The Coventry Carol 15th Century I spent four slow hours cleaning the house today, sprucing up and gently setting to rights, refreshing candles and putting away gifts. But we’re by no means ‘done’. I’ll be sweeping pine needles and picking up fallen holly berries for another good week and a day, for we keep Christmas…
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…
Christmas Eve, 2007 adapted from my journal On Christmas Eve morning I was up at five. I wondered if any of my neighbors were astir at that hour, but all the other houses through the trees were dark. It was my own, private, precious hour with Jesus—on a day when His humanity is nearer to…
Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day Traditional English Dancing with my Daddy, Christmas 2005 photography credit Frank Gibson, 2005
“It was a labor of love,” she told me, coming to my door on a November day and handing me a tissue-wrapped package, wrinkling her nose with a smile. There’s no doubt that it was. A host of paper leaves, hand-tinted in varying hues. Tiny pictures she knew I’d love, dusted with glitter and hidden…
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…
It’s the day before Thanksgiving. One of my very favorite days in the whole year. My kitchen, like so many others across the country (and around the world—I have friends in England, France and Sarajevo celebrating this year) is a scene of happy industry, the loved and familiar scents of sweet potatoes and simmering cranberry…
It is the burnished season. At last. The sheep and goats amble across the pasture these late afternoons in a wash of amber and the trees around the house are clothed with rainbows, green and crimson and scarlet, tawny gold and flaming orange, blended into a dreamy patchwork amid the thin blue vapors of woodsmoke…
(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…
I never dreamed a month could pass so quickly. The very fleetness, of course, as I have had occasion to learn over and over again, is the levy time imposes on our happiest hours. There’s always a stern little claw-like hand grasping for a toll at the passage to fairyland, and we pay it with…
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
After the heartbreak of last summer’s drought, I let it be known far and wide that I had officially become a three-season gardener: winter, spring and fall. After all, I reasoned, there are plenty of things that can be grown in the South over the winter; plenty of things that need a good dose of…
With a bound she leaped to the top of a hill and looked down into a dell carpeted with bluebells. She checked and paused, still poised on her toes with her arms stretched out. The bluebells ran down the sides of the dell in rivulets and gathered at the bottom into a pool of…
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…
I did something today that I have never done. I went to the post office to pick up a very special delivery, namely, a package of honeybees! (Basically, a little screened wooden crate with the bees fully visible and active inside.) We’re officially beekeepers now–and I’m alternating between a dizzy joy and a quaking terror….
The old Art Deco theatre in my hometown has recently been restored, and Friday night Philip and I went to a movie there. The fact that it was a favorite of mine, based on one of my all-time favorite books made it even more special: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, set to the…
It doesn’t feel like Spring this morning. I woke to the wind rattling about the eaves of the house and to leaden clouds, so unlike the mild sweet May-like weather we had on Saturday to make it seem almost laughable that we were able to have our first meal on the patio and that Philip…
Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and…
The End
The End