A Man After My Own Heart

 

Are RH and I some of the few who love storms?

Granted, we've never been hurt in a tornado and escaped to sunny Destin when Hurricane Matthew neared our home in Ponte Vedra Beach. 

Even the epic ice storm in Nashville of  1994 where we stood with Zack and Defee at the picture window and watched trees in the yard being snapped in two was so awesome (full of awe) that we weren't afraid, only mesmerized by the sight and sounds.

I am so glad that RH shares my love of storms and love of weather, all kinds of weather. We love every seasonal change.

Another man after my own heart is Jessamyn West's Jess, married to the Quaker minister, Eliza. In the movie Friendly Persuasion Jess is played by Gary Cooper and Eliza by Dorothy McGuire and I always pictured these two actors when I read West's Friendly Persuasion and Except for Me and Thee. 

Eliza liked weather herself: sun and a brisk wind on washday, warm weather when her Plymouth Rocks hatched...she liked to hear weather busy doing its duty; sending the windmill around, distributing a leisurely rain once the corn was in, snapping the nails in a hard frost when fall fruits needed a touch of cold for mellowing. But Jess relished weather, it seemed, for its own sake. Hailstones big as pullet eggs cutting the corn to shreds, and Jess in the thick of it gathering up buckets full like diamonds. The wind so strong the log cabin, low as it was, quivered like an old dog beat down to its haunches, and Jess out, hat off, mouth open, gulping down draughts of air like a doctor's prescribed medicine. 

Jessamyn West

Except for Me and Thee

  

I always loved Jess for this. And I love RH for this too!

And speaking of RH, he just yelled in the door to turn on the TV, there's a big storm approaching. Uh oh, five minutes until another front like this one above from the other day reaches us.

Got to go get some pictures and gulp down some rain fresh air--and pray we keep our electricity. RH is madly trying to finish cutting the grass.

He's a man after my own heart. 

The Scent of Water's Col. & Mrs. Adams

For years I have meant to review Elizabeth Goudge's The Scent of Water, especially after rereading it in the days following the loss of our twin dachshunds Milo and Otis in the fall of 2017. 

Night after night my reward for getting through the day was getting into bed with The Scent of Water. It was the courage and dignity of two minor characters in the book, Col. & Mrs. Adams who were living in necessary frugality in their Holly Cottage, who helped give me courage to face the next morning.

And so I will simply share with you here Goudge's words about this remarkable couple who I wish had a book of their own, themselves the main characters. 

Here are Elizabeth Goudge's Col. & Mrs. Adams:

They did not have supper, just cocoa and bread and butter when they went to bed, cocoa being cheap...

 The fact was that by the time they had done the work that had to be done in the cottage, cooked and eaten their frugal lunch and washed up afterwards, they were tired and couldn't do much more for the rest of the day except sit; out in the garden in warm weather, in front of the fire in winter.

Colonel Adams was eighty-two and crippled with arthritis. He had suffered with a grim and humorous heroism for many years though now the joints were fixed and he was in less pain; but it was difficult to get about on his two sticks. Mrs. Adams was younger, a little creature who hardly reached her husband's shoulder, but her physique had not been equal to the strain of bearing her four sons, losing three of them in the war and having the fourth turn out so disappointing. Then had been the perpetual planning and contriving that had been necessary with the cost of living ceaselessly rising and Service pensions staying where they were. And so now she was delicate...

But if life had been hard for Mrs. Adams it had never occurred to her to think so, and her soft face was serene as a kitten's. It had never occurred to the Colonel to complain either. His lean brown face, with bushy white eyebrows and white calvary mustache was wrinkled in lines of perpetual good humor...

Colonel Adams finished his tea and turned his chair around to the fire and lit his pipe. The little room was shabby and charming...remnants of a beautiful carpet...yellow curtains and chair covers were faded and darned but still pretty. There were books, photographs of their children, and a few bits of rare china that could not be sold because they were cracked...Outside the window the evening light was turning the garden to magic and in the wood the cuckoo was still calling.

 Elizabeth Goudge in The Scent of Water

While there were other wonderful characters in this book, and I have a personal fondness for another minor character, Mrs. Hepplewhite who most people avoid like the plague, Col. & Mrs. Adams really tugged at my heartstrings.  

The whole community where the book takes place wrapped itself around my heart and I even rejoiced when the Adam's selfish sponging son had his own redemption story. 

Many layers make up The Scent of Water, not to mention the title itself that contains hidden meanings.

Finally, "What is the scent of water?"

The answer: 

     "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew." 

Have you read The Scent of Water? Did you enjoy it?

Any other Goudge fans out there?

 

 

Trying to Swing Back Into Blogging

[ad from Ladies' Home Journal June 1951]

It's not easy getting back into blogging after being absent two months but I'm really trying to.

There's been a mental block going on in my head every time I sit down to click on New Post. 

Know what I mean?

But I've missed this little ole space and my friends who met me here so I'll be trying hard this week to do it in between visits to PT. 

I always was afraid to try to swing high when I was young, but it was exciting. I don't think I'm quite ready to let the swing get rusty. Not yet.

So see you soon?

The Delights of April

Have you heard, dears?

       April is here!

Do you like my new silk dress?

       The color is called Rosemary.

You know, for remembrance. 

       I'm remembering all the delights of April.

I'm craving asparagus and shad roe and strawberries.

       At the same meal at my favorite restaurant, please.

A proposal on the same night would be lovely.

       Or at least a clutch of Parma violets edged with paper lace. 

I may look like a modern woman of 1930, but at heart?

       At heart I'm just an old-fashioned girl.

And it is sweet sentimental April, after all.

       What are you craving this April?


[Picture is an ad for silk fabric from my March 29, 1930 Vogue magazine.]

March Goodbye

 

Tomorrow I'll change the Kevin Dobbs calendar page from March to April.

But these three things tucked into the wire cookbook basket beside the calendar will stay there for a while.

 

They're a reminder of the miracle of spring arriving again but also of two people very special to me on either side of our little granddaughter.

The unicorn card on the left was written to me many years ago by my dear mother, and the card on the right of Japanese cherry trees in bloom is a Christmas card that was once sent to my father from a Japanese business associate. 

Isn't it beautiful? 

I hope it is as lovely a Spring where you live as it is here in Tennessee this year. As RH and I were out driving yesterday I saw one flowering tree after another, each seeming to outdo the previous one. 

I'm going to take time to enjoy Spring and I hope each of you will too, to the upmost! 

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'?"

Spring

Bits and pieces come back to me of past Springs...

And so many of them, 25 years, were part of this garden...

It was a Spring garden, essentially...
 

And it was a beautiful place.