Daybook

Reading

I finished Every Eye this morning.  A little labyrinth of a book with prose that slows your progress with its beauty.  Isobel English was a Catholic.  There is some really excellent Catholic chick lit out there: Rumer Godden, Antonia White, Alice Thomas Ellis.  Irene Nemirovsky, whom I haven’t read yet, also converted to Catholicism.

Life of St. Teresa, Story of a Soul, Leviticus, Song of Songs, Pascendi, Dante’s Paradiso. Next up in our Carmelite community will be St. Elizabeth of the Trinity!

Time to start a new novel!  I have not even begun on the stack of seven books I borrowed from the library two weeks ago.  One of those?  Something I already own?  The possibilities are overwhelming.  Yesterday my brother recommended The Women on the Porch by Caroline Gordon.  It really looks good.  And she also became a Catholic.

Around the house

I’m not thinking about cooking dinner yet because my sister is taking care of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I need to fold clothes today because I was hardly home all weekend and clean laundry has piled up.

My sister is making a “practice” Italian lemon pound cake.  Lux!

Beauty in the Ordinary

The weekend was far from ordinary but surpassingly beautiful!  My friend entered the cloister and we drove down (South this time) to be there.  Dream-like settings: the monastery and the pastoral hill country around it.  The Thai restaurant where we had dinner that evening with the friends who drove her to the monastery.  Lovely people who spoke Italian with their five year old daughter.

Family gathering on Sunday!  My brother is home to visit my parents and will be soon be in the area “to stay.”

Shopping

I found a big Sherlock Holmes book with the original newspaper illustrations, a Shaker cookbook, and two hardback Dorothy Sayers mysteries at a library sale on Friday.

 

 

Daybook

Beauty in the Ordinary

We went North on Sunday.  Hills in the mist.  Water splashing over rocks.

Mother’s Day morning.  My husband and daughter surprised me with strawberry jam tarts and a bouquet.  The flowers — lavender daisies and white roses — perked up beautifully in water.  Now around the icon of Mary on the kitchen windowsill we have sprays of flowers: that bouquet and another of yellow carnations and baby’s breath.  Also the new “school bell” from India to ring the Angelus with.

Mother’s Day kisses from my baby boy!

Around the House

Work on the floor being done as I write.  The babies are mesmerized.

Cooking.  Yesterday: (not-from-a-box) mac&cheese, chicken nuggets, and broccoli.  Today: chicken and white sauce, rice, salad.  Tomorrow: pizza with garlic and basil crusts. (Pepperoni, cheese, and mushroom or red pepper.)

Praying

For those in prison.  For the priest who celebrated our wedding Mass, through the intercession of his patron saint today.

Reading

I’m halfway through Every Eye by Isobel English.  My sister, sister-in-law, and I will be discussing it later this month.  I read it years ago but it’s as if I never read it before.

Actively reading St. Teresa’s account of her life.  I read that years ago too.  And, though I remember things here and there, they read completely differently now.  This is the Kavanaugh translation.  I think last time I read Alison Peers.

Planning to read the Pascendi encyclical by St. Pius the X soon.  I had a conversation at the first Communion party on Sunday in which I promised that I would.  I tried to read it on the computer but it was difficult.  So I ordered a copy which should get here by tomorrow.

I love book blogs!  I wonder if I should make this a book blog or start a book blog?

Grateful for

A wonderful Mother’s day, a wonderful family, wonderful friends.  Priests who are true pastors.

Daybook

Around the house

Different house now!  Still not “mine” or “ours.”  But a wonderful place to live.

We have a second table, a work table, in the kitchen/dining room.  It’s revolutionary.  A place to do projects or fold laundry that is out of the reach of toddler and pre-toddler.

I have a nightstand and a new shelf for books and I’ve moved the nightlight to be closer to me so I can read with the main lights off and adjust the brightness by putting things in front of it/moving them away.

We budgeted for a new quilt this month.  The quilt we bought with our wedding gift cards almost eleven years ago has a huge hole in it.  It will be a beach blanket because our oldest cannot bear to see it thrown away.

A new floor soon to be installed in dining area.

Cooking: herb and cottage cheese omelettes for lunch, Texas sheet cake, Bundt pan coffee cake, crock pot spaghetti sauce from Joy of Cooking, all the standard favorites.  Hazelnut coffee in the French press, fresh ground and lovingly brewed by my husband.

Praying

For two special first Communicants.  For those in prison.  For the priests whom I can never repay!

Reading

So much, so much.  At last, so much.  It is so good.  I’m reading Greenbanks by Dorothy Whipple.  The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis.  I’m reading Dante with my husband and we’ve started the Paradiso.  Out of the books I wanted to read last time I posted, I’ve now read all except El Cid and Doctor Zhivago.  I don’t plan to read Doctor Zhivago soon, if ever.  But perhaps I’ll read El Cid!

Spiritual reading?  The Life of St. Teresa.  Story of a Soul.  The Bible (Song of Songs and Leviticus these days).

Grateful for

Being able to breastfeed.  Being able to homeschool.  My parish and my pastor.  My husband!  We’re not wealth-building yet but we are rejoicing in having a budget and a vision, a shared goal to get out of debt and to be good and faithful stewards.

I’m grateful for a friend’s offer to be my literary agent.  This seems to be the path God wants for the fruits of my pen.

Beauty in the Ordinary

Organ and choir at church.  Hymns with ancient melodies by people like Praetorius.

Returning wildlife of spring.  I saw a swan in flight for the first time in my life.

Cemeteries with their orbs and obelisks.

Roses with their corners and curves.

Daybook

Beauty in the ordinary

Overhearing my brother lead grace for his family, in Latin!

My adopted sister singing songs from her time in a Catholic school choir, including “Libera Nos Domine,” after a family dinner.

Even late fall is richly beautiful here. Today, stopped for roadwork, I admired a tree with yellow leaves standing in the center of a thick carpet of yellow leaves.

Around the house

We’re being incorporated into the city sewer system. We’ve had a lot of work done on our street for that in these past few weeks.

Cooking. . . I made a new recipe, a skillet meal with peppers, onions, kielbasa and potatoes that came out well. But it took a long time to cut everything up and to cook six large potatoes on the stovetop. Tomorrow I’ll be making spiced cider for a St. Martin lantern walk.

A favorite lunch these days is spaghetti with chopped up sundried tomatoes (and a little oil from the jar). And parmesan cheese (I prefer the shredded kind).

Praying

Mmm. Praying for priests and the needs of the Church. For my father-in-law with cancer. For the souls in purgatory in this month of November.

Reading

Can I just put what I want to be reading? I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila (Letters and The Way of Perfection). I’ve dipped into St. Catherine of Siena’s letters as well. Matthew, Isaiah, Song of Solomon.

I want to read: El Cid, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, True Grit, In Sunlight and in Shadow, Bread in the Wilderness. And the rest of Doctor Zhivago!

We read some Tomas Transtromer poems in September. We never picked an October poet. And now it’s getting to be mid-November (the month we were going to read Borges).

Grateful for

The sacraments and especially the tremendous joy of monthly Tridentine Mass.

The wonderful new friends we are making and friendships that are rekindling/lasting.

I’m always grateful for my family, the ones I live with, the ones I miss. If I start listing people I’m particularly grateful for at this moment, I’ll feel like I’m playing favorites. But I had a beautiful talk with my brother’s wife the other day. And there’s my rich long distance friendship with my husband’s older sister. And the sister nearest to me in age is made of gold!

A winter coat for my daughter and the fun shopping trip with my mom to look for it.

All the little misplaced things St. Anthony is always helping me find.

Oh and I wrote a poem. First time in a long time.

Daybook

Beauty in the ordinary

Blossoming trees, cast-iron lampposts, and brick buildings in the sharp light of sunrise yesterday.  Our city has wonderful brick buildings, including the old mill buildings on the river.

The gentle movements of air over the lake surface.  Another day, near the lake, the trunks of tall pine trees reflected in the vernal pools around them.  There was a block of styrofoam in the water, clarifying that this was our world rather than some other planet or wood between the worlds.

Around the house

New wall-mounted bookshelves in our room and a new set up for our home shrine.  Last time we established such good order in our living space, a whirlwind descended right away.  We still have a way to go in organizing things this time. . .

After failing miserably the last time I tried, I made some decent lasagne last weekend.  My sister told me it was easier with the “oven-ready” noodles and she was right.  It was part of our celebration of the canonizations of Pope John the XXIII and Pope John Paul II.

Praying

Once again, a novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots.  For the same people as before.  And around the same time of year as the last time I prayed it.

Reading

I read The Way of Trust and Love by Jacques Philippe over Lent.  Now I’m almost finished with Time for God by the same author.  With my spiritual director, I am reading a book called Finding Sanctuary.

Louise Gluck in May.  Read Meadowlands, uncertain about it as a whole.  Then some earlier poems of hers.

The title essay of Joseph Brodsky’s collection Less Than One.

Yesterday, in a bookstore, most of Czeslaw Milosz’s “last poems.”  Something that was always present in his work clarified and distilled in these.

Isaiah and Matthew.  Song of Solomon.

I want to read Journal of a Soul and Witness to Hope but not sure I have the stamina.  I ordered A Letter in the Scroll the other day; the title allured.  My brother recently heard a lecture by Rabbi Sacks.

Grateful for

I am playing the recorder again.  The wooden student recorder I bought last month once belonged to a religious sister with the name Soeur Marie-Joseph.  The music book the owner of Courtly Music Unlimited helped me choose is the second volume of Hugh Orr’s Basic Recorder Technique.  It is right at my level and incorporates a lot of Renaissance and Baroque music.  Courtly music unlimited. . .  a way to think of heaven: The Lord is our Savior. We shall sing to stringed instruments, in the house of the Lord, all the days of our life.

WERKI

An English horn, a drum, a viola making music

In a house on a hill amid forests in autumn.

A large view from there onto bends of the river.

 

I still want to correct this world,

Yet I think mostly of them, and they have all died.

Also about their unknown country.

Its geography, says Swedenborg, cannot be transferred to maps.

For there, as one has been, so one sees.

And it is possible even there to make mistakes; for instance, to wander about

Without realizing you are already on the other side.

 

As I, perhaps, just dream those rusty-golden forests,

The glitter of the river in which I swam in my youth,

The October from my poems with its air like wine.

 

The priests taught us about salvation and damnation.

Now I have not the slightest notion of those things.

I have felt on my shoulder the hand of my Guide,

Yet He didn’t mention punishment, didn’t promise a reward.

 

Czeslaw Milosz

Catholic Woman’s Almanac

Beauty in the ordinary

Saturday’s drive down the long, winding road that took me to the Secular Carmelite meeting.  Spikes and splashes of forsythia appearing at the road’s bends.  The stone walls of semi-rural New Hampshire.

Brushing and braiding my daughter’s long light hair.

The velvet mirror of the river on the way to my daughter’s school.

A woman walking by the side of the road this morning.  She had a little child with her.  She was older, probably the boy’s grandmother, with a long dark red skirt and a light colored wimple.  I thrilled to her archaic dress, to her aged beauty and feminine dignity.  She looked like someone from Eastern Europe.

Around the house

My cousin is living here temporarily and replanting our lawn.  The front yard is all torn up which goes well with the opening of this new blog: “break up a new field for yourself.”  He prays the liturgy of the hours with us and, sometimes, I’m aware of our great-grandmother’s intercession, watching us from God’s Presence.  I thought of her unexpectedly too last week, as I was stirring a pot full of spinach leaves on the stove, felt her nearness.

I cook just twice a week now, since my mother’s busy season as a tax preparer is over.  On Tuesdays, I’ve been making “noodles and meat crumbs”; my daughter loves it and it’s easy to make, about half an hour from start to finish.  On Saturdays, I make spaghetti, with meat sauce, garlic bread, and olives, and Ben does a salad.

During her vacation week, my daughter and I enjoyed little pizzas baked in the toaster oven: wheat English muffins topped with red sauce and Mexican blend cheese.  The crushed red pepper on top made them “deliciously spicy.”

Praying

Ben and I just finished a novena to Our Lady Undoer of Knots.  Pope Francis has a devotion to Mary under this title.  We prayed our novena for my sister during the stressful time before her wedding — which will be on Saturday.

Reading

I have been reading The Art of the Icon: a theology of beauty.  I like a lot of it but I get uneasy when the author critiques the Western Church and modernism in art — and sometimes the writing loses me.

I finished the book of Genesis and started Exodus in lectio divina.  Also reading, over and over, the Song of Solomon.

Pondering

The New Evangelization.  What is my role in that?

The difficult things Pope Francis says.  What does it mean to be “the protagonist of a lay path”?

Discerning

A couple questions, one concerning our daughter’s education (do we homeschool next year?), the other concerning my health.

Also I am filling out the application to the aspirancy for the Secular Carmelites.  Yesterday, the woman I gather is the formation director took me aside after the meeting and gave me materials to study.  She said that, with the permission of the President, I may be able to be clothed in the large brown scapular as soon as November.   She wears wedding and engagement rings on her left hand and a silver ring representing her total consecration to Mary on her right.  I wear a very simple, inexpensive rosary ring on my right hand too.  There was this sense of a rhyme, looking at her hands, then my own.  I can’t deny I have a strong sense of belonging already with the Secular Carmelites.  I’m ready to test my vocation.