I picked up a copy of this 1964 gem at my grandmother’s: Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to Be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions by Genevieve Antoine Dariaux. I have every reason to suspect that my grandmother took very seriously the dictates of this classic guide to style, and…
We finished Brideshead Revisited last night on the way home from Charleston. We both longed to and hated to. Reading that book together has been a moving and sweet experience for Philip and me, in the same class as A Severe Mercy. I can’t stop thinking about it. All day the various elements have been…
There are just a handful of devotionals that I’ve spent much time with over the years, and among that small band, only three have found a permanent place on the side table with my Bible and journal. With ever-fresh insight the great classics My Utmost for His Highest and Streams in the Desert have prodded…
Lucilla Eliot, of Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘Eliot trilogy’ (Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim’s Inn and Heart of the Family) is one of my heroines. Expect to hear much of her—and the wisdom that Ms. Goudge imparts through her voice—in this journal. Elizabeth Goudge’s writings have played a very formative role in my thoughts on homemaking and…
I wasn’t sure that I wanted to read a novel about birds. “You mean, the birds are the characters?” I gave my mother a skeptical look. To be sure, our new friendship with Gene-Stratton Porter should have left me little room to doubt. On the heels of ‘Freckles’ and ‘Laddie’, it was a safe assumption…
“I’ll never forget the summer I read Freckles”, Mrs. Downs said one afternoon when I had escaped from the heat outside into the cool dimness of her basement shop. “I was fifteen and I sat out on the front porch swing and read it cover to cover.” Her face warmed with a reminiscent light. “And…
The End
The End