When I was seven or eight, my grandparents went to England. And among the things that they brought back to me was one of those coveted little books bound in green cloth and wrapped in a gorgeously-familiar glossy white dust jacket. Not to date myself, but it must be pointed out that this was at…
I can’t believe that it was fifteen years ago. How could anything be fifteen years ago? It was April. One of our number was turning 21 and we had spirited her away to one of the most enchanted places on earth to celebrate: the coastal isles of Georgia. Twelve girls in one hotel room (don’t…
We’ve always called him Uncle Will. And we always make much ado about his birthday. We toasted his memory–and his gift to us all–with gallons of hot tea and a Queen’s Cake laced with rosewater. In recitations and tokens and songs. But it was our five year-old Juliet that stole the show and carried the…
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…
… is the only word to describe the void that is following The Dean’s Watch,” quoth my friend Laura in an email over the weekend. Our book club just finished reading this 1960 Elizabeth Goudge jewel and I know exactly how she feels. We’re all kind of wandering, I’m afraid, unwilling to exchange that post-Goudge…
There was a fabulous question posed over at The Rabbit Room this morning that all good Tolkies will hail with a joyful recognition: Are you a Took or a Baggins? It reminded me of this piece I wrote for YLCF a couple of years ago after my first wild and lovely sojourn in Middle Earth…
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…
I didn’t realize how desperately I was waiting to hear someone say this until I read it in print: Why quarrel with a writer over realism and idealism? After all an author is a glass through which a picture of life is projected. The picture falls upon the pages of the writer’s manuscript according to…
Quaint child, old-fashioned Alice, lend your dream: I would be done with modern story-spinners, Follow with you the laughter and the gleam: Weary am I, this night, with saints and sinners. We have been friends since Lewis and old Tenniel Housed you immortally in red and gold. Come! Your naïveté is a spring perennial: Let…
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, ‘mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. Reading George Eliot is never a comfortable occupation. An…
One of the most poignant observations that the precocious Laura Timmins makes in Lark Rise to Candleford comes near the end of the third book, Candleford Green. Uniquely poised in history as a young girl watching an old order give way to the new, she comments on the differences between the housewives of her mother’s…
Fried green tomatoes and Oysters Rockefeller. Shrimp and grits for supper and beignets for breakfast. Jazz, Southern-style, and a full moon over Moon River. A blessed sojourn on an Island that love has made our own and which never fails to restore our souls. Cat naps in patches of sunlight like golden wine to our…
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…
I could tell by the tone of my mother’s voice that something had happened–even over the phone I sensed the gentle sadness–and I knew with a pang of kindred sorrow what it was. Aunt Ruth had died. Quietly, my mother told me, in her sleep. 104 years old and the last of my grandmother’s sisters….
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…
Your lovely, lovely words and comments have been a strong cup of grace to me this week. I have read and cherished every one–smiled at some; brimmed with tears over others. I don’t know what to say in response to your generous kindness but thank you. I am overwhelmed. God bless you all…
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. Henry David Thoreau I have always been a dreamer. When I was a child in school I was constantly being called down in class for staring out of the…
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