Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes. The Henry David gem had been buzzing at my mind all day, and all day I had been tenaciously smiling it down. I had smiled it down when I cut out one of the skirt pieces upside down, and when I had to trot back to the store…
Note: I wrote this piece two summers ago, and while circumstances don’t find me quite as artistically drained as I was then, it’s still a good word to myself in a historically thirsty time of year. This August was plenished in an unprecedented way by the creative immersion of Hutchmoot, the first-ever in-the-flesh Rabbit Room…
Flannery O’Connor called them the King of the Birds. She also said that instinct, not knowledge, led her to them. I had never seen or heard one. Although I had a pen of pheasants and a pen of quail, a flock of turkeys, seventeen geese, a tribe of mallard ducks, three Japanese silky bantams, two…
‘T is heaven alone that is given away, ‘T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer. And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries…
Innocence Mission again. Same album; different song. But that loaded phrase has been a song of its own in my heart and mind these past few days. A token of grace and a good word of God’s love poured out through other people. You aren’t really strangers, of course. Some of you heard of our…
That snippet of an Innocence Mission lyric has been running through my mind the past couple of weeks: newly weighted with meaning; warm like the steadying handclasp of a friend. For over two years now, we have known the almost unclouded joy of a dream-made-real here on our farm-in-the-city. We have stood amazed as God…
It was a regular free-for-all. An unlatched gate, a freakish puff of passing wind, and in moments the bucolic tranquility of a sleepy afternoon unraveled into a three-ring circus. I came downstairs just in time, glanced out the window with serene satisfaction (I should have known better), and gasped in horror. Slamming down my freshly-brewed…
There is something in the air today that feels like England. I caught its fragrance this morning the moment I opened the windows. A greenness that you could smell, inhale, be nourished by. A great leaping joy in growing things and in the songs of the birds. And when I took my little constitutional after…
The one thing that people invariably ask me when they see my sheep for the first time is, “Can you really tell them apart?” I never cease to be amazed and tickled by this. It’s like asking the mother of a blonde-haired brood if she really knows who’s who. I want to laugh out loud…
It’s been a day of gorgeous indolence, a true gift after all the glad hustle and bustle of the weeks previous. I sat on the couch by the fire and nursed the cold I sustained through late nights and early mornings and too much sugar and running out barefoot into the frost-touched grass for just…
My home smells like gingerbread and fir once more, and a gloriously-spangled tree, ‘the prettiest ever,’ has joined the Advent wreath in the den. My few ‘permanent’ decorations—the crèche on the Empire chest, the mantle swag of vintage glass balls, the stockings above the kitchen fireplace, have taken up their yearly residence, and yesterday I…
My post in the YLCF series on typical days of the members of our team. I chose Monday. 🙂 Monday at the Farm-in-the-City photography copyright Griffin Gibson 2009
I simply cannot believe that it has been one year since we brought all these lovely animals home to live on our farm-in-the-city. When I go down to the barn in the morning, or leave it at night, I often pause and look around me, just trying to remember what it used to look like—even…
This piece, originally published last spring on YLCF will hopefully give an account for my long silence around here…a condition I hope to remedy! I love how Catherine Marshall put it: Dreams carried around in one’s heart for years, if they are dreams that have God’s approval, have a way of suddenly materializing. And I…
February 8, 2007 That’s what I was doing yesterday afternoon. Playing nursery-maid to my biddies, on a blanket in the backyard with my tea on a tray. Fortunately my work was of a portable variety, and thus I sat, surrounded with pencils and notebooks and papers that kept rolling over the lawn on the light…
January 20, 2007 The bluebirds are house-hunting this morning. I had to call Philip and tell him, describe the way one female in particular kept poking about the hole of the house on the side of the water oak outside the kitchen window, nosing in and out as if unsure, tilting her head in examination,…
After a gentle nudge from my sister-in-law, I realized it had been three weeks since I’d shown my face around here! 😉 It has been a delightful and busy November, and apart from keeping house and preparing for the holidays, my spare time has been predominately employed in a most ridiculous scheme…Not to mention the…
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