I've been reading

 I had a chest cold or something like it, and now have bronchitis. I've been reading.

"We do not migrate as the birds do, but I notice there is a change in the rhythm of our life when the season ebbs. Nights are cool, days dreamy with blue haze. There is a quickening in the blood, a restlessness. Suddenly, we are full of projects, which may be our own manner of migrating."

                                          -  Gladys Taber

"...the one thing that sets creative people apart is that they have all acquired the habit of being receptive to inspiration, actively seeking it, or even simply recognizing it. Some may have to travel to the ends of the earth to find inspiration, others may find it hiding in libraries, at the tops of mountains, buried under the earth. But the domestic artist is in the glorious position of being able to find inspiration in daily, domestic life."

                                           -  Jane Brocket, The Gentle Art of Domesticity

"The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth - and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice."

                                               -  Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Also from Against the Machine: "No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society. On the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order."

                                                       -  Eric Voegelin

From Magnificat:

"Our glory is to mirror back in loving praise to the God who made us the beauty we glimpse dimly in all that comes from his hand."

I couldn't take it anymore

 I decided to stop reading The Brothers K - I won't miss them. I w

rote down the publisher, and the translator in case I ever have a reason to go back to them. For a good reason, I might; if so, it may as well be the same edition.

I've had the cushion for the rocking chair in my bedroom, waiting for some finishing touches, so long that I kept forgetting about it. But enough was enough and today I was looking at it. Basically, I'd covered the whole thing with some corduroy, just going right over the original, piping and all, and it almost was enough to cover the whole pad, but there's a space at the back of it that I just handstitched on. I've been meaning to cover it with something - nothing seems like a great idea. So I left it that way; it's on the chair and nobody's going to notice it until something strikes me. 

The offending area is at the back, where the chair spokes (is that the right term?) are, quite unobtrusive.

I took a video of Benny, coming up our driveway:

He stopped at the "crossroads", to ponder whether to go ahead to the back door, or take a left to the front door. 

I picked up Gladys Taber's The Best of Stillmeadow, which I apparently read six years ago . I hadn't remembered that a previous owner of their old farmhouse had murdered his wife! They didn't seem to mind it. They wanted their children to grow up in the country, with fresh air and nature all around. The house was rather run-down, more than they'd realized.

"Our basic equipment for this venture consisted of a staggering fortitude and no common sense. But we didn't know it then. We came out the next weekend and paid some more money. By then, most of the furniture had vanished, except three carders and five spinning wheels, and one rope bed which had been too big for moving out quickly.

High hearted, we advanced. We bought tons of wallpaper, and it turned out to be tons, since we had never papered before and so were uncertain about quantities. For years we gave away wallpaper. I sent for some furniture stored in Virginia, and three weeks later a disturbed Kentucky racehorse arrived while the furniture rode along to some racetrack. It takes time to swap a horse for your furniture. But by then we had discovered the fatal truth about every sink, toilet and tub in the house.

'Well, one could not expect a man to drain the pipes before shooting his wife,' said Jill. 'He didn't think of it.'"

willingness to be this new thing

 I've been reading an article in Plough, an interview with Ken Burns, the filmmaker and historian. 

"This word 'liberty' had an incredible effect. Why would anybody want to give up the benefits of being a subject of the British constitutional monarchy? Most of everyone's wealth, education, prosperity, and literacy came from that colonial relationship. Why would you give up those benefits for freedom and democracy, ideas never tried before in human history? At the heart of the American experiment is possibility. At the heart is risk. At the heart of it is this willingness to be this new thing, a citizen.

It's not hard to be a subject. You're under authoritarian rule and you just put up with stuff. But to be a citizen is to assume responsibility, to assume the pursuit of happiness, which the Founders understood not as the acquisition of things, but the pursuit of lifelong learning. Lifelong learning made you more virtuous, and the more virtuous you were, the more possibility that you could begin to bear the responsibility of citizenship and to be able, if not to answer, then to ask more authentically those essential questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Where am I going?

I am interested in these gigantic conflicts like the Revolution that produce something as spectacularly interesting as this idea that people, for the first time in human history, could govern themselves. It wasn't just the aristocracy that pushed this forward, but ordinary people who debated over the ratification of the Constitution and the subsequent Bill of Rights. It is one of the most active moments in the history of humanity of people coming together in a civic way to create something. But did they agree? No, not at all.

In the compromises of the Constitution, there was the perpetuation of slavery, even though it had just been proclaimed eleven years earlier that 'all men are created equal'. And yet saying these things began to open the door to permit even the people who knew it wasn't about them to see path forward. Women, Native peoples, free and enslaved black people, and the poor understood that this was the opening salvo in battles that they could fight to make the words truer and less hypocritical. So, for me, in American history, the best sometimes comes out of the worst and sometimes the worst comes out of the best."

                                                     -  Ken Burns

I didn't mean to quote so much of it. But it's a week since the 250th July 4th, and it seems weird that it's not more of a big deal; I really appreciate his vision of this country.

the course of human events

 The pie came out well, I decorated the table with lots of red, white and blue, I made strawberry coconut milk ice cream and we stayed in with the air conditioning. Of course! One has to make the most of things. I wore my latest dress creation - the coolest thing I own.

I was hoping I'd hear some bells ringing if I stuck my head out, but I suppose city dwellers would be more likely - nobody near me was ringing any bells. I would have rung some, if we had any. I even had the idea to dig around for some little Christmas bell decorations, but I stored my ornaments differently this year and have no idea where they are! I would have rung anything if I could have just found it! 

We were talking a bit about the founders: what made them persist, what gave them their momentum to  shake off the British and start their own government. It's easy to give up, especially when the average person complains in the pub, but that's about all. I did read a book about Samuel Adams where the author gave him credit for never letting go of the idea to throw off British rule; he was constantly talking about it, planting the idea in people's minds. I need to find more books about that. 

And after a week of extreme heat, it was barely seventy today, and raining. Cold air was actually blowing in! I'm happy for the creatures - I couldn't tell if anybody was drinking from the little trays I set out with water. The rabbit above was out in the rain for a while today, and didn't mind the wet at all. Maybe the leaves he ate were jucier.

resisting the machine

Spring is definitely in the air! It's warmer, but not terribly; but the birds are singing, the daylight lasts longer, the paths my brother plowed for the rabbits are showing grass! Everything feels like it's coming alive. Under the surface, of course, except for the birds - they're the ones who show it.

I am almost finished reading Defending Middle Earth by Patrick Curry. I picked it up when it was dropped off at the library. I do not exaggerate when I say that not a day goes by when someone does not drop off books at their local library - at least, I assume it happens everywhere; it sure does where I work! And of course I have to look through them. 

Anyway, Mr. Curry defends the Lord of the Rings stories, and their focus on the simple enjoyments of home, community and nature. He tries to explain the popularity from different angles. I feel I should read it again, so I put a note in it to that effect. Anyway -

"Why can Tolkien's 'mythology' be described as universal? I have already shown that it embodies an attack on unchecked modernity in all its worst aspects, and presents a world of community, nature and spiritual values that successfully, albeit barely, struggles to survive such destruction. That world seems to be a different one, with strange people and places; yet at the same time, it is also recognizably ours. And because the processes of rampant modernization - economic, political, cultural - are now truly global, the potential appeal and relevance of Tolkien's attack and alternative are also effectively universal. This is a social and historical development; there is nothing necessarily mystical about it. 

But his universality comes about in another way, too. For the very terms of his critique are mythic; after all, that is ultimately the most (and perhaps even only) effective way to counter a worldview which is rigidly rationalistic and scientistic. And there is literally nowhere in the world without some native tradition of a mythical way of relating to the world in which it is alive and saturated with spiritual meaning - enchanted, in a word. Those traditions may be deeply buried, but - like the gods they embody - they can still be revived by recognition."

This book was published in 1997, and even back then he was speaking of "re-enchantment". There's a lot of talk about this: that, in a nutshell, we have lost the ability to take true delight in the world, and we need to re-enchant our way of seeing things, like they did in the Middle Ages. 

There is an article in Plough by Paul Kingsnorth about this very thing, speaking about his new book, Against the Machine: "Its modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences, and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. Its endgame is the replacement of nature with technology, in order to facilitate total control over a totally human world."

According to Patrick Curry, the popularity of the Tolkien books shows that we really don't want a world like that, whether we realize it in this way or not. 

Brothers and sisters: We speak a wisdom to those who are mature, not a wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away. Rather, we speak God's wisdom, mysterious, hidden, which God predetermined before the ages for our glory, and which none of the rulers of this age knew; for, if they had known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory,,,, For the Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God.

 -  1 Corinthians 2:6-10 

crow on the shed

may he rest in peace

 Well, everyone's stunned by the sudden death of Charlie Kirk, assassinated by a sniper with a high-powered rifle. He must have been hired by someone - surely those with such a skill are known to the kind of people who want to force revolution on the world, who want to sidestep the order of the constitutional process. 

They are cowards, and they do not love their fellow beings. Gavin Ashenden has a lovely youtube meditation with his thoughts. It's just under ten minutes.

One if by land, two if by sea"

Good Friday has some competition this year in the U.S. - it is two hundred and fifty years since Paul Revere took his famous ride up north from Boston, warning that the British were coming. Longfellow's poem is fantastic in every way, except that there were others making this journey, and Revere was apprehended by the British partway through. Perhaps Longfellow didn't know all this, since the story was not well-known before this was published. 

I basically lifted it from poets.org, rather than type it all in. But I would have, if I'd had to! But it wouldn't behave when I tried to center it. Small troubles.

Paul Revere's Ride

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch
Of the North-Church-tower, as a signal-light,—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country-folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said “Good night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war:
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street
Wanders and watches with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the church,
Up the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry-chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town,
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night-encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black, that bends and floats
On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride,
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now gazed on the landscape far and near,
Then impetuous stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry-tower of the old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height,
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village-street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed that flies fearless and fleet:
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders, that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer’s dog,
And felt the damp of the river-fog,
That rises when the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,
How the British Regulars fired and fled,—
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard-wall,
Chasing the red-coats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,—
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

-  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 1860

a lot of snow on the way

 It's supposed to start snowing any moment, but the sky is too dark. When it's going to snow, the clouds are so thick, it looks whitish. But we are getting - some are saying five to nine inches, some six to ten - a good amount, and it will come in its own good time, I guess. But this morning, I hung something on the line to dry! It was just over freezing, but there is something mild in the air - it's hopeful.

We went to Mass this afternoon, in case it's too bad tomorrow. A lot of others had the same idea. One of the hymns we sang was In Christ Alone, which is rather stirring - an Irish-sounding melody.

I've put Samuel Adams aside (again! poor fellow) and am finally reading Hillbilly Elegy. I have been interested in that book for eight years, and now he's Vice President - it's time. What kept me from it, was the idea it would be heavy, but it's not. In fact, the introduction really grabbed my attention; I often skip introductions.

"I was one of those kids with a grim future. I almost failed out of high school. I nearly gave in to the deep anger and resentment harbored by everyone around me. Today people look at me, at my job and my Ivy League credentials, and assume that I'm some sort of genius, that only a truly extraordinary person could have made it to where I am today. With all due respect to those people, I think that theory is a load of bullshit. Whatever talents I have, I almost squandered until a handful of loving people rescued me.

That is the real story of my life, and that is why I wrote this book. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the American Dream as my family and I encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels. And I want people to understand something I learned only recently: that for those of us lucky enough to live the American Dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us."

                                               -  J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

At five minutes to ten, it hadn't begun to snow yet. At ten fifteen, I looked out - the ground was almost covered.

And I baked a fancy quick bread recipe, because I always want to bake during snowstorms.

"the purpose of education"

 "The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, ....But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish. The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it - at no matter the risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change."

                                                          -   James Baldwin, from Plough, Winter, 2025

"How Samuel Adams supported his family starting around 1769 is a mystery. With his brewery closing that year, his only steady income was his small salary as clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. According to gossip, the Adamses were so poor at this time that John Hancock and other friends sent them food to keep them from starving and repaired the Purchase Street house to keep it from falling. There was even a joke around Boston about Adams's letter writing: 'Samuel Adams writes the letters and John Hancock pays the postage’.”

Dennis Fradin, the author of this biography, says that Samuel Adams never held a good job when he was younger, he was more of a thinker. And it seems that our revolution would Never have come to pass without him. He knew we needed to revolt against the oppressive British rule and he never stopped insisting on it, trying to stir up the populace. 

July Fourth holiday supplanted by rabbits

 A couple of weeks ago I notice one of the tomato plants on the side of the house was wilting, so I watered it. Meanwhile, my brother came home and said he saw some grass clippings scattered around that plant and he surmised it might be a rabbit's nest, so he was just going to call that plant a loss. There are more rabbits around.

I just was coming up from the basement and heard him call to me, hurry up, but carefully! There's a mother rabbit nursing her baby right out here at the foot of the back steps. Oh, my word, there was.
It was a haphazard affair, I have to say: she was sitting upright and the babe was just sort of hanging underneath, doing its best. It's a wonder that rabbits survive. It looked kind of like this.

She must have seen my brother's movements as he tried to take a photo, and ran off. The baby wandered around the driveway. 

On the same subject, he was mowing yesterday evening and complained afterward that three times a young rabbit suddenly appeared in the grass and ran off - he is very dismayed to think he might run one over some day, as they're impossible to spot. 

everything on the table was blue, so I had to find a red something

Anyway, this subject has almost trumped the fact that it's July 4th, and we had a nice time. I tried to make a red, white and blue dessert.

Raspberry crisp with blueberry coconut "ice cream".

personality, and other things

My project today was to finally do my state income taxes. Now I can relax. I never intend to leave them till the end, but I keep putting household things first. A dumb idea, in certain circumstances. 

 Our weather this week has suddenly turned warmer, and the clothes in my closet are not entirely suitable for temperatures in the sixties and seventies. This has got me scrambling. I am also thinking about what I'd like to sew next. I like this Nepheline blouse. 

I was starting on the soup, sauteeing onion, etc., and I saw Leo outside, or maybe it was Leon - I have never seen them together, so am never sure. He was in the driveway; I tapped on the back door and he saw me. I went back to my cooking for a while, but Daisy somehow realized he was out there, and when I returned to the door, he was on the step.

He smelled the food, I'll bet. I put the chair there for Daisy to get a better view. 

He didn't stay very long - I hope he went home to Dianne. Some of her cats are true wanderers, wanting to be outside all the time. I was just about to say it was a little excitement for Daisy, but she doesn't really need anything like that for stimulation; she is submerged in cat madness lately. 

Can you guess what this is?

She started pulling down my bath towel the other day. She did it twice. But I have a solution.

I just need to unpin it before I get in the shower. I mean, to remember to unpin it.

I took this during the eclipse, in a quiet moment.

The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis is very interesting. The author, Jason Baxter, quotes Lewis:

"In all previous ages that I can think of the principal aim of rulers, except at rare and short intervals, was to keep their subjects quiet, to forestall or extinguish widespread excitement and persuade people to attend quietly to their several occupations. And on the whole their subjects agreed with them. They even prayed (in words that sound curiously old-fashioned) to be able to live "a peaceable life in all godliness and honesty" and "pass their time in rest and quietness." But now the organization of mass excitement seems to be almost the normal organ of political power. We live in an age of "appeal", "drives", and "campaigns." Our rulers have become like schoolmasters and are always demanding "keenness." And you notice that I am guilty of a slight archaism in calling them "rulers." "Leaders" is the modern word. I have suggested elsewhere that this is a deeply significant change of vocabulary. Our demand upon them has changed no less than theirs on us. For of a ruler one asks justice, incorruption, diligence, perhaps clemency; of a leader, dash, initiative, and (I suppose) what people call "magnetism" or "personality." 

pilgriming

 Our author, after studying the medieval methods of Hildegard von Bingen, wanted to go on the popular pilgrimage of the day, the one that begins in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and goes into France. Because of her responsibilities at the hospital, she had to break it up, doing part of it - over three or four years, I forget which. She found a friend to go with her.

Rosalind and I began to organize the second section. We would walk for two hundred miles through the south of France, and we would begin in our footsteps of the year before. We flew to Paris, took the fast and slow trains to our starting point, and spent the night in the hotel we'd left the year before. Then we put on last year's clothes, fastened our shells to our packs, lifted up our walking sticks, and took the next step.

Our doctor then tells about the mainly uninhabited lands they pass through that day, and the monastery they will rest at overnight. They have to be there by seven or will miss dinner. Period. They realize they won't make it. 

It was way past seven when we arrived. As we walked through the monastery's gates, flushed and thirsty, our of the main door came a tiny, very old nun in a dark blue habit and white wimple. She, too, was flushed and sweating. But she was smiling. Her eyes behind her glasses twinkled. She said in French, "You made it! We were so worried! Come in." 

We followed her inside. With its stone floor, stone walls, and stone ceiling, the monastery was cool. 

"Put your things here," she said, showing us the stone washroom. "Wash up...and hurry. We've delayed dinner for you."

They ended up having one of the best meals ever, and enjoyed the company of the other pilgrims then, and throughout the pilgrimage. I had my own room, whitewashed and plastered, with a sleigh bed of walnut and a rope mattress. In the night, there was a thunderstorm; in the morning, there were the monastery bells, and out of my window I could see the nuns' medicinal herb garden down below. The longest and hardest day turned out to be the opposite of what I'd expected. And over and over again, for the rest of that second section, that's how things would turn out. That was the main lesson I took from the pilgrimage that year.

During that second section of walking I began to see that a pilgrimage had a rhythm, a dailiness, just like at home. Every day I awoke, ate breakfast, started walking, and things happened. People showed up; I had adventures. Some I liked, some I didn't. Some I expected to like and did not like; others I expected not to like and did like. I began to see that the unexpected - the inattendu, the unawaited-for, as the French have it - was the only thing I could expect. One was presented with an experience, a person, whose value one did not know in advance. What seemed to be good might be bad; what seemed to be bad, good. One didn't know; one had to wait.

That waiting to see how it would turn out was what made pilgriming different from ordinary life, I began to see. And that year I learned I didn't have to leave it with my last footstep. If I wanted, I could take that kind of waiting home and have my daily life become a kind of pilgrimage.

With that open expecting, I discovered that a day at the hospital was even more interesting. One never knew. All one knew was that there would be a beginning and a middle and an end to the day, just like on a pilgrimage. And just like on a pilgrimage, characters would appear - patients, nurses, deliverymen, doctors - with spiritual and moral messages, if I chose to decipher them. Sometimes in words, sometimes in actions, sometimes in silence.

                                                  - from God's Hotel, by Victoria Sweet

have your figured out that I think everybody should read this book?

a little hysteria

 To continue last night's post, I came home from work today to find the same yarn I used for the mitts, all over the house.

Starting in the kitchen, into the living room (above), down the hall and into the spare bedroom, before ending in my bedroom.

Well, that must be backward, because she found the yarn in my room, so you have to reverse it, but that's the way I found it. 

I was laughing, actually, maybe a little too much. What next?

first real snow of the winter

 

Well, the last day of February, and we have our first *real* snowfall. And, contrary to what I expected, a snow day! The library and other town offices are closed for the day. I had really given up the idea of snow, and even the desire for it, but - here it is, and I do love to see it. But.......it does make one feel like we may be going back in time - to winter's beginning - which is not what we want for March!!

It isn't that much, at most five inches, and we are above freezing, so it won't last very long. The transformation will be of short duration; the magic will soon be gone.

My brother said the snow blower started right up. 

schole

"We can't dismiss the point that democratic self-governance requires a kind of cultivation among citizens that can only happen when they don't devote all of their energy to earning a living. In Aristotle's words, a citizen's virtue requires that one be 'freed from necessary tasks'; it requires the capacity for 'leisured activity' or schole, from which we derive the word school.

Rights and equality before the law mean little in a democracy unless individuals have the scope to develop their humanity in a way that is free from the yoke of economic compulsion."

                                               -  Roosevelt Montas, Rescuing Socrates

remembering

 Veterans' Day here in the U.S., but Remembrance Day in many other countries. 

These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.

- from The Dead by Rupert Brooke

in the blink of an eye

 Shortly after I got home from work yesterday, an older neighbor came by to ask if we had a fluffy black cat. I said no, but Dianne does. Well, there's a large, energetic dog on the next street and I guess he grabbed this cat and swung it around; the cat got away, ran around our forsythia hedge beside the house, but this dog got him again. He escaped a second time, but then our neighbor lost sight of him. He was yelling at the dog to let it go, and so was its owner, who felt pretty bad about the whole business. I ran over to Dianne's and told her husband - she was in the shower. I quickly fed our kitties and went out; Bill and Dianne appeared shortly after. This was an hour before dark.

We wandered around the back yard for at least thirty minutes, Dianne calling him. There are so many fallen leaves under every bush, making a search more difficult; we tried to figure out where he would have headed - this is impossible. We didn't see a body anywhere, we heard no cries. How could he have survived such an attack? It must be that he didn't, poor creature. 

Dianne is pretty philosophical about her cats, we've noticed. When my brother found Yogi had been hit by a car, and brought the body to Dianne's, she didn't cry. She has so many animals, she's seen it before so often. But if only we could find him, at least they could bury him.

I was thinking of how little I know my neighbors, and that it was good for us all to be looking for this cat together, trying to help, even though the circumstances were so unfortunate.

gradual and silent encroachments

 "There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

                                            -  James Madison

the family as the root of democracy

 In an article by Madeleine Kearns in National Review magazine, she quote Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the different stages of a man and woman during their marriage:

"First is the 'body-mystery' of the marital act; second, in the arrival of the first child, a husband and wife 'see in each other' something they 'never before knew existed', motherhood and fatherhood; third, once children reach the age of reason, is the mystery of 'fathercraft' and 'mothercraft'; fourth is an appreciation of 'their contribution to the well-being of the nation.' And 'here, too, is the root of democracy,' he added. 'For it is in the family that a person is valued not for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but primarily for what he is.'   (emphasis mine)

Independence Day

 I came upon a copy of the Declaration of Independence at the thrift store. I bought it, of course! 

My brother said it hasn't got proper margins; the real one's are properly sized. He's been to Washington. I'm okay with this: it's good enough for me. The frame is nice.

It has the right signatures.