This is for you, Randy.......................as inviting as it looks I need to remind you that it is COOOOLD right now!

Oh, you say, I already tol' ya that? Well, you haven't experienced cold, until you've experienced New York in the the dead of winter. Only Alaska gets colder...........

1. Sunrises or sunsets?

Both. Sunsets are easier to see cause you're already up, but sunrises over the lake are to die for.

2. Cheeseburgers, Hamburgers or Hotdogs?

Well, I like hotdogs but cheeseburgers with lots of lettuce, tomatoes, onions on a sesame seed bun are the BEST.


3. How many black tee-shirts do you own?

I wear black most of the time. I wear black pants all the time and either a black tank top of some kind (I have a drawer full) with a colored shirt over, or a colored tank top with a black shirt over.

4. What color is your wedding ring or the rings that you wear?

White gold, not that I wear it anymore. Not to worry, Mr. Hope doesn't either. We just realized we're not ring people, plus we didn't feel like we had anything to prove anymore.

5. Apples or Oranges?

Both. I like orange juice but not apple juice.....I like apples as fruit better than orange as fruit.


6. At what age did you learn to swim?

I was a fish before I could walk. I raced and did sychronized swimming when I was in middle school and high school. Water is my medium. My goal is to swim across my lake. It's four miles across.

7. Do you own something pink? What is it?

Oh, my goodness......yeah......I wear pink, I have dusty rose blinds and carpet in my living room, and pink and gray in my kitchen. It might sound ugly but maybe Whisper will verify that it looks good. Besides, I LOVE pink roses and other pink flowers.

8. Have you ever won an award or medal of some type? What was it for?

I have ribbons for swimming, trophies for bowling, and a few other misc. things when I was in grammer school.


9. How many houseplants do you have in your house?

I don't have any at home but at the lakehouse I have about ten. About five are big........like a huge palm, etc.


10. Did you have a secret hideout as a kid? What or where was it?

My fort, Whisper, my fort! I also used to hide on the side of the stereo. I would turn on Mitch Miller and wrap the thickly lined drape around me. I felt like no one could see me but my mother always knew I was there. Rats!

11. Name something you fear.

Well, I rebuke all fear in Jesus name, but if you have to know something I USED to fear and still don't like very much, it's the dark. I don't mind the dark when I'm actually in my bed but even then, if Mr. Hope would let me keep the light in the bathroom in our bedroom on, I would. I despise walking or driving alone in the dark.

12. If you could pick out any vehicle you wanted as a prize, what would you choose?

Awww, I don't really care what car I drive as long as it gets me there. Then again, Mr. Hope's yellow 351 1969 Mustang was the coolest...........I felt like I was walking on a cloud the day he pulled up in front of my high school, in front of all the popular kids, and their jaws dropped when I got in............I was always kinna closed mouthed about my private life when I was in school, unless you were my best friend so they didn't even know I had a boyfriend........let alone one with the coolest car around. Once we sold that one I never cared again.


13. If you go to the zoo, which animal do you want to see first?

The monkeys or the elephants.

14. If you have to burp, do you do it loudly or quietly?

I close my mouth and burp as quietly as possible and I despise it when my kids burp really loud. I can't even understand how they can do it.

15. Do you like answering all these questions every week?

Sure. Do you like reading my answers?

With Whisper and Mr. Ornery sharing childhood memories I thought I would repost something I wrote back in 2002 in my journal, right after we purchased our cabin. I posted this last winter but thought it was appropriate in this moment of sharing word pictures of our lives..............
The setting of the cottage, which really isn't a cottage, per se, it is a cabin, high atop a hill, overlooking one of the Finger Lakes in New York, is quiet, somewhat rugged (although we have a shower and other bathroom facilities and a nice new hot water heater) and is very peaceful. To get to the lakefront you have to traverse the stairs, which I have never heard one person NOT complain about, save my 4 year old grandson, who has too much energy anyway. There are 110 steps between the cottage and the lake, the only nice part being that it feels like you are taking a walk in the woods with all the trees around. The bad part is that it is like climbing 7 stories, and after doing that five times a day, it gets annoying. The first summer there I lost a pants size, which I have never gained back, so I guess I shouldn't complain. My husband has set up Direct TV which kind of shatters the illusion for me that we are away from all civilization, but it does help in the pitch black evenings, when the kids want to stay up late, to keep them busy watching something, so I can go to bed. My Fort When I was little, my two best friends, and I used to build "forts" in the woods in our neighborhood. A fort was a place you made when you wanted to hide away from everyone. For some reason your fort made you feel safe. Sometimes your fort was more like a "clubhouse" that you built with boards and nails and stuff that you scavenged off of people. Most times it was just a little clearing in the woods that you put stones around to mark it as yours. You used all your mothers old hand-me-down stuff to fix it up and you didn't worry about stuff when you were in your fort. It wasn't like the real world. The world of school, and work, and chores, and parents bossing you around, and all the stuff that makes you grow up. It wasn't like that world. In your fort, it was just you and her, dressed in your father's very old, white button down shirts, that they used to wear to business meetings but now the collar is frayed and the elbows are thin, so you begged to have it before it was thrown in the rag pile. The shirt tails hung down to your knees, but you liked it that way. You and your best friend wore these funny looking sailor hats on your heads and with your best friend and her sister by your side, you felt like you could conquer any enemy. My friend could draw. She couldn't just draw. She could draw like a real artist. You would sit and dream about how you were going to write a book and how it would be published someday. She would sit and draw like she was going to be a real artist. Her sister didn't know what she wanted to be but we knew she was really smart. Smarter than us even though she was a whole year younger! On Saturdays you would look through all the couches at both of your houses and when you found enough pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters (you were a luuuckeeeee if you found a quarter!) you would walk up to the five and dime a few streets away and you would buy a bunch of candy and stuff that your mother would NEVER let you have at home and when you got back to your fort you would sit and eat Twinkies and candy bars and dream about all the stuff you would buy if you ever had a million dollars. You would forget that soon you would have to go home and "pretend" to eat dinner because if you didn't your mother would find out that you ate junk food in your fort and she might tell you that you couldn't have your fort anymore. In your fort you could be anyone that you wanted to be and no one was around telling you anything else. I knew my friend would be a great artist someday and she knew I would be a great writer. We didn't know what her sister would be great at but we knew she would be great because she was so smart. Smarter than almost anybody! In your fort you could pretend. You could pretend that the world wasn't really so big, and bad and scary. You forgot, until your mother rang the cowbell at the door to come in for dinner reminded you, you forgot that there even was a "real world" out there. Your fort was your fort and other kids weren't supposed to come in your fort unless they asked. It was an unspoken rule about forts. Your fort felt safe because you thought that no one else knew where your fort was, even if they did. My friend grew up and went to a prestigious School of the Arts. She never became a "great" artist but she still draws and paints and in my mind she will always be great. Her sister grew up and became a lawyer. She never became a "great" lawyer because she got married, had kids, and thought they were more important than being a lawyer. In my mind, she will always be one of the smartest people I know. I didn't want to grow up. The world was too scary to me. I married young. Maybe so I wouldn't feel so alone and scared in the world. I don't know. I raised some kids, then I raised some more. Ironically, it was having kids that made me grow up. I still wrote, but like my friends, I was never "great" either. I wrote in spiral bound books that I called journals but after a while I would re-read the stuff and think it was dumb and throw it away. Now it is common for people to write in journals but back then I only knew a few people who did. I still write sometimes but I don't let people see it. They might laugh straight out, or think it's stupid, or they might just tell the sound man to turn the microphone down. Either way, it doesn't feel good. You always thought that after you grew up you would be like all the other grown ups you knew when you were little. So wise, so perfect in every way. You always thought that when you grew up everything would be so happy because grown ups don't hurt your feelings the way your sisters and your friends at school did. That is what you thought. You always thought you wouldn't have to hide from the world in your fort anymore after you were grown up. That is what you thought. I'm glad that God knew I would need a fort when I was grown up. I'm glad He gave me one.

Sorry, by changing my background just for this one post I messed up my comments. I still don't know how to make a box for them. If you highlight them though you will see them. That or you can press clear at the top of the blogstream page. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Hope. The word itself breeds hope. It is almost unnecessary to define it because hope is such a 'hope'ful word in and of itself. Hope springs eternal in the human heart. Hope against hope. All that remain are faith, hope and love. "I hope..........".

What is hope? Is it a substance? The Bible calls faith the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen. So, then faith and hope are connected, right? It is not my intention to talk about faith, as in spiritual faith, but can hope be separated from that? Maybe. But not for the prisonerofhope. So, by proxy, hope is a substance and it is evidence.

It seems to me that hope is something that you either have or you don't have. It is fairly obvious when you look at someone to tell whether they have hope or not. Children, by and large, have hope. It is in their nature. You can see by their shining eyes and 'hopeful' looks. There are a few children who have no hope and it is a pitiful child indeed who has not. Their faces are drawn and have a pallor of death about them that is not natural to childhood. I think of Whispers post about a couple of her day care children and think that their hollow expressions might be indicative of no hope. With children though, hope generally can be revived fairly easily if they are taken from their situation and placed in such a place that hope can thrive. For an adult, hope is a harder commodity to come by. Their experiences, the width and breadth of them, caters to an on-going sense of doom, even when hope is apparent. Adults tend to speak 'death' over themselves with self-deprecating statements like, "with my luck......", or "that would never happen to me.......",



When I came on a year ago, a fellow blogger told me repeatedly, that he did not like the fact that I used the word "prisoner"ofhope for my blog nickname. He corrected me, saying that my faith was a choice that I made and implied that I was not being held captive in anyway to my choices except by my continued choice to do so. In other words, I was not being held to hope against my will.

In a sense that is not true though. When one has hope, and it stays them through good and bad, less and more, thick and thin......and all the other things that life dishes out on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis........the staying power of the hope begins to keep them. It fills them up, gives them joy...........even in the darkest night. It is the light in their eyes and the glow on their cheeks. It is the invisible substance that causes them to have courage and perseverance even through the worst of times as well as the best of times.

Holocaust survivors know something about hope. Some gave up all hope at the beginning and resigned themselves to their apparent fate. Some fought until they were captured and then gave up hope. Some, never gave up hope and fought in small bands of resistance. Some were successful in their escapes and some were not but none gave up hope until they either died by the bullet as they fled or made good their daring escape. Some, like the Christian believer, Corrie Ten Boom, retained hope even after she was taken to a concentration camp for hiding Jews in a secret hiding place her family constructed in her attic, and had to stay there for several years, even losing her father and sister to the Nazi's. She continued to hope against hope and eventually was released, knowing even if she wasn't that her greater hope, the one she held in the Lord Jesus Christ, would ultimately save her anyway. Before her death several years ago as an old woman, she traveled around telling her story to groups all over the world. Her face shone with hope. Hope for victory over evil, even in this world as well as the next, and the hope of a greater life on the other side with her Savior.

The name I chose, prisonerofhope, was not original with me. There is a book, written by a Holocaust survivor, by that name. I chose it because the circumstances of my life, some I have shared and some I have not, have caused me to develop the kind of perseverance which the Bible says breeds hope. At this late stage of my life, I have not accomplished all that I ever set out to do but in the process of what I have done I have gained patience, perseverance, faith, love and hope.

No one who knows me casually would think that I am prone to despair. Whisper says I have a 'sunny disposition' and for the most part I do. I have spent the past 30 years training myself in my desperate and despairing times to hope against hope and I will no longer, in my occasional despair, allow myself to lack hope. Hope sustains me. It feeds me day by day more than the food that people think is so all-fired important to eat every three or four hours. Hope keeps me alive. The God of hope stills my trembling body and soul when I think I have nowhere to go and no one to save me........even from my self and my human frailties and weaknesses. Heide reminded me tonight to "Be still and know that He is God". Thanks Heide. I needed to hear that more than you know. That is what is called a word in season..