by Joanne Wiklund
With Fall here, a trip to our local orchard in Hampton was in store. Since we moved to Cordova when I was ten years old every year Mom took us there. The house our parents bought at the South end of the village had 39 very old decrepit apple trees dying among the long overturned grass. We salvaged a few apples, but she always took time to take us to the orchard and get some really good apples. It’s been a LONG time since I was ten, but I continue the tradition every year.
My trip was rewarded with Honey Crisp, Golden Delicious and Johnathan apples. This morning while I was cutting one of those big Honey Crisps, I remembered the late Shirley Dahlquist. She was married to Carl Dahlquist, camp manager at Rock River Christian Camp in Polo, IL. The camp is still running well. Shirley was one of the most organized people I’ve met. She could get done in a day what I only dreamed about doing. Her mathematic skills were uncanny. I worked with Shirley in an organization which held book parties selling inspirational, motivational, nondenominational books. She could make an estimate of how large an audience you would have for a presentation and interpret it into how many books you needed to have on hand.
Never mastered that accurately myself. She was such good help.
What does this have to do with apples? Shirley loved them, but most of all, she often found a way to work a statement into a presentation she was doing that always inspired me. All it takes is an apple in my hand, and I think of Shirley, great smile and laughing at herself. At one point we were together crossing a toll bridge between Illinois and Iowa somewhere south of here. The bridge is double, with railroad tracks running under the traffic span of the bridge.When she stopped the car to pay the toll, the car kept moving only vertically instead of horizontally. I rolled my window down to hear where the noise and the shaking was coming from. When I realized what was happening I turned to Shirley with my always remembered line: “Shirley, we’re being run under!” We laughed tear dripping laughter, but were so glad to get off that bridge!
Her apple line was great: “We can count the seeds in an apple, but only God can count the apples in a seed.”Our God is an awesome God. Shirley was an awesome friend.
Genesis 1:11 “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and God saw that it was so.”
