It happens every year. March gives way to April, and I wake up one morning and see that a miracle has transpired, overnight, as it were. And every year I am unflinchingly convinced that no spring has ever been as gorgeous as this one. ‘How could it have been?’ I ask myself. If it were, we’d spend all of the rest of the year pining for its charms. But one glance through my journals reminds me that the God who masterfully blends our love of the familiar with our passion for change has outdone Himself every year since spring ever was. 

Here are some previous raptures…

April 2002

We planted 10 apple trees in the front pasture. I told Philip that if my children are going to have an orchard to play in, we’d better get busy and plant it now. He agreed–his philosophy is that ‘now is always the time to plant trees!’

I’m like a little child with my garden: I run out every morning and inspect everything carefully to see what’s grown and what’s coming up, even digging around a bit to see if late-comers have germinated! And they’re all appearing day by day–beans, squash, okra, cucumbers, corn, nasturtiums, four-o-clocks! The tomatoes and peppers are thriving, too. I planted a combination of sunny marigolds, blue plumbago and red salvia with them.  

April 2003

This sweet April has stolen my heart…my little world is a rhapsody of birdsong and green leaves and wavering sunbeams all infused with an essence no perfumer could ever hope to imitate. After church yesterday I laid in the hammock for a long time, dozing and day-dreaming and just looking…I feel so rich in violets and bluebirds, in glittering sunsets and rosy dawns.

We had tea under the cherry tree. I wanted Philip to experience it before the blooms all shattered–and, as it was, there were soft little showers of petals the entire time we sat there. 

April 2005

There is a brood of downy chicks in the basement, pecking and scratching and preening in a most business-like manner. It’s so funny to see those little balls of fluff pretending to be grown-up hens. I won’t admit how much of my day I stand watching them…but, honestly, is there anything in the world so adorable as a baby chick?

In the potting shed there are rows of young plants just bursting to get into the garden. I’ve cut back a bit this year, but there will always be room for my foxgloves and hollyhocks and basil and tomatoes. Not to mention my yearly attempts at Flemish poppies and lavendar. But there are still stacks of seed packets in the refrigerator waiting for the magic middle of April to be direct-sown! 

April 2004

I haven’t written yet of the charms of this beautiful April–of the grey and silver days of steady showers; of the hushed expectation of a garden all in bud; of the maidenly approach of warmer weather. When I cross the lawn in the mornings on my way down to the chicken pen, the sweet, simple odor of clover wafts all about me and the world seems washed clean in the glittering dew. Oh, it’s all so lovely–every time I step outside I feel compelled to lift my heart in praise and thanksgiving.

I was talking to a friend yesterday on the tree-shaded porch of a little French bistro just off Peachtree Street about what a healing time the spring is. We both waxed eloquent on the virtues of a long winter to put everything in perspective and to make the spring that much more precious when it comes. As Lucy Maud says, ‘It is always safe to dream of spring…’. To come out of darkness into a world of such gentle beauty and freshness is like a good, strong restorative to the soul.

~And, just to shake things up a bit…

April 2001

Yesterday we drove through Chianti to Sienna. Our route wove through olive groves and vineyards, and was so typically Tuscan that we found ourselves laughing with sheer delight around each bend in the road that revealed yet another spread of sloping pastures and cypress trees, tall and dark against the bright green hills. We kept pulling over just to stare and enjoy!

At one point we came around a curve and met an old man with an enormous bale of hay across our lane. He started chattering away in Italian, cheerfully shouting, "Poggliobonsi! Poggliobonsi!", and pointing for us to turn around. We looked at each other, mystified, then, repairing to our map, realized that Poggliobonsi was a town in the opposite direction. With a little maneuvering we managed to re-route our course, and arrived in Sienna not much later than we had anticipated...  

Hope all of you are enjoying the delights of the season in your own part of this beautiful world!

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.

We saw Ballet Russes a few weeks ago; two of seven people in the audience. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a film so utterly devoid of appalling content was so under-attended. My sister tells me, however, that it was slated to run for two weeks in New York back in November and that it’s still going strong. Maybe there’s less appreciation for classical ballet down here, though I’d hate to think it! 

The film opened modestly, quietly: a clip of ancient footage of a twirling 1930’s era dancer in a white tutu on a dimly lit stage. I felt my eyes burning and dashed away a quick tear. And then there was the great Dame Alicia Markova, throwing back her impeccably-groomed head with a reminiscent smile saying how grand it was, that great adventure of the Ballet Russes.

It all began with a little band of Russian refugees in Paris in the 1920’s and the daring of an intrepid ballet master—none other than George Balanchine—to make a world-famous company out of mere girls. Not one of the celebrated ‘Baby Ballerinas’, Irina Baronova, Tatiana Riabouchinska, and Tamara Tchinerova were more than 13 when they were given staring roles. But it worked, and it took the world by storm, charming America half out of its senses. Sets by Matisse, costumes by Dali, and a choreographer bold enough to set ballets to the symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Brahms—an unheard of liberty! The result—in the words of Maria Tallchief, one of the greatest American ballerinas of all time and future principal with the company, “It was the most glamorous thing I had ever seen in my entire life.”

By the end of the movie I was glad there were so few in the theatre because I was sobbing. The full impact of the commitment level of these bygone dancers descended upon me all at once, I suppose. I was deeply moved by the harsh realities of the privations they endured, even at the height of their fame, simply to do what they loved and to do it like the world had never seen. I wondered how many famous artists today would put up with exhausting sea voyages with immediate performances at their end, little food at times—and not by choice, learning three full ballets in a matter of days, and all for, as Frederic Franklin so aptly put it, ‘pennies’. There may have been huge squabbles over money between directors and backers and choreographers, but from all appearances, the dancers were just there to dance because it was their passion and because they were good at it.

My sister and I have enjoyed discussing the implications of such an example, and its message of excellence to all artists in all of their various callings. If each of God’s children would give their heart, soul, mind and strength in like manner to loving Him through their individual talents and creative abilities, think of the glory that would rise continually to Him through the many and varied forms of artisic expression! More thoughts coming, specifically as this applies to dance…

An ordinary morning last week turned into a post for the Young Ladies Christian Fellowship…

‘There is a great deal of poetry and fine sentiment in a chest of tea.’   Ralph Waldo Emerson

I grew up in a busy, lively household. There was always someone coming and going, some project underway or some party planning afoot. But no matter how full the days were, the wheels of industry always ground to a halt at the sacred chiming of four o’ clock. I remember being up to my ears in a sewing venture or a literature assignment behind the closed door of my bedroom and hearing that insistent blaring whistle of the teakettle in the kitchen. It broke upon the most intent of pursuits without apology and summoned my sister and me to the living room post haste.

Mama would have the tea tray ready and would be laying out ginger cookies or lemon crisps on a Spode plate. More often than not she’d use her grandmother’s silver tea pot, though all of the loved china ones–especially the powder blue Hall–would come into service in their turn. Winter and summer we’d sit in the living room sipping Darjeeling or Earl Grey from Mama’s Blue Italian cups and discussing the events of the day. If Daddy came home in time Mama would fetch him a cup and he’d enliven our feminine chatter with a humorous story du jour from the courthouse.

Such happy memories those are to me! I still manage to wander towards Mama’s house when I’m in town on errands knowing that the kettle will be on the boil before I’ve gotten in the driveway good. What tangles we’ve sorted out, what godly counsel I’ve received over all these hundreds upon hundreds of steaming cups!

When I was newly married I mistook my late afternoon plunges for caffeine deficiency, and, amid the half-dozen things I was trying to wrap up before my husband came home from work, I’d brew a quick mug. Dashing all over the house with the label hanging over the edge of the cup, I’d partake of it like a stimulant, a last little surge of energy to squeeze one more ‘check’ onto my all-important ‘to-do’ list. It didn’t take me long to realize that this so-called tea time–which my mother would lament as ‘nearly-tea’, had she witnessed my cheap imitation–wasn’t having quite the same effect as the quiet pauses I was accustomed to. In fact, I was more harried than not by the time my husband came in the door, wound up as much by my frantic sprint as by the injection of the aforementioned tonic.

It finally dawned on me that it was the pause itself that refeshed; the calming ritual of a few moments’ preparation, the friendly whistle of the boiling kettle, the cherished cup and the small silver tray, the ‘little bite’ of something tasty–these were all part and parcel of the allure of tea. I now look forward to my afternoon tea as a reward for a busy day or a solace for a hard one. I make much of it as a gift to myself. And on the weekends, or when Philip is home in time to join me we have such merry little parties! I have my own favorite pot, and a stash of the loveliest teas, white, green, red and black, from my favorite tea shop. (Here’s a plug for all of you local readers!) Seasonal fruit makes for a lovely addition, or a couple of dates and a dish of almonds. (And as a nod to some very happy trips to the Blessed Plot, I always have a tidy supply of digestive biscuits or custard creams on hand for those days when sugar is a necessity! )

I came across this precious poem in a search for Alice Van Leer Carrick the other day and I just had to share it. How well I remember what is was like to be quite small and to lie in bed at night imagining all the wonders just beyond my window…   

Why does the wind lie down at night
When all the sky is red,
Why does the moon begin to shine
When I am put to bed,
And all the little stars come out
And twinkle overhead?

I see the sun shine all the day,
I gather daisies in my play,
But oh, I truly wish that I
Could see the stars bloom in the sky!
I’d love to see the moon shine down,
And silver all the roofs in town,
But always off to sleep I go
Just as the sun is getting low.

Alice Van Leer Carrick