Resolutions? "Folly, folly, all folly!"

 Tell us how you really feel about New Year's Resolutions, Phyllis McGinley!

Phyllis McGinley: "I'm not sure anyone over forty should make a resolution."

Being over 40, or even 60 since 60 is evidently the new forty, I have no problem ignoring any desire to make New Year's Resolutions. (Let's not even discuss what over 70 might be.)

Any further arguments against resolutions from the 1961 Pulitzer prize winning poet?

Phyllis McGinley:  We promise to deprive ourselves of the trivial comforts that may be all that stand between us and frenzy. Coffee, for instance, or that martini before dinner...

Folly, folly, all folly! Those promises might stand a chance of being kept in June, say, with the spirits burgeoning along with roses and summer barbecues. In spring, when the year really begins. But in winter, no.

 Applause, applause!!

No, I intend to spoil myself with every small comfort January 2021 will offer, although my comforts tend to run to fresh flowers and perfume and a good book rather than martinis. (Let's not talk about desserts here, either.)

I'm not about to turn down anyone else offering to spoil me, either.

No, siree, bring it on!

Remembering Phyllis McGinley and one author leads to another.

Phyllis McGinley, March 21, 1905 to February 22, 1978.

Every March I've meant to write on her birthday about this American Pulitzer Prize poet who meant so much to me as a young married woman. Not for her poetry, I had yet to discover that, but for her book of essays called Sixpence in Her Shoe, the old faded red book in the picture below.

 It was the first contemporary book I had read that made homemaking sound attractive in an age of Betty Friedan back in the early 1960s.

I think that McGinley is responsible for plunging me headlong into a lifetime of love for houses. All kinds of houses. Trying them on for size in my mind if not in my life. Constantly playing the game of "what kind of house do I want" even before RH and I ever bought one.

Admit it, you've done it too.

Avidly, I read McGinley's words:

And charm in a dwelling is like charm in a woman. It is a mysterious essence compounded of warmth, character, and a welcoming countenance.

The right house, no matter what its period, must pluck you by the sleeve and say, "Take me. We were meant for each other."

I loved the stories of how McGinley set about furnishing and decorating the houses she and her husband and daughters moved to, lapping up her advice on all of it.

But natural good taste is rare. A few lucky souls have it from the cradle like long eyelashes or perfect pitch. Most of us simply muddle along with our prejudices or our predilections instead.

I had no prejudices or predilections as a young married woman and natural good taste was not handed out to me in the cradle. I was a blank slate but knew I was. I did have that going for me.

We proceed by trial and error. We work and we plan and we read the instructions and we study other people's triumphs. Then if our surroundings really matter to us, if we are willing to use our eyes and our wits, we gradually acquire what is even better than taste: minds of our own.

It is only the mindless house which is dull...A house which charms and welcomes does not need to conform to any current fashion. But it must wear its owner's signature.

At least the houses I inevitably admire do wear that signature. They are not necessarily ones I want to copy or to live in. I enjoy them because they mirror the character of the friends who planned them.

Bingo!

 The rest of the book, on many other subjects, is equally as good, and still as relevant today as when I first read it in 1964.

Decades later I bought McGinley's Pulitzer Prize Poetry book, Times Three. I came late to loving poetry. It was not until I said to heck with poetry and started reading it as prose that I discovered I loved it. 

And it was an author of fiction who led me by a roundabout way to buy McGinley's poetry book. 

 
 I bought my first Alexander McCall Smith book that happened to be his first of the Isabel Dalhousie series.

The Sunday Philosophy Club's philosopher Isabel was like a bolt of lightning in my life. I had never thought much about philosophers but if Isabel was one, I liked them a lot.

A few Isabel books later I noticed that she was an ardent fan of a poet I hadn't read since high school, W. H. Auden. I won't use any Auden quotes from the Isabel books here because this is primarily a love letter to Phyllis McGinley but I took sharp notice of my favorite lady philosopher's love of the poet she called WH and ordered his big book of poetry. 

Fell in love. With 50% of the poems, not bad for a prose-reading woman. 

Then at a Goodwill, where I always look for older books, I spotted a book by Phyllis McGinley. However, it was a book of her poems and would I really read a book of what I thought would be like the humorous McGinley poems that had been in my mother's women's magazines? Even if I still loved her Sixpence in Her Shoe?

I opened it up and discovered that the long foreword was by an admirer of her work, no other than W. H. Auden himself.

For eight pages Auden quotes and praises McGinley's poems.

Holy cow! I nodded and empathized and laughed my way through McGinley's Times Three. Even when she poked fun and denigrated the South and our enthusiasm for ham.

Ham,
Ham,
Not lamb or bacon
But ham in Raleigh
And ham in Macon.
Ham for plutocrats,
Ham for pore folk,
Ham in Paducah and ham in Norfolk;
In Memphis, ham, and in Chapel Hill,
Chattanooga,
And Charlottesville.
Ham for the Missy,
Ham for the Colonel,
And for the traveler, Ham Eternal.

Oh, patriotically I implore,
Look away, Dixieland, from the smokehouse door.
--Phyllis McGinley, from "Notes for a Southern Road Map"

I laughed but I admit to another thought running through my mind, something to the effect of, well, honey chile, head back north if that's the way you feel. Just kidding. No, actually I'm not. But I do still love you, Phyllis.


That's probably more than enough poetry or prose from me now, but in my enthusiastic delve into poetry while pulling together a birthday salute to Phyllis McGinley, I pulled another favorite poetry book off the shelf,  Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Poems. 

I opened it up and discovered a little treasure inside, a pretty card from my mother from many years ago. When I saw the unicorn I knew I had to save it for our youngest granddaughter who is passionate about unicorns, or she was at Christmas.

I won't share the whole message with you as much of it was personal family news but I smiled to read that my father had brought home some purple grapes and she had made eight cups of grape jelly. 

To my three sisters, if you're reading this, wouldn't you love to have some of Mama's homemade jelly again? 

 Do any of you reading this, whether you ever comment or not, do you tuck cards and notes into books that you're reading, to be found years later? Don't you love it when you find them?

And don't you love it when the love of one author leads to another author? And on and on it goes, discovering one book after another. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

And have you ever been blessed to walk in a house for sale and have it "pluck you by the sleeve and say 'take me'?"

St. Nicholas Day

When I found this photo yesterday in our family Christmas scrapbooks I was also watching the memorial service for President George H.W. Bush.

Tears were flowing during the eulogies for the memories of this remarkable man, mixed with smiles as I turned page after page of family Christmases. 

Okay, I admit there were a few mama tears shed as I looked through the scrapbooks too but only happy ones. 

And I even chuckled as I remembered our St. Nicholas Day pancake breakfasts on December 6th, remembering those two above opening small gifts from the pack of St. Nick and how our youngest told me at a later St. Nick breakfast that he got lots of flak from his fellow 5th grade friends for believing in the old gentleman. 

I believe in believing!

Happy St. Nicholas Day!

Nicholas, Bishop of Myra's See,
Was holy a saint
As a saint could be;
Saved not a bit
Of his worldly wealth
And love to commit
Good deeds by stealth. (etc.)
           Phyllis McGinley

The Shortest Day, Blankets and Books

I love the shortest day of the year, do you?

"The shortest day and thus,

by implication,

the darkest week."

Ronald Blythe

Do you know Ronald Blythe? I think of him as a British Father Tim, resembling Jan Karon's dear parish priest, but not a character of fiction--then again, not many Karon fans think of Tim as fictional, do we?

Word from Wormingford is my favorite Blythe book, and it has stayed on my bed table since November of 1998.

Blythe uses illustrations by the World War II artist John Nash. Blythe was a close friend of Nash's and his wife Christine. I especially love the above illustration, as I am very fond of art with window views.

Here's more of Blythe's words written on the shortest day of the year, and I think you'll understand why I love them:

"Now I have to read.

Reading has always been my way to the Way,

always my way of knowing anything."

Ronald Blythe

That just hits the nail on the head for me. If there's one thing I know for sure it is that the Word led me to Christ, and the Word is the only way I find my way along life's path.

In my time away from blogging after we lost our darling dachshunds Otis and Milo, I turned to the Psalms for comfort. But I also turned to my collection of Christmas books, devouring them for comfort and escape, letting simple stories ease my heart.

Here are two that I took to bed with me this month of long dark nights, actual dark nights that fell early and dark nights of the spirit when I longed to pet the silky ears of Otis and Milo, missing from my bedroom.

Anything from Miss Read comforts my spirit and No Holly for Miss Quinn is a book I save for December each year. It's good, it's easy, and it's not stuffed with sentiment that would reduce me to mush this month.

"She recognized her own limitations.

She liked her own company.

She liked the tranquility of her natural surroundings.

She had more than enough people

around her during office hours,

and Holly Lodge she hoped 

would be her refuge from them.

She spent most of the evening by the fire,

relishing her solitude...

her posting was done.

A box containing Christmas presents,

to be given by hand to Joan

and other local friends,

was on a shelf in the kitchen cupboard.

The milkman was going to deliver

a small chicken in two days' time,

ready for her modest Christmas dinner."

Miss Read

Miss Read's books are illustrated by the famed and beloved artist J S Goodall.

I have one of his wordless books, An Edwardian Christmas, that I use each Christmas for my personal Advent Calendar.

Phyllis McGinley's poems were a part of my newlywed years and I needed their acerbic wit, spot on as much today as they were in the 1960s and 70s. McGinley was known as "the best writer of light verse" in the US in those days. I loved her because she was both a city mouse and country mouse, extolling the virtues and flaws of both with tongue in cheek.

City Christmas

Now is the time when the great urban heart

More warmly beats, exiling melancholy.

Turkey comes table d'hote or a la carte.

Our elevator wears a wreath of holly...

There is a promise--or a threat--of snow

Noised by the press. We pull our collars tighter.

And twenty thousand doormen hourly grow 

Politer and politer and politer. 

 Phyllis McGinley

 I remember being one of the capable wives and mothers of those years when I read McGinley. We put on our panty girdles, took a bus to the city and marched to the office, then went home and donned a frilly apron. We were feminists and homemakers.

What? You think only young women today are true feminists? Honey, we were demanding R-E-S-P-E-C-T in the 1960s too...not that we always got it, but then women today don't always either. It will come if we insist and teach our daughters to insist and our sons that it's the right thing to do.

I don't often get on my soapbox so I'm a little tuckered out 
and it's 8:33 p.m. right now as I'm writing this on the shortest day of the year so I'm heading to bed.

Which brings me to one other thing I love....blankets.

100% wool blankets, to be precise, those comforting covers that get put on my bed November through March.

They have to have satin covered hems.

Satin to hold in my hands the same way I did when I was a child to soothe myself to sleep. Just the same, only I don't suck my thumb now. 

This red one is my favorite. I've had it for decades and it's shrunk through washings and dryings. I look forward to the day each fall that this beauty goes on my bed.

I've only had this lighter weight green blanket a few years, bought on eBay, made by the same company that made my red one. 

And the Fairbault Woolen Mills still make them but you might need to look at eBay for the beautiful ones like mine.

The one in the gorgeous illustration at the top is a St. Mary's blanket. Isn't it beautiful? Can you imagine pulling that one up to your chin on a frosty winter night? I'm looking for one like that too. 

Tonight may be the longest night this year but there are still quite a few ahead before Spring arrives. So grab a good book and a blanket and go to bed early. 

I am. I'm already 46 minutes past the time of my being offline rule so goodnight and sweet dreams, enjoy the rest of December.

Love to you,

Dewena

"The Night Is Moonstruck"

Halloween

by Phyllis McGinley

The night is moonstruck, the night is merry.

Haunted by shades abroad together...

They cast long shadows, or roly-poly.

They tamper with doorbells. They chalk the stairs…

Swarming past hedges like sparrow flocking,

The gravel cracking beneath their feet,

Flutter the children. When they come knocking,

Open the door to them, Trick or Treat.

Open the door to phantom and vagrant,

Whistle them in from the wild outside…

Comfort them quickly with candied apples.

Stay them with pennies and lollypops.

Or they may forget how their beds are standing--

Sheets turned down, and a light in the hall--

Coax them, wheedle them, call to them fonder

Than ever you did on an evening yet…

Treat them or trick them. But bar the door

Till the Shade is bewitched to a child once more.

A Happy & Safe Halloween to Each of You!

We hope you enjoyed these old photographs of our children when they were young--and the two new ones of granddaughter Nora enjoying Trunk or Treat at church as Tinker Bell. She had so much fun!

R.H. & I hope you'll return here to Across the Way tomorrow for our
First-Year Blog Anniversary post!