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On Golden Sands by a Silver Sea…

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Fried green tomatoes and Oysters Rockefeller. Shrimp and grits for supper and beignets for breakfast. Jazz, Southern-style, and a full moon over Moon River.

Old Dream-Maker

A blessed sojourn on an Island that love has made our own and which never fails to restore our souls. Cat naps in patches of sunlight like golden wine to our winter-weary hearts. Daydreaming and castle-building and dancing to a live combo at night.

The Verandah

Live oaks and Spanish moss. The salt tang of the marsh and a breeze that makes you know you’re alive. Picnics, indoors and out. Local seafood and early morning ambles and Earl Grey at four.

'Glooms of the live oaks, beautiful-braided and woven...'

The marshes themselves: limitless, humbling. The great sweep of Aliveness. The keen and exquisite Sameness that rushes forth in greeting like an old friend.

'Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-withholding and free! Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves to the sea!'

Dolphins almost near enough to touch. White herons stark against golden grass.

Longing for summer and sapphire water and diamond spray.

...There is nothing--absolute nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats...

Lovely to escape and lovely to come home again. And I’m already asking the age-old question, as much of a piece with our holiday as the tea and the sunlight and the bobbing boats and the curtains of moss and the inevitable tears at departure:

“When can we return?”

La mer a bercé mon coeur pour la vie

Posted in Journal Entries | 7 Comments »

He calls them by name

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Titania

The one thing that people invariably ask me when they see my sheep for the first time is, “Can you really tell them apart?”

I never cease to be amazed and tickled by this. It’s like asking the mother of a blonde-haired brood if she really knows who’s who. I want to laugh out loud and exclaim, “Well, for starters, the boys have horns!” (The girls do, too, incidentally, but they are such dainty little adornments that you really don’t notice them at first.) And how on earth could anyone with eyes mistake that exquisitely placid expression of Beatrice’s for the pert little inquisitive one of Hermia? Isn’t it quite as plain to everyone else that Benedick looks just like Kenneth Branagh and that Harry is dignity itself and that Sebastian has an almost dog-like friendliness about him? Titania with her fastidious little nose the color and sheen of wheat-colored velvet and that adorable widow’s peak of wool that grows down over her forehead? And what about Ophelia—honestly, if you didn’t know better you’d think she made up those gorgeous eyes of hers daily with mascara and eyeliner.

But I have an advantage over the casual acquaintance of my flock: the keen and unmistaking eye of Love. I love my sheep. I love them to the point of utter distraction. The slightest bleat sends me dashing to the back porch just to make sure everyone is alright and happy. I know where each of them likes to be scratched and who likes apples better than pears and which one is most liable to pick a fight when they’re hungry. And who they’re going to pick a fight with. And when I call them of an evening, and they lift their heads from the bit of earth they’ve been grazing, recognizing my voice and my form and then come at a run, I seriously wonder if there’s any finer compliment in life.

I love my sheep so much that people laugh at my supposed neurosis in measuring and mixing grain and my insistence on ‘horse quality’ hay. When a cold ran through them at the change in the weather last fall, I was the Florence Nightingale of the barnyard, administering tinctures and vitamins and herbs to anyone who so much as sniffed. I’ll go over the pasture with a fine-toothed comb checking for wild cherry (a real no-no) and hand clip treats of cedar and pine for them from the family farm to bring back as a surprise.

My little flock is a lovely, living, daily parable. Predictably, all of the verses in the Bible that have even the slightest reference to sheep have come more alive to me in the last year than ever before. I’ve become fascinated with the differences between the Eastern shepherds, which are the pattern of our Bible stories and allegories, and the more contemporary Western approach. Jesus wasn’t just embellishing his narrative of the Good Shepherd and His sheep in John 10 with a few pretty, humanizing details. When He says that the He calls His sheep by name, His audience knew exactly what He was talking about. According to Phillip Keller in A Shepherd Looks at the Good Shepherd and His Sheep, the modern, industrialized mind cannot conceive of the bond that these shepherds have with the individual members of their flock:

A…remarkable aspect of the care of animals in these countries is that each one is known by name. These names are not simple common names such as we might choose. Rather, they are complex and unique because they have some bearing upon the history of the individual beast.

Hermia, Titania, Sebastian and Harry

I’ve had the unique opportunity this past year of looking at things from the shepherd’s perspective. I have experienced first hand the joy that comes of a sheep learning its name, learning to trust me, learning to look me in eye without a shade of fear in those gorgeous limpid depths of theirs. I have an inkling of how Jesus feels when His sheep run to Him not only for protection, but for the sheer pleasure of His presence. And I will never, never forget the first time that my sheep actually followed me.

It was several weeks after we had brought them home, and I was just beginning to smile rather sadly upon my preconceived notions of ‘pet lambs’ as a naïve delusion. After hand-feeding them grain and spending hours in the stall with them, talking quietly to accustom them to the sound of my voice and consciously avoiding the perceived threat of direct eye contact, they still seemed rather indifferent and afraid. One evening, however, just about the time the sun met the tops of the pines fringing our west pasture and the light became diffused with a dusting of gold you could almost touch, I went out to call them in for the night. I rattled the grain scoop. I called them again. I could see them all, grazing beneath the pecan tree, a portrait of ovine contentment. Suddenly one of them raised their head—Hermia, I’m sure it was—and looked right at me. A bleat and an answering “Blah!” And suddenly, with a tender thundering of little hooves they were coming at a run. I turned towards the barn and they fell in behind, scampering and capering and clicking their heels and bobbing their heads, as lively as my goatlings could ever be. And I walked on, cooing and soothing with the voice they had at last learned to trust, feeling about ten feet tall.

“Lord, is this something of what it must be like for You?” my spirit whispered.

But I knew without saying that it was. This wonderful, beautiful acknowledgment of Love; this sprightly little parable Peace, It went straight to my heart, stamping an image, a moment, that will be with me forever.

My name is not only known to Him—it is precious to Him. He is not only acquainted with but passionately interested in the details that make up my life. Nothing is too unpleasant a task for His ministering hand. He cares for me every bit as tenderly as I do my flock of seven—every bit and a universe’s worth of more. And when I follow Him, my joy is second only to His.

He does not drive us from behind, goading us on as the Western shepherds do, with dogs and commands. He leads. He calls us by name with a voice that is our soul’s sweetest music. And in the voluntary compulsion of Love, we follow Him. And what follows us? Goodness and mercy, all sufficient and all encompassing, all the days of our lives. Green pastures and quiet waters and an unfailing Presence in the valley of the shadow. We shall not know the meaning of want.

My sheep had to choose to trust me. They have to remember who I am when they see me coming with that odious dosing syringe, dripping wormwood. Through all the ordeal of hoof trimming and shearing. Through the winter barrenness when I portion out the right amount of hay—neither too little or too much—for their sustenance. And in the coming plenty of spring when I limit them from one pasture and choose for them another. Because with all the ear scratches and loves and apples and goodnight kisses, comes a whole lot of stuff that’s not as much fun in their opinion.

I doubt that Jesus could have chosen a more tender, a more infinitely attentive symbol for His relation to us. For me, as I go about my barn duties, from mucking stalls to picking up the wheelbarrow an impish Sebastian has just overturned, to running a careful hand over everyone as they go out to pasture, it is a mercy that is new every single morning.

out to pasture

originally published 2008 on YLCF

Posted in Farm Life, Journal Entries | 8 Comments »

The Last of the Amazons

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

I could tell by the tone of my mother’s voice that something had happened–even over the phone I sensed the gentle sadness–and I knew with a pang of kindred sorrow what it was. Aunt Ruth had died.

Quietly, my mother told me, in her sleep. 104 years old and the last of my grandmother’s sisters. The last of a generation that was mighty upon the earth.

I never thought the Aunts would die. It never seriously occurred to me to fear it—they were too foundational to the proper functioning of the world in general and my life in particular: like Corinthian columns fluted and lovely and made to bear the enormous weight of life with seemingly effortless grace, especially in such a precision of placement as these five sisters had aligned themselves. Even frail little Aunt Ruth, an invalid these forty years, had borne her load manfully, with a core of iron and steel beneath her thin housecoat. Out of all these mighty pillars only she had remained, her faded, almost transparent little body but thinly veiling the light and fire of a still-vibrant mind within.

And now she was gone, too.

The last time I saw her was on a broiling day in late August, nearly as stifling indoors as out in typical Deep South fashion. But it was a warmth that enveloped me like an embrace and distilled with it the essence of summer days long-ago but not lost. We came in through the kitchen and the scent assailed me even more potently than the heat had done, for it was precisely the smell of every other Aunt’s kitchen, a kind-of incense of sausage and cornmeal and Wesson oil, with simmering field peas thrown into the mix. (Grandma’s kitchen always seemed heavier on the sausage-side for some reason, and Aunt Tiny’s, of course, was imbued with the perfume of caramel icing.) Though there were no field peas simmering that day, nor any other indication of domestic activity, there had been enough over the years, I imagine, to steep the very walls with nourishing aromas so that they exuded a collective memorial of the sovereigns in print aprons that had presided there for so long.

Aunt Ruth was lost in a recliner and a pale green afghan and her eyes wandered listlessly while the conversation went on because she could hear so little of it and see nothing at all. But the minute my mother asked for a tale or a reminiscence from the past those eyes came to life. They sparkled; they shone like a girl’s in the first headiness of youth. The little hands worked excitedly and the honey-sweet voice droned on and on about the old days with a lilting that was like music. She told us about the first automobiles that they saw down on the river roads, and how every time a car went past their old farmhouse it would honk for sheer neighborliness and all the children would come running out to see it and wave. How the first time she drove a car herself she was twelve years old and her mother was sick and she had to go and get her daddy. How on her honeymoon in ’29, she and Uncle Bugg drove to Washington D.C. in a red Ford Roadster and went up for a tour in an airplane.

She spun a magic that afternoon in her simple words so fraught with happy remembrance, so that the steamboats on the Altamaha wavered into existence once more and plied their course through the murky waters. And the live oaks that arched over the deep tram road down in the swamp rang with the voices of children long-since departed, swinging across the chasm like so many monkeys. Even the terror of the stunt flier that crashed into the Number One bridge before their very eyes when they were picnicking on the river as a family had a certain conjuring of grotesquerie about it, like something one might encounter within the pages of Flannery O’Connor. Her manner changed with the telling of that tale, her voice dropped low and the bright eyes were hooded with an unforgotten horror. A dark thread amid the brighter ones, throwing color and joy and light and goodness into sharp relief.

Philip fed her just the right sort of questions, shouting politely across the room, and the glances he and I exchanged expressed our mutual enjoyment. How often, after all, does one have the opportunity to spend the afternoon with someone who can boast of over 100 years’ worth of experience in this world? And yet, as we sat in Aunt Ruth’s parlor that day we could have been in the ‘Front Room’ of any of the Aunts. There were the same 1950’s-era portraits of her girls on the wall, the same best furniture, the same aura of gentility and dignity. Each of the sisters’ homes had their own unique stamp, but some indefinable likeness in Aunt Ruth’s parlor invoked all of them at once. From this distance they all seem to have been painted the same pale, limey green, though I know they were not: Aunt Tiny’s was splashed with the color of her bold and vivid oil paintings, and Aunt Babe’s had pale carpet which was stiff on bare legs and religiously unsoiled. Grandma’s had marble-topped tables and a beautiful antique lamp dangling with crystal prisms which was the absolute only thing in her house she ever worried about us breaking. Nevertheless a uniform impression of coolness reigned on those sultry afternoons when we’d sit in state in one or another of them and give an account for ourselves: our grades–first in preeminence–and then our music and perhaps our ballet recitals or tennis matches. (Too many ‘extracurriculars’ were somewhat suspect, the general consensus being summed up in my grandmother’s fear that we might be ‘jack of all trades; master of none’.) And they wanted to know about our friends, which says the world of their genuine interest in our lives. My grandmother knew every one of my friends by name, though she’d never met most of them, and she kept such a detailed mental account of them that whenever we talked she could ask me if Jenifer was still in the marching band or where Ann was going to school or if Amanda and her new husband had bought a house, a fact which, naturally, I took for granted at the time, as we do some of the most precious and genuine things in life, but which strikes me now with a sweet stab of belated gratitude.

(We didn’t always sit in the Front Room, of course. Only on such calls of ceremonial reckoning. On other occasions we’d settle comfortably in rockers and recliners under the ceiling fan in the den, or in aluminum folding chairs in the back yard. But no matter where you ended up, you always came in through the kitchen. No one ever entered an Aunt’s house any other way. And no one ever knocked—a bang of the screened door and a trilling “Yoo-hoo!” was the only announcement a visitor required.)

I was in a state of resolute bliss that August afternoon at Aunt Ruth’s, overwhelmed alike with her memories and my own, and every sense sated with time-erasing impressions. I clung to the moments almost desperately, dreading the time when we had to go, back on the highway, back to the city and the present age and the noise and confusion and hurry. I wanted to be a little girl again with a new piece to perform on Aunt Ruth’s piano—always a bit trying as I was constantly reminded that Aunt Ruth had done the very elegant and appropriate thing of going to Conservatory. (Though I really think as a child that I had some nebulous notion of Aunt Ruth sitting in a starched white dress in a room full of palms and tall windows.) It would have been wildly inappropriate for any of her sisters to have done something so purely ornamental; but for Aunt Ruth it fit her personality like a fine, kid-leather glove.

The whole afternoon was a gift, a window opened mercifully, if briefly, upon my past, granting me glimpses of things I thought vanished forever. Aunt Ruth was enough like my grandmother, in voice, in appearance, even—though so shrunken and tiny—to make me believe for one sweet moment that a beneficent Providence had brought her before me once more. I wanted to throw my arms around Aunt Ruth’s neck that afternoon, and kiss her wrinkled cheek in tearful greeting, for Grandma’s sake, and for her own self-effacement in looking so much like her to me. That’s what I was doing inside as I knelt beside her chair and pressed the beautiful claw-like hands that were once so proficient in Chopin and Schubert in my own young ones.

For even now, so many years after Grandma’s death, it’s only the sight of her tombstone that makes me realize she’s really gone. And Aunt Babe just down the way. Aunt Mary Mac nearby and Aunt Tiny over the hill. And now, at the last, little Aunt Ruth, laid to rest beside her parents. It just cannot be. These were the Immortals; these were the Amazons, these diminutive ladies with their cool fresh front parlors and their very decided opinions on the cut of a roast and the year’s crop of mustard greens and the dispensations of the young lives in their charges–lives loved better than their own.

They are the stuff of legend, and fittingly so. For the world will not see their kind again.

Posted in Journal Entries, Stories, Uncategorized | 14 Comments »

Touch Hands!

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Valentine's Day, 2010

February 12, 2010

The phone calls started the night before and continued into the morning:

“Are you going?”

“Do you think the roads will be safe?”

“What does your husband say? What does your mother say?”

I had been watching the weather forecasts just as intently as everyone else. And I was just as torn up about it. Any other day, was the track along which my anxious thoughts kept running. But not the afternoon of my precious friend’s party, the Valentine Tea that’s become legendary not just for the number of years we’ve enjoyed it in succession, but for the overflowing love of our hostess, perennially delighting us with the art of her kitchen and the warmth of her home. The years are so crammed with memories that they all seem to blend together in a tender mural of glitter and lace, homemade chocolates and heart-shaped scones. Little hands dispensing their tokens of affection and larger ones just as eager to impart theirs. Buoyed and borne upon oceans of hot tea and haunted by the music of feminine conversation: by times intense and passionate, and light-hearted and shrieking with laughter.

And though some of our girls have grown up and wandered far over land and sea, the same memory draws us all, and there’s still a handmade Valentine to be looked for in the mail—and last year even a high-tech Skype call from Sarajevo!

And so it was with a decidedly conflicted heart that I pored over the forecasts and discussed possible outcomes. I mean, snow down here in God’s country is a treat; a holiday! A fleeting miracle of what Brenda so endearingly calls Narnia-magic. If only we could have the magic without the potential danger of those roads winding up to my friend’s mountaintop home!

The Eastern Fence

It must be understood: we Southerners are famously chicken-headed about snow. (And characteristically proud of it, I might add. ) When I look at the pictures of Mid-Westerners’ snowy lanes and New Englanders’ high-piled gardens, I confess it’s not without a shade of completely ignorant envy. And a rather liberal dose of admiration for the indomitable cheerfulness and creative joy with which the privations of winter are met in such regions. I don’t know how it is in other parts of the country, but the appearance of so much as a single flake in the five-day forecast will literally clean out the bread aisles in the grocery stores in an afternoon. And the steady campaign of a storm already dubbed ‘Southern Fury’ headed our way was certainly enough to give us pause.

Experience is a great teacher, however, and wisdom is often its fruit. And as my mother has more of both in stock than any of us younger women put together, we tallied up the smiling but conflicting suggestions of our husbands and we asked her what to do.

“I’m going,” said the indefatigable Claudia. “And if anyone wants to go with me, they’re welcome to.”

The only thing certain about snow in the South is uncertainty, she might have added. No one really knows what’s going to happen till it’s happening. And as there wasn’t a snowflake in sight—not so much as a pellet of sleet—it did seem rather overly cautious to forego the joys that awaited for a prediction of snow that might prove just as mistaken as the half-a-dozen previous this winter.

Offerings of Friendship

All we needed was a leader, it seemed. And we fell in line with alacrity, glad to have someone at the helm and the party beckoning on the horizon once more. Ashley and Edie met at my house along with my intrepid mother. Rachel and Debra and their collective girls set off together. JJ was to meet us along the way.

And just as we got in the car and slammed the doors shut with a giggle at our former indecision, it started to snow. Heavily. We turned around at the end of my driveway in distrust of my half-hearted windshield wipers and piled into my mother’s sedan in even higher spirits than before. Edie transferred, along with her dainty basket of Valentines, a brown paper bag from my car to my mother’s. It seemed that her husband had insisted upon her taking a change of clothes. Just in case…

“It’s too warm to stick,” we assured ourselves. “It’s just a wet, slushy snow.”

“But it’s pretty,” Ashley said.

We were all imagining Wendy’s home, tucked up among its trees like a picture in a storybook with the poetically harmless snow falling outside.

But about a half-an-hour into our trip we started getting nervous. The interstate was growing sluggish, and the roadsides were becoming decidedly white. And the flakes weren’t melting on the road quite as quickly as we’d like to have seen.

“I don’t feel good about this,” my mother said in a voice just as firm with conviction as her earlier assertions had been.

When once the confidence of our captain wavered, the crew wasted no time in following suit. Edie piped up from the back seat, and I, never one to scruple over voicing an opinion, threw in my oar with an emphatic concurrence.

Sebastian in the snow

We pulled off at the next exit and we made my mother put in the hateful call to Wendy. Almost tearful with the disappointment we all shared, she broke the news that we just didn’t think we could go any further—that we were turning back. It broke our hearts to consider all the tender care Wendy had gone to; the knowledge of what we were missing finished the job. And we couldn’t even let ourselves think about the four little baskets of handmade Valentines that had accompanied us on our failed voyage. Husbands started calling and were called to confirm the decision; Rachel and Debra, ahead of us on the road, were forced to abandon the mission shortly thereafter. And poor JJ, in the lead of us all and waiting patiently at the meeting point, had no choice but to navigate onwards alone.

It was Ashley who broke our glum silence.

“We could stop at the French bakery.”

I turned around in my seat and grinned at her, so pretty and stylish in her 1950’s pink velvet hat and soft lavender scarf.

“I’ve got some gorgeous white tea,” I said.

“We could sit by your fire,” my mother added, only taking her eyes from the road long enough to cut her eyes hopefully in my direction.

“I have some little cookies in my basket,” Edie said in her sweet way.

The very thought cheered our way, and we were able to be glad that we had tried and failed instead of accepting defeat without a fight. That’s one thing that I love about my mother—one thing that the day’s little misadventure illustrated in vivid color: she’s not afraid of anything. She faces the mountains in her life with the unflinching eye of faith. But she has wisdom enough to heed the pluck of prudence at her sleeve, and she’s keen enough never to mistake ordinary foolhardiness for courage. A small picture of a great reality. But no less striking for its delicate subject matter and compact frame.

When we got back to my house, Ashley put on the kettle and got out the dishes while I laid the fire, and my mother peeled some blood oranges and Edie sliced some nice cheese to go with our exquisite pastries from the bakery. I turned on the Little Women soundtrack, which always takes us back to Valentines long past, and we feasted and laughed and enjoyed one another and the absolutely breathtaking aspect of the falling snow. It was such a sweet moment of companionship, held in the pristine silence of the materializing wonderland outside. Unlooked-for and perhaps all the sweeter because of it.

Edie's Valentines

But it made me sad for all my delight when the others produced their Valentines—such exquisite little creations can hardly be conveyed, each one a small labor of love—for the baskets still brimmed with the offerings for all those other dear ones whose company we missed that afternoon. Ashley had crafted lovely paper swallows with glittered wings, and Edie had fashioned tiny treat boxes daintily trimmed with ribbons and flowers and sentimental ephemera and filled with the aforesaid cookies. We divided up the lot according to who was going to see whom next—I took Rachel’s and JJ’s, while my mother took Wendy’s and Debra’s—and soon after the party broke up in the interest of everyone getting safely home. But it was even a lovely picture as I stood at my door and watched them down the front walk, laughing and waving, traversing the snow in flimsy heels with white flakes starring their coats and hair and velvet hats.

The Next Morning

A sequel of phone calls the next day confirmed that corresponding little fetes had taken place that afternoon by Debra’s kitchen fire and at Wendy’s, as well, with the troopers that were able to make it, in what my mother is calling the Cell Group Valentine Party. But scattered though we may have been, as effectually as the aforementioned wanderers, there was a great sympathy of friendship binding our hearts that day. And a figurative, if not literal, touching of hands…

Ah, friends, dear friends, as years go on
and heads grow gray, how fast the friends
do go. Touch hands, touch hands,
with those that stay. Strong hands to weak,
old hands to young…Touch hands! Touch hands!

~William Henry Harrison Murray

My Garden

Posted in Journal Entries, Stories | 5 Comments »

Teacups and Paintbrushes

Monday, February 8th, 2010

Afternoon Tea by Alexander M. Rossi

January 12, 2008

Last week my sister-in-law had two of my friends and me for lunch. It had been arranged before Christmas, a flurry of emails having saved and secured the date, but as I set out on that dour January morning, it seemed to me that the timing of our little gathering was exquisitely providential. My mood was as heavy as the dark clouds piling in from the west; tears seemed even more imminent than raindrops and the headache that had been brewing with the approaching weather front was raging so violently I could hardly see straight. I pulled into her driveway with something like a sigh of relief and hauled myself out of the car, grateful only that I hadn’t gotten a speeding ticket on my way there as I had two days previously en route to meet two other friends for lunch…

Edie still had her Christmas wreath on the door—fresh and yet fragrant it was too lovely to take down. I gazed at it rather mournfully, luxuriating a bit in my post-holiday blues. But before I had a chance to knock the door swung open, and there stood Edie, smiling in her radiantly gentle way, and beyond her, Ashley and Debra, waiting to receive me with hugs and smiles of their own. Is there any medicine on earth so potent as the embrace of a friend?

I forgot my headache. I dismissed my Janu-weary mood, for what place had it in this little sanctuary of beauty and warmth? The 1920’s bungalow was aglow with candlelight, and soft French music lilted through the rooms. A collective gasp went up at the sight of our table, for a more daintily feminine array cannot be imagined. There were place cards (with appropriately deco script), and the damask cloth was laid with every possible accouterment for a ladies’ tea: antique china, vintage silver, a tiered cake plate boasting everything from homemade scones to macaroons and melt-in-your-mouth truffles. On the sideboard stood enticing decanters of chilled lemonade, with crystal goblets at the ready. And everywhere I cast my eye, it seemed, were sweet little bottles and vases of pink and white spray roses. Pretty as a Valentine; proper as an English tea room.

Edie brought out the soup course while I poured the tea, and then we fell to the feast of fellowship with as much relish as that with which we polished off the roasted red pepper soup, and the mushroom and pine nut quiche that followed. Our conversation took a delightfully meandering course, as it only can in the hands of like-minded ladies. We discussed everything from organic gardening to vacuum cleaners, touching on politics, homeschooling and needlepoint, each in their turn.

But over all our talk, it seemed, a shining mantle was cast, a high vision of beauty’s worth that infused every subject with a strange sort of lowly nobility. Time and again we came back to one of the tenets of our homemaker’s hearts: the value and validity of loveliness. The power of beauty, in its simplest and purest sense, to speak audibly of the presence of Jesus Christ in our lives. Beauty is of Him, from Him, for Him. Beauty has a language that transcends even the finest words, that soars above our sweetest experiences in this life and whispers to our souls of what heaven will be.

Debra and Ashley are painters, artists in both life and craft. It has been beautiful for me to watch the former inspire and instruct the latter, pouring herself out, as it were, to the enrichment of a friend’s creative world. As a homeschooling mother of three, Debra could easily justify the forestallment of her own artistic desires. But instead, she’s set an example for the three of us childless women not to deny the significance of our own unique and God-given talents, even in the whirl of a houseful of teenagers. Creativity is a hidden spring, feeding the deep wells of our personalities. And when that spring is tended, unclogged and running true, cups of cold water in His name abound. We give of ourselves, because there is something there to give.

Ashley has approached the discipline of oils with courage and joy (almost she makes me want to paint…not quite. I’m not that brave!). I love to go into her house and see a new work in progress lying on the dining room table, or to catch that light that comes into her eyes when she’s describing some technique that Debra’s entrusted to her. Ashley doesn’t want to have her works in the Met, or even make a living off her paintbrush. She wants beautiful things of her own making on the walls of her home; she wants to give gifts that are indeed a portion of herself. When one considers that her whole life is a gift, that being around her is one of the most energizing occupations I can think of, it appears that the hours spent mixing paints and poring over a canvas are a perfectly natural and even necessary replenishment for her.

Into the midst of all our high talk that afternoon, Ashley slipped an analogy she’d heard in a sermon that caught my fancy in a compelling way. She gave us a picture of our callings: Some of us are tiny watercolor brushes, with only a few strands, intended for the most delicate of detail work. And the range goes all the way up to those big industrial paint rollers that can cover a whole wall in minutes. If you asked a watercolor brush to coat the side of a building it would be a disaster that ended in despair. And a paint roller would wreak havoc upon a little violet in a cut glass vase. Is the paint roller more important, more valid, because it covers a greater area with speed and efficiency? Is a Winsor & Newton more extraordinary merely because it is able to capture the rare beauties of life that might otherwise have been trodden underfoot? We all know the answer—in our heads. Both have their place and their job to do. And it’s a job that is certainly never going to get done by looking around at the other brushes nearby and comparing oneself to their bristle size and handle length. Or their subject matter, for that. And just as an artist will rifle through many brushes in the creation of one painting, we will doubtless find that the Master Painter will bring varying sizes of implements to bear upon the living landscapes we’re all creating, day in and day out.

And, if you happen to be a watercolor brush, don’t be mistaken in thinking that you cannot have a far-reaching impact in this world for beauty and truth. In a recent (and umpteenth!) viewing of the movie Miss Potter, I was struck by something she said regarding her own art: “I’m not very good at landscapes,” with a somewhat regretful glance over a sweep of Lake District loveliness. But Beatrix Potter was good at animals. And charming little stories that revealed their dignity to untold numbers of children the world over. She did not set out to write the best-selling children’s books of all time, or to almost single-handedly save the Lake District. She was just brave enough to be good at what she was good at. And there’s not a one of us alive who should not be grateful to her for it.

In like manner, Edie was merely living in her gifts that day. Hospitality, gentleness and grace; the touch of an artist upon her table and the rooms of her home. She gave of herself in that little luncheon for four, and created an environment for edification to flourish. It took time and great care, and a painterly attention to detail. (And if she wasn’t the immaculately tidy housekeeper I know her to be, I’d say she was still washing dishes!) She refreshed us from a source both deep and true, and I feel safe in assuming that she was refreshed in the process. This is beauty’s seal and signature: a mutual joy and a glory to God.

Renée Zellweger as "Miss Potter", Phoenix Pictures, 2006

originally published on YLCF

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Face Down

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Ezra, Gustave Dore'

And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people answered, “Amen, Amen,” lifting up their hands.And they bowed their heads and worshiped the LORD with their faces to the ground.

Nehemiah 8:6

I was a Christian, and I was a dancer. A ballerina, as I liked to avow with all the solemnity of seventeen. Studying classical ballet three and four days out of the week, showing up early to stretch before class, wrestling against all the opposing forces of aching muscles and tight tendons to add a fraction of a degree to my arabesque or half an inch of height to my grande jete’. I loved it, and I worked hard, both of which I owe almost exclusively to the much greater fact of a superlatively excellent teacher. She drew me out of the back corner of regional ballet school indifference and she scraped grimly away at an acquired layer of sloppiness and mimicking conformity, down to the very bones of my so-called technique. We spent untold class time spread out on the floor with anatomy books and I was made to perform all manner of ridiculous maneuvers in order to find and feel the muscles we were talking about. I danced for months without any shoes at all, and marched across the floor, en pointe, holding chairs over my head. She would call for sixty-four changement at a time and then call for them again, and drill me on the names of the famed “Eight Positions ” as I assumed them in rapid succession.

In short, she taught me how to dance. She set something free within me; something longing for expression, but something equally desirous–even dependent upon–the limitations of form and structure that make classical ballet the art form that it is. I loved it more than ever; the more that was required of me–the more I experienced the essential freedom of the form–the more lovely it became. The restlessness and joy and angst and elation of youth found voice and wing in that simple studio, all alone, under the eye of a fiercely loving taskmaster. And I was happy. And I read in the Bible about ‘doing all things as unto the Lord’, and I was happier still.

But I had no idea what it meant, that majestic little verse and the worlds of possibility it suggested. I had never gotten my mind and heart around the concept of art as worship.

Never, that is, until the day we began working on our piece for the recital. There were three of us at that first rehearsal: my sister and another friend and myself. We were stretching out, whispering and giggling, and speculating inwardly, if not outwardly, about the diaphanous costumes the occasion would doubtless require. (It didn’t, by the way–plain white tunics and single silk flowers softening harsh little buns turned out to be the order of the day. And nothing could have been more perfect or appropriate to accompany Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, though not-too-distant memories of Nutcracker performances and pink net made it hard for me to see it that way at first! ) We were talking–but suddenly our voices dropped and we looked around us a little awkwardly. Where was our teacher? She had been there a moment before, watching us stretch or cuing up the CD player. We hadn’t even noticed when she’d left, and it was odd that she’d disappear so soon upon the start of the rehearsal, being the stickler for time that she was.

I looked around the open studio, beyond the marley floor which delineated our classroom, past the piano and chairs and shelves of music. And I saw her–in a heap in a back, dark corner of the studio. She was on her knees and her face was to the ground. And she was praying.

At first I was frightened–had something terrible happened, or had she just learned of some disaster that had catapulted her into such a desperate, un-self-conscious attitude of prayer?

But as the mists of my dullness gradually cleared, the truth broke with a light that pierces to this day: she was praying for inspiration, for the choreography and for the execution of it. She was entreating the favor of God upon this endeavor and imploring His ability to procure it. She had the spiritual vision to see that this was not just a workshop recital for families and friends at a little performing arts school–it was a chance to honor the God of the universe. To love God with the heart, soul, mind and strength. To create something beautiful out of love for Him and to lift it up as an offering of praise.

That moment changed everything for me, in the way that small, seemingly trifling moments often do. All my loves–writing, music, dancing, homemaking, gardening–have since been charged with the influence of it. And not only by the ‘glory’ side of the equation–by the appeal, as well, if not more so. I have in that memory of my beloved and respected teacher, face down before the God she adored, an image of the creative process that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. Creativity is a giving, an offering to others and a glory to the Creator-God. But it is also a receiving. And the courage to create and not valuate our offering by the market standards of the world is, I believe, a gift in itself, and one to be sought most earnestly by the likes of such frail co-creators as we humans prove ourselves to be.

I used to love to tell my ballet students and piano students what we all probably know and already admire about Bach, namely, that he ever signed his scores and compositions with the letters S.D.G. at the end: Soli Deo Gloria. But of equal insight to me is the way that he opened them: J.J. Jesu Juva.

Jesus, help.

Jesus, help me to make something beautiful for You. In this poem. In this bit of earth. In this story. In this cake or loaf of bread or painting or song. Not only can I not do it truly, essentially, without You. I can’t do it for You without You.

The very acknowledgment is an act of worship, and I see the humility of the ‘great ones’ in this practice. Madeleine L’Engle (one of my mentors!!) underscores that writing–or any art form–is an act of faith. Not a blind fumbling in the dark but a reaching towards what we know is there. She loved to image artists as midwives, assisting in the birth of some bright gleam from heaven upon our world. I smile at the thought of C.S. Lewis by his study fire, musing patiently over the mysteries of God to the good of us all. And I read, with, O, what joy, of Sheldon Vanauken praying “daily, almost hourly, that God would speak through [his] two typing fingers” as he fulfilled his vocation to write A Severe Mercy.

Jan Karon speaks of it. The thoughtful and talented folks over at The Rabbit Room are always writing about it. It’s a beautiful thing, this holy desperation, and liberating in the extreme. God is not going to magically make me write like Elizabeth Goudge just because I ask Him to. But He is going to enable me to write from the burden of love He has laid upon me, to the end that He desires–which is more desirable than all to me. And the desire and the desiring draw me irresistibly into the heart of Love itself.

It’s one of the lovely paradoxes of this pilgrims’ way: we pour out our hearts in worship and find them filled in the very act. We stumble under our weakness, our grasping at words and colors and notes, and just when we think we’ve fallen we find the grip of a mighty embrace lifting us with wings like eagles’. We imagine we know the end of our art–where our ambitions lie–and we make our plans accordingly, only to discover we’re being propelled merrily along in some kind of crazy empowered helplessness towards a dream we’d likely have laughed at in our saner moments.

I found myself toward the end of last year under a big writing deadline, the enormity of which I had no idea until I had assumed it. To say that I spent most of November with my head down upon my desk asking God for help would not be too far off the mark. (I wish I could say that I spent as much time thanking Him for it when it came…) I have never felt so out of my league and over my head. And, as I told Philip, the joy of it was an almost incandescent thing. I wished that I could always live with such intensity, such dependence upon God and awareness of His help. Exhausting as it was, it was one of the shining seasons of my life.

It was a glimpse, I think, small but lucid, of the great antiphonal exchange of prayers and praises, giving and receiving, with which art greets worship and worship quickens art. A snatch of the music of the spheres.

A hint of what it’s going to mean to love God face to face. I think there’s only one thing I’m going to be able to do then:

…And they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.

Revelation 7:11, 12

Paradise, from Dante, Gustave Dore'

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A Fragrant Kindness

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

A bit of fragrance always clings to the hand that gives roses. ~Chinese Proverb

Your lovely, lovely words and comments have been a strong cup of grace to me this week. I have read and cherished every one–smiled at some; brimmed with tears over others. I don’t know what to say in response to your generous kindness but thank you. I am overwhelmed. God bless you all…

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Cloud Castles

Monday, January 25th, 2010

The Land of Enchantment, Norman Rockwell

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

I have always been a dreamer. When I was a child in school I was constantly being called down in class for staring out of the window, chin in hand. When I would read a book, I lived in it–I literally walked with Anne Shirley through all her chagrin over red hair and geometry and Gilbert, and I nestled in the dim, light-filtered shadows of Marmee’s attic while Jo March spun her fantastic tales. When I was in junior high I was the one at the back of the room industriously scribbling out stories in the back of my algebra notebook and doubtless leaving my teachers mystified as to how so conscientious a student could perform so poorly on math tests.

And when I was given the life-changing opportunity of an idyllic (and I really do mean idyllic, thanks be to God) home education experience, something wild and sweet and joyous suddenly broke free within me and my fledgling soul soared skyward without the least inhibition or impediment, darting blissfully from one literary feast to another and back again in a glad spree of abundance. I could scarcely alight for long in those early days–the banquet was too rich and varied and my freedom too fresh not to soar and hover and settle and flit again as my fancy took me. In time I sobered down a bit, much to my mother’s relief, no doubt. But never, as long as I live, will I ever forget those ‘first, fine, careless raptures’, or the bright ideals and dreams that sprang from them. They have left their permanent mark upon my soul, one of the outward evidences of which is the stacks of books I find myself surrounded with to this very day. Creeping in at my desk on both sides, toppling my three-legged bedside table, accompanying me from room to room (and from continent to continent, as the case may be, to which the outlandish temporary ‘library’ I set up in England last fall will attest!).

I am deeply grateful to God for the wise friends that He has blessed me with in the way of books. Their dreams have validated mine again and again–dreams once thought so secret and solitary–and have given me a substance upon which to build a few cloud castles of my own. Their truths have affirmed to me the value of pain, ever couched in the goodness of God. And their witness has ever been one of a beauty that yearns and lures and breaks the heart with a loving stab of eternal reality. Elizabeth Goudge, George Eliot, Sheldon Vanauken, Elizabeth Gaskell, J.R.R. Tolkien, Gerard Manley Hopkins–and so many other trusted ones!–have taken up the threads that Louisa May Alcott and Lucy Maud Montgomery began to weave so long ago, fitting their silken strands into the tapestry of my life and helping me to write my own story. There are times that I know a certain book or poem or line has been divinely chosen for me, hand-picked and illumined by God for a particular challenge or season of life, and few things compare to the sense exhilaration that accompanies. There are books that my husband and I have read together and have fallen more in love with God and life over. And there are others through which I have traveled with surprising joy at the recommendation or in the company of true kindred spirits. All dear–all gifts from Him who gives without stint and without ceasing.

I find as I grow older that I have more dreams–not less. And the end towards which all this rambling leads is that I have dreams for this humble little corner of the web. With all my heart I wish it to be a place of peace and beauty, “simplicity and contentment in a greedy and tired culture”, a haven from complaints and complaining. I want fellow dreamers to find themselves in good company, no matter how huge and howling the world may seem at times. I want the precious battered ones whose dreams have taken a beating to know that there is hope unimaginable in the blessed Person of Jesus Christ. I want to encourage the artist that lives within each one of us to take up the call to which we have been uniquely designed and to rejoice as children in the glory of God that results.

And I long to share the joys of a truly beautiful book–inside and out–and to make introductions between those readers and writers who just ought to be friends. (And I’m dreaming, somehow, of actually getting them into your hands, as the opportunity arises.) That is what I want to do here–that is what this site is about. And if you’re kind enough to be reading, I just thought you should know.

Speaking of your kindness, I would like to close with a profound thank you for all the lovely and generous comments that have been left over the past few months on my ‘return’ to Lanier’s Books. I really cannot tell you how you have inspired and blessed me with your encouragement. Madeleine L’Engle said, profoundly, that “art is communication”, and it just heartens me beyond words to know that I am not writing into a void. (Not that comments are required by any means or that my vanity needs stroking! But I was rather loathe to publish over those months that my comment form was broken, simply because I felt like I was talking to myself! ) At any rate, thank you for reading and for taking the time to tell me. It has meant so much.

For this I bless you most: You give much and know not that you give at all.

Kahlil Gibran

Land of Enchantment, Norman Rockwell, 1934

Posted in About Lanier, Journal Entries | 32 Comments »

Lark Rise to Candleford

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

The hamlet stood on a gentle rise in the flat, wheat-growing north-east corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Lark Rise because of the great number of skylarks which made the surrounding fields their springboard and nested on the bare earth between the rows of green corn…

Peasant Woman with a Cow, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1865-1870

Thus opens Flora Thompson’s gentle masterpiece of rural life in an England that was just beginning to feel the benefits–and the drawbacks–of the Industrial Revolution. By times witty and elegiac, this combined collection of three original works (Lark Rise, Over to Candleford and Candleford Green) is a haunting and detailed chronicle of a world that is no more; a world that had existed for centuries previous and which ended abruptly with one generation. With an eye as keen as only love could make it, Flora Thompson, by way of her thinly-veiled little fictional counterpart, Laura Timmins, paints a picture of the life she knew among the fields and hedgerows, in her father’s garden and at her mother’s humble but well-stocked table (“there was never enough of anything except food”), in the shades of her beloved woods and in the comparatively elegant streets of the neighboring village of Candleford. Through Laura’s eyes we see the men savoring their meager half-pints at ‘The Wagon and Horses’ after a grueling day in the fields and watch the women over their well-deserved teas at one house or another:

These tea-drinkings were never premeditated. One neighbor would drop in, then another, and another would be beckoned to from the doorway or fetched in to settle some disputed point. Then someone would say, “How about a cup o’ tay?” and they would all run home to fetch a spoonful, with a few leaves over to help make up the spoonful for the pot.

With a sensitivity that is never mere sentiment, Flora Thompson gives us an honest assessment of the life of the poor: the tiny cottages too small for the ever-growing families that occupied them; the privations resultant of ‘enclosure’ acts which kept them in a station of life we would deem below poverty level, the ceaseless occupation of mothers endeavoring to cover the bodies if not the feet of their children as they went out to school or to work in the ‘larger world’. But there is a beauty, even in the harshness of reality, and an original truth undergirding the simple rustic lives she portrays. Perhaps water must needs be drawn from a common well on the outskirts of the hamlet (and in times of drought they “just had to get their water where and how they could”), perhaps milk was a rare luxury and “for boots, clothes, illness, holidays, amusements, and household renewals there was no provision whatever”. But in spite of such struggles for existence–or, perhaps, because of them–that existence was in many ways an enviable thing to those of us jaded and dazed by the overwhelming complexities of the current age.

The Apple Gatherers, Frederick Morgan

I’d never so much as dare to suggest that their lives were easier than ours, in the purely practical sense of the word; in almost every way they were harder, grittier, leaner. But there was an abundance in all the rustic rituals and dearly-earned pleasures, a fundamental simplicity that, quite frankly, made my heart ache to read of at times. Flora Thompson writes with such an honest beauty that the images of Harvest Home suppers and May Day customs long-since abandoned seem to voice their own appeal for the traditions of the past and lure our hearts to any and all of the various roots from which we have sprung. From her descriptions (and oftentimes adorable commentary!) she affords her readers a privileged view of life as it really was, and that in staggering detail. And all without the slightest shade of condescension or petty moralizing that would ruin the confiding tone and reduce its timeless truths to mere curiosities of a vanished era.

As it is, Lark Rise to Candleford is a gift and a gem, and a kind pluck at the sleeve to the modern reader tempted to exchange community for all the things purchased with its price on the world’s market. Though she never says it outright, it seems to breathe in every well-crafted line: Don’t despise the old because it’s old, or overvalue the new because it’s novel. Don’t sacrifice the verities simply because they are invisible.

Don’t forget where from whence you’ve come.

But, in spite of their poverty and the worry and anxiety attending it, they were not unhappy, and, though poor, there was nothing sordid about their lives. ‘The nearer the bone the sweeter the meat’, they used to say, and they were getting very near the bone from which their country ancestors had fed. Their children and children’s children would have to depend wholly upon whatever was carved for them from the communal joint, and for their pleasure upon the mass enjoyments of a new era. But for that generation there was still a small picking left to supplement the weekly wage. They had their home-cured bacon, their ‘bit o’ leazings’, their small wheat or barley patch on the allotment; their knowledge of herbs for their homely simples, and the wild fruits and berries of the countryside for jam, jellies and wine, and round about them as part of their lives were the last relics of country customs and the last echoes of country songs, ballads and game rhymes. This last picking, though meagre, was sweet.

L'Angelus, Jean Francois Millet

Please give yourself the pleasure of this beautiful trilogy. It’s a treasure that would not have come into existence but for a remarkably observant little girl and the remarkably insightful woman that she became.

all quotations from Lark Rise to Candleford, copyright 1939, 1941 and 1943 by Flora Thompson

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Going to London to see the Queen…

Monday, January 18th, 2010

The Young Victoria, 2009

Well, we may not have been able to travel to London with my parents this past week, but we did get to take a little vicarious flight of fancy via a really good film. It’s a delight–and such a gift of the modern age–to see beautiful things reproduced on the canvas of a screen, and while the pickings are generally quite slim–at least as far as new releases are concerned–it’s heartening to know that if you wait patiently enough, a lovely movie just might come to a theatre near you! Good, true and beautiful films are certainly among my loves, but my criteria is really tough. And the ones that make it I’m devoted to for life.

Such will be the case with the brilliant rendering of the early days of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, The Young Victoria. We saw it Saturday night and were completely swept away. It’s visually gorgeous, with enough panning views of Kensington and Buckingham palaces to make the heart ache–and enough curls and shimmering gowns to make me loathe the wide-legged pants and leather boots I’d worn that night. But it was the legendary romance between Victoria and Albert that struck the real chord with me. I loved seeing them as I’d always imagined them to be: Victoria’s queenly will yielding to the patient tenderness of the man she already loved; Albert’s caution and respect as he awaited the proposal that could only come from her. It was just so gentle, so restrained, that I could hardly believe I was watching a twenty-first century movie.

Victoria learns she is queen, from the picture by H. T. Wells

Victoria learns she is queen, June 20, 1837, from the picture by H. T. Wells

I think it scored pretty well in terms of historical accuracy in other ways, too, with a few embedded hat tips to current scandals and a nearly verbatim (and painful) speech on the part of King William. (But, no, alas! Albert did not actually take a bullet for his bride, as much as he may have tried to shield her from a would-be assassin. A romantic modification of fact which, I for one, am totally alright with.;)) I liked seeing Victoria come to terms with the value of her husband’s participation in her reign, an arrangement that was not by any means a matter of course, and portrayed in the film almost without words in one eloquent moment of camera artistry. And I loved that Victoria herself was depicted as just as impassioned as one might hope such a famous and influential queen would be–and just as imperfect as any woman is. A work of genius on the part of the actress, Emily Blunt, in my humble opinion.

Victoria and Albert by F.X. Winterhalter, 1846

And that opinion may not be worth much to the masses, for Philip and I had the theatre entirely to ourselves Saturday night. But I am not of the masses, any more than my gentle readers are , and so I know I’m in good company when I recommend such an altogether delightful film. It’s refreshingly slow. But there was not a moment that I was not riveted.

The Young Victoria, 2009

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