Saturday, March 17, 2012
Measuring Life
Some men measure their lives by days and years, Others by love affairs, passages, and tears. But the truest measure under the sun Is what in your life for others you've done.
Fulfill the Meaning of Life
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Birch Family
Birch Family History
BIRCH FAMILY
The name of our family originated in England and has been spelled a number of ways down through the years, namely: Birk, Byrck, Byrch, Birch, Burtch, and finally, Burch. The first record of the name, Matthew Birch of Hatheersage, England, was recorded during the reign of King John of England, A.D. 1199-1216.
The first record of a Burch coming to America was in January 2, 1634, when 167 men and women were bought to Virginia as colonists on the merchant ship "Bonaventure." The second was "William Prior who was granted 600 acres of land by the Charles River Co. for sailing to the New World 12 colonists" one of which was John Burch. This was in the year 1637. Both of these groups sailed from the port of London. Later records show that more Burches came to Virginia and the Carolinas by way of Barbados, The West Indies, and Bermuda. Few records were available then but became available shortly before the American Revolution when several Burch families were living in southern Virginia and northern North Carolina along the eastern edge of the Smokey Mountains. Henry Burch is believed to have been born in Henry County, North Carolina, where he too reared a family before moving to new land in western South Carolina. With the opening of the Creek Indian lands of Alabama to settlement in 1832, members of the family settled in Benton (now Calhoun) County, Alabama, between 1832 and 1834.
During the Civil War and following that war, 17 families of Burches migrated to Cooke County, Texas in 1868-1869 to land granted to some for wartime services. The journey was made by oxen and mules drawn wagons over trails they had to blaze which took a year to complete.
Today, there are members of the family widely scattered over the United States. One of which is my grandmother, Maude Mae (BURCH) Anderson, who was born October 23, 1883, Mountainside, Cooke County, Texas. She married George Anderson, December 6, 1906, and remained bethrothed to him until his death on September 15, 1934. From this union, my mother, Ruth Isabel (ANDERSON) Smith was born on March 17, 1912, at Sunset, Montague County, Texas. She died on September 3, 1982, at Lubbock, Texas.
With the death of her brother and sisters, Johnny Clifford Anderson, Jessie Lucille (ANDERSON) Beardsley, Ethel Lu Ella (ANDERSON) Hope, Thelma (ANDERSON) Halcomb, Elva Leota (ANDERSON) Elliott, and Billie Lois (ANDERSON) Johnson, the torch is passed to continue the family with my generation. To date, November 26, 2009 (THANKSGIVING DAY), all brothers, save Russell Lee, and sisters are alive and well.
JERRY D. SMITH
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Christmasby Jerry D. Smith
Every time a hand reaches out
To help another,
That is Christmas.
Every time someone puts anger aside
And strives for understanding,
That is Christmas.
Every time people forget their differences,
And realize their love for one another,
That is Christmas.
May this daily Christmas celebration
Bring us closer to the spirit of human understanding,Closer to the blessings of peace.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Life
Life by Jerry D. Smith
Life can be compared to a book. The number of pages in a book depends on the number of events that need to be told. The number of days in a person's life depends on a preprogrammed biological or spiritual number of days given to each person.
A book is divided into chapters of major events. A Life is divided into chapters of major events. The most common chapters are birth, maturation, graduation, marriage, birth of one's children, divorce, should it occur, and death of one's contemporaries, prior generation, or simply one's own. Some people experience all of these during their life; some people do not. Some people have more chapters in their Life due to other major experiences or maladies, predestined, self-fulfilling, or unexpected; some do not.
Books mirror Life. Life is for the living. It is an excellent opportunity to learn love, faith, hope, charity, compassion, and forgiveness. If one does not learn these things during the course of Life, then understanding Life becomes more difficult.
A good book has transitions from one chapter to another. In other words, as one chapter ends, there are transitions into the next chapter with recapitulations of words and phrases to give the reader a sense of continuity from the past to the future. A good Life has transitions between chapters. These are commonly signals from the chapter whether we recognize them outright or not, or simply choose to deny or acknowledge their existence. Regardless, the chapter will end with or without our consent, and a new chapter will begin. Thus continues Life.
A book comes to termination or resolve. Life does likewise. A book may be shelved after reading and committed to memory. A Life may be transformed into another reality, and the deceased's Life will be committed to others' memories or forgotten in time.
Thus goes the circle of Life.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Dale Chihuley's Hand-Blown Glass at OKC Museum of Art - March 2006
Swirls and turns, tubings and bulbs, wrap and swirl, twist and turn, cling and reach, individual creations into one work of beauty.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
It began with a sign and a feeling of dread. I just finished my Friday afternoon’s habit of eating catfish and French fries at the local geriatric hangout. My stomach was full and my heart was happy because it was now a Friday afternoon, and I had made it through another rough week at school. Friday afternoons tend to be my favorite times of the week.
I pulled into the garage knowing that I could no longer postpone this dreaded task that I had tactfully avoided for so many weeks. I got out of the car and walked out onto the driveway to survey the magnitude of my impending job. Although overcast and feeling the possibility of rain, I could not use that possibility as an excuse to get this over with. I just had to brave things and pull those darn weeds up anyway.
I opened the other door of the garage to roll my 60 gallon trash can out onto the front lawn anticipating filling it with the dreaded and unwanted vegetation, weeds more appropriately. I prayed the soil was still damp from previous showers during the past week to make my job easier. I searched for my five inch screw driver on the shelf above my car to help me pull these stubborn plants out of the ground. I dropped to my knees and plunged the screwdriver into the earth to loosen the soil around one of the biggest and ugliest winter weeds in the yard. Its tap root seemed to go on forever. It came out easier than I expected because I used my head this time and put on my leather gloves to give me better leverage to pull on them.
I simply went from weed to weed noting the differences in them and their different foliage and root systems. Some of them I thought were downright pretty, but I knew better than to become attached to their beauty for doing so only makes my job harder as time goes on. They spread rapidly. So, without surveying how many more weeds were left to pull as most people do, I just concentrated on the ones nearest to my body and pulled, pushed driver into the ground, and pulled more.
Thirty minutes into my job it began raining. Not the gentle sprinkle of a May shower, but the big droplets of an angry storm. Thunder shook the ground; lightning blazed across the sky. More weeds remained for me to remove.
Stubbornly, I refused to allow this rainstorm from Nature to deter my task. I continued to work despite being drenched. My hands became wet from the rain. This only slowed down my ability to grip and pull the weeds up by root, but I persisted. I was determined to rid my lawn of these unwanted plants.
The boys next door only watched me curiously from their drive and garage as the rain had interrupted their baseball game of catch. I sensed they thought I might be a little touched for crawling on my hands and knees pulling weeds in a downpour. I chuckled inside myself for I understood that Life does not always give us the best circumstances to do what we need to do. I thought of their youth and how they must always seek the comforts from uncontrolled situations out of naiveté, and I thought that someday their lessons would have to be learned regarding this small but important detail of Life. I ignored their curiosity stares.
Drenched to the skin, I spent the next thirty minutes continuing my job. Despite the heavy leather gloves, I earned a water blister on my left hand’s index finger from the toils of my labor. That didn’t stop me either. My job was to rid the lawn of the weeds the Spring winds had brought to me despite all my efforts spreading lawn food with weed killer being applied weeks before.
I stood under the protection branches of the oak tree to survey my accomplishment. I had completely eradicated the pests, by root no less, from my lawn. My trash can was filled with their corpses, and now was a good time to take them to the dumpster in the alley to rid my trophies to be transported someday to an even trashier place called the city dump. The rain persisted. Now my trash can was completely wet and catching raindrops whenever I left the lid off.
I opened the gate to the backyard on my journey to the dumpster. Damn. Right there in the puddles of water in this seldom seen by the public part of my home was more weeds. I tell myself, there’s nothing you can do but continue your job, Jerry, for they will not be ignored or go away. I had a fleeting though that I wished it would ease up or stop raining while I did this, but I recovered quickly from these thoughts. We needed the moisture. Despite all, I dropped to my knees and inserted the screwdriver in the ground near the tap root and pulled. The only difference was I did not have the boys now as an audience to look curiously at me. I pulled and crawled for another good thirty minutes.
Finally, my job was complete. I had successfully accomplished what I wanted to do: I had freed my lawn of pesky weeds. I felt that despite the obstacles tossed my way, in this instance the rain, I would prevail and I would finish my job. I was being Jerry, doing what Jerry always does, doing what needs to be done.
I pulled into the garage knowing that I could no longer postpone this dreaded task that I had tactfully avoided for so many weeks. I got out of the car and walked out onto the driveway to survey the magnitude of my impending job. Although overcast and feeling the possibility of rain, I could not use that possibility as an excuse to get this over with. I just had to brave things and pull those darn weeds up anyway.
I opened the other door of the garage to roll my 60 gallon trash can out onto the front lawn anticipating filling it with the dreaded and unwanted vegetation, weeds more appropriately. I prayed the soil was still damp from previous showers during the past week to make my job easier. I searched for my five inch screw driver on the shelf above my car to help me pull these stubborn plants out of the ground. I dropped to my knees and plunged the screwdriver into the earth to loosen the soil around one of the biggest and ugliest winter weeds in the yard. Its tap root seemed to go on forever. It came out easier than I expected because I used my head this time and put on my leather gloves to give me better leverage to pull on them.
I simply went from weed to weed noting the differences in them and their different foliage and root systems. Some of them I thought were downright pretty, but I knew better than to become attached to their beauty for doing so only makes my job harder as time goes on. They spread rapidly. So, without surveying how many more weeds were left to pull as most people do, I just concentrated on the ones nearest to my body and pulled, pushed driver into the ground, and pulled more.
Thirty minutes into my job it began raining. Not the gentle sprinkle of a May shower, but the big droplets of an angry storm. Thunder shook the ground; lightning blazed across the sky. More weeds remained for me to remove.
Stubbornly, I refused to allow this rainstorm from Nature to deter my task. I continued to work despite being drenched. My hands became wet from the rain. This only slowed down my ability to grip and pull the weeds up by root, but I persisted. I was determined to rid my lawn of these unwanted plants.
The boys next door only watched me curiously from their drive and garage as the rain had interrupted their baseball game of catch. I sensed they thought I might be a little touched for crawling on my hands and knees pulling weeds in a downpour. I chuckled inside myself for I understood that Life does not always give us the best circumstances to do what we need to do. I thought of their youth and how they must always seek the comforts from uncontrolled situations out of naiveté, and I thought that someday their lessons would have to be learned regarding this small but important detail of Life. I ignored their curiosity stares.
Drenched to the skin, I spent the next thirty minutes continuing my job. Despite the heavy leather gloves, I earned a water blister on my left hand’s index finger from the toils of my labor. That didn’t stop me either. My job was to rid the lawn of the weeds the Spring winds had brought to me despite all my efforts spreading lawn food with weed killer being applied weeks before.
I stood under the protection branches of the oak tree to survey my accomplishment. I had completely eradicated the pests, by root no less, from my lawn. My trash can was filled with their corpses, and now was a good time to take them to the dumpster in the alley to rid my trophies to be transported someday to an even trashier place called the city dump. The rain persisted. Now my trash can was completely wet and catching raindrops whenever I left the lid off.
I opened the gate to the backyard on my journey to the dumpster. Damn. Right there in the puddles of water in this seldom seen by the public part of my home was more weeds. I tell myself, there’s nothing you can do but continue your job, Jerry, for they will not be ignored or go away. I had a fleeting though that I wished it would ease up or stop raining while I did this, but I recovered quickly from these thoughts. We needed the moisture. Despite all, I dropped to my knees and inserted the screwdriver in the ground near the tap root and pulled. The only difference was I did not have the boys now as an audience to look curiously at me. I pulled and crawled for another good thirty minutes.
Finally, my job was complete. I had successfully accomplished what I wanted to do: I had freed my lawn of pesky weeds. I felt that despite the obstacles tossed my way, in this instance the rain, I would prevail and I would finish my job. I was being Jerry, doing what Jerry always does, doing what needs to be done.
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