One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help,
gardens to enjoy
and books in the long winter evenings.
~ D. E. Stevenson
The Antidote to Dullness
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Category Archives: Uncategorized
Wonderful Wedding Moments
Saturday we celebrated the wedding of Julie and Daniel, the fourth and final wedding of the year in our church community. In this lovely picture (credit: Matthew Hurley), we are dancing a Virginia Reel. Isn’t Julie beautiful? She is wearing the same dress her mom, aunt and grandma wore with a gorgeous pair of cowboy boots underneath. Directly behind her is Isaiah (white shirt) for whom many of you prayed to wake up from a coma. There he is, dancing! I’m leaning forward, ready to twirl around.
It was a wonderful wedding. I woke this morning through a floodtide of memories…moments worth recording:
~ The groomsmen’s toasts were simply amazing. My friend leaned over and whispered, “If these are the kind of guys Daniel is friends with, it speaks very highly of him.” The masterpiece was the song written by one of the best men, Daniel Went Down to Wallowa, modeled on The Devil Went Down to Georgia.
~ Collaborating with a college freshman on the composition of a violin descant for St. Patrick’s Breastplate, the bridal processional, was a hoot! We had more fun isolating a musical phrase and pulling a blues riff from it when we should have been focusing on the descant. Julie entered during the centerpiece of the song: Christ be with me. My first exposure to NoteWorthy Composer software has me drooling.
~ I looked across the table and said, “Krista, You. are. beautiful.” Her mother, holding with a squirming grandson agreed, “She really is.” Krista smiled and explained, “My husband’s love makes me beautiful.” And. It was so sweet and genuine, not a Sunday School answer, if you know what I mean.
~ The. Kiss.
~ Our Bonnie (mother of the bride, a friend who belongs to us all) displayed extraordinary beauty and serenity. Hosting a wedding reception in her back pasture was no worry. She glowed with the light of grace. It has been five years since she fought Stage 3 cancer. We are so thankful for God’s kindness displayed in her life.
~ The entrance of the cake, held high and carried around all the tables and delivered to the head table by a Best Man (there were two), while a jig was played on the violin.
~ When I heard the men were wearing Wranglers I was a skeptic. However. They looked exceedingly handsome in their Chocolate Black Wranglers with cowboy boots, formal vests and, after the ceremony, cowboy hats.
~ It has been a glorious summer. Glory can be fatiguing but it is a Good Tired. A Happy Tired. Looking back with a young friend, we smiled and sighed and took a deep, cleansing breath. “Well,” she said, “I guess it’s time to start a new season of love!”
A Thread of Grace
There’s a saying in Hebrew, he tells her.
No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us,
there’s always a thread of grace.
Mary Doria Russell’s A Thread of Grace
When I read it half-heartedly-dipping in here and there–I just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm. There are many characters and more storylines than a modern novel usually has. The place names are unfamiliar (many are fictional) and it is easy to become lost, dislocated. Like Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, it takes a while to settle in and get comfortable.
His face twists, but he holds back the tears,
determined not to commit the sin of despair.
After I finished this story of the Jewish resistance in Italy, sniffling and throat-lumping, I count it in the top five books about civilian life during WWII. Russell (who grew up in my hometown, Lombard, IL) obviously knows both Jewish and Catholic culture deep down at the roots in this well-researched and well-written story.
She nods and his glorious gap-toothed grin apears,
utterly transforming the homely face.
To make a man so happy! she thinks.
To make this man so beautiful..”Yes.” she says, “Really.”
The courtship of Claudette and Santino, written with sparse, elegant prose, remains long after the book is finished. Santino, a solid man, builds stone walls that will be standing 200 years after he’s gone. Claudia (she Italicizes 
her name) is a young refugee who is forced to grow up in a short space of time. Like any book with Nazis and Jews, there is difficult-to-digest terror and violence.
The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child.
Misere mei Deus:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies.
The other relationship which barnacled my heart was between a Catholic priest, Osvaldo Tomitz, and Werner Schramm, a German Doktor who has deserted the Nazis. The story begins with Don Tomitz hearing Schramm’s confession–who calculates that he has killed 91,867 people–and ends with Schramm acting as a priest to the father. Don Tomitz wrestles with guilt, forgiveness, atonement and absolution as he ministers to broken people.
May I share some of my favorite sentences?
~ Shutters open like windows in an Advent calendar.
~ Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet…
~ He could give a lecture on the natural history of terror.
~ He tries to thank God, but can’t help feeling like a thug’s wife who believe she is loved if a punch goes wide.
~ Autumn light makes the varnished chesnut bookcases beneath the windows glow.
Trollope’s Rachel Ray
Beer and evangelicals: that’s what you’ll find in Anthony Trollope’s Rachel Ray
.
.
What Luke Rowan, the main man in this novel, cares about is brewing good beer. He inherits a portion of the brewery of Messrs. Bungall and Tappitt, gentlemen who consistently made muddy, disagreeable beer. Naturally Mr. Tappitt objects to an upstart nephew suggesting ways to improve his beer. To Tappitt, beer is business; Luke thinks there is a great deal of poetry in brewing beer.
He is “a young man, by no means of the bad sort, meaning to do well, with high hopes in life, one who had never wronged a woman, or been untrue to a friend, full of energy and hope and pride. But he was conceited, prone to sarcasm, sometimes cynical, and perhaps sometimes affected.” Perhaps the greatest compliment is that Luke “had the gift of making himself at home with people.”
In the character of Dorothea Prime, Rachel’s widowed sister, Trollope takes aim at pharisaic pietism. “Her fault was this: that she had taught herself to believe that cheerfulness was a sin…”
Nice things aggravated her spirits and made her fretful. She liked the tea to be stringy and bitter, she liked the bread to be stale; –as she preferred also that her weeds should be battered and old. She was approaching that stage of discipline at which ashes become pleasant eating, and sackcloth is grateful to the skin. The self-indulgences of the saints often exceed anything that is done by the sinners.
Sweet Rachel Ray is the antithesis of her sister. “She walked as though the motion were pleasant to her, and easy,–as though the very act of walking were a pleasure.” Rachel’s sister wants to keep her cloistered at home, leaving only for church services and afternoon teas at Miss Pucker’s house. Rachel protests, “If I was minded to be bad, shutting me up would not keep me from it.”
Thus two views of marriage and courtship are at opposition. Trollope poses “that great question,–What line of moral conduct might best befit a devout Christian?”
Marriage is the happiest condition for a young woman, and for a young man, too. And how are young people to get married if they are not allowed to see each other?
versus
Men and women, according to her theory, were right to marry and have children; but she thought that such marriages should be contracted not only in a solemn spirit, but with a certain dinginess of solemnity, with a painstaking absence of mirth.
I loved the storyline but I adored the writing. Phrases like “elated with dismal joy” and “she knew her mother must be appeased and her sister opposed” and “burial service over past unkindness” delighted me.
If you are so inclined, click on the link in the first sentence of this post, then click Look Inside the Book, First Pages. Read the first paragraph and tell me it’s not brilliant.
Rachel Ray. Written in 1863; my favorite book of 2009.
Julie and Julia
Julie and Julia follows the true story to two women: Julia Child in France, 1949, and Julie Powell, who cooked and blogged her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 2002 from her apartment in Queens. It is an interesting technique to put two memoirs into one film, but it works.
If you like period pieces, you’ll especially enjoy the French parts of the movie. I wouldn’t have thought post-WWII Paris could have looked so luscious. My husband was salivating from the beginning of the movie…over the wood paneled blue Buick station wagon.
Meryl Streep delivers an award-winnable performance as the jaunty Julia Child. She captures the voice, the mannerisms and the joi de vivre that is signature Julia. One cannot help but love this woman who is so at home in her own skin. Amy Adams plays Julie Powell, a cubicle worker and aspiring writer, restless and riddled with angst. Julia becomes Julie’s role model.
Paul Child and Eric Powell, the husbands, play supporting roles. The film portrays the Childs’ relationship as stable and secure, tinged with sadness at their inability to conceive; Julie and Eric’s marriage is threatened by the blogging project and her focus on it. It is refreshing to see a movie with two married couples for whom fidelity is a given.
The main message that I extracted is that Julia Child was her joyful, unflappable self because she was a woman adored by her husband. His love “beautified” her. We admire this woman who is plain and tall, with a voice that grazes the ceiling, because of her passion and zest and joy in cooking. The security of being loved meant she didn’t have to edit the fiascos out of her television shows. That woman could laugh.
My strongest criticism is that the intimacy of both couples was overstated and brought on screen. Less is more. The scene where Julia and Paul exit their Paris house holding hands until their fingertips part communicates their sexual sizzle better than the bedroom scenes.
Oh..the food! Lots of butter, lots of whisking, chopping, and plenty of eating. It’s delicious.
Six Word Saturday
Bubble wrap: best rest from stress .
Random Reading Notes
Lots happening in the “Shire” and it. is. glorious. Our community is celebrating weddings, music, friendship and growth. I had not factored in how fatiguing glory can be, but surely there will be time to rest in the winter.
One of my dear ones is getting married this Saturday. Here is a Tolstoy quote that landed in her invitation:
The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage
but to bring more love and truth into the world.
We marry to assist each other in this task.
The most selfish and hateful life of all
is that to two beings who unite
in order to enjoy life.
The higher calling is that of the man
who has dedicated his life
to serving God and doing good
and who unites with a woman in order
to further that purpose.
~ Leo Tolstoy
but to bring more love and truth into the world.
We marry to assist each other in this task.
The most selfish and hateful life of all
is that to two beings who unite
in order to enjoy life.
The higher calling is that of the man
who has dedicated his life
to serving God and doing good
and who unites with a woman in order
to further that purpose.
~ Leo Tolstoy
The irony of that quote is that joy is the byproduct of a life of service.
I have so many good books on my nightstand I can hardly bear going to sleep.
You know, if you’ve read this blog for more than a week, how much I admire Wendell Berry. I have two new book of essays and I love to read them wherever they fall open.
Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere to the universe or the planet
or the nation or the institution or the profession,
but to the singular sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these my brethren.”
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic.
It is heroic only when compelled to be.
It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
~ from “Word and Flesh”
It does not adhere to the universe or the planet
or the nation or the institution or the profession,
but to the singular sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these my brethren.”
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic.
It is heroic only when compelled to be.
It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
~ from “Word and Flesh”
Another author in my top five favorites is Neil Postman. The Disappearance of Childhood
is teeter-tottering in my pile of books. Some quotes such as “Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act.” need a bit more background to be appreciated. My antipathy to television needs no bolstering, but you can’t blame me for chortling a bit over this Reginald Damerall quote on how television erodes the dividing point between childhood and adulthood:
is teeter-tottering in my pile of books. Some quotes such as “Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act.” need a bit more background to be appreciated. My antipathy to television needs no bolstering, but you can’t blame me for chortling a bit over this Reginald Damerall quote on how television erodes the dividing point between childhood and adulthood:
“No child or adult becomes better at watching television
by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.”
by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.”
I’m revisiting a book that had a powerful impact on me thirteen years ago: Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. It is curious to re-read the book at a little more emotional distance. I asked my husband to read the introduction and the first chapter in order to understand me better. While he believes Wendell Berry is a better grief counselor, Curt appreciated this:
“How do I keep my mother’s death from being a lifelong lesson?
How do I keep it an isolated incident,
something so overarching, so devastating,
so pervasive in my life still?
How do I keep from being crippled by it?”
The answer, I believe–if there is such a thing
as a concise answer to such questions–
is to slowly learn to live with the loss and not under it,
to let it become a companion
rather than a guide.
How do I keep it an isolated incident,
something so overarching, so devastating,
so pervasive in my life still?
How do I keep from being crippled by it?”
The answer, I believe–if there is such a thing
as a concise answer to such questions–
is to slowly learn to live with the loss and not under it,
to let it become a companion
rather than a guide.
Helene Hanff is kick-in-the-butt fun to read. 84, Charing Cross Road
is high on my list of lifetime favorites. She uses a strange and intriguing convention in Apple of My Eye
, a book about New York City. The entire book is a diary about a book she *plans* on writing. Her friend Patsy is forever commenting, “Put that in the book.” Her humor is irrepressible, her writing wonderful. She is one of those friends who is a walking encyclopedia, able to give you a two minute synopsis of the history of anything. Thanks to Hanff, I’m am SO ready to visit the Big Apple. The Cloisters, a collection of twelth and thirteenth century buildings, torn down and reconstructed in NYC, is now on my “must see” list. I had never heard of it before this week. Anybody been?
is high on my list of lifetime favorites. She uses a strange and intriguing convention in Apple of My Eye, a book about New York City. The entire book is a diary about a book she *plans* on writing. Her friend Patsy is forever commenting, “Put that in the book.” Her humor is irrepressible, her writing wonderful. She is one of those friends who is a walking encyclopedia, able to give you a two minute synopsis of the history of anything. Thanks to Hanff, I’m am SO ready to visit the Big Apple. The Cloisters, a collection of twelth and thirteenth century buildings, torn down and reconstructed in NYC, is now on my “must see” list. I had never heard of it before this week. Anybody been?
Then you look out,
and the splendor of the city
smites you all over again
with “astonishment of the heart,”
as it says in the Bible.
and the splendor of the city
smites you all over again
with “astonishment of the heart,”
as it says in the Bible.
Finally, I am snuggling into Donald Hall’s memoir of his childhood summers with his grandparents in Maine, String Too Short to Be Saved
The idea of their [Donald’s grandparents] mortality
was never far from the surface of my day,
for a flush or a sigh or a hand pressed to the heart
brought death to me,
as if I had heard someone say the word.
It was a pack on my back,
and I would feel the sharp, physical pain
of their approach to dying,
something becoming nothing–or
was it my own approach to bereavement
that made my side ache?
was never far from the surface of my day,
for a flush or a sigh or a hand pressed to the heart
brought death to me,
as if I had heard someone say the word.
It was a pack on my back,
and I would feel the sharp, physical pain
of their approach to dying,
something becoming nothing–or
was it my own approach to bereavement
that made my side ache?
What are you reading this summer?
The Tree Fort
Our project this weekend was building a tree fort.
The frame and supports
The deck is on!
One view from the tree fort.
Looking through a canopy of leaves.
Future residents, Noah and Preston
Fine Art Friday – Watercolor!
A Moment Spurred, Ann Yoder
My goal as an artist is to create paintings
that share a ‘voice’ that your heart hears.
~ Ann Yoder
that share a ‘voice’ that your heart hears.
~ Ann Yoder
People! I have a real treat for you.
My friend, Ann Yoder.
Our kids were in play group together.
Whenever we meet randomly in town,
it is talk, talk, talk…
Please don’t skip this link, she does excellent work.
The stories behind the paintings are like
the “Vivid” setting on a camera.
Inspiration Behind the Art
Your day *will* be better because of her art.
Found in the Laundry Room
Our cousin’s laundry room sports this sign.
Did her husband make it?
This looks like something her father might have made.
It makes me smile.
Emily at “Not so idle hands” blog is giving away a sign she makes.
Crafters, you’d love this blog.
You can enter to win a sign by clicking on Emily’s name.
I love looking at this Degas when I’m scooping
up wet clothes from the washer.
Who knew ironing could look so romantic?
All it takes is watercolor!
Folk art from my sister-in-law.
The background picture at Nettie’s blog.
I love pictures of woman hanging the wash.
What’s in your laundry room/nook/space (beside stinky socks)?
A Living Pencil 