Castle in the Sea

So Long, Doc

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 30 May 2012 00:35:00 +0000

Non-Events and Other News

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 29 May 2012 17:32:00 +0000

Finished with the day's end-of-the-year standardized testing, drinking the last of the morning's coffee (When you can't decide whether you want it hot or iced, go tepid. Tepid Is Best!), wondering whether or not it's going to rain out there. This morning during Mass, there was thunder -- the kind of sustained low rumble that makes you stop in the midst of prayer to ask yourself, "Is that what a freight train sounds like?" It was so worrying that Aelred actually got up, mid-prayer, and went outside to investigate, which now that I think of it was, if undeniably heroic, not the most self-preservationist-minded thing a person could have done under the circumstances. Is that a tornado? I dunno. Well, why doesn't somebody go out and see? On the other hand, our church is a pre-fab kind of octagonal arrangement on a slab, so it's not like you'd be any safer inside if the answer turned out to be yes. But on yet another hand, you'd still be saying your prayers.

As it was, the answer turned out to be something to do with one of the air-conditioner compressors on the roof. Aelred said later that he'd noticed that the cessation of the thunder coincided precisely with a little click of the thermostat which apparently nobody else heard -- too busy praying that the tornado would miss us, I guess.

So that was the weather non-event of the day, which even now begins to loom in my mind in Thurberesque proportions: The Day the Tornado Struck. Obviously people who have been struck by actual tornadoes might not find this funny, which leads me to wonder whether survivors of the Johnstown Flood would have laughed at "The Day the Dam Broke." Or whether the authors of the Left Behind series would find the Get-Ready Man the least bit amusing. Or Shakespearean actors in Columbus, Ohio, either.

Edgar: Tom's a-cold.—O, do de, do de, do de!—
Bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting, and taking . . .
the foul fiend vexes!
(Thunder off.)
Lear: What! Have his daughters brought him to this
pass?—
Get-Ready Man: Get ready! Get ready!
Edgar: Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill:—
Halloo, halloo, loo, loo!
(Lightning flashes.)
Get-Ready Man: The Worllld is com-ing to an End!
Fool: This cold night will turn us all to fools and
madmen!
Edgar: Take heed o' the foul fiend: obey thy
paren -----
Get-Ready Man: Get Rea-dyl
Edgar: Tom's a-cold
Get-Ready Man: The Worr-uld is coming to an
end!...
They found him finally, and ejected him, still shouting.
The Theatre, in our time, has known few such moments.

But that is neither here nor there, as they say. In fact, I believe this entire blog post is neither here nor there. Yet here I am, at my kitchen table, watching Aelred read some document which came in the mail with a look of fierce concentration which is the natural expression of his face in repose -- is he engaging in mental combat with the fundraising letter from the Franciscan Friars of the Eternal Renewed Something-or-Other? Or is he thinking about lunch? It's hard to tell. Since I'm not at this moment making lunch, I rather hope it's the Friars, and I'm sure they do, too.

Epiphany is away this week, working as a camp counselor. Besides shepherding ten second-graders daily to their swimming and arts-and-crafts sessions, her duties include awakening at six-thirty every morning and saying aloud, before she gets out of bed, "It's a great day, and I feel terrific!" Aside from the fact that this strikes me as an extreme and peculiar form of psychological torture, I wonder about the logistics of it. Every staff person, apparently, has to utter these words on awakening. When the bugle blows, or the bell rings, or the siren blasts, or the trump sounds, to signal the general wake-up, are they all supposed to sit up in bed and shout in unison? And are the walls of Jericho then supposed to come tumbling down? Or is it more of a private-devotion kind of thing, a sort of whispered prayer-from-the-heart to the greatness of the day and the terrificness of the feelings? Or what? I really couldn't begin to say.

Last night, Helier and I built a fire in the backyard firebowl, ostensibly to celebrate Memorial Day, but really because we just felt like setting something on fire. It was a good fire: we started it with a handful of dryer lint and a bunch of twiggy viney stuff that had gotten tossed into the chaos which is meant to be our woodpile, and it flared right up and kept going. Of course, once you build a good fire, you then feel compelled to sit by it, which made me wonder anew why I always wait for the outdoor temperature to hit ninety before I decide to do things like this. Helier quickly tired of it, and nobody else wanted to sit by it at all, so the duty of sweating and blinking smoke-tears and slapping those mosquitoes too stupid to realize that they were being smudged out fell to me.

Darkness fell at last, however, and Crispina, who earlier had dragged an adirondack chair halfway across the yard so that she wouldn't have to sit by the fire, came out and sat in my lap, and we watched the last lightning bugs flash on the gray-black air and the first stars appear. The fire was burning steadily, eating its placid red way through a slab of oak and casting its glances this way and that. It was beautiful.

Remembering it now, I think also of all the fires I've sat by with various of the children: pre-dawn campfires with babies in the Uintas or the red-rock desert, fireplace fires with preschoolers in our old Memphis house, and now these backyard fires, with children so big that when they deign to sit on my lap, their feet touch the ground. And here is the moment when I should say something about the heart's fire never going out, or the memory's constant burn, or something like that, except that it seems a little too neat. And really, last night, like most of those other times, Crispina and I weren't doing anything particularly. We were just sitting together, watching the motions of the fire. When we got tired of that, we poured a bucket of water over it, and while it exhaled its long gray hiss, we went back inside.

Random May Outdoor Photojournal

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 28 May 2012 20:39:00 +0000

Front Porch Cafe. Later it'll be a tossup whether it's any cooler out there than in the kitchen, but for now...

May garden: Monster Squash, shown here in act of devouring tarragon.

Monster Squash Blossom. Mwa Ha Ha.

Daylilies opening, serene in the knowledge of having outlived who knows how many generations of squash.

Consider the lamb's-ears, who like the lilies neither spin nor toil, nor graze, either, and who furthermore laugh at the audacity of squash. (But I wish I'd cropped out those sad hummingbird feeders, which I think I last filled the summer before last.)

Even the captives rejoice.

Four chairs in search of a bonfire.

And, um, that's all, I think.

Why, Again, Did I Read All That Stuff in School?

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 28 May 2012 19:55:00 +0000

Sometimes I think the sole purpose of a liberal arts education is to enable a person to criticize her own decisions from as wide a variety of schools of thought as possible.

--The brilliant Dorian Speed

Reading and Talking

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 21 May 2012 17:58:00 +0000

Though I haven't been posting much, I have been carrying on what is (to me, anyway) a very interesting ongoing combox conversation about Rumer Godden, and in particular her novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita. Thanks very much to Anne-Marie and Pentimento for the good book talk. I am one of those obsessive readers who go over and over and over the same ground, again and again and again, which sometimes makes me feel as though I must be very dull and narrow in my habits. It's conversations like this which make me glad anew to know a few fertile books with a degree of intimacy.

Meanwhile, speaking of fertile books, I've been renewing my acquaintance with Edwin O'Connor's The Edge of Sadness, which I first read two years ago. Here's my plot synopsis from that earlier post:

Father Hugh Kennedy, the precariously-recovered alcoholic, has returned from four years' rehabilitation in the Southwestern desert to the parish of Old Saint Paul's, a down-at-heel pile in an even downer-at-heel section of Boston, at an enormous remove from the comfortable, familiar, prosperous Irish-Catholic-Boston world in which he once circulated. Baptised, as it were, into suffering by the death of his father, driven (as much by the Bishop as by the Spirit, though they may amount to the same thing) into the desert, then recalled to ministry, Fr. Hugh returns slowly, reluctantly, to life. The temptation of drink he finds easy enough to resist; on the other hand, the temptation to dwell in a kind of between place, neither dead nor entirely engaged with the living, masters him with such powerful subtlety that it is not until late in the novel, when a friend accuses him of withholding himself from his parish, that he even realizes that he has succumbed to it. It is this self-realization which breaks him open, as a cast is broken from a mended limb, and enables him both to turn his back on old ambitions and accept, with certainty and hard-won happiness, the life and the vocation which he has been handed.

Of course, this is hardly everything there is to say about the novel. I barely mention the Carmody family, for instance, whose triumphs and disasters, whose goodness and badness, Fr. Hugh recounts, in the classic role of the narrator-foil -- though it occurs to me that perhaps the Carmodys are as much a foil for Fr. Hugh's interior complexities as he is for them.

Among the manifestations of his interior complexity is this rumination on the difficulties of prayer, which strikes home for me:

The truth seems to be that my mind is a kind of happy hunting ground for the negligible: every night as I start to pray, even if the day has been as dull and unmemorable as one could possibly imagine, a hundred little items of no significance at all rise up from God knows where, and softly and painlessly begin to poke and prick away until suddenly, before I know it, all attention is leaking down a hundred little drains. Which, as I say, is absurd, which is humbling, and which nevertheless continues . . .

And yet while it can -- and does -- still shame me, it no longer leaves me discouraged. For I discovered . . . that the one way I can pray is with patience. We all approach God differently, and I know that there are those who can do so devoutly, totally, immediately, who can, in a sense, fling themselves into prayer. I can't. I wish I could, but I can't. I've said before that prayer doesn't come easily to me -- it probably doesn't to most of us -- and the only thing I can do is to start to pray and to wait -- to wait at night, for example, until the day runs down and dies. As it always does now; as it did tonight. But there's always the prologue of innumerable false starts -- I suppose this is, for me, the preparation for prayer. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes not long at all. But however long or short, it's always there, until finally it goes, and then there comes a calm, a quiet, and at last, prayer . . .

And you know, that's sort of all. My mind, too, is a kind of happy hunting ground for the negligible, though it also occurs to me that it is of the negligible that daily life is largely composed, and that this is what we have to offer to God -- this algae we skim off the surface of the mind -- as prayer at the end of the day.

It's a nice afternoon out there; I think I'm going to take Fr. Hugh out to the porch with a harmless cup of tea and let him speak to me some more. For a fiction, he's more pastoral than he can possibly know.

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 19 May 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Happiness is a violin upstairs.

Remember the Sabbath

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:28:00 +0000

Today all I really wanted to do was to sit on the front porch with my sweetheart, drinking beer out of the cooler -- for breakfast, even, this sounded like a good idea. I often wonder about this Sunday-as-day-of-rest thing, because if ever there were a day made to wring me out and hang me up to dry, it is Sunday. Up and out, with children, for choir practice at 8:20, Mass at 9, and after that an hour with miscellaneous second-graders. By noon I'm generally in such a state of exhaustion that I start falling asleep at the kitchen table, over my after-church coffee; I then stagger to the nearest couch and wake up in time to wish that someone else had made dinner. Even then I don't feel rested. I feel undead.

First Communions were yesterday, and today the children wore their finery to church again, so that everyone who hadn't been there for the actual event could see who had been there. Over the years I have begun to develop theories pertaining to the peculiar universe of First Communion: for example, the smaller and scrappier the girl, the bigger and poofier and more unspeakably princessy the dress. Also: the more enthusiastic the student -- as in, the more likely to write the teacher love letters and beg every week to erase the board after class -- the faster the disappearance once First Communion is over and done with. I tell them it's not graduation. I tell them that we call it First Communion for a reason; First implies that there will be a second, at the very least. I say these things, but I say them in vain, and this morning my gussied-up children were thin on the ground.

This morning, too, something happened which was the reverse of my law of diminishing returns, and I hope it's not going to become a law in itself. What happened was this: I have had in my class many lovely children this year, and among them was a particularly lovely little girl whom I'll call Jocelyn. I assure you that's not her real name. It's actually the name of my classroom assistant, but I'm sure she won't mind be impersonated just this once. Anyway, this little girl Jocelyn was the kind of child you mark out early in the year as the girl you'd pray to win, in a random drawing of names, the opportunity to carry in the crown of flowers for Our Lady, with the fancy pillow, wearing the special blue cloak of honor, at the First Communion Mass: a smiling, cheerful, well-behaved, helpful child who answered questions and gave the general impression of actually liking to be in class.

There was weirdness in the air around Jocelyn from the beginning, however. For some reason, she never did show up on my official attendance sheet, even after several rounds with the DRE and the church secretary and heaven knows who else. We all ascertained that she belonged in my class, having taken the requisite first-grade catechism class, so I just kept writing her in and counting her present. That is, I counted her present until suddenly she was absent.

And absent, and absent, and absent. The rest of the class made their First Confessions, in drips and trickles and dabs, until at last (like, last week) they'd finally all gone. All except Jocelyn. Nobody knew where she was. I talked to the DRE about her. The DRE talked to the church secretary, who tried to call her parents. The number we had on file didn't work. Nobody seemed to know anything about her or her family. She just wasn't there. And then she wasn't there some more.

By last weekend, when we held a morning retreat for the First Communion class, we'd written her off. The family must have moved. People do come and go, as if under cover of darkness, so that when somebody doesn't show up for weeks at a time, you begin to assume that they're gone for good.

But then, this morning, out of the blue, there Jocelyn was, in her gray hoodie jacket, her hair still damp from the shower when I hugged her. There she was, in her gray hoodie jacket, surrounded by little girls in poofy white dresses and veils, looking understandably disoriented. We got through class -- we spent most of it praying the rosary, to practice for the dedication of the church rosary garden next Sunday -- and then I went and found the DRE in the hall outside the church kitchen and said, "All right, I'm going to cry right now."

Before I could begin my cry, however, someone pulled at my sleeve. It was Jocelyn. She said, "Um, why was everyone else wearing white this morning?"

And I had to tell her, that sweet child, that she'd missed it.

Hopefully she hasn't missed it for long. Even as I was speaking to her, the DRE was swooping down on her parents with, I believe, leaflets about Confession in several languages, and then going straight to Father to try to arrange something.

Still, there was something about the way she asked the question -- Why was everyone wearing white? -- and her wavery smile, and the brightness of her dark almond eyes -- that was, I think, the bravest thing I've seen in a long time. I'm going to watch Foyle's War now with my sweetheart, up late together in the quiet house, but all night, I think, I'm going to think about Jocelyn.

Worth So Many Thousands of Words

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 06 May 2012 02:30:00 +0000

Bicycles

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 04 May 2012 03:36:00 +0000

In the lengthening afternoons, as the daylight lingers and the dinner hour gets pushed back, the kids have been abroad on their bikes. There's a little gang of them in the neighborhood: my younger boy and girl, plus a pair of brothers, plus another brother and sister, plus another girl who's taller than any of them, wears a supercilious look, but goes with the rest of them because that's what there is to do.

I don't actually know where they go a lot of the time, unless it transpires that someone has money for the ice cream shop on the square. Uptown, they say vaguely, when pressed for information about where they're going, or where they've been. Uptown, of course, is three blocks away and consists of the courthouse square, with businesses where the kids are known by sight at the very least, so that if they got into trouble of any kind, it wouldn't be anonymous trouble. Three of the four sets of parents involved have agreed on boundaries: for example, the gas station way out Main Street where they stopped for drinks last week is officially over the line. No gas stations. No going way out to where the Mom and Pop businesses give way to AutoZone and Bojangles and the Department of Human Services.

Three out of four sets of parents draw the line, and maybe the fourth would, too, for all I know. At the supercilious girl's house I've never ever yet seen evidence for the existence of adult life. When Crispina, my youngest, had a sleepover party for her eighth birthday, somehow this child wound up spending the night, despite the fact that not only had her mother never met me, I had never met her, the child; she came as an appendage to the other neighborhood-bike-gang girl, and after disappearing home briefly to ask permission, she seemed perfectly happy to have a sleeping bag unrolled for her in our strange house, in a roomful of girls she mostly hadn't known for more than three hours. As a child I think I would have found this uncomfortable. As an adult, long acclimated to the parental anxieties of other adults, I found it at least vicariously uncomfortable. For all I know, however, her mother slept the night away in perfect peace, trusting me sight unseen.

Still, I'm just going to assume that she'd back the rest of us in this matter of children and bikes and boundaries. Suddenly I feel like Daedalus, handing Icarus his wings and saying, Now be sensible about this, will you, even as I know what boys, and girls too, are like, especially when you present them with something as world-enlarging as a pair of wings, or a bicycle. A pair of wings, a bicycle, a bunch of other kids with the same apparatus, and you're talking to yourself, daddy-o.

Helier, riding the loop road behind the gym today, managed to fall off his bike and catch a branch in the kisser, also destroying, in the ruin of his fall, whatever was left of the Nutty Buddy he had taken from the freezer and put in his backpack for later. It is to my credit, I think, that I looked at his teeth, to ascertain that he still had any, before I asked whether the ice cream was still in the backpack, or what, because what was going through my mind, maybe to keep me from thinking too much about blood, was how utterly unspeakable a backpack full of ice cream would be three days later, when somebody finally thought to think about it. As it turned out, the girls who were riding with him had disposed of the ice cream before dashing up to find me, to tell me breathlessly that Helier was hurt, that they thought his teeth looked crooked now, and that I had better bring the car.

Long story short: his teeth didn't look any more crooked than they looked before, but I took him to see the dentist, who was more worried by Helier's uncharacteristically neglecting to bring a water gun with him, for the express purpose of shooting the dentist while his back was turned, than by anything in Helier's mouth. Our visits to the dentist in his tiny little office, with his staff of motherly hygienists, even at the worst of times are like fluoridated homecomings. (ADDENDUM: And let me be clear here that it's the dentist who started this water-gun-fight-in-the-office business. That's not something we habitually do in public places) Crispina rode along with us because it's been six months since she last spoke with Miss Christi, her own personal hygienist; while I sat with Helier, reading the National Geographic and waiting for his x-rays to come back, she disappeared down the hall and came back with some kind of little twisty-bendy puzzle thingy which apparently Miss Christi always keeps on hand for antsy non-dental-work-loving patients to play with, and which she had said that Helier could borrow if he needed it. It was pink, so he didn't need it, though until the last minute he was consumed with worry that his teeth would have to be pulled. No good my arguing that the dentist's objective -- beyond not being caught unawares by Helier's water gun during a routine cleaning visit -- was to keep a person's teeth in his mouth. This assertion became credible only as we were leaving, laden with Macdonald's Happy Meal toys from the treasure chest, of which no child ever is permitted to take just three.

One thing the entire dentist's office knows now is that Crispina makes her First Holy Communion on Saturday. Like Helier, she's had her share of bike wrecks -- though so far her teeth have been spared -- and her legs are a mass of bruises, scrapes, and bites. I tell her that these are evidence that she knows how to live. They're the marks of a girl who flings herself into God's arms, which as often as not feel just like the sidewalk. That's what it is to be a girl, and eight: to have those legs and the life that gives them to you, and then to put on a veil, like a bride, and become something that should have a red candle burning beside it, day and night, to tell the world that God is in there. In her, with shouts of joy and occasional blood, God will soon go riding.

One Real Chance

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:41:00 +0000

It was not the absence of a man that Olivia regretted so much, though she could have wished that both she and Angela had married -- Angela was too fastidious -- that blank in her life was not the worst; but I wish children were not unknown to me, she thought, looking down on that hotbed of children, the Street. Olivia divined something in children -- not in her nieces and nephews, Noel's children, who were precocious and spoiled -- but in the children who were let alone, real children. Though she knew from Angela's dealings with them that they were blunt, even rude -- as I am myself, thought Olivia -- they seemed to her truer than grown-ups, unalloyed; watching them, she knew they were vital; if you were with them, you would be alive, thought Olivia.

...

I didn't want extraordinary things, she said, to go up the Amazon or dig for gold -- if you do dig for gold -- an ordinary little bit of life would have done for me; and she leaned far out from the window sill, as far as she could, for it was high, as if she wanted to see into all those countless thousands of ordinary lives below. I wish I could have one chance, thought Olivia, one real chance, the chance and the courage -- she could see that she had been singularly lacking in courage -- not to have a life of my own, she thought -- it was a little late for that, she could see -- but the chance to join in something real -- real, pleaded Olivia.

Rumer Godden
An Episode of Sparrows

Spring Monday Homeschooling

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 19:59:00 +0000

It's finals week in the big world out there, or at least in our part of it. This morning Aelred was up and out before seven, in order to plank a twiltin' gurt examination in front of one batch of students at eight, leaving the rest of us to drag ourselves out of bed and off to Mass. Which we did, remarkably. Until I was actually backing out of the driveway with my entire household, minus dog, on board, I'd had my doubts. One soupcon more of resistance, and I'd have caved. But we got there, more or less on time, and afterwards we stopped for bagels. Home by nine-twenty, which gave us forty minutes to drink our coffee, read our email, and goof around before school. I don't know what the kids did all that time.

Ten o'clock: We'd been to Mass and said Morning Prayer already, so our start-the-day devotional was confined to a lusty singing of "Christ the Lord Is Ris'n Today." And then we:

1. read and narrated about two pages of Saint Patrick's Summer
2. read and narrated a short chapter of Herodotus and the Road to History
3. did, together and orally, the first two exercises of this MEP lesson
4. read a chapter of Padraic Colum's The Adventures of Odysseus

All this took about an hour, maybe a little more. After we'd finished with Odysseus, the kids got out their individual work for the day, as follows:

2nd-grader:
1. a page of subtraction-with-regrouping word problems
2. about five minutes' worth of cursive practice
3. a page in her grammar worktext, dealing with verbs with singular and plural subjects. We noted that tomorrow she has a writing day, so that she can think ahead of time about what she might like to write.

3rd-grader:
1. a page of multiplication facts practice
2. about five minutes' worth of cursive practice
-- hmm, need to make sure he writes tomorrow. He has been doing a good bit of independent writing, however, which is good to see.

Both children read to themselves for about ten minutes. All this took maybe half an hour.

The 8th-grader had been upstairs all this time, working on algebra and his history research paper. We all broke for lunch, and then he vanished upstairs again. I went out to sit in the yard to read the draft of his paper which he'd emailed me. Almost immediately, there was a scrunch of running feet on gravel, and our young neighbor, who's also homeschooled, appeared in a state of great excitement. She and her brother had been down at the creek behind the neighborhood gym, where they'd found innumerable salamanders and crawdads. The 2nd- and 3rd-graders took off with her, and I've hardly seen them since. They came back once for a bucket to hold crawdads and salamanders for observation, and then they came back for bathing suits, but that's it. Meanwhile, I read and commented on the 8th-grader's paper and emailed it back to him. It's due Friday, when he also takes the final for that class, so we have time to discuss as needed.

Also, I'm trying to figure out why two of my tomato plants are dying. I've never had that happen before: perfectly sturdy starter plants (I don't do from seed . . . not yet, anyway) withering . . . on the vine, as it were. Withering before they become actual vines. What's up with my soil? What's up with the plants themselves? What's up?

Tomorrow: The 2nd- and 3rd-graders have an art lesson in the afternoon. This is golden: it's maybe a 7-minute walk over there, and the lesson lasts for an hour and a half, so there's actually time for me to get something done at home while they're profitably engaged. They get to work on their own projects, which they started last week: paintings of a horse (the 2nd-grader) and the Titanic (the 3rd-grader). Until very recently, the latter's forays into the realm of artistic endeavor had resulted chiefly in a lot of stick figures wielding light sabers, and he'd been far more reluctant about venturing into this class business than his sister had been. I was all the more surprised, therefore, to discover on picking them up last week that he had managed to reproduce a very credible and detailed Titanic, complete with its four smokestacks, many portholes, and "not enough lifeboats," all of which bore the ship's name in tiny, clear writing of a sort that I don't see very often from that particular child. In ninety minutes, he had done a study in pencil and paper, then drawn his picture on a canvas and begun painting the sky and water. As he was putting everything away, the teacher -- really she's more of a helpful artist-in-residence -- mentioned casually that next time she'd help him lay in more detail, to show the water reflecting the sky, for example. She said the same thing to the 2nd-grader, who was rushing to finish her horse painting. No, no, the artist said. You don't have to be finished now. Art takes time.

Clearly this is a brilliant addition to our life . . .

***

ADDENDUM: The week's plans

The Week's Good Reads, Plus a Few Thoughts on Eccentricity

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:06:00 +0000

Meet Kate Fridkis:

As an unschooler, I learned early on that work and play can be the same thing, on some level. When you love what you do, you work to get better at it, to learn more about it. Work fits naturally into the pursuit of something inspiring. Because learning wasn't separate from living for me, as a kid, it made sense that I'd have jobs and make money as a part of my education and my life. Everything an unschooled kid does is based in the "real world," so to speak. There's no training period, or special area where you wait to be released into the rest of your life. You're already living it. So, as a matter of course, I worked. My first serious job began when I was fifteen. I still have a version of that job, and it is one of the most fulfilling parts of my life. From the time I was pretty young, I loved having real responsibility. It made me feel important. I think kids like to contribute to the world in real, concrete ways. I had that opportunity, and I learned a lot from it. I also saved a lot of money!

We're far less unschooly these days than we used to be, and more and more drawn to Charlotte Mason, whose philosophy has resonated with me from the beginning, though we're not absolute purists in that direction, either. Still, the following certainly underscores my own experience of the power of books themselves as teachers:

But really, don't you think they learn more with projects? No, I really don't. They may remember the projects with great joy, and for that reason, if you like them and the kids like them, and you want to do them, go ahead. But my experience has been that the projects don't really help the children remember (or even make) connections with their learning.

So what do we do? Read a section ask for a short narration if your child is old enough. That seems too simple and easy. It's so simple, that I suspect many of us subconsciously feel that we're cheating, but it's really a very meaty, idea-filled study. (read more . . . )

And from Dwija Borobia, whose cool kind of name I wish I had (not that I would have to be named Dwija, necessarily, but do you know how many Sally Thomases there are out there?):

Why is this perception of the weirdo homeschooler so pervasive? Why is it that despite the clear academic achievement of most homeschooled students, the fear of them “acting like that one weirdo guy I knew when I was a kid” is enough to turn otherwise supportive folks against the idea? I’ve thought about it a lot and the best explanation I can come up with is this: ridicule.

See, everyone is born with a certain temperament. Parents of more than one will all attest to this. Same parents, same environment, same rules….completely different reactions from their children. And some kids- well, some kids are annoying. And what do I mean by “annoying”? I mean what people mean when they say that homeschooled kids are annoying. I mean kids who ask too many questions and know too much information and like certain stuff and refuse to like other things and don’t care what other people think about their silly hobbies and their know-it-all-ness.

When “annoying” kids like this go to a traditional school, they’re ridiculed. They have a hard, or even impossible, time finding their niche. They must either hide their true personality and inclinations in order to be accepted or they’re pushed to the fringes and made to feel abnormal. Not good enough. Made to feel less likable than those who keep their ideas and opinions to themselves or fail to form any to begin with. Made to feel that convictions and fascinations are stupid and that pop culture is the only culture. Not because “normal” kids are mean. They mostly don’t even know they’re doing it, I assure you. They just don’t know what to do with someone who’s so, like, weird. Ya know?

I know. I was one of those weird kids. (More!)

So was I, and I'd be lying if I said that had had nothing to do with our now-distantly-past decision to educate our children at home. This decision was not, of course, a decision to pack the kids away in bubble-wrap until time for college; they play -- or, well, interact, since I don't know that you can say that 14-year-olds play, exactly, except maybe by running into each other at full speed with loaded backpacks on, and stuff like that -- with other children almost every day, mostly happily. What I have found is that homeschooling, like anything else short of the Beatific Vision, is not insulation against the occasional comment that you're stupid or weird or a coward -- this last was very upsetting to the person to whom it was said, in the same way that having someone call you the wrong fantasy name on purpose in a made-up game can ruin your whole day. Girls practice their own version of social whatever: you can play at my house if this other girl isn't going to be there, because when she's not there you're my best friend, but if she comes over I'm going to deny that I ever liked you and then pretend that you don't exist for the rest of the day, or until that girl goes home, at which time I will be perfectly happy to pick up with you where we left off.

The difference when you're a homeschooler is that this isn't your entire day. It's an hour or so in the afternoon, between the time the schoolbus coughs up the rest of the neighborhood kids and dinnertime, and if it gets bad, you can just go home. You're a free agent, not an inmate.

Just yesterday we were over at the church -- my description of pretty much any day of the week could begin with that clause -- and Father, passing Crispina on his way to the office, asked her whether she was looking forward to her First Holy Communion next week.

"Yep," said Crispina, rewarding him with some kind of goofy smile which caused him to remark to me later that in case I hadn't noticed, all my children are really eccentric. "In their own way," he added hastily, in concern for my maternal feelings. "I mean, they're all . . . distinct."

Yep, I might have said, with probably the same goofy smile. They are that. Eccentric and distinct. God made 'em, counter, original, spare, strange, and we like 'em that way.

Motherhood, Self, and Sacrifice

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:37:00 +0000

I read with interest the other day this article by Clare Coffey, a Dartmouth undergraduate writing about contemporary motherhood, and what she perceives as a cultural tendency to conflate, or confuse, or reduce, that vocation with or to the grunt-work of child care and housekeeping.

I don't want to unpack the whole article, which in any case is brief and light-handed and . . . young. It's the work not of a mother, but of a young woman looking simultaneously ahead and all around her, for cues and clues to the mystery of what might well be her future. Furthermore, she's a young woman considering motherhood in a cultural context which frankly doesn't offer many obviously useful paradigms.

"Our cult of motherhood, " writes Coffey, "demands human sacrifice—hence the constant need for, and glorification of, victimhood." I'll say right now that one of the weaknesses of this essay, or maybe just of my reading of it, is that I'm never quite sure what "cult of motherhood" we're talking about here. I think I've personally observed at least three different cults of motherhood in the eighteen years I've belonged to this club, all largely defined by the kinds of parenting books their members read, each one, in my observation, with its own specific set of sacrificial opportunities, and its own particularized guilt load. Still, I think she's right to identify an all-too-common motherhood model in which a mother appears, and feels, powerless and even negated before the forces of nature which are her children.

Look even at how we as a culture joke about children. I used to laugh at the comic strip "Baby Blues," for example (and okay, in small doses it's still kind of funny), until I realized that virtually every story line revolves around the shambles the children make of their parents' lives. It's all chaos and vomit and Mom wearing ketchup stains and baby spit-up, and while I've been there, and I know that those things are reality in a house with young children, still as a meme it gets old. Or, well, what got old for me was the way the parents seemed to wear their nose-wiping and their constant family diet of chicken nuggets as badges of honor, and as the sum of their identity. Obviously the identity of a cartoon-strip character played out in two dimensions and four squares is going to be of necessity somewhat limited, but I got tired of Wanda, the mother, and the daily comics-page installations of her life began not to amuse but to annoy me.

Maybe it got old for me because living that way in real life got old. I could make jokes about it, too, but really. It wasn't that I thought that the work and wear of motherhood itself was demeaning, because it isn't, but that gradually I came to realize that I couldn't keep using the kids' need for me as an excuse for not showering, or not getting at least a tiny bit of writing done. I've had babies I couldn't put down, but five-year-olds? Seven-year-olds? Teenagers? How much of my schlumping around all day in the yoga pants I'd slept in was a function of actual demands on my time and attention, and how much of it was purely and simply sloth? And for how long was I really willing to put up with the disappearance of my kitchen tools into various toy boxes while I (just like Wanda in one comic episode, now that I think of it) measured out cocoa powder with the little medicine cup off a bottle of Robitussin?

Human motherhood does demand sacrifice; in fact, I think that's sort of the chief purpose for it. That's what's in it for the mother, at any rate. In following Jesus, we have to learn somehow to detach ourselves from ourselves, and I can't think of too many better ways to do that than to carry another human being in our own body, to suffer to bring that human being to birth, and to serve the flourishing of that life. In our children's flourishing, we find a lot of our own flourishing, and we wouldn't find it if we weren't continually laying down our lives in love for these nearest of our neighbors and friends.

But I don't really think that this is what Clare Coffey means to critique when she invokes the notion of human sacrifice. At least, I hope it's not. What seems truer to me, at any rate, is not so much the problem of conflating motherhood and childcare as the problem of conflating self-sacrifice with self-negation. Getting up at two in the morning with a sick child is self-sacrifice, and even if it weren't, it's still your job, with demands like any other. So is doing the dishes or -- which is harder -- teaching someone else to do them. That's work, and effort, and a sacrifice of patience and maybe your nice dry shirt, and you do it, because. Wearing the same clothes for days, on the other hand, or forgetting to brush your teeth, or not showering for a week, or skipping meals, or consistently and voluntarily depriving yourself of sleep and exercise and small enjoyments: these, as an ongoing way of life, are not symptoms of mental or spiritual health. They're not the self-denial that love demands.

These are also all things which I have done, and friends of mine have done, at one time or another in our lives, so it's not as though I'm pointing fingers. I'm simply looking back at myself, you understand, with an appropriately interrogative eye. And what I'm saying is: When you have a new baby, okay. As a whole ongoing lifestyle, labeled Motherhood? Not. We have more accurate names for this kind of thing, actually, like subclinical depression and acedia and self-loathing. Yes, self-loathing. Why else, exactly, do some of us never appear in our family's photographs? I'm looking at me, here: page through my photo albums, scroll through my iPhoto, and you'll know everything about my children, and virtually nothing about me, the cipher behind the camera. The partial explanation for this, of course, is that I like to take pictures, and my grip on the camera is a grip of steel. Back off, kid. Mitts off, I said. But the fuller, and truer, explanation is that whenever people are lining up for one of those communal mug-shots for posterity, my reflexive inner voice says, Oh, you don't need a picture of me.

Am I talking about you? Maybe I am. I might not be talking about you in the context of your entire life, but perhaps I have nailed you at that stage when you've just had a baby, and you're fifteen pounds heavier than you've ever been, and you happen to have picked up the nursing shirt that was on the floor from day before yesterday, because that's all you had time to grab while the baby was screaming . . . and suddenly that baby is seven, and you've had two or three more, and you're still wearing that same shirt a lot, in public, because somehow you haven't been able to face shopping, the magical day having not yet arrived when you're once again the tender sweet young thing you loved to dress before you started down this road. Anyone? Anyone?

This syndrome, it seems to me, is what Clare Coffey sees in the harried mothers at the playground, though she lacks the experiential insight to understand what's behind the stretched-out, spit-up-stained sweatshirt and the haggard look, or to render her observations into accurate language. I think as well, though, that if I were a young woman on the brink of the rest of my life, as she is, I'd look at them, too, and think, Uh . . . Is there no way around that?

By the same token, I wouldn't really fault that young woman for not knowing what she would say to herself, or to anyone else, to find a way around that. It's a blessing that I can't remember much of what I thought or said when I was twenty, though I do recall being full of opinions. Like Clare Coffey, apparently, I did a lot of babysitting in college, and many of my most decided opinions had to do with child-rearing. For example, I thought long and sagely on the subject of what I would and would not say to my children. I would not, like one woman whose children I kept, praise a child by saying that she was "an obedient little girl." To my ears, that didn't sound like human praise, but a kind of verbal dog treat. I would have praised that same child's exuberance, the funny things she said, the sweetness of her nature: beside those virtues, in my imagination, obedience sat like a mousy boring thing, not worth anyone's mention -- which should tell you right there what I knew from virtue, or what it might be like to live with someone who does the opposite of what you say all day long. I still don't rely on obedient much as a praise word, but boy, do I value it in my children when it happens, in a way I could not have foreseen.

So I am inclined to be gentle with what I still think are the places where Coffey's essay gets it wrong. These are the prescriptive bits, what she imagines that you would say and do in order not to practice a lifetime's worth of self-erasure in the name of motherhood. Here's the paragraph I'd like to pick at:

In what other field would we accept and even romanticize these working conditions? Contrary to the sacrificial lamb aspect of the motherhood mythos, it is perfectly acceptable to say “We need to make buying clothes for me a priority in our budget, because I am a human being and a worker, and both of those facts demand a certain dignity.” It is perfectly acceptable to say “No, you’re not doing trombone camp this year, because I have interests and talents that do not involve you, and spending my life in the car prevents me from pursuing them.” It is perfectly acceptable to say “No, I will not stay up late making rice-krispie treats in the shape of ninja turtles, because who does that?” Thanks for nothing, Pinterest.

I'd like to look specifically at the three things which are, according to Coffey, "perfectly acceptable" to say: 1) "We need to make buying clothes for me a priority," 2) "You're not doing trombone camp, because I have interests, etc," and 3) "I will not stay up late making rice-krispie treats in the shape of ninja turtles, because who does that?"

1) I think this one is valid enough, though as several friends have pointed out, husbands often beat their wives to it. You bought Kelsaleen forty-seven pairs of toe socks, and what did you buy for you? I'm wearing a dress right this minute which I love, and which came in the mail only today, and the reason it came in the mail was that my husband saw me looking at it online and said, "Buy that dress, for crying out loud." Really? You think I should spend money on a dress? "Yes, I want you to spend money on a dress. It's pretty. Buy it." Besides, it was on sale -- as one of my children has pointed out, we almost never buy things that are merely for sale. Anyway, I have a hard time imagining saying, "We need to make buying clothes for me a priority in our budget," any more than I can imagine saying, "We need to make knick-knack collection a priority," but then I am the person who spent the honorarium from my last speaking engagement on nothing but books for my children, so perhaps my priorities are suspect here.

At any rate, I think there's nothing actually wrong, and a lot actually right, with the idea that a woman at home with her children deserves -- insofar as any of us deserves much of anything in this life -- decent, well-fitting clothing which doesn't make her feel worse about herself than she was already inclined to feel. There's also nothing wrong with the reality that for a mother with numerous young children, that clothing might be yoga pants and t-shirts much of the time, as long as she can feel that she's at least somewhat dressed, together, and on top of the chaos, instead of being trampled under its feet.

2) Okay. Only a sociopathic narcissist, I think, would declare aloud, to her child's face, that he isn't going to get to do something because frankly she has better things to do with her life than drive him around. I don't think there's anything remotely, let alone perfectly, acceptable about saying that sort of thing to a child, who in any case is naturally going to think, "Who said we were talking about you? The subject of this conversation is me and trombone camp."

(Okay again. It's been suggested to me that this is strong language, and maybe it is. After all, a lot of us, myself included, do say things to our kids like, "Not now," and "Run along while I finish what I'm working on," and "You can do X when I'm done with Y," and so on. Which is to say that you don't have to be a sociopathic narcissist to a) have projects of your own, or b) intimate to your children that that is the case, and that the absoluteness of your availability to them depends on what you happen to be doing, which may or may not have anything to do with them and their desires at that moment. What I begin to think that I object to here is the idea of the language itself -- "You can't do X, because I want to do Y" -- which seems . . . childish, presuming that the other person's wanting to do X is an act of taking something away from you, the person with the interests and talents, and entering into the kind of fight about it that children tend to have. He got twice as long a turn as I got, so I get to have four times as long a turn, because his turn was too long, and it's not fair . . . In other words, this seems like the kind of mother-child interaction that a child would envision having. The reality, I think, depending on the ages of the children involved and the adult and family needs on the table, looks a lot more like either respectful negotiation, because after all, children are people, too, and we're all in it together; or else, sometimes, like unilateral parental decisions that just are what they are. I don't need to enter into special pleading with my children: But what about meeeeeeeee? Because children tend to be sort of narcissistic and sociopathic, and do not get that line of reasoning at all. You? What you?)

That doesn't mean, however, that a non-sociopathic non-narcissist doesn't sometimes think those very kinds of things, or that there's anything intrinsically wrong with those thoughts. In fact, those thoughts are a valuable contribution to the behind-the-scenes planning that goes into decisions about children's activities and commitments. I don't say to my children that I've got better things to do with my life than drive them around, but when I'm thinking about and discussing with my husband what they will and won't be able to do, extracurricularly, during a given season, you'd better believe that Mom's not going to spend her entire waking life in the car enters into the conversation. Again, though, as with the clothing thing, more often than not it's my husband who says, "No way. We're not going to live like that. If she goes to Irish dance on Wednesday nights, how are you going to go to choir practice?" (Actually, the kids all know that choir practice is sacrosanct. Nobody else gets to have plans on Wednesday nights. Nobody. Not nohow. Fortunately, Irish dance happens early enough that I can in fact get the child in question there and back and make it to choir, as long as I remember to put dinner in the crockpot. See what my husband and his voice of sanity are up against?)

And especially now that I have children who can entertain themselves without endangering their own lives, after several hours of intense face time I have no problem saying, "Go play. I have to write my sonnet now." You can't really do this with tiny children, whose physical wellbeing is your continual business, but as they get older and more self-sufficient, self-sufficient is what they should be, when it comes to occupying their time. At least, so think I, who cannot be the 24-hour entertainment center.

3) I'm with her. Ninja-turtle rice-krispie treats? Staying up late to make tv-character-shaped desserts? Not me, sorry. Not my charism. I cook daily from scratch; I put a lot of thought and effort into decent meals for my family. We don't eat out much. I don't buy convenience foods. I have actually trained my children to enjoy oatmeal scones with no sugar or honey or any sweetener whatsoever, other than fruit (when it's that or nothing . . . ).

In any event, children don't know to demand maternal performance -- performance-anxiety-type performance, in the kitchen! -- unless someone teaches them that they ought to expect it. And that someone should be honest with herself and admit that she's not making ninja-turtle-shaped rice-krispie treats for her children: she's making them, even if she's not going to taste a bite, to satisfy something in herself, that Pinterest-shaped hole in her heart. And that's okay. I know women whose creative outlet is food, and that's wonderful, and obviously their families benefit from their efforts, but the reason they create beautiful food is essentially the same reason I write: because it makes them happy. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. Left to their own devices, kids are just as happy with square rice-krispie treats. Or unsweetened oatmeal scones, if we really want to be extremists. Even an extremist, though, doesn't need to lose sleep over dessert.

***

I had meant, originally, to write about Rumer Godden's novel The Battle of the Villa Fiorita, which I've just reread, and whose plot turns on these very questions of motherhood, self, and sacrifice. Fanny Clavering, the mother at the heart of the novel, has left her mundane and lonely marriage, her self-effacing care of children and a large old house, and her kowtowing, silent relationship with an imperious mother-in-law, for an idyllic new life with her film-director lover. His care for her has made her newly aware of herself as a self, a beautiful and a sexual being, desirable not for doing, but for existing. When her divorce is final, she goes with him to Italy, to live for the limbo time between divorce and remarriage in a borrowed villa on a northern lake, in a setting as warm, lush, rich, sensual, and acutely happy as her old life in an English village was cold, exhausted, and constrained.

But her happiness is not without brutal cost: she has left her three children behind. In choosing Rob, her lover, she has, as far as she knows, burned all bridges to the loves which have formed her adult self, the very self with which Rob has fallen in love. "You forget: they may not want to visit you," her ex-husband reminds her gravely at their last meeting. In Italy, in the midst of sun-drenched joy, she cannot bear to meet children in the road. Her solution is simply to shut the door on that part of her mind and memory, but when two of her children appear one day on the villa's veranda, having sacrificed dearly to reach her, the door is forced open again.

"You ran away to me," she cries, thinking at once to knit them into the new life she has begun to make for herself.

"No," they say. "We came to get you."

This is a sensitive, sad novel which acknowledges difficult and contradictory truths: that motherhood is hard and frequently lonely, and without the sustenance of a nurturing marriage, often soul-deadening; that for a wife and mother to embrace desires and happinesses utterly outside and opposed to the circle of her home, children, and marriage, is to invite destruction; that to seek the self above all other things is ultimately to destroy the self. If nobody dies, it's a comedy, goes the old Shakespeare formula, and while nobody dies in this novel, it is unquestionably a tragedy. Though in the end there's a triumph of sorts, the novel holds out no hope of a happy ending, only a resolution, one devastating right and possible thing.

When I read this novel as a teenager, it struck me as strange and jarring, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was that so disturbed me about it. Much of it seemed frankly opaque to me. Now, a wife and mother myself, I see what's at stake for Fanny, all the contradictions, the impossibility of the happiness she has sought, what it is that makes her cry out, several times, that she's being torn apart. I don't know in what ways The Battle of the Villa Fiorita would speak to a young woman like Clare Coffey; still, for any young woman contemplating marriage and motherhood -- for anyone, really -- it's an unsettling, sobering, but intensely true and beautiful read.

***

On children, chores, and being the martyr mother:

But there is still something that can be done- one important thing is NOT to be the sort of mother who, in frustration, gives in and does the undone work herself since the kids never did get around to it. I particularly dislike this, as it is often accompanied by the Martyr Mother Syndrome, where the mother sighs heavily and looks overburdened while she does the chore she has CHOSEN to do. It is manipulative. She is also *training* her children to know that if they just wait long enough, somebody else will do it so they don't have to- and this does not even have to be a conscious choice on the children's part. It becomes the comfortable reality of their world. As adults, their world will be far less comfortable and they will wretchedly wish YOU had been more diligent with them when they were young so that they could be more diligent now. (read the rest)

***

More conversation on this subject at Pentimento, with many thanks for the mention and the link.

House, Garden, and Other Things

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 15:59:00 +0000

I'm home alone right now, if you can believe it. If you were here, you'd want to take a picture, I'm sure, because this is an Event. Aelred is on retreat, the boys are at the Scouts' pancake breakfast, Crispina is visiting the Poor Clares, who may or may not want to keep her forever, and Epiphany is a thousand miles away doing whatever it is that college students do on a Saturday morning.

I have been uploading pictures from the camera, which I haven't done for ages. In fact, I haven't taken pictures for ages, because first we lost the camera-battery charger, and then I couldn't find the camera, not that it would have done me any good, since the battery was dead, which has also been the story of my mobile phone . . . anyway, the other day, lo I went into the bathroom and found the camera battery charging away in the outlet by the sink. That which was lost had been found, I know not by whom, though I can make an educated guess.

So here are some shots I've taken recently, to record the state of the garden, circa April 2012:

The vegetable and herb garden on the south side of the house, by the driveway. Not looking like much yet, but everything's in. Cosmos, which we direct-sowed, are starting to come up between rows of peppers at the far end.

Another view of the vegetable garden.

Rosebush we inherited from previous owners. It's still a bit grass-choked, but is loaded with blooms this spring.

Now here, in no particular order, because this is how they got loaded, are some pictures from inside the house. After three-plus years, this past winter we finally got around to painting -- that is to say, we had saved up enough money to pay someone else to paint (and that was interesting: in the end we wound up paying two completely different sets of someone elses, which is its own story, the moral of which is that you do, in all kinds of ways, get what you pay for . . . and then some).

Here, first, are some "before" shots of the dining room. Now, I love green. It's my favorite color, hands down. But somehow . . . in a room on the north side of the house . . . with no direct sunlight, ever . . .

(Note: These pictures of the dining room are from the first winter we lived here. The table is set for fourteen, because we were having friends over after Mass on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Note in the photo below that there's still a moving box in the corner. I forget when we finally unpacked that box, or what was in it.)

We made the best of it, with lots of bright pictures, which did sort of pop on the dark walls. And now I wish that an "after" photo of the dining room followed directly, but no! To get there, you must first enter the living room, which used to be yellowy off-white, but is now . . .

. . . still neutral! But I love it. Throughout the house we used this gray-y, taupe-y, stone-y color: "Jute," by Benjamin Moore. And it's wonderful. It's cool but not cold, and very, very serene. The trim is Linen White, also by Benjamin Moore.

Here's one of my favorite spots in the house: the end of the hall between the kitchen on the left and the study/library/schoolroom on the right. Here, in this funny little cul-de-sac looking out on the back porch, is where people crash with books and quiet, on-your-own schoolwork. As you can see, the dog enjoys it, too.

Ah, here's the dining room in its "after" phase. Not so dramatic, perhaps, but serene and versatile, and in lamplight, beautifully glow-y. This is Linen White, done on both trim and walls:

The window in our sunroom/music room:

Piano, with real-life post-Christmas clutter:

The home-magazine shoot I'd love to see. Speaking of real life:

Freshly-painted stair pickets. Yes, one of my children did in fact pick paint off one of these pickets as an anti-taking-a-mood-break-on-the-stairs statement. They had been unbelievably dingy before, and I was unbelievably angry at that child for about an hour . . . you know, you ask for the grace to be more forgiving, and this is what you get: more opportunities.

Phone alcove, repurposed as shrine.

The window above the comfy loveseat at the end of the hall. The view onto the back porch is not so great (there's a reason why you're not seeing pictures of my back porch), but the deep windowsill, with room for books, makes up for that in spades.

The front door used to be white. Now it's BM Van Deusen Blue. My mother found that chair by the road years ago, and my brother taught her how to weave the Shaker-style seat.

The kitchen used to have busy striped wallpaper, the kind with vines loaded with grapes and eggplant, because you know that's how things are in real life. Now it's Linen White as well, which is both fresh and very warm, especially at night. Those things on the wall are framed land deeds dating mostly from the eighteen-teens, which my parents as newlyweds found in my grandparents' house and framed, to have something to put on the wall. They're kind of off-center on the wall, because I wanted to leave room for some paintings of my dad's, which I have yet to have framed. That tablecloth is a 1940s twin bedspread which I found in our local junk shop. For a while it was on our bed, but then I decided to co-opt it for the table.

Oh, hey, back to the garden. (I'm in kind of a hurry here, and I don't have time right now to cut and paste these pictures so that the narrative makes sense). Now we're in the back yard butterfly garden-in-progress. It looks pretty scrubby right now, but the coreopsis are lovely:

As is the yarrow.

Not to mention the hen-and-chicks.

Here's columbine and fern outside the back door:

And suddenly we're standing in the driveway, looking at the front of the house:

As you can see, we have an oak tree, and our lawn is almost solid clover. Amicus cut it yesterday, so right now it's passing as verdant grass, but we know better. Anyway, the irises have been gorgeous.

Now, by the magic of computers, we're whisked to the back gate, and the little dooryard by the back door:

Finally, welcome to our bedroom, where I'm sitting right now in the quiet and the sun at the window. This room used to be the same dark green as the dining room, only faux-finished: it was like living in a green suede cave. Like most of the rest of the house, it's now painted in Jute, with Linen White trim, and it's airy, quiet, and calming . . .

And would be a nice place to sit all day long, by myself, except that I'm already late for a scout planning meeting, alas alas. But you go ahead and make yourself at home.

PS: Now that I'm home again and waiting for dinner to cook, I've gone back and enlarged the photos, so that you can see better. Well, I can see them better, anyway.

"The Dog Ate My . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 13:37:00 +0000

. . . pinecone-smothered-with-peanutbutter bird feeder."

Yep. Sorry, kid. All the evidence points that way. The tatters of grocery bag on the floor, the suspicious wood-chip remnants, the guilty eyes from the sofa . . .

Of course, the dog always looks guilty. But then, he usually is.

Homeschool Notes: 8th-Grade Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:54:00 +0000

I'm down to one teenager at home this year, since the big girly departed this quiet homeschool life for the larger and more eventful existence of the college student. For those just joining us, my current teenager-at-home is 14, male, and intent right now on going to West Point. From there he wishes to embark on a career in the sciences. To remark that he is a man with a plan is to master the obvious. The plan might change later on, but he's got it, and that gives us something to work with.

Let me back up a minute. I'd like to say, first of all, that although I've enjoyed my children thoroughly at every stage, I am one of those people who reallyreallyreally love teenagers, because it is at this point that children -- my first two children, anyway -- reach the apotheosis of my dreams and goals for them. That is to say, they become autodidacts who do their own laundry. As the mother of toddlers, I adored toddlers and longed for them to stay that way forever, but as the mother of teenagers: oh, my. Who has it all? I do, that's who.

(of course, once you have some teenagers, then it's inevitable that even your younger children will start to be shorter versions of the same, in mostly the more trying ways. I've just had to shut my door against the music party upstairs, hosted and attended by the 8- and 9-year-olds, whose favorite band is Coldplay. We sniff at Justin Bieber. Yes, we do. And this is good. But we like our music LOUD, and we don't care how many of the neighbors know it.)

So, you are asking me, what does homeschooling look like for a 14-year-old? What grade is that, anyway? Etc.

This particular 14-year-old is an 8th-grader. And I don't know whether I'm alone in feeling this or not, but these middle-school years -- especially the years we used to call "junior-high," ie 7th and 8th grades -- are hard to figure out academically. It's not elementary school, and it's not high school, though you can grant high-school credit to a limited number of courses undertaken in these years. I've tended to think of these betwixt-and-between years as "high-school prep," which has helped me to decide what to do about them and what they're for. And what they're for is twofold: first, to cover anything left undone in the primary years, and second, to lay the foundation for successful learning in the years when the future is coming more and more sharply into focus.

So in planning for this year, the first question I had to ask myself was, What has this child not done?

And this was difficult to answer, because this child has done a lot, particularly in history, which -- while science is seeming like his vocation -- is his most consistent avocation. We have done the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Medieval period and the Renaissance and the New World, concentrating heavily on military operations, because that's what this boy loves. On the other hand, he hadn't done much history outside the broad narrative of Western civilization, which he'll pick up at the beginning again in 9th grade anyway.

So I said to him, "How would you like to read about China, Japan and Russia this year?"

He said, "Hm. That sounds good."

I found readings for him, and he thought they sounded good, too, and that was history/geography taken care of.

This was how my lesson-planning went: I'd have an idea and run it past him, then locate materials. Or he'd have an idea and run it past me, and often enough, he'd find the materials he needed himself. I had conceived of science for this year as a sort of pu-pu platter of scientific disciplines: a little introductory chemistry, a little introductory physics, maybe some astronomy and geology, in mini-seminars of readings. What quickly became obvious, however, was that he hadn't gotten enough life science last year. I don't mean that the course he did was inadequate; as a pre-biology course for a 7th-grader it was quite thorough. No, what became clear to me was that he wanted more. We set aside the readings I'd planned. Instead, he did internet research, and he went to the library, and he ordered vials of e. coli bacteria and packs of petri dishes, and he taught a class on bacteriology to his brother's Cub Scout pack. For which I sort of wish I'd been a fly on the wall, actually, but anyway, I let him have at it.

Anyway, our year may be summed up by a booklist, with addenda. He's read, in roughly this order, the following so far:

The Story of Japan
The Dark Tower and Other Stories/C.S. Lewis
Creator and Creation/Mary Daly
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves/Lynne Truss
Great Expectations/Dickens
The Story of China
Life in a Tidal Pool/Silverstein
Life in a Bucket of Soil/Silverstein
The Code of Life/Silverstein
The Prisoner of Zenda/Anthony Hope
Game, Set, Math! /Ian Stewart
The Story of Russia
The Three Musketeers/Dumas
Band of Brothers/Stephen Ambrose
(he's actually read several Ambrose books this year, but I forget the others)
Ghost Soldiers/Hampton Sides
David Copperfield (still in progress, I think)
The Old Man and the Sea /Hemingway
Mere Christianity/C.S. Lewis
Invisible Invaders: Viruses and the Scientists Who Pursue Them/Peter Radetsky (also in progress, I think)

While I assigned some of the above -- notably the Story Of books for history/geography -- most of these are books he read on his own, either finding them on our shelves or buying them at the secondhand bookstore in town.

He's done Saxon Algebra 1 for math, maintaining roughly a 95 test average. We'll see how our standardized-test scores correlate with that grade; his scores last year were quite high. As always, I take test scores with a grain of salt, but by this time, with college-entrance exams not that far ahead, I think it's useful to put that pressure on the grades I give. They don't mean much to me in terms of who my child is, but they -- and the level of mastery they represent -- do mean something to his future.

For English composition, he's been working his way through a program called "The One-Year Adventure Novel." (reviewed here)

For foreign language he's done an online program called Deutsche Interaktiv, which he says is okay, though he'd prefer being in a class where he had to converse in German. That's in the plans for next year, but I'm going to go ahead and credit him with a high-school unit in German, since he has covered elements of grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, as well as some limited conversation.

In addition to reading for religion (I forget now what else he's read at home), he's been taking the parish Confirmation class with his friends, even though he was confirmed at 9, when we all entered the Catholic Church. He just likes being in class, and our pastor teaches it, so it's cool, too (not to mention thorough).

He runs a 5K course four days a week (actually, I think he's running farther lately, but I'm not sure how far) and works out before starting his school day.

He's a Life Scout in Boy Scouts and has just begun work on his Eagle project: an oral history of a local World War II veterans' group.

Actually, the Eagle project has led to what's probably been the richest and most intense part of his school year. My husband, who's a theology professor, happened to mention the project to a new member of the history department, with the result that the 8th-grader is now taking that professor's World War II history class at the college. It's a writing-intensive course, with seven papers (including a ten-page research project), two exams, and many quizzes, so the boy has been busy, not to mention having had a crash course in college writing ("The paper's due tomorrow? Okay, here's how you write a thesis sentence . . . ").

So if I were going to break down the year into a transcript, it would look like this:

English (literature, grammar, composition)
History: World (1 semester)
History: Special Topic/World War II (1 high-school history credit)
Geography: World
Math: Algebra 1 (1 high-school credit)
Foreign Language: German (1 high-school credit)
Science: General
Religion
P.E. (the running and working out)

Actually, I do have the year broken down into a grade sheet/transcript, via this inexpensive and invaluable service. I've use it for all my kids, but it really comes into its own at the middle- and high-school levels, when careful record-keeping truly matters. I also keep, with this service, an online portfolio of things like community-service hours and Scout projects, which will make college applications that much easier.

And what are we preparing for? Well, in the short term, here's our plan for 9th grade. He'll be taking general biology and, hopefully, German at the college. And in the longer term, maybe the West Point dream will come true, and maybe other dreams will supercede it, but if we proceed on the assumption that that's the plan, we can hardly go wrong, I don't think.

PS: I forgot all about the second question: What does this child need to do?
Short answer: algebra. And be ready for high-school-level writing. Which . . . after this semester . . . what with one thing and another . . .

Me on the TEEvee, vol. 2

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 12:52:00 +0000

I have worked out, and a friend actually literate in the EWTN program schedule confirms, that I'm on tonight at 11 pm. Eastern Time, 8 p.m. Pacific.

I might really catch this one.

Homeschool Notes: Diversions Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:39:00 +0000

Not that I can remember, right now, the many fruitful diversions which have certainly occurred to us in the past. But here's something fruitful which happened today:

Both the younger kids were feeling lethargic this morning, and one was truly borderline unwell. We did our regular work, gently -- not many sick days when you homeschool, since even a borderline-unwell person can melt into a beanbag chair and listen to a lively account of Archimedes' discovery of pi -- and as sometimes happens, a miracle cure didn't actually take place, but the borderline-unwell person did sort of semi-rise from the semi-dead to ask, out of the clear blue sky as it were, "What's the national bird of England?"

Wow, I said. I have no idea. Let's look it up, shall we?

And so we googled, and we found not only the national bird of the UK (the European robin, in case you also had no idea), but also the national bird of every country that has a national bird. So in addition to knowing, now, that the European robin represents not only England, but also Ireland, we know as well that Antigua and Barbuda have the Magnificent Frigatebird, Gibraltar the Barbary Partridge, Namibia the Crimson-Breasted Shrike, Sweden the common blackbird, and several South American countries the Andean Condor.

Then we watched some YouTube videos of eagles catching fish.

There's nature study in the back yard, and then there's nature study you have to do secondhand, if like me you have no bald-eagle habitat or salmon river in your back yard.

At any rate, not bad for a serendipitous lesson on a semi-sick day.

Homeschool Notes, Spring 2012: Primary Years Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 12:56:00 +0000

We've long since settled into a general daily MO which manages to be both flexible and consistent. If this sounds as though we're living a paradox every day . . . well, that would be literary of us, and it might well be true.

I've managed to be more organized this year -- as in not losing the read-aloud books under the sofa and not wiping from my mind's whiteboard all memory of the hands-on science stuff I bought -- thanks in large part to Jennifer McIntosh's "Morning Basket" system, which I've adopted and adapted for our purposes. Like Jen, I like to start our day with everyone gathered; everyone is a word which here usually means the two younger children, ages 8 and 9, and I. The teenager at home is on his own schedule, which involves a long morning run before he either settles down to work or goes off to the college with his father for a Tuesday-Thursday World War II history class. But more about him later.

Our morning basket, actually a sturdy red plastic bin, holds more items than we could ever use in a given week, so that we can move in and out of books and activities in an informal rotation, as seems right for a given time, without actually putting something away for good. For example, we spent about six weeks working intensively in several volumes of the excellent Draw Write Now series before hitting at least a temporary saturation point; now I'm keeping them on hand in our basket to pull out again at need. I also keep a boxed science kit, the Magic Schoolbus Human Body kit, ready to use. We do the bulk of our science and nature study through reading and real-life observation, but every several weeks it's nice to have a hands-on experiment at the ready, with materials.

Most importantly, though, the morning basket holds the read-aloud component of our school day. We begin our day on the couch with books; we do most of our learning through literature, and after prayers, we move through a series of read-alouds which cover religion, history, geography, and science (and sometimes math), as well as "literature," per se.

By this point in the year, I've simplified our daily reading schedule somewhat, mostly because in browsing our shelves I rediscovered several books that I'd overlooked, or thought too advanced for us, when I was doing my planning for the year, but that struck me, on finding them again, as must-reads-right-now. We do two history tracks, old world and new world; for most of the year we've done history in alternating weeks, but right now what's working is to cover ancient history and science in the morning, then use lunchtime for our new-world-history read-aloud.

So our morning goes like this:

Morning Basket Time

1. Morning Prayer, including a sung hymn for the season. I keep prayer books and a copy of the St. Michael Hymnal in the morning basket -- not losing the prayer books under the sofa all the time has made an enormous difference in the level of our discipline, let me tell you. Our hymn this week is "Christ the Lord is Risen Today," sung to the tune "Llanfair."

2. A read-aloud for religion. Currently we're trying to finish Marigold Hunt's Saint Patrick's Summer before my 8-year-old's First Communion in two weeks, so that's become a daily, rather than a weekly, read. I have the children narrate, or retell in their own words, what we've read, and we discuss any questions which might have been raised while we were reading.

3. A chapter in our current ancient-history book, Herodotus and the Road to History. Again, I have the children narrate.

4. A chapter, or partial chapter (some are longer and denser than others) in Archimedes and the Door of Science, which is serving us for both history and science. Again, we narrate and discuss. Eventually we'll segue into written narrations, as a bridge into more formal work in composition, but oral narrations serve us well now as a discipline for listening, understanding, and rendering into words what we've just taken in.

If it seems we've been sitting too long, or the children are on listening overload, as happens some days, we might take a break from one reading or the other and do a hands-on science experiment using our Magic Schoolbus kit.

Morning Basket time lasts roughly an hour. From here we move to what I euphemistically call . . .

Table Work

It's a euphemism because people in my house tend not to work at tables. The 8-year-old's preferred work space of the moment, in fact, is under the drop-leaf table under the study window. The 9-year-old likes to work on the couch, with his books on a lap desk.

We spend half an hour to forty-five minutes on table work: math, handwriting, grammar and composition (accomplished both by workbooks -- we like the Catholic Heritage Curricula Language of God series, as well as Draw Write Now -- and by independent projects like cartoon-drawing and -writing). The 8-year-old is working on her religious award in American Heritage Girls, so she uses this time to work in that workbook as well.

Independent Reading

My kids have mostly tended to be the kind of readers you don't have to make read. Still, I like to have a time -- ten minutes at the end of the school day -- when everyone's settled down with a book while I make lunch. Sometimes I assign the independent-reading book -- if a given person seems to be in a rut of reading, say, the same Star Wars novelette over and over in his free time -- but more often I let them choose their reading (here's where I really didn't follow my ambitious plans for the year so much). The 8-year-old has been essaying the first Harry Potter book, a page at a time; the 9-year-old has been reading a book called The Fallacy Detective.

Lunch Basket

I like to read aloud to the kids while they're eating lunch. This is typically when we read things like Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare or one of the "twins" series by Lucy Fitch Perkins, but right now we're reading our new-world-history book, Madeleine Takes Command.

This is a flexible, easy schedule, not tied -- as you might have noticed -- to actual times of the day. We tend to begin school around ten or ten-thirty, whether we've gone to daily Mass at 8 a.m. or not, which means that we finish around noon. The children then have the afternoon free for chores and play, both of which I also consider to be not add-ons but integral parts of their education. They're allowed very limited computer play time (mostly educational apps and online games), but spend most of the afternoon, especially this time of year, outside on bikes and scooters, playing in our old garage, or walking to friends' houses in the neighborhood to play.

Later . . .

After dinner, we have a bedtime read-aloud and pray Compline. And thaaaaat's our school day, beginning to end.

Upcoming

I've been working on plans for next year, using this basic, useful, adaptable schedule as a template. Here's our proposed reading list by subject; here's how I visualize our days, though I'm still trying to hammer out in my mind what to read exactly when, if you know what I mean.

My lesson-planning style is sketchy, I guess, as you can see -- I think I actually wrote out these "plans" for last week on Thursday, so this was more of a log than a plan . . . I find, though, that if I made myself a to-do list, then the books get read and the written work gets done, and the learning happens without my having to teach so much as just serving the list. If that makes sense . . .

I'll devote another post to my 14-year-old, who is his own animal entirely, but meanwhile, if you'd like a peek at what he'll be doing next year, here's the first semester laid out by weeks. For teenagers I do plan in greater detail, because the plan, with the books, is their teacher. I hand it all to them, and they're off to the races. At least . . . well, my 18-year-old is off to the college races, and has thanked me for having made her read The Iliad in the 9th grade, so I'm thinking this stuff does work . . .

Overheard in the Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:13:00 +0000

"Would you not turn an act as simple as eating banana pudding into Little Big Horn, please?"

Yeah, it's Monday in our world . . .

Me on the TEEvee

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:23:00 +0000

I think I was on at one this morning, wearing a blue sweater set and talking about homeschooling. If you missed me, don't worry; so did I, but I think I'll be on two more times this week, and then again in rotation for the rest of the year. Details here.

Apparently somebody heard me on the radio, too. That's a little odd: to keep hearing about media apparitions of me. Anyway, if you happen to run across me, do let me know where I am.

At the Last Meeting of the Fiat Bottle and Pottery Club

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:26:00 +0000

Here the imagination stalls. I don't know what might have happened at the last meeting of the Fiat Bottle and Pottery Club, which I saw advertised via a xeroxed page taped to the window of the junk shop on Water Street. The junk shop sells a good bit of our traditional local pottery, which -- well, if I say that this particular style of folk pottery is an acquired taste, you will understand that I'm not saying I don't like it. I do like it, in rather the same way that I like a beer called Pipeline Porter, which I started drinking because Osama, who runs the restaurant on the square, had it on special for ninety-nine cents for a spell of about six months. Pipeline Porter's list of ingredients includes coffee, which delivers a sort of malty-espresso-up-all-night-under-the-table experience to which words really fail me to do justice; anyway, I like it. At ninety-nine cents I'll like a lot of things, but I would actually pay more for this if I had to, especially since it's beer and coffee in the same bottle, thus saving me the trouble and expense. And our local pottery is sort of like that, too: dark and subtle and also alarming, because the local folk tradition is to make pots with faces, with staring eyes and prominent white teeth. Finding one of our face jugs in a midnight alley would be a caffeinating encounter, I would think.

Everyone else in the family has gone to Scouts, and the dog and I have been abroad in the town. This is how I know that, while nothing but nothing is happening tonight, the recent past has been enlivened by a meeting of the Fiat Bottle and Pottery Club. Also, I've missed the Relay4Life Yard Sale, which is a shame, because now I'll be up all night trying to visualize a relay yard sale. How does that work, exactly? You pick up a Mildred Q. Rupman commemorative figurine-slash-floor lamp (minus cord and shade), note that the seller wants seventy-five cents for it, and pass it to the lady in the hair curlers, who hands it to her husband, saying, "Put that in the car, too, Dinsmore, you might as well?"

I might have gone to the relay yard sale, except that it happened on Saturday, and I only saw the sign tonight; also, the sign declined to divulge any information pertaining to location. Apparently you just had to know. The Prohibition era had its speakeasies; we have our Mystical-Knowlege Relay Yard Sales. Ah, well. At any rate, I thought about starting a short story about the Fiat Bottle and Pottery Club, but as you see, I never got past the opening phrase.

I suppose that there are people who find small towns boring. My observation is that many people who grew up in small towns would, in their adult lives, rather live on a potash collective on Neptune than in a small town. But then, my observation is that many people believe that anyplace that they didn't grow up -- even a potash collective on Neptune -- is bound to be better in every way than wherever they did grow up, not necessarily because there's anything wrong either with their hometowns or with them as people, but because anonymity is a freeing thing. I don't necessarily mean anonymity as in, nobody knows who you are. We hadn't lived in Fiat for fifteen minutes before I overheard somebody cycling past our house remarking to her companion that a new family with four children had just moved in. No, what's freeing is that the place itself is anonymous to you. You can spend the rest of your life learning its secrets and still not know them all, or even that many of them. Maybe you'll never know what happens at any meeting of the Bottle and Pottery Club, or who belongs to it. Nice bottle, Dinsmore. Was that your wife I saw with the floor lamp from the relay yard sale?Maybe no one will ever tell you who it is that plays basketball in the old high-school gym on Monday nights, or by what machinations the brand-new science building at the community college became, overnight, a department of cosmetology. You may never understand the graffiti on the wall of the old Eureka Textile Mill -- We Love Tim! Beer -- and if other people don't get it, either, they may not admit that in your presence.

Meanwhile, the train -- that same train which kept recurring in the Lenten sonnets -- is moaning and shuddering its way through town, on its way to the power plant in Panacea Falls. I do know that secret: where the train goes, rocking and swaying and dripping lumps of coal which my children pick up at the crossing at the bottom of our hill. I know, now, who owns the beagle-Pekingese mix tied to one front-porch support of a peeling house in the next block, and when I hear a screaming clamor at night, as of a yardful of scalded turkeys, I know it's only that dog remarking to some other passing dog that there's room on the porch for one, bub.

The night is coming down, the crickets are whispering in the vinca, the ivy is growing in through the front-porch screen, and even my dog has gone inside. I'm trying to bring all this to some conclusion, but I don't know . . . I don't know . . .

Regina Coeli Two Ways

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Here's the Marian antiphon for Eastertide, for them that likes the Latin, and for them that likes the English (and also can't get enough of the tune "Easter Hymn"):

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My Flesh In Hope Shall Rest

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 11:13:00 +0000

Death and Life Have Contended

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 04:02:00 +0000

Christians, to the Paschal victim
offer your thankful praises!

A lamb the sheep redeemeth:
Christ, who only is sinless,
reconcileth sinners to the Father.

Death and life have contended
in that combat stupendous:
the Prince of life, who died,
reigns immortal.

Speak, Mary, declaring
what thou sawest, wayfaring:

"The tomb of Christ, who is living,
the glory of Jesus' resurrection;

"Bright angels attesting,
the shroud and napkin resting.

"Yea, Christ my hope is arisen;
to Galilee he will go before you."

Christ indeed from death is risen,
our new life obtaining;
have mercy, victor King, ever reigning!
Amen.

att: Wipo of Burgundy, ca. 1030