Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—
      For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
            For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
      Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
            And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
      Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
            With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                                                                                    Praise him.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Chapters Two and Three

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

What does Esolen mean by imagination, anyway? Dictionary.com lists the first definition as “the faculty of imagining, or of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses.” My 1940s Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary goes further by adding, “esp. [mental images or concepts] never perceived in their entirety; hence, mental synthesis of new ideas from elements experienced separately.” I especially like Dictionary.com’s fifth definition, “ability to face and resolve difficulties; resourcefulness.”

Those qualities are what I’ve been thinking of so far while reading the book, and I’ve seen children who really didn’t have any imagination -- or, as my children would say, “Those kids don’t know how to play!” It’s not that they didn’t know how to play on the swingset or throw and catch a ball, but that they didn’t know how to make-believe.

In her post on keeping them inside, Dawn says:

I don’t ever remember, as does Esolen, thinking big thoughts, being intrigued by nature, staring at the sky, being around animals other than sheep or dogs or cats.

Part of my problem with these sorts of books is that I think the writers are the exception to the norm; do most children enjoy wandering with their inmost thoughts on death and proving God’s existence? Are children really that introspective? The examples he gives are wonderful, but I have to think something at home was done so the examples wished to think on Dante or other long thoughts. That being outside wasn’t by itself the solution.

I think she’s right. My parents’ attitudes surely influenced my own, and they also made sure I had the right books to read and plenty of time to read them and to daydream. But maybe being an introvert has something to do with it, too, since you’re predisposed to sit and wonder about things. When I was in kindergarten, every morning I’d go sit quietly at my desk and watch the other kids laughing and talking and playing together, and I distinctly remember wondering how they were able to do that. “I have to get used to people before I can do that,” I told myself, and that was every morning for at least half the school year. When I was five years old. Maybe “most children” aren’t that introspective, but I don’t think I’m exceptional, either -- just more inclined to sit and watch and think than to interact.

Well, on to the methods -- and I’m so late on last week’s contribution, and anyway these two methods belong to each other, that I’ve decided to make one post of it.

Method 1: Keep Your Children Indoors as Much as Possible, or They Used to Call It “Air”

Method 2: Never Leave Children to Themselves, or If Only We Had a Committee

My parents utterly failed at these, and how grateful I am that they did!

I have a lot of pleasant childhood memories -- Mom playing Chopin’s waltzes on the piano as we fell asleep at night; Daddy taking me on my first boat ride, and to visit his workplace, a laboratory -- he was a chemist; make-believe games with my brother, usually involving the deep recesses of the linen closet which could be anything from the Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house to a spaceship, or appliance boxes Daddy brought home.... But most of my happy memories take place outside.

Daddy would take us out to the carport during thunderstorms to watch the lightening and listen to the thunder, and we had regular times of lying in the back yard watching meteor showers. My best friend, Nan, and I would lie on our backs watching the clouds and tell stories about what we saw there, then we’d roll over onto our stomachs and look for four-leaf clovers. I don’t remember whether I ever found one, but I did find a five-leaf clover once and pressed it in my Bible. I remember the tiny flowers that grew in the grass and watching the ants move about in their own tiny world, as oblivious of us as we were to what happened above the sky in the daytime. I remember waking up one morning and looking out my bedroom window to see that a ring of mushrooms had magically sprung up overnight. Thankfully I’d read the right books, so I knew just what that meant -- the fairies had danced there in the night!

When we were a little older, my brother and I played in the woods that were behind our house. Our neighborhood was a suburban one, but it had once been part of a farm and our house was built on the edge of a former pasture up against a large wooded area that was state property. Trails wandered all through it and one of them led to a pauper’s cemetery -- people who’d died in the State Hospital were buried there. It was such a sad lonely place, no real headstones at all, only small, flat concrete markers with numbers identifying whoever was buried there. I used to sit and wonder who those people were and how they got to be there instead of in a cemetery surrounded by family like all my relatives were. The cemetery was dug up when I was ten or eleven years old to make way for new buildings for the state police and the Game and Fish Commission and I always wondered what they did with the bones. Of course there were also ghost stories that we kids told each other that all took place in that cemetery after dark. That neighborhood couldn’t have been more than five years older than I was, but our stories made it seem like it had a long history, and we told all of them as if they were true.

The best part of the woods was the creek that ran out of it and across the wide path that ran between the back yards and the woods, and into a concrete pipe and underground. Johnny and I spent countless hours there panning for gold -- never found any. One summer we dug out the area beneath a tiny waterfall (it was maybe a foot high) to make a swimming hole. We finally got it deep enough that we could sit, one at a time, up to our chests in the water.

We had to move away when I was thirteen years old, but that place is so much a part of who I am that to this day when I dream about being At Home, I’m in the house I grew up in surrounded by those woods.

Reading over what I’ve written, I notice that there are hardly any adults present in those out-of-doors memories. The parents were there, just in the background. Nearly all of the moms were home during the summer and most were during the rest of the year. My mom taught school for several years while I was growing up, so I spent more time in day care than is typical of people my age, but she preferred being home, so when school was out, we were free -- no organized activities except for Vacation Bible School at our church, the first week of summer break.

In letting us have so much free time outside Mom was merely raising us the way she and my daddy had been raised.

Both my parents grew up in close-knit farming communities, so their parents knew everyone and didn’t have to worry too much about what might happen to their kids when they were out playing with friends, or walking to and from school. I walked to school, too. My kindergarten was a half-day affair at a Methodist church three blocks from my house. Several of the kids in my neighborhood went there and we all walked together. We “Walkers” felt very superior to the kids who were driven by their parents. First through third grade was an elementary school that we got to by walking along the wide path between the woods and the back yards in our neighborhood, then across a pedestrian overpass that spanned the new Interstate, down a hill and across the school yard -- a little over half a mile, over all. Then, from sixth through ninth grades I went to a junior high that was a little more than a mile away, and of course we walked whenever we could. There was a city bus that we could catch on bad weather days or when we were running late, but it cost thirty-five cents we and preferred to use the money to buy a candy bar at Wal-Mart on the way.

That is a lot more freedom than my kids have today, but it’s less than my parents had. My daddy, who was born in 1935, used to tell about going rabbit hunting as a boy -- he’d spend the entire day out hunting, taking along his lunch and gun, and bringing home something for supper. Once, wandering in a swampy area near the Arkansas River, he lost his way and spent hours trying to find a landmark he recognized. It was getting late and he’d decided to look for a dry place to build a fire and spend the night when he finally found his way home. He was eight or ten years old at the time. And it was not the last time he spent the entire day out like that.

It’s certainly a different world today and we can’t let our kids have the same kind of freedom that we had growing up, let alone that our parents had, but I think Esolen still makes a good point, in his tongue-in-cheek manner -- if you want your kids to grow up without two ideas to rub together, keeping them safe indoors and perpetually occupied are where you should start.

Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child: Introduction and Chapter One

(Follow the discussion of Anthony Esolen's book at Cindy's blog.)

I had an epiphany while reading the first chapter, entitled "Why Truth Is Your Enemy and the Benefits of the Vague," and it made me really angry. In the midst of explaining how to make any subject dull, Anthony Esolen turns to mathematics. "There can't possibly be any imagination in manipulating numbers, right?" He answers the question by first talking about memorizing math facts and rules of operation, which are dull enough in themselves, but then warns the reader that having a kid full of that kind of fact is really quite dangerous if you're trying to produce a dull, unimaginative mind, lacking in insight and initiative. To illustrate the danger, he pulls a problem from the classic math text, Ray's New Higher Arithmetic (1880) -- "Multiply 387295 by 216324."

Simple drudgery, you say. Ah, but here's the trick of it. Do the operation by performing only three sets of multiplication. That is, 216324 has six digits in it, and you'd think, if you were not imaginative with numbers, that you would therefore have to perform six sets of multiplication, first by 4, then by 2, and so on. It isn't so.

The trick is to see -- and imagination is a power that allows us to combine things and recombine them, seeing them anew every time -- that 216324 has a pretty set of digits. It has a 3, and a 24, and a 216. But 3 x 8 = 24, and 24 x 9 = 216. These things you just know; they are tools for your cleverness to fool about with, as a machinist learns the feel of a wrench or a drill press. This means that if you multiply by the 3 first, putting the product...

... and then he goes on spouting some gibberish explaining how easy it is to multiply those horrendous numbers in Three Easy Steps. Only I don't "just know" what he suggests I should because I never learned my eights, and don't know my threes very well, either. I know my nines, but only up to eleven, so "24 x 9 = 216" is something I have to figure out either with pencil and paper or by skip-counting.

Esolen describes this facility with numbers as "play." That's when I had my epiphany. I used to LOVE playing with numbers and number patterns. When I was seven or eight years old I invented a pattern that goes like this: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34... It's only been a few years ago that I learned that some Italian guy nearly a thousand years ago first wrote about that pattern, so it's called a Fibonacci Sequence in his honor.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that I'm terrible at math. I'm so bad at it that I've taken to bragging about it as an act of bravado. I hate math because I was so bad at it in school -- well, starting around the fourth grade. Before that I was really good at it and enjoyed it. I don't know what changed in the fourth grade, but by the sixth grade I was happy if I got a "D" in math because that meant I wouldn't have to repeat the class.

But according to Esolen, playing with numbers IS math!

I felt the same way during my oldest child's first year of formal education. We were reading Margaret Pumphrey's book Stories of the Pilgrims as our history text, and thoroughly enjoying it. I've always loved reading about people who lived Long Ago, and finding out what they thought and seeing how they dressed and so forth. But I hated "History" as a subject in school -- we had to memorize names and dates of battles and treaties and whocaresaboutallthatstuff -- so it was a pleasant revelation to find out that, actually, I loved history. But pleasure quickly turned to anger that my schooling made me think I hated it.

Several years later, it slowly dawned on me that, even though I had hated studying Poetry in school, I loved poetry. I've figured out why that's the case: In school, you study poetry by killing and dissecting poems.

I suppose that that's what they do with History and Math, too.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~

On a more cheerful note, I now have a new favorite sentence: That sixteen-line-long feast of words and ideas and humorous commentary from Henry Fielding's Jacob Andrews that Esolen quotes earlier in chapter one.

I won't quote it just now, but I will say that if you haven't read Joseph Andrews you really should -- it's delightful. But first you have to prepare yourself by reading Samuel Richardson's Pamela, followed by Fielding's Shamela. Then and only then can you fully appreciate Joseph Andrews.

BC : AD

This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future's
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.

U. A. Fanthorpe

On keeping saints' days... or not

[Trying to keep Valerie's Rules of Good Blogging, one of which is that if you have a substantial comment, don't leave it in the comments, make a new post of it. I originally posted this as a comment on Brandy's blog, which you should all be reading.]



We notice saints' days, but mostly in an informal way -- the same way we talk about loved ones who've passed away on their birthdays or the anniversaries of their deaths. Our church gives everyone a calendar, which I keep hung near my phone, that tracks which Sunday of the year it is and the proper liturgical color for each day, plus the saints that Anglicans recognize, and there's one for maybe a fourth of the days. Some of them I've never heard of but occasionally it'll be one with a really cool story, like Boniface, and then I'll mention it and we'll retell the story of him chopping down Thor's sacred oak. Other times it'll be one of the twelve apostles or one of the martyrs, and I'll mention how they remained faithful till the end, suffering much for the sake of Christ.

There are a very few that we notice a little more formally -- St. George, for example, whose feast day is in April. During that month we read Sandol Stoddard Warburg's adaptation of Edmund Spenser's Saint George and the Dragon. Some day I hope to be able to read the original. Then in October, we read Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse about Alfred the Great (who, inexplicably, isn't on our calendar).

For the most part, you see, it's a way of teaching Church history, which is really the history of our extended family. If you start looking up saints' biographies you're likely to find all sorts of wild stuff, like Saint Nicholas standing on his own two feet on the day he was baptized (I'm assuming as a newborn) for three hours, in honor of the Trinity, and that he early on began fasting twice a week, refusing his mother's milk on Wednesdays and Fridays until after evening prayers. I usually skip those, but occasionally include one or two to let my kids know that some fantastic tales have grown up around these heroes of the faith. I don't want them to be cynical, so I don't usually pooh-pooh stories of healings, and things that really could have been miracles, if you see what I'm getting at, so a huge amount of discretion is required on Mama's part when reading anything about the saints to the kids.

We've done a few things to commemorate St Nicholas's day -- one year we bought hope chests for our two oldest daughters. We plan to do the same for our two younger ones in the next few years. If I ever find anything nice to put in there, I try to save it for St Nicholas day, but I'm not too good at doing that. We're not doing anything at all for it this year, other than reading a bit about him -- about how he slapped Arius at the Council of Nicea and temporarily lost his position over it. LOL.

We don't notice Valentine's day at all, unless Mike happens to bring home candy or flowers, and we may or may not wear green on St Pat's day (I've avoided the orange b/c it seems to politicize the day, which misses the point) -- but I just learned something interesting. Green is itself political. The original color of Ireland before the whole Prot/Cat issue came up, was blue. After reading that, I was looking at the flag of our county -- King George -- it has George I's coat of arms on it, which is quartered with all the realms he ruled over. In the lower left quarter is the arms of Ireland, azure (bright blue) with a gold Celtic harp. That's Irish Blue, and I think we'll wear it next year.
;-)

What the best-dressed teapots are wearing this season

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My latest knitting project, I made this tea cosy based on a pattern found here: Super Simple Tea Cosy Pattern Generator. You type in your teapot's circumference and the page generates a pattern that makes the cosy the right size.

I used wool left over from two projects -- the brown is from a scarf I crocheted my youngest son a few years ago, and the green is from a shawl I made my sister to help her through her first bout of leukemia. There wasn't enough of either one for anything, but I liked the way they looked together and thought they'd go well with the Brown Betty teapot my oldest daughter gave me for Christmas two years ago.



And it really is simple. I'm still learning to knit, so until now I've only made dish rags and one scarf, which was just a very loooong dish rag. This pattern is two rectangles that you sew together, leaving openings for the spout and handle. The brown yarn is thicker than the green, which is why the brown part is wider.



New-for-me stitches include making the lacing eyelets, using two colors at once, and making I-cord for the drawstring.



Here is Lily, demonstrating how to put on the tea cosy:









... and how to pour tea while hugging big sister:

Advent preparations

We've celebrated Advent with an Advent wreath nearly every Christmas since we married, but last year we began a new tradition: an Advent Tree!

It came about like this: We usually wait till just before Christmas Eve to get the Christmas tree and for some reason the kids always panic -- they always think we're not going to be able to find one this year. It almost happened once, ten or twelve years ago -- there had been a drought out west so there were fewer trees available than usual, and nearly all of them were sold out by the time we went shopping. We ended up with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Well, five years ago when we first moved here to Virginia, we went to a church that put a Christmas tree up in the Parish house right after Thanksgiving, and had the children make ornaments on the first Sunday of Advent to put on it. Each ornament was decorated with, or made in the shape of, a traditional symbol that represents Christ -- a lamb, a cross, the Chi Rho, Alpha and Omega, and so forth. This style of ornament is called a "Chrismon," which means "Christ Monogram." I thought it was a neat idea and tried to figure out how to do it at home -- I mean, really, where would I put a second tree?

Finally, last year I figured it out -- we didn't need two trees. All we had to do was put up the Christmas tree at the beginning of Advent, call it an Advent tree, and then decorate it with Chrismons. On Christmas Eve we could remove the Chrismons (or not) and add our usual Christmas ornaments. It worked out so well we're going to do it again this year. We made the ornaments yesterday and will decorate them on Friday.

Here are the specifics (sorry I don't have any pictures -- I'll see if I can get some this year and add them later).

Here's where you can find an explanation of Chrismons and a PDF file of patterns you can print out [link corrected].

Here is the recipe we used to make the ornaments. [Note added 21 November 2011: That link is dead now, but this one has the recipe and a clear explanation of the technique.] I used the first recipe at that link, cut them out with a 3" biscuit cutter. Last year we decorated them with white fabric paint but this year I'm going to try Wilton's fondant icing writer, but I have fabric paints on hand in case that doesn't work out. The plan is to hang them outside after Christmas for the birds.

The designs I used last year were fairly simple -- Celtic cross, shepherd's crook, crown of thorns, cross and crown, eternity cross, IXΘYΣ, and several others that didn't require much detail.

Thanksgiving weekend we put up the tree, with its lights and the star topper, a brass Moravian star, pierced, with a light inside. Saturday night before evening prayers, we turned on the lights (but not the star) and let the kids each pick one Chrismon to put on the tree, and talked a bit about the symbol and what it meant. On Sunday we had the lights on all day, and that night we let them add a Chrismon, or one purple or silver ornament from our collection (purple being the color of Advent). The next week we added one Chrismon a day, but we left the lights off until the next Saturday night. Then we did the whole thing over again so that the tree grew more and more festive as Christmas approached.

On the 24th, we removed some of the purple and silver ornaments (because we have a LOT of Chrismas ornaments) and added the rest of our Christmas stuff. That night we turned on the star as well as the lights, and left them on through Epiphany (except for while we were sleeping or away from home, of course). We take the tree down a day or so after Epiphany, and we generally start back to school on the next Monday, known traditionally as Plough Monday.

The kids love crafty stuff and I normally don't do much of that kind of thing with them, so it makes a nice change, and adding the ornaments day by day builds excitement in a way that's just perfect for this season of anticipation.

Reading and pronunciation

Or, Continuing my daughter's education.

Now that my eldest daughter is home again I'm showing her how to do reading lessons with her youngest brother -- the two oldest girls are teaching reading to the two youngest children while I'm having a Latin lesson with my eleven year old daughter. Yesterday's lesson went something like this:

Me: Now sound out this word.
Little Man: Pĕĕĕĕĕnnnnn.
Me: Yes. What word?
LM: Pin.
Me: Good!
Eldest Daughter: But, he said "pin" not "pen."
Me: We're Southerners. That's the way we say it.


Some of y'all might remember this passage from The Fathers by Alan Tate, but I want to highlight one sentence in particular: "In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher."

:-D

Death

Grieving for the loss of my dear baby sister; looking forward to the Resurrection.


But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.
Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.
For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?

I Corinthians 15:20-26, 51-55

Summer blessings

Summer is not exactly my favorite season, but I do LOVE summer food -- all the raw milk I can drink, fresh home-grown tomatoes, watermelons...

I also love Mexicany food -- beans, salsa, avocadoes. Granted these foods are available year-round, but they just aren't the right things in the winter. In the winter you want your food to keep you warm, not cause you to break into a sweat or otherwise cool you down.

Another yummy summer food is smoothie made with yogurt, coconut milk, and frozen fruit -- my favorite combo is half strawberries and half peaches.

Then there's curried dishes. My current favorite curry is salmon cooked with coconut milk, red curry paste, and various chopped veggies, served over rice.

What's your favorite summer food?