On November 22 of last year, I lost my voice. I’m not talking laryngitis; I mean my words. They scattered from me like a covey of quail, and I knew, standing there amid the ragged stubble of a waning year, that there was nothing I could do to call them back, nothing but lean into…
A year ago I embarked on a reckless (and often humiliating) venture into the French language, and to mark the occasion I’m re-posting this piece I wrote for The Rabbit Room last summer about my decision to take the plunge. But before I can do that, I find myself honor-bound in an equally-reckless pledge to…
I wrote this piece for The Rabbit Room last year, but I’m posting it here again. Because after an intensely busy spring and early summer, and a serious writing sprint on the horizon, I need to be reminded again. And again and again… So surrender the hunger to say you must know, Have the courage…
It’s rare that people pay a first visit to our old farmhouse without asking if we have ghosts. I can hardly blame them; I wondered the same thing the first time I came here. It’s certainly haunted with its own past, standing there under its trees, brooding gently over vanished things like a wise old…
Thanksgiving, like any other beloved memorial with which the years are reckoned, has its own certain types, its venerable standard of ‘brightest and best’ against which each year’s observance is weighed. They may all—or most—be cherished in our hearts, a mellow, collected memory of loved rituals and the loved ones that give them meaning. But…
It’s easy to forget—or perhaps never fully realize in the first place—just what a treasure we hold in our hands in the form of a book. In times not too far past, books were solely the possession of the wealthy. As recently as the publication dates of many of my favorite nineteenth century novels, books…
January 12, 2008 Last week my sister-in-law had two of my friends and me for lunch. It had been arranged before Christmas, a flurry of emails having saved and secured the date, but as I set out on that dour January morning, it seemed to me that the timing of our little gathering was exquisitely…
And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands. And they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground. Nehemiah 8:6 I was a Christian, and I was a dancer. A ballerina, as I liked to avow with all the…
January 6, 2007 Last night was a chapter out of fairyland; a sojourn into a vanished realm that exists only in stories and songs—and in the very lively imagination of crazy people like Philip and me. 😉 I’m sitting here in my den this January afternoon with a pot of fragrant Winter Garden tea and…
(originally published 2005 in Inkblots magazine) It was five years ago this October that I casually tossed my new Victoria magazine on the coffee table and then snatched it back up again. Invite Your Book Club to Tea proclaimed luxurious scrolls above a picture of a tastefully laid table by the fire and promises of…
My little sister and her husband are painters. They’ve dreamed of careers in art since they were children. And it’s with much more than a sisterly bias that I can say they are both extremely talented. With an enviable ardor they packed up and left everything they had ever known not six months after they…
My husband adores old books every bit as much as I do. Someday, I fear, the very rafters of our house will bulge with loved acquisitions. But even he looked askance at some of the derelict volumes I carted home from the dispersal of my grandmother’s house. Ex-libraries, with yellowed pages soft from use and…
May 2, 2005 Philip and I had quite the Gene Stratton Porter experience today. We’ve been troubled about the recent tenants that have taken up residence in our prize black walnut, namely, a swarm of honeybees. We actually saw them swarm a few weeks ago, and were pretty frightened by the sheer…
We had a dinner party Saturday night. Both of us were shocked when we realized how long it had been since we’d had a real sit-down china-and-crystal affair, what with working on the house and family weddings and all…I was as obsessively excited about it as Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway…I planned the menu with excruciating…
Each age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. C. S. Lewis The greatest tragedy in the life of a book,…
On my twenty-first birthday I did a very sentimental thing. I wrote a letter to myself on my best stationery, sealed it solemnly, and dated the envelope July 27, 2005. Ten years later. With a fluttery feeling about my heart I laid it reverently on the bottom of my new hope chest and piled on…
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