mothers, wives, citizens, and all the other titles we might hold, we have to stand firm in our convictions. I’m talking to myself here and really just letting you listen. Using God’s word as the guide, I need to redraw the lines, readjust the scales, and reset the boundaries wherever they’ve been compromised. Through the years, I know I’ve let my scales get out of whack- in more ways than one. May God give us courage to fight for things that are right and noble and true. Even when right is made to seem wrong and what is noble is a source of ridicule and the truth is made out to be false. Then, more than ever, is it important to plant our feet and hold the line. Taut. 

I may talk to you before week’s end. Y’all have a good one! 

JONI 

Our garden is really small potatoes, pardon the pun, but whenever I put up our little harvests, I feel like my Grandmother- only a really amateur, slothful, unskilled version of her. Just the process of putting up vegetables reminds me of her standing at her kitchen sink for hours on end- cutting corn off the cob. She’d be in her duster with her hair wet with sweat- putting up bags and bags of creamed corn for all of us to enjoy through the year. They were bags of liquid gold, really. If my young self had only known then what it knows now about how much work was involved, I would’ve eaten it much more regardfully and with some added reverence. 

Some of my favorite memories of her house involved all of us on the front porch with a pan of peas in our laps- shelling and swinging and rocking. There was always an old sheet in the middle of the porch for throwing our hulls. Not a phone anywhere in sight. Just good conversation and waving at the passing cars. Every now and then, somebody would go in the house and ask if anyone wanted anything while they were there. A glass of tea or a slice of pound cake were common requests. We’d shell everything in our dishpan or roasting pan or Tupperware cake carrier lid- whatever Grandmother had scrounged up for us all to use as pea-shelling vessels. With our thumbnails green and sore to the touch, we’d knock out the huge undertaking and get a whole lot of visiting done at the same time. 

Gardening is mostly a hobby now, but it hasn’t been too many generations ago when it was more a matter of survival and not a choice. We just celebrated the birth of our nation and I thought about the centuries of men and women who have worked to scratch life and sustenance for their families out of the ground since its very beginning. Most without tractors, electricity, freezers, Ziploc, and, perhaps most notably, air-conditioning, they worked circles around us, I’d venture to guess. With each generation, more inventions, modern conveniences, and access to food have been added to our arsenal and now we have little need to do things the hard way anymore. 

I’m not really interested in going back to the pilgrim days and doing it their way. I’ve always said I would’ve been the first headstone in the pilgrim cemetery and I mean that. God knows who belongs in what century and He was so wise in His placement of me. But, I do wish we could take it back just a little ways- maybe to the time when families and friends sat on porches for hours and worked and talked without any distractions or interruptions. When there weren’t so many other options competing for our time and we were content just to be with each other doing not much of anything. Yeah, maybe we could revisit that……but only if we can take the air-conditioning with us.  

Hope y’all are having a great week! 

JONI 

So, if you’ll notice, M&M has a fresh look. I’ve had watermarks, as of late, due to some expired licensing on some of the images the blog designer used when I first started blogging, so my new designer suggested we just redo the whole thing to solve the problem and so it did! 

Also, Feedburner was discontinuing their email subscription service and I needed to have my email list transferred to another service before losing your addresses. Licensing, email subscriptions, web design- all significantly over my head, so Amanda from Cutest Blog on the Block helped me with all of my technical challenges and made it look really good in the process. Bless her sweet heart. 

So, if you aren’t receiving email notifications about posts and would like to, just enter your email address on the right side of the page. If you’re already receiving those, then there should be no interruption in service but if there is, just enter your address again. Also, there are links on the top right side to my Facebook and Instagram pages if you want to follow along there. I’m going to try to post more useless and meaningless stuff more frequently, so you certainly wouldn’t want to miss out on that. And now, this concludes the technical portion of today’s post. 

So, how about my Mississippi State Bulldogs winning the College World Series?? Is that something else or what!? I admit I’m not the avid baseball watcher. Unlike my son, I can’t tell you the scores from all of the 982 games they played this season or recall anyone’s batting average. As a matter of fact, if we’re being real honest, I find baseball to be painfully slow and, most of the time, just a little dull. I don’t mean to offend the baseball people, but it’s just a personality thing. I’m more of the impatient sort and require the constant action that football brings. But, while baseball’s not my favorite to watch, I do appreciate the skill it requires and I do so love Mississippi State! 

My brothers and I graduated from there. My husband and his brother. Our daughter and, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, our son will graduate next May. Our ties are strong and our love for maroon and white runs deep. Deep enough to make this football fan sit on the edge of her seat with a pounding heart for 3 straight nights watching baseball- which, I have to say, was rarely slow or dull. And anytime my precious home state gets positive attention of any kind, well, we’ll sure take it because it seems to happen so rarely. When we do make the news, it’s usually of the bashing sort, but we’ve learned to be ok with that. We know who we are and that’s all that matters. Those young men showed great athleticism and sportsmanship, this week, and they made our state so proud of the way they represented us. 

During my unusual baseball binge watching, I made some mental notations. 

-Men spit a lot. I never have gotten that. What is it that makes swallowing spit less appealing than spurting it out from between one’s teeth onto public surfaces? I’m sure my failure to understand is along the same lines as their failure to understand why we go to the bathroom in pairs. 

-I can imagine the mothers saying to their sons before the game- “Son, play hard. Give it your very best. Enjoy the experience. Take it all in. Represent God and your team well. And, please, for the love of all that is good, don’t pick your nose and embarrass your family on tv.” 

-If the bases are loaded with two outs and you’re up to bat, do you secretly wish it was somebody else’s turn? 

-Ball, strike, foul, foul, ball, ball, foul, strike, foul, foul, hit. This game seems the perfect fit for those who also enjoy driving slowly on the interstate, having their driver’s license renewed, and texting on flip phones in their spare time.  

-If you’re not from around these parts, you might have watched the CWS and been confused by the widespread misspelling of our mascot name. In case you haven’t noticed,  southerners like to shorten words. Some might even call us lazy in our speech. We shorten Bulldogs to Dogs and then put the southern spin to it- thus the spelling Dawgs. “D-ahhh-g” is a northern dog. “D-awww-g” is a southern dog. 

-Young people amaze me. Baseball for 50-somethings would definitely require a stool for the catcher and those wristband play cards would be an absolute must. Any sliding would be purely accidental and require emergency medical services. 

-The scratching and “situating” of oneself is generally considered to be a socially unacceptable behavior in the public square with the apparent exception of the baseball diamond where it is not only admissible, but expected. 

-The sweetest sound to TV sports announcers is clearly the sound of their own voices. 

-If you win the national championship, it doesn’t matter how bad you smell, people will still want to hug you. 

-No matter which team you cheer for, let us all agree that the whistling Vanderbilt fan is conclusively the most annoying human to ever walk the planet. Since we do not condone violence in any way here on M&M, I’d just say- bless his heart.