She Colored Everything Yellow

I really want to get back into blogging on a regular basis. I do enjoy it. I thought I had submitted something on this quilt but I guess not so here goes!

She Colored Everything Yellow Art Quilt

This is the first finished entry in my “She  colored everything yellow” series based on a memory from the past. This art quilt was started in a workshop given by Deborah Boschert in 2016 and finished in 2017.

As an adult I realized that I had a serious problem with the way other people reacted to me. Everything, from not taking me serious, to making fun of what I was saying or of my ideas, to criticizing me or my work. At times it could cause me to start crying my eyes out (in private of course). I have always been a very shy, quiet, and even at times timid person. Sometime in my late fifties I decided enough. I prayed and asked the Lord to show me why I was so sensitive to the words of others. Then a memory surfaced from my childhood. One that I had not remembered or acknowledged since the day it happened.

I was in first grade. The class was a combination class of first and second graders. The teacher wanted to work with the second graders so she instructed the first graders to color a page in our workbooks. I raised my hand and the teacher told me to be quiet and do as I was told. So I did.

As she was teaching she walked around the room, when she came to my desk she took my workbook and held it up to the class. “Look what Rose did” she exclaimed to the class. “She colored everything yellow.” The entire class – first and second graders started laughing. I was embarrassed and ashamed.

What I had tried to tell the teacher was that I only had one color crayon, the color yellow.

That was the beginning of a seed sown in my heart that kept on growing and causing me to be super sensitive to words spoken by others about and to me. Sometimes the weeds would be pulled out but the root remained and continued to grow until I allowed Jesus to exposed the root and remove it from my heart.

Now I love the color yellow. It reminds me of what He has done for me and gives me hope, love and courage!

Laughter

Most of us have probably heard the platitudes: “Laughter is the best medicine.”; “Laughter is good for the soul” and others similar to these.
I’ve never given it a lot of thought but lately with prodding from my online friends and my daughter I’ve been considering things. Most of these prodding’s fall in the range of “tell us seven (or ten, or five) things about you that no one knows.
So I’ve been thinking and last night while trying to drift of to sleep it occurred to me “I like to make people laugh and I like to hear people laugh”. Now most of this laughter comes from telling on myself, or about something happening in my life, or just making merry about a difficult situation that’s been taken a little too seriously. It’s definitely not telling jokes cause I’m not much good at that!
I’m not sure where this comes from. My mother always told me I have a weird sense of humor. According to her I'm like her mother in the humor department. So I guess maybe I take after my Grandmother Clough. It’s true I find humor sometimes where others do not. For example I think it’s funny how I can get lost because I’m not paying attention to where I am or I decide to try a different route. Once when exiting a freeway I almost hit the guardrail because I wasn’t paying attention, I laughed but the passengers didn’t.

Or I could tell you about the time as a sophomore in high school when I put the entire varsity football team on the run. It was very embarrassing at the time but is now a funny memory with the passing of the years. Then there was the time I was setting up our computer training room for a workshop I was to present. Not my normal routine! I had turned on the laptops but couldn't figure out how to turn on the PC's (a task I do everyday at my desk but for the life of me I was so nervous I couldn't get it!). In a panic I was getting ready to call our regular trainer and confess to her when it finally dawned on me "Just push the power button on the CPU!" I told the trainer about my panic later and we both had a good laugh.

Once when my invalid mother was living with me we (the home aids and nurses who took care of her while I was at work) were surprised and happy that she was drinking a lot of water. Something she normally didn’t do, she hated our water. All of a sudden I started laughing because I realized what might have happened. You see I always made her cream of wheat or something similar to it for her breakfast and I always added a lot of cinnamon to it. That morning I think I might have grabbed the bottle of red pepper instead and that was why she was so thirsty. Of course we flushed her with a lot of water but she didn’t complain.
There are things that have happened that when told to my friends bring a smile, maybe a chuckle but which give me a real belly laugh. Even several months later when I think about it I want to break out in a loud, throw the head back laugh, but mostly I settle for a chuckle, a smile, or even a silent inside laugh. After all I wouldn’t want the other people on the bus to think I had lost it! And I certainly wouldn’t want to go into a long story explaining my laughter. Chances are they wouldn’t see what was so funny about it anyway.
My dad used to get us to laugh at the dinner table. I was raised with six brothers and we would all try and keep from even cracking a smile when dad started his fake laugh. He would start to laugh about nothing in particular it was just his goal to get us to laugh. And he always succeeded. We kids would start out biting our lips, then the giggles would start and then before you knew it we were convulsed with side splitting laughter just from his infectious laugh. We loved it of course. I think we slept better on those nights. I know a good solid laugh will always help me sleep better.
Laughter is good for easing tension as long as it is either at something and not someone or with someone and not at someone. Maybe that’s why clowns are so beloved, they make up laugh with them or at least a good one does. Comedians too! Favorites of me and my dad’s were Red Skelton, Jackie Gleason, Bill Cosby, Carol Burnett and many others.
I’m considered by most to be a very serious person but I consider it a good day when I’ve made someone laugh!
Smile and the world smiles with you, put a little humor in someone’s world today, tickle their funny bone and you’ll feel better for it!