The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn… Thus opens Flora Thompson’s gentle masterpiece of rural…
Well, we may not have been able to travel to London with my parents this past week, but we did get to take a little vicarious flight of fancy via a really good film. It’s a delight–and such a gift of the modern age–to see beautiful things reproduced on the canvas of a screen, and…
Each and every one of Elizabeth Goudge’s books is crammed full for me of all-time favorite passages, and I never read one without a notebook or a piece of paper close at hand to jot down the page numbers of the most shining and stirring among them. Here’s an oft-revisited jewel from The City of…
I used to hate January. Really, truly, heartily despise it. It was an insult to Christmas; a dour, grumpy matron which, at the height of my sensibilities, seemed to frown upon the bright, ever-young beauty of the season just past. Tired and heartsore, I would fall upon my house with a vengeance the day after…
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…
Let this New Year be the beginning of a new life wherein “old things are passed away.” Let all blessed old things stay, but let the clutter of our heads and hearts be removed, that new inspirations and new affections may come in to gladden our lives. Chester B. Emerson God bless you all in…
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…
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his…
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
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