It is Friday

The sun has come out after
a foggy yesterday with rain.
It felt like Friday yesterday and
today does too. Fridays have a
wonderful sigh to them, don't they!
So I had two days of sighing.

The weekend is ahead.
I'm thankful for the time it holds!
More on my reading ........and
third son returns from the mts.
to go back to school in the mts.
on Sunday!
We'll feast tomorrow night!


Carl Larsson, Around The Lamp, 1900

Just give me a pen!

Lots of remakes of that last
blog entry! I don't know where
the margins are so the words
come to the next line when they
cross some invisible line that is
right over there!! ( on my screen)

Love Letters ~~ a pen and paper!
I'm reading the Letters of Keats
and Letters of Thomas Chalmers
right now. One to teach, one to
teach my soul!

Life Changers

Some answers :

Gileskirk is a high school humanities
curriulum from Franklin , Tenn taught
by Dr. George Grant. Google that!
Best thing we've done in homeschooling.
My third son, freshman at Appalachain
State, exhorted our class ( 15 homeschoolers)
to keep on because it's how he learned how
to study and knows it formed his worldview.
Then he was off to the mts. yesterday to visit
a friend and to get a snowboard! We are doing
Antiquity this year. It's a four year cycle. It
changed our lives.

L'Abri Fellowship also changed our lives.
Francis and Edith Schaeffer founded L'Abri
in Switzerland in the 1955 as a study center
for up to a 3 month term and today has
branches all over the world. I've never
been a "student" but have been to
many L'Abri conferences.
The 50th Anniversary Conference was in St.
Louis in 2005. Susan Schaeffer Macaulay
wrote "For the Children's Sake" and "For the
Family's Sake". She has mentored me deeply
in how I've homeschooled using Charlotte
Mason's methods . I had the pleasure of
meeting her in 1995 here in Charlotte when
our homeschool support group hosted a
day and half conference
with Susan! I had just begun homeschooling and
thought God was Amazing with a Capital
A!! I still do !

Steve Garber is head of the Washington Institute
on calling and the author of The Fabric of
Faithfulness ( book for college students).
He gave a lecture in St. Louis on
True Spirituality, stemming from
Schaeffer's book, but more what it meant
for him. He referred to The Wild Birds
by Wendell Berry as the best example
in a novel of calling.
Doing that which God made you for as a
vocation. I read the book 3 years ago,
but I remember the character wanting
to be a priest but becoming a barber!
I have never forgotten how rich that
barber's life was.
Amen!

Getting it right

Right at the end of class this
morning, (Gileskirk) I saw several
of these on the railing of the deck
eating.




I found out WHO these birds are:
Phoebe! Cute white underbellies!
There were several , so they bring
their friends.

It's wonderful to find out something
with a Bird book. And they are new
to our house@!

Good book of Wendell Berry:

The Wild Birds:Six Stories of the
Port Williams Membership

I heard Steve Garber at a L'Abri
Conference say that this is one of the
best books on "calling." So I came
home from St. Louis that year and
bought it!

Stuck in my mind

There's a scene in "Facing
the Giants" that is stuck in
my mind. After the 4th pregnancy
test, the coach's wife has a negative
report. She goes out to the car and
looks up at God with tears and says:
"God , I will still love you."

Those words will stick with me
in days to come. Strength.

Oh the weather outside is....

The rest of that song is
LET it SNOW. It's cold enough
to, but no clouds. Very , very cold,
so my husband is building a fire
in the hearth! He's a corporate
guy who gets to commute down the
stairs to the libary to work at home.

Our plans changed
today. We're home to read and
write and think now in front of
the roaring fire!Maybe the knitting
needles will get pulled out of our
bags!

Reading about Jan Karon's house
in Virginia. John Grisham lives nearby!
It's a historic farmhouse that she
refurbished and has in her will to donate
it to a children's organization.It's all about
redemption: the property, her books, her life
now for Christ!

Comfort and joy

The coziest room in the house is the kitchen. Its wood-paneled walls and cabinets are finished an antique sage-green. In one corner is a large fireplace, built-in window seats, comfy French Bergere wing chairs and a gate-legged table. "I like to sit here and have a cup of tea," she says.

Even the basement had potential with its exposed brick walls, low wood-beamed ceilings and 7-foot-wide fireplace; Karon renovated it to look like an English tavern. "I wrote a lot of Light from Heaven here," she says of her new novel, the ninth and final book of the Mitford series. (It made its debut this week at No. 3 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list.)

There's a fun chapter in Lauren Winner's
Girl Meets God, about trying to find Jan
Karon's farm near Charlottesville. Perhaps
Lauren who is at Duke now, has met her!

At the Back of the North Wind

That's how it felt today!
It made me think of George
MacDonald's children's book
where one of my favorite poems
is :Where did you come from ,
Baby Dear?

Just put this on a progress report
for my literature class. I love the
truth in CS Lewis' words:

"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life
requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates
the deserts that our lives have already become.

A manuscript of At the Back of the
Northwind: