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Archive for January, 2007

When nature lies despoiled of every charm…

Sowing sweet pea seeds outdoors in January seems like an act of faith.
Especially when the sun hasn’t shown its face in days and the whole world is sodden and drear. I was almost laughing at the absurdity of it last week when, bundled in my winter coat and hurrying against the cold of a […]

The Gift of Music

I seriously cannot recall a time in which music was not an essential element of my life. In fact, I have a distinct memory of my own personal first encounter with classical music—Mozart to be exact. My parents had given me a little record player (how much children miss these days! There is something so […]

Nesting

January 20, 2007 
The bluebirds are house-hunting this morning. I had to call Philip and tell him, describe the way one female in particular kept poking about the hole of the house on the side of the water oak outside the kitchen window, nosing in and out as if unsure, tilting her head in examination, while […]

A great writer on reading

One of the books on my current reading list (I’ve usually got at least three going at any given time, sometimes more!) is E.M. Forster’s classic on writing, Aspects of the Novel. Here’s a passage I simply had to share:
Pseudo-scholarship is, on its good side, the homage paid by ignorance to learning…Books have to be […]

Every Day Matters

In the film Miss Potter, Beatrix’s character has a conversation with her parents in which her mother makes a rather disagreeable reference to her age. Her reply has been in my heart ever since: 
“At my age, mother, every day matters.”
She was thirty-two.

Every day matters too much not to spend it on—or at least […]

Miss Potter

Well, my mother and I spent yesterday afternoon in the Lake District–via the delightful new film, Miss Potter, which chronicles the literary journey of our beloved Beatrix. It was so enchanting–so altogether lovely–that we were walking on air when we came out of the theatre. That hasn’t happened to me in a long, long time! […]