Goodness in a Silent Afternoon

     The daffodils parade in a yellow so brazen it hurts the eyes, yet hang their heads in such humility you have to go low to see their faces.  After the snow melt, they've pushed up through the pine needles in the back corner of the yard, flaunting beauty in the three o'clock sun.  The cardinals are courting in the bushes behind, the jilted male, a third wheel, leaves in a hurry and flies so close to my head he scares me.  The hawk is hunting, flying high over tree tops.  Large and awkward the bumble bee makes his way to nectar, he too hears their siren song.  And so I sit, silent, on the cat's gravestone, waiting.  The words of  Psalm 62 come, from the days when we sang the Psalter in church,

"Surely in silence my soul waits on God, for my salvation comes from Him."

     But when the congregation sang it out, the Psalm sounded like lament.  Today is no lament.  I am waiting.  Silent.  I am watching His work, rejoicing.  Then I think of Wordsworth, his crowd, his host of daffodils:

I gazed - and gazed - but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie,

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon the inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

     

     Aren't we to gather God's goodness the way we gather daffodils, the memory of His goodness being our heart's treasure long after the flower of the moment fades and falls?

*Note on Geographica:  I'm going to try moving Ally's quizzes to Fridays' posts and see if that suits our schedule better than Mondays.

Even For Me

"Coming sinner, whatever promise you find in the Word of Christ, strain it as much as you can, so long as you do not corrupt it, and his blood and merits will answer all."  John Bunyan

 "But every time a godly man reads the Scriptures (remember this when you are reading the Scripture) and there meets with a promise, he ought to lay his hand upon it and say,  This is part of my inheritance, it is mine, and I am to live upon it."  Jeremiah Burroughs

 "If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desire not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, we are like ignorant children who want to continue making mud pies in a slum because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a vacation at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased."  C. S. Lewis

     I have been thinking long on these quotes.  Thinking long on promises in the Scripture.  I've found Colossians 1:9-11 in which Paul prays for a full knowledge of the will of God, all spiritual wisdom and understanding, walking worthy, pleasing the Lord in all respects, fruit bearing good works, an increasing knowledge of God, strengthening and attaining all steadfastness and patience and finishing off with a joyous giving of thanks.  I've reread Luke 6:38 in which Jesus says our giving is given back "pressed down, shaken together, running over, they will pour into your lap."  I can't help but think of Ephesians 3:14-21 and lay my hand on my Bible, asking for God's riches in glory to be bestowed on me exceedingly abundantly beyond all that I ask or think.  And here I find a difficulty, I don't know what God's exceeding abundance looks like in such an ordinary person.
     Today time has passed slowly.  Today has been a day for cups of tea beside piles of kleenex, and girls laying flushed under quilts.  Today has been a day for digging in the mud, adding compost, and pulling out weeds.  There has been time for thinking and daffodil gazing and playing with the camera.  Today has been a day for scrubbing toilets, hanging laundry in the sun, and reading stories on the couch.  There has been time for a few stolen pages of Dorothy Sayers and an allowance for an English teaspoon filled with sugar stirred in my tea.  Today has been a day for daffodils in grandma's crystal and the bubbling excitement of giving a gift.
     God is in the midst of all of this and promises an exceedingly abundantly beyond, and that promise stretches my belief.  I need faith, the assurance of things hoped for, and so I ask for it and dare to believe God's promises are even for me.  Even for me.

A Birthday Affair

     Sam's handmade gift for Bryan was a chessboard, chess being the current game du jour.  We only have three other chessboards, collected on travels or as gifts, but not one handmade.  Sam sawed scrap wood into a square, and painted on the chessboard pattern all by himself.  Then he came looking for help, wondering how to make chess pieces.  He thought maybe he could carve them.  This was one week out from The Day, and as nice as that would have been, I thought it might be too challenging, with no prior carving experience. Oh, to be young and dream big!  Old and jaded by too many frustrated projects, I suggested oven bake clay.  While I read aloud to them, the kids rolled and cut.  There followed a flurry of new birthday ideas for Dad.  Arden was sure Dad would want a "chest" set from him too, but we talked him down to a set of checkers and a shared board with Sam.  Then Kara dreamed up a tic-tac-toe set and whipped one out of left over clay.

     Dinner preparation was an all day affair.  In the end it was delicious and we arrived at the Double Chocolate Torte already fully satisfied, but there's no skipping birthday cake.  The torte was rich.  How rich?  Nine eggs and a pound of chocolate went into that torte.  Bryan asked if it was related to fudge.  We liked it, but in the end decided next time to go back to a true cake with flour, light and fluffy.  The backwards seven?  Someone dyslexic put that on the cake, and we laugh and carry on.  Actually she's not dyslexic, but it makes a mom wonder.  Really, the number in reverse is there so that you won't be able to tell how old Bryan is, a distraction technique.

     Bryan is the kind of wonderful Dad who opens all these sweet surprises and praises every one.  He calls for quick games with the givers.  The Little Giver has been so excited all day he could just hardly keep the secret.  The Medium Giver has a whole stack of gifts, and confesses to Dad that they didn't cost much, and cries out with dismay, the paper tic-tac-toe board wrapped in the gift was wrinkled.  But Dad's the kind of man who can smooth out paper.  The final touch to the chess set was a storage pouch, designed by Ally and stitched by Sam, who doesn't often sew.  This is how we celebrate birthdays here, nothing expensive, yet all priceless, to honor a Dad who we love more than any other.

Bedding Down the Boys

     Arden is hard core.  He sleeps on the floor.  I've tried to find a reason why it might not be acceptable practice, but I can't, so I let the boy sleep on the floor.  I roll him in his blanket, and make sure he has his little fireman pillow, I call him a "turkey sandwich" (as in "you little turkey," but he doesn't know and thinks it's nonsense, which I guess it is.  Why do turkeys deserve that sort of aspersion cast upon their kind?) and kiss him goodnight.  He likes to tell me his bed is hard as a rock, his mattress from the furniture store.  Arden tells me to sell it at a yard sale.  My motherly intuition tells me to hang on to the bed, it may someday be important.  Maybe when he's six he'll make a comparison between the bed and floor and change his mind.
     Meanwhile, Sam senses an opportunity.  I try to make them keep that room clean.  I try to have them pick every toy up off that floor every day.  But they are boys, they know my weaknesses.  And one of my weaknesses is the now deserted bed, after all, those things aren't technically on the floor.  Sam has appropriated Arden's bed for the over-flow books from the top bunk.  The I-have-so-many-books-I-can't-curl-up-on-my-bed-any-more-over-flow.  Sam does sleep with books, I guess when you're under five feet you don't need all of your mattress to stretch out.
     Tonight I was looking at those over-flow books, thinking about the life of a boy.  He has stashed his Encyclopedia of Swords and Sabers here below.  There's The Good Fight : How World War II Was Won, which he recently rediscovered and moved from the hall to his room.  There's a Dorothy Sayers book of short mystery stories.  A Latin textbook, a Bible and his Bible study notebook.
    What are Sam's current top bunk books, the things he sleeps with, in lieu of a bear or any other such commonplace item?  What does Sam love?  Here we find The Dangerous Book for Boys, always close at hand.   Another Latin textbook and a Latin reader.  A notebook of sketches.  Two World War II Encyclopedias for children.  A well read copy of The Three Musketeers (Puffin Classics), which is abridged.  I've bought an unabridged copy, but Sam hasn't tried it yet.  Sam keeps his nice Bible up here, and some loose papers.  I don't even want to dig through and know what they are.  Then, lest we think we can cubby hole him, and figure him out, you'll find a knitting project and a roll of masking tape (I didn't let myself ask, but I have been wondering how that roll of tape had disappeared).
     Instead of stressing about the mess, I'm rejoicing in the boy.  The stacked disaster is Sam developing his own interests, his own overflowing pile of books to feed the curiosity and imagination.  I love that boy!

Reading at a Feverish Pace

     Kara is a little sick today, a little cough, a little fever keeping her quiet on the couch.  What do we do on a sick day?  We set aside formal school activities and we read and read some more.  We read Snow White.  We play Sorry and Kara begins filling her new sketch pad.  We read Peter Pan.  Barrie makes me laugh aloud as I voice the tale, though it does require censorship, his unique style and stunning vocabulary are well worth knowing.  Bryan and I walk to the college library over his lunch break, discussing on the way home the sheer number of books we wish we could read.  What if you started at one end of the library and read to the other, with permission to skip a few of the boring or offensive volumes?  We come home with hefty books, art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  We bring Ally a couple volumes on Queen Elizabeth.  We bring Sam fodder for his WWII curiosity.  And for the sick child on the couch a book on the solar system and Houdini.  We read again in the afternoon, Little Pilgrims Progress and the next adventure of Peter Pan.  We read to ourselves during quiet time.  We'll read again tonight, warm in the lamplight under the cold dark sky.  And we'll hope when Kara's lamp is turned off she'll sleep quiet and undisturbed through the night and wake up new tomorrow.

Geographica: Northern Africa

    Well, here we are and it is Tuesday.  Have you noticed the geography quiz is typically Monday's post?  Mondays are always busy here, and I'm trying to figure out how to fit it all into the available hours.  This week, the Geographica post will just have to be on Tuesday, and we'll just continue on.  I'm plotting a birthday dinner on Thursday and was helped out more than once by Epicurious in planning an Italian menu.   I'm going to attempt, with my assistant chefs: homemade gnocchi, homemade noodles, homemade sauce, roasted garlic crostini with assorted toppings, wilted spinach salad with portobello mushrooms and a double chocolate torte.  We will be busy and we will be a size larger on Friday.  Bryan will probably say it is all too much work, but I think we'll have fun.  If I wanted to get carried away, like those other homeschoolers, we would make it a mini-unit study all about Italy with maps and photos and, of course, cuisine.  I will hold myself back and simply try to accomplish dinner at 6:30 Thursday evening.  But (smile) there will be no holding back on the reigns, I'm not one of those others and if you're here looking for ideas on how to become so very other yourself, I'm afraid I will disappoint.  I should stop meandering and come to the point, if you are here looking for a geography quiz, written by a lovely 13 year old who adores her atlas, then you will be thrilled to test your knowledge with this (I think she could have at least humored me and created a quiz on Italy, but alas!):
Quiz: Northern Africa
1.  With the Straight of Gibraltar to the north and the Atlas Mountains in the south, name this country whose largest city is Casablanca.
2.  What country, that was once on the Barbary Coast, also has the Great Eastern Erg and the Ahaggar Mountains?
3.  The Valley of the Kings, the Qattara Depression, and the Aswan High Dam are in what country that was once ruled by the Ptolemaic Dynasty?
4.  The rich and powerful city of Carthage, destroyed by the Romans in 146 BC and later rebuilt, was in what country on the Mediterranean Sea that now has Tunis as its capital city?
5.  Leptis Magna is in the region of Tripolitania, and is a World Heritage Site because it is a well preserved Roman city.  Leptis Magna is in what country, also containing the Gulf of Sidra and the capital of Tripoli?


Answers:

1.  Morocco
2.  Algeria
3.  Egypt
4.  Tunisia
5.  Libya

Last Year's Marigolds

    
     In August of last year I proclaimed myself an Erstwhile Gardener.  An Erstwhile Gardener being one who is a former grower of living things, one whose garden dreams have been arrested, one so weary of the battle that dried asparagus and chrysanthemum stems stand through the winter and right on into the summer if no one else takes them in hand.   I scoff at the Martha Stewart Gardening Issue, I too thought I had a green thumb when I planted in locations that only required seeds, tossed haphazardly in the ground.
     Today is spring.  Spring brings hope.  Reluctantly I take the rake in hand and am irresistibly drawn to weeding, and to hope.  This is a vain, misguided hope.  This hope will be chewed through like Swiss cheese.  This hope will be damaged at the roots by the tunneling mole.  This hope will be beaten down by the rain, by the hail, or by the children.  I'd like to tell you this hope will persevere, but I can't.  Still I am unable to restrain myself.  I hum Great is Thy Faithfulness while the breeze blows soft and a stick battle rages across the grass, one lone boy against a host of invisible enemies.  My finger nails are black and I feel the dirt, wondering if there's any promise.  Kara builds a kite made of plastic that cannot fly.  I think of Habakkuk 3:

Though the fig tree should not blossom

And there be no fruit on the vines,

Though the yield of the olive should fail

And the fields produce no food...

Yet I will exult in the LORD,

I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.

     I come in and I look at seeds and wonder if there's still time to change my mind and order a few, just a few, more varieties.  What about a red okra?  It ought to grow, this is the South after all, I could concede a little ground.  I'm vowing to plant a few, just a few, things; lots of basil, some Pink Heart tomatoes, Japanese Long cucumbers, Little Gem lettuce (if you grow heirloom seeds for no other reason, at least do it for the names).  The problem is that stinking seed catalog, mine is from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, is like a trellis for the hope in my heart.  I'm defeated before I have begun, yet I can't stop myself, hope's tendrils have wrapped round my heart.  I do have plenty of seeds from last year's marigolds, and as an alternative I could carpet my beds with simple, indefatigable cheer.  But I am afraid it's too late.