Castle in the Sea

Thoughts on the HHS Contraceptive Mandate

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 20:26:00 +0000

It occurs to me that what's really wrong with the contraception-coverage mandate is not only that it's a clear intrusion of the state into the territory of the free exercise of religion in this country. What strikes me also is that first, the state is underwriting the definition of an elective medical option as an absolute healthcare requisite. It's coming down hard, at least, on the side of an existing definition which has not, until now, been required to be universal in practice.

This is a little like declaring rhinoplasty a basic and universal human right, the denial of which, to anyone, at any time, however conditionally, amounts to an injustice. A nose job may in fact be essential to a given person's sense of well-being for perfectly valid reasons; still, the government's not forcing everyone's employer to pay for it, nor is the fact of having to come up with the cash yourself considered particularly an affront to your rights under the law.

Second, and more important, however, the state is underwriting the definition of pregnancy and childbirth as disease. It's buying and selling a default position that like smallpox, pregnancy and childbirth are conditions which ought to be prevented, via what amounts to a government-sponsored campaign.We don't quite yet want to stamp out children in the same way that we wanted, in the last century, to stamp out smallpox, but we sure as hell want to put our official state signature to the position that to get landed with a child you didn't specifically ask for ought to feel like a scar. We want any institution which objects to this position to understand that it is inflicting a wound, and that there's no other possible way to think.

I Know, I Know

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 17:56:00 +0000

It's boring around here. I promise you I haven't just been lying on the chaise longue eating Belgian truffles and waving my polished nails around in the air to dry them. (As if, my daughters might say). In fact, it's not that I haven't just been doing those things; I haven't been doing them at all. I'm not even in the remotest danger of doing them, because for one thing, I don't own a chaise longue on which to lie, and the box of truffles I got for Christmas has long been consigned, a tomb of rustling paper cuplets, to the county dump (and please don't send me more). Plus, I hate nail polish.

So what I have I been doing, all these weeks I've been ignoring you? Well, I've been lesson planning, and also, of late, I've been meal planning. Not long ago, fed up with trying to cook for Aelred's low-carb diet, and also fed up with my own physical proportions and general state of well-being, I decided that what I needed was a new cookbook. I bought Melissa Joulwan's Well Fed (not a sponsored link, by the way, just a link), and I have to say, it's made me want to cook again. For more info on the book itself, you can read the Amazon reviews; in my view, all the raves she gets are right on the money. Anyway, I've set myself to cook my way through this cookbook this spring, adapting some recipes as I'm inspired to, but mostly putting on some more helpful cooking habits as I go. Chiefly I'm training myself to do a huge "cookup" every weekend, so that I have grilled chicken, browned ground beef, and chopped and steam-sauteed vegetables for go-to quick meals throughout the week, as well as one or two more special dishes. So, there's that going on in my life, and it's all good so far.

I've also been working on poems and on putting together a new poetry manuscript which I think -- though I'm not married to the idea right this minute -- I may self-publish sometime this year. My sense is that -- within the parameters of the already-microscopic poetry book market -- I'm simultaneously too formal and too free-verse, too religious and not religious enough, to fit any of the existing paradigms. I mean, many of the best poems I've written so far were written before I was Catholic and when I was actively struggling with faith, so there goes that devotional audience, for example. Even now, the poems I write are just -- poems. Some are a little prickly. They're not really supposed to make you love Jesus, though of course I hope you do. On the other hand, if you don't, they're not going to affirm you in that, which is something, I guess.

So I am thinking that I'll run up a limited number of small books, which I'll try to make lovely enough for Christmas presents, and see if friends won't have me to do poetry readings around town-ish, and that kind of thing. In the meantime, to amuse myself, I've been playing with a 5x8 format, arranging poems, trying on various classy-looking fonts, and trying to decide what overall narrative might tie together roughly twenty-five years' worth of poems, spanning a rather varied range of life experience.

Aside from schooling the shorter folk, reading Dickens with Amicus, and talking on the phone with Epiphany, who this week turned in the piece of paper transforming her into a red-hot Texas English major, that's what's been happening around here. Stay tuned . . .

Many Things Have Happened

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:27:00 +0000

A boy ordered some bacteria through the mail, and now they have arrived. You may ask yourself why a person would need to buy bacteria, when all he really has to do is open the refrigerator -- statistically speaking, that is. Apparently the average American refrigerator houses several million times more bacteria than the average American gas-station restroom, though on second thought, maybe that's less a statistic than a damned lie. Still, you hear things like that, and not all from the makers of Clorox. Now, when I use the words bacteria and refrigerator in the same sentence, it's not necessary to assume that I'm speaking in a specific sense of any particular refrigerator of my personal acquaintance: merely statistics (or damned lies), you know. Of course, it's not necessary to assume otherwise, either. At any rate, as the boy suggested, he had to have something to go in his petri dishes, and here we are.

So now we have these bacteria, cunning little red ones and cunning little green ones, in their cunning little test tubes. Their presence has given rise to a whole new set of household rules, to the effect that thou shalt not cultivate e. coli on the kitchen counter. We have rules about gas burners, too, though it occurs to me that we might just have recycled the rules about the backpacking stove, since it's virtually indistinguishable from the little gas burner that came with the chemistry equipment -- for that matter, since we had the gas burner first, I wonder why the backpacking stove was even necessary except that, as the boy suggested, he had to get something for Christmas. Besides petri dishes, that is.

*

A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal: one minute you're lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, "Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?" The next minute the burrito is calling you long distance to say that the philosophy final is over, and that the young man to whom she has become appended wants to leave Dallas by 6 the next morning to drive thirteen hours to Atlanta to his parents' house, then four more the next day to bring her to your door, and you realize that there's an entire world beyond the walls of your own house, and it's not you rattling around in it footloose and full of a sense of infinite destiny, but the burrito. You, rather to your surprise, are the one in the house, waiting to open the door and let some of the infinite destiny back in, to grace you with its gilded presence for a few minutes, until the phone rings and something else claims its attention.

And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here?

And also, Was it ever really otherwise?

*

A mother, two boys, a girl, and a dog went hiking together on the Feast of the Epiphany, in short sleeves and a blond wash of sunshine. Their hike began in a place called Confederate Laboratory: it really is called that. I couldn't make that up. Confederate Laboratory proper is a cluster of little old houses which grew up around an 1820s cotton mill by the South Fork River, which used to run so thickly with eels, so they say, that men had to chop them out of the mill wheel with -- I'm not sure what, actually. Axes might have broken the mill wheel, so maybe shovels? At any rate, you never hear about eels in the South Fork River any more, and as far as I know, they don't feature in the traditional local cuisine as they do in East Anglia, which until the seventeenth century was one big eely fen, over which the Isle of Ely (literally, the Isle of the Island of Eels) rose like an unlikely hematoma, crusted with a cathedral. At some point after the trouble with the South Fork eels, another variety of trouble broke out, and the mill community became, for some reason, a site on which medicines were compounded, hence the current name.

The trail follows the bed of a defunct railroad leading -- as all roads lead in these parts -- to Gastonia. We have friends in a place called High Shoals, which is bigger than Confederate Laboratory but not much, through whose woods a rusted section of this railroad still runs. In the olden days, when the storefronts weren't so empty, people from High Shoals used to take the train the full five miles to Fiat to do their shopping. In those days, as now, Fiat was the big doings in this neck of the woods; in those days, obviously, the doings were bigger than they are now. Now the tracks are mostly gone, and where the trains used to clatter you can stroll in relative silence, with the gray trees whispering around you and the river, below the mill dam, exhaling noisily over its shoals and scattering light.

There's a place by the water where someone has strung a rope on a tree limb, for no more nefarious purpose than to swing out on over a deep spot and let go. I suppose you could also use it to shimmy up to the place where all the fishing floats cluster like grapes on the barren tree. I sat on the bank looking at this strange fruit for several minutes yesterday before the realization of what they were broke upon me. It was the Feast of the Epiphany, after all. While I sat gazing at the fishing floats caught in the tree, the girl with me, who had worn wellie boots without socks and, in consequence, developed the predictable blisters, waded in the mud in her bare feet. She didn't have to go into the water to wade; floods had deposited plenty of silt right there on the riverside rocks, and not all of it had cracked in the sun into a sort of crumble-edged tile floor. The girl amused herself for some time in not only mud-wading, but also digging up these mud tiles with her fingers -- they came right away in satisfying handfuls -- patting them into smooth black grapeshot, and lobbing them into the water. Meanwhile, one of the boys expended the respite from walking in rummaging through his well-stocked pack for a piece of moleskin with which to remedy the sororal blisters. Probably he had the backpacking stove with him as well, not to mention the gas burner; it's not for nothing that the other Boy Scouts call him Wal-Mart. The second boy, the one whom I'd tried to persuade to wear a fleece pullover, because after all it's January, for pete's sake, and who had turned out to be right after all, feinted at underbrush with the walking stick his brother had lent him, to shut him up about the sword he had wanted to bring and been forbidden. The dog panted and walked around and around on the end of his leash, winding his legs up in it until he was effectively hobbled. The sun shone down beneficently on us as it would shine down on any oddly assorted fivesome in a lull in the action of a Dickens novel.

It's still Christmas, various people remarked at intervals, in tones of incredulity.

*

It is still Christmas -- at least it was, and as the American Church celebrates Epiphany tomorrow, I'm loath to take the tree down even now, though I'm mortally tired of it. Yesterday, after we came home from hiking, I had the front door propped open to admit the dulcet air, and then I looked at the Christmas tree shining away in its corner with the tattered leavings of Christmas morning still clustered around its base, and one of these things was not like the other.

Of course, that's the thing about the Church year: it does run counter to everything, including the weather and our own feelings. In Advent, when the rest of the world is riding high on the holly-jolly jingle-bell flood tide that started running around Halloween, we're supposed to override our convivial Christmasy impulses with a sense of eschatological longing. Hard as it is to accomplish at the time, it occurs to me that that's somehow far less difficult than singing O Come Let Us Adore Him on the third of January, when everyone else's tree has long since vanished into the county landfill and even we, who keep plugging the lights in day after day and forcing down whatever remnants of chocolate we happen across, feel that we've done this already. Can we fast now? Please?

It's not that we sweep it entirely away, of course. The Holy Family and their adoring retinue live on the mantelpiece until Candlemas, when Epiphanytide officially ends and the kings depart into their own country by another way, involving bubble wrap. Some winter dark will close in on us, even as the days stretch out languidly towards another round of Daylight Savings. We might have snow. Still, it's hard to swim against this sudden current of spring feeling which makes me want to throw things out, throw open windows, and let the fresh honest daylight in again.

But then, maybe we're not supposed to swim against it so much after all. Maybe we're supposed to drop our nets and follow. New year, new season, new life.

Greeting

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Carolina Carol

Gentle weather, meek and mild,

Promise us a holy child.

While the wet wind bows the thorn,

In winter rain let spring be born.

Mockingbird, awake and sing

From every branch the sap's upswing

Inside the barren, dreaming oak

Which wears the warm sky like a cloak.

Let grape hyacinth rejoice.

Raise its spears in yellow grass.

Through these short-lived twilit hours,

Wrens fall silent; still He flowers.

Cardinal like a scarlet flame

On the bare dogwood, proclaim

The shaken seed-head, swelling bud --

Our Spring has come in flesh and blood.

Learning Space

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 14:06:00 +0000

Dorian Speed asks: "How does your schooling space fit into your home?"

For us it's a timely question. After eight years of homeschooling, first in an apartment, then in a couple of small houses, and finally in this much-larger house, which we bought because it seemed a potential goldmine of discretionary space, we finally -- as of two weeks ago -- have an actual, dedicated room for our books and our learning.

I had been sort of vaguely anti-the idea of having a schoolroom, because I'd been not-so-vaguely anti-the idea that homeschooling means the same old school model, translated to your house. To a great degree, I'm still anti-that idea. At the same time . . . well, we have all these books. Our learning, which is to say our life, is arranged around these books. And at last I've come to grips with the reality that, charming though it may be to fill the kitchen cabinets with books, they're not really all that accessible that way. If I can't see them, I won't use them. Ditto the books shelved two-deep in the butler's pantry. Ditto the books which disappear under people's beds.

Strewing, as I've come to realize, doesn't mean books and crap scattered all over your house, where you hope people will stumble on things. When I think of the parts of my own school experience which were good, what comes to mind immediately is the Lower-School library. In those days, the library was a modest thing: it occupied a balcony in the upstairs hallway, overlooking the big lunchroom below. This was the pre-computer era, when a school library was still a library and not a media center, and smelled of books with plain library-bound covers, yellowed pages, and type you could feel if you ran your fingers over it. To say that I loved this library is an understatement. Mostly school gave me stomachaches, but to go to the library and choose a book was a glorious reprieve from the minefield of the rest of the day. In those years, in that library, I read everything from Roller Skates to Cherry Ames to Marguerite Henry horse stories to all the poignant Rumer Godden doll stories, with their requisite lonely and maladjusted little girls: Fairy Doll, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower. School was an alien place, but the library seemed like home, and it, not the classroom, was where a significant portion of my early education occurred.

So when I realized that our books had outgrown the spaces to which I'd relegated them before, and I began to see that what we really needed was a space for everything together, I didn't think schoolroom so much as I thought library: a place for books to live, a place to come and find and meet them, a place to read together; a place where a person could come to graze and find good pasture.

Meanwhile, we had this little room at the back of the house, which we'd been calling the study. It had been home, mostly, to Aelred's books, and in the ordinary way of things, it did double duty as a guest room and a den. As such, it was mostly a pit. The room is really too small for the kind of large, comfortable couches and chairs which make a den a good crashing place, so we didn't sit there much. The kids mostly gravitated there with their toys and projects. We could close the door on on the resultant carnage rather than putting things away, so unless houseguests were coming, the room remained in a perpetual state of unusability.

Which was really too bad, because it's my favorite room in the house, the only room currently which I don't want to repaint. The apple-green walls are pleasant and soothing, summer and winter; the ventless gas fire is a bit of a monstrosity, but it's cozy on cold mornings. Whenever we cleaned it, it was a nice place to sit and read . . . but it never stayed that way.

Part of my little series of recent epiphanies was the revelation that to be pleasant and usable, this room needed a definite, daily purpose. Meanwhile, there was the question of all these books. Aelred by this time had moved the bulk of his library to his office on campus, and the study shelves looked like a mouthful of missing teeth. Hm, I said to myself. And, Would you mind? I said to Aelred.

So, at the end of a week of exertion both physical and mental, his books had taken up residence on two bookshelves in the kitchen and in a cupboard in the dining room, where he tends to work when he's at home; and our books were newly at home in the study. A maple drop-leaf table, a legacy from my brother's father-in-law which used to hold our printer, now occupies the middle of the floor, with stools and a chair drawn up to it -- in fact, I'm sitting at this table right now to write this blog post, my coffee at my elbow. When school starts, we'll sit at it to write and do our math together. The down-at-heels futon which our guests sleep on (sorry, guests, we're still not very four-star here) remains a good place to sit and read together. Some friends just passed on to us an old desktop computer, which the younger kids can use for learning DVDs and interactive CD-ROM things; it and the printer sit on a coffee table and end table which used to float aimlessly about the room as, essentially, clutter instead of useful furniture. The gas fire's oversized mantel holds art supplies, binoculars and a telescope, DVDs and other sundries at one end, while I'm turning the other end into a little altar.

We've had the room set up thus for several weeks now. We read here in the afternoons and at bedtime; the kids play on the computer or sit at the table to write. Aelred and I have escaped in here with glasses of wine or cups of coffee, because it's quieter, cooler, and more peaceful in here than anywhere else in the house. Best of all, it's stayed tidy because we're all using it to live in, the way we like to live.

But enough blah-blah. Here are some pictures:

A view of the room from the hall door.

I love this window, giving onto the dogwood tree where we can hang bird feeders.

My history shelf. All kneel.

The short-people computer station.

Futon with decorative computer-charger cable, Periodic Table, and maps.

The Battle of Hastings

Shelves with each child's books for the year, plus resources and supplies.

Good Stuff

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:12:00 +0000

Dry-erase crayons. What everyone, everyone, everyone needs.

Owls in the Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 03:16:00 +0000

Last night the teenagers, out to walk the dog in the dark, discovered -- well, all right, not owls on the backyard grass, but an owl, to be visited by which is to be brushed sufficiently by the wingbeats of mystery, don't you think? I didn't see it. They watched it, holding on all the while to a dog who had decided to feel protective and unfriendly, until at last it went away, with the aforementioned wingbeats of mystery. It was huge, the teenagers told me, the size of a toddler, and its wings shadowed the grass as it flew.

I should not share this information with my friend K., who has a small dog and lives in fear that some bird of prey will stoop down someday on her garden and bear Pegotty away into the eternal blue stratosphere. As my dog weighs sixty pounds -- more, probably, since he's taken to climbing into the compost bin to eat the eggshells and coffee grounds -- this is not a worry which keeps me awake at night, and so I am glad to know that an owl visits my yard in the after hours, when no one is abroad but my teenagers and (see dog, above). It's like being visited by . . . well, not an angel, and not a ghost, not something that would walk over your grave, but by the reminder that complex and intelligent lives go on on the periphery of my own, which of course lies on the periphery of theirs. Being visited by an owl, I feel the way Helier did when we read a book about microscopic life in a drop of water. Pages and pages of amoebae and protozoae and euglenae and so on: he listened stoically enough, but later he came to me and said, "Imagine. Whole other worlds, all around us."

If the natural world is like this, invested with mystery, all on the plain of the purely material, then it's hard to see why belief in things like angels, for example, or heaven, is such a stretch. I have a harder time believing that the bus will come on time, or that the rest of the soccer team will show up for practice (today they didn't, but that was because I'd gotten the day wrong), than I do believing that unseen presences walk with us, or that our beloved dead are nearer than we think and knowable to us, as we are knowable to them. Things go on beyond our imagining; why shouldn't we imagine them, and more?

Meanwhile, like everyone else I'm fed up with summer. After longing for it, after shuffling around my house in layers of clothing and huddling by the open over door in the mornings, for month upon endless month -- geesh, I can't write things like that without breaking a sweat, even with a box fan blowing full in my face. And yet it's not the heat so much as the longing for order that strikes me about this time every year. The fireflies have gone away, and now children running around the yard in the dark strike me not as icons of joy and freedom but as hooligans who need to be jailed for their own good and that of society: jailed and read to, ten chapters of Swiss Family Robinson every night. Some of their friends went back to school today; others will go next week; we are making one last trip of the summer, to take Epiphany to college, then it will be all up for us, too. There's the winged mystery of the great dark sultry night, and then there's the orderly daylight mystery of what we might do together this year, given enough books and some nice rain outside.

Oh, and this cicada who's been flying into the window behind me for the last two hours? Whenever I'm tempted to feel, for whatever reason, that I've been wasting my life on one small pursuit or another, I do well to contemplate the fact that some creatures wait seventeen years for the privilege of trying to fly through glass before they die.

Rain Steam Bugs

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 02:39:00 +0000

And snow. Because of course that's what I'm thinking about, and not only because it's what's not happening now. The other day, cleaning a closet, Aelred happened upon a set of pictures I took the winter Helier was a baby, when East Anglia was paralyzed, much as the American South is always paralyzed, by a three-inch snowfall: cars abandoned by the roadsides, buses not running, people exchanging war stories in the checkout line at Sainsbury's while they bought their extra cartons of UHT milk. The day of the actual snowstorm, I had taken Helier across town to see the doctor for some reason or other -- it must have seemed urgent, for me to have trudged out with a baby in a pram while the snow came bucketing down, in the very street pictured above, actually. The next day, after it had stopped, I walked out with the baby again, this time because the beauty of it all seemed kind of urgent, too.

I distinctly recall trying to cross the Seagull Bridge by Trinity Hall, pushing the baby in the stroller, and discovering too late that the bridge was a sheet of ice. We were stuck for a while at the top -- me transfixed by the vision of what would happen if I slipped, fell, and let go of the stroller on the steep downslope of the bridge, Helier either asleep or thinking his inchoate fleece-wrapped thoughts beneath the vinyl weather shield which turned the stroller into a little rolling greenhouse -- until some nice man came along in, I guess, spiked boots or something, and helped us down.

Anyway, here's what I saw on my walk that day. Maybe it'll cool you off.

Saint Catharine's College

The lane outside our church. I don't think that's the Vicar's bike, but then again, it might have been.

Memento mori in the snow: the wild garden behind the church.

Punts by the Silver Street Bridge.

Punts with snowman.

Some humble Bible chapel or other, with insignificant human figures.

A view of St. John's, I think.

Not the bridge we got stuck on.

Nor is this one, though possibly it's because I was taking these pictures that I got stuck.

At every turning, something dear to see.

Like this. I'm almost home; it's right across the Piece, in the middle of that row of gray houses. The wind's behind me, pushing me there.

Not Exactly Your High-Stakes Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:28:00 +0000

Now, if there were high stakes for homeschool planning, beyond the obvious people's-lives-in-my-inept-hands thing, that would be another story.

I've posted booklists here already (and then gone back and thought, "No, that's not what I want to do. Yes, it is. No, it isn't," &c), and have finally set up a couple of separate planning blogs for the youngers and for Mr. Eighth Grade Wonder. His is more of an interactive deal between us, while the youngers' blog is really just for me to try to keep all my ducks swimming in the right direction. Anyway, if you're interested in our homeschool planning, and who wouldn't be, I've moved most of that to those places to keep from cluttering things up here. Comments are deactivated on both those blogs; if you want to comment on our plans, feel free to do it here.

Meanwhile, there's also the high-school humanities site.

Not to mention real life, in which children are coming and going and spending the night and packing for college. Re the last, people keep asking me sympathetically how I'm doing, and I think the answer is fine, though the thought of driving back from Texas without her does leave my happiness for her not unmingled with a sort of pit-of-the-stomach regret for the years which have slipped through my hands when I wasn't looking. Then again, though, how would I have held onto them? Could I really have burdened every second of those years with my full and conscious attention? Would I have wanted to? At what point would I have wanted to stop the clock, and how all right would I have been with not living past that point? Like I need more questions to ask myself at three in the morning.

All of that leaves this blog pretty quiet. Oh, well.

Homeschool Reading List #2: Third Grade

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 14:34:00 +0000

Gradually getting the learning thing together here, in the doldrums of midsummer. My aim is to have some plans nailed down before we take Epiphany to college in late August, so that come September, when we resume what passes as our regular routine, I can commence ignoring them. What else are plans for? I ask you.

Nevertheless, I make them, and occasionally I actually follow what I've written. The other day I shared our projected second-grade reading; now for third grade.

Goals for third grade:

* For a fluent, fast reader, to increase "depth" and comprehension in reading

* To improve proficiency in handwriting, which right now remains a struggle, despite huge improvements last year

* To make strides in and feed enjoyment of mathematics

*To nurture a well-furnished historical, scientific, literary, cultural, etc. imagination

*To maintain good habits of prayer and expand understanding of our faith

*To cultivate a greater sense of personal responsibility via life skills and chores

Much of our reading will happen in a "combined-school" setting with the second grader; that booklist to follow shortly. Meanwhile, here's the third grader's individual reading list, which will be scheduled, like the second grader's, in small doses so that books are spread out over at least a semester, if not the entire year:

For the Children's Hour
School of the Woods
Story Book of Science
Robinson Crusoe Written Anew for Children
The Secret of Everyday Things
The Boy's Book of Sea Fights
The Book of Saints and Heroes
Poems Every Child Should Know (copywork)
Our Island Saints
This Way to Christmas
Great Inventors and Their Inventions
When the King Came
The Bears of Blue River
Boys and Girls of Colonial Days

Math: MEP Year 3

Head of the Class: I'm using this, in all honesty, as a way to keep people gainfully occupied while I'm working one-on-one with someone else. If an MEP math lesson is going to take the full 45 minutes -- and my experience so far is that really, though in general I believe in short lessons a la Charlotte Mason, the full benefit of this program lies in doing it as it's written, and not skipping or breaking lessons in half -- then I need the person who is not doing math to be doing something quiet and learning-ish and independent for that amount of time, which is just becoming possible with these younger two.

So the third grader, once he's finished his independent reading for the day and finds himself at loose ends, will work his way through a complement of online applications in spelling, science, geography, and music, via a customized curriculum I've set up (nifty feature, that). The curriculum for each grade level also includes a "fun" component; the third grade "fun" is a series of little multimedia presentations, a.k.a. narrated slide shows, on various career options. This is one of those Gee, I wouldn't have thought of that offerings, and it does look like fun, so he'll be doing that as well. Plus we'll be printing out Spanish vocabulary words and geography goodies like the flags of Europe to put in lapbook/folders in our notebook.

He'll also do liturgical-year lapbook projects with the second-grader, but I think I'm trespassing into "Combined School" territory now.

That booklist, plus Grade 8, up shortly.

Deals Deals Deals

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:38:00 +0000

Over at the Homeschool Buyers' Co-op (free membership required to participate):

The One Year Adventure Novel is currently available at a 20% discount. The more families opt in for this group buy, the greater the savings.

Amicus will be using this very cool-looking, rave-reviewed program for the writing component of his coursework this year: it looks to me like the perfect way to learn about structure in writing, about pushing your writing beyond the limits of the terse informative paragraph, about how your written voice sounds to other people, about creating and sustaining a long-term project. A kid who navigated this curriculum would, in my view, have prepared himself beyond adequately to adapt his writing to the structures and constraints and conventions of more formal writing later on.

Anyway (and no, this isn't a paid endorsement or formal review -- having requested and been impressed by the free demo, I just want to buy this product for the best price possible), I'm joining this buy-in and thought someone else out there might be interested as well.

Offer expires July 31, so don't dawdle!

Also . . .

Big savings on Rosetta Stone languages

A year's subscription to Defined STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) at 60% off

Discounts at Bethlehem Books . . .

and more.

Check 'er out.

Homeschool Reading List #1: Second Grade

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:15:00 +0000

Goals for second grade:

*increased fluency in reading

*increased proficiency in penmanship, spelling, and mathematics

*a well-furnished literary, historical, natural/scientific, and cultural imagination

*good habits of prayer and an expanded understanding of the faith, with reception of sacraments of reconciliation and communion.

*cultivation of personal responsibility via life skills and chores

Reading List:

(NB: These will be presented as individual daily readings of, generally, no more than a page apiece. I've scheduled four selections a week, which allows us to linger over something if we have to. Most of these books are long enough to last us a semester, if not the entire 36-week school year. Until reading becomes really fluent and confident, we'll buddy-read our daily selection, alternating paragraphs. My plan is to print out a week's worth of reading to put in the second-grader's binder, collecting finished readings in a larger binder to be enjoyed again as an anthology)

Kindergarten Gems
The Burgess Animal Book for Children
Birds of the Air
A Child's Own Book of Verse, vol. 1 (copywork)
Good Stories for Great Holidays (selections)
Christmas in Legend and Story (selections)
Understood Betsy
Boys and Girls of Colonial Days

History, science, geography, religion, and more literature will be covered in "combined school," with second and third grades together (that reading list to follow).

More level-appropriate chapter books will be added to school box for independent reading: The Courage of Sarah Noble, And Then What Happened, Paul Revere, etc.

Lapbook projects for the Rosary, Advent, Lent, and the life of Jesus courtesy of ThatResourceSite.com.

Introductory Spanish, plus fun online interactives in spelling, geography, nature, music, and art, via a customized curriculum from Head of the Class. Lapbook and folder projects to unfold from these topics as desired; I will use file folders, hole-punched to fit into a notebook, for gluing on Spanish vocabulary cards, to keep them straight and available for us to use. I'll also be printing out cursive-writing worksheets: this child really wants to write in cursive, and it won't happen if I don't have some kind of template.

Math via MEP. We began, experimentally, in Year 2 this last spring, but per advice from the knowledgeable folks at the MEP-Homeschoolers Yahoo group, I think we'll drop back to Year 1 to build confidence and solidify skills and concepts. It's a rigorous-enough program that I don't see this as a setback, and I think we'll be glad in the long run that we took the time to get things right.

Coming soon: Grades 3 and 8, plus "Combined School." Stay tuned!

PS: If you wonder how to schedule readings, check out this excellent and helpful conversation.

Free-Range Crash and Burn

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 04:30:00 +0000

A child in this house turns nine on Saturday, or so I am told. So I was told twenty times today, and yesterday, and the day before that; so, if my luck holds, I will be told tomorrow.

This child is a creature of habit, not to say repetition, and having found a birthday-party paradigm to suit his needs, he aims neither to alter nor to wander from its course; lo, he deviateth not. So on Saturday we will be driving, for the third consecutive year, with a vanload of boys and others, to the mountains, so that everyone can run around half-naked and surprise some copperheads and poke each other with sticks for an afternoon. With cake.

Today I suggested that he might make up some invitations to take around to neighborhood friends, and this he did. When he was finished, he then wanted to deliver them -- alone.

We live in a quiet neighborhood: no seriously busy streets, no especially creepy houses, nothing much going on besides the odd late-night drug deal in the community-college parking lot across the street. In broad daylight: nada. This child's older brother has been roaming the town since he was ten, the year we moved here, taking himself to the library, the secondhand bookstore, the junk shop, and City Lunch, where he can get a late-afternoon cheeseburger pick-me-up for a dollar, if he happens to have one. Statistically, of course, he courts real danger by getting into the car with -- well, me, for instance; when he walks the streets of Fiat, the perils which lurk lurk largely in my own imagination, where I can keep them penned up and refuse to feed them. Besides, he's a sensible kid. I trust him not to make his own peril any more than he absolutely has to.

Somehow, though, it escapes me completely most of the time that the younger children aren't still toddlers. Occasionally I'll look at one of them -- Crispina, for example, who is seven -- and I'll think, When your older sister was seven, she was riding a bicycle to school down a narrow street full of double-decker buses in a foreign country. When we came back to this country, we were flabbergasted to discover that seven-year-olds still ride in booster seats, at least till they hit 78 pounds, at which point we throw up our hands and round to the nearest ten.

So I have to make myself, deliberately, not treat them like babies. Things which came naturally for the older two, like having pocket money and budgeting it, walking to the corner store and spending it, I have to remember to enact with the younger two. Half the time I forget, which is no good for any of us. And so it is that although we live in a relatively quiet neighborhood, in a relatively safe town, and our children's friends live within relatively easy walking distance, I'd never let either of the younger kids walk to those friends' houses alone.

But today Helier wanted to, and I said yes, provided that he took Crispina with him. I don't know why I thought it was so important for him to take Crispina with him: she doesn't know jujitsu, and I'm not sure I'd rely on her map skills in a pinch, either. As it turned out, I was glad that I had made him take her with him, though he rolled his eyes and asked why he couldn't ever do anything alone.

"Just take your sister," I said. "Just do it. And here," I added as an afterthought, "take my cell phone, too."

"Cool," he said. This, obviously, was the consolation prize for having to wag his little sister all the way to Chandler's house. I showed him how to find our home number on speed dial, just in case they took a wrong turn, and I sent them on their way.

Now, I wasn't really worried about them. As I say, the neighborhood is quiet. And in general, I don't worry so much about them, per se, as about the appearance of the thing. When, for example, I let them ride their scooters in the parking lot -- on Sunday afternoon when the drug dealers aren't there, obviously -- and I'm not visibly watching them, are they unsupervised? Am I negligent, to let them experience a limited facsimile of the autonomy I took for granted at their ages? I mean, they're not babies. Not anymore. Even I know that. And yet. Last year a friend of mine, whose children ride bikes on their dead-end street, had a social worker appear at her front door. Someone on the same street, some anonymous tipster, had called CPS to complain about unsupervised kids. The interview was over quickly, and the social worker rolled her eyes a bit even as she asked the necessary questions -- some things are just obvious -- but still. Do I want to court that? Do I need that reason to lie awake at night?

So I wasn't worried, exactly, but I was on alert. And I wasn't that surprised when the phone rang.

"Mom? If we're at the corner of Elm and Hackberry, which way do we turn?"

I told him, and he hung up.

Three minutes later the phone rang again. "Mom? We turned left like you said, and we've gone all the way up to Legislature Street, and I don't see their house."

"Ah. Are you sure you're on Hackberry?"

"Uh, yes?"

"Do you see a street sign?"

"Oh. We're on Gingko. What do we do?"

"Go down one more block. That will be Hackberry. Turn right, and you'll see their house."

He hung up again.

Five minutes later: "Mom? We did it. They weren't home, and I think the lady next door was suspicious, because she opened her door and watched us put the invitation on the porch."

"That's all right. Come straight on home now," I said. And thinking that this thing was a wrap, I told Amicus to listen for the phone, and I went to take a bath.

This I might not have done, at least not with such naive confidence, had I not assumed that they were walking. What I didn't know was that they'd taken their razor scooters. Not that I necessarily worry about them that much more on the razor scooters, because they're both pretty competent, especially for toddlers. Still, there's always the chance that something will go slightly more spectacularly wrong than it might have if the scooter-rider were merely lumping along on his own boring pins.

From the bathroom, I didn't hear the phone; fortunately Amicus did. Between the time he set out from our house and the time he caught up with them, in the middle of the block of Hackberry between Legislature and Crape Myrtle, where Helier's scooter had executed a double axel of its own free will and deposited him ungently on the sidewalk, they called home several more times; Crispina did, that is, our cool-headed heroine who in an emergency knows how to seize and operate a phone. There seems, mysteriously, to have been a dog on the scene, too, because the phone messages, which I listened to later, are full of barking and Crispina saying with authority, "Shut up, you stupid animal."

Amicus found them readily enough, and there wasn't really much wrong with Helier, beyond an epic skinned knee. He limped home, clinging to Amicus, while Crispina followed with the scooters. They came banging into the kitchen about the time I emerged from the bathroom. "Mission accomplished," I was about to say in triumph, when I saw Helier's bloody knee and surmised that all had not been quite the summit-gaining that had been hoped for.

Between us we dressed the busted knee, and Crispina, solicitous and important, made a bed on the sofa for the invalid, brought him his plastic army men, and offered to carry him to the bathroom, should he have need of that service. By this evening he had risen and walked and gone to Cub Scouts -- you know how these miracle healings go.

I did ask him: "Were you riding your scooter really fast?"

"Uh, yeah."

So I guess maybe he learned something firsthand today, about freedom and danger and limits. What the heck did I learn, though? Beyond remembering, next time, to make them leave the scooters at home, I'm really not sure. Did I learn that there shouldn't be a next time, not till -- well, when? Did I learn that it's naive to assume that simply because God is in His Heaven, and we pray their guardian angels to guide them safely, my children will not fall down and bleed on the sidewalk three blocks from home? Did I learn gratitude? They did come home, after all. Other women's children do not, sometimes. Nothing terrible happened to mine this time, just enough to remind me that something in the universe likes to twitch the throw rugs, drop banana peels, stick its ugly foot out as people are running.

And of course, it's not just out there. It's in my house. It's in me, in my uncertain judgment and faulty calls. On the other hand, there's grace, too, in the brother who dashes from the house to save somebody from he doesn't even know what, in the little sister who tags everlastingly along. And you know, really, that those two things, fallenness and grace, don't even hang in the balance. The grace weighs infinitely more than all the things broken and stupid and wrong, in all their boring mostly-low-grade variety. You know at the end of the day who wins. Still, it comes as a surprise.

July Garden

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:03:00 +0000

Vegetable garden by driveway: a bit out of control at this stage.

A Very Fetching Garden Friend, Surprised Among Bean Leaves

Marigolds

My favorite summer constellation

The sun the summer day revolves around.

Hm, moussaka . . . ratatouille . . . I will *force* people to like eggplant . . .

Blue sage

More blue sage

Bee balm going to seed

A second round of daylilies

I love this little dog vase, but I dunno about the flower-gargling effect here . . .

Memento Mori in Massachusetts

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 03:43:00 +0000

Not, I mean, that you will necessarily die in Massachusetts. But you will die somewhere, sometime, and these stones don't mean to let you forget it.

Many of these I found in a Lexington graveyard several centuries older than the Catholic church beside it. Aelred had left his breviary in the pew at Mass on Sunday, and while he was fetching it from the church office and the children, who after all still have all the time in the world, waited dutifully in the car, I went stalking with the camera.

Et tu, Transcendentalist?

Et tu.

(Bonus: Wilfred McClay on Mr. Emerson's Tombstone)

Pussycat, Pussycat, Where Have You Been?

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 18:42:00 +0000

What? Me? I've been to Boston to be on EWTN.

When we left off with each other a few weeks back, I was spazzing, as you may recall, over what to wear on television. Now, I will readily admit to personal vanity, which I have in spades, deeply and complexly; I will also admit that one of my worst recurring anxiety dreams involves standing before a closet full of clothes, with a clock ticking and someplace I have to be in fifteen minutes, and every outfit I put on is wrong. Tick-tick-tick goes the time, life's rich cavalcade passes outside, and there I stand, putting on and tearing off clothes with a feeling of desperation and futility which mounts until finally I wake up. To compound matters, despite my personal vanity, which I do have in spades, deeply and complexly, I'm perfectly aware that most of the time I look like a line out of Eudora Welty's novel Delta Wedding: "Clothes, I'm going to town. Anything that wants to go with me can jump on my back."

So, yeah. Invite me to be on your tv show. I'm intensely interesting.

Fortunately for us all, the topic of this particular segment of Colleen Carroll Campbell's Faith and Culture show did not deal with personal neuroses, but with homeschooling. That I can talk about, though mostly, as I was preparing my off-the-cuff remarks, as Mr. Collins prepared his little spontaneous compliments for Lady Catherine de Bourgh, I was aware that off the top of my head I could think of twenty people far more experienced, thoughtful, and articulate than I, a reality which I hoped to offset by the acquisition of a royal-blue sweater set and some under-eye-circle concealer. Behold! She homeschools her children, and see how refreshed she is! God is good to her indeed!

Well, He is, but I have a feeling that I might be digressing the tiniest bit. The story, in linear fashion, is this: Colleen asked me very kindly and utterly out of the blue, back in the winter, to be on the show, and I said yes. A date was set, and, oh, I don't know, about four days before the taping at St. John's Seminary in Boston, I made an actual plan for getting there. I had had vague thoughts of flying and coming home the same day, and had gone so far as to look up airline prices; then I thought, How can I go to a place like Boston and not take at least one child? What kind of homeschooler wouldn't turn this into a field trip? Once I had had that thought, however, there was the problem of which child to choose. Finally I said to Aelred, "Do you think we might possibly all go, and make a vacation of it?"

There are educational experiences and educational experiences, and Epiphany opted to stay at home, alone, mistress of her own fortunes, while we drove away north. Immediately we left, she rang her grandmother for the macaroni-and-cheese recipe and then went to the grocery store. Except for a couple of nights when she went out and another couple of nights when she babysat, I believe she subsisted for six straight days on a diet of macaroni-and-cheese, than which a person can do far worse. Anyway, beyond that, she does not enter this tale, a state of affairs to which I realize I must accustom myself in days to come.

The rest of us drove north through Virginia, Maryland, a sliver of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. If Helier and Crispina were telling the story, it would go like this:

1. We stopped at a motel. It had a pool.
2. We stopped at another motel. It had a pool.
3. We stopped at a motel with a pool, which was closed. From outside the fence it looked perfectly fine. This was an outrage.
4. We did some stuff not involving a pool, and looked at some old stuff.
5. The best part was the gift shop.
6. We got rear-ended on an off-ramp, on our way to a motel with a pool.
7. We stopped at a motel. It had a pool.
8. Now we're home. Mom, why don't we have a pool?

The day of the Faith and Culture taping, we were eating breakfast in the second motel-with-pool when we happened to notice that the television news was all about the Boston Bruins, and the Stanley Cup, and some parade happening in the center of Boston that day.

"Oh, yeah," said the morning guy at the front desk. "The game was Wednesday, and the parade's today. You guys aren't gonna be driving in Boston, right?"

Fortunately, as it turned out, we weren't gonna be driving in the part of Boston upon which a million people were expected to converge by 9 a.m. We also weren't gonna be driving that early; I didn't have to turn up at the seminary until 2-ish that afternoon. All we saw of the festivities was what played on television during breakfast plus hundreds of people in Bruins jerseys disgorged from the public transport by Boston College while we were eating lunch. We did, however, scrap our plan for seeing the historical sites that afternoon, once I emerged and was a normal, non-makeup-wearing member of the populace again.

OK, so, the interview itself. First of all, I have to say that the EWTN people were beyond nice. The camera guy who doubled as makeup artist didn't make me feel like a yokel for not owning face powder. Colleen was lovely and down-to-earth, so that I wasn't really all that nervous; when the lights were bearing down on me and the camera was rolling, I just made meaningful eye contact with her -- otherwise I'd have stared at the camera like that Andrea Martin character on SCTV's Night School Hi Q (sorry, there used to be a YouTube video, but it's gone now) -- and talked.

Talk talk talk talk talk. Apparently I can bang on effortlessly for -- minutes, anyway. On end. What did I say? I don't know. I remember that when we got around to the subject of homeschooling and faith, all I had the presence of mind to bang on about was that, you know, we get to go to Mass a lot, but not all of us every day, necessarily, but you know, we have kind of a crazy Mass schedule, so it's really nice that we get to go to some if not all daily Masses, but not all of us, always . . . And then we were out of time.

So ever since then, lovely, concise phrases like the integration of faith and learning; the integration of faith and life have been floating about the deserted stairwell of my head, awaiting some opportunity for wit to meet the world. So if you happen to see me, which you won't for almost a year, anyway, please feel free to fill in the blanks.

As for the rest of the travelogue, I think I'll let the pitchers do the talk-talk-talking.

"Integration of faith and learning. Integration of faith and life. Why couldn't I think of the word integration?"

"Lexington, Massachusetts, and not a motel pool in sight."

"I went to the woods because I wanted to shake hands with this metal dude."

But look:

He has a pool.

We really did get rear-ended, by the way, on an off-ramp to Fishkill, New York, around midnight as we were coming home. The woman who hit us smacked us hard, but did no damage -- this is when I don't feel guilty for driving a tank -- and was manifestly too afraid that Aelred was going to beat her up to volunteer any insurance information. We all drove away from the scene, and I presume she's okay. I hope it wasn't any actual, real-life experience which made her so afraid of Aelred, who had only wanted to be sure she wasn't in worse shape than, say, Crispina, who slept through the whole thing in the very back seat.

We were so late looking for a hotel (with pool), chiefly because we'd loitered in Boston having gelato, but also because we'd wound up loitering in a Macdonald's in Waterbury, Connecticut, watching a uniformly gangsta-dressed populace queue up for McChickens, while two Russian guys hunkered over a game of chess. I can't explain why this scene fascinated me, but it did.

Where Have You Been?

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:43:00 +0000

Because I haven't seen you in -- oh. Wait. You've been right here all this time, tapping your foot, wondering if we'd died out here or what.

Well, we haven't died. We haven't even had heatstroke yet, which for the Fourth of July week in Fiat is saying something, let me tell you. No, no, nothing's wrong. We've just been . . . busy.

Doing what, you ask.

Oh, you know. Washing our hair. Stuff like that.

Traveling. Pictures to follow, sometime.

Picking cucumbers and more cucumbers.

Making sourdough starter, crackers, and bread. Also yogurt.

Going to Mass a lot.

Updating the Abandon Hopefully curriculum site -- Grade 10 is almost finished, lacking only some more Shakespearean and historical resources, some art and music and theological writing, to round out a medieval/Renaissance humanities course. Grade 9 is put-near done, too.

Lesson planning. Why I obsess so fervently over plans I so quickly forsake for better things, I do not know, but this has come to be my summer mode. What's in my plans, you ask? Well . . .

1. The Baldwin Project. It occurred to me not long ago, as I was scrolling through their beyond-excellent list of vintage children's titles, that one could do worse than simply to read through everything -- or as near everything as might be reasonably expected -- on that website. In the lower grades, at any rate, do a broad spectrum of Baldwin reading, some copywork and other writing, and a good math program, and you got yourself a edumacation. As they say.

Anyway, every year I look at The Baldwin Project and think, This is incredible! Every year, promptly I exit the site, I forget what I saw that looked so good. This year I sat down with booklist forms from Donna Young, and I went down the list of titles at the site, and I made a reading plan for each of the three children who will still be at home this year. For Amicus, who'll be an eighth grader, I went heavy on the world history and geography. For Helier I went heavy on titles beginning with the words The Boy's Book of. Crispina's going to be reading her way through anthologies with names like Kindergarten Gems, which I hope she doesn't notice, since no self-respecting second grader really wants to be seen in public with a book that says kindergarten.

2. Math. Did I mention that I'd found a good math program? I had seen the Mathemathics Enhancement Programme mentioned glowingly on various homeschooling forums and websites, but when I'd looked over the student materials, all I'd thought was, "Eh . . . this looks random." Finally, though, after reading yet more glowing reviews of the MEP curriculum, I went back for a more thorough look, and this time I bothered to read the prepared lesson plans. My goodness, what had I been missing? A lot, as it turns out. Each page of each random-looking practice book comes with a 45-minute scripted lesson plan which takes the student through mental math challenges, work on the whiteboard, and independent practice. This is a teacher-intensive program, but in our limited experience with it so far, well worth the investment of maternal time and energy. There's also a very helpful Yahoo support group for homeschooling families using MEP.

3. More free online curriculum. I've played around a good bit lately with a program called Head of the Class. We're not especially worksheet- or kids-on-computers-based in our homeschool, but via their handy "customize curricula" function, I've been able to draw up a sequence of online applications in math, spelling, art, music, science, and geography for Helier and Crispina to work on independently, as I need them to work independently, plus arranging to have cursive-writing worksheets (ok, we're using worksheets some) queued up regularly for us to print out. From a Charlotte-Mason-ish, literature-based perspective, a program like this looks too thin to stand on its own as a full curriculum, but were I to be ill or otherwise need the kids to work completely autonomously, the math and language-arts curricula are thorough enough to reassure me that if we had to cut back to the bone, core knowledge would be covered.

4. Evernote. Yet another resource I read about on a homeschool forum: an online plus a downloadable desktop application, for organizing information. You make "notebooks," ie folders, for collecting .pdf files and .jpeg image files, typed notes to yourself, web pages which the free "web clipper" function allows you to paste into your notebooks, and more. The free version allows you 60 MB of space, which I'm fast using up, but I'm trying to be disciplined and not surrender to the allure of the paid, premium level, which allows you everything everything everything in your wildest dreams not necessarily excluding a yacht. Nah, I'll live with my 60 MB, thanks . . .

I am thinking of setting up an Evernote for Amicus, however, particularly if we -- and this is a gargantuan if -- acquire another family computer. Our old iMac desktop has done put up its legs in the air and died, and life in this house currently is one long wrestling match over my (personal, private, bought-for-work) laptop. Though it is true that in general we are not a terribly kids-on-computers homeschool, still a lot of what he does for school happens online. He uses KhanAcademy.org, for example, extensively for math and science instruction; I'd also like to collect sites like this one into folders for him to access with ease. Eighth grade for him is looking a lot like throwing meat into the tiger cage and running away, and I can foresee Evernote's usefulness in keeping the meat organized, fresh, and readily available for devouring.

So, there you go. This and that. We are here, and we have a pulse. More will be revealed.

Garden Notes and Other Matters, Not In That Order

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 02:26:00 +0000

The grad-jee-ation done been had, and the company done gone home. Now what?

Well, for starters, I'm stressing out about being on tv. I'd tell you when I'm going to be on tv, but I don't really know, exactly; the taping is next week, but the show won't air immediately. I'd tell you what I'm going to talk about on tv (the topic, surprise surprise, is homeschooling), but the truth is, what I'm thinking about most is what to wear. What to wear? WHAT TO WEAR?

What to do with my hair would be a close second.

Yes, I've already visited about umpteen billion fashion and media websites in search of inspiration, so I know not to wear white, red, or little migraine-inducing patterns, and apparently my hair shouldn't be shiny, either, which should not actually be that much of a problem, since I don't have the shiny kind of hair.

But perhaps I should be getting over myself now.

The garden has not these image problems, so let us spend some time with it instead.

A shot of the whole vegetable garden, which flanks the driveway

Cukes vs. Marigolds

Marigold Wins Beauty Contest

Thyme not bad either

Pole beans on teepee trellis

Zinnia, baby!

And in the regular old flower garden:

This purple coneflower reminds me somehow of those stuffed-toy dogs that are all nose.

Bachelor Buttons re-seeded this year.

Pansies hanging in there, thoughtful as always.

Someday I hope to be back with something thoughtful myself. Something passing as thought would be nice, but while we're waiting, the flowers are nice to look at.

Some Quick Takes: Graduation Edition

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Fri, 27 May 2011 20:54:00 +0000

It's true. Homeschooling works. You insert child into Intake Slot A, and you turn the crank, all the while repeating things like, "Read the directions again," and, "You'll thank me someday," and eventually -- since I can't decide whether "after several eternities" or "an hour later" would be the more appropriate expression of the movement of time in these instances, "eventually" will have to do -- some unseen spigot splorts out a more or less convincingly fully-grown demi-adult. With, in our case, a driver's license and some spiffy thong sandals with metal stuff on them that she went out and bought with money earned by the sweat of whatever part of you sweats while babysitting. So you buy a diploma and give it to her.

*

Well, let me back up. You don't just give it to her, like, "Your diploma came in the mail. Here."

Non non non. Jamais jamais. Pas du tout. Et cetera. Jamais.

No, you talk other people with kids the same age into putting on a graduation with you, and you all tell yourselves that this will be simple, like, I don't know, your wedding or something, right?

*

Simple, like sending your graduation announcements, which you made up yourself on Snapfish using photos you had lying around, to the rented beach house where you plan to spend the week, because that way you'll get them out on time.

Simple, like it's not going to occur to you that the beach house might have no mailbox, and that this might pose some impediment to the valiant endeavors of the U.S. Postal Service.

*

The fun part is planning the music for the Mass of Thanksgiving. At least, if you're me that's the fun part. Here's what we're having, sung by a trio ensemble including me, with, I am sure, an accompaniment of choking up:

Introit: Regina Coeli
Processional: O God Beyond All Praising (Richard Proulx, arr.)

Kyrie and Gloria: Missa de Angelis

Psalm 40 (a not-bad setting from the ol' Respond and Acclaim book; Gospel Acclamation from same)

Offertory Hymn: I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light

Offertory Anthem: Hail, O Star That Pointest: it's really just a hymn setting, but we do it as an a capella soprano-alto duet, and the 18th-century tune and harmony are lovely.

Communion Mass Parts: Jubilate Deo Mass

Communion Antiphon: Non Nobis Domine (Byrd)

Just like this, only with two treble voices and a bass. Or maybe more like this, only with about thirty-eight fewer people, and a guy:

Communion Anthem: Jesu, Rex Admirabilis (Palestrina)

Communion Hymn: Love Divine, All Loves Excelling (Hyfrydol)

Retiring Procession: Holy God, We Praise Thy Name

*

Then they all come back in, and we have awarding of diplomas, and another retiring procession with Pomp and Circumstance, because you have to.

*

Then you have a swing dance, because you have to do that, too. And you feed the two hundred people in attendance hotdogs, because, after all, it's Memorial Day, and you are three homeschooling families on a grand total of three incomes.

*

But of course none of these things has happened yet, which means that I really do not have time to be writing this now.

*

I had never, before this week, connected the idea of the first day of the rest of your life with increased housecleaning. Today's revelation: The interior life involves a lot of fuming and spazzing. I suppose that this could be construed as speaking in tongues, and therefore a gift.

*

Snapfish has just written to say that they are overnighting the graduation announcements. Good thing we already had email. Meanwhile, if people out there have scrapbooks they're just dying to put a graduation announcement in -- any graduation announcement -- I think I may have a few to share.

*

And now I have to pass the computer along, because various younger siblings are . . . doing things . . . which I can't talk about publicly right now. And I have to tweak the grocery budget again.

Thanks, Jen!

Flipping Out

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Tue, 24 May 2011 22:43:00 +0000

Graduation next week. Company coming. Book review deadlines. House in chaos. Back soon.

News From the Land of Silence

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Wed, 18 May 2011 22:11:00 +0000

Mostly offline this week, but there's a new chapter up at the story blog. Boo-yah, baby.

(newbies: it's a private blog, but if you want to read, drop me an email and I'll send you an invitation)

Floodwaters

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:37:00 +0000

And a dude in a boat: my brother in the Washington Post.

Screen Porch Sunday

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sun, 08 May 2011 19:25:00 +0000

Okay, so whenever I read home-makeover kinds of articles about houses with screened porches, the makeover almost always begins with getting rid of the screened porch. Look how much more light and airy! Look how open! Look how now there's nothing to stop the bugs getting in and the dog running away!

Apparently in makeoverland the screened porch is a liability. For us, however, it was the number-one selling point. We would have bought a cardboard box to live in, as long as it had a screened porch. That this one came with an indoors attached was a bonus. Never mind that right now, if you're on this porch, you have to be careful where you step, unless you want a tour of the crawlspace. It's still the best room in the house.

A Screened Porch in the Country

All of them are sitting
Inside a lamp of coarse wire
And being in all directions
Shed upon darkness,
Their bodies softening to shadow, until
They come to rest out in the yard
In a kind of blurred golden country
In which they more deeply lie
Than if they were being created
Of Heavenly light.

Where they are floating beyond
Themselves, in peace,
Where they have laid down
Their souls and not known it,
The smallest creatures,
As every night they do,
Come to the edge of them
And sing, if the can,
And if they can't, simply shine
Their eyes back, sitting on haunches,

Pulsating and thinking of music.
Occasionally, something weightless
Touches the screen
With its body, dies,
Or is unmurmuringly hurt,
But mainly nothing happens
Except that a family continues
To be laid down
In the midst of its nightly creatures,
Not one of which openly comes

Into the golden shadow
Where the people are lying,
Emitted by their own house
So humanly that they become
More than human, and enter the place
Of small, blindly singing things,
Seeming to rejoice
Perpetually, without effort,
Without knowing why
Or how they do it.

James Dickey
from Contemporary American Poetry
A. Poulin, ed.
Houghton Mifflin Company
1980

A golden evening to all.

Saturday Night Music

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Sat, 07 May 2011 21:32:00 +0000

Scholarship Alert!

noreply@blogger.com (Sally Thomas) — Thu, 05 May 2011 20:57:00 +0000

Still trying to make that college decision? Think nobody has any money left to give away? Think it's all beyond your reach?

Think again.

H/T several places today, but most recently here.