I have the blogging blahs

Ennui has overtaken me.  Don't you love that word, "ennui"?  It was a vocabulary word I learned in my senior year at good old North Kansas City High School.  Because our school mascot was Henry Hornet, our vocabulary words were called Henry Hornet words.  Childish, I know.  I was a senior, for pete's sake!  Anyway.  When I learned that word I seized it as mine, because it described my day-to-day life:  A feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest.  Come on, hasn't every teenager felt that way during certain periods of her life?

Or, in the words of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities.  All is vanity."

To a person of my age... by the way, I had a birthday July 7th... the changes in the world are difficult to take in, and while I often try to insulate myself here on my own little piece of land, sometimes the magnitude of it all overtakes me.  A baseball team changing its name because it's offensive?  A piece of cloth suddenly being banned from everyplace in the country because it represents bigotry?  It's a piece of cloth, people!  I'm not saying all this is wrong, I'm simply saying I don't understand it.

I just want to be five years old again and go back to Skinner School, where we said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning (without "under God" because they hadn't added that yet).  Sometimes the teacher, Mrs. Eighmy, would sit at the piano and we would sing songs.  Other times she would play records and we would sing along with those.  Lately I've been remembering a sort of hymn I learned in that one-room country school that resonated with me the first time I heard it, a song I had not heard at the Hepburn Church of Christ, but one that sank right down into my bones and became a part of me.

This Is My Father's World

The United Methodist Hymnal Number 144
Text: Maltbie D. Babcock
Music: Trad. English melody; adapt. by Franklin L. Sheppard
Tune: TERRA BEATA, Meter: SMD

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1. This is my Father's world, and to my listening ears all nature sings, and round me rings the music of the spheres. This is my Father's world: I rest me in the thought of rocks and trees, of skies and seas; his hand the wonders wrought. 2. This is my Father's world, the birds their carols raise, the morning light, the lily white, declare their maker's praise. This is my Father's world: he shines in all that's fair; in the rustling grass I hear him pass; he speaks to me everywhere. 3. This is my Father's world. O let me ne'er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet. This is my Father's world: why should my heart be sad? The Lord is King; let the heavens ring! God reigns; let the earth be glad!

This was a song with which I could identify!  You start talking about skies and trees and birds and rocks and rustling grass, and you are talking about the world of my childhood.  

Anyway.  I am checking in, and maybe this will get me jump-started.  Or not.  Meanwhile, you will find my heart at Skinner School in Taylor County, Iowa.  Things seem so much simpler there.  I'll be sitting in the next desk from the back, learning what there was to learn in 1950.