A True Story from Home April is young, and I’m in my garden as often as I can be. Today, I have company. My nephew, Bennett, is kneeling in the zucchini patch beside a Red Ryder wheelbarrow. He asked if he could help, so he’s weeding the clover that crept up in early March, tossing … Continue reading A Garden in Babylon
"Today on the hill road toward Belchertown I came across an old farmhouse in an old field with stone walls all about it and a great elm above it, and lilacs at the doorway. I stopped for a long time to look at it. In some other time... I shall choose just such a small … Continue reading Little Kids, Cows, & Keeping Bees
Before the sun slipped down on the Sabbath, Mary might have pressed aloe leaves and squeezed their gum into a dish, mixing it with myrrh and water. Carrying it to a buried Jesus at dawn must have felt like a last, little fragrant offering. But when she saw the sunrise streaming into an open tomb, … Continue reading Leaves of Healing
“I was putting off knowing it. All that day there had been a crashing in the wind, the sound of a chainsaw and that of a much heavier engine.” - Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow I watched one afternoon in October to see my neighbor’s chainsaw whir and whine and whistle clean through the trunk of … Continue reading Upon the Death of a Bradford Pear
In The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett wrote of a woman named Mrs. Almira Todd, who lived in a clapboard house on the coast of Maine---a gardener and a landlady and "an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame." They grew out from her gray-shingled walls and up her steep gables, … Continue reading Scent on a Spring Breeze
A True Story from Home To me, Mrs. Olave Thurston was the lady in my grandpa’s stories---as if she was another Ma Ingalls or Miss Rumphius. When we ate chicken for dinner, Papa would tell how Mrs. Thurston raised, butchered, and boiled her own. When spring came and I cut fresh flowers for the table, … Continue reading Gravestone Flowers
May you wake to the sun that wakes the bees in their boxes and by which you can see your work and spot the queen laying her eggs in golden wombs of light. May you hear the hum of all twenty-nine colonies and may it harmonize with the song of the robins and the breeze … Continue reading For the Beekeeper
"And on the banks... there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing." ~ Ezekiel 47:12 Visiting the … Continue reading Honeybees & a Wildflower Market
Whenever Papa Larry tells of the lavender farm he and Nanny visited up in Maine, I stop to listen, because I can almost smell the sweetness of flowers and sea. And then he'll reminisce to when they met the Lupine Lady herself--- Mrs. Barabara Cooney, who wrote the book Miss Rumphius. This past Christmas, Joel … Continue reading Acres of Lupines
"There is, and there continues to be, a resurrection." ~ Francis Schaeffer, True Spirituality Things that made me happy in April: Purple clover Freshly stacked wood and a yellow wheelbarrow Orange juice in a jar How Andrew Peterson puts words to spring, like: "The hills remember green again" My Tuesday morning routine: coffee, write, check … Continue reading Resurrection & Sweet Alyssum Sprouts
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