Under the Gables

Lo, How a Rose E're Blooming

2012-01-06T18:08:00.000-08:00

For a beautiful Christmas post, see Lanier's Books.

Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton

2012-01-04T03:22:00.000-08:00

"We must pray literally without ceasing—without ceasing—in every occurrence and employment of our lives . . . that prayer of the heart which is independent of place or situation, or which is rather a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with Him."--Elizabeth Ann Seton

Today is the feast day for Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821), the first person born in the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church (1975). She is the patron saint of Catholic schools.

Born in New York to a prominent Episcopalian family, Elizabeth Ann Seton was left motherless at the age of three. Even as a child, she was dedicated to Christianity, wearing a small crucifix around her neck and taking delight in reading the Psalms. Psalm 23 remained her favorite prayer throughout her life. When she was 19 years old, Elizabeth married a New York businessman, to whom she was devoted. The couple had five children. Despite her many household duties, she found time to organize prominent women in New York City to visit the sick poor in their homes and bring them and their families sustenance. Inspired by the work of Saint Vincent de Paul, the group was called informally the "Ladies of Charity."

In December 1803, Elizabeth Ann Seton was widowed and lived for a period of time in Rome with the Italian family of her husband's business partner. Here she was introduced to the Catholic faith, and in March 1805 was received into the church, amid the protests of her family and friends. Faced with the necessity to support her children, Mrs. Seton sought teaching positions. In 1809, after several difficult years, she accepted the invitation of the Sulpicians Order to teach in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Here she founded the Saint Joseph's Academy and Free School for the education of Catholic girls, the first such school in the United States. She also established a religious community in Emmitsburg dedicated to the care of the children of the poor. She died at the age of 46 of tuberulosis, having already buried two of her daughters.

You can get a glimpse of the soul of this saint in the book Elizabeth Seton: Selected Writings edited by Ellin Kelly and Annabelle Melville. Here is a benediction that she wrote toward the end of her life:

Mary Queen and Virgin pure!--as poor unfledged Birds uncovered in our cold and hard nests on this Earth we cry to her for her sheltering outspread wings--little hearts not yet knowing sorrow--but poor tired and older ones pressed with pains and cares seek peace and rest--O our Mother! and find it in thee.--

Saint Genevieve of Paris

2012-01-02T16:05:00.000-08:00

Saint Genevieve by Hugo van der Goes, 1479

Women saints are exemplars of faith whose charitable work often resulted in the creation of new institutions and new precedents that changed the course of history. Saint Genevieve (420-502), the Patron Saint of Paris, was one of these saints, and January 3 is her feast day.

This faith-fueled woman is a saint for our time, especially because she appears to have been mentored by Saint Germanus (378-448), Bishop of Auxerre, who led the Church's fight against the Pelagian heresy in Britain at the behest of Pope Saint Celestine I. Pelagius (354-420) believed that man can be sinless and good all on his own and has no need of God's grace. The story goes that on his way to Britain in 429, Germanus stopped in Nanterre, France, where Genevieve, a young girl born of well-to-do parents, confided to him that she wanted to live only for God. Germanus encouraged her and sent her the veil of a dedicated virgin. When Genevieve's parents died when she was 15, she went to live with her godmother in Paris, where she devoted her days to prayer and charity and was reportedly visited again by Germanus.

Her life of devout piety though is not why Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris. In a foreshadowing of the peasant military heroine, Saint Joan, Saint Genevieve is credited with averting the destruction of Paris--twice. The first time was in 451, when the ferocious Attila the Hun was on a course straight for Paris. Genevieve told the terrified Parisians not to flee the city but to remain in their homes, fast, and pray, and she organized a prayer marathon. Abruptly Attila changed course, leaving Paris intact. The second time was when invading Franks had blockaded the city in 464. Genevieve ran the blockade to bring food to the starving Parisians. Later she pleaded successfully for Parisian prisoners of war to the Frankish King Childeric, and King Clovis liberated captives at her urging.

Hugo van der Goes painted Saint Genevieve on the outer panel for a diptych that depicted the Fall of Man on one side and the Redemption (the Lamentation of Christ) on the other, indicating the high esteem either he or his patrons (or both) had for Saint Genevieve 1,000 years later. She is also considered a patron saint of young girls.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

2011-12-31T22:38:00.001-08:00

Fine Arts Any Day: Vermeer's Lacemaker

2011-12-31T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Lacemaker by Johannes Vermeer, 1669-70.

In you are in England or heading that way, you have 15 days to see the exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge of Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence. The centerpiece of the exhibition is Vermeer's Lacemaker, which is on loan to the Fitzwilliam from The Louvre. Surrounding this masterpiece of an artisan rapt in concentration as she creates an object of beauty are paintings by both Vermeer and other artists of the 17th-century Golden Age of Dutch painting. The exhibition, as discussed in a wonderful podcast by its curator Betsy Wieseman, has been designed to probe the Dutch portrayal of that edge where private and public spaces meet, the secrets found in the private space, and the silence of women, especially, as with the lacemaker, when they are at work.

There are paintings of women in all kinds of stances and activities. A young girl eavesdrops as an older woman reprimands a young boy, a woman writes a letter with an engaging smile at the artist (now us), a woman sits with her back to us but her face is present in a mirror so we can see her secret-not-so-secret expression, an elderly woman with her back to us leans over to look out the window at the pale face of a child, a woman stands poised right at the edge of the private space looking down the street while her maid and a child are walking in the inner courtyard. These are some of the images painted by the Dutch artists of this period in their celebration of the sacrosanct domestic space that their national bourgeoisie carved out for their homes--drawing the line against the public space that homes used to be in the time of the Middle Ages.

For Vermeer, this celebration of private space was also a celebration of the soul. His portrayals of women in domesticity are transformed into great art through his painting of space here on earth unified and transformed by God's celestial light.

Although I have not been able to view this exhibition, I am grateful for the Fitzwilliam Museum of Cambridge University for organizing it. You can read more about Dutch interior space here and here.

Finally It Was Christmas!

2011-12-30T06:33:00.000-08:00

Finally it was Christmas, and in a whirlwind my daughter and I decorated the house and prepared a Christmas dinner. Aside from multiple food and tree disasters (reminding us that all's well that ends well), it was a real pleasure to prepare a Christmas dinner--the kind you eat only once a year--and feast with good friends in an atmosphere saturated with golden candlelight. In my mind I kept thinking of the candlelit Christmas dinnner John Keats had with the family of Fanny Braune, in Bright Star.

And God Bless You, Everyone!

Merry Christmas, Everyone!

2011-12-23T21:08:00.001-08:00

Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, 1475

Our Hope, Our Strength, Our Joy!

Fine Arts Friday: Winter in Pennsylvania

2011-12-15T19:56:00.000-08:00

For Curious Acorn...

Near New Hope

Here are paintings by Fern Isabel Coppedge, a painter of southeastern Pennsylvania, who lived from 1883 to 1951. According to her online biography, snow scenes were her favorite subject. "The residents of Bucks County often saw Fern I. Coppedge traipsing through the snow, draped in her bearskin coat with her sketching materials slung over her shoulder, seeking the perfect scene to paint." To me, she captures the stillness of winter snow and the quiet veil of eternity it gives us a glimmer of.

Here are more of her winter scene paintings.

Hillside Village

The Hill Road

Mountain Creek

Bucks County Scene

I hope to report more about Mrs. Coppedge in the new year.

Restraining Myself in Advent

2011-12-12T19:05:00.000-08:00

(Compliments of Anxious Moments)

Here in the great season of Advent I am trying to observe this time of penitence. This means to understand that the Christmas season does not begin until Christmas Eve, lasting through Epiphany to January 6--the 12 days of Christmas. In the meantime, we scrub our hearts and our homes as preparation for the birth of Christ. Since I do my Christmas shopping all year long, I do not have to join the commercialized Christmas frenzy. Inside I have an Advent wreath and candles. And instead of preemptive rejoicing and stringing white lights along the bushes in the front yard, as in other years, I have placed only the candles in the windows--a traditional signal of welcoming to the Lord, the true Light in the darkness. On December 24, I will string my lights outside and trim the tree. I can hardly wait...for Christmas.

First Sunday of Advent: Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord

2011-11-27T17:35:00.000-08:00

Saint Columba Altarpiece by Rogier van der Weyden, 1455.

Luke 1:26 to 38

And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, 27 To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. 28 And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

29 And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

30 And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. 31 And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. 32 He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: 33 And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

34 Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?

35 And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. 36 And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. 37 For with God nothing shall be impossible.

38 And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

2011-11-22T17:43:00.001-08:00

Autumn Gold by Fern Isabel Coppedge

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen.

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus

2011-10-23T17:47:00.000-07:00

Standing on a hill overlooking the city, the Philadelphia Museum of Art with banner showing Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus, part of the exhibition of Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus. Standing right under the banner, one sees a long set of stairs that meet the tree-lined Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with a view of the boulevard to City Hall.

Today I went to see the exhibition of Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus" at the Philadelphia Art Museum. Breaking with centuries of tradition, Rembrandt began to paint Christ on the basis of studies of living Jewish models, who it is believed may have lived in Rembrandt's own neighborhood, to which many Ashkenazi Jews came in 1648 from Eastern Europe. The Netherlands had opened its doors to Jews. Nora Hamerman has written a fascinating review of the exhibition.

Head of Christ by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1648-50

This painting of the Head of Christ is relatively small and far more moving than any print or Internet version of it, because of Rembrandt's detailed brushwork, particularly around the eyes, which gets washed out in the prints. Through this detail, which distinguishes Rembrandt's Heads of Christ from those of his studio pupiles, the great Dutch painter portrays a Christ with the emotions of one who took upon himself the sins of the world.

Rembrandt placed a high importance on his studies of Christ's face, keeping two of his oil studies in his bedroom.

The exhibition ends in Philadelphia on October 30. But there is good news if you are in the Midwest. The exhibition, which collects Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and prints from many museums, will be at the Detroit Institute of Arts from Sunday November 20, 2011, to Sunday February 12, 2012.

Small Town Life in America: Five Good Reads

2011-10-21T06:22:00.000-07:00

(All paintings by Childe Hassam, 1859-1935)

The small town was long considered to be the backbone of America, but now small towns struggle to survive as our agricultural life is increasingly curtailed and young people move to the cities and their mega-environs seeking higher-paying jobs and greater opportunities. In my meandering journey to "read America" (having seen only its eastern seaboard), I have been reading novels that take place in small towns and in which the town plays a role, in part to understand what a small town is, as opposed to the suburbs that have so defined American life since the 1950s. Here are four of my favorite novels and one play about small town life from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century.

Outskirts of East Gloucester, 1918

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1896

"After a first brief visit made two or three summers before..., a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all the mixture of remoteness and the childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a crowd of spectators, and the youngest portion of the company followed her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town."

Main Street East Hampton, 1920

Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell, 1948

"To arrive at some idea of the culture of a certain street in a Middle Western small town shortly before the First World War, is a much more delicate undertaking [than an archaeological dig]. For one thing, there are no ruins to guide you. Though the houses are not kept up as well as they once were, they are still standing.... In every yard a dozen landmarks (here a lilac bush, there a sweet syringa) are missing. There is no telling what became of the hanging fern baskets with American flags in them or of all those red geraniums. The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization."

Maxwell's book is a heart-breaking story of a marriage in the first decade of the 20th century in which the town itself wields a strong influence as the novel takes us across the tracks and to the town center. Maxwell paints all of his characters and their actions with a brush that is dipped in compassion but still pointed enough to go straight to the heart of the matter.

East Gloucester, End of the Trolley, 1895

Intruder in the Dust by William Faulkner, 1948

"If you got something outside the common run that's got to be done and cant wait, dont waste your time on the menfolks; they works on what your uncle calls the rules and the cases. Put the womens and the children at it; they works on the circumstances."

A young man, Chick Mallison, nephew of the town lawyer, and Miss Eunice Habersham go to work to clear an African-American, who has been hauled to jail and is in danger of being lynched, of charges of murdering a white man. Miss Habersham was a "kinless spinster of 70 living in the columned colonial house on the edge of town which had not been painted since her father died and had neither water nor electricity in it, with two Negro servants [a married couple].... Miss Habersham and the man [servant] raised chickens and vegetables and peddled them about town from the pickup truck."

November in Cos Cob, 1902

The next two should be read back to back, since the second awakens our affection and near-envy of the simplicity and community that give our ideas of small-town life a radiant ambiance, while the first takes a look at thwarted longings and nightmares.

Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, 1919

"The old man had listed hundreds of truths in his book.... There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and poverty, of thrift and profligacy, of carelessness and abandon.... And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them. It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth became a falsehood."

Church in a New England Village, 1901

Our Town by Thornton Wilder, 1938

"Stage Manager: The name of the town is Grover's Corners, New Hampshire--just across the Massachusetts line: latitude 42 degrees 40 minutes, longitude 70 degrees 37 minutes. The First Act shows a day in our town. The day is May 7, 1901. The time is just before dawn. The sky is beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East there, behind our mount'in. The morning star always gets wonderful bright the minute before it has to go, doesn't it?"

Revolutionary Road: First Step in an Exploration

2011-10-12T11:13:00.000-07:00

A 1950s modern home interior.

Earlier this month I read the book Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (1926-1992) and then watched the 2008 film of the same name starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet. Richard Yates made his name with this book in 1961. A novelist whose novels resided far from the bestseller lists, Yates is being apprised anew, especially with the release of Revolutionary Road and the acknowledgement of their debt to him from more current writers such as Richard Ford.

Winslet, especially, and di Caprio put in fine performances as the central couple of the book, Frank and April Wheeler, who live the life of typical suburbanites: April is a housewife, there are two children, and Frank works in New York City for "Knox Business Machines." Frank, buried somewhere in the public relations or sales despartment, does not do his job well, sloughing off as much as he can out of boredom.

Frank and April Wheeler as played by Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet

Despite the cast's best efforts, the movie skips over the surface of the book. This is about all it can do, because Yates has written a real novel: we are privy to the inner-most thoughts of the characters, beyond what they say; we learn about April's childhood, which helps to explain why she is so uncomfortable with family life in the suburbs and also hear Frank's reminiscences of his father (who was earlier a salesman for Knox, although Frank never told him he also works for the company) and of his father's strong hands.

The back cover of the Vintage paperback edition advertises Revolutionary Road as "the most evocative portrayal of the opulent desolation of the American suburbs." The novel, it claims, shows "how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves."

Really? Frank and April met at a party in Greenwich Village, she studying to be an actress, and he not doing much of anything but known to be an interesting talker, which trait sweeps April off her feet. There is no indication in the book that Frank was seriously preparing himself for an artistic career in any medium. The two have an affair, and April becomes pregnant. She wants to abort the child, but Frank successfully fights against and proceeds to get a job. They marry and move to the suburbs. This entire pre-episode is missing from the movie.

The young Richard Yates, authoring painful probes into the human condition of the times

April, now a housewife with two children, is restless. Her attempt to play the lead female role with a new community theater proves to be a disaster, and it is in the failure of this effort that the Wheelers come right up to the edge of the canyon that separates them in their marriage. Prompted by her dramatic failure, April insists that they pull up stakes and their children and move to Paris, where she will be a highly paid secretary and Frank will "find himself." It is never clear who is to take care of the children.

Frank reluctantly agrees, but soon the Wheelers run up against two obstacles: One of Frank's bits of off-hand writing has met with high-level company approvals, and there are offers to join a high-level promotional team, with higher pay and greater interest. Two, April is again and very unhappily pregnant. She proposes, again, abortion. Frank strongly fights against this, even to the point of accusing April of being crazy and needing psychiatric help because she does have natural motherly feeling (understandable given her orphaned childhood).

The message from the movie is that April is right--the suburbs are bleak and hopeless; there is no real life, only conformity. Conformity in the suburbs and conformity on the job--conformity which crushes true life. April declares (in the book) that "conventionality and morality are the same thing, aren't they?" But she has no real passion of her own, only a desperate desire to escape from what she perceives as self-suffocation. While Frank toys which such ideas, he not anymore serious about them than he is about his job or the woman he has a brief affair with in the office (after April tells him, in her rage over her dramatic failure, that he is no longer the man she loved and married, he is no longer a man). He does, however, like to attack suburbia and those who inhabit it as a way of exerting his own self-image as a superior, more serious being.

The Wheelers drink a lot, and so do their friends. Their children are entranced by TV. There is no religious faith.

Many families of the 1950s were headed by former GIs of World War II.

The book's center is the sharp knife-edge between the outlooks of these partners in a tortured relationship, although April's are so erratic and often so vicious, it is hard to sympathize with her. Yates never proffers a solution.

Yates also gives us the character of Mrs. Givings, the real estate agent who found the Wheelers their home on Revolutionary Road. Living with an older retired husband, she tries to befriend the Wheelers and wants them to help with her only son, a long-term patient at the local mental hospital. In a meeting with the Wheelers and the Givings' son, Mrs. Givings observed that they all seemed to be enjoying the afternoon, as was she: "the sound of their easy, nostalgic laughter filled her with pleasure, and so did the taste of her sherry, and so did the sherry-colored squares of sunset on the wall, each square alive with the nodding shadows of leaves and branches stirred by the wind"--a thought that comes to someone who is determined to make the best of it. Mrs. Givings, unlike the Wheelers, was also a hard worker.

It is noteworthy that for both Frank and his friend Sean Campbell, who lives next door with his family, their self-images of greatest potency and competence were wrapped up in their experiences as GIs in World War II. Perhaps these men were less discontent, because they had already experienced something they knew they could never achieve again. I don't know.

I am not recommending this book as a pleasurable read. (Read a good review of it at Booksnob and read a good review of the movie atLetters from a Hill Farm.) I read it because I am, in a snail-like pace, looking at thethe 1950s, through literature produced during the decade and soon thereafter. Yates was considered a chief chronicler of this era, along with John Updike, whom I have not yet read.

Although the 1950s is often indicated as the high point of the housewife, real life in the 50s, I believe, was far more fraught with psychological difficulties. It was during the 15 years after the World War II that the seeds of the 1960s cultural rebellion were sown. What was really going on inside the homes of America? I started thinking about this when I observed the startling differences between 1938's film Four Daughters and its 1954 remake Young at Heart.

If you know of books that explore the inner life of this era, I'd be very grateful for any recommendations. And if you have any thoughts on this era, from your own readings and experience, I would love to hear them, either through comments or email. Many thanks.

Fine Arts Friday: A Painting for the Sartorialist

2011-10-07T12:16:00.000-07:00

Afternoon in the Park by William Merritt Chase, 1879

(Click on the painting to see a larger version.)

American impressionist William Merritt Chase painted this portrait when he was 30 years old. Here we see a young lady in the park who may be watching an event, given her folding chair, or perhaps she is in an artificial setting contrived by the painter.

Whatever the circumstances, we see a quietly confident young woman meticulously and tastefully dressed. I don't know if her dress is high fashion for her time, but the principles of its assembly are timeless. It is hard to imagine that she wore such an outfit on the advisement of her mother; she wears her clothes as the possessor of her style.

The arms of the chair match the red in her hat, the flower on her bodice, her belt, and fan, but we can note that she had already perfectly matched these items herself in dressing and chosen a gold bracelet and necklace to offset the outfit's dominating warm pinks and red. We can also note that the white lace of the bodice and the cuffs beautifully frames the dark intensity of her hair, eyebrows, and her expression, which speaks of a relaxed but thinking woman.

Or, perhaps her outfit was assembled for her by the artist. Either way, we have sartorial elegance.

Creating Beauty in the Frontier Home

2011-10-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

Inside of a Nebraska sod house

I am always moved when I read about the efforts of women to make their frontier homes comfortable and beautiful--with barely any materials to do so. From this effort comes the American tradition of scrap quilting, for instance. Here, Mrs. Grace Snyder describes how, as a new wife, she worked to make her house livable for herself and her cowboy husband:

All the time I was growing up, on the homestead and the other places we had lived, Mama had "made do" with the little or nothing she had on hand to fix up her homes. Now I found I could do the same. We didn't have a table for the living room, so I made one by driving two old broomsticks into the sod wall and laying a wide board across them. I covered the shelf with a pretty scarf and put the parlor lamp and the Bible on it and set my rocking chair beside it. With old blankets for padding and one of my quilts for a cover, I turned the old wire cot into a decent front-room couch.

For a spare bed in the empty middle room, I propped an old bedspring from the Squaw Creek shack on canned goods boxes, and covered the bed and boxes with the pretty quilt I had made that long, lonesome winter at Aufdengartens (a family she worked for earlier). There wasn't a closet or a chest of drawers in teh whole big house, but I made out with stacks of boxes, covered with pretty calico curtains. And when I had hemmed and hung curtains at all the deep windows, the house looked really nice.

Birdcage outside of a sod home. Many frontier women, including Grace Snyder's mother, had canaries or other birds in cages inside or right outside the home.

What Is Civilization, Anyway?

2011-10-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Sculpture signifying grammar on the wall of the Chartres Cathedral.

The quote on the right-hand sidebar of Under the Gables reads: "Every home was a brick in the great wall of decent living that men erected over and over again as a bulwark against the perpetual flooding in of evil. But women made the bricks, and the durableness of civilization depended upon their quality."

I firmly believe this, but it does beg the question: What is civilization?

In Chapter 4 of the 2009 book In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea by John Armstrong, there is one answer that sounds promising:

Civilization is the life-support system for high-quality relationships to people, ideas, and objects: it feeds and sustains love ('love' is the one-word version of the phrase 'high quality of relationship'). In genuine love we do not only have an appetite for and devotion to something or someone, but we also perceive what is good and loveable and recognize our own need to meet and engage with that.

The life-support system for love has two aspects. First, civilization seeks to find and protect the good things with which--potentially--we can form high-quality relationships. And second, civilization fosters and protects the qualities in us that allow us to love such things for the right reasons. The qualities that inspire love are: goodness, beauty, and truth. And when we love these qualities we come to possess the corresponding capacities of wisdom, kindness, and taste....

Love is the antidote to fashion and gossip; for love spurns rapid change; it repudiates the language (and the inner attitude that fuels the words) of what is 'hot' or what is 'in.' Love spurns trivia--or, better, longs for what is real and substantial.

Mr. Armstrong's book explores the Athens branch that feeds into Western civilization, without exploring the contributions of the Jerusalem branch. Nevertheless, by placing love at the center of his definition, the door is open to a fuller definition that encompasses both, I hope.

Haute Couture Has Nothing Over Mrs. Grace Snyder

2011-09-16T06:53:00.000-07:00

Flower Basket Petit Point Quilt by Grace Snyder, 1940

Grace McCance Snyder, the Nebraskan pioneer, started piecing quilts when she was only seven. Charged by her father with watching the cattle in the fields, she would lie or sit on the back of her favorite and sew all day. Through the next decades of her life, Mrs. Snyder made tens of quilts for her family and later in her life for exhibition. She became Nebraska's most famous quilter and was inducted into the Quilters' Hall of Fame in 1980 at the age of 98. Two of her quilts are on the list of the Twentieth Century's 100 Best American Quilts.

Section of the Petit Point quilt showing the needlepoint effect of the piecing.

Mrs. Snyder accomplished the Flower Basket Petit Point quilt in 16 months, basing her design on the pattern of a china plate produced by the Salem China Company of Ohio. In her design, she used a triangle for each stitch of the petit point to achieve a pointellist impression on the quilt's surface. It took Mrs. Snyder 87,875 tiny triangles, no bigger than a fingernail, and 5 miles of thread to sew to create the Petit-Point quilt!

Here are other samples of Mrs. Snyder's quilting.

A documentary segment has been produced about Mrs. Snyder's quilting, and her work and life were featured in the International Quilt Study Study Center and Museum of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

You may also want to see: Fashion and Quilting: Two Roads

If I Could, I Would...

2011-09-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

Evening dress, Chanel, 2011

If I could, I would support the haute couture, speaking of it here in its most narrow definition as the "creation of exclusive custom-fitted clothing. Haute couture is made to order for a specific customer, and it is usually made from high-quality, expensive fabric and sewn with extreme attention to detail and finished by the most experienced and capable seamstresses, often using time-consuming, hand-executed techniques." Its literal translation is "high sewing."

In this narrow definition, today it involves only those few houses that are official, correspondent, and guest members of the French Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture.
Haute couture in itself is not a road that leads to riches. The standards for hand sewing, materials, and design for those with the ability and interest to buy unique pieces of the finest clothing in the world are kept extremely high. For instance, as Karl Lagerfeld explains in describing to an interviewer in the BBC production,The Secret World of Haute Couture , the feathers for his designed evening gown composed of embroidery in the bodice and feathers in the skirt, are specially produced on a farm in South Africa. In short, all pains are taken to render an article of the highest possible quality and all the fabrics are created and treated specially. For his 2011 fall-winter collection, the designer Valentino, reported the September Vogue, showed a "magnificent coat of hammered gold brocade ... which had the brilliant texture, almost a relief effect, of a Russian icon's surface, clocking in at 750 hours' worth of embroidery."

Chanel embroidered gossamer, 2011.

Such "high sewing" could become a lost art. Twenty years ago, a haute couture designer would fashion up to 160 different pieces of clothing for a collection; today the number hovers around 40. In the years after World War II, Parisian haute couture kept 46,000 embroiderers, lacemakers, and hand seamstresses busy in subcontracting ateliers. Today that number has dwindled to 4,500. The money lies in ready-wear, which are duller shadows of the original dress.

Despising ready-wear as a form of prostitution, the French designer Alix Gres, for example, died in penury and obscurity in 1993, after creating clothes for such non pareils as Jacqueline Kennedy. Madame Gres, as she was called, was a sculptor who turned to dress design in the 1940s. Taking inspiration from the Greek and Roman statues of antiquity, she molded a dress from one, uncut piece of cloth directly on the model, through pinning tiny pleat after pleat--with exquisitely graceful results.

A gown of white silk jersey by Madame Gres, 1958

For sure there are plenty of designer clothes that I find incomprehensible or dislike. That said, haute couture repesents the pinnacle of excellence in turning a two-dimensional object--in this case, the cloth--into a three dimensional object, the finished article of clothing, in a way that expresses both the designer's and the owner's ideas and sensibilities. Those who collect haute couture regard their purchase as an investment in a work of art, in the same way that a wealthy person collects original paintings. I can only imagine that if haute couture succumbs, the quality of all of our clothes, including those in the sales bins at our favorite department store, will slip irrevocably downward.

You may also want to see:
Welcome Back Lace!
In Praise of Sewing

Home Economics Revival?

2011-09-07T08:25:00.001-07:00

Home Economics Class--on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1951. Today, for the most part, only private Christian schools have home economics as part of the curriculum.

Although couched in politically correct terms--as a means of fighting obesity--the revival of home economics classes as part of children's education was posited by Helen Zoe Veit in an article in the New York Times September 5. Veit feels compelled in her first sentence to acknowledge that such a proposal goes against the grain of feminism, stating this untruth right off the bat: "Nobody likes home economics."

The basis for Veit's proposal rings true though: "Reviving the program, and its original premises — that producing good, nutritious food is profoundly important, that it takes study and practice, and that it can and should be taught through the public school system — could help us in the fight against obesity and chronic disease today. The home economics movement was founded on the belief that housework and food preparation were important subjects that should be studied scientifically."

Who can argue with this, except those who feel that cooking, housework, cleaning, and other household tasks are inherently demeaning to women and should be performed by presumably paid (mostly female--oops!) servants.

Veit does admonish though that "today we remember only the stereotypes about home economics, while forgetting the movement’s crucial lessons on healthy eating and cooking. Too many Americans simply don’t know how to cook. Our diets, consisting of highly processed foods made cheaply outside the home thanks to subsidized corn and soy, have contributed to an enormous health crisis."

I believe she is right, as the effects of a diet of constantly eating restaurant food, take-out, and fast food quickly lead to body ballooning. Restaurants and processed food manufacturers have the incentive to lard their food with fats, sugar, and salt, because it is an easy pleasure for the palate and they want you to come back for more. That is not the basis for home cooking--you are already there! Here the goals are great nutrition and great taste at lower prices. Home economics classes can give both women and girls the basic rudiments of how and what to cook. Today Veit's proposal was seconded in the Food and Think blog of the Smithsonian magazine and noted by National Public Radio and The Atlantic.

Catharine Esther Beecher, who believed the education of women was crucial to the survival of the republic.

Home economics has a proud tradition among women in the United States and was first launched by Catharine Esther Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe), whose Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) became the domestic bible for women in the settled areas of the United States. For Beecher the proper management of the home was intrinsic to the proper rearing and education of children.

Today, women of all ages can fruitfully turn to Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson (1999). Mrs. Mendelson presents clear and exceedingly helpful discussions of everything from making a bed to nutrition. Offering thorough guidance and suggestions, she never lectures. This book is a great gift for any young woman starting out in her own home or apartment or for a bride.

Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts. She won her way to my heart when she reported that she had held many jobs in her life, including being an attorney, but found performing domestic duties in her home the most gratifying.

But back to home economics classes. In my high school, the girls took home economics, while the boys took shop. The boys always returned from shop to academic classes with a happy sense of accomplishment. Probably we girls less so. Home economics was not taught from the height of this topic down to gritty details, but was taught like First Aid 1: clear instructions only for the most vital things you need to know. It was assumed you already knew why you needed such a course; there was no motivational excitement on the part of the teacher. I think it could be a lot more fun. Nevertheless, I took great satisfaction in making a summer skirt, and the experience of making something wearable prompted me to sew many of my own clothes during my high school years.

Ms. Veit has my gratitude for bringing up such an audacious proposal as the revival of home economics as part of the curricula in public schools. I suspect though that for many, fighting obesity is merely the calling card for ideas of reviving home economics classes and good practices. Fast food and eating out is expensive and goes out of the budgetary ballpark in hard times. Now is the time to learn to cook!

Victorian Husbands and Wives

2011-08-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

See the entire set at Retronaut compliments of Lisby.

I feel inspired to write a story for each couple, don't you?

Grace Snyder's No Time on My Hands

2011-08-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

Grace McCance Snyder's autobiography, No Time on My Hands, written with her daughter, Nellie Snyder Yost, is the account of her pioneer life from 1885--when Grace is three years old and her family moves to Nebraska from settled Missouri--until 1962, a full 20 years before Grace Snyder died at the age of 100. I have read all of Laura Wilder's books of life on the prairie and other fictional and non-fictional accounts of pioneering women, but No Time on My Hands makes these accounts even more vivid and awe-inspiring because of the great detail that Grace shares about the work that she and her mother and sisters did at their sod homestead on the plains of Nebraska.

The book's title comes from Grace's paternal grandmother, Mrs. McCance, who was heard to say that "if there's one thing more'n another I simply can't abide, it's time on my hands." The elderly Mrs. McCance, as Grace's mother and Grace herself, were in a state of perpetual motion tending to the work on their farms and ranches. Grace and her grandmother thrived on work of all kinds; Grace's mother, of more fragile health, had long bouts of illness and a perpetual cough and her thin body seemed nearly crushed by the weight of her daily burdens. Nevertheless, she too lived to raise all of her children and see her great-grandchildren thrive.

The McCance Family. Grace's parents, Mr. and Mrs. McCance are standing together on the right. The six McCance children (there were eventually nine) are seated, with Grace third from the left. Grace's older sister Florry (second from left seated) died in childbirth.

As I read this 541-page book, I jotted down the different activities that these women routinely performed. Given that many of these tasks must be repeated daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly and also that calamities--primarily caused by extreme weather--posed constant disruptions to any routine, it is difficult to imagine how a woman would plan such a whirlwind of work as that performed in a well-managed homestead. Here is my list:

Creating and tending a vegetable garden (be prepared for heartbreak caused by hail or loose animals pummeling the garden to pulp)
Gathering cow chips for fuel
Berry gathering
Making jam
Drying corn Grinding corn for cornmeal
Churning butter
Curing meat
Making cheese
Preparing meals
Washing up the dishes and pots and pans after meals
Making yeast (boiling cornmeal and hop leaves to a thick mush and drying it in hard cakes, out of doors under cheesecloth in the summer and in the oven in winter) Baking bread
Making desserts with fruit and baking custards
Putting up (canning) fruits and vegetables for the winter and spring

Washing clothes
Making starch (smearing potato starch on a large piece of canvas and letting it dry, then peeling it off, and storing for use)
Hanging and gathering in clothes
Mending clothes--(a major activity, for example: During broomcorn harvesting, "each day the sharp stalks ripped their jacket sleeves to ravlings, and every evening Mama basted the backs of old overall legs to the sleeves, replacing the shredded patches she'd sewed on the night before.")
Making clothes--without patterns
Making quilts--Grace became a nationally known quilter--more on that later

Keeping a sod house clean (no mean feat)
Home decorating (curtains, etc.)

Breastfeeding babies
Watching young children
Homeschooling children

Feeding hens and chickens, goats, and cows, all of which contribute to putting food on the table
Milking the cows and/or goats

Killing snakes--one day a rattler got into the house and was sitting on the same blanket Grace's baby brother was on. Grace's mother killed the snake and then sought and found the den where it had come from and killed all 22 rattlesnakes therein.

Nursing the sick (Grace describes being at the bedside of a seriously ill person for days on end and also night and day)
Tending to and healing wounded or sick animals
Laying out the dead
Helping afflicted families

Even with this workload, Grace's mother found time to make delectable picnic food when the family went to town for the annual Fourth of July celebration, which, next to Christmas, was the biggest holiday. "Under the seats we carried a bag of grain for the mules and a tubful of picnic lunch--including

one of Mama's five-layer cakes, three white and two yellow, with custard filling between the layers and whipped cream, shredded coconut, and black walnut meats on the tops and sides.

Hands of a Farmwoman, photo by Russell Lee, 1936. "Grandma's hands were thin and brown and spotted, their soft, paper-dry skin crisscrossed with high, dark veins, and the fingers twisted and knotty, but she would look at them with grim satisfaction--anyone could see she'd never had any time on her hands."

Jessamyn West: "It's Making Something Beautiful"

2011-08-16T09:24:00.000-07:00

In the Old House by Childe Hassam, 1914

Jessamyn West, the 20th-century author of The Friendly Persuasion and many other novels, snapped at a young feminist interviewer when asked if wanting to keep her home neat was an obstacle to writing because she was a woman. The interview, published in the book Women Writers of the West Coast (1983), took place on November 12, 1980. The exchange on order in the home went like this:

[Interviewer] Chapman said, "But you've written that, being a woman, you sometimes feel a certain sense of guilt that gets in the way of your writing. For instance, you wrote, 'I wish I could unlearn the need to straighten the house before writing.'..."

West countered: "Where is anything contradictory about wanting to sit down in the midst of something that is pleasing to the eye? Answer that, please!"

Chapman asked: "What about the fact that you didn't tell anyone you wanted to write until you were 26? You said you thought you were somewhat mad initially for having an urge to write, and I wonder if those feelings of responsibility for the house and the fear of admitting you wanted to be a writer are both tied to your being a woman."

West replied, "I don't tie them to either one. I had a sister, and I think a writer would be lucky if she could be born this way, who didn't give a damn if things are in a wild clutter. She wouldn't have been bothered if there were a pair of shoes on the mantle, but as it happens, I am not that way. I wouldn't feel happy writing until I took the shoes off the mantle and put them down where I thought they belonged. That is just a piece of my temperament. I don't understand the house not being orderly, because that's like painting a picture. It's making something beautiful. That is what I feel about straightening a house."

Village Life in America by Caroline Cowles Richards

2011-08-04T13:13:00.001-07:00

Caroline Cowles Richards in 1860

Village Life in America is a name given to a diary written by one Caroline Cowles Richards, later Mrs. Edmund Clarke, from 1852, when Caroline was 10 years old, to 1872, when she is married and has a family. The writer lived in Canandaigua, New York, in the finger lakes region, with her maternal grandparents, Mrs. and Mrs. Thomas Beals, and her sister Anna, younger by four years. Caroline's mother had died, and their father had sent the girls to be raised by the Beals, as he pursued his career, remarried, and had a new family. He wrote to the girls often. Even with these paltry facts, we can note that the nuclear family was not so stable as we might think in yesteryear, as it was often torn asunder by death, and children may be sent to live with relatives rather than stay with a single parent. This is just one example of the richness of comparisons and insights into mid-19th-entury housekeeping, social mores, attitudes, child-rearing, and religious belief and practice that are to be gained from this slim and charming book.

The diary takes us through the Civil War. With a Puritan grandmother, Caroline had been well taught of the necessity to end slavery. She describes in detail the patriotic fervor that gripped the village upon the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, which reached a fever pitch in the early days of the war; of the town's deep sadness at the loss of so many of its menfolk and sons; and its intense joy at the war's end followed only 10 days later by its shock and grief at the assassination of Lincoln.

As a historical record the diary is priceless. As a record of the coming to age of a young girl, it will leave voyeurs disappointed. Youthful perplexities are not subjects for discussion; Caroline says that she wanted to write down only the good things. Nevertheless, we are privileged to learn about daily life in the Beals household, as if we were walking through a museum of their house except they are still there and interacting right before our eyes.

First Congregational Church of Canandaigua, the center of social life for the Beals household, where they attended church, Sunday School, lectures, and meetings regularly each week.

Within the pages of the book we find a social fabric quite different from that of life today. The community revolves around its churches, and the household relies on written Scripture for the raising of children. Particularly, Grandmother Beals cites a verse or two from the Bible, it seems, at any point that she admonishes or reprimands her two granddaughters. For example, Caroline wrote in 1854:

I almost forgot that it was Sunday this morning and talked and laughed just as I do week days. Grandmother told me to write down this verse before I went to church so I would remember it: "Keep thy foot when thou goest to the house of God, and be more ready to hear than to offer the sacrifice of fools." I will remember it now, sure. My feet are all right any way with my new patten leather shoes on but I shall have to look out for my head… Grandmother always comes upstairs to get the candle and tuck us in before she goes to bed herself, and some nights we are sound asleep and do not hear her, but last night we only pretended to be asleep. She kneeled down by the bed and prayed aloud for us, that we might be good children and that she might have strength given to her from on high to guide us in the straight and narrow path which leads to .life eternal. Those were her very words. After she had gone downstairs we sat up in bed and talked about it and promised each other to be good, and crossed our hearts and "hoped to die" if we broke our promise. Then Anna was afraid we would die, but I told her I didn't believe we would be as good as that, so we kissed each other and went to sleep.

Grandmother Beals is especially fascinating because she is of Puritan stock and was born in the 18th century (1784). She tells the story of how as a little girl, "down in Connecticut in 1794, she was on her way to school one morning and she saw an Indian coming and was so afraid, but did not dare run for fear he would chase her. So she thought of the word sago, which means 'good morning,' and when she got up close to him she dropped a curtsy and said 'Sago,' and he just went right along and never touched her at all. She says she hopes we will always be polite to every one, even to strangers."

Grandmother Beals is a "good neighbor"--delivering food to families under duress, treating her two hired girls (who live in the household) well, and extending herself to African Americans. In one case, she invites to dinner a former slave woman, and Caroline is surprised to see that the grandmother has her eat in the dining room with the family.

Grandmother Beals was dearly loved and respected by her granddaughters:

I asked Grandmother to-day to write a verse for me to keep always and she wrote a good one: "To be happy and live long the three grand essentials are: Be busy, love somebody and have high aims." I think, from all I have noticed about her, that she has had this for her motto all her life and I don't think Anna and I can do very much better than to try and follow it too. Grandfather tells us sometimes, when she is not in the room, that the best thing we can do is to be just as near like Grandmother as we can possibly be.

Despite the determination of both grandparents to stay on the "straight and narrow path" to heaven, there is plenty of wit and humor in the Beals household. Anna is a jokester, but unless her jokes are sacriligious, she never seems to get in trouble for it. Here is an entry from 1858 that gives an idea of the ruefulness with which the family members thought of each other:

Frankie Richardson asked me to go with her to teach a class in the colored Sunday School on Chapel Street this afternoon. I asked Grandmother if I could go and she said she never noticed that I was particularly interested in the colored race and she said she thought I only wanted an excuse to get out for a walk Sunday afternoon. However, she said I could go just this once. When we got up as far as the Academy, Mr. Noah T. Clarke's brother [and Caroline's future husband], who is one of the teachers, came out and Frank said he led the singing at the Sunday School and she said she would give me an introduction to him, so he walked up with us and home again. Grandmother said that when she saw him opening the gate for me, she understood my zeal in missionary work. "The dear little lady," as we often call her, has always been noted for her keen discernment and wonderful sagacity and loses none of it as she advances in years. Some one asked Anna the other day if her Grandmother retained all her faculties and Anna said, "Yes, indeed, to an alarming degree."

I would love to post the entire diary, but no need, because you can read it right here. I recommend this fascinating book for all, but especially for girls aged 10 to old age.

Hymns by Firelight

2011-08-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

Family Life on the Frontier by Caleb Bingham, c. 1845

Hymns by Firelight

Now the sweet cloudy voices rise and fall,
Blurring the soft damp air with melody,
And one sits shadowy with the white shawl
Drawn to her throat and folded over her knee,
Repeating gently the cadence of the hymn,
And the thick ash mantles the dim coals
And the dew gathers on smooth leaf and stem.

Where they are sitting the firelight gleams
On their familiar faces, touching with charm
Or fantasy all the lines and seams
That the mind may have made, but the heart dreams,
Comforted, cradled, and warm,
In these old words, cradle of many souls,
And the white ash gathers, heavy upon the coals.

Janet Lewis

Against a Darkening Sky: Life in the 1930s

2011-08-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

Janet Lewis

Janet Lewis wrote Against a Darkening Sky in the early 1940s (published 1945) about the life of women with families in Encino, a suburb of San Francisco, based on her own experiences and those of her friends during the 1930s Great Depression. Ms. Lewis, whose real name was Mrs. Yvor Winters, lived in this area with her family and, as did her neighbors, grew vegetables, raised goats and chickens, and undoubtedly had to tighten the family's belt in the 1930s downturn. Credit cards were not even on the horizon during that prolonged recession.

The novel is not thickly plotted but chronicles on the life of the Perrault family, particularly the mother Mary Perrault, who came to first Canada and then California from Scotland, and her young adult daughter Melanie. Mary is married to a French Hugenot immigrant Aristide Perrault, who has a job with the water company but also breeds rabbits as a sideline source of money and food. The Perraults raise vegetables for their own consumption, keep a cow for milk, and eat the fruit of their orchard, producing as much of their own food as possible.

Near Kennebunkport by Abbott Fuller Graves, 1900

Mrs. Perrault is a busy woman, working from early in the morning til into the mid-evening before sleep, baking bread, cakes, and pies; preparing meals; gardening; canning vegetables and fruit; keeping their four-room house clean; washing and mending clothes; and watching over her children: Melanie and three younger boys. She is also active in her community, chairman of the PTA and involved with her neighbors. There are no luxuries; there is no telephone. The Perraults never eat out, but there is always room for guests at their table.

The book begins on Friday afternoon in the early summer, as Mrs. Perrault receives a visit from her oldest friend, Mrs. Alice Hardy. Both women are in their early 50s and enjoy a short stroll to the garden and chit chat about their children and neighbors. "It was a day so like a long procession of tranquil days that nothing could have warned them that it might be the last. And yet years afterward Mary Perrault was able to look back into that afternoon, as into a scene framed and set aside, and remember trivial words and gestures, trivial things observed, which assumed thereafter a dignity and a permanence beyond the words and gestures of any other afternoon."

From this point forward, although the Perraults do not lose employment, their home, or their two acres, the times become increasingly difficult. At all points, Mrs. Perrault exhibits remarkable patience, courage, and care for those around her, which encompasses her neighbors. Indeed, the families Lewis describes, particularly the women, work together to stay on top of what is happening in households and to bring succour when needed. Services and food are exchanged, as money becomes scarcer. Women, as does Mary Perrault, seek outside, part-time employment, to keep things afloat.

Unlike Hollywood, Janet Lewis is not a sentimentalist, and her portrait of her own friends and neighbors--Against a Darkening Sky being the novel closest to her heart--likely can be relied upon as an accurate portrayal of times for a certain strata of working families during the Depression. Those who have watched movies of the late 1930s and early 1940s such as The Human Comedy (1943, based on the novel by William Saroyan), The Clock (1945), It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and Four Daughters (there are more), will recognize the courageous spirit of Americans and their habitual willingness to sacrifice for others. Lewis' novel seems to indicate that the films are less of an exaggeration than we would be comfortable to think.

Mary Perrault and her neighbors are not, however, members of the "greatest generation" but were born in the 1890s and first decade of the 20th century--before World War I draped a pall of pessimism over Europe and the United States. Indeed, upon attending the memorial of a hapless neighbor at a funeral home where a minister delivers a eulogy about someone he never knew, Mary Perrault begins to think that

"there was hardly anything abut a funeral such as this which she did not dislike, small items which summed up a discreet commercialism. Yet, it was not entirely the fault of the morticians.... The fault lay in the lack of faith, the lonely and independent lives--every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost--the shifting communities whose constant change made it impossible for anyone to live as she had lived as a girl, in a community as in the center of a family.... It was the loss of faith that grieved her the most. About her own children, growing up in this world, could they have, as she now had, security of faith without a literal belief in the things which she had been taught as a girl? All the honey of that old discipline was now hers, distilled in many precious and life-giving phrases, but how could she convey to Melanie what these phrases now meant to her?"

Sunday by Edward Hopper, 1926

Lewis leaves no doubt that for her, Mary Perrault is a civilizer, whose dedication to family and charity to neighbors pushes back what Mary Perrault herself calls the "moral wilderness." Against a Darkening Sky--a good book for our times.

Fine Arts Friday: It's Summer!

2011-07-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

A Clambake.

(As always, click on the painting to see it in a larger size.)

The spirit of summer--fun!--led to me thinking about Winslow Homer's watercolors of children. In 1873, Homer went to live in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and began his forays into watercolors, painting of children, in quick strokes, in the Gloucester environs during the summer. Boys are out of school and seeking fun--boating, hunting, playing games, and watching the shoreline. When they're hungry, they dig clams, collect wood, build a fire, and have a clambake. They seem totally at ease in their pursuits, even in occasional boredom or rest on a rock. Undoubtedly, they did not have to be urged by their mothers to go outside, since outside is their preferred habitat--outside to freedom and conspiracy with confreres. Some of these boys are undoubtedly the sons of fishermen; others might be here on vacation. We know that at night they go home to their mothers, their dinners, and their beds, but out here they assume an air of self-sufficiency and self-confidence.

Toys are at a minimum, and there's no playground in sight. Here some boys fashion a seesaw from a board and rocks--which may be an element in a game.

The Seesaw

Boys have found a kitten down by the shore. The mama cat sits patiently as they handle her offspring. Each boy sports a different kind of hat: one white bowler with a blue ribbon pointing to wealth; a straw hat of a farmer; and the navy blue Union cap of a soldier--the imagined futures of these three?

\
Boys and a Kitten

I don't know what kind of eggs the boy is hunting, but the flying gulls, sand, and shells show that these boys are close to the shore. What will they do with the eggs--sell them, eat them, or take them home?

How Many Eggs?

I like how the boys in this painting are totally relaxed on a glassy sea on a windless day. They do not seem bored--water is mesmerizing after all--and their eyes seem fastened on the horizon. The painting evokes longing for the future--"What is beyond there?" is the implied question and "When can I go there?"

Seven Boys in a Dory

I like the self-confidence these boys exude on the catboat which is commanded by the seated adult. Homer later worked this watercolor into the famous Breezing Up (also called Fair Wind) of 1876. Unlike Homer's great oil paintings of later years, such as The Fog Warning and The Gulf Stream, the emphasis in not on the elemental struggle of man and sea but on the unity of purpose of the boaters and the wind as the sailboat cuts through the water. The relaxed pose of the boys indicates that they are already old hands at boating.

Sailing the Catboat

These boys may be waiting for a boat to come in or just lying around til they think up what they are going to do next. But it is summer and there is no hurry.

Three Boys on the Shore

Play's the Thing: Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott

2011-07-18T07:40:00.000-07:00

This is close to the way I imagine the bower of lilacs near the Victorian mansion in Alcott's book.

Louisa May Alcott is rightly renowned for Little Women, but as a child and later as an adult reading out loud to my young daughter, I found Alcott's Under the Lilacs to be the most charming "chapter book" for children--rivaled only by Anne of Green Gables. The story concerns two little girls, Bab and Betty, who live with their widowed mother in a small house next to an empty mansion, and what happens one spring when a runaway circus boy, Ben, and his trick dog, Sancho, are found in the carriage house and a lovely young woman, Miss Celia, and her sick younger brother, Thorny, come to spend the summer in the mansion. What happens is tons of fun for all!

Miss Celia's mission is to bring her convalescing brother back to life. She espies in Ben, Bab, and Betty just the right sort of people to help her do it, and Under the Lilacs offers a glimpse of how children created their own fun in the time before summer day camps and organized sports for children, not to mention television, video games, phones, movies, and all the other hyper-stimulative gadgets and toys that youngsters have at their disposal today.

Bab tugged away at the bow Miss Celia gave her.

She hands over one of the rooms of the mansion to the kids and gives them her rag bag and needles and thread, after which they designing and sewing flags to festoon the house's big porch. "A spell of ship building and rigging followed the flag fit," as Thorny let the children use his array of large toy ships and boats. "These gifts led to out-of-door waterworks, for the brook had to be dammed up that a shallow ocean might be made....

Thorny, from his chair, was chief engineer, and directed his gang of one how to dig the basin, throw up the embankment, and finally let in the water till the mimic ocean was full; then regulate the little water gate, lest it should overflow and wreck the pretty squadron of ships, boats, canoes, and rafts, which soon rode at anchor there. Digging and paddling in mud and water proved such a delightful pastime that the boys kept it up, til a series of a waterwheels, little mills and cataracts made the once quiet brook look as if a manufacturing town was about to spring up where hitherto minnows had played in peace and the retiring frog had chanted his serenade unmolested.

Miss Celia also organized jaunts to unknown spots in the countryside: "It really was quite exciting to start off on a bright morning with a roll of wraps and cushions, lunch, books, and drawing materials packed into the phaeton, and drive at random about the shady roads and lanes, pausing when and where they liked. Wonderful discoveries were made, pretty places were named, plans were drawn, and all sorts of merry adventures befell the pilgrims."

In the midst of all these adventures, each child enjoyed growth and development as part of the process of encountering obstacles, losses, or new challenges.

Louisa May Alcott--child delighter.

There is evidence from Harriet Reisen's Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women that Alcott modeled Miss Celia on herself. It was the recollection of one of Louisa's schoolmates that "Louisa was the foremost of her sisters and the ringleader of the group," Reisen reports. The schoolmate also recounted a performance Louisa put together for one of her sister's birthdays. "She concocted a satisfying bill of fare out of dubious romantic legends--vaguely Gaelic, Germanic, and Native American.... Louisa stole the show as Alfarata, an Indian girl who like Louisa 'was swift as an antelope through the forest going.'"

Another playmate of Louisa's recalls that in the summer that he was 14 years old, he and the Alcott sisters played outside all day, blissfully unsupervised. "We christened a favorite nook, a beautiful rocky glen carpeted with moss and adorned with ferns opening upon the water's edge, 'Spiderland.' I was the King of the realm, Anna [Alcott] was the Queen, and Louisa the Princess Royal." He also noted that Louisa's mother Abby Alcott also participated in their play, "No matter how weary she might be with the washing and ironing, the baking and cleaning, it was all hidden from the group of girls with whom she was always ready to enter into fun and frolic, as if she never had a care."

Louisa May Alcott's childhood, we know and as Reisen relates, was not blissful but rife with poverty that served up brown bread, oatmeal, and apples for most meals. But Louisa May Alcott surely remembered the best of her playtimes and re-created them in her novels, albeit properly embellished. She, as did other authors of beloved children's books such as L. M. Montgomery, wrote her dreams so that we could dream them too... and hopefully give our children a taste of such marvels.

It takes so little to make a child happy, it is a pity grown people do not oftener remember it and scatter little bits of pleasure before the small people, as they throw crumbs to the hungry sparrows.
Under the Lilacs, by Louisa May Alcott

Dancing in the Rain

Janet Lewis: Novelist and Poet, Wife and Mother

2011-07-13T11:27:00.001-07:00

Janet Loxley Lewis

I am enjoying The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (1899-1998), a novel based on a true story that shook the French village of Artigues in the middle of the 16th century.

The wife of the poet, professor, and poetic critic Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis was an author in her own right--writing poems and novels over the course of decades in a crystalline clear style. A native of Chicago and daughter of an English professor, Lewis started writing at an early age--"I don't pay as much attention, when I'm not writing, to living in general," she said in an interview--and contributed to the same high school magazine in Oak Park, Illinois, as her contemporary Ernest Hemingway. Later, studying at the University of Chicago, she met Yvor Winters. Throughout first his and then her own convalescence from tuberculosis, the two carried on a literary and romantic correspondence that culminated in their marriage in 1926.

The two shared a passion for poetry and writing and founded and co-produced the literary magazine The Gyroscope from 1929 to 1931. When Winters died in 1968, she kept his writing shed as is and his name on the mailbox of their home in Los Altos, California, where they made their home upon their marriage and where Lewis lived a total of 62 years. Many of her husband's students and literary friends came to visit the Winters, including famous writers, as her obituary in the New York Times reports: "You may have to close your eyes to conjure up the sight, but there they are forever, two 1899 contemporaries standing side by side at the kitchen sink, Janet Lewis washing, Vladimir Nabokov drying."

Her Times obituary also notes that

over the course of a a career in which she wrote hundreds of poems, a single collection of short stories, a couple of children's books, a handful of novels, the words to five operas and one acclaimed masterpiece, Miss Lewis pursued a literary life in which the focus was on the life and the life was one of such placid equilibrium and domestic bliss that she had to reach deep down in her psyche -- and far back in the annals of criminal law -- to find the wellspring of tension that produced some of the 20th century's most vividly imagined and finely wrought literature.

She also had to find the time.

As she once observed, women of prodigious literary output, like Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, tended not to have children. As the mother of two, Miss Lewis willingly put her work aside when her children were young and cheerfully accepted other duties as well. ''It's a question of what you want to do with your life,'' she once said. ''You might also want to take care of your husband.''

In an interview in Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers, Lewis herself stated her priorities: "Being a writer has meant nearly everything to me beyond my marriage and children."

Lewis had a life-long interest in American Indians and her first book of poetry was Indians in the Woods. Indians also feature prominently in her novel, The Invasion, A Narrative of Events Concerning the Johnston Family of St. Mary's, about a pioneering Scots-Irish family in 18th-century Michigan. She and her husband were also active in the civil rights movement.

Here are two of Lewis' poems.

Girl Help

Mild and slow and young,
She moves about the room,
And stirs the summer dust
With her wide broom.
In the warm, lofted air,
Soft lips together pressed,
Soft wispy hair,
She stops to rest,
And stops to breathe,
Amid the summer hum,
The great white lilac bloom
Scented with days to come.

A Lullaby

Lulle, lullay
I could not love thee more
If thou wast Christ the King.
Now tell me, how did Mary know
That in her womb should sleep and grow
The Lord of everything?

Lullee, lullay
An angel stood with her
Who said: "That which doth stir
Like summer in thy side
Shall save the world from sin
Then stable, hall, and inn
Shall cherish Christmas-tide."

Lullee, lullay
And so it was that Day.
And did she love Him more
Because an angel came
To prophesy His name?
Ah no, not so,
She could not love Him more,
But loved Him just the same.

Happy 4th of July, Everyone!

2011-07-03T21:37:00.000-07:00

Àcorn Street, Boston, by Childe Hassam, 1919

Fine Arts Friday: At the Seaside

2011-07-01T09:53:00.000-07:00

At the Seaside by William Merritt Chase
(As always, click on the painting to see it in a larger size.)

It's summertime, and here we are at the seaside in 1892, painted by American impressionist painter and teacher, William Merritt Chase. Chase seems to particularly enjoy painting his family, which is likely the subject here, since he had a home in Shinnecock Hills on Long Island, New York. Mr. and Mrs. Chase had eight children.

In this work, he has captured the charm of being near the water in the midst of a stiff breeze--the umbrellas are protection against the wind, not the sun. Ladies traipse down to the beach from their houses with pillows, umbrellas, and children in tow. Children have the same preoccupations as today: digging around in the sand looking for whatever tiny critters, shells, pebbles, egg bags, seaweed, tiny seahorses, and other treasures they might find. They closely the observe the magic of burying and unburying, of hiding and seeking. Perhaps the families behind the umbrellas have brought food for picnicking. All appear unified by their class, pleasure, umbrellas, white apparel, and the red that Chase has splashed about on their clothes and accoutrements.

Best of all, we see in the foreground a mother in dialogue with her child. The tilt of the daughter's head could signal that the child is trying to accept a rejection of a request, or perhaps her mother is telling a story of the sea, perhaps a grandfather was a sea captain. The other daughter squats behind her mother, totally oblivious to the discussion, totally absorbed in her digging. Like his near-contemporary Mary Cassatt, Chase was an impressionist with a gift for catching the relational moment of his subjects.

Trend Shifting Against Abortion

2011-06-01T05:25:00.000-07:00

Results of a Gallup poll conducted May 5-8 confirmed a growing shift away from national approval of abortion:

61% of American adults said that abortion should be illegal in all or most circumstances. This 61% majority opposed most abortions, even though 49% of those called said they were "pro-choice."
A total of 71% said that abortion should be illegal at least in some cases.
22% said it should be illegal in all circumstances. A majority of 51% said they consider abortion morally wrong.
Younger Americans tended to be tougher against abortion than older generations. 53% in the 18-34 age bracket said they believed abortion was morally wrong--as opposed to the 51% of Americans in the 55 and older bracket who said they believed abortion was morally wrong and the 48% in the 35-54 bracket who said it was morally wrong.
Women and younger Americans were more likely than others to reject exceptions for legalized abortion. 24% of women, and 24% of Americans 18-34 said they believed abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

Perhaps one reason that abortion is becoming less popular than previously is because so many women have had them and seen the devastation it caused in their lives. Note that the overturning of Roe v. Wade would not result in making abortion illegal but would send the issue back to each state.

In the meantime, let us hope that this growing shift against abortion also leads to a shift toward adoption as an option, so that there are more opportunities in the United States for those couples unable to have children.

Booth Tarkington's Alice Adams

2011-05-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Katharine Hepburn as Alice Adams. Alice had to wear a made-over organdy dress and walked all over the city to gather violets for her bouquet to wear to a dance whose hostess was an upper-crust "friend."

Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, but its tale is far sadder than the 1935 movie of the same name starring Katharine Hepburn.

Alice is a young woman of the middle class in her early twenties who seeks a husband of status, success, and wealth--at the behest of her mother. For most of the book, the most potent actor on the stage is Mrs. Adams, wife of Virgil Adams, a clerk in a city manufacturing firm, and mother to Alice and son Walter. Mrs. Adams is seems would sacrifice anything--including her life, if she had to--for her husband and her children. In reality, her primary concern is that her children achieve the wealth and status she desperately desires for herself and which she would believed she would acquire, but did not, with her marriage to Virgil Adams--a man she treats now with only disdain.

Hence, her life zeal is focused on enabling Alice to associate with the right circles--everything that Alice wears, how she behaves, her life in fact--is constrained by a mother whose only thought is that she must dress, walk, act, dance, and be seen with the right people so that "people will think..." and that, conversely, she must not dress, walk, act, dance, and be seen with her peers, so that "people do not think"...., "people" always being the right kind of people.

For the same reasons she upbraids her husband for not bringing in enough money so that her children enjoy all the "privileges that other people have"--defined as membership in a country club, fine clothes, the best schools, and so forth. Her attachment to such goals is so great that she proclaims, when forced to defend herself, that "Money is the family."

The effect of this manipulative mentality on Alice is to shape her into a narcissist. She sits before the mirror and realizes that the way she behaves with her erstwhile friends in the right set is a lie and has nothing to do with who she really is. But then, she realizes, to her profound dismay, she does not really know who she is. Tarkington implies that she is saved both by the humility of her father and her love for him. As inevitable misfortune descends upon the family, Alice stands up and points herself in a direction grounded in reality rather than in her mother's fantasies.

Booth Tarkington was an upper-cruster himself. His prize books--Alice Adams and the Magnificent Ambersons (second book of a trilogy)--examined the toll of industrial growth on American society.

The grave flaw of Alice Adams is that we never learn why Mrs. Adams is the way she is. Her character never deviates from its social-climbing pattern; she represents a type whose clamors drive the plot forward but whose human truth the author cared not to explore.

However, since Alice Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, we have to assume that it touched an emotional nerve in America's self-perception at the time. Class stratification, with or without money, may have been far more significant than it is today, or rather its standards have changed.

One thing though must have been as obvious in 1922 as it is now: Mrs. Adams has no idea what is important in life, an ignorance that destroys her son and nearly destroys her daughter.

Fine Arts Friday: The Sick Child

2011-05-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

The Sick Child by Gabriel Metsu, c. 1664

I am pleased to post a guest article by a friend and art historian, Nora Hamerman. I think the background to The Sick Child that she brings to light makes this painting all the more poignant.

A Catholic `Dutch Master’

In the Golden Age of 17th century Netherlands, Gabriel Metsu infused scenes of contemporary daily life with allusions to the sacraments.

By Nora Hamerman

One of the most striking pictures at the special exhibit devoted to Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington shows a woman, her face in shadow, cradling a listless boy on her lap. The child looks wan. His outer clothing has been discarded on a nearby chair. A side table holds a porridge bowl and a spoon. On the wall over the child’s head hangs a picture of the Crucifixion of Christ in grisaille, a grey-toned technique used to imitate sculpture.

The painting, a beloved treasure of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam on loan to the Washington exhibit until July 24, 2011, is labeled The Sick Child, but it might just as well be titled, “The Caring Mother,” suggests National Gallery of Art curator Arthur Wheelock. Viewers may enjoy this picture as an exquisitely brushed oil painting of red, blue, and ochre against more neutral shades; or they may look deeper for a religious meaning, specifically, a Roman Catholic one.

The child’s nude legs hanging down in front are most unusual in the domestic scenes that were a popular staple of Dutch 17th-century art. What they do call to mind are the numerous Renaissance-era paintings of the Virgin Mary and Christ Child at the Nativity, or of the Virgin Mary with Jesus on her lap at the Lamentation. The sick child’s pose is especially close to that of the dead Christ on Mary’s lap in Michelangelo’s Pieta in the Vatican. Metsu, who never went to Italy, was a Catholic like his famous contemporary Vermeer, and trained by some of the leading Dutch Catholic artists. He would have known the work through prints.

Pieta by Michelangelo, 1499

One widely circulated engraving posed Michelangelo’s Pieta in front of a crucifix in Santa Maria della Febbre (Saint Mary of the Fever) next to St. Peter’s in Rome, where the statue had been moved in 1516. This church—a lovely view of it by another Dutch master, Saenredam, is in the National Gallery’s permanent collection—also housed a miraculous image, the Madonna della Febbre, that was invoked against the plague.

Wave after wave of the bubonic plague swept through the Netherlands during Metsu’s lifetime, felling nearly a quarter of the population of his native Leiden when he was a child, and claiming more than 30,000 lives in Amsterdam between 1663 and 1664, when Metsu, residing in that city, was painting The Sick Child. No one knew how the disease was transmitted, and children were at highest risk. Fever and thirst were common symptoms. Popular literature advised mothers to hold their afflicted children on their lap and feed them pap.

The Roman Catholic community--comprising about a third of the Dutch population, and obliged to worship in secret--relied heavily on reverence for the Virgin Mary and the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and the anointing of the sick, in these desperate times. “During the height of the plague in Amsterdam, the close, personal concern of a Dutch mother with her child during a period of illness served as a vehicle for a reflection of the love and attentiveness of the Virgin Mary for her son, Christ, during his infancy and adult life,” writes Valerie Hedquist, a University of Montana professor who has analyzed the Catholic meaning in works by Metsu and Vermeer.

Most of Metsu’s pictures are what art historians call “genre” scenes, depictions of daily life. He often put a Catholic twist into these pictures. His version of An Old Woman at Her Meal highlights red wine and bread in an allusion to the Eucharist.

An Old Woman at Her Meal by Gabriel Metsu, 1657

In 1645, the Roman Catholic community observed the 300th anniversary of the miracle of Amsterdam, in which a Host had survived abuse and worked healing miracles. Joost Vondel, the nation’s greatest poet and a Catholic convert, issued a poem “Mysteries of the Altar” defending the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament.

Just before he died in the prime of life, Metsu painted a Crucifixion similar to the painting in the background of The Sick Child. His large canvas, loaned to the exhibit by Rome’s Capitoline Picture Gallery, might have been destined for one of the hidden churches in private houses in Amsterdam where mass was celebrated. Christ is silhouetted against a dark background while the Virgin Mary, Saint John, and Saint Mary Magdalene grieve at the foot of the cross. The Magdalene grasps the cross in a gesture that Catholic literature identified as the saint’s attempt to touch the blood of Christ. Her white undergarment spreads like a caporal in the center foreground under a golden chalice and paten.

I'm Dreaming of a Sleeping Porch

2011-05-14T06:10:00.000-07:00

Victorian home with a sleeping porch on the second floor. Usually built off a bedroom, the sleeping porch was screened in on three sides for maximum air circulation.

We assume in Virginia that hot weather will eventually arrive, which sets me to wishing again that I had a sleeping porch. So often in the summer, it is a lot cooler at night outside than it is in or there is a soft breeze outside that invites enjoyment. But we are stuck sleeping inside our homes with the windows shut and the hum of canned air. At these times, I start fantasizing about building a porch outside my bedroom window.

The screened-in sleeping porch enabled adults and children to sleep outside with protection from rain and insects during the hot summer months. With the advent of electric fans and air conditioning, it was erased from blueprints for new homes. But perhaps the high price of energy these days will bring about its revival, or families will start building them on their own. Here are some inspirations.

I like the way this porch is right up there with the trees--almost an enclosed treehouse.

Here's a first-floor screened in porch used for sleeping--and reading during the daytime?

At her home in Florida, Margaret Rawlings, author of The Yearling, wrote her books on a table on her porch and also slept there.

This sleeping porch also has windows, so that it can be used in the colder months also. These types of rooms also make nice studies or dining areas.

The sleeping porch offers us an opportunity to be more aware of our natural surroundings.

My personal favorite: the night-time nursery outside.

Every Human Life Has Meaning

2011-05-08T11:59:00.000-07:00

This video was shown to my daughter's pediatric nursing class at the University of Pennsylvania to highlight the way in which medicine is fighting to prolong the life of newborns with disorders and other problems. Among other benefits, the fight to save an apparently doomed infant can lead to breakthroughs in care practices that can be incorporated into protocols and to new insights into the disease that can contribute to finding a cure.

Happy Mother's Day, Everyone!

2011-05-08T06:30:00.001-07:00

Flowers in a Vase by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1866

Fine Arts Friday: Purposes of the Porch

2011-05-05T19:35:00.000-07:00

Perching before one's admirers (see Gentle Julia): Summer Girl by Robert Lewis Reid, 1896

Resting and contemplating at the end of the day: The White Porch by Daniel Garber, 1909

Communing with nature: Listening to the Orchard Oriole by Childe Hassam, 1902

Relaxing with the family: On the Verandah by John Singer Sargent, 1921

Coordinating with the flowers for one's admirers: The Crimson Rambler by Philip Leslie Hale, 1908

Sharing a quiet afternoon tea: Tea on the Porch by Willard Metcalf, 1890

Sewing and dining in elegance outside: Summer Porch at Mr. and Mrs. C.E.S. Wood by Childe Hassam, 1914

Chatting with friends: Ten Pound Island by Childe Hassam, 1896

And, oh my, reading: Couch on the Porch at Cos Cob by Childe Hassam, 1914

The Stone Diaries

2011-05-04T19:03:00.000-07:00

Lilies by Childe Hassam, 1910

The Stone Diaries by the Canadian author, Carol Shields, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1995 and tells the life story of one Daisy Flett (nee Goodwill), a Canadian by birth who then lived for a time in Indiana, went to live with her husband in Ottawa, and then retired for her final years in Florida.

Although Shields, who died in 2003, is considered and considered herself to be a domestic novelist, that is, writing about the domestic work of women in her novels, I would beg to differ with this categorization. Although she writes of scenes in which Daisy plans and carries out domestic activities, because the heroine's heart is not in her work, it remains a cold and rather dull activity.

The book chronicles Daisy's life, but for the most part only as seen by those around her, and we learn more about these characters than we ever know about Daisy. Some of these characters love her--her father, her husband, her children, and the next-door neighbor, Clarentine Flett, who took Daisy in as a wee infant when her own mother died giving birth to her. We also see Daisy through the eyes of the town wags, or hear about her in announcements of her major life events in newspapers, letters by friends, and other assorted specks of prose such as lists, real estate clippings, luncheon menus....

Throughout this Daisy remains nearly opaque to herself and also to us. We are led to believe through the course of the novel that the only thing about which she felt truly passionate was her writing of a garden column for the local newspaper. When she lost this job after eight years she went into a morose depression, from which she noiselessly emerged to resume her life as mother, grandmother, and friend.

Before she dies, Daisy writes an epitaph for herself:

Flowers gratefully accepted in remembrance of Daisy Goodwill Flett, who embraced as well as she was able most growing things
gardens children balloons
of memory
though she feared greatly the encircling shadow of her solitude and silence which she came to equate with her own life
Daisy Daisy give me your answer true
Day's eye, day's eye
The face in the mirror is you

There are undoubtedly some people who go through their life this way. We are led to believe that the source of Daisy's anomie is that she lost her mother at birth. The only mother she knew was the generous gardener, Clarentine, who loved Daisy, as she had loved her friend, Daisy's mother. Although Daisy's gardening may be a tribute to Clarentine, Daisy seems to have no depth of feeling for Clarentine or anyone else close to her, including her husband, Clarentine's son. Daisy is fixed on the loss of the mother she never knew.

But Daisy is not portrayed as emotionally aberrant but as every woman, at least of her time--Daisy was born in 1905.

Now it is true that there may be a part of us all that feels the way Daisy does about her life--that is in a quandary, feels no real connection with others, is ceaselessly grumbling over life's disappointments, even those that can't be remembered, and suspects the impossibility of meaningful activity. It's the atavistic part of ourselves we generally try to ignore in favor of getting out of ourselves and going about the business of life, and if we try to think of who we are, it is impossible to contemplate ourselves without bringing to mind all those we have loved and who have loved us.

Shields, though, seems to say that reality is the grey dusty doubt and withdrawal that is her portrait of Daisy. Such is the mode of modernity.

April Rain

2011-04-28T13:15:00.000-07:00

April Rain by Newell Convers Wyeth, 1935

The rains have turned the grass dark green here in Virginia, but we pray for all those who have been devastated by the storms in the South and Midwest. May God bless you and keep you.

Where Did Porches Go?

2011-04-26T18:35:00.001-07:00

Wisteria adorns this beautiful wrap-around porch with round columns.

Now that summer will soon be upon us, there is no time to lose to think about outdoor living space, which brings me to the topic of the porch. Time was that most new homes came with porches, no matter the size of the home. Porches offered an outdoor room where the family could sit together, children could play, older people could rock and watch, ladies could sew, bluestockings could read, teenagers could gab or cuddle in the evening, and people could gather for parties all summer long.

Porches, with their roof overhead, offered an outdoor refuge from rain and sun alike. The shade of the porch roof also helped keep down temperatures inside the house.

The 1950s saw the end of porches in new homes, ending the porch's 100-year reign as a necessary fixture in practically all new homes. Although some houses had porches in the colonial period, the porch did not become widespread until the 1840s and 1850s. Its popularity rose with the increase in leisure time in America, since it offered a cool and protected place for resting.

19th-century farmhouse with a porch.

Socially, the porch was the living room outside. "What the family room or TV room of post-World War II America would become, existed first as the front porch," notes the Evolution of the American Front Porch website.

New homes with porches in Collier, Pennsylvania, circa 1900.

The front porch also invited community. In towns, informal interaction with neighbors and friends could take place from the porch. As the website notes:

For the front porch existed as a zone between the public and private, an area that could be shared between the sanctity of the home and the community outside. It was an area where interaction with the community could take place. The neighbors from next door might stop by one's house, to sit on next door might stop by one's house, to sit on the porch and discuss both personal and community issues. The couple walking down the street might offer a passing "hello," as they passed house after house whose inhabitants rested outdoors. The porch brought the neighborhood and community together, by forcing interaction and an acute awareness of others. Indeed, the front porch and the ideal of community in America had developed into a congruous union.

Greenwood Plantation House, Louisiana

Slave quarters at Evergreen Plantation, Louisiana.

The decline of the porch can be attributed to new technologies that brought both prohibition to porch sitting and new sites for leisure. In towns at least, with the arrival of the auto and its fumes and noise, the front porch became less pleasant. In the early 1950s, the arrival of the television brought the family indoors for entertainment. Lastly, air conditioning squelched the impulse to sit outside on the porch and enjoy an evening breeze.

By the 1960s, reports Evolution, the front porch had disappeared in new homes. It began to be replaced with side porches hidden behind shrubbery or decks in backyards. The disappearance of the front porch increased family privacy at the expense of community life. Family life also frayed with the centrifugal forces brought by entertainment media in the home and a new focus on individualism, rather than on family and community.

The good news is that porches are beginning to re-emerge in new homes. Seaside, Florida, for instance, is one of several planned communities in the United States today where a front porch is mandatory. I, for one, would be pleased to see a porch revival. I say: The more porches the merrier!

Ruskin Street in Seaside, Florida.

In Praise of the Mudroom

2011-04-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

A mudroom is a small room or corridor, usually between the kitchen and the outdoors, that serves as a transition before entering the home. It's a boon to any homemaker lucky enough to have one. Here is my friend Christina's mudroom, which is not only of high utilitarian value but is also beautiful. Here is the mudroom as seen from the porch going into the house,

and as seen from the house going out. The window on the right opens to the kitchen.

Like most mudrooms, this corridor is a catch-all for spillover from the outside:

garden gear and coats and jackets

Hats and egg crates (Christina and her family have chickens),

shoes, lined up on the shelf below, and baskets for use inside and out.

It also holds spillover from the kitchen. Since this room is unheated, in winter it serves as a second refrigerator--especially handy during Thanksgiving and the Christmas season. In all seasons, stored here are:

fruits and vegetables,

large kitchen equipment that is not used regularly, along with large pots for canning and a crock for making brandied fruit,

and treasures.

Right outside the door to the porch is a potting table,

now in full swing for spring.

Happy Easter, Everyone!

2011-04-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

Easter Eve by John Sloan, 1907

"And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."--John 1:5

Welcome Back Lace!

2011-04-14T17:59:00.000-07:00

Chantilly Lace

I love lace, so I was happy to hear from the Wall Street Journal that lace has made a comeback on the runway for spring and fall. The Journal shows how lace is still made today after decades of its virtual disappearance from the fashion world. I hope a revival of this ancient art can be sustained. As the Journal slideshow indicates, lace can be transformed for edginess. But to me there's nothing more feminine than lace. I wonder if its return signals a subterranean longing in women for clothes that are more feminine and less oriented toward the office.

A turn-of-the century beauty in Irish lace

An Oleg Cassini wedding gown circa 2003

A lace mantilla

My mother at her second wedding in a dress she designed herself as a December bride--light green taffeta with a lace overlay and a dark green velvet sash, 1957.

His Family: A 1916 Shocker

2011-04-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

Interior Green Street by Daniel Garber. I imagine the Gale house in 1916 Manhattan with this ambiance--dark.

From the wiregrass country of Georgia in the 1850s, I zoomed up to New York City, time: 1916, with a reading of His Family by Ernest Poole. This book won the first Pulitzer Prize given for a novel.

Here on the verge of U.S. entry into World War I, Poole tells the story of an upper-middle-class widower, Roger Gale, as he attempts to hold together his family of three very different adult daughters.

His oldest is married with four children and pregnant with her fifth when the story opens. Edith is concerned, we are told, about 150 percent of the time with her children, and their well-being is the prism through which she sees the world. She is racing toward the suburbs, in terror of the tall-rise apartment buildings replacing the brownstones.

His next child, Deborah, is a school teacher in the tenement slums of New York City. "Down in my school we have a family of about three thousand children," says Deborah. Her ideas are painted in the most favorable light in the book.

The third sister, Laura, is rushing toward the flapper age and beyond as fast as her silk-stockinged legs can carry her. "What do you think the girls over there [in Europe] are going to do for husbands, with half the marriageable men either killed or hopelessly damaged? They're not going to be nuns all their lives!"

You can see that Roger has a real job on his hands. As each of these women are drawn by Poole, they represent a type rather than a fully developed character. Since their reactions are true to type, the novel is less of an exploration into the human heart than a dialogue of the views clashing in the cities during the second decade of the 20th century.

Poole's cleaving to ideas makes the book an eye-opener though. It is one thing to read history books about the avant-garde ideas emerging during the period before the Great War. It is another thing entirely to watch those ideas wreak havoc with a family. Since Edith is a reclusive mother, with little social involvement except that useful to social-climbing, she is regarded by both her younger sisters as a paragon of reactionary Victorianism, a despised burden on the family, and on humanity--even if her children might occasionally be enjoyed. (Somehow in the 20th century, motherhood must have made a comeback before it got knocked down again by Betty Friedan et al.)

Roger is a good man and vaguely an atheist, whose religion becomes distinctly Feuerbachian as the book proceeds: The great human family, which includes his own, becomes his highest universal. Neither he, nor the author it seems, notices that his lack of religious faith severely limits his ability to intervene successfully with his children.

With Deborah -- suffragette, volunteer social worker, and crusader for the poor -- and her friends, we see ideas that today we think of as being post-1960s, which are presented in a beneficent light:

Euthanasia--mercy killing, with or without the permission of the sick--should be permitted and is humane.

The old God of the religions is dead.

"Humanity" is the new god, replacing both God and any particular family as the object of devotion and loyalty.

Crimes, including second-degree murder, committed by poor people should not be treated as crimes, but such people should be given a chance, with opportunities in careers. Equality of opportunity and equality before the law are less important than economic equality.

Domestic life is not worthy of attention.

Motherhood must change: "All such mothers as you [Edith] are out of date and have got to change! ... We're bound together--all over the world--whether we like it or whether we don't! And ... if we want to keep out of war, we've got to do it by coming right out of our own little homes--and thinking, Edith, thinking," rages Deborah [emphasis not added]. Never does Deborah believe that the widowed Edith deserves a minutia of respect for the very difficult sacrifices she makes for her children. She and her brood are packed off for permanent residence in the country.

Poole frowns upon the rise of fascism in Italy and nails its goals accurately: "She [Laura] did not consider the war wholly bad.... It was clearing away a lot of old rubbish, customs, superstitions and institutions out of date. Musty old relics, she called them... She threw out hints about the church and even Christianity, as though it were falling to pieces. She spoke of a second Renaissance, 'glorious pagan era' coming.... She talked about a world for the strong, bits of gabble from Nietzsche and that sort of rot; she spoke blithely of Rome reborn, the 'Wings of the Eagles' heard again." Later, Roger reflects on his youngest: "She had hit it, struck the keynote of this new age. Rome reborn, all clean, old fashioned Christian living swept away by millions of men at each others' throats like so many wolves. And at last quite openly to himself, Roger admitted that he felt old. Old and beaten, out of date." Laura waltzes off to Europe.

Deborah--although in somewhat modified form--is the future, Poole seems to tell us. He was, not surprisingly, a socialist, and a journalist, who reported first hand on the Russian Revolution. His Pulitzer is, I think, an acknowledgment not of his artistry, but of his ability to write a book that mirrored his time and place. In this way, His Family puts the social issues of our own day in an interesting perspective.

I'm Wondering About Dessert

2011-03-28T18:37:00.000-07:00

My great-grandmother, who baked fabulous bread, and my grandmother, who made a dessert for every dinner.

Anna at Pleasant View Schoolhouse posted a day's menu from the vintage cookbook, The American Home Diet, or, What Shall We Have for Dinner? published in 1920. It doesn't take long to see that this diet is packed with carbohydrates and sweet delectables, in one form another, for each meal. Since the epidemic of obesity had not yet struck America in 1920, it is interesting that people could eat through such a day's menu.

When I was between four and eight years old -- quite a few decades ago -- my mother and I lived with my grandparents. My grandmother did most of the cooking. Every evening, dinner was served in the dining room, on a table cloth -- not in the breakfast nook adjoining the kitchen. Every night there was dessert. Years later when I looked through my grandmother's recipes and those of her mother, at least 50 percent of the recipes were for sweets--puddings, sherberts, cakes, pies, cookies, sweet sauces, tarts. For each kind of fruit there was an array of recipes, so you could cook it when it was in season in all kinds of ways. If are making 365 desserts a year, you need variety.

There are plenty of differences between the 1920s, when my grandmother first started cooking for her husband and family, and today. For one, many more people moved their bodies in the course of doing their daily work, rather than sitting in an office, or walked a lot more as part of their commutes or trips to the store.

Our portions are reported to be much larger today.

Food represents a much smaller portion of the family's monthly budget -- that is, it is cheaper.

But was there a difference in the experience of the meal itself, especially the family dinner? At my grandmother's, meals were regular (I don't remember eating in restaurants), and eating ended when the meal ended. Adults never ate between meals.

Ergo, missing from the grocery store that we went to every Friday night were the huge aisles of snack food that we see in today's supermarkets. In my local grocery store, there is one side of an aisle devoted to candy, another to popcorn and nuts, another to frozen desserts, a double aisle of cookies and crackers, and another double aisle of chips, pretzels, and other snack food. With the exception of the desserts, crackers with soup, and cookies for lunch, none of these foods are eaten at meals, yet they consume close to 25 percent of the supermarket floor space devoted to food items.

I am wondering if there is a correlation between the lack of a ritualized family dinner, complete with dessert, and the rise in snack food?

I am wondering, do many women today still make a dessert when they prepare the family meal at night? Do you? And if you do, does it help decrease your family's eating between meals?

Housekeeping in Lamb in His Bosom 2

2011-03-20T10:15:00.000-07:00

Here are more quotes from Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom that give an idea of the work of women in non-slaveowning families of southern Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War.

Weaving and Spinning

Ma was happy at her loom, or when she was spinning, the long hum of the wheel filling the house, or when she was dyeing, mixing her likkers of indigo with maple bark or poplar, or this or that or the other root she had to see what color it would make. She would souse the hanks of cotton or worsted yarn into the pot, pushing them gently under the bubbling, swirling surface. She would take them out, and dry them on a leaning bush, and the colors would be softly blent through the threads, set with the lye of the green-oak ashes. She used the juice of the poke-berries for short lengths of red for bright bibs and tuckers. But that color would run in the washing, and it was a pity.

Spinning wheel, an ancient tool for making thread from fibers.

Cean would try new dyes herself when she made cloth. Lonzo would set her up a loom when the cotton was in. He was working at her spinning wheel now by the firelight of nights. The wood squeaked softly under the blade of his knife where he rounded off a corner or settled a spoke into place. Cean would make all her frocks straight blue or yaller, or block her colors together as she wove then. She would have frock of blue with flounces of yaller across the bottom.

Pokeberries used for dyeing.

Making Soap

Tomorrow Cean would make soap-grease out of the scraps [of the butchered pig], when her lard was cold in the kegs, and her sausages were all strung up in greasy links in the smokehouse. Not every woman knows how to make good strong soap that will not shrink away to nothing when you lay it out in hunks on the smokehouse shelf. But Cean knew how, for her mother had taught her when Cean was not knee-high to a duck. Like meat-curing, there is no quick way to make good soap. Wait till the dark of the moon to cook up your soap-grease and pot-ashes, and while the mixture is boiling stir it from left to right with a sassafras puddle; when it is thick and ready, let the fire die under the pot. Next morning you will find the soap shrunk a little from the sides of the pot, and a little wet-like dew will be gathered upon it; then you can slice it in hunks and lay it away, sure of fine, strong soap for another year.

Washpot, used for making soap, doing the wash, and making big stews for large gatherings.

Doing the Laundry

Four times she had soaked his and her clothes in the wash-trough, had battled them free of dirt on the block, had boiled them white and rinsed them through the spring water, had hung them out on the elder bushes to dry. Together, in the water, she had washed their clothes—his long, sweaty shirts and britches, her short shimmies and full-skirted homespun dresses of pale natural color, and of the soft blue of indigo, and of mingled colors patterned on the loom.

Butchering the Calf

And now Lonzo would butcher him and they’d eat him. Cean would beat the tender pieces and fry them on the fireplace; she would try out the yellow tallow for candles, and boil the tough pieces, and she and Lonzo would carry Ma a half of beef. Lonzo would stretch the hide to the back side of the house, and the sun would dry it. Then Lonzo would tan it, and rub it down till it was soft and giving, and then he’d make shoes for them on the shoe-last that lay under the bed.

Making and Preparing Food

For Cean and Lonzo had aplenty and to spare. Out in the smokehouse there were kegs of lard and sides of meat, sweet brown hams and shoulders, and sausages fried and buried in lard; piled back in the corner were pumpkins, pale-colored in the half-light; behind the corncrib were mounds of dirt and pine straw covering banks of potatoes—all Cean had to do was go and grabble out as many as she needed; in the loft were dried peas aplenty; in stone crocks Cean had preserved all manner of things in thick sweetness—mayhall jelly, blackberries, huckleberries, watermelon rind, wild plums. Like her mother, Cean set a good table. With corn aplenty for meal and hominy, with potatoes to fry, with syrup to be sopped up with a hot biscuit, and preserves to be had for the asking, it was no wonder that Cean had only a coming war to worry her. When her table was set, neat and tidy with its crockery plates and bone-handled knives and forks and pewter spoons, it was a pretty sight to see. Maggie and Kissie would rake the coals from the top of the oven, would push the coals from under the pots and skillets, would lift the pot lids and let the food cool a little. Rich simmering would mingle with the floury, fresh odor of buttermilk biscuits and varied scents of boiled beans, stewed pork, and such like—all fitten to stir the hunger of a stone man. The roasted potatoes would come out of the hot ashes to be peeled and buttered. “Fine rations,” Lonzo would say as he sat down to eat… And for the next meal she might stir up a sugar-cake to please him and make him eat the heartier.

Berries of the mayhall bush, found in southern Georgia. You can buy it from Southern Grace Farms here.

Fixing Wounds

She washed the gashes that tapered to scratches down her arm, and caked the open places with tallow melted with clear turpentine. The hot liquid seared with its heat and sting, but she must do this or have blood-poison or proud flesh, and high fevers, and be dead, maybe, before ever Lonzo found her.

Tallow, rendered from animal fat, usually beef, which was used for making soap and candles.

Laying Out the Dead

Seen washed her new dead while dawn was breaking. Margot helped her. The two women were steeled to the emergency…. They washed his naked, wasted, sore-eaten body. Once the breath was gone, here was an unclean body to be prepared for its burial in the clean earth…. She raised the limp body, and Margot helped her clothe him in clean clothing. She set her hand under his chin to see that the jaws were set together properly. She brushed his hair down with a bristle-brush; it was docile under her hand as he been docile since he was sick, but never before. Margot shook out a clean sheet….

Family cemetery from the mid-19th century. The Carver-Smith family buried their dead on their own land.

Praying

Cean, back home on a low slope bounded by swaying stretches of broom straw and tilled fields, sheltered by lofty pines and the blazing bright dome of heaven, prayed God-almighty that she would never have just cause to leave Lonzo; but over and above any other thing, each day raising her heart to an altar, she prayed for patience—patience to listen to a child’s fretting; patience to endure a man’s hard displeasure over bad weather or the death of a hog; patience to love God as she ought, this being hard to do since never might she see His face until she died.

Along a path from the Cean's house to the road her husband planted a row of crape myrtle, that exuberant bush-tree that blooms in the summer in the southern states.

Housekeeping in Lamb in His Bosom 1

2011-03-19T20:15:00.000-07:00

Here are some quotes from Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller that give an idea of the work of women of non-slaveholding farming families in Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War.

Thoughts on Setting Up Her House

Now she was a woman and would churn her own butter, scald her own milk-crocks and set them in the sun to make them smell sweet and clean; now she would own and tend her little patches of herbs and melons, drop corn behind her own man, and watch it grow, and hoe the grass out from around the sharp, clean blades cutting through the earth.

Typical milk crock

Creating the Bed

She went into the house where the floor of split logs had never been scrubbed and yet was clean, where Lonzo had set the bedplace in the corner with its depth of dry cornshucks soaked and softened in water, and dried again in recent suns. Over these shucks, that would rustle softly with the turn of their bodies, was spread a thick mattress of soft new cotton, caught between its homespun ticking with strong thread in the hands of Cean’s mother. Atop the cotton mattress lay Cean’s feather bed, the feathers saved from every goose for years gone. Atop this were homespun sheets and Cean’s quilts, one of them the bright and dark scraps of the Widow’s Trouble pattern, sewn by Cean’s fingers through her girlhood. She had two other quilts—Star of the East, and Maiden’s Tear—that she had pieced herself. That would be more than enough cover for these bright, cool nights, and before winter came again she would make other quilts. Lonzo’s mother had promised wool for two comforts when the sheep should be sheared in April.

Widow's Pane Quilt Pattern from Carolina Patchworks (Is Widow's Trouble the origin of this pattern?)

Making the Broom

Cean gathered the bushes of the gall berries for brush brooms and laid them on top of her wash-shed to dry. The brittle stems, beaten free of leaves, would keep the dooryard clean of trash. Each morning as she swept the yard the twigs of the brush broom left their little wavy marks on the thin sand about her doorstep.

Gallberry bush

Cean’s House

When they needed more room Lonzo would ceil the room and make a loft for another room. Now there was room aplenty; and truth to tell, Cean liked the dim space overhead where the corners were veiled with dusty cobwebs that the little gray spiders had woven, bringing good luck to this house. She loved her house; from the beams of it hung her bronze-red pods of pepper drying for sausage seasoning, her beans strung to dry for winter use, her seeds gathered fresh, season by season, and tied in clean rags to hang safe from the rats’ greedy teeth….

Yonder on the wall hung the little looking-glass that Lonzo had brought from the Coast so she could see to comb her hair; on the narrow shelf below the looking-glass lay the fine bone-backed bomb and the bristle hair-brush, and the little pipkin of ointment compounded of witch-hazel tea and rose leaves, to soothe her lips and hands from winter chapping. On her floor were yellow shuck rugs of her own plaiting and sewing, and deep bearskin rugs from the backs of the honey-robbing, lamb-stealing beasts that Lias, dare-devil! had killed in the swamp. Far in the corner was her bed, and close beside it was the cradle where the babies would sleep, each in its time.

Witch-Hazel

You may also enjoy:
Housekeeping in Great Forest: The Trees 2
Housekeeping in The Fields

Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller

2011-03-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

Lamb in His Bosom is about a poor white farming family living in the wiregrass country of south- central Georgia in the two decades before the Civil War. It's about the life and extended family of Cean Carver Smith, beginning with her marriage to Lonzo Smith and their setting up housekeeping in their newly built tree-chiseled home among the pines, six miles west of her parents' farm.

Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Lamb in His Bosom in 1934. The book was a bestseller, as readers could see, in the story of how the Carver-Smith family endured the harsh difficulties of life in antebellum Georgia, a mirror of their own struggles to survive in the Great Depression's meanest years. I would not be surprised if John Steinbeck drew on Lamb in His Bosom for his 1939 Grapes of Wrath.

Conrad Richter said his novel, The Trees, was heavily influenced by Lamb in His Bosom, which is one of the reasons I made an immediate beeline for it. Miller's novel is historically authentic, writes historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the book's afterword. How the farmers and their families did everything -- from building a house to making dinner to sowing their crops to butchering a pig -- is authentic, along with the characters' dialect and reliance on the Protestant religion. Fox-Genovese notes:

Miller understood the context of the lives of those she was writing about. Her accounts of the business of everyday life ... conform in extraordinary detail to what we know about the Old South from a myriad of sources. It is difficult to think of a single other text that could give students of antebellum history as complete or accurate an account of the lives of nonslaveholding whites.

I thought the main character, Cean Carver Smith, was fully drawn, and I felt close to her most of the time. We see the anguished work of her soul as she struggles to physically and emotionally survive one catastrophe after another. None of the stories seems implausible, but only too painfully true of the difficulties American frontiersmen and women faced and persevered against.

Miller may in part be indebted to Sigrid Undset for the richness of her portrayal of Cean and other characters; she told an interviewer for the Atlanta-Constitution in 1933 that she liked Sigrid Undset "better than a dozen others all rolled together." In comparison with the female heroine of Richter's Awakening Land trilogy, Cean Carver Smith is a real woman. However, most characters in the book do not fundamentally change over time, including the heroine, so I do not come away with the same sense of closure I felt upon leaving Undset's Kristin Lavransdattar. The book's momentum derives from the unfolding lives of the family and the challenges they overcome, or, in some cases, as in any family, are unable to overcome, and their deep faith in God and His love for and tutoring of their souls.

Lamb in His Bosom was Miller's first novel, published when she was 30 years old. She never went to college but was mentored in literature by her high school English teacher, whom she married and with whom she bore three sons, who were collectively nicknamed "the three twins," her niece reports. Her impetus for writing Lamb in His Bosom was the hard time she was having keeping house and minding her children! As she told an interviewer:

When my twins were two years old (and Billy was four) I thought I would break under the strain of trying to take care of them and do the hundreds of other little things any normal wife and mother is called upon to do. But one day it suddenly occurred to me that I was not half so weighted down with duties as the pioneer women used to be. Even my mother and grandmother, who had such large families, seemed to get through with much less effort and energy than I was expending. I couldn’t help wondering why. They had something, something very real, very tangible, yet almost indefinable, that anchored them and gave them faith and courage, and I needed that something so much.

From that day I turned to the examples set by the pioneer women of Georgia. I gathered my material around Baxley and in the surrounding country, and it has been a wonderful help to me. Needless to say, I feel that I have derived more benefit from writing the book than my readers could ever obtain through reading it.

Miller began collecting stories and information from her family. Her own parents had buried six infants, including two sets of stillborn twins, and two toddlers. A preacher in the book is modeled on her great-grandfather who built a New Light church in the area. With her children in tow, she visited people beyond her town of Baxley, in the Georgia countryside:

I’d get in the Ford and ride about the country and talk to the people. I’d buy chickens and vegetables from them, and they’d tell me about their lives, in the language which even today preserves many of the picturesque and graphic figures of speech which their ancestors used. These people are obscure, but they are an important part of our history. Their forbears fought in the Revolution, and in the Confederate army. They are loyal Americans, patriotic citizens, and people of high moral character.

And while I found my book among these people, I also found something which helped me. I discovered the fine spirit in which they met the hardships and tragedies. What they suffered and their nobility in the midst of desperate conditions made my own problems less difficult. I hope that I have captured something of their patience and courage and faith, not only in my book, but also for myself.

In its liveliness of speech and description, its authenticity, and its story, Lamb in His Bosom, listed by Abebooks as a "lost Pulitzer," is ripe for revival.

650 American Red and White Quilts!

2011-03-18T09:58:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Ancient Industries, I have learned of this extraordinary exhibition in New York City's Park Avenue Armory. What's showing: a collection of 650 red and white quilts constructed by American women over three centuries. The quilts, from the collection of Joanna S. Rose, are on display from March 25 through March 30.

Prayers and Donations for Japan

2011-03-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Book Snob.

How Do They Make Those Bejewelled Dresses?

2011-03-05T10:28:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal reports that beading and embroidery were prominent in this year's Fashion Week. If you would like to see how these elaborate dresses are created, watch the movie Brodeuses (Sequins), available at Netflix -- a visually beautiful movie and one of my favorites.

Scene from Brodeuses, when a young girl dedicated to embroidery applies as an assistant to the local embroidery contractor for Paris haute couture.

The Awakening Land Trilogy by Conrad Richter

2011-03-04T15:12:00.001-08:00

Statue of Pioneer Woman in Hamilton, Ohio (compliments of Hanneorla)

As I suspected, The Trees, the first book in the trilogy called The Awakening Land by Conrad Richter, is in a class by itself for the beauty and vitality of the language that Richter surfaced from the annals and letters and diaries of early America. That language and the story of the "woodsy" Luckett family that first staked out a home in the deep forests of early Ohio took this reader by storm.

Statue of a pioneer farmer in Kansas.

In its sequel, The Fields, we see the leading figure of this trilogy, Sayward Luckett Wheeler, now married to Portius Wheeler, an attorney who has come, for reasons unknown, from a well-off family in the Bay State of Massachusetts to the Ohio woods, where until Sayward married him, he lived alone in a shanty cabin and spent his time memorizing Latin, Greek, and English classics. Portius and Sayward produce ten children. In The Fields, Sayward is the driving force for clearing the trees, planting crops, building a church, and starting up a school. As we leave The Fields, which has the flavor but not the force of the language of The Trees, the village of Moonshine Church is on the brink of becoming a town.

By the end of The Town, Sayward lives in a large brick house built at her husband's insistence, and she, her husband, and her grown children are leading citizens and even political figures of a large town, now called Americus, that is on the brink of becoming a city.

Thus, through the span of Sayward's life, Richter gives us a window to the relentless activity and the hopes that built this country. While in The Fields, Sayward is marching at the head of the line for progress, by her middle age, the coming of town and city ways make her yearn for the old days of isolation (softened by reliable hospitality to strangers) and extremely hard work. Work is redemption for Sayward.

As the trilogy progressed, I became increasingly irritated with Richter's drawing of his characters. Although he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Town in 1951, to me this last book was a step down in quality from The Trees, written in 1940. I felt that Richter had withdrawn from the inner life of his characters, freezing them into positions representing ideas or a worldview and skirting the complexities of human flesh and blood. Even in The Trees it sometimes struck me that Sayward had the sensibility in human relationships of a man, rather than a woman. She becomes a formidable matriarch for her family. She is devoted to her children, she diligently does her duty for her husband, she both loves and fears God, she loves the land. We see her views of the changing world around her. What's missing are the tensions and upheavals of her heart. She is pure stoic; her inner struggles last but a minute.

Other than Sayward, we sometimes see things through the eyes of her children, but we never get a glimpse of the insides of her husband. Sayward and Portius seem to operate on parallel tracks to the same destination, but the rails never seem to meet emotionally or spiritually. We never see below the surface.

Given that The Awakening Land centers on the life of a strong woman, I couldn't help but compare it with a trilogy I well love, Kristin Lavransdattar penned by the Norwegian author Sigrid Undset in 1921-1922. Like The Awakening Land, Kristin Lavransdatter is a work of historical fiction; in this case the setting is medieval Catholic Norway.

The young Sigrid Undset (1882-1949). She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928.

Here, against a backdrop of political power struggles and the medieval church, we read about Kristin who becomes a wife, a noblewoman, and a matriarch and exhibits robust capabilities for perseverance and manorial management. But we are far closer to Kristin and her family than we are ever permitted to be with Sayward and hers in early Ohio five centuries later. Indeed, as Kristin discovers herself in the final book, we come away feeling that we also know her. Kristin truly loves.

The quiet love evoked within the Luckett family in The Trees is not carried over into the family of Portius Wheeler and his wife. As they become more and more invulnerable to the elements, so they seem to become more invulnerable to each other and deserted in emotional isolation. Perhaps this is the message that Richter wanted to deliver, but because he never gives us a glimpse into Portius' mind and heart, I think he was emotionally hesitant as a writer.

Nevertheless, The Awakening Land delivers a vibrant and fascinating portrayal of what it was like to live in the first 80 years of the American republic. With good reason we call our country "the home of the brave."

Also see Housekeeping in the Great Forest: The Trees 2 and Housekeeping in The Fields for some of Richter's beautiful descriptions of women's work.

Housekeeping in The Fields

2011-03-01T16:41:00.000-08:00

Pennyroyal (mentha pulegium), which was used as an ant and flea repellant

I devoured in a day Conrad Richter's The Fields, sequel to The Trees. The feeling of this book is different. In The Trees, the drama overshadowing the characters is the problem of physical survival in the face of extreme isolation, lack of necessities and amenities, and a very formidable natural setting. Far more than the pioneers, I suspect, this reader was shivering in her timbers with fear for the characters.

In The Fields, the drama has shifted to the intricate relations among people, since now there are a lot more of them where the Luckett family first plunked down its two kettles, quilts, and hunting and trapping gear. Clearing the forest to make a field and planting a crop is a cruel struggle. We see Sayward Luckett Wheeler's efforts not only to "defeat the trees" as she put it, but also to corral her children to the ways of civilization.

Here are quotes from The Fields that give an idea of Sayward's work.

Even her cabin looked small and pitiful aside of the big timber. But it had a tight roof against the rain, stout walls against the beasts and the winter, a bed to sleep in, a fireplace to cook by and gourds on clapboard shelves spilling over with what grew in woods and patches. Hanging from her rafters she had dittany tea, herbs for complaints, a jug of whiskey if you needed it, sacks of meal and grain. With these she reckoned they could make out.

A piggin

The river was her boundary. Down here was a place to get gourds in the late summer. You sliced off the tops for lids, pulled out the guts and had all the piggins and pipkins [small earthenware pot with a horizontal handle] for your shelf boards you wanted....

Her and Portius’ bed was the only one left down the ladder. This bed Sayward had made new in the fall. First she littered fresh fallen leaves on the bark she had spread on tamped dirt floor. Then she laid ticking [strong ticking fabric] she had sewed up herself and stuffed with corn shucks and wheat straw. Between the yarn blankets on top of this Sayward from time to time took her ease....

My, but the cabin smelled good with its joists hanging with curing dittany and pennyroyal. They had to gather linn [jute] for rope and hickory bark for light wood when candles ran low.

Shellbark hickory (carya laciniosa).

First she stood a slab bench with a gourd of soft soap by the run, and all had to scrub their heads and hands like they were pewter plates. Then she hung up a [black] haw comb, and every time before you came to eat, you had to hackle your hair with it. Oh, she was bound you’d be somebody around here. She put those puncheons [planking] down in the cabin just so she’d had a floor to scour, he believed. Now she talked of getting lime from Maytown and making her boys whitewash the logs…. Her ways were so “cam” you figured she was easy-going, but that’s where she fooled you. The day wasn’t long enough for the things she studied out to do to get you along in the world. She was having a loom built and said she knew where she could get her hands on two more ewes.

Blackhaw (viburnum prunifolium)

Wheat was coloring up fast. It would have to be reaped, bound, shocked, flailed, and the chaff fanned out. Then her flax had to be taken care of, pulled, spread, turned, ripped for the seeds, and that was only a start of the long “tejus” work before it could be spun. All the time corn and potatoes would have to be hoed and sprouts and weeds fought. And meanwhile the hay had be made and put away. It was all coming in a pile. You couldn’t put off a crop once it was ready.

Mayapple

She smelled just the same, that good, clean smell of soap and wood smoke and something broad, sweet and healthy that was just her. He reckoned a part of it came from May apples. She always dried May apples, he recollected, and laid them among her clothes in the chest.

Housekeeping in the Great Forest: The Trees 2

2011-02-27T17:28:00.000-08:00

Detail of an early 19th century quilt from Pennsylvania

Here are quotes from The Trees by Conrad Richter that describe various domestic activities. I deeply appreciate Richter's descriptions of these tasks and his respect for what women accomplished in the wilderness in creating a home from nothing but what they could find in the forest.

What they brought from Pennsylvania:

In that pack under his rifle were a frow [a cleaving tool] and auger [tool for boring holes], bar lead and powder, blacksmith’s traps and a bag of Indian meal wrapped up in a pair of yellow yarn blankets. Sayward carried the big kettle and little kettle packed with small fixings, Genny the quilts thronged to her white shoulders and Achsa a quarter of venison with the bloody folded buckskin her Father had taken since the last trader. Even the littlest ones, Wyitt and Sulie, had their burdens of axe, bullet mould and clothes.

Shadbark hickory tree

Making a broom:

Her mother’s old broom was worn til it wasn’t more than a club, and she cut a green hickory stick, her knife splitting a splint at one end. This she turned back and split another, and another. When she was done and the handle whittled down, she had a fine, new broom.

Making bread:

She spilled the grey white meal soundlessly in the little kettle, hoarding every pinch, feeling of it between her fingers. Not even the fur on the belly of a mink or beaver was soft and velvety as this. They must have run it through the deerskin sifter. Never had she baked wheat bread before but she well knew how…. Now the girl’s firm hands mixed the flour and some water together, working in a little precious salt and maple sugar with the miller woman’s yeasty stuff. By the time she set it by the fire to rise, her father had taken off his buckskin leggings that were wet from the fording of streams and had lain across her and Genny's bed,* some of the quilt over his bare legs, dead as a log from his long tramp.

"Bed" is very loosely speaking, a bed of leaves on the clay floor covered with a bottom quilt and a yarn blanket or a top quilt.

Making a buckskin shirt:

Now she went on about her business, working a doeskin with her hands. They had taken hair off with lye from fire ashes and tanned it with oak bark liquor in a log trough. Once the hide was worked soft, Jary would lay it on the table and cut it out with the cabin knife, and Genny’s nimble fingers would sew up a shirt for Wyitt. He had some squirrel ready that he wanted it trimmed with.

New neighbors have brought considerably more to the forest:

Genny said they had pewter and copper ware, a looking glass with a towel they hung on a tree, more pots and kettles than you could shake a stick at, a grind stone and grubbing hoe. And that wasn’t half of it. They had two chests; fine patched quilts; a big iron shovel and a small one Genny thought for the fire; a candle mould, reels, a flax and spinning wheel. And the woman had all the bushes airing with shirts, britches, petticoats, bedgowns and sheets like great folks had. The walls of the Luckett cabin, Sayward expected, would look mighty bare of clothes to such a woman.

Ladies Yellow Slipper (cyridedium pubescens [orchidacaeae])

Getting ready for a visit from the new neighbor:

Then she went and redd out [tidied up] the cabin. She was glad she had set sour dough to raise that morning. Only yesterday Wyitt said he knew where it had early yellow lady slippers and she had him fetch some for Genny to stick in cracks between the logs. She told him to fetch some fresh mint and cucumber tree leaves, for they made it smell good and welcome over a swept dirt floor... When the kettle started to simmer, she used it a fifth time, as a teapot, putting in a lick of dittany and sassafras root shavings. Then she poured out a pair of steaming wooden cups and set them with her two breadstuffs on the table.... Her sour dough biscuits were not fine and scanty but of a hearty size with a square of smoked bear’s bacon set in the top of each to run down over the sides and bake with a tasty crust.

Leaves of the cucumber tree (magnolia acuminata)

Getting ready for a new husband:

Quickly she turned back indoors and redded up the cabin. Her splint broom scraped and hackled the bones, gristle, bed leaves and black boot dirt off the hard clay floor. The hearth she swept clean with a turkey wing. Her old buckskin rag wiped dust off logs and chinking. The clean-washed blankets she lugged down from the marriage bed and spread them over the everyday place she slept in. Last she fetched out a choice slice of roast venison she had saved back for her man if he came home, and set a place at the table....

Dittany (cunila mariana), also known as stone mint, which Sayward used to make tea

The Trees by Conrad Richter

2011-02-23T16:07:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, Alicia at Posie Gets Cozy asked her readers for suggestions on novels and other reads on the American frontier and pioneers. I appreciated this request as a good way to compile my own list on this topic, which is always of interest to me. From the long list of recommended books, many of which sounded wonderful, I chose to read was The Trees by Conrad Richter, which I had recently found out about and was very curious to read.

Suffice it to say that this is one of the best books I have ever read in my life.

I did not expect it to find it so. The Trees is about the Luckett family in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War and their move from Pennsylvania to the great forests of Ohio, where they build their cabin so surrounded by trees that in the summer months, it is impossible to see the sky. It is hard to imagine living in such a remote, unsettled area, so closed off from a landscape of human modification. It is doubly hard to imagine it with as few human-made amenities as the Lucketts had brought along. Yet, they carved out an existence there that permitted the father, Worth Luckett, to hunt--the reason for their move being the draining of the Pennsylvania woods of the game that Worth Luckett pursued as his meaning in life.

Richter well evokes the vulnerability of human beings in the elements in which the Lucketts find themselves alone. Even with neighbors slowly making their way into the area, life remains exceedingly precarious. It doesn't take anyone too far into this book before you are worrying about the Luckett children like a fretting mother yourself, racing home from work to find out if they will survive what surrounds them--unrelenting darkness, creatures of every kind, plants beneficial and dangerous, the giant trees, and the unknown-unknowable. We are in awe of the enterprise these weakling humans have undertaken, children in tow, and their imagination and resourcefulness in bending nature's productions to their own every-day needs.

Even if the author had told his story in a down-to-earth humdrum style, this would have been a good book. What makes it an extraordinary book is Richter's language, as if the tale were being told by an omniscient woodsman observer striding right alongside the Lucketts in this dense 18th-century American forest. The cadence of this language hurls us into this distant world, like a fast river that does not stop til the last page.

In his introduction, Richter tell us that this language

approximating as it does the store of 18th- and early 19th-century speech collected from old manuscripts, letters, and records, a speech quite different from the formal written and printed language of the time into which the talk of citizens, the testimony of court witnesses, and even the conversation of ladies and gentleman in the privacy of their family circles, had almost invariably to be translated before reaching the respectability of public print. This early, vigorous spoken language, contrary to public belief, had its considerable origin in the Northeastern states, whence it was carried by emigrants into Ohio and adjoining territories, where today [1940] it has largely disappeared, and, along with the Pennsylvania rifle, into the South and Southwest, where it has more widely survived and it is sometimes thought to be a purely native form of speech but which, wherever found, should be recognized with its local variants as a living reminder of the great mother tongue of early America.

This language makes The Trees a tour de force and in so doing plants the story of our early American forebears firmly in the heart and mind. The Trees is the first of a trilogy and is followed by The Fields and The Town. I am excited to read more of the Luckett family, but I imagine that The Trees is in a class all its own.

Who's Minding the Kitchen While Mom Is Out Working?

2011-02-10T04:23:00.000-08:00

Holy Family at Supper, from the Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves.

In the United States, most mothers work: In 2007, the labor force participation rate for mothers with children under 18 was 71%, and this figure must be rising as women have gone to work as their husbands were laid off in the Great Recession.

Now, researchers at American University, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago studied 900 school-aged children and found a mother's employment outside the home correlates with a small but measurable increase in the child's body mass index (BMI). The researchappears in the January/February issue of the journal Child Development.

[A]mong sixth graders, a mother’s entry into employment was associated with an increase in BMI of about two fifths (40%) of a standard deviation, and those children were about 6 times more likely to be overweight. Additionally, among fifth and sixth graders, entry into employment was associated with an increase in the likelihood of being overweight of 8 and 11 times, respectively. However, there was no evidence that TV time or physical activity mediated this relation at either fifth or sixth grade, or that total HOME score, time spent unsupervised, in structured settings, or with parents mediated this relation at fifth grade (the HOME scale and time-use data were available at third and fifth grades only)....

Our FE results provide evidence for a cumulative influence of maternal employment; every period (averaging 5.3 months) a mother was employed was associated with an increase in her child’s BMI of 10% of a standard deviation. For a child of average height, this is equivalent to a gain in weight of nearly 1 lb every 5 months above and beyond what would typically be gained as a child ages. This link between maternal employment (vs. nonemployment) and children’s BMI is consistent with a growing body of evidence on this question (e.g., Anderson et al., 2003), including studies that have adopted comparable analytic approaches....

The results of this study have implications for policy and practice. We find that maternal employment has a cumulative influence on children’s BMI that, over time, could lead to an increase in the likelihood that a child is overweight or obese. We also find evidence that, among older children in particular, maternal employment status is linked to an increased likelihood of being overweight. Excess weight in childhood is a risk factor for excess weight in adulthood (Strauss, 1999), and the effects of obesity on chronic conditions have been found to be even larger than those of current or past smoking and problem drinking (Sturm, 2002). On average, in 2002, an obese adult and an overweight adult spent an additional $395 and $125 in health care costs per year, respectively, than healthy-weight individuals (Sturm, 2002).

In addition to the physical health and economic consequences as adults, being overweight as a child has social-emotional implications. During the early elementary school years, higher BMIs are associated with greater internalizing problems (Bradley et al., 2008). In adolescence, overweight status is associated with an increase in depression among girls (Needham & Crosnoe, 2005). Additionally, overweight teens have lower academic achievement, especially in contexts in which being overweight is stigmatized (e.g., schools with high rates of dating or lower average BMI; Crosnoe & Muller, 2004). For girls, higher BMIs are also associated with a reduction in dating (but not in having sex; Cawley, 2001; Cawley, Joyner, & Sobal, 2006). Overall, research suggests that stigma against overweight individuals is commonplace, including in the workplace, in the health care system, and in schools (reviewed in Puhl & Brownell, 2001).

Since many of the other factors measured in this study--such as TV time, sedentary life styles--did not budge the overall statistic, it appears that the culprit is the actual food consumed--its quantity and quality. A working mother is also simply less able to monitor her child's food intake and teach good eating habits throughout the day. My sister-in-law, who was a stay-at-home mom, did a great job of this with her children.

As a working single mom for more than half of the years that my daughter was growing up, I know that it is fatiguing to come home from a long day of work to make a decent dinner, set the table, and clean up after. In the days when I had a long commute, I resorted to feeding my daughter and myself like the mother in Little Miss Sunshine--fast food and ready-made frozen food. Since the food is basically unsatisfying and also heavy in salt or sugar (not to mention expensive), the tendency is to eat more.

Finally, I decided this was not fair at all. Why shouldn't my daughter be able to smell a good dinner cooking or be able to enjoy fresh homemade baked goods? So I tried to clean up my act.

Marion Cunningham -- to the rescue.

My cooking savior was Lost Recipes: Meals to Share with Family and Friends by Marion Cunningham. You can read about this wonderful book at Letters from a Hill Farm. I also used Mrs. Cunningham's The Supper Book, which has more easy recipes for preparing an easy and fast evening meal. A lot of her recipes can be created straight from the pantry and don't require a hunt for expensive exotics. Some recipes appear in both books. I especially savored her descriptions of the recipes and how she found them and her exhortations to revive the ritual of the family meal. For working mothers, who may be harried people, we need this kind of encouragement.

I also started baking with these books and Mrs. Cunningham's Fannie Farmer Baking Book.

When my daughter was in 10th grade and had her Humane Letters seminar for the first two hours of school every morning, I took a lot of pleasure in sending her off with a loaf of freshly made quick bread or muffins for her teacher and classmates to enjoy with their seminar coffee. (She went to Trinity School at Meadowview.) I rearranged my kitchen counter so that all the measuring cups, measuring spoons, and mixing spoons along with the flour and sugar canisters were alwayson the counter in front of me with baking powder, baking soda, spices and herbs, and oil in the cabinet above. In this way, I was able to whip up these morning items in no time flat.

I started using the crock pot. My daughter likes meat and potatoes, and it was easy to make a stew or a pot roast with potatoes in the morning and have the meal ready when we got home. I also made salmon or cod cakes that I could freeze and take out at the end of the day to cook. Mrs. Cunningham's cobb salad was a big favorite with my daughter and her friends.

Beef stew in a crock pot compliments of Audrey's Favorite Recipes.

Soon of course my daughter was off to college, and home cooking is more humdrum. Even so, yesterday morning I made a shrimp and rice dish based on Margaret Cunningham's "Sara Tyson Rorer's Spanish Rice with Chicken" in The Supper Book and looked forward all day to coming home, scooping some on to a plate, zapping it in the microwave, and sitting down to a decent home meal.

Lost Book: Booth Tarkington's Gentle Julia

2011-02-07T04:48:00.000-08:00

Summer Girl by Robert Lewis Reid, 1896 (Julia spent a lot of time on the front porch.)

I intermittently read lost American books, which pleasant pursuit brought me to Gentle Julia by Booth Tarkington (1869-1946). I remembered Tarkington as the author of the Penrod books--Penrod and Penrod and Sam--that herald the antics of a boy of 10 or 11 and his buddies in a suburban neighborhood in the 1910s. I laughed hard at these books, which were read out loud in our classroom by my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Doolan (and a great teacher she was). Tarkington also wrote the books upon which the movies Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons were based. So I picked up Gentle Julia, which is about a young woman who lives in a small city in Indiana, thinking that perhaps it would involve domesticity as well.

In fact, Julia is just the foil for a story about her niece, 11-year-old Florence Atwater, a very active young lady, who is constantly sneaking around and trying to bend Julia's marital outcome to her (Florence's) own will. The sweet and beautiful Julia has many suitors.

A sad note in this entertaining book, written in 1922, is the character of the maid at Florence's house, Kitty Silver, who is portrayed in the stereotypical way that many African Americans were in the twenties and thirties of the last century: uneducated, good-hearted, and funny, and often consorting with children, with whom they apparently have so much in common.

Otherwise, as in this scene, Tarkington is a precision writer of comic dialogue:

(From the window of her home, Florence is watching her cousin Herbert and his friend who are sitting on a fence down the lane writing in notebooks.)

And seldom in the history of the world have any such sessions been invested by their participants [Herbert and friend] with so intentional an appearance of importance. The important importance of Herbert and his friend was so extreme as to be all too plainly visible across four intervening broad back yards; in fact, there was sometimes reason to suspect that the two performers were aware of their audience and even of her goaded condition; and that they deliberately increased the outrageousness of their importance on her account. And upon the Saturday of that week, when the notebook writers were upon the fence the greater part of the afternoon, Florence's fascinated indignation became vocal.

"Vile Things," she said.

Her mother, sewing beside another window of the room, looked up inquiringly.

"What are, Florence?"

"Cousin Herbert and that nasty little Henry Rooter."

"Are you watching them again?" her mother asked.

"Yes, I am," said Florence; and added tartly, "Not because I care to, but merely to amuse myself at their expense."

Mrs. Atwater murmured, "Couldn't you find some other way to amuse yourself, Florence?"

"I don't call this amusement," the inconsistent girl responded, not without chagrin. "Think I'd spend all my days starin' at Herbert Illingsworth Atwater, Junior, and that nasty little Henry Rooter, and call it amusement?"

"Then why do you do it?"

"Why do I do what, mamma?" Florence inquired, as in despair of Mrs. Atwater's ever learning to put things clearly.

"Why do you 'spend all your days' watching them? You don't seem to be able to keep away from the window, and it appears to make you irritable. I should think if they wouldn't let you play with them you'd be too proud----"

"Oh good heavens, mamma!"

"Don't use such expressions, Florence, please."

"Well," said Florence, "I got to use some expression when you accuse me of wantin' to 'play' with those two vile things! My goodness mercy, mamma, I don't want to 'play' with 'em! I'm more than four years old, I guess; though you don't ever seem willing to give me credit for it. I don't haf to 'play' all the time, mamma; and anyway, Herbert and that nasty little Henry Rooter aren't playing either!"

"Aren't they?" Mrs. Atwater inquired. "I thought the other day you said you wanted them to let you play with them at being a newspaper reporter or editor or something like that, and they were rude and told you go away. Wasn't that it?"

"No, Mamma, it cert'nly wasn't."

"They weren't rude to you?"

"Yes, they cert'nly were!"

"Well, then--"

"Mamma, can't you understand?" Florence turned from the window to beseech Mrs. Atwater's concentration upon the matter. "It isn't 'playing'! I didn't want to play being a reporter; they ain't 'playing'---"

"Aren't playing, Florence."

"Yes'm. They're not. Herbert's got a real printing press; Uncle Joseph gave it to him. It's a real one, mamma, can't you understand?"

"I'll try," said Mrs. Atwater. "You mustn't get so excited about it, Florence."

"I'm not!" Florence returned vehemently. "I guess it'd take more than those two vile things and their old printing press to get me excited! I don't care what they do; it's far less than nothing to me! All I wish is they'd fall off the fence and break their vile ole necks!"

Having a Problem with the "Tiger Mother" Debate

2011-01-30T07:00:00.000-08:00

Yale University professor Amy Chua stirred up a lot of controversy in the last month with her January 8 article in the Wall Street Journal under the headline "Chinese Mothers Are Superior," an excerpt of her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Chua berates American mothers for a lackadaisical attitude toward their children's levels of achievement, in contrast to Chinese mothers, who harshly (by American standards) harangue their children into meeting standards of perfection in academics and musical performance. Because of the time and energy that the Chinese tiger mother invests in keeping her child marching to the dictates of competition and achievement, Chinese children are getting into the best colleges and universities and far outstripping their American competitors in the field of classical music. Western mothers, wimps that they are, want their children to have fun and they reap the reward: children who cannot compete with Chinese children. I suppose a subtext is that the United States will soon be eclipsed by the expansive People's Republic of China.

Since the article appeared, there have been answers forthcoming from various quarters praising American ways as superior in fostering creativity, among other arguments.

I'd like to address the underlying assumption of the debate that I have read in the secular press: the major goal of child rearing is the high achievement of the child in society and the world.

To me raising a child involves a sacred trust to raise children who become good people. The questions that nag me are not Will my child win the next piano competition? Will my child get an 800 on the SAT? Will my child get into an Ivy League college? or even Will my child be happy?

What worries me is Will my child be a force for good in the world? Will my child have the courage to stand up for the truth under pressure? Will my child have charity and serve and give to others less fortunate? Will my child raise children who are good? Will my child be willing to sacrifice for others? Will my child keep their faith? Will my child be a beacon of hope to those in despair? Will my child have the character--an old-fashioned word--to do what is right under pressure? Will my child have the courage to stand up to evil? Will my child always love God?

These are the questions we never stop worrying about not only for our children, but for ourselves.

I assume that if my child knows and fights for the goodness within them, they will know that they are required to do their best in whatever vocation they choose, since they will understand that one's life is a precious gift not to be wasted--another problem that is posed constantly throughout one's life.

Fine Arts Friday: In Praise of Winter

2011-01-28T04:17:00.001-08:00

January Morning, John Fabian Carlson

February, Tres Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, 1410

Detail, Winter Landscape with Skaters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

Train in the Snow, Claude Monet, 1875

Thompson Neely House (Pennsylvania), John Sharp

Round Hill Road, John Henry Twachtman, 1900

Columbus Circle (New York City), Guy Wiggins, 1911

Winter Lyric, John Fabian Carlson

Fine Arts Friday: Painters Painting Their Children

2011-01-20T19:54:00.000-08:00

My Little Daughter Dorothy by William Merritt Chase, 1894.

William Merritt Chase has once again inspired me, thanks to this painting in which he (the unseen artist) and his daughter take such delight in each other. Chase has set her before a heavy frame for a large artwork--art being the backdrop to her young life. But her stance is not languid in any way as if she were a mere art appendage or adornment of scenery. She is dressed for going out--to be her own self and make her own world, as I imagine, given her plucky expression, she did.

Jean Renoir Drawing by Auguste Renoir, 1901

I saw this painting this past year at an exhibition of Renoir's late works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Internet does not do it justice, as Renoir's brushstrokes in the painting are almost like caresses, giving the painting a soft effect although the substance and weight of the subject remain. The son became the great movie director. Through the close juxtaposition of Jean's face and hands with the drawing, Renoir captures the intensity of thought in his son--a celebration of childhood creative tension and concentration.

Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, Julie by Berthe Morisot, 1886

Julie Manet was the daughter of the French impressionist Berthe Morisot and the niece of the ground-breaking French painter, Eduard Manet, who also painted portraits of Morisot and Julie. This portrait was done with pastels. Here, although Julie looks like she is peacefully reading a book, the frenetic lines in the dress suggest that she is a lively soul and at any moment might leap up from the chair and skip out to the garden.

The Fairy Tale aka Tanis Seated by Daniel Garber, 1917

This young girl, on the other hand, is absorbed and will not be moving til the story (or painting) is finished. I like this portrait for the beautiful light that Daniel Garber, a Pennsylvania impressionist, wraps his daughter in against a wall softened by its texture and fawn-like color. Her pose and concentration tell me that Tanis feels perfectly safe and secure in her chair as her father watches and paints.

Portrait of a Boy in Fancy Dress aka "Titus" by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1655.

This is an early and lesser-known portrait of the great master's son, Titus. The National Gallery of Art in Washington says that evidence suggests that this might not be Titus, but does not say what the evidence is. It looks like Titus to me--the apple of his father's eye.

A Daughter by Carl Larsson, 1897

Carl Larsson delighted in painting his children. I chose this painting because of the ambiguity in his daughter's face and in her position alone at the table, which suggests that she is in the middle of a situation. Clearly there is someone sitting on the other side of the table outside of our view, or through the door out to the kitchen, who has captured this child's attention. Is she fascinated but doubtful of a conversation between two other children at the table? Is an adult gently reprimanding her? Or is she just patiently watching through the kitchen door for the food to come to the table?

"An Ordered Plan of Love"

2011-01-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

Karin Larsson, by Carl Larsson, 1909

The genesis of this blog was a search on the Internet to investigate the effects on children of a physically and emotionally chaotic home, which led to Homeliving Helper and eventually to Under the Gables.

However, none of the explanations I read about the importance of maintaining a loving and clean and orderly home for children was satisfying. But at last, in Lift Up Your Hearts to Mary, Peace, Prayer, Love, by Caryll Houselander, I have found an explanation that makes complete and perfect sense to me. Here is what this most poetic writer says in her essay, "The House on the Rock," in this book:

To a young child home stands for God. In it he learns to see and touch the gifts of God. If his mother is wise she will make his home beautiful. She will copy the world's creator and make a tiny new Eden. She will bring in flowers and give the child animals and feed the birds. The food on the table will be clean and simple and good. It will not only taste nice, it will look nice....

It is in his home that the child should assimilate the Sermon on the Mount, not as if it were being drilled in his brain by words, but as if he were breathing it in his whole being like the air....

The ordering of time, which seems so simple, really requires great skill and energy from the mother. It has tremendous importance, above all if it is related (as it obviously should be) to the rhythm of day and night and is interwoven with prayer.

The child should wake to the singing of the birds (and they sing in the cities as well as in the woods). Give his heart to God, when light is young, play for long hours when the world is awake and lively. He should form habits of regular hunger and thirst, so that food and hunger come together, and his grace is a real thanking. With twilight there should come stillness in the house and he should be lit to bed by the stars.

From such ordering of time he will learn unconsciously, though it may be years before he thinks this out, that he is not part of that chaos that man has made of this world, with its fearful abuse of time, but part of an ordered plan of love.

Illustration for her book Bright April by Marguerite di Angeli.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

2011-01-01T06:26:00.001-08:00

Christmas

2010-12-29T16:47:00.000-08:00

The Newborn, by Georges de la Tour, 1645

"What we shall be asked to give is our flesh and blood,
our daily life -- our thoughts, our service to one another,
our affections and loves, our words, our intellect, our waking, working, and sleeping,
our ordinary human joys and sorrows -- to God.
To surrender all that we are, as we are, to the Spirit of Love
in order that our lives may bear Christ into the world -- that is what we shall be asked."

- Caryll Houselander
via Heimatland

Heroine of Human Dignity: Mildred Fay Jefferson

2010-12-27T08:33:00.000-08:00

“I am at once a physician, a citizen, and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow the concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged, and the planned have the right to live."

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, 1926-2010

See Tea at Trianon for a discussion of this great American.

Reading Charles Dickens with Young Teens

2010-12-13T13:30:00.000-08:00

"The pilgrimage begins." Two wayfaring strangers, Nell and her grandfather, from The Old Curiosity Shop.

Recently, I picked up The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens, where I had left off a few years ago at page 265, and after looking at the book's first sentence--"Night is generally my time for walking."--decided to start again at the beginning. I am glad that I did, because there is no haziness in my head as the story of Nell and her grandfather unfolds before me in vivid color.

When I came to the descriptions in chapter 15 of Nell and her grandfather working their way toward the outskirts of London through the night into dawn and how life slowly awakens in the streets, I was surprised by the beauty of the prose and then saddened that so few people read Dickens today and that his books are often missing form high school reading lists. Although Dickens' descriptions do not make you feel as if you are in the scene, as with Flaubert, they are so rich in the minuteness of telling detail, the lush depiction of human behavior, and evocations of mood, that, in comparison, the descriptions I have read recently in late 20th century American literature seem paltry and starved in comparison.

So I was happy when I found Sunday in the Wall Street Journal that Oprah Winfrey has chosen two Dickens novels--A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations--for her book club. I think the more that people read Dickens the better. Especially, I hope that children in their early teens read Dickens. Here are some of my reasons:

Reading Dickens takes us into a different world, and there is nothing wrong with that. Although the torments of poverty, especially for children, are depicted starkly and that may not be our experience, children in such straits are not far away, even in America. Although the Victorian morality may differ from today's standards, it is a morality that is recognizable to almost anyone. In short, there is nothing so vastly different in Dickens' world from ours that makes any of Dickens' world irrelevant.

Within this world, we get a glimpse of just about everything--we see extraordinary goodness and kindness, we see eccentricity, we see hilarity, we see evil, and all shades in between. We see this in great detail. It is not just that Dickens paints an unforgettable character. Like a great painter or a great actor, he reports the character's gestures--the tip of the head, the pause before entering the door, the scratching of the nose, the deep bow--all at the service to the moment at hand. Sometimes the narration is so nuanced, we feel that if we stretched our hand from the pages of the book, we might bump right into a character!

Mrs. Jarley, queen of the waxworks, a kind-hearted soul who regularly quenches her thirst from a "suspicious bottle."--The Old Curiosity Shop

This embracing of the distinctness of human beings--no matter how brief the encounter--let's us know that Dickens loves everything about the world he has created--even its evil characters. Life is the subject and within that circumference, everyone, good and bad, has something to contribute to the story, to guiding the reader through the glories and pitfalls of human existence.

Hence, I find in Dickens a benign introduction for young teens into a world that is far more complex than the world in the mind, say, of a sixth grader. Here in Dickens' world, we meet all kinds of gradations, even within the same character--as with Nell's grandfather, a kind-hearted man devoted to his grandchild yet ready to squander every penny away in his gambling addiction, which brings her nothing but torment. We see the consequences of action and inaction; the intended and unintended consequences of cruelty and of kindness; and the great inability of everyone to control their lives as they like.

I am reminded that Anne Frank's father read Dickens constantly during the years in their hiding place, a time when Anne was in her early teens, and regaled everyone with a reading of The Pickwick Papers. Love of life is Dickens' central theme, and life, as Dickens' books, has many lessons to teach.

In David Copperfield, Dickens portrays his vision of the best life has to offer: love within a safe and secure family in a home that expresses this love in gardens, neatness, and orderliness. I am not deterred by the fact that Dickens forswore his own wife for a far younger woman; I am not recommending that young teens read Dickens' biography; many writers paint their dreams, not their far frailer realities. But when David Copperfield is a young boy living with his beloved mother and Peggoty, and at Peggoty's brother's home on the beach, we see that the close-knit family is the center, the very fire, of life--a life all children deserve.

"I am hospitably received by Mr. Peggoty." -- David Copperfield

Welcome Back, Mr. Milkman!!

2010-12-10T12:15:00.000-08:00

Some of you may remember my disgruntled post of a while back titled: "Where's the Milkman?" I noted that my mother, a suburban stay-at-home mom, had practically a parade coming to her own home every week: the milkman, the bread man, and the egg man, and that now, when many wives and mothers are working, this is the kind of service we need more than ever, but it's not there!

Now, I am happy to report I have a milkman! I was driving down the street where I live in northern Virginia about two months ago, and I saw a big truck in front of me, which said "South Mountain Creamery -- Milk Delivery." What! I noted the url on the truck and raced to the Web as soon as I got home to look it up.

Sure enough, some smart folks in rural Maryland are delivering milk and other necessities to your doorstep once a week. You can go online to change your order or to skip deliveries if you are going out of town. Along with milk, eggs, and bread,South Creamery delivers local jams and preserves and other condiments, their own yogurt and assorted dairy products, bacon and meats, and other specialties. The prices and the delivery charge are all reasonable.

I signed up for a weekly delivery of a quart of skim milk (IN GLASS BOTTLES--hurray!), a loaf of honey wheat bread, and a dozen eggs. This week, I also ordered some jam. They come every Friday, and I just set my cooler outside.
I hate going to the food store, and I figure that in a pinch I can scramble up a repast with these items. Thank you so much, South Mountain Creamery, which is getting busier by the week.

In today's delivery I also received a Season's Greeting card, signed by the owner and underneath, it read:
"Milkman"

Mr. Milkman, welcome back!

Fine Arts Friday: The Sower

2010-11-26T07:44:00.001-08:00

The famous works of Vincent van Gogh have so permeated our visual culture today--appearing in posters, on mugs, umbrellas, note cards, ties, t-shirts, calendars, etc. -- that we tend to be unaware of the huge body of work this extraordinary man left us as the fruits of barely a decade of artistic production. In viewing the Starry Night (shown here), Wheat Field with Cypresses, or the portrait of L'Arlesienne (Madame Ginoux), we are so startled by the vibrancy and colors of the painting that we imagine that van Gogh produced it in the high heat of a moment of pure genius. Such masterpieces were the result of genius and also van Gogh's persistent pursuit of visual truth in countless drawings and paintings of people, landscapes, and still lifes. Given the ferocity of his own efforts, it is not surprising that van Gogh found in labor of all kinds a subject for his study -- sowing wheat, planting potatoes, digging potatoes, burning weeds, cutting down wheat with a scythe, working in the vegetable garden, raking, olive picking, and resting in the field. He captured women sewing, knitting, cooking, doing the laundry, and tending children and men cutting wood, selling wood, weaving,taking their goods to market, and mending fishnets.

Continuing on the Thanksgiving theme, here are his studies of The Sower.

The Sower, Vincent van Gogh, 1888

The Sower, 1888

The Sower, 1888

The Sower, After Millet, 1888

The Sower, After Millet, 1889

The Sower, Outskirts of Arles in the Background, 1888

The Sower, 1888

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

2010-11-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

The Sower by N. C. Wyeth, 1926

We plough the fields, and scatter
The good seed on the land,
But it is fed and watered
By God's almighty hand;
He sends the snow in winter,
The warmth to swell the grain,
The breezes and the sunshine,
And soft refreshing rain.

All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above;
Then thank the Lord,
O thank the Lord
For all His love.

He only is the Maker
Of all things near and far;
He paints the wayside flower,
He lights the evening star;
The winds and waves obey Him,
By Him the birds are fed;
Much more to us, His children,
He gives our daily bread.

All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above;
Then thank the Lord,
O thank the Lord
For all His love.

We thank Thee, then, O Father,
For all things bright and good,
The seed-time and the harvest,
Our life, our health, our food:
No gifts have we to offer
For all Thy love imparts,
But that which Thou desirest,
Our humble, thankful hearts.

All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above;
Then thank the Lord,
O thank the Lord
For all His love.

(The Hymnal: Published by the authority of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., 1895. The words and music are here.)

Fine Arts Friday: The Chadds Ford Wyeths

2010-11-19T11:02:00.000-08:00

Chadds Ford Hills, Newell Convers Wyeth

N.C. Wyeth was the father of Andrew Wyeth and grandfather of Jamie Wyeth. His son's work is noted for its muted palette, while N.C. Wyeth's paintings radiate color and atmospheric effect. If you have the opportunity, visit the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, home to many paintings by all the Wyeths.

At the museum, which I visited last year, the effects upon me of the works of N. C. Wyeth and his son were quite different. Many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings I found deeply moving, especially those with the layers of dry tempera rising from the surface of the canvas. The experience is almost religious; despite the apparent simplicity of his subject, its essence is drawn out through the paint signifying a whole world to us, each leaf seeming to drip with the cosmic significance of creation.

N.C. Wyeth's paintings awe in a different way--their human poignancy and the placement and gestures of the figures in his paintings, many of them used as illustrations, draw us into their world. We are caught up in the action; we are dying to know what happens next. The fulsomeness and beauty of the drama, surroundings, and coloration prompt in us a near reverential appreciation of both the fragility and the richness of life.

So in praise of the fall and the Wyeths, here is a painting by N.C. Wyeth of his beloved Chadd Ford Hills, for which I have no words at all.

Fine Arts Friday: A Benefit of Working

2010-11-12T05:02:00.000-08:00

Scrubwoman, by John French Sloan, 1910-1911

(Click on the paintings to get a better view.)

Here is a painting of scrub women working at the Astor Library in New York City, a place I used to spend a lot of time in as a reader. I like this painting, because it does not depict these ladies as victims of poverty-mandated drudgery, but instead draws our attention to their cheerfulness: they seem to be enjoying a friendly joke, although the shading of the painting indicates that they live in a different world than the silent scholars in the next room.

An atmosphere in which jokes are welcome is a crucial factor in selecting where I work. Once when I was a waitress at a New York City diner, if I made the slightest hint of a joke, the owner would snort, "Don't get fresh, Linda." It was dreary to work there, and I didn't last long. At another restaurant I worked in, all the waitresses, the cooks, the bartender, and the hands-on manager joked all day, and half the time I was in stitches. It was fun to work there. Even today, when I am buried under mountains of work on my job (the reason for the dribble of posts these last months), although the work is difficult and can be tedious, the atmosphere is convivial--which makes the job easier. If a spoil-sport like Ebenezer Scrooge ran the place, it would be intolerable. Women on the job jabber about their children, food, clothes, shopping, doing things for one another, their hobbies and crafts. Men report to each other on food, sports, trips, and sometimes (I overhear) what they are doing to keep their wives happy.

These conversations and jokes among fellow workers relieve tension, put a downward pressure on anxiety levels, and build team spirit to get a job done. It is a benefit of working.

John French Sloan (1871-1951) was a major figure of the Ashcan School of realist artists who resisted the pull of abstractionist art in the early decades of the 20th century. Born, raised, and trained in Philadelphia, he produced most of his art in New York City, where, he wrote in his diary, "I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed at it ... No insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen."

I think he had a particular knack for portraying women in conversation, as these paintings show:

Sunday Women Drying Their Hair, 1912

Three A.M., 1909

Spring Planting in Greenwich Village, 1913

Although he looks a little taciturn himself...

Self Portrait, 1890

Preparing for Advent

2010-11-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

Advent begins on Sunday, November 28, and it may seem strange to talk about preparing for a season that is itself all about preparation, but that is how the British writer, poet, and Catholic mystic, Caryll Houselander, begins her beautiful treasure, The Reed of God, written in 1944:

That virginal quality which, for want of a better word, I call emptiness is the beginning of this contemplation.

It is not a formless emptiness, a void without meaning; on the contrary it has a shape, a form given to it by the purpose for which it is intended.

It is emptiness like the hollow in the reed, the narrow riftless emptiness which can have only one destiny: to receive the piper's breath and to utter the song that is in his heart.

It is emptiness like the hollow in the cup, shaped to receive water or wine.

It is emptiness like that of the bird's nest, built in a round warm ring to receive the little bird.

The pre-Advent emptiness of Our Lady's purposeful virginity was indeed like those three things.

She was a reed through with the Eternal Love was to be piped as a shepherd's song.

She was the flower-like chalice into which the purest water of humanity was to be poured, mingled with wine, changed to the crimson blood of love, and lifted up in sacrifice.

She was the warm nest rounded to the shape of humanity to receive the Divine Little Bird.

Emptiness is a very common complaint in our days, not the purposeful emptiness of the virginal heart and mind but a void, meaningless, unhappy condition.

Strangely enough, those who complain the loudest of the emptiness of their lives are usually people whose lives are overcrowded, filled with trivial details, plans, desires, ambitions, unsatisfied cravings for passing pleasures, doubts, ambitions, unsatisfied cravings for passing pleasures, doubts, anxieties, and fears; and these sometimes further overlaid with exhausting pleasures which are an attempt, and always a futile attempt, to forget how pointless such people's lives are. Those who complain in these circumstances of their lives are usually afraid to allow space or silence or pause in their lives. They dread space, for they want material things crowded together, so that there will always be something to lean on for support. They dread silence because they do not want to hear their own pulses beating out the seconds of their life, and to know that each beat is another knock on the door of death. Death seems to them to be only the final void, the darkest, loneliest emptiness.

They have no sense of being related to any abiding beauty, to any indestructible life: they are afraid to be alone with their unrelated hearts.

Such emptiness is very different from that still, shadowless ring of light round which our being is circled, making a shape which in itself is an absolute promise of fulfillment.

The question which most people will ask is: "Can someone whose life is already cluttered up with trivial things get back to this virginal emptiness?"
Of course he can: if a bird's nest has been filled with broken glass and rubbish, it can be emptied.

It is not only trivialities which destroy this virgin mindedness; very often, serious people with a conscious purpose in life destroy it by being too set on this purpose. The core of emptiness is not filled by trifles but by a hard block, tightly wedged in. They have a plan, for example, for reconstructing Europe, for reforming education, for converting the world; and this plan, this enthusiasm, has become so important in their minds that there is neither room to receive God nor silence to hear His voice, even though He comes as light and little as a Communion wafer and speaks as soft as a zephyr of wind tapping on the window with a flower.

Zealots and triflers and all besides who have crowded the emptiness out of their minds and the silence out of their souls can restore it. At least, they can allow God to restore it and ask Him to do so.

The whole process of contemplation through imitation of Our Lady can be gone through, in the first place, with just the simple purpose of regaining the virgin-mind, and as we go on in the attempt we shall find that over and over again, there is a new emptying process; it is a thing which has to be done in contemplation as often as the earth has to be sifted and the field ploughed for seed.

At the beginning it will be necessary for each individual to discard deliberately all the trifling unnecessary things in his life, all the hard blocks and congestions; not necessarily to discard all his interests for ever, but at least once to stop still, and having prayed for courage, to visualize himself without all the extras, escapes, and interests other than Love in his life: to see ourselves as if we had just come from God's hand and had gathered nothing to ourselves yet, to discover just what shape is the virginal emptiness of our own being, and of what material we are made.

We need to be reminded that every second of our survival does really mean that we are new from God's fingers, so that it requires no more than the miracle which we never notice to restore us to our virgin-heart at any moment we like to choose.

Our own effort will consist in sifting and sorting out everything that is not essential and that fills up space and silence in us and in discovering what sort of shape this emptiness in us is. From this we shall learn what sort of purpose God has for us. In what way are we to fulfill the work of giving Christ life in us?

Are we reed pipes? Is He waiting to live lyrically through us?
Are we chalices? Does He ask to be sacrificed in us?

Are we nests? Does He desire of us a warm, sweet abiding in domestic life at home?
These are only some of the possible forms of virginity; each person may find some quite different form, his own secret.

I mention these three because they are all fulfilled in Our Lady, so visibly that we may be sure that we can look at them in her and learn what she reveals through them.

If you would like to read more writings of Caryll Houselander, many of her books are available at Albris, Barnes and Noble, and Borders.

The painting is The Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci, 1472-75.

In Praise of the Linen Closet

2010-11-07T09:04:00.001-08:00

Karin Larsson at the Linen Closet, by Carl Larsson, 1906. The artist's wife is carefully inspecting her linens. I like the large size of this beautiful cupboard--which holds a lot, unlike the narrow linen closets built into the upstairs hallway in many American homes.

I have always been impressed by a beautiful linen closet, so you can imagine how much I enjoyed this passage in Joy Street, a novel written by Frances Parkinson Keyes in 1950:

One afternoon, Emily [a new bride of upper-crust Boston society in the 1930s], led her husband to the spacious linen closet and, throwing open its double doors, revealed pile after pile of snowy sheets and pillowcases and towels, gartered with satin-covered elastic to insure perfect regularity, and scented with small bags of lavender nestling between each pile.

At the Linen Closet by Pieter de Hooch, 1663. The Dutch, the first to value housecleaning and whose art celebrated domesticity, naturally took their linen closets seriously. Here the mistress of the home returns sparkling clean sheets to the linen closet. Note the child playing hockey on the floor on the right, reminding us that chaos is always on the horizon.

The scene reminded me of a similar description in the book, Sweeping the German Nation: Domesticity and National Identity in Germany by Nancy Ruth Reagin. A non-German in the early 20th century visits the home of a German professor, whose wife:

"threw back both doors of an immense cupboard occupying the longest wall in the home... [For] their happiness, they possessed all this linen: shelf upon shelf, pile upon pile of linen, exactly ordered, tied with lemon coloured ribbons."

A German housewife was expected to wash her white linen and spread it out on the lawn for bleaching so it was snowy white before being laid in the closet.

I've always appreciate Martha Stewart's ideas about the linen closet, too, reading them in her magazine quite a few years ago. Here is a Martha Stewart Linen Closet Picture Gallery and a Martha Stewart Organize the Linen Closet Checklist.

Below a Martha Stewart linen closet--I love the eyelet border hanging over the edge of the shelves. Note ribbons.

Meeting Mrs. Egg

2010-10-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

Although Mrs. Egg was younger than the woman in this picture, she fed her 6'5" son with that kind of zest. Mrs. Egg was the creation of Thomas Beer, who wrote stories about the Eggs and other families for the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s and 1930s. Most of his books are out of print. Reading about Mrs. Egg is like reading stories that Norman Rockwell would have liked to illustrate. Or was it the other way around--did Norman Rockwell, whose paintings graced the covers of the Saturday Evening Post--inspire Thomas Beer?

I was referred to Thomas Beer by William Faulkner. During his question and answer sessions at the University of Virginia, Faulkner was asked who were the major influences on his work. He replied, Cervantes (whose Don Quixote he said he read once a year), Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and Thomas Beer. Thomas Beer?

Beer was actually a literary man, the kind of man that Faulkner said he wasn't. He wrote a biography of Stephen Crane, a book on the American culture of the 1890s titled The Mauve Decade, and three novels. He moved in literary circles in New York City (he lived and died in Yonkers), and his many literary friends felt sorry for him because he was chained to churning out popular stories for the Saturday Evening Post about everyday types of people--like the Egg family, who own and run the biggest dairy farm in Ohio, a world away from that which Beer made his home--to make the money he needed to live in style. Mrs. Egg and her son, Adam, champion Navy wrestler in the years of World War I, are the major characters of the stories, which are otherwise crowded with Mr. Egg, her three married daughters, Mrs. Egg's grandchildren, her parade of cooks, friends, neighbors, town folk, and various strangers who often are the occasion for the plot. These are fun stories of small-town family life.

Mrs. Egg, who weighs 250 pounds, thinks a lot about food and how to keep her strapping son well fed, and is a very down-to-earth person--a condition that Beer celebrates. Her strong suit is common sense, that always wins out against pretension. The dialogue is authentic, as if Beer secretly stalked Middle America listening to people talking in their homes or along their backyard fences or at the local store. And in fact, he had many correspondences with all different kinds of people all over the country.

In Beer's third novel, Road to Heaven, he attempted to write about people like the Eggs in a more literary style, but the book was panned by the critics, who considered this side of Beer's work to be too low-brow. Beer was writing at the same time as Sinclair Lewis was penning his caricatures of small-town life in Main Street and Babbitt, books the literati found far more praiseworthy.

Faulkner, however, said he never read literary criticism and so was free to find in Beer's stories a source for learning his craft.

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips: A Diamond in Coal Country

2010-08-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

At the end of July I spent a weekend with my widowed sister-in-law and her family in southern West Virginia--and it is only recently that my mind, forced to pay attention to other issues, has returned back to home. I asked for some glimpses into "uncanned history," and my sister-in-law and her sister very kindly obliged and took me to see two deserted coal towns, Thurmond and Kaymoor. Both sisters had lived in Thurmond when its population was down to fewer than 100. My sister-in-law used to flag down the Amtrak passenger train with her bandanna and then hop on to go to Philadelphia, where my brother picked her up to go down to the Jersey shore. To see Kaymoor we hiked nearly three miles up a mountain. Along with their mother, they introduced me to the world of coal--a lot different than the far easier worlds of farming and suburbia in southeastern and south-central Pennsylvania that I had grown up in.

When I came home I started digging into coal mining, the struggles of the United Mine Workers to unionize coal mining in Appalachia (a campaign that at least ended coal feudalism), the history of coal mining in the United States, who owns the land in Appalachia, and the history of the region and of its people. I also wanted to read novels from these endless mountains and happily came upon Gin Phillips' The Well and the Mine.

You don't need an interest in coal to read this book--The Well and the Mine will appeal to anyone who is interested in reading novels about families, raising children, housework, and everyday morality.

The story takes place in the coal mining region of northern Alabama, home region to Ms. Phillips, and is about the Moore family--a father, mother, two daughters, and a son. Ms. Phillips tells the story through the words of all five, which is a pleasure in itself. In this way -- unlike modern-day novels that function only as screenplays with scenic description -- The Well and the Mine gives us insight into the mind of each character and what they are thinking, including of each other.

The story takes place during the depression. It is hard to imagine a family in which the father works hard every day and it is still a struggle to put food on the family table. The Moores do better than others, because the father works a small farm and raises vegetables. They get milk from the family cow. Mrs. Moore puts up vegetables for the winter, and the family rarely eats meat, not even on Sundays. Their meals are composed of bread, which Mrs. Moore bakes, along with assorted vegetables, relishes, and fruit. They churn their own butter. Breakfast is biscuits. The book also describes Mrs. Moore's views of housekeeping--in contrast to those of her sister. (I love books that talk about housekeeping theories!)

It was a relief to spend time visiting, through this novel, with a functioning family. Far from being boring, as Tolstoy avers, it is fascinating to see how the Moores muster their strength to deal with the many difficulties they face, with the opportunities they have for doing both good and evil, with the changes each goes through as the family's youngsters grow older. This was a thoroughly enjoyable and inspiring read.

You can read about Gin Phillips here, and here she explains the origins of The Well and the Mine, her first novel. I will be watching out for the next.

Little Squirrels

2010-08-12T18:27:00.000-07:00

Squirrels by Albrecht Durer, 1478-1521

See Louella at What Matters Most for a very ingenious method of seeing a squirrel up close and personal. And don't miss Mennonite Girls Can Cook, which she contributes to, for scrumptious recipes.

Fine Arts Friday: Just a Reminder

2010-07-23T07:24:00.001-07:00

Children on the Shore by Mary Cassatt, 1885

This is a favorite painting of Americans, undoubtedly of those, like myself, that spent summer vacations at "the shore." It reminds me of the happiest playtimes that children can have in freedom at the beach. Of course, parents need to keep a watchful eye that children don't stray or get into trouble in the water, but for the most part, unless a parent wants to join in the fun and assist in creating an ocean castle, fortification, or living burial ground, it is best that adults stay out of the way (applying sun lotion only and otherwise not worrying about clothes or sand or wet).

These two charming little girls are equipped with shovels and a bucket. A bucket is useful for carrying water and also for shaping sand for fortifications, but no other equipment is needed; clam shells are good shovels. My brother's family and I plunked our kids at a beach one afternoon with absolutely nothing, and they managed to play for four hours in perfect bliss.

There is so much going on at the beach--sand crabs, shells, the constant motion of the waves and whatever they bring up, the eating away of the sand around your toes and your castles as the tide comes up ever closer and then recedes, the seaweed, the clouds, the invitation to skitter and slide in the shallow surf, gulls catching fish, gull political conventions, sandpipers fretting, instant relief from heat in an ocean that always surprises, skate and fish remains, boats going by, holes that fill up with water from the bottom, sand sharks, fishermen, mud pies that need to be made, the ocean breeze, and constant noise of surf and animals and wind and jabbering with friends about what you will build and how, with improvisation along the way.

And the beach accommodates children of all ages together in an ensemble of play. Here are photos of my brothers and two friends playing on the shore. The littlest one there (on the right), my youngest brother, never left it, living his adulthood on the Florida eastern coast. At the beach he was always and thoroughly absorbed. If you have access to a beach and young kids, take advantage. They have a ball--you have a rest. Mother beach takes over.

Happy summer, everyone!

Clothes that Bespeak Femininity

2010-07-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

Keri Russell in The Magic of Ordinary Days.

I love the clothes that Keri Russell wears in the Hallmark movie, The Magic of Ordinary Days. Russell wears cotton blouses that are, in fact, exquisitely cut to fit, with fine flowery prints and beautifully cut dresses also with flower prints.

A lively print shirt dress with accompanying sweater.

The dresses all fit to a T, so that although Keri Russell is alluring, she is always dressed modestly. Of course, few of us are as beautiful as Russell, but I think most women would look better in clothes like these than in many of the outfits I see on the street or the grocery store, which often are either sexy but not necessarily feminine, or are unfeminine by virtue of being sex-less.

A superbly cut red skirt with a red and green flower print blouse that reminds me of Liberty of London prints available at Purl Soho.

Fine Arts Friday: "I Am Going to See Grandma"

2010-07-16T06:14:00.000-07:00

I Am Going to See Grandma by William Merritt Chase, 1889

American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase created this pastel of his two-year-old daughter, Dorothy, as her mother buttons her coat in preparation for a visit to her grandmother, who lives cross-river in Brooklyn.

Needless to say, this is a beautifully rendered image. The room's furniture and rug both frame and point us to the mother and her child. The beautifully harmonized colors unify the well-established but cheerful surroundings that lack the oppressive darkness one often associates with Victorian interiors.

Click on the painting to see it in a larger size and get a good look at little Dorothy's expression. Although she is excited, as the title tells us, Dorothy is patiently standing still while her mother primps her coat so all is in order for grandma's inspection. But the tilt of her head and her half-smile show she's also enjoying the joke: "I see you drawing me getting ready to see Grandma, Daddy!"

Creating a Mary Garden

2010-07-12T16:23:00.001-07:00

In this medieval painting Mary gives the Baby Jesus a flower. Strawberries, signifying Fruitful Virgin, grow in the raised garden behind them.

(I realize this is a little late, but consider it early for next spring!)

The Mary Garden is a tradition from the Middle Ages, when gardens were created with flowers and shrubs that all signify names of the Virgin Mary or her attributes. Medieval gardens were usually small and enclosed and featured trellises like the one in the painting above.

If you have a garden, most likely numbers of the flowers and shrubs you have planted signify names of Mary or her attributes, such as humility (violet) and purity (lily), or also her eyes (forget-me-nots) or her heart (begonia), or even an event like Easter (forsythia, known as the Easter Bush), the Flight into Egypt (lavender), or a Lenten rose.

A Mary garden in Australia, compliments of Under Her Starry Mantle.

A Mary Garden gives praise to Mary and also invites us to contemplation, especially if it is centered around a statue of Our Lady. Mary gardens are traditionally enclosed. But even if you are not able to strictly create a Mary garden, it is a lovely thought to know the religious meanings of the plants that you may already have. In my garden, for instance, I have hydrangeas and was very happy to learn that they mean Ave Maria. They sit next to forsythia, the Easter Bush, and a rose bush, meaning Mary's Glory, and in front I have petunias (Lady's Praise).

To learn all about Mary gardens, you can go here and here and to see a beautiful Mary garden in Annapolis, go here.

Fine Arts Friday: Mary's Flowers in the Portinari Altarpiece

2010-07-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

Still Life in the center of the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, 1476-1479.

Flowers, in two vases next to a wheat chaff and surrounded by strewn violets, form the lower section of the frame for the image of the Infant Christ in this large triptych that now resides at the Uffizi Museum in Florence, Italy. The iconography of this still life points to the underlying theme of this Nativity scene: the Virgin Mary and her relationship to Christ and Christ's relationship to us through His Passion.

The exquisitely painted flowers each have a meaning:
The lily was a symbol of Mary and her purity. The stalk represented her religous mind, the leaves her humility, and the flower her mercy. The lily, it was believed in the Middle Ages, had first grown from tears that Eve shed as she fled the Garden of Eden. There are two lilies here on one stalk, with the number two signifying Christ's dual human and godly nature.

Also in the vase are three irises, white and blue for purity and heavenliness and three perhaps for the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The iris was itself a symbol of light and hope, but its leaves, seven in number here, signify the seven sorrows of Mary:
The Prophecy of Simeon over the Infant Jesus. (Gospel of Luke 2:34)
The Flight into Egypt of the Holy Family. (Gospel of Matthew 2:13)
The Loss of the Child Jesus for Three Days. (Luke 2:43)
The Meeting of Jesus and Mary along the Way of the Cross. (Luke 23:26)
The Crucifixion, where Mary stands at the foot of the cross. (Gospel of John 19:25)
The Descent from the Cross, where Mary receives the dead body of Jesus in her arms. (Matthew 27:57)
The Burial of Jesus. (John 19:40)

The columbine in the clear glass, with the light shining through in the left of the glass, symbolizes the Holy Spirit, or the Divine Spouse.

The three carnations peeking out over the rim of the glass symbolize love, and their number symbolizes the Trinity. It was believed that the carnation first grew from the tears of Mary for Christ.

The violets symbolize faithfulness, humility, and chastity.

The meanings of these beautifully rendered flowers are part of the great symphony of van der Goes' painting, to which we are called as participants.

Portinari Altarpiece central panel.

The wheat chaff and the liturgical garb of some of the angels point to the Eucharist, in which we partake of the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, who sacrificed his life for our sins in the Passion. The Passion is the invisible theme of the painting, as shown in the solemn visage of Mary, who foresaw Christ's Passion from the beginning, and the pious stance of Saint Joseph and the angels, as if in preparing to receive Holy Communion. The empty shoe before Joseph is a reminder of God's words to Moses on Mount Sinai before the burning bush: Put off your shoes from your feet, for the place you are standing is holy ground."

Nevertheless, even though this painting is "hallowed ground," we, like the shepherds, are invited to join in this scene, which is not at our eye level or above us, but is slanted toward us, a beckoning to bear the sorrows of Mary for her Son and to join in the sacrifice of the Eucharist.

You can see all panels of the Portinari Altarpiece here. Van der Goes painted the altarpiece in Flanders on commission for the Sant d'Edigio chapel in the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence, Italy.

Some People Struggle Very Hard to Keep Their Families Together

2010-07-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

Winter's Bone 17-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly, with her younger brother and sister.

Winter's Bone, based on the novel of the same title by Daniel Woodrell, won the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize this year. Set in the Ozarks of southeastern Missouri, the film, directed by Debra Granik, tells the story of Ree Dolly, daughter in a family heavily involved in producing the highly addictive drug, crystal methamphetamine, or "crank." Because her father has jumped bail and signed over title to the family's land and house to pay his bond, the 17-year-old Ree vows to find him to keep a roof over the head of her remaining family: her brother and sister and her mother who has slipped into catatonic mental illness.

The sacrifice Ree is willing to bear, her determination, and the pain she suffers in her search are difficult to comprehend. One wonders that she has not followed her mother's road into obliviousness.

I suspect that the cruel codes of a criminal drug culture are the same everywhere, no matter who is involved, and no matter what the drug. The story could have been taken place in any city in the U.S.A.

What distinguishes Winter's Bone is that the setting is one most Americans are not familiar with and have seen little of in film; we have not been inured to it. Far from milking the sterotype of "hillbilly" though, the film forces us to confront real human beings, their faces taut with conflicting emotions--compassion and cruelty--who are trapped. We are forced to take in this reality in a profound way because there is no Hollywood gloss, no stylization, no pulling back from the harshness, no attempt to draw attention to acting, no artistic flourishes for the sake of artistic flourishes--the film is entirely at the service of the subject. While Winter's Bone revolves around violence-- both the threats and the results of it, we do not see much violent action per se. The removal of violent acts from the film eliminates, it became clear as I thought about it, a major method of Hollywood gloss that functions to anaesthetize the audience. There is also no unrelenting drive to doom--another Hollywood method to distance us from what we are seeing.

I have seen many films, some of which changed my life. I have seen many sad films, the postwar Italian realist films being among the saddest. No movie has ever moved me as much as Winter's Bone. The only film that it calls to my mind is Charles Burnett's independent sleeper of 1977, Killer of Sheep, which explores the life of an African American family in Watts.

I know that Winter's Bone reflects a harshness that is the life for a sizable swath of rural Americans. For a documentary glimpse of this world, which proves that Winter's Bone is not "stretching things," you can see on You Tube Diane Sawyers' "Hidden America: Children of the Mountains," which first aired in February 2009.

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

2010-07-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

Fourth of July by Childe Hassam, 1916.

God bless America.

Fine Arts Friday: Now Let Us Praise Flower Sellers

2010-07-01T08:26:00.000-07:00

At the Florist by Childe Hassam, 1889

In Paris in the years 1888 and 1889, Childe Hassam created a series of paintings of flower sellers at their work. At the time, the flower sellers congregated around the Bastille. At the Florist is so beautiful pictorially, it nearly takes your breath away. (Click on a painting to see it better in a larger size.) I love that Hassam has painted the very young flower sellers wrapped in the same white as the flowers themselves. The one girl whose face we see has the feature and aura of a cherub from an Italian Renaissance painting. The same white wrapping is picked up in the cap of the maid accompanying her mistress to the florists.

The Flower Seller by Childe Hassam, 1889.

In this painting, Hassam highlights the relationship between the two girls in the painting: the flower seller and the girl walking with her mother. The flower girl looks imploringly at the younger girl, and one assumes that she wants the child to ask her mother to buy her flowers. The younger girl meanwhile is fascinated by the flower seller. Either she is looking at the flowers, but more likely she is apprehending the flower seller as a young girl, like herself, but in a startlingly different position than herself; the flower seller has no childhood, having been hurled into adult activities for reasons of family poverty or even loss of family. The mother meanwhile ignores the flower seller and is hustling onward. I find it noteworthy that in the painting Hassam's shadowing of the heads of all three figures makes it appear almost as if each has a nimbus. In the left middle ground is the figure of a mother and child, the mother clearly from the working class. "There but for the grace of God go I."

Flower Girl by the Seine by Childe Hassam, 1889.

In this painting again, Hassam is focusing on the contrast between the flower seller and the flower buyer. As can be seen from umbrellas carried by those who have already passed, it is raining, but the flower girl lacks cover. She is looking at the woman in black with her black umbrella, who has just bought flowers now held by her daughter. We have little doubt that the flower seller as she gazes at these two is pondering the difference in their stations in life.

Parisian flower sellers were organized. One hundred years before Hassam painted the subject, the flower sellers of Paris put forward a Cahiers de Doleances (Register of Grievanes) to the Estates-General (spring 1789--the year of the French Revolution) to protest the dismantlement of the flower sellers' association in 1777. The cahiers begins:

The freedom given to all citizens to denounce abuses that press on them from all sides to teh representatives of the nation is doubtless a certain omen of an impending reform. Confident of this, the flower sellers formerly forming the community of the female sellers of flowers and bouquets of flowers of the city and suburbs of Paris dare to address themselves to you our lords [the Estates General]....

Heretofore, flower seller candidates had to pay a fee to join the flower seller association, which had been formed in 1735 "through the kindness of Louis XV." The association's banning in 1777 under the laissez-faire doctrine of Finance Minister Anne Robert-Jacques Turgot, caused a leap in the number of flower sellers and hence a commensurate decrease in each woman's share of the market, "as the number of consumers does not increase proportionally" to the growing number of sellers. This was causing problems within the flower selling community:

The lure of thee earnings, however, limited as they are and even more a strong propensity to idleness, encourages a crowd of young peole of the fair sex to practice the profession of the supplicants, and since their profession cannot feed them, they seek the resources they lack in licentiousness and the most shameful debauchery. The supplicants' cause is also that of morality.

The flower sellers community particularly directed its cahiers to the Third Estate (the elected representatives), who are "friends and brothers and it is to them that it falls to plead the cause of the destitute."

The supplicants will not cease to send wishes to heaven for the preservation and prosperity of the representatives of the nation.
Signed, The said merchants, represented by Madame Marl, syndic of the community.

Source: Doleance particulieres des marchandes bouquetieres fleuristes chapeliers en fleurs de la vile and faubourgs de Paris in Charles-Louis Chassin, Les Election and Les cahiers de Paris en 1789, Vol. 2, pp. 53-57, found in The French Revolution: A Sourcebook, by Philip G. Dwyer and Peter McPhee.

I do not know what happened, or if the flower sellers that Hassam painted were organized into a legal association.