Bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree.

Elizabeth Von Antrim

Some of my thoughts on tea party weather… 

I’ve just had one of the goldenest of golden days with my best girl friend.

She’s here from Australia, whence she wandered when she married her true love almost ten years ago. Every time I go up to her former home—almost an hour outside of the city and set on a hill commanding views of rolling pasture land and neighboring farms—I feel the years slipping away. I remember the endless walks we’ve taken through scenery as lovely as an English countryside. The lively conversations in the wee small hours of the morning, our Bibles spread open on our laps and the music of a whippoorwill outside the open window. Lazy afternoons on the porch swing and picnic lunches and midnight snacks.

The last time she was here we had tea on the front porch overlooking the old memory-haunted valley where we’d spent so many happy afternoons as girls. We laughed at the time that had passed, and pretended like it was ten years ago and that we still had all of our dreams and visions before us.

    “Only our skirts were longer then,” I smiled, glancing down at our almost identical, chic knee-length numbers.

    “And there weren’t all these lovely children!” she declared, snuggling her little girl who had sidled up with her own tiny tea cup. We both laughed at the parade of small boys who just then marched onto the porch with muddy boots and stick swords.

    “What children?” I cried. “Why, these are all just little fairies!”

But this week we went for one last ramble through the valley in its springtime glory. Sadly—tragically—development is lurking beyond its pastoral charms and its days are numbered. As we tramped down the drive there was a great mingling of joy and sorrow in my heart. I thought, unavoidably, of the coming destruction, and my imaginative mind made all manner of parallels to the eroding values of this modern day—what Sir John Betjeman so tellingly calls the ‘age without a soul’.

However, the joy of this beautiful friendship and all it represented, the life God had blessed us with and the dreams He had fulfilled in all the years since we’d been there together swelled within me as a wordless song of praise. My spirit kept whispering thanks to Him for His great beauty and goodness. My happiness was beyond expression and my dear friend knew it.

We slipped through the gate and ambled down a light-filled pasture, our feet crunching on the tussocks of grass, our every sense awake to all of the fleeting gifts of loveliness that dear realm had to offer.

    “The last time I walked here I was in a medieval gown with roses in my hair!” I laughed. Visions of knights and ladies danced before me, imaginary feats of derring-do, cows that became henchmen of an evil prince and an old vine slung between two trees that was a swing for the fairies.

I wore jeans this time, and my hair was in braids. In place of the faithful old Sheltie, ‘Bear’ a new companion fittingly named ‘Merrie’ frisked about in the grass just ahead of us. And two little boys pranced along beside, their eager commentary supplanting the giddy chatter of days gone by. So we went, past a pond holding a cup of sky, through a patch of wood, down, down to the valley itself, all green and gorgeous, with a little river cut through its heart, red-banked and overhung with budding trees.

The boys scampered down the path and I watched them with delight. A five year-old, slim and spry, with a darling mop of hair and the eyes of a poet; a three and-a-half year-old, adorably pudgy and utterly devoted to his big brother, trotting along behind pumping his fat little arms. Like Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear. Like the children my friend had envisioned so long ago.

We settled ourselves on a soft bit of grass in the sunshine and watched them play on the sandy bank. Murmuring softly over our cherished memories—in between removing little socks and shoes and forming the clumps of clay we were presented with into cubes and spheres—we honored the past. Our past, beautiful, maidenly, and sweet. And, in our hearts, we honored our wonderful Lord who is ‘righteous in all His ways and loving toward all He has made’.

Ten years ago this very spring we were light-hearted girls, gathering dreams for the future with as little care as we picked posies of violets on the wooded hill beyond the valley. I remember it yet—what we ate on our picnic, what we talked about. How I confided to her my dream of a ‘bit of earth’ and a man who loved the land. How her eyes grew soft over the plans for her coming wedding. How we both sighed over the romance of her unfolding love story and the devotion of her Australian sheep rancher.

It amazes me now to see how we’ve both grown since then, and how quickly ten years can fly. What figurative valleys God has led us through, and what sunshine His presence has been! What lessons we’ve learned and what loving cautions we’d give our younger selves if we could. We’re older now, and hopefully wiser, but deep inside we’re still those same girls. Idealistic enough to really believe that God is good; hopelessly in love with our husbands—who were but dreams back then; in awe of the Lover of our souls. And with a world of beautiful hopes for the future stored up between us.

Those friends whom thou hast, and their affection tried, grapple to thy soul with bands of iron. ~Shakespeare

After several busy weeks I’m sensing the need to pause and refresh the springs of inspiration a bit. Lest any of you fear that I’ve wandered off into some black hole in cyberspace, I’m only reading, journaling, trying to spend more time in the Word, discovering a new poet (which I’ll tell you all about) and tinkering at my piano. Letting God restore my soul with what T.S. Eliot so appealingly terms the ‘intellectual pleasures of the senses’…

Lord, shall we not bring these gifts to Your service?
Shall we not bring to Your service all our powers
For life, for dignity, grace and order?
And intellectual pleasures of the senses?
The Lord Who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating.
For man is joined spirit and body,
And therefore must serve as spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His temple;
You must not deny the body.

from Choruses from ‘The Rock’

"We ought to hear at least one little song every day, read a good poem, see a first-rate painting, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words."  ~Goethe

I was remarking to a friend the other day that what with preoccupation with another friend’s grief and sickness of my own, I’ve been moving through my days more slowly than normal. Almost deliberately. Unable to process the next task till I’m done with the task at hand. Refusing to let my tired mind be muddled with what I can’t do anything about right that minute. But it’s been refreshing, in its own way, as I normally find myself thinking at least three or four steps beyond whatever I’m doing. I hear God’s whisper in my weakness–perhaps because of such enforced quiet. ‘Take no thought for tomorrow…’ And perhaps that’s why this passage in dear old George MacDonald meant so much to me today:  

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years–in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.

The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you–that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. "No, mine is a reasonable care–and unavoidable care, indeed." Is it something that you have to do at this very moment? "No." Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment. "There is nothing required of me at this moment." Nay, but there is–the greatest thing that can be required of man. Trust in the Living God…

My best friend’s mother went to be with Jesus tonight. After a heroic battle with cancer she passed quietly from this world to the next, quite literally with her Lord’s praises on her lips. All I have been able to think since I received the news is that she is looking into the face of Christ this very moment. That all of life’s sorrows are but a shadow to her, and that her heart is overflowing with a joy it would never have been able to contain on earth. I’ve thought of my friend and her siblings and their dad, as well, and of their unutterable loss, for this mother and wife was no ordinary saint. Her life distilled the beauty of the Lord wherever she went, like an irresistible fragrance. I wonder what they will ever do without her. I turn my wonderings to God and tell Him with the force of faith that I believe that He is good. And then I go back to cleaning the supper dishes, wearily amazed that I can be about something so unbelievably ordinary when such a heavenly event has transpired.

All at once I am overcome with grief and I sit down at the kitchen table and weep, dishcloth in hand, as countless women have done before me over countless sorrows. Then I pull myself together and dry my eyes, for there’s a little one upstairs—my charge for the week owing to the fruit-basket-turnover of my friend’s children—and I must tuck her in with a smile.

All afternoon I’ve watched this little fairy of a girl, marveling at her innocence, contrasted so sharply with what I knew was going on down at the hospital. It gave me joy to see this fresh young life flitting about when I knew that the presence of death was hovering so near those I love. And it made me feel quite oldish to consider that I was now the grown-up with a head-ful of hard facts she little suspected in her happy ignorance…that I was the one speaking in code across the dinner table and slipping out of the room to make phone calls.

That innocence was a balm for Philip and me both. I watched her go out in the yard with a basket, returning presently with a mélange of wildflowers for a most delectable ‘soup’. We made cookies, and extracted my kitten Pip’s head from the chair spindles where he’d got it hung. And tonight after dinner she gave us a laugh that was as good as any tonic: When Philip went up to read her a story, he noticed a bit of kitty litter on the rug. In fact, he noticed that it made a rather tidy ring around the entire coffee table. His bewildered gaze met Frances’ frank one. “I thought I’d just put out a little food for the kitties, so maybe they will come in here and sleep with me tonight.” How she laughed when Philip explained it to her!

What a wonder, that the One Who breathed laughter into this little child is probably laughing with Susan this very moment over all the things she finally understands.