Carking Cares

I've turned back to my favorite comfort novels during this unsettling time and to favorite garden and food writers.

In one of my Richardson Wright books the longtime editor-in-chief of House & Garden Magazine writes of admiring one breed of wine enthusiasts, "a small coterie of rare souls, who write in true humility, men endowed with the sure and penetrating touch of the mysteries."

One he quotes often in his books is André Simon, often enough that I squealed with delight when I found an old book written by Simon in a thrift store. More on that another time, possibly, but here is the quote that Wright, a layman Episcopalian, was taken by:

Wit is not sold in bottles over the counter. Wit is in us as the spark is in the flint; wine strikes the flint of the intelligence and sparks cheer in the gloom; but it must be flint, not chalk, if there are to be sparks. Nor will any quantity of the best wine remove carking cares. Carking cares are a physic trouble not of the body but of the soul, and the soul liveth by the finest wine of all, a wine that is a food with a drug action a hundredfold greater than that of the best red or white wines; its name is Faith.

I had never heard the term carking cares but found that it is a Middle English term that means "to be burdened with trouble; worry."

Anyone experienced that recently? I have.

Those that be are searching for cures right now but maybe André Simon is right and the cure for our present personal carking cares is faith. 

I've known that all along and consider faith as my personal spiritual gift but it sure is good to be reminded, daily and often, especially at 3:30 a.m.

Know what I mean?
 

 

Sweet Memories and Sorrow

My mother and I on my second birthday....

Less than a week after my last post my beautiful mother slipped peacefully away to her heavenly home, probably feeling that it was past time to join my father, already there for many years.

My sisters and I miss them both so much but we are full to the brim with wonderful memories and so thankful to have been their four daughters.  

Though her passing was not unexpected at 95 years old, the depth of the sorrow my sisters and I have experienced was more than we ever could have imagined. 

Thank you for your thoughts and prayers for our mother's big family and for the families devastated by today's tornadoes in Nashville. All of our family is safe but so many have lost their homes and some the places where they worked and others have lost their lives. 
 

A Certain Slant of Light

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses...

Sorry, Emily, not in my kitchen!

 

Hello February!

I love February! Do you?

Hal Borland, editorial writer for The New York Sunday Times from 1942 to 1970, and one of my favorite nature writers described this short month beautifully....

Here comes February, a little girl with her first valentine, a red bow in her wind-blown hair, a kiss waiting on her lips, a tantrum just back of her laughter. She is young as a kitten, changeable as the wind, and into everything. She can sulk, she can beam, she changes from one minute to the next...

February is soup and mittens, and it is a shirt-sleeve day that demands an overcoat before sundown. It is forsythia buds opening in the house and skid chains clanking on the highway. February is sunrise at 6:30 for the first time since November. 

February is a gardener pruning his grape vines today and shoveling a two-foot drift off the front walk tomorrow morning. It is a farmer wondering this week if his hay will last the Winter, and next week wondering if he should start plowing. It is tiny catkins on the alder in the swamp and skunk cabbage thrusting a green sheath up through the ice. February is the tag end of Winter--we hope. But in our hearts we know it isn't Spring, not by several weeks and at least a dozen degrees. 

Hal Borland, 1900-1978

Is it just me or do you love to greet February too? 

  

Every Day in the Garden: January 25 - 31

I've made it through one month in this series but admit to fudging a couple of days this last week.

 [Ha! Fudge #1, this is actually a photo our daughter took from her car and sent us, saying that this is their idea of a traffic jam in their town in Montana.]

[RH and his brother on our backyard project.]

[Fudge #2, since James Mason made it in the pics this week, BreeBree thought she should too! Like her mama, she's a little bit too much of a couch potato.]

Thank you for visiting here! I've had a tough time getting pictures for my blogs since Christmas when my normal lens on our camera stopped focusing. So I've had to use either the close up lens or the telephoto lens. Or my phone where sometimes my Mac just refuses to import them. 

Our son, a professional photographer, has advised me to forget about using the camera and retire my Android phone for an I-Phone. I know I need to do that but goodness gracious, I dread learning how to use one!

Any bloggers or Instagramers visiting? What do you use for capturing good pictures?

Every Day in the Garden: January 11-24

I've always thought of March as fickle but this January is borrowing from her younger sister's fame. Bright and sunny one day, dreary icy cold the next, blustery clear, twice dustings of snow. 

What to wear? What to do, stay home or go somewhere?

What have you been doing these January days? Have you been out and about or cocooning inside? 

Here's the second part of my new Every Day in the Garden series, a way to get me outside for a few minutes each day even if once or twice my pajamas were underneath my coat.

 

                     [as far as I ventured one day; still loving
                     the little wreath on kitchen door]

                    [never made it outside at all on 22nd;
                     borrowed pic from 1/22/2019]

                          [RH's backyard project is coming
                            along nicely.]

Little Women Movies

I've not yet seen the new Little Women but if you have, please tell me what you thought about it. 

When I saw this picture of Jo and Laurie, I started thinking about the actors who played them in three previous movies.

 This must be how Norman Rockwell thought of them when commissioned to paint this full page color illustration for Women's Home Companion in the January 1938 issue to accompany Katharine Anthony's four-part biography of the author, Louisa May Alcott.

Honestly, not how I pictured either of them. What do you think? And what was Norman Rockwell thinking?

Not counting some television adaptations, I thought back to the three movies I've seen, from 1933, 1949, and 1994.

In 1933's version Katharine Hepburn played Jo and Douglass Montgomery played Laurie.  Despite the distinctive two s's in Douglass (is that how to type it-- two s's?), he left no lasting impression on me. 

Hepburn? She was okay, I guess. But Spring Byington as Marmee, never!

However, Edna May Oliver as Aunt March was inspired! Remember her in Pride and Prejudice as Lady Catherine? Same type and perfect. 

Then in 1949 came June Allyson as Jo and Peter Lawford as Laurie. I love June but think she belongs better in WW II movies as the soft voiced patient wife, not as Jo. Lawford wasn't bad as Laurie, but oh my goodness, handsome Rossano Brazzi as Professor Bhaer won my heart!

I liked Mary Astor as Marmee and Elizabeth Taylor was darling as Amy.  Whatever incredible genetics went to make up Taylor's eyes, I want some!

I admit to being partial to Winona Ryder as Jo in the 1994 production. I just think she played Jo right. And I thought Christian Bale was Laurie! Gabriel Byrne was good as the professor, Claire Danes as Beth, and Susan Sarandon as Marmee. Kirsten Dunst was perfect as spoiled Amy and Samantha Mathis, however unrealistically, turned into a lovely Amy grown up. Mary Wickles was a delightful Aunt March. 

The one character I've failed to mention is sister Meg. Why do we not really think of Meg? It's been years since I read Little Women and I can't remember whether the written character was as forgettable as the movie versions of Meg.

In the biography of Louisa May Alcott in the 1938 Woman's Home Companion, Katharine Anthony wrote a lot about Alcott's trip to Europe as paid companion to the invalid daughter of a wealthy family. On the trip she met a handsome Polish pianist named Ladislas Wisniewski. A lot is known of the time the two spent in Paris where he kissed her hand goodbye when she had to return to America, and it was assumed that the young man who was thirteen years her junior had proposed marriage.

Nothing is really known about why nothing ever came of it. 

Several American men thought themselves to be Laurie but Alcott herself later said that "Laurie was really Ladislas Wisniewski."

Have you seen the new Little Women movie? I'd love to know what you thought about it! 

Of all the Little Women movies you've seen, which did you like the best?

           Who was your favorite Jo? Laurie? etc.?