The Immortal Symphonies

"When Victor Hugo was past eighty years of age he gave expression to his religious faith in these sublime sentences: 'I feel in myself the future life. I am like a forest which has been more than once cut down. The new shoots are livelier than ever.  I am rising toward the sky.  The sunshine is on my head.  The earth gives me its generous sap, but heaven lights me with its unknown worlds.

'You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of the bodily powers.  Why, then, is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart.  I breathe at this hour the fragrance of the lilacs, the violets, and the roses as at twenty years.  The nearer I approach the end the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me.  It is marvelous, yet simple.'"

                   --from my devotional Streams in the Desert

Holiday Weekend

This weekend is H O T in our neck of the woods, and I am looking forward to joining the pool next week (as long as I can win the battle against the head cold that keeps threatening to overtake me--echinacea, fresh veggies, zinc, and lots of sleep are my weapons). 

Our children now have bikes!  And helmets! And may I just say that Annie, wearing a ladybag helmet, riding on her pink princess bike with the iridescent streamers, is THE cutest thing in the world.  We only have gravel on our lane and driveway, so the children are learning the way I did as a kid: the hard way.  Gravel is tricky! But they're doing great, and after dinner when it's not 3,000 degrees, I go out and help them ride.  (I hibernate during the afternoon hours.)

My husband has been diligently putting plants into the vegetable garden and covering the ground with straw.  In addition to lettuces and snow peas (which probably won't last too long if this heat wave continues), we now have peppers, tomatoes, pumpkins, cucumbers--and I can't remember what else.  The vegetable garden is his domain.  The flower beds are mine. 

And the big news is that Finn and I have finished our end-of-the-year standardized testing (required by our state). This miserable experience is particularly hard on the visual-spatial learner, and yesterday was rough.  But today we rallied and he did so well.  I realized that the huge math computation section is basically his worst nightmare.  And then when we got to math concepts and word problems?  He nailed it!  Even for the concepts that were above his grade level or he hadn't learned yet--many of them he was simply able to infer or figure out.  

I tried to make testing more palatable with offerings of chocolate, popcorn, and cookies between sections, and breaks for swinging on the swingset and dancing.  It helped, sort of.

My reward for finishing standardized testing?  

Takeout Thai food + sewing. Happy, happy day!

What's On Finn's Mind

He's obsessed. Truly.

We'll see how far this interest goes!!

Driving Out of the Storm

Peonies Aplenty

The world seems cruel and dark at times.  Sometimes I think my little corner of it needs to be extra-beautiful, just to combat the darkness.

The peonies are helping right now.

(So are the coral bells, flowering sage, and roses.)

A Milestone Week: Graduation + Baptism + Perfect Coffee

Where has the last week gone?!

Well, it went many places. Hemming my sister's work trousers, teaching some homeschool, reading The Screwtape Letters, for starters......

 We attended our niece and goddaughter's graduation party. She graduted from high school last week and her parents threw a beautiful brunch in her honor on Saturday. Unfortunately I am still operating with *only* my phone as my camera, so I did not take many pictures.  But here you can see the delicious crostini. 

Her father is an excellent cook and made everything from scratch....that included the tartine, the granola, the pimento cheese, the everything. 

My contribution was some thrift-store champagne flutes for the mimosas, and our gifts--a necklace engraved with the letter "L" and a 5-year daily journal.  I love the latter so much that I think it will be my newest go-to baby gift, along with an embroidered onesie or homemade bib. 

After the party we traveled on to another state, to spend the night with our best friends, because on Sunday their son was baptized.  And we're his godparents!  It was a gorgeous baptism in a cold, cold lake, with a wonderful potluck (kale salads abounded....Mr. Polly was a happy man).  Allison has learned how to make the best coffee I've ever tasted (hint: pour-over + battery-operated frother) and so we had a second cup at her house before heading home and getting here Sunday around dark. 

Monday was a day of babysitting in the morning, and having my babysitter come in the afternoon so that I could do laundry, clean and tidy.  Yesterday we had a marathon day: handing out an award in my mother's honor at the school where she taught (a 2-hour awards ceremony--my children were so good and so patient), multiple errands, lunch out, art class, etc.  When we got home I had a call from the magazine editor I used to work for--I was a writer--asking if I could please proof four articles in the next 24 hours?  The rate he offered was excellent, and my Wednesday was free, so I said yes. I'm almost done, and plan to celebrate by watching "Sense and Sensibility" with Annie....because rewards are good. 

 So we are busy, but it's a privilege to see our only niece, who is also our goddaughter, graduate. And it was an honor to be asked to serve as godparents again.  

(As I type this, Annie is dancing around me singing songs from princess movies.  Adorable!!!)

The First Essential for Progress...Or Not

"Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result....[t]he very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.....

"What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe?  What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situation of men?"
                                                                         --from That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis

Today after lunch Finn and I had a talk about this very topic.  Well, he's eight, so there's that.  But the idea that morality is subjective?  He understands it, and he understands its flaws.  I'm finding that children's reactions to scenarios are often spot-on; as observers of the natural world and human beings they seem to have an unadulterated sense of what's true and right. In other words, they still maintain their deep-set repugnances.

It's the adults who have rationalized our way into all sorts of odd corners who have the problematic perspectives.....and that's where my thoughts have centered as I've folded laundry and scrubbed the bathtub and cleaned the windows and vacuumed today.  Housewifery is, in fact, an excellent vocation for the student of philosophy......