Reading Round-Up: Midsummer Edition

If the first quarter of the year was mystery reading time, then second quarter reading was definitely steeped in fantasy. I haven't actually planned to get so "into" certain types of reading each quarter; it's just the way things have worked out so far this year!

Here are a few notes on my reading from the second quarter. Links are to my full-length reviews on Epinions.

April/May/June reading was steeped in C.S. Lewis for me, though his name won't show up on my list of "books read." That's because I've been reading chapters and essays from a number of books about Lewis (in addition to reading some more by him that I've not finished yet). I plan to do a whole Lewisian post soon, with titles of some of the wonderful things I've been reading and re-reading. One of my favorites, and a book I did finish this spring, is A Reader's Guide to Caspian: A Journey Into C.S. Lewis's Narnia by Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead. Ryken and Mead, both respected Lewis scholars/teachers/researchers, have created a wonderful "guided tour" into the second book of the Chronicles (they've also written one for LWW, which I've not read yet) that I think would be particularly rich for high school and college aged students.

My second quarter reading was colored by the last leg of my re-read of the entire Harry Potter series, especially the final three volumes. I'd not read Deathly Hallows since the summer it came out (when I read through it once at top-speed in the days after its release, then read it aloud to my husband, our tradition) and the book felt incredibly fresh to me as a result. I'd forgotten parts of it, and reading it right on the heels of Half-Blood Prince was marvelous. I've loved it from the start, but I was moved on much deeper levels than I expected upon this read-through. I also finished Travis Prinzi's excellent Harry Potter & Imagination, which I've not yet reviewed but still want to. It's very thoughtful: not only full of insights into HP (particularly Rowling's inclusion of social justice issues) but into the Christian fantasy tradition in general.

By the way: total HP side note/rabbit trail, but did you know that when you enter Dumbledore's name in an anagram generator, one of the many fascinating things it turns up is "BOLD DEMURE"? Fun!

Second quarter also found me reading George MacDonald's The Lost Princess; Shannon, Dean and Nathan (no relation) Hale's Rapunzel's Revenge (a graphic novel); and N.D. Wilson's 100 Cupboards. I was less taken with Cupboards than I expected to be (perhaps my expectations were too high) but am looking forward to finding and reading the sequel, which I hear is even better.

One of the most pleasant surprises of my reading spring was my ability to get, via inter-library loan, the first novel in Regina Doman's young adult fairy-tale/fantasy series, The Shadow of the Bear. A contemporary re-telling of Grimm's Snow White and Rose Red, it's darker and more thrilling than I expected, just a terrific read from start to finish.

Spring felt like just the right time to read Linda Sue Park's mid-grade novel Keeping Score, the story of a young Brooklyn girl in the 1950s and her deep love for the Dodgers. I had what felt like some personal associations with the story-line, but it would have been a gem in any respect.

Spring was also just the right time to enjoy John Yow's recently released book of essays: The Armchair Birder: Discovering the Secret Life of Familiar Birds. If you know any devoted backyard birders, this would be a great gift book. The essays are witty and stuffed with good research as well as careful observations. Conversational in tone, the kind of book you like to read on a porch or on a blanket at the park -- with your binoculars handy.

100 Species Challenge #7: "Red Magic" Daylily

I have always loved daylilies. When I was a little girl, my parents grew lots of lovely orange ones, which we called tiger lilies. I'm also partial to lemon lilies.

But this variety, Daylily Hemerocallis, often called "Red Magic," is just breathtaking. I love the contrast of the red and yellow: rich red petals, deep yellow innards, and then the striking red stamens. Just gorgeous.

From Dinnertime Conversation...

"I'm glad I'm not an elephant. I don't like to drink through my nose."

(Thankfully, no, I don't think she'd tried it first.)

Early Elementary Math Resources

One of my homeschooling inspirations is the memory of the many things my Dad taught me at home when I was a preschooler. My father (who turned 77 yesterday, happy birthday!) could almost always make learning fun. When I was about four or five, he kept a blue notebook (we simply called it the blue book) where he and I did fun things together: simple math problems, writing poetry, learning the color wheel and how to mix paint colors. I loved that book!

I've tried to tap into his "learning is fun" approach when it comes to teaching math to the sweet girl. Kindergarten math went well, but we both struggled a little (as teacher and learner) in the first grade year. I think it's a combination of things: my own lack of confidence that I can teach this subject as well as history and language arts, and the fact that my daughter's skills in math feel very different than mine. While I loved lower math, especially addition and subtraction (partly thanks to the games Dad taught me) and struggled with other, more complex spatial ideas (like fractions) the sweet girl is almost exactly the opposite. Her grasp of fractions, for instance, was better at the age of four than mine was in second grade. She also enjoys learning concepts like place value.

But she's balked at learning math facts, and it doesn't help that I've second-guessed myself many a time about having blended (or moved too quickly) from manipulative to mental/abstract phases. (We use Horizons curriculum, which tends to present certain concepts and keep on reviewing them even as they present new concepts.) She actually adds and subtracts quite well, but she's not memorized many facts (much beyond 10). She can get anxious with double-digit work and carrying, a concept we just began toward the end of first grade year. And she went through a phase in spring where she decided she really didn't like working with flash cards, which just about drove this mama bear crazy. I've never been able to invest in those cool, expensive math manipulative sets (we use decorative stones from Wal-Mart's floral arranging section for counters!) but I did invest in two excellent sets of addition/subtraction flash cards from "Math in a Flash."

Watching her set up mental blocks for herself can be frustrating, especially when I know she has it in her to do the work easily. I know that both because she's bright, and because on days when everything seems to be "clicking" she can glide smoothly and easily through problems that stump her on other days. Playing math games, encouraging number play/work in every day situations, and trying to find new ways to work on memorizing facts are all part of my current plans (in a more relaxed way this summer, but stepping up the pace as we move toward fall).

With all this in mind, I've been delighted to find some terrific free online resources/helps. Here are some of my favorite early elementary math resources at the moment:

Dr. Mike's Math Games for Kids. The link is set to his page of games for first graders, but he covers bases for kids older and younger than that as well. Lots of game ideas and printable charts and worksheets.

Open Wide, Look Inside, a blog self-described as a blog about teaching elementary math, science and socials studies, with heavy emphasis on the integration of children’s literature across the curriculum. The link is set to my current favorite destination on the blog, a list of addition/subtraction resources for second graders, but you'll find all sorts of useful things for other grade levels if you poke around.

Ten Frame, one of the games we found through the Open Wide post just mentioned. It's a simple but fun computer game where children can do all sorts of things involving a frame of ten squares (two rows of five) and colored circles (filling the squares with the correct number of circles, adding circles in two frame sets, noting how many frames are empty in a given set, etc.) Cute graphics and sounds. Though this one is mostly pretty easy for her skill set, the sweet girl likes it, and I like that she can review basic concepts in such a painless way.

If your child can't get enough of worksheets, check out the Math Worksheet Site which lets you generate different types of worksheets depending on what skills you want to emphasize.

Besides these online resources, I also highly recommend Ruth Beechick's The Three R's, which combines her old title "A Home Start in Reading," "A Strong Start in Language," and "An Easy Start in Arithmetic." Sometimes I just need to go back and re-read portions of her basic but usually very solid guidance on teaching young learners in a natural way.

And we love Mathtacular, the DVD series produced by Sonlight. We used the first one last year. They call it "unbelievably understandable math." Justin, the young man who presents the concepts, is enthusiastic and engaging, and I love that my daughter gets another "teacher" at least once a week.

100 Species #s 5 & 6: Chicory & Queen Anne's Lace

One of the best things about walking the sweet girl to camp most mornings is the opportunity to see the beautiful summer wildflowers in bloom on the roadsides. Two that grow in abundance around here are Chicory (Cichorium intybus) and Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus Carota).

In fact, they grow in such abundance that we often pick some for our small green vase on the kitchen table.



Chicory is actually a flowering herb. The flowers are sometimes called "blue sailors" which I love. The fragile blooms look strikingly blue in the early morning light, though they seem to fade to lavender and then a purplish-tinged creamy white as they dry and fade.

Queen Anne's Lace is actually wild carrot. That tiny red flower you often see right in the middle is supposed to represent a drop of blood from a finger pricked while making the lace.

"Without One Star For Company"

In the morning when the sun
Is shining down on everyone
How strange to see a daytime moon
Floating like a pale balloon
Over house and barn and tree
Without one star for company.

~Dorothy Aldis

I love this poem. In fact, I loved it so much I set it to music when the sweet girl was a baby. I still have lovely memories of holding my chubby infant on my lap and crooning out the words; then later, when she reached toddler/preschool age, seeing her light up when I would sing it and hearing her begin to sing it too.

I still love this poem, but today it cracked me up. Or to be more precise, the sweet girl cracked me up. If I needed any more persuading that my seven year old has arrived firmly at the "grammar" stage of learning (the delight in facts stage, the "reality testing" stage) I need it no more.

When we left for camp this morning, the sky was a bright, vivid blue spread like a smooth canopy over the river valley. Not a cloud to be seen everywhere, but one pale white balloon of a waning gibbous moon right overhead as we walked.

"Look, Mommy, a day-time moon!" the sweet girl exclaimed, which is always cause for me to launch into the song. Which I did.

And my little girl paused thoughtfully. "I wonder why you can't see other stars in the day-time like you sometimes can the moon," she mused (sending my poetry mind reeling in the direction of Wendell Berry's "day-blind stars").

Then she added, "and why does she say 'without one star for company'? The sun IS a star, so the moon does have a star for company!"

Hmm. Good point. I suggested that perhaps the poet meant no other stars, but that the line worked best for the poem here. But my "just the facts" girl said "yes, but maybe she just didn't KNOW the sun was a star."

Of course the last time we read Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar, that pillar of her toddler imagination, it also drove her buggy (pun intended) that Carle said cocoon instead of chrysalis.

Welcome to grammar land!

Here, There and Everywhere There Be Dragons

I discovered the other day that when you post a status update to Facebook about something you're considering writing, you might be surprised by how much feedback you get.

I posted this little musing: that I was pondering (just pondering, mind you!) a re-telling of St. George and the Dragon for beginning readers. To put it mildly, I was amazed by the enthusiasm this musing generated. How wonderful to hear those words of encouragement. It makes me think I really ought to try it!

The difficulty I'm facing right now is finding the time to dive into any more new projects. I've started several in July, what is meant to be my serious writing month (meaning the only month where the sweet girl is in camp enough to give me some real daylight hours in which to work). I'm posting a number of reviews at Eps because we need the income, but I'm also working on several longer-term projects: two essays, one potentially longer non-fiction book, and some fiction.

The St. George idea sort of winged me out of nowhere the other day. I've had dragons on the brain, as you can probably tell from my recent posting on re-reading (in which I contemplated some of the differences in Tolkien and Rowling's treatment of dragons). The sweet girl and I are in the midst of a read-aloud of The Silver Chair, where Eustace Scrub (former dragon!) has yet another starring role. I've been working on a story (with a contemporary setting) that combines some elements of Sleeping Beauty and St. George and the Dragon (both princes-fighting-dragon stories). And I've been thinking about the particular gifts of really good writers for beginning-intermediate readers like the sweet girl.

Thinking about St. George led me to Margaret Hodges and Trina Schart Hyman's gorgeous, oh so gorgeous, picture book version. It's a Caldecott Medal winner, just stunning.

But I know that's only one take on the legend of George, merrie saint of England. I'm particularly interested right now in different versions of the legend, and in what visual images and colors recur most often through the different re-tellings. I went to the Baldwin Online Children's Literature project, my favorite repository of old stories and legends, and searched on "St. George" within the site. LOTS of versions popped up, and I've only had time so far to read a couple.

At any rate, I do seem to be finding dragons everywhere I turn. A friend wrote me today (yes, via FB) to say she'd recently purchased a small stuffed dragon to keep beside her while she works on the fantasy book she's writing. And I just finished Regina Doman's dark and thrilling contemporary Gothic fairy-tale Black as Night in which the New York subway system was wonderfully described as a fire-breathing dragon (and a terrific fight scene takes place near the third rail underground).

So if anyone wants to share any more good dragon stories or illustrations, St. George or otherwise, let me know!

Notable and Quotable

"The most important reason we need the church may be to remind us of our need to find communion with Someone with whom we have nothing in common, Someone who loves us and receives us despite our difference and inadequacy. The old idea of parish churches, where everyone attended the church closet to home, meant a variety of people were blended together into a community of unlikes. In The Screwtape Letters the tempter Screwtape advises Wormwood to attack the use of local parishes as a structure because 'being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy (God) desires.'"

~Peter J. Schakel, "Is Your Lord Large Enough? How C.S. Lewis Expands Our View of God"

The Joys of Re-Reading

One of the many blessings of discovering kindred spirits in online reading communities is the realization that I am not alone as a re-reader.

I have always loved re-reading books. As a child, the books I loved most were books I went back to again and again. It surprised me when I discovered that not everybody did this, and I went through a period of time when I thought perhaps I was just weird or perhaps not as smart as people who could get everything they needed or wanted from a book the first time through and go on to other things.

Gradually I began to realize that I wasn't re-reading because I forgot "things that happened" in a story (though sometimes I did, and part of the joy was rediscovering events or lines I'd forgotten!) but for the sheer pleasure of revisiting a world I'd loved the first time through. We would never say "oh, I've been to grandma's house once, so I never need to go again." Every trip is different and new, even though elements of such visits are comfortingly familiar.

I use grandma's house as an analogy partly because it was my own paternal grandmother, who came to live with us when I was nine, who presented me with one of my first pictures of an adult re-reader. My parents, who loved books and made sure our house was full of them, were rather busy in that season of my life, busy raising four of us children, taking care of my invalid grandmother, and working hard at their various jobs and household tasks. They both read, but mostly late at night or in the cracks and crevices of their busy lives.

(Side note: I still recall marveling that my mom could fall asleep over a book, something I almost never used to do -- until the past few years. Middle age has not deprived me of my love of reading, but it has ensured there are times when I simply cannot keep my eyes open and end up with my face pillowed on a paperback.)

But my grandmother, who was confined to bed for large portions of the five years she lived with us, seemed to read constantly. And I was intrigued that she went back to her favorites again and again. Suddenly I didn't feel so strange about reading Little Women for the third or fourth time, because there was Mamaw cracking open the red covers of Jane Eyre again.

I've been reading C.S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism for the first time, and it's such a delight to hear Lewis talk about the joys of re-reading. He hails literary readers as "deep" readers, who often want or need to go back to the same book again and again. He seems to feel that a good book is a book that can and should be revisited often. All of this gels wonderfully with the thoughts of John Granger, whose reflections on the Harry Potter stories I've enjoyed now for several years. In his new book, Harry Potter's Bookshelf (due to be released tomorrow!) John talks about the "slow mining" one can do in the great books, books that have been written with more than one level of meaning and that provide rich treasures for those who are willing to keep going back to dig.

I don't often consciously choose what to re-read when, but more often than not, I find myself busy with a re-read at the same time I'm reading other books for the first time. Certain authors seem to pull me back into their worlds at regular intervals, and even sometimes in regular seasons (Austen is almost always an autumn/winter re-read for me.)

At the moment I'm re-reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and absolutely loving it. Although I typically re-read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings every 5-7 years, it had been quite a while since I'd done a full read-through of The Hobbit. I'm guessing it's been at least a decade (I know the last time was before the sweet girl was born, at any rate, so over 7 years). I'm about fifty pages from the end now, with the Battle of the Five Armies on the horizon, and while certain images and scenes have definitely come back to me, I'd also forgotten many things. It's been wonderful to re-read for the sake of the story itself, but also eye-opening to think of it as a "prelude" to LOTR (so many foreshadowings and set-ups!) and even to read it with my recent re-read of the Harry Potter series in mind.

I'm still not sure where I fall on the spectrum of thoughts about Tolkien's influence on Rowling (how direct or conscious such influence was) but it's been interesting to note certain similarities. One realization I had was how much Rowling pulls on and yet also subverts, in her usual fascinating way, the story tradition of dragons. Tolkien's Smaug is such a nasty, greedy brute, hoarding every bit of plundered treasure so that he knows down to the last ounce exactly what he's sleeping on, even though he never puts any of it to use except to encrust himself in diamond armor.

It makes perfect story-telling sense for Rowling to have dragons guarding the treasures in the vaults at the deepest levels of Gringotts, the wizarding bank, but the plight of those dragons seems so sad as they're not free (not even free to be greedy and nasty as in stories of old!) and the treasures they are guarding are not their own. By the time we get to Deathly Hallows, we've been long set up to feel sympathy for dragons through Hagrid's care for a baby dragon (and his love for all wild things) and even Harry's grudging admiration for the Hungarian Horntail. The dragon the trio meets in Deathly Hallows is a sad portrait of a proud creature now broken and in chains, trained like a beaten dog to guard someone else's hoard. It makes the whole escape from Gringotts in DH yet another yet moment when Harry, acting on intuition and his own love-shaped character, frees an oppressed fellow-creature. I know it's not his main purpose (he needs to find an escape route, after all!) but it's a happy by-product of his actions, and one that he never seems to regret. As much as JKR writes about Harry's "saving people thing" it's his "freeing people/creatures thing" that feels almost as interesting, whether it's making glass walls disappear at the zoo so the boa constrictor can slither away or making sure Mr. Malfoy hands Dobby a sock. And oh, the fruit of Dobby's freedom...

I did happen to notice that the bit of treasure that Bilbo first sneaks from Smaug's mountain of treasure (the missing bit that enrages the dragon once he wakes up and realizes he's been robbed) was a two-handled cup. It reminded me forcefully of Helga Hufflepuff's cup, the horcrux Harry, Ron and Hermione manage to get from Gringotts and then flee with on the back of the dragon. This time around, the enraged creature is not the dragon (who could care less about the treasures he's guarding for wizards and goblins and only wants his freedom) but red-eyed almost totally inhuman Voldemort. No wonder Voldemort has such an affinity for snakes and basilisks. He's got a greedy, hoarding dragon heart.

Literary Parents

I'm having "one of those weeks" where I figure I may as well clean house. When you know in advance that a week is going to be filled with stressful things you can't control (like your loss of health insurance or your kid's difficult morning at the dentist) it helps to dive into a simple, practical project where you can see satisfying results almost right away. At least it helps me! (I'm reminded of the fact that I used to love...weirdly, many people thought...shelf-reading books at the library. But what could be more satisfying than seeing that things are put in their proper places, the places where people can really find what they're looking for?)

I spent much of the morning (following the sweet girl's brave survival at the dentist...first novacaine, first laughing gas) cleaning out my laundry area. The sweet girl lay on the couch nursing her sore mouth with a milkshake and the solace of Charlie and Lola episodes and I cleaned. And I do mean cleaned. Our laundry area is essentially a hallway that functions as a sort of attic. We throw stuff there whenever we can't find room for it somewhere else, and it had been months since I'd done a good digging out. There were the piles of clothes that need to be hand washed and the ones that need sorting for give away or mending. Bags with miscellaneous craft supplies and stuff from one of the last cleaning out of the small junk drawers and a box filled with S's outgrown shoes. Plastic bottles and paper towel rolls we'd saved for D's puppet making ventures. And so on...

As I sorted, tossed, dusted, scrubbed and started loads of laundry, I remembered an idea I had once for sprucing up my laundry room. It seems to be a place where I spend a lot of time doing the routine kinds of drudgery that aren't much fun and yet are necessary if the house is to keep running. So despite the fact that I sometimes begrudge how much time I spend washing, folding and sorting, I know deep down that it's a labor of love.

So here's the idea I had: to create a montage of some of my favorite pictures of literary moms and dads that I can put up on the wall. So many of the wonderful children's books I read have terrific parental characters. They're not usually central to the story, but they're there, nonetheless, often working busily and cheerfully to make home a good place for their kids to grow.

I thought I would copy a picture of Ma Ingalls (from the Garth Williams illustrations in the Little House book) washing clothes or cooking or one of the many other chores we usually see her doing. I also want to copy a Vera Neville illustration from one of the high school Betsy books, the one of her papa, Bob Ray, wearing an apron and making onion sandwiches for the family's traditional Sunday night lunch. A picture of Sal's mother, in Blueberries for Sal, either collecting berries or canning.

Those are the ones I've thought of so far. I know there are lots more I'm not thinking of right away. Can you think of beloved or iconic illustrations, from picture books or longer books, of creative literary parents who loved their kids? My laundry room awaits your ideas!

Got Books?

I've got about a thousand more priority projects I should be working on right now, but I keep going back to ideas for a potential course proposal I'm working on about the work of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. I think it's because I've been reading a lot of Lewis and Rowling again (and also MacDonald and some Tolkien).

One problem I keep coming up against: finding books I'd really like to read that are not in our county's main library system (one of the best in the country) or in the seminary library (which has a very good Inklings section). Given my complete lack of budget for books right now...no joke, I had to use my last book review income for bills and still have no idea how I'm financing the rest of the books we need for homeschool this fall...I really can't go out on a limb and purchase these right now, no matter how I might try to justify it. I'm trying ILL, but sometimes that can take months.

It dawns on me, however, that many folks who read my blog tend to love Rowling and the Inklings (hmmm....what a coincidence)! So I thought I'd throw out the titles of two books I'm looking for in hopes that some of you out there might have copies you'd be willing to part with for a few weeks, perhaps in trade for some of the other terrific books I have on my shelves. A geeky book exchange! Sounds exciting, doesn't it? Sort of harkens me back to my tween and early teen summer days when I would swap baseball cards with Wade and Woody, two guys who lived down the street from me.

So nobody gets my 56' Yogi Berra or my signed Brooks Robinson, but here are the books I'm looking for:

The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community by Diana Pavlac Glyer (Kent State University Press, 2008)

George MacDonald: Literary Heritage and Heirs, edited by Roderick McGillis (Zossima Press, 2008)

Got books? If you have these and are willing to trade for a few weeks, let me know. I've got a parcel of interesting things on my shelves, ranging from Anglican theology to Christian education to good fiction to literary criticism. If I don't need it to teach with this fall, maybe we can work out a creative exchange!

The Seventh Birthday

The sweet girl's birthday is becoming my "new way" to realize we're half-way through another year -- it used to be the approach of July 4th!

We had a lovely celebration on Saturday. After seven years, I am at last getting the hang of what makes a birthday celebration "just right" for my daughter. It has to do with simplicity and tradition: friends, ice cream, balloons, and of course muffins (no cake!) She loves the tradition I started last year, where we bring out her "birthday book," a scrapbook of pictures from previous birthdays. I didn't finish putting in all the 6 year old pictures until the morning of her 7th, but no matter. It was there to flip through and look at and marvel over, and that's what mattered.

Although we were missing some folks very dear to us this year, we still had a lovely day. And our precious little one really is seven...truly growing up, in all sorts of wonderful ways, right before our eyes. Thank you, Lord, for all your blessings on this family.

"Why It Is Important to Edit" OR Just One Little Sound

So I just posted a review of a picture book. As I re-read my zippy little conclusion, I realized I had just written this:

"a fun picture book for all households who have ever had young picky eaters of kids with big imaginations"

I don't know about you, but I doubt picky eaters would find kids with big imaginations all that tasty!

I hastily changed "of" to "OR" and practically dissolved into giggles. Now I find myself humming Hap Palmer's wonderful song "One Little Sound."

Take the /r/ from rice, and the food is cold as ice
Take the /h/ from heat, warm it up and we can eat
Take the /t/ from tape and feed a hungry ape
Oh, what a difference, just one little sound

A great song: it not only works to teach phonics, but to remind writers of the importance of careful editing!

Oh My Aching Writing Muscles

While the sweet girl is trying out her muscles and learning new found skills in sports and arts camp, I'm at home trying to get through overwhelming piles of things to do. I can roughly sort the piles (like socks?) into categories like these:

~scholarly reading and fall course prep
~homeschool planning
~writing projects (research, actual writing)
~housecleaning and organizing

It's a lot easier to sort than it is to do the actual work, especially the writing.

That's because I'm discovering how flabby my writing muscles are. I thought I'd done a pretty good job of keeping them exercised this year, but now that I'm faced with some actual daylight hours (read: I'm awake!) to dive into projects that have been simmering on the back burner, I'm discovering how painfully slow I am right now at crafting essays and stories.

I'm also re-discovering how easy it is to let myself be distracted. I'm actively looking for venues where I can send some of my work (both work I'm writing now and things in the files ready to submit or re-submit) so I legitimately need to look through some online journals, read samples of other people's work, etc. It's fun, but way too easy to while away "just a few more minutes" reading instead of diving into the waiting projects. And far too easy to let myself fall into discouragement when I read an essay or story by someone else: I remind myself that good writing should enlarge my creativity and give me hope, not make me feel diminished when I inevitably compare my creaky prose to someone's final published draft.

At least my writing log makes for amusing reading!

I'm also discovering it's easier for me right now to go back and forth between kinds of work: the practical, nitty-gritty work of household tasks (so pleasurably measurable...there's the "J" in my INTJ personality type) and the more ephemeral work of getting well-crafted sentences onto the page (harder to see immediate returns or quantify your sweat equity!). So it was that I turned with some relief to bandaging the sweet girl's scraped hand and getting her a popsicle when she got home this afternoon -- yes, she was covered in paint, dirt, and scrapes, but filled with enthusiasm over the day's fun adventures.

When I look into her smiling face, I find myself tapping into that enthusiasm and remembering something important I don't want to forget: writing is fun and I love to do it!

Images of Life and Growth

Near the end of George MacDonald's The Lost Princess, there's a fascinating chapter where Rosamond is tried in the "chamber of moods." She has shown some soul growth, growth in kindness, love and self-control, and is on her way from being a "mock" princess to a "real" one. But the Wise Woman knows she still needs testing, situations in which she can try her patience.

In the last scene, she discovers a beautiful young girl with a lap full of flowers. When the child throws a flower down on the ground, it magically takes root and blooms. When Rosamond goes to touch or pick the beautiful flowers, however, they wither. She cannot touch the living flowers without killing them, in part because she has a greedy desire to possess them rather than to simply admire their beauty and let them live.

That notion of giving life instead of death is powerfully portrayed in the image of the growing or wilting flowers. Poor Rosamond comes to realize how desperately tired of herself she is, how awful it is to be "a creature at whose touch the flowers wither!" Only when she has lived through that despair, repented of her greed and learned to touch the flowers gently (without plucking them up) do they begin to not shrink from her touch. Indeed, when she touches them with love and gentleness, she is astonished to see that the flowers actually begin to grow. Rosamond becomes speechless with joy in the face of such a transfigured flower, which mirrors her transfigured heart.

I keep thinking about the potency of this simple story image: green and flourishing plants and flowers show life and growth while wilting or drooping plants and flowers show death and barrenness. It's an image that's used to great effect in Shannon, Dean and Nathan Hale's graphic novel Rapunzel's Revenge, which I just finished yesterday.

Rapunzel is a wonderfully funny and fascinating retelling of the old fairy-tale. The Hales have moved the locale to the Old West, where Rapunzel uses her long braids of bright red hair as a whip and a lasso. She's a girl on a rootin-tootin' quest: to free her real mother and revenge the many years stolen from her by evil "Mother Gothel" the woman who took her from her real mother when she was just a little girl, and who eventually imprisoned her in a tall tree when Rapunzel refused to acquiesce to Gothel's plans to turn her into the Gothel of the next generation, a tyrant who reigns over the surrounding peoples by withholding growth from their land if they don't do as she bids.

Yes, the people in "Gothel's Reach" live a miserable existence. The land is becoming dry, barren and cracked. The few patches of vegetation that are left are quickly wilting. Gothel has gotten hold of some serious "growth magic" (it's not her own magic) and while she can use it to grow things, to nourish and provide, more often than not, she uses it to withhold growth. What an evil character! Even in the places where we see she has grown things, she often uses them to stunted purposes, like the tall tree where she imprisons Rapunzel. When Rapunzel fails to submit to her wishes by her sixteenth birthday, Gothel uses her anti-magic to withhold food from Rapunzel. Fruits and vegetables that used to magically appear for her to eat no longer show up, and the tree itself starts to twist closed. Small wonder Rapunzel has to find a way to get down.

I've barely recounted this story -- there's lots more adventure, especially once Rapunzel hooks up with trusty sidekick Jack -- because I hope you'll check it out and read it on your own. Nathan Hale's illustrations are terrific and add so much to the already terrific storytelling by husband and wife team Shannon and Dean. But I did find it fascinating that within a space of just a couple of days, in incredibly different kinds of novels written 133 years apart (The Lost Princess was published in 1875, Rapunzel's Revenge in 2008) I should find the same potent growth imagery used to similar effect.

So much of our soul's growth or stunting shows itself in whether we bestow things that nourish and help life flourish or if we try to grab and cling selfishly and thus end up bestowing death. What sort of person do we want to become? Someone who helps nourish life or thwart it?

More on soul growth and stories soon...this is a topic I find myself stumbling on everywhere right now, and thinking about a lot.

Never Too Early To Plan Your Wedding

For some reason, the sweet girl was thinking about weddings last night.

"Could people decide to have a really short wedding?" she asked me. "Could they just kiss each other and then go have cake?"

And a few minutes later, still thinking about the cake part, obviously, she gave a little sigh of dismay. "Do you have to have cake at your wedding?" she asked, because (as everyone who has ever met her for more than five minutes knows) she DOESN'T LIKE CAKE.

"Of course not," I assured her. "When it's your wedding, you can plan the celebration the way you want it. You could have pie! You could have ice cream!"

"Oh!" she exclaimed, a little gleam in her eye. "Then I think I'll have milkshakes!"

Random Early Summer Musings

The sweet girl seemed to grow three inches today, not in physical stature but in maturity. She decided to do sports camp, something she's been going back and forth about for weeks. She loves art, so the afternoon camp was a given, but athleticism is not her strong suit. She was a little nervous about the camp, but decided to give it a try. I was so proud of her when she got home and announced "Sports camp was a challenge...but it was fun!" Proud that she did it, proud that she recognized it was a challenge for herself, but that hard things are worth doing. I don't think I had that much awareness or perseverance when I was her age.

Even at six, almost seven, she still loves to carry her comforting "cloth" (an old soft piece of cloth she uses as a lovey). She mostly enjoys sleeping with it but has gotten in the habit of carrying it certain places (like church, for some reason). Mostly these days the only time she really seems to want it is when she's feeling tired or if she's feeling a bit nervous about something. I knew she was going to want to take it to camp, but I also knew there was no way it would fit in her shorts pocket or be something she could keep track of (she also tends to drop it and forget it once she gets comfortable in a situation). She seemed to feel extra vulnerable when I told her gently that I didn't think she could take it. Thankfully God gave me wisdom and I hit upon the idea of giving her a much smaller torn piece (of the same material) that I had saved in a drawer for just such a time as this. She tucked that little piece in her pocket and was just fine. She now calls it her special "baby cloth" for sports camp!

The evening found us out on the bench near our sycamores enjoying some quiet time. She grubbed around with a stick in the nearby rocks and the little patch of garden by the parking lot, and I finished reading George MacDonald's The Lost Princess and enjoyed listening to our urban birds (a noisy crow and some starlings that have a nest nearby). On our way back into the house, we were totally thrilled to discover not one, not two, but THREE precious baby rabbits scampering about and munching greens in the big tangled mess of grape vines at the end of the sidewalk. I don't think I'd ever seen rabbits this small up close! We dubbed them Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail ("but they're gathering grapes instead of blackberries," said my knowledgeable little Beatrix Potter fan) and decided Peter must be off somewhere in Mr. McGregor's garden!

The work on our building, by the way, is pretty much complete. Today they replaced the streetlamp that used to be right beneath our window. I was very saddened to see the old one go as it was old-fashioned and had a wonderfully Narnian feel, especially in falling snow. Now we just have an annoying, glaring light that makes weird shadows on the sidewalk.

First Grade Art: Degas Dancers

On the eve of arts camp, I thought I'd post another of our art projects from first grade year. The month we studied Degas, we drew ballet dancers with chalk on dark construction paper. Another great project idea from the Usborne Art Treasury. I joined in on this project, as you can see from the photo below.

Under the Rafters

I live just down the road from the seminary where I graduated eight years ago. I still teach in their online program. If anyone had told me I'd be walloped by emotion by this past weekend's homecoming event, I would have chuckled. Homecoming? That's what you do when you go back to visit places. We never left!

And yet in many other ways, we really did. Anyone who has ever been around academic communities for any length of time knows how quickly and completely they can change, at least every few years. Pretty much all of the students I studied with (4 years) and all of the co-workers I worked with afterwards (3 years as part-time staff) have long since gone. The faculty is almost entirely different from the one I studied under. Although I am still very blessed to be connected with the school (I love teaching in their distance program, where I have had the privilege of guiding some amazing adult learners and continuing to learn and grow as a scholar and a mentor) my life for the past five years has been in a completely different season.

When we realized it was time to leave seminary, our daughter was two. I was still finding my way into parenthood. Our daughter was going through a really difficult year (that's a story for another time). We went through an incredibly long season of unemployment, of vocational blankness, of questioning whether or not we'd been wise to go to seminary. Once we realized, once and for all, that God was calling us to stay in this area, our work and ministry lives began to revolve around our church and other local organizations.

I was still on campus fairly often to use the library or to attend adjunct training, but there were days I felt a bit like one of the Hogwarts ghosts. I'd slide through the walls, invisible, because almost anyone I ran into was no longer someone whose name I actually knew or who knew my name. I'm exaggerating, but only slightly. The grief I felt over such displacement dissolved after a while. I found I could take the sweet girl to play on the seminary lawn in the evenings and it was okay, a lovely place to play, a place with some good though fading memories. This past year I was able to get plugged into a homeschool co-op group with some of the newest student families, which put me on campus once a week again. The main connection I share with these ladies and their kids is homeschooling, but I enjoy listening to them talk about their classes and their spouses' study schedules and the new professors. It makes me grin a bit to remember some of my own student days.

But in the past ten days, D. and I have both been on campus more than we have been in years. A conference last week, a homecoming (the first of what they hope will be an every few years event, I think) and we found ourselves attending lectures and dinners and hanging out with some people we'd not seen in years (except on Facebook!). It was all good, but I found myself overwhelmed with emotion during a couple of the lectures.

Oddly enough, I think it was because of where they were held. Newer classrooms, renovated since we were students, are now used most often, but for larger events, crowds get moved into a multi-purpose area in one of the old buildings. I had almost every single one of my classes in that building, the majority of them in that room (or the smaller classroom in the corner). Sitting listening to someone speak on theology and church history, standing to pray evening prayer, what moved me in my gut was the fact that these were the same windows, the same rafters overhead, that I had studied under a decade ago.

Weird, I know, but we human beings are strangely visceral people. It was when I looked up into the rafters that I was flooded with memories, not just of people, but of the joy of learning and reading and writing, the whole passion I felt during that season of study. Two professors in particular helped formed my ability to think, read and write theologically, to think with my heart. Sitting in that classroom, I felt tremendously grateful to them, and for the ways that spiritual and intellectual formation still enriches my life. I may still not fully understand why the Lord brought us here and the very different ways he has guided our path since we first came (oh how different our lives are now from what we imagined we were being prepared for!) but I think I have a newfound sense of peace and trust that nothing experienced in this past twelve years has been a waste. It's all there, ready to draw on, "life and food for future years."

Lewis Reviews

I just posted my review of A Reader's Guide to Caspian: A Journey Into C.S. Lewis's Narnia over at Epinions. This is an excellent "guided tour" through Prince Caspian penned by two devoted Lewis scholars/researchers/teachers: Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead.

I'm on a major Lewisian reading kick right now, working my way slowly (note-taking as I go) through Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism, reading a number of Lewis related essays, beginning to re-read Planet Narnia, and watching the Prince Caspian film (for the first time since the theater). I'm hoping to do more writing about Lewis in the coming weeks, both review work and notes for a possible course proposal.

I also realized, when I posted this evening, that over the past few years I have slowly built a small but growing body of Lewis-related reviews at Eps. He is such an important writer of my heart. I linked to several of my other reviews in tonight's post, and some of those links take you to others as well. I'm a bit frustrated that the wonky search engine there does not always yield my actual reviews when you type in certain book titles (as I discovered tonight)...so for now I will just keep linking!

Parents, Kids and Jesus

Hat-tip to Janet at Quoth the Maven for putting me on to the very funny (and sometimes profound) blog "Stuff Christians Like." I clicked over there last night and read this wonderful post "Asking Our Kids to be a Mini Jesus." Does the daily walk of parenting teach us more about the love of God? Definitely worth a read if you're a parent, and maybe especially if you're not.

And oh, did it bring back memories of the toddler toothpaste wars...

Prose You Swallow, Prose You Follow

I'm extra hungry this week. That's because the sweet girl and I are reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy aloud.

Farmer Boy is the third book in the original Little House series. It tells about a year in the life of young Almanzo Wilder (who would grow up to marry Laura). How much fun she must have had talking to Almanzo and his family as she prepared to write this book! Like all of Laura's books, it's filled with vivid descriptions of daily life and activities, in this case the daily activities of a busy farming family in northern New York in the 1860s.

The family works very hard, including the children, so it's small wonder they eat a lot of food. And boy, could Almanzo's mother cook! I had almost forgotten how hungry I get when I read the descriptions of the table laden down with all the good things she made for them to eat:

"Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed, and tucked his napkin deeper into the neckband of his red waist. And he ate plum preserves, and strawberry jam, and grape jelly, and spiced watermelon-rind pickles. He felt very comfortable inside. Slowly he ate a large piece of pumpkin pie."

There's a solid, workmanlike quality to Wilder's prose. I keep getting a picture in my head of someone carefully building a brick wall, layering each brick with care, spreading the mortar in between with a trowel, scraping off any excess that slops over the cracks. She uses simple subject/verb sentences, and isn't adverse to repetition and listing things. It's a noun-heavy kind of prose, with crisp verbs and an occasional strong adjective (and not always the one you're expecting either -- I love "sleek butter"). This is true whether or not she's describing good food, harsh weather, or how to make or clean something.

Her descriptions of food always feel vivid, but I think it's Farmer Boy where they really stand out because there's just so much food. There's no getting around it: Laura's family was poor, especially in comparison to the wealthy land-owning Wilders. The food descriptions in the two books particularly highlight that difference. I can still recall, years ago, drinking water and eating dry bread (well, as dry as I could find it) while imaginatively entering The Long Winter, the story of the harsh winter during Laura's teenage years when her family almost perished from cold and hunger. Who can forget the howling of yet another prairie blizzard, the painful grinding of seed wheat to make bread, the twisting of hay for fuel? Wilder is as good at describing scarcity as she is plenty.

If the brick wall image doesn't work for you, try bread. I used to love watching my mother bake bread: the careful lining up of ingredients, the mixing together, the punching down of the dough, the rising of the dough beneath a cloth. All the careful steps to make something substantial and nourishing. Laura Ingalls Wilder's writing feels like that to me: thick, crusty, substantial and nourishing, carefully put together from time-tested recipes. Nothing fancy, and yet somehow it feels and tastes like a work of art.

If I'm thinking a lot about prose style this week, perhaps it's because I'm turning to a very different writer late in the evening. While the sweet girl and I are munching on Wilder in the afternoons, I'm sipping a delicious frothy beverage in the evening as I read George MacDonald's The Lost Princess.

I've read some MacDonald before, but can't recall if I ever read my way through this particular story. It's a fairy-tale, a parable, and the way MacDonald uses language couldn't be farther from Wilder's use of language, though they are both wonderful at evoking a sense of place and painting vivid pictures in your mind. But while Wilder describes things with her eyes wide open, noticing and recording exacting detail, MacDonald seems to describe what things are underneath, as though writing with his eyes closed. You can almost hear him murmur under his breath as though the words follow a tune he's making up as he goes along. He suggests and compares as often as he tells.

"In a little while she unfolded her cloak and let the princess look out. The firs had ceased, and they were on a lofty height of moorland, stony and bare and dry, with tufts of heather and a few small plants here and there. About the heath on every side lay the forest, looking in the moonlight like a cloud; and above the forest, like the shaven crown of a monk, rose the bare moor over which they were walking."

Walking through a MacDonald story I am struck that the landscape feels less solid. It's almost always bathed in some sort of light, moonlight or sunlight, affecting how we see (like an impressionist painter who goes back to the canvas to paint the same object or scene again and again, in different seasons and lights). The words meander. MacDonald doesn't mind advancing ahead a few feet and then stopping and swooping back a few feet more. Like someone sewing a back-stitch, he'll stop a sentence somewhere, go back and pick it up in the middle, then pop the needle back through right where he stopped. If he's a forest guide, he doesn't stick to a straight path, but runs off into detours, some of them inexplicable or even a bit wearying until you realize he's led you right to a bright wildflower several feet away (you just hadn't noticed it) or pointed out a animal hidden in the shade.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the second paragraph of the very first chapter of The Lost Princess where he separates the words "it came to pass one day that, in the midst of a shower of rain that might well be called golden....something happened" by over fifty phrases/clauses separated by commas, dashes and various other forms of punctuation, and once even a complete jump from prose to poetry as he stops to admit he's "stealing" some lines from Coleridge. All of this to describe what the golden rain looked, sounded and smelled like, as though he couldn't possibly imagine anything more important at that point in his story than to just stand there and linger, along with you, in this golden rain. It's like working your way through a sentence in a Pauline epistle (which I hear is even more fun in Greek) realizing that the flow of thought just goes on and on, like a babbling brook, one that you eagerly follow even if you sometimes lose your memory of where you started and have to go back to the source and start again.

Comparing Wilder and MacDonald is an odd exercise, I guess, because they're going about their art in such different ways and writing such different kinds of stories. But it's enjoyable for the mere sake of comparing, and for the beauty of realizing how much one can love both kinds of writing for what they are.

I love the breathless, meandering feel of MacDonald -- even just imagining reading that opening sequence makes me laugh, knowing how anyone listening will be almost quivering in anticipation (as I was the first time I read it) by the time we got to those two little words "something happened." He makes me want to follow him on that winding path deep into the magical forest drenched in moonlight, where I know owls will hoot and small creatures will scurry across our path and we'll stop to listen and to watch.

But I also love the substantial, solid feel of Wilder, where each sentence builds on the next as bricks in a wall, raindrops in a barrel, ingredients in a recipe, accumulating in ways that make sense, where the end of a chapter leaves me as satisfied as someone who has just eaten a piece of crusty homemade bread warm from the oven. And dripping with "sleek butter." Of course.

Constellations and Sequences

"Why is this cup constellating?" the sweet girl asked me tonight at the dinner table.

"Why is it what?" I asked.

"Why is there constellation on the outside of this cup?" she asked again, tracing the wet drops with her finger.

"Oh!" I said. "You mean condensation!"

I do love our daughter's way with words. She uses them so boldly, even when she's not quite sure if she's got the right one on the tip of her tongue.

One of my other favorites, which she used to say quite regularly, is "sequences."

You know, sequences...those bright shiny things you use to decorate clothes and purses.

First Grade Art: Water Lilies

Since we're in our last week of school, I'm starting to pull together some notes and pictures from the sweet girl's first grade year. I want to keep these things together with some samples of work from her narration notebooks, so we have a good chronicle of the kinds of things she learned and did this year.

So don't be surprised if I'm posting a few more pictures than usual in the coming days, especially artwork samples.

Here's one from just a week or two ago. We were learning about Monet, and did a tissue paper collage of some water lilies. I helped cut some of the shapes and laid down some of the glue and a few of the tissue paper pieces (S. always complains of sticky fingers) but she did much of the work on this herself. She especially loved tearing the different colored papers into strips and layering them on top of each other.

"Lost and Found"

Right as I finished posting the frustrated post below, I began listening to a favorite song from Robin Mark's "East of the River" CD. A friend passed this recording on to us a few weeks back and I've been falling in love with it during the past week. There's one song in particular that's speaking volumes to my heart right now. I thought I'd post the lyrics here, because this is the kind of perspective I'm praying for in the midst of difficulties.

Sometimes I feel like certain songs or poems are written as though God had me in mind when he touched the poet's heart with certain words. Have you ever felt that way? For instance, I'm so very thankful for the reference to "pavement" in the first stanza here, as it connects the whole song even more deeply to my life and experience right now. In fact, that whole first stanza puts me in mind of a moment I had years ago when we first moved to our little town. I was having a hard time making the transition here, as you might guess, and was absolutely startled one day to find the sidewalk not far from here sprinkled with small silver angels. A shopkeeper had spread them out like confetti, just because...

I still have one of those tiny angels. I've kept it for almost twelve years.

"Lost and Found"

When the rain falls and it somedays will
Then the pavement under my feet
Sparkles silver and gold, in reflected light
That I otherwise wouldn't have seen

And when the storm comes and the strong winds blow
I will bow my head to push through
And every step that I take I will watch and pray
To be sure my foothold is true

So Jesus don't you keep me from that storm
I want to walk that sacred ground
For You are Master of it all
And I am just a lost and found

And in the dry place,
in the wilderness,
When Your Word seems so far away
Then I will think of my life, and I will
bless your name
For your promises never have failed
And when the night falls at the end of days
I will lift my eyes to the heavens
Where we will shine like the stars
in reflected light
In Your presence forever and ever

Lost and found, lost and found
I am but a lost and found
But can there be a sweeter sound than
singing with the lost and found

(Robin Mark, 2007)


Amen

Ready For That Vacation...

We started our last week of school this morning, but oh my, am I ready for a vacation. And it has almost nothing to do with being tired of school (though both the sweet girl and I are ready for a break from routine...we seem to be wrapping up well).

Remember my post from a couple weeks back, about my struggles to live in a city? I had one of those days where city was pressing in on all sides and just exhausting me.

Our landlord decided on this week for the workers to come and strip the bricks from the top part of our building. There's some sort of oxidization (i.e. rust) problem, and they're breaking the bricks off from the top of the building down to the top of the window-frames. I have no idea whether or not the bricks will get replaced, which may mean the outside of our building will look even more forlorn and dilapidated than it does already. I'm trying not to mind, reminding myself of how much we enjoy the good space within.

In the meantime, we have a huge scaffold across our sidewalk. We have to duck under it to get in and out of the house and the foreman of the project has issued a friendly caution that we let them know when we come out or at least check overhead so we don't happen to catch bricks on the head. And of course, for most of the day they were pounding and hammering at the surface of the building, breaking the bricks off. I've been struggling with headaches since a minor migraine-like episode last week, and let's just say continual pounding for hours didn't help today (they may bring the electric hammer tomorrow...oh joy! which at least has the advantage of getting the job done faster). They're right at our front windows...we had to close the front blinds this morning because otherwise the workmen would have been right there during out entire math lesson ("Mommy, I feel a little bit distracted..." said the sweet girl. Huh. Wonder why?)

I decided to have the sweet girl skip her rest time (hard to rest with all that pounding) and we went out to run errands. I guess I was hoping to escape "city sounds" for a while, but motorcycles, a bus, and an angry and quite possibly drunk man (we get that a lot round here) really didn't improve the atmosphere much. I just kept feeling tired and more discouraged.

Part of my discouragement is our difficult financial situation which continues to get harder. Pardon me for mentioning it (and I'll spare you details) but we could use much prayer. Our long-held ministry positions and patchwork of part-time/self-employment jobs (sans health insurance, which we pay out of pocket) has had us running a really long deficit. We're trying to be wise, but each month the squeeze gets worse. I knew this summer was going to be difficult, but I thought the worst of it would not hit till July. The way we get paid, June should have been slightly less anxiety-ridden. But go figure, it's still awful. I spent part of the morning trying to wrestle with the numbers and see our way clear, but it remains a fog. So awful that the debt hole is beginning to feel not like a mere pit, but a Mars-sized canyon (yes, we've been reading solar system books again). First of the month is always hard for me because of the frustrating hours spent trying to figure out the bills.

And this month feels particularly hard because I just can't see any way we're going to be able to cover any summer vacation (much less the things we *really* need, like groceries and gas!). Normally I would not be whining about the fact that we can't get any vacation. I'm aware of how selfish that sounds, especially in a world like our's! Last summer we got 2 1/2 days, and I remember being determined then that we would find a way to make sure it was a bit longer this year. But with a shortfall every month, there is no way to do it. And I am just having one of those days when my longing for -- beach, rivers, mountains, fields -- anything not covered in concrete! is just acute.

So please forgive this post. I know the weariness will pass; refreshment will come (it always does somehow...God is good, all the time!). I'd appreciate prayers that I'd be open to it when it does come, not bowed down with heaviness. And grateful for prayers that I will survive a week of sledgehammer sounds on our walls.

Last Six Betsy-Tacy Books Being Released Again This Fall!

Woo-hoo! Or perhaps that should be "Yoohoo! Betsy!"

Harper's is re-releasing Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy high school & beyond books (Heaven to Betsy, Betsy in Spite of Herself, Betsy was a Junior, Betsy and Joe, Betsy and the Great World, Betsy's Wedding) this coming autumn. You can go to this page at the Betsy-Tacy Society to see the announcement and sneak peek at the covers. You can even pre-order through their gift shop!

I almost swooned when I saw these. They're part of the Harper Perennial Modern Classics line. They've packaged them as two novels per volume (odd choice, but okay, I'll take it) but they're reproducing them with some of Vera Neville's original cover art. Too wonderful that. From the pictures, I think the cover art is from the earlier book in each pairing -- I wonder if they reproduce the art from the other book on the back cover or somewhere inside?

I don't often feel a desire to own another copy/edition of a book I already own, and I already own all the Betsy-Tacy books and the other Deep Valley books as well. But these books are such a major parting of my reading/writing life. So yes, I would love these.

I'll even forgive the publisher for letting Meg Cabot provide one of the forewords (I apologize in advance to any Meg Cabot fans) instead of...well...me. Considering I've never had a book published, for children or otherwise, I can understand why no one called! I can think of other authors, however, whose writing would definitely fit the spirit of Lovelace's world better. Though for all I know, Cabot loves these books dearly and has penned a terrific foreword. (I promise I will eat my Merry Widow hat if she turns out to have written something wonderful.)

Wouldn't it be fun if we all decided to have Betsy-Tacy picnics in honor of the release date in October?

The Flight of the Hummingbirds

I'm a bit more than half-way through John Yow's The Armchair Birder. It's been a while since I've read a book of essays and I'm thoroughly enjoying these. He provides witty commentary along with his observations, and the birds he covers in these pages are "ordinary" birds (if there is such a thing...I'm starting to wonder!) not exotic ones. He even writes on a few birds, like the crow, robin and starling, that we see here in our little city.

An example of Yow's writing style will also provide you with one of my favorite passages so far. It's in the essay on the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris):

"Maybe the male I'm watching right now, sitting impatiently on the hook from which I've removed the feeder to refill it once again, is in fact trying to fatten up so he can hit the highway and catch up with his pals. Or maybe, since we're having one of the hottest, driest summers on record, he and all the other hummers are just thirsty. In any case, they'll be gone soon enough, headed to Central America on a journey that will include a 500-mile, nonstop flight across the Gulf of Mexico. The energy they build up for the trip often doubles their body weight, yet even so, the feat seems pretty miraculous. Austin says that a physiologist once proved by metabolic tests in his laboratory that the ruby-throat couldn't possibly store enough fuel in its tiny frame for such a lengthy flight, but, he writes, 'the birds, never having read the report, continue to do so twice each year.'"

Heh. It's not possible, but they do it anyway. How I love this.

Can you imagine the thousands...nay, millions...of wingbeats that one hummingbird must beat for such a long flight? A nonstop flight of 500 miles! For that tiny (yet courageous and ferocious, according to other descriptions) brightly colored bird.

Where does the hummingbird get its hidden reserves of energy? Yow mentions later that hummers can eat a wide variety of insects in mid-air, catching them "flycatcher-style." He didn't connect that to his former musings, but I found myself speculating that perhaps the way they have been designed enables them to take in the extra nourishment they need as they go.

Well, however the mystery works, it strikes me that the hummingbird probably gets the energy he needs where we all get it: from God, the one who sustains the whole world. As I was praying yesterday, feeling in need of strength for the ongoing journey, I felt thankful for the hidden reserves of energy given us by the Holy Spirit. And I found myself picturing the flight of the hummingbirds, whose migration will for me forever be an icon of reliance on the unseen...and the cheeky joy of doing what looks impossible in the face of all the reports that seek to define what's possible.

The Quilt That Covered Me For Years

Last weekend we bought a new quilt for our bed.

Normally that wouldn't be something I'd find a need to post about on my blog -- or even turn into a status update on Facebook! It's actually not the new quilt (a practical machine washable one, lightweight with lovely colors, on major sale) that I feel a need to post about. It's the quilt we're retiring.

That quilt (the one pictured above) was handmade by my grandmother. My beloved Mamaw passed away almost seven years ago, the day that the sweet girl turned one month old.

Mamaw was an amazing woman. Tiny and tenacious, she gardened and quilted and canned for years in her small mountain home in western North Carolina. She often made what I thought of as "milestone" quilts to celebrate marriages and births.

By the time Dana and I got married, in 1992, she was in her early 80s and her quilting activities had slowed down, mostly because of her failing eyesight. I didn't really expect she'd be able to make us one and so was extra-delighted when she presented us with a quilt (the last one she ever made) in 1994. It was not her best quilt, she apologized. Some of the stitches came out crooked (I loved those). But she wanted us to have it. She stitched our names in tiny little red stitches on the inside corner. "Both your names," she emphasized, "so you'll always have to stay together." Her way of telling us that marriage is meant to last!



Although part of me considered the possibility of giving the quilt a longer life by only using it for decorative purposes or only using it once in a while, I found I just couldn't. My grandmother was such a busy, grounded, active person, always doing things for others, that it just didn't make sense not to use her gift to us as it was intended to be used. It was lightweight and stayed on our bed year-round. It's been there for fifteen years.

In the past couple of years, it's begun to get ragged. I started to cringe whenever I had to wash it as some of the tears got larger and some of the batting came loose. Unlike my Mamaw, I have no sewing gifts, and there wasn't much I could do to repair it. The edges and corners also began to look perpetually grubby and dingy. I used it longer than I should have probably, but it had become such a comfort and such a icon of love. Yes, it was a quilt that graced a marriage bed, so it represented that, but it seemed to bundle many other kinds of love in its warm folds. I cuddled with it on the couch on sick days, wrapped it round me in times of grief, and wrapped up in it to read countless times. I snuggled my nursing baby in the warm embrace of this quilt.

It was past due for retirement. It was time to take it off the bed and replace it with a serviceable quilt for "everyday use." As I folded it up and smoothed its soft surface, I found myself remembering a poem I wrote years ago when it was brand new, a tribute poem to my grandmother. It's one of those poems that makes me realize there really are moments when poetry can be a touch prophetic. I thought I would share it here.

You Gave Me Strawberry Squares

You gave me strawberry squares
stitched together with gnarled love
and trembling tenacity.
Patches of red cut a zig-zag path
against a field of soft white cotton.
"If I have one more quilt in me, it's yours."

You pulled it, piece by piece,
from your inner spaces
like sticky strands of intricate web.
Your weaver-hands are old.
You say you lost the needle
whenever your eyes got tired.
I see you searchng, on hands and knees,
looking for the eye, the center of things.

I patch your story with every question
about every photograph in the album.
We lose the thread of conversation
in the jumbling of years,
but always find the center again.
Your life has ripened on the vine,
bright like cloth strawberries.
Your creation holds the colors
of Christmas, the fruit of summer,
full circle in the midst of squares.

This quilt will cover me for years --
the fruitful squares of story
keep me going when I can't find the eye.
What did you think while you sewed
the pattern, bent over the frame
like living prayer?
(Was the pattern there all those years?)

Did you think about
the boxer dog who stole brown workpants
and green shirt right off the line,
how Papaw gave away the best beans
in the row because giving the best
is what you do,

the depressed corn field
where hungry neighbors stole healthy ears
and you pretended not to see,
the grave your men dug in the same field
for a friend,

the way you could turn your
Baptist-preacher-father-in-law
on the sheets with one hand
he took to dying so lightly...

You remember it all, the places,
the names, the color of the corn
and beans, the feel of the sheets
and the smell of the field,
and it's all there, stitched into
strawberry squares you gave me,
past pieced lovingly to future.

This quilt will cover me for years.

(EMP)

100 Species Challenge #4: Mayapple

On Friday, the sweet girl and I went on a field trip with one of the families in our homeschool group. We headed to a nature center about 20-30 minutes from here and had a marvelous time seeing and hearing all sorts of amazing creatures great and small. Our favorite sounds belonged to croaking bullfrogs (we saw about a dozen of them, poking their eyeballs just above the surface of the pond) and hammering woodpeckers (we heard them but didn't see them). We also saw tadpoles in various stages, thousands of termites devouring an old log, and countless beautiful trees.

One plant we saw in the woods intrigued me so much I decided to take this photo so I could bring it home and identify it. The kids kept noticing the large, umbrella like leaves and I was surprised to find this mostly round white flower clinging to the front of the stem and sheltering under the leaves. Not all of the plants were flowering, but the ones that were had only one flower.

Thanks to Peterson's wildflower field guide, I now know this is a mayapple (podophyllum peltatum). It's a perennial plant found in woodlands; the flower usually appears in May and is later followed by a lemon colored berry. According to Peterson's, everything but the berry (which can be made into jelly?) is toxic.

The funniest thing was that I had no flash of recognition when I read its English name, but the light bulb went off for me when I saw the Latin name. Podophyllum happened to be the name of the homeopathic remedy that got me through a terrible intestinal virus in March. (Recall that homeopathic remedies are made with miniscule and very diluted amounts of substances which would otherwise be toxic.) So thank you, Lord, for the helpful medicinal qualities of this unusual woodland plant!

One more funny note: the plant has gone by many other names, including wild lemon and also mandrake. One website where I read information mentioned that in English folklore, the plant has been described as screaming when it's pulled from the ground, with its screams driving people insane. Ah-ha! Anyone else think that JK Rowling has read this bit of folklore? Good Harry Potter reader that I am, I couldn't help but laugh...and consider reaching for my fluffy pink earmuffs.

Pretty Wild! Top Picture Books for Children

Fuse #8, a blogger at School Library Journal, has been gradually posting the results of a poll that asked people to rank their 100 top children's picture books. Although I've only read a few posts, I've enjoyed them...she's not just ranking the books but talking about them, sharing snippets of emails in which the voters explained their choices, reflecting on the artistry and history of the various books, etc.

I just happened to hop over today and saw that the final post is up with the number one book from the poll results. You can click here to see the fun post on Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, which (not surprisingly perhaps) came out on top.

Also great fun...within the post is a link to a YouTube video of President Obama reading Where the Wild Things Are to a group of kids on the White House lawn. It was clearly not the easiest of tasks: one gets the impression the group of kids was huge, and he's in the unenviable position of trying to make sure everyone can see the pictures and also hear him, but it's still a delight. He's a bit stilted until he gets to the roaring, but then he warms up. My favorite moments are watching his daughters, especially the youngest, enjoying their Dad reading aloud, and Mrs. Obama adding comments and sound effects from her seat behind him. Yes, sound effects. Clearly Sendak's classic has been read at the Obama house long before this public relations event. Any time a family has sound effects down, you know it's a beloved book!

I'm looking forward to seeing a post that provides the entire list of 100 books, which should be coming soon. For now you have to scroll down and pick up links that direct you to other postings that detail the list. If you're curious, here's the top ten in descending order, from #10-#1: Knuffle Bunny, Millions of Cats, Madeline, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Make Way for Ducklings, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, The Snowy Day, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Goodnight Moon, and Where the Wild Things Are.

An interesting list. I'm trying to decide what my top ten would look like, and what difference there might be in my personal list of books that I love and that have influenced me and my family, and my list of books that I think deserve to be in the top ten by virtue of their historic influence and how much they've been loved by so many people. My other thought has to do with editor Ursula Nordstrom, whom I was happy to see was featured prominently in the post in the post on Wild Things, and how far-reaching and long-lasting her influence has been in children's literature.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the top ten, or your own top ten!

Loving the Beautiful Particulars

If anyone had ever asked me if I loved nature...all the wonderful things God has created...animals, plants, weather...I would have always told them yes.

I grew up with, and completely took for granted, a lovely yard in Virginia. We had terrific climbing trees, green grass that felt terrific on my bare toes, a gorgeous garden complete with a garden patch I was allowed to call my own from a very young age. We had rose bushes and a plum tree and at either end of the street where I lived there were grassy fields (we called them the "triangles" because of their approximate shapes) where the kids in the neighborhood could meet to play kickball or pick wildflowers or collect bugs. We had ditches with ivy-covered banks between which water flowed like a miniature stream, allowing us to race leaf boats. I had a sand pile and a swing set. Down the road from us were neighbors who had all sorts of lovely trees, including magnolias. Almost nothing is more beautiful than their large, creamy blossoms and shiny dark green leaves unless it's the feathery, powder-puff pink blossoms on the sweet-smelling mimosa trees, which also flourished in our neighborhood. A block or so away, we even had a patch of woods in which we could wander (sadly gone now).

I loved it all. But I never fully appreciated it until I didn't have it.

I've had other places of beauty besides that first neighborhood. I lived on two stunningly beautiful (though vastly different) college campuses, including one in the mountains of western North Carolina, truly one of the landscapes of my heart. In the first five years of our marriage, D. and I lived less than five minutes from a Pennsylvania national park that burst into incredible dogwood bloom every spring, a place where you would stumble upon fields of deer or quaint covered bridges when you turned a corner.

I didn't know I was going to grow up and be called to live in an urban setting. Cities, for all the fascination they hold, always felt like they sucked the life out of me if I was in them for too long. Too much concrete and glass and brick, too much rust and bustle. I didn't mind visiting cities, but I was certainly never going to live in one, and I would have said adamantly that I would never a raise a child in one if I had a choice.

And yet...here I am, here we are. In the post-industrial rust belt for almost twelve years, a tiny town of boarded up storefronts and too much traffic, completely yardless, my front "porch" a concrete step just a few inches above street level. Would I love to live somewhere else? You bet, except for the tiny little wrinkle that the Lord has apparently called us to be where we are for the time being and given us a love for this place and those who live here. If there was one other important thing I learned along with my love of all things green in God's world, it was that the very best place to be is the place where God calls you, no matter where it is.

So here I am, here we are. And guess what? In this remarkably dry and weary concrete land, I have found myself falling in deeper love, and in deeper ways, with the created world.

I think it's because we see so little of it, because I have to work so hard to find ways to share nature with my little girl. She has none of the beauties I took for granted when I was her age, no yard to run around in, no place to safely walk barefoot, no opportunity to just sit and stare for minutes (or hours) at bugs. Well, we do have those opportunities sometimes, but they come rarely and they have to be planned carefully, with visits to the yards of friends or nearby parks or the seminary lawn. I think what I am most wistful for is the deep sense of freedom and spontaneity that I had as a child, when I could simply wander outside (I can hear a squeak and the slim wooden frame of the back screen door slamming behind me as I write this) and toss myself down onto the grassy lawn with a good book. The sounds I took for granted were cricket chirps and cooing doves, not motorcycles and trucks. The smells I took for granted were sweet honeysuckle and pungent ivy, not exhaust fumes and the dumpster across the road.

So we've had to get creative. We've had to get passionate about learning as much as we can about every bit of nature within reach. We take nature walks here in our little city, picking wildflowers, crouching as near as we can to curbside gardens that don't belong to us, twining binoculars around our neck so we can peer at the birds nesting in the birdhouse in the yard of a nearby church. During the week hardly anyone is around those church grounds, so we sometimes sneak into their side yard for a few minutes and play. There's a long, cascading kind of willow tree there, a small one that blooms with beautiful white flowers in early spring, and the sweet girl calls it her "tree house." She hides beneath the branches while her Mom keeps a casual lookout for anyone who might be wanting to kick us off the property, trying to give her little girl a few minutes of the kind of quiet, green privacy she loved so when she was six.

And I am amazed at how much I'm learning. Do I still long to live in a place where I can these things for granted? Well, to be perfectly honest, yes. But having to work hard to find bits of nature means I value them all the more when I find them. I have learned the names of plants and trees and birds. I've never been particularly good at knowing specific names of things, so I've tried to get better. And as I learn them, I pass them on to the sweet girl. We're learning together to appreciate every bit of God's beautiful created world we can, from the ten sycamores across the road (whose buds we watch with such raw expectation every March) to the wonderful starlings that are nesting in the gap between the buildings across the street. Not to mention the tree sparrows that have their nest in the corner of our own building (we live over a warehouse) and the huge crow that struts his stuff on the roof across the way from time to time.

This past weekend we went to a nearby park for a picnic supper, something we try to do as often as possible in spring and summer. This was our first picnic of the year and it was a bit grey and chilly in the early evening, but still oh so beautiful. Robins were scattered on the grass in such vast numbers it was like they were having a Robin convention, or (more likely, I thought) deciding to field a few baseball teams. I counted 29 robins at one point on the baseball field, most of them congregating in the outfield.



And I was stunned by the surge of excitement and happiness I felt when a bright yellow blur tumbled by us, surfing the wind. I actually stood to my feet shrieking "it's a goldfinch! it's a goldfinch!" I was so thrilled to see that amazing bird I wanted to toss a handful of confetti or set off sparklers. D. had told us he'd seen one during his morning walk the other day, but neither the sweet girl or I had been able to add this particularly beautiful little bird to our spring list yet, and we were delighted to do so. He flew by twice (yes, it was definitely a he...we could tell by his colors and markings) finally alighting on the metal fence by the baseball field, and I simply stood on the other side of the fence, staring in awe.

Getting to know God's world in its particulars is a joy. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that it took almost a decade of lean years to get to me to the place where I began to passionately look and learn everything I could. Somewhere along the line I realized I had to stop majoring in wistfulness and get busy appreciating anything and everything alive and growing (or singing or flying!) that God put in my path. The beauties of green and growing things, the gorgeousness of the natural world, are never going to be something my daughter is going to be able to take for granted as I did. But that doesn't mean I can't teach her a deep gratitude for them, and a deep joy in discovering them wherever they are.

For All The Moms Who've Been Before...

From the sweet girl's bedtime prayer last night, at the end of a lovely Mother's Day:

"Thank you for my mom...and her mom and her mom and her mom and her mom and her mom, all the generations back. All the way to Eve."

I think that just about covers it!

Speaking of Writing

"Work of the eyes is done now/go and do heartwork..." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

I love this quote. You can find it in various forms online; depending on the translation, people seem to break the line in different places. Sometimes you'll find it as "done now...go" and sometimes as "done...Now go" and though those nuances make a subtle bit of difference, both seem to work.

What I love about it is the way it clearly shows the need for both "eyework" and "heartwork" when you're writing. "Work of the eyes" is necessary -- we need to look and look and look some more, and store up all we see. But there comes a time when the looking stage reaches some sort of end, and we find ourselves needing to do "heartwork" on the images we've seen. The last part of the quote is actually something like "go and do the heartwork on the images imprisoned within you." Although that speaks to me too (especially the idea that the work of writing has to do with freeing) I don't think that all the images we begin with are necessarily imprisoned. A better description for me might be embyronic. The images are like seeds, the "heartwork" involves digging, plowing, planting, nourishing, watering, and all the other many things one does to encourage growth and blooms.

Sometimes the images we begin with in the eyework stage are actual ones, things and people we've seen as we've explored the world. Sometimes the images are born in our imagination, including the images and characters that we're given as gifts. But once we have the image firmly fixed in our mind, it can't just sit there. We need to get it to the page, then begin to wrestle with it and create something that is born not only of close observation or creative imagining, but of the deepest parts of our hearts and what we believe about the story...the one we're telling, the one we're living in, and how those intersect.

Work of the eyes, work of the heart. Eyework, heartwork. Both utterly necessary, and both arduous tasks. I'm rediscovering that right now as I try to step back into the creative work of writing fiction. So far I've mostly dangled my toes, cautious about the water below. Pretty soon I need to dive.

A Festive Morning To You

I woke up this morning feeling discouraged. That's not an easy thing to admit for someone who tries/wants to greet each new day like the gift from God that it is. But unfortunately today it was true: I felt like I sprang straight into the morning with leftover discouragement from the day before attached to my back in a heavy pack. Maybe I forgot to take the pack off last night before I went to bed!

And then the sweet girl got up. I was cleaning up a bit in the kitchen before I went into her room for morning prayers. I'd already told her good morning and when she came back into the kitchen, I said "good morning again" sort of automatically, my mind somewhere else.

"Good morning!" she exclaimed, her voice bright. And then added, "Festive morning! Great morning! Excellent morning! I love you morning!"

I started laughing. I told her I especially loved "Festive morning" -- one of the most joyful ways I've ever heard to welcome a new day and to share your joy with someone else.

I think I may try this discipline for a while: finding a joyful way to greet God each morning, maybe even before I get out of bed. I know some days I will feel that joy...and other days, like this one perhaps, it will be a conscious stretch. But that's okay. I think the discipline of doing it can matter, to my heart and to God's.

I've been realizing anew lately how important it is that I let God know how much I love him. So often when I pray, I'm stuffed with requests or worries, and yes, that's part of praying too, to present those things at God's feet. But simple words of love mean so much in any relationship, including our relationship with the Lord of heaven and earth.

A festive morning to you!

What a Difference...

the sun can make, especially in the way we see shadows.