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Sit Still My Daughter

Saturday, May 28th, 2005

pre-raph woman.jpeg

“Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall…” Ruth 3: 18

A sweet word for waiting hearts…

Sit still, my daughter! Just sit calmly still!

Nor deem these days—these waiting days—as ill.

The One Who loves thee best, Who plans thy way,

Hath not forgotten thy great need today.

And if He waits, ‘tis sure He waits to prove

To thee, His tender child, His heart’s deep love.

Sit still my daughter! Just sit calmly still!

Thou longest much to know thy dear Lord’s will!

While anxious thoughts would almost steal their way

Corrodingly within, because of His delay—

Persuade thyself in simple faith to rest

That He Who knows and loves will do the best.

Sit still my daughter! Just sit calmly still!

Nor move one step, not even one, until

His way hath opened—Then, ah then, how sweet!

How glad thy heart, and then how swift thy feet

Thy inner beauty being then, oh then, how strong!

And waiting days not counted then too long.

Sit still my daughter! Just sit calmly still!

What higher service couldst thou for Him fill?

Tis hard! Oh yes! But choicest things must cost!

For lack of losing all how much is lost!

Tis hard, tis true! But then—He giveth grace

To count the hardest spot the sweetest place.

J. Danson Smith

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The first sweet pea bloom of the year is a cause for celebration, particularly considering the attempts I’ve made to grow them since I was seventeen! Last year was my initial success with the elusive little things. You simply must sow the seeds where they are to grow, (after an overnight soak in water) and no later than January. October is best—of course, I’m speaking from the perspective of a Southern zone 7 garden–so that they have a nice good chill in the earth before a late winter emergence. A good trellis or fence to grow on and plenty of manure tea or compost and a mulch to keep the roots cool is all they will ask of you. And in return, such beautiful little bonnets of pink and white and lavender and purple!

In the Victorian era Language of Flowers, sweet peas bore the message of ‘delicate pleasures’. I know of few flowers so aptly named. Once their requirements are met, the growing of them is in itself a ‘delicate pleasure’.

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My Grandmother’s House

Monday, May 23rd, 2005

I have never had to say goodbye to a house, never had to watch a house I loved pass into the hands of others. And that is why the sale of Hamrick Hall has been a peculiarly painful idea for me. Having my sister’s wedding in my grandparent’s house this winter has culminated a lifetime of fond memories and associations. From my earliest recollection it has held a fascination for me. How I used to love to sit up in Grandma’s bedroom on great-great-great Aunt Olive’s settee and hear stories about my ancestors. She would show me pictures of Piety Green, the plucky young woman who married her father-in-law when her husband and his wife died so that she could stay on at the plantation. She would bring out the fragile lace sleeve of my great-great grandmother’s wedding gown and would speak of her so lovingly that I felt honored to be named after her. We pored over old pictures and I took notes in a little composition book, and I think that my interest satisfied a need in both of us. Mine a hunger to live the past, if only for an hour or two, and hers to entrust treasured family relics into the heart of the younger generation. That house always meant history to me, my history, part of where I came from. Dismantling it for the sale has been like desecrating a shrine.

I don’t believe that it’s too far off the mark to say that God cares about the souls of houses. He speaks so much of the dwellings of His loved people; He nurtures our inborn love of home into a transcendent longing for heaven—“In My Father’s house are many rooms…I am going there to prepare a place for you…”

A house that has been loved, that has been truly lived in is no more a pile of mortar and timber than our human selves are mere bones and skin. It cannot help but assume the nature of those who have called it home; it is only natural that the blessings and the vicissitudes of those it has sheltered should be cherished away in the secret of its walls. I feel that about the Ruff House all of the time…

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Otium Sanctum

Sunday, May 22nd, 2005

My friend Lauren has a new motto painted over her kitchen sink: Otium Sanctum. It was the first thing that I noticed when we were visiting in their home a couple of weeks ago. I asked about it, and her husband explained that it was an ancient Latin phrase that the church fathers used to describe an attitude of heart and body which promoted an awareness of the presence of God in all of the issues of daily life. Literally, ‘Holy Leisure’, the ability to walk in the duties allotted to us with an inward restfulness and a reverent spirit. It describes a state where nothing is undertaken without the thought of God, where worship and communion with Him can happen at any time and in any place. What a marvelous reminder to the woman faced with an overwhelming potential of tasks for the day! This is where simplicity begins. Hurry and strife cannot survive in such an atmosphere of calm, just as true spirituality cannot thrive in a whirl of frantic activity. In the garden, at a desk, standing at the kitchen sink…we can enjoy the love of God and savor the rest that He gives when we are quiet enough to receive it.

“We must come to see how central our whole day is in preparing us for specific times of meditation. If we are constantly being swept off our feet by frantic activity we will be unable to be attentive at the moment of inward silence.” Richard Foster—Celebration of Discipline

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The Wisdom of Lucilla

Saturday, May 21st, 2005

Lucilla Eliot, of Elizabeth Goudge’s ‘Eliot trilogy’ (Bird in the Tree, Pilgrim’s Inn and Heart of the Family) is one of my heroines. Expect to hear much of her—and the wisdom that Ms. Goudge imparts through her voice—in this journal. Elizabeth Goudge’s writings have played a very formative role in my thoughts on homemaking and womanhood, but most especially the books that deal with this remarkable matriarch and the profound impact of her faithfulness upon her children and grandchildren. Lucilla’s vision for a consecrated home, where godliness, beauty and love all unite to safeguard the hearts of the young ones in its care, has appealed to every domestic desire that I cherish. I, too, long to fashion a culture of beauty and grace within my home to the eternal benefit of my family.

Here are some of Lucilla’s thoughts on the decoration of homes:

For it was one of the special mercies of Providence, Lucilla was apt to say, that beauty and shabbiness are quite compatible. The great thing, she would tell her grandchildren, was to start well. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, but it must be a costly and strong beauty, purchased at a high price of service or sacrifice, not skin-deep but bone-deep, if it is to be as desirable at the shabby end as it was at the sumptuous beginning. Pointing a moral to the grandchildren she would wave a hand towards her Sheraton chairs with the petit-point seats worked by her grandmother in a pattern of purple pansies and crimson gilliflowers. She would tell them how the exquisite curves of the wood had been created by the hands of a craftsman, each tool in its aptness and simplicity itself a thing of beauty in his hands as patiently, line by line, he fashioned the vision that was in his mind. And the same with the great-grandmother’s needlework. She had spun the wool herself and dyed it to its lovely colors with the juices of plants picked upon her walks, she had seen with the eyes of her mind a vision of her garden, formalized and touched with perpetual stillness, and painted the picture with her needle upon canvas. And now, though their legs were scratched and their colors were faded the chairs were as lovely as ever. Lovelier, Lucilla declared, because a work of art is like a human being, the more it is loved the more beautiful it grows, reflecting the gift of love like light back again to the giver. ..The odes of Keats, she had heard it said, are lovelier now than when they were written…And the same with her Sheraton chairs, which had been loved now for so many years. And everything in the house, she had told Margaret twenty years ago, must be as love-worthy as they were if Damerosehay was to be a perfect refuge for the grandchildren. Margaret had sighed and asked if this dictum applied to the saucepans. "Certainly," Lucilla had replied. "I’ll have none but the best saucepans."

from Bird in the Tree

This is exactly why I love antiques.

"By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures." Proverbs 24: 3, 4

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Treasured Books

Friday, May 20th, 2005

I’ve spent a delicious rainy afternoon perusing the stack of books I was blessed to acquire from my grandmother’s estate. I’ve held them each, gently turned fragile pages, read the inscriptions of familiar names. Out of one falls a Christmas card to my great-great-grandmother; another has an examination for a W.M.U. Mission Study Certificate tucked under the flyleaf along with a scrawled page of sermon notes on John 4. The titles are both familiar and enchanting…Scaramouche, A Mennnonite Maid, Daddy Long-Legs, Anne of the Island, Lamb’s Shakespeare…and the authors represent a host of old friends, Grace Livingston Hill, Myrtle Reed, Gladys Tabor, and Longfellow. These are books I would have thrilled to come across in an antique store, but it is the folded pages and penciled notes in my ancestor’s hands, the sloping script of ownership or dedication, that places a value on them for me that simply cannot be told. ‘Miss Ada Gann, by right of conquest’—or, rather, the illustrious ‘Cous’n Ada’ of whom I’ve heard such humorous tales all my life. ‘Miss Lena May Gann’ proclaims the flyleaf of one of my great-grandmother’s college textbooks, a limp leather volume of poetry. ‘For Olive’—indeed, none other than great-great-great Aunt Ollie whose lovely mantle clock and ‘courting couple’ have been conversation pieces in my grandmother’s house all my life. Being such a lover of books myself, it seems to me that there are few more tangible links to our forbears than the books they have cherished, digested, carefully preserved. How glad I am to come from such a long line of bibliophiles!

I’m so pleased to welcome all of these wonderful old books to my shelves, to introduce them to their neighbors. They must know by now that they’ve come home to a place that loves them as much as their first owners ever did.

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Advice to Young Ladies

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

A friend gave me this years ago:

"Arise early.

Dress thyself quickly.

Go thy ways gaily.

Do thy work wisely.

Answer men demurely.

Treat thy kin courteously.

Rule thy tongue carefully.

Con thy book soberly.

Sing thy bit joyously.

Dance thy round jocundly.

Go thy supper warily

And to thy bed merrily.

Kneel then devoutly.

And sleep surely."

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The Song of the Cardinal

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

I wasn’t sure that I wanted to read a novel about birds.

“You mean, the birds are the characters?” I gave my mother a skeptical look. To be sure, our new friendship with Gene-Stratton Porter should have left me little room to doubt. On the heels of ‘Freckles’ and ‘Laddie’, it was a safe assumption on my mother’s part that another of Porter’s books would not fail to lay claim to the imagination of three teenagers. And this one came with the backing of both Mrs. Downs and her sister, Miss Edith, who often spent afternoons in the shop and who had her own decided opinions on what made for a good story.

Mrs. Downs had let us borrow a very valuable first edition of the book because she simply could not be satisfied unless we had the gorgeous tinted photographs to accompany the tale that the author had labored with such loving diligence to provide with her text. It seems that the ‘Bird Woman’ in some of Gene Stratton-Porter’s fiction is none other than a representation of herself. She was known to spend hour upon hour in stealthy observation of the birds of the swamp and woods, and was rewarded for her pains with photographs of these exquisite creatures that were really quite remarkable for their day.

In The Song of the Cardinal, Porter takes the reader along as an intimate observer, following one of nature’s most ardent lovers from his spring migration to his amorous pursuit and courtship of a shy little dove-colored maiden. With great tenderness and the accuracy of a naturalist the habits of the cardinal are rendered in genuine drama that will be sure to enchant anyone who has been awakened to the romance of God’s creation.

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Freckles

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

“I’ll never forget the summer I read Freckles”, Mrs. Downs said one afternoon when I had escaped from the heat outside into the cool dimness of her basement shop. “I was fifteen and I sat out on the front porch swing and read it cover to cover.” Her face warmed with a reminiscent light. “And do you know what I did when it was finished? I closed the book, sat there for a moment or two—and then I just opened it and started all over again.”

“It’s that good?” I raised my eyebrows. There was no better endorsement as far as I was concerned.

And thus I was introduced to Gene Stratton-Porter, an author I have since grown to love as a kindred soul. My mother read Freckles out loud to the three of us, and to this day when I look at the flowery border of the sampler I was stitching at the time I can still see as clear as ever the beautiful grin of a plucky young Irish boy and the dancing eyes of the golden-haired ‘Swamp Angel’. I can hear the sounds of the birds in the brush of the Limberlost as only Gene Stratton-Porter could give them voice, and smell the damp forest loam rising in the morning stillness as Freckles made his lonely circuit in the office of timber guard for the swamp.

Freckles is a tale of true hearts, of moral valor and pure devotion. As the story unfolds the reader is captivated by the charm of a young man who won’t be trodden down by his troubles and who overcomes towering obstacles with a truly brave spirit. An acquaintance with Freckles, as with so many of Gene Stratton-Porter’s characters, is one that will genuinely enrich your life.

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On the Worth of Old Books

Wednesday, May 18th, 2005

Each age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

C. S. Lewis

The greatest tragedy in the life of a book, in my humble opinion, is that of being purchased by a decorator—at a fabulous sum, no doubt—to stack artfully on a table, or to fill a barrister case that will never be opened. How is a book’s value determined but in the worth of its content? It is a sad commentary on the literacy of our day to see lovely old volumes piled up in displays in shopping malls and to know that no one will ever entertain the slightest notion of reading them. To be sure, there are reverent collectors who will pay a great deal of money for a first edition of Little Women, but will it profit them any more than the young girl who received a vision of womanliness and goodness upon reading it for the first time? Indeed, the bounty carried in her heart will so far outweigh the collector’s investment that they are not worthy to be compared.

I have handled a good many books in my time. Working for years in an old and rare bookstore, I was often entrusted with the restoration of a battered volume. I always saw it as such a privilege. The dingy cover was wiped clean with a thin coat of lighter fluid, and the illustrated plate at the front was secured with a careful bead of glue. Perhaps the spine needed a little reinforcing, or an old library card holder needed to be removed. At any rate, it was a joy to me to give these old books back their dignity.

Some had fallen into dereliction by abuse or neglect, cast out and orphaned, their only hoped pinned on the chance of someone looking past their ragged cover and crumbling pages in search of a timeless message, and that was always painful to see. But others had been loved into shabbiness, read into their worn condition by someone who had treasured the worth of their tale. Those books never seemed like orphans to me; they had a mission yet to fulfill, a charge from the one who had written them—and perhaps the one who had loved them—to work their way into another generation in another world and to tell of things that are true and honorable to those who yet have the ears to hear and the eyes to see.

There is a staunch, enduring quality to them, these messengers of a gentler, simpler era, and whether one regards their message or not, one must respect their tenacity of life. I have a weakness for all things old, but especially old books because of their great potential. They are a tangible link to the heart of another time, a time when godliness was venerated and womanliness and manliness gloried in. They are the sign posts directing us to the ways our hearts are longing for in this tumultuous time. What riches might lay within to charm, to inspire, to challenge! They have been the very fuel of my dreams from the time that I first picked up Anne of Green Gables, and was thus ushered into the presence of realities that have since run through my life like a lovely, irresistible song: beauty and purity and the divine glory of everyday life.

Indeed, such verities are all the more precious in our modern-day world for their scarcity, but they are still there, and to find them we must often only follow the pointing finger of a bygone author who had the gift and the foresight to entrust them to their pen. After all, what did Louisa May Alcott do but portray the beauty of virtue? Gene Stratton-Porter proclaimed the power of moral courage, and Lucy Maud Montgomery glorified the commonplace. There is no comparison between such classics and the drivel that is passed off as literature on the girls of today. There are those who would rather have a bright new paperback, no smudged fingerprints or underlined passages to mar the pages, no one else’s name in sweeping script inside the front cover. But to me, it is the marks and pencilings, the very name itself that give a book a life of its own. The faded gilt, the sleek, heavy pages, the sweet, slightly dusty smell—all of these things are wine to the soul for the lover of old books. Yes, give me the old ones, the classics, the timeless and the noble—but give me old copies of them.

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