Simple and Beautiful

So interesting that all the different colors chosen by Amish women all go together in such beautiful harmony.

Also see: Amish Communities Now in 28 States

Botticelli Moments

I felt as if this painting, by Alessandro Botticelli that took my mother's breath away when she saw it in Paris, had come to life.... as lovely bridesmaids prepared my daughter for her wedding in the morning light with her sweet flower girl watching.

 

 

Every Human Life Has Meaning

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.

In Praise of the Mudroom

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.

Heroine of Human Dignity: Mildred Fay Jefferson

“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.

Little Squirrels

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.

Happy Fourth of July, Everyone!

Fourth of July by Childe Hassam, 1916.

God bless America.

Favorite Christmas Movie: My Life as a Dog

The orphaned Ingemar in the train riding to northern Sweden to live with his uncle and aunt.

My Life as a Dog is not really a Christmas movie, but to me it's a Christmas movie, because it celebrates love and our openness to it as the heart -- that is, the truth -- of our life on this earth.

Ingemar is a boy of 11 or 12 years old who lives in Sweden. He does not know his father, who evidently is in Brazil and shipping bananas from there to points north. His mother, whom he loves and shares his stories with, is terminally ill. His enraged older brother is harsh to him -- no help at all. He has a young friend who is a girl who is surely sympathetic and loving to him but is a bit shocked at the violence of Ingemar's mother -- when she is frustrated with Ingemar's boyish antics -- and of his brother. When the mother becomes so sick that she has to be hospitalized, the brothers become wards of the state and are separated. Ingemar is sent to live with his uncle and aunt in a remote village in northern Sweden--without his beleaguered but beloved mother, without his mean brother, and without his beloved dog, Laika.

All the time, Ingemar is narrating the story in a certain way: He thinks about terrible things. He thinks about the lovely lady who became a missionary who then was attacked and killed by those she strived to convert to Christianity; he thinks about the Soviet dog who was sent to outer space never to come back; and he thinks about the stuntman motorcyclist who tries to soar over one too many buses and finally meets his doom. The purpose of these mental meanderings? "I have it better than them," or

There but for the grace of God go I.

And when Ingemar arrives at his uncle's village he finds hilarity -- he finds it because he is open to it, and he longs to tell his mother about all the people in the village and how funny they are -- "she would have liked that." His friend on the soccer team asks, "Why are you looking at me?" and then answers in pure humility, "I know. My hair is green."

Despite his lacks and losses, Ingemar is enticed by life. He cannot help but be amused by the old man who spends all day hammering his roof; he cannot help but find a home in the new "lusthus" or summer house that his uncle builds in the backyard; he longs to join in the romps of his aunt and uncle as they chase each other in love around the house; he is enthralled by the beautiful lady in the glass-blowing factory in which he works parttime who is a subject of sculpture by the "local artiste"; he finds fun in joining his green-haired friend in a swinging basket that the friend's father has rigged to shoot kids out of his barn into the meadow; and he revels in sparring with the sole girl on the soccer team.


Ingemar sees his mother for the last time. She wisely admires his new jacket and its reflector lights.

So that: When he has his last heart-breaking visit with his dying mother in the hospital and comes back to northern Sweden and is suddenly struck with the realization that his dog Laika has in fact been taken away and that he will never see her -- or his mother -- again, Ingemar cries his heart out and lashes out at those who love but have lied to him. Yet he cannot help laughing at the old man hammering on his roof when he takes his annual plunge into the icy river to show his toughness and cannot help celebrating the boxing victory of Sweden's pride, Ingemar Johansson, with his girl soccer player friend.

It is not duty that calls Ingemar; it is love of life whose source is his love of people and enables him to survive his devastating losses and to live to tell the tale.


Affection seems to be the conclusion of the sparring match between Ingemar and the sole girl on the village soccer team.

As I watched Ingemar deal with the harsh blows that life had meted out to him, I felt I had a lot to learn from him. First, his constant thinking about others that had it far worse than he perceived his own situation to be enabled him to put things in perspective and to hold on to life and all it has to offer. Second, he found constant amusement in the foibles, lovable traits, and idiosyncrasies of those around him. I am reminded of Bishop Fulton Sheen's idea of humor -- in humor man finds amusement in the vast, incomprehensible but real difference between the Divine and the follies of man. And so Ingemar's bemusement is not a sarcastic and hurtful ridicule but a loving amusement at our human frailties, in contrast to the unattainable perfection that is a loving God.

Is this love -- both human and divine -- not the Christmas spirit?

And so this movie reminds me always:

“Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” (Luke 18:15-17)

Merry Christmas!

One Family and the Spirit of Christmas

The Holy Family by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1845

See Over the Moon with Joy for a beautiful Christmas story.

Taking Chance

Yesterday, on the anniversary of D-Day, I watched Taking Chance, about a Marine colonel, Michael Strobl, who escorts the body of Private First Class Chance Phelps, a young war hero killed in Iraq, home to his family in Wyoming. This is a very moving story based on the report that the colonel wrote about the trip.

It is especially a tribute to Chance Phelps, who was killed trying to protect his company from enemy fire and who in his brief military career had already been highly decorated with six ribbons.

This movie is also a tribute to the U.S. military and the respect and honor with which people in the military treat each other and treat their fallen. This respect is shown in the way that the military morticians at the Dover Air Force Base take meticulous care of Pvt. Phelps' body and effects and those of other fallen soldiers. This respect is shown in the way in which Col. Strobl performs his slow military salute before the body of Pvt. Phelps and others join him and in the extreme care that the colonel took to ensure a dignified and safe journey. This respect is shown in the deep sense of humility and respect that Col. Strobl showed to the private's family in the face of their loss.

Taking Chance is also a tribute to the American people, because it was the care, honor, and respect that they showed to the body of the dead soldier and to his escort that inspired Col. Strobl to write the story. Thus, this is a story of the character of both of these men in their selfless devotion to the U.S. military and of the American people. I would that all Americans, but especially young people, see this film.

Throughout the three days of the Memorial Day weekend, Turner Classic Movies featured many fine films from World War II, a few from World War I, none from the Korean War, and only one from the Vietnam War. It saddened me to think that Americans, from this lineup, regard World War II as the war in which we can acknowledge our heroes. Watching these films, I realized that although one man may stand out more than others in devotion and leadership, war is filled with heroes--the many unnamed heroes that even help to create the known heroes, or the simple heroism of risking your life for the defense of one's country. In denying the continuation of that military aspiration in our films and in the media, we are denying inspiration to our own youth, not simply inspiration for a military career, but inspiration to service, devotion, self-sacrifice, and belief in our country. The film Taking Chance, exquisitely acted by Kevin Bacon, shows how young men and women are inspired to join the military as the highest achievement of their life--a young friend of mine, who has just joined the Marines, is a case in point--and that most Americans, stretching across the country as in Chance's final journey, recognize this and honor them.

Life: Imagine the Potential

Another ad from CatholicVote.Org--telling the truth and spreading hope.

Learn How to Cook for the Depression

Thanks to Suzanne for introducing me to the wonderful Clara, who demonstrates her recipes for eating during a depression. Have fun!



Find more cooking videos with Clara here.

"My Walden"

See My Year 1955 today for a beautiful reflection on the home.

Hats Off to Nicola Beauman and Persephone Books

I think of Nicola Beauman, the founder and owner of Persephone Books, as a treasure seeker who has struck it rich. Her own appraisal of women's literature in the first half of the 20th century A Very Great Profession tells the story of her immersion in the works of women novelists, mostly for women and mostly by British women, which, without her intervention in republishing them through her Persephone Books company, would be completely forgotten.

The fascinating question arose to Ms. Beauman: What were the housewifely ladies, such as the heroine of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter, reading when they were riding on the train to town for shopping? She surveys many of the books that they may have been reading--many of them bestsellers in their day--and how they shed light on the questions that were occupying women in the period of say, 1910 through to 1950. Reading these books is thus a fascinating study of our mothers and our grandmothers.

Not many of the authors whose writings are now again in print thanks to Persephone Books have books that are available in my (very good) local library. I have had to hunt them down in various used books sites online. But when I heard that Nicola Beauman, after several years in the business, was just beginning to think about paying a salary to herself, I have tried to patronize the more expensive option of buying Persephone Books.

The fact is that despite feminist efforts, often the books of women authors--unless they stick to masculine concerns, as most feminists do--are not appreciated in the longer term. Books that deal with family from the standpoint of the woman who tries to hold it together (We Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple, for example) do not seem to hold their own to become classics.

These women won the Pulitzer Prize for the American novel in the years 1918 to 1947:
1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1923: One of Ours by Willa Cather
1924: The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
1925: So Big by Edna Ferber
1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
1931: Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
1935: Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1939: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1942: In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow

Of these authors, I know only Edith Wharton, Willa Cather (but not this book), Edna Ferber, Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Otherwise, I have no idea who these ladies are or what they wrote.

Then there is Susan Glaspell, author of the wonderful short story "Jury of Her Peers," who wrote plays that were considered on a par with those of Eugene O'Neill, plus eight novels, whose name is not found in the catalogue of my local library. Persephone Books is playing a role in resurrecting the work of this very astute American.

Therefore, as you are willing and able, I urge you to support Persephone Books. Ms. Beauman's fascinating catalogue is worth a read in itself to know about the stories we never would hear about otherwise. You can read more about Persephone books here and here. Happy reading to you!

P.S. I learned about Persephone Books from Jane Brocket, whose literary adventures I enjoy reading about.

A Haunting Story and Picture

Please see At Home with the Farmer's Wife for a very moving post by Suzanne on the ghostly image of her grandmother with her grandmother's stepdaughter. I urge everyone to daily check Suzanne's blog, because she always has fascinating and beautiful photos and writing that matches them.

Support Feminists for Life

Just in case everyone does not already know, I'd like to briefly talk about Feminists for Life, an organization that Sarah Palin, vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party, is a member of. I first heard of Feminists for Life when I was on the DC Metro commuting to my job. I saw a poster that said: "Women Deserve Better Than Abortion."


The poster was sponsored by the Knights of Columbus of the Catholic Church, but the slogan, the poster made clear, came from Feminists for Life. I was overjoyed, because for the first time the anti-abortion movement, which I supported, was acknowledging the terrible damage that an abortion does to the mother. I jotted down the FFL website URL and went to their website, called them, and then joined.

The Feminists for Life's founder is Serrin Foster, who was kicked out of the National Organization of Women when she declared that she was pro-life. As Foster has brought to the fore through Feminists for Life, the suffragette movement was opposed to abortion and fought for laws against it. Their compelling logic was that if women did not want to be treated as pieces of property by men, then they in turn could not treat their children, their unborn children, as pieces of property.


Feminists for Life founder Serrin Foster addressing students at Georgetown University in February of this year.

This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the feminist movement of today, whose slogan is a woman's right to choose [abortion]. But as Feminists for Life has made clear and as many, many women know, often a woman is not "choosing" in any meaningful sense of the word. Often she is being coerced, by the baby's father, by her family which may demand abortion on pain of being thrown out of the house. She is coerced by pressures on her to make a career or by financial difficulties. In short, she is not choosing, but bending, giving up her baby because conditions are unfavorable and no one will support her in having her child.

I believe that no matter how much a woman believes that she has a right to an abortion, the very act of deciding to kill her own baby, causes extreme distress and will change the woman's life forever. She may believe that in having an abortion, she has done the right thing, or the only thing possible. Perhaps she will never look back. That does not mean that she has not been damaged. It does not mean that her capacity to love has not been damaged It does not mean that even without knowing it, she slips into depression, which to her, may seem to have no reason at all. It does not mean that she sinks into a cynicism whose origin she may not even know. It does not mean she does not suffer guilt. It does mean that at some point in her life she will not suffer a deep pain of regret. It is impossible to kill life within you and not lose something precious in yourself.

The suffragettes believed that if a woman had an abortion that society had failed her. In other words, it was not the woman who had failed society by being pregnant. Society had failed any woman, who believed there was no alternative for her but to abort her baby. The idea that society must support women to have their children and to raise them or give them up for adoption is a much healthier attitude than an attitude that leads to murder of the child in one's own womb. I say murder of a child, because scientific evidence continues to mount that from the moment of conception, a child represents a unique genetic combination--it is the only one, there can never be another just like it. Further, we know now that at a very early point in the womb, the child can feel pain. Left to develop, this child in the womb will become a new precious human being out in the world.


There is only one, unique in itself from conception.

The Feminists for Life has therefore concentrated its efforts on college campuses, to try to force colleges and universities to offer the resources that will permit a pregnant woman to stay in school and to complete her education, rather than face the choice of either abortion or dropping out of school. Their work has borne fruit as abortions on campuses have declined.

For all of these reasons, I support the Feminists for Life, although I do not think of myself as a feminist. And I hope you will support it too.

The Symphony of Supper-Time

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as a young woman in college, where she met her husband Charles. They married in 1919.

In the latter half of the 1920s, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published weekly poems in the Rochester Times-Union in upper-state New York, where she lived with her husband. Many of the poems were published in a book edited by Rodger L. Tarr entitled Songs of a Housewife. In motivating her column of a poem a day chronicling the life of a housewife, Rawlings told her editor in an interview published June 8, 1926:

"I was brought up to believe in the modern myth that housekeeping is only drudgery, and the housewife is a downtrodden martyr. I thought that any seemingly contented housewives were only 'making the best of it.' When I first began housekeeping in my own home, I felt that I had entered the ranks of the mistreated.

"After a time I began to realize, to my amazement, that I didn't feel at all downtrodden, and that I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I began to look at other domestic 'martyrs' from a new angle, and I have learned many things.

"I have found that there is romance in housework: and charm in it; and whimsy and humor without end. I have found that the housewife works hard, of course--but likes it. Most people who amount to anything do work hard, at whatever their job happens to be. The housewife's job is home-making, and she is, in fact, 'making the best of it'; making the best of it by bringing patience and loving care to her work; sympathy and understanding to her family; making the best of it by seeing all the fun in the day's incidents and human relationships.

The housewife realizes that home-making is an investment in happiness. It pays everyone enormous dividends. There are huge compensations for the actual labor involved. It will always be so: as long as human beings living together and eat and sleep and wear clothes. Even if community kitchens develop, and community nurseries, women will get a fundamental satisfaction out of making men comfortable and well-fed, and children 'well brought up'....

"There are verses in almost everything that fills a housewife's day....

"There are unhappy housewives, of course. But there are unhappy stenographers and editresses and concert singers. The housewife whose songs I sing as I go about my work, is the one who likes her job."

So for fun, from time to time, I will post a poem from Song of a Housewife, and here is the first:

The Symphony of Supper-Time

I like the sound of silver
When the table’s being set,
In the early Winter twilight,
With the lamps unlighted yet.

I like to hear the kitchen door
Swing slowly out, and then,
When Mary passes, laden, through,
Swing slowly back again.

I like to hear the kettle sing;
The hissing of the roast;
The children coming in from play,
A hungry, noisy host.

I like to hear the murmurings
When my dessert appears.
The symphony of supper-time
Is music to my ears!

Amish Communities Now in 28 States

A funeral procession for two Amish sisters who were murdered in their school in September 2006 by a gunman who killed three other girls in the school and then turned the gun on himself.

The Associated Press reported yesterday that the Amish population in America has nearly doubled in the last 16 years and that Amish communities have spread to 28 states from their original base in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Ohio in search of inexpensive farmland. I think this is good news. I am not Amish myself, but spent my first four years in Pennsylvania Dutch country. I remember on country roads behind Amish carriages and my fascination with them. I also loved seeing the beautiful colors of their clothes on clotheslines and the sweet innocence of their children--girls in their little bonnets and the boys in their straw hats. For all these reasons, I adored the book by Marguerite de Angeli, Henner's Lydia, about the Amish girl and her adventures in making a hooked rug and taking it to market.
These are all the familiar images of the Amish, a shy people who do not appreciate being photographed.


Grief-stricken Amish outside the schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where the girls were killed.

But when a gunman broke into a small Amish schoolhouse in September 2006 and murdered five little Amish girls in cold blood and seriously injured five others, the country got a measure of the depth of the religion that has held this community together. Instead of mounting bitter protests against this violent intrusion into their community, the neighboring Amish and the families of the dead girls expressed their feelings of grief not only for themselves but for the perpetrator and for his family. "We forgive"--without conditions--was their uniform message to the world.

"Dozens of Amish neighbors came out Saturday to mourn the quiet milkman who killed five of their young girls and wounded five more in a brief, unfathomable rampage," reported Yahoo news October 7, 2006. In another news report, Dwight Lefever, spokesman for the family of the man who killed the girls and then himself, told a prayer service that an Amish neighbor came to comfort the [Roberts] family. "He stood there for an hour, and he held that man in his arms, and he said, 'We will forgive you,'" Lefever said. "He extended the hope of forgiveness that we all need these days."

"We have to forgive. We have to forgive him in order for God to forgive us," an Amish woman told CBS News Early Show on the condition that her name and face not be shown.


Girls looking out the buggy back window.

The Amish do not evangelize but seek to preserve their way of life. A book I read on the Amish a year ago discussed their relationship to technology: They do not oppose technology per se, but they will not adopt technologies they believe will introduce centrifugal forces that disperse their community.

In all areas that they live, the Amish are known as hard-working good neighbors and gentle people, whose craftsmanship in all endeavors is unsurpassed.

The Amish are growing. I find that to be good news.


The Amish are plain people with a highly cultivated sense of beauty: home-dyed clothes on the line.

Life and Death in a Corn Field

A dear friend pointed me to this story today on At Home with the Farmer's Wife. I hope you can take the time to read it. Over the weekend I read parts of the author's accompanying The Farmer's Wife, which chronicles in photography and well-informed and wise commentary the passing away of rural life in northern Illinois. I intend to read it all.

Vintage Homemaking

Please see Pleasant View Schoolhouse for important words from Anna on the vintage homemaker. Pleasant View Schoolhouse is a daily treat for me, and I have learned a lot from reading about her family; how she works as a mother, home maker, and seamstress; and her insightful thoughts.