Change and Waiting

We are so nearly finished with Year 2 that I can taste the fresh air on the other side. I have to complete two class plans in the next 72 hours in order to get there, however. A year and a half ago, I would have said "Impossible!" A year ago, "It'll take a miracle." Today, "Just let me stay up all night and don't tell me anything that's going on with the forum or the Year 3 booklist." I have to chuckle. How times do change!

Speaking of change, a dear friend from college called today to tell me that she got engaged last night. Ah, Domina---how good it was to hear your voice, and how beautiful your ring is!

Yes change: Fortuna with her wheel, constant only in that her changes change her changes evermore. Honestly, though, I'm ready for a little change. The pace this year has been.... difficult. I told the Domina that it has been like a perpetual PHC finals week for the past twelve (actually fifteen, counting all the madness that started last October) months. That's the best I can do to sum it up.

So, I'm ready for changes, and they are slowly finding me. Some have been months and months in preparation, others weeks, still others days. My maple bookshelves, for example, were delivered this week after four months of waiting. My pocket watch (see picture below) arrived from England at last---a belated birthday present from my family.




In February I am due to go to Florida for what will be my first consecutive three days off in eight months. Yay! And there is no prettier change of scenery than Florida, my dear, when you are in Maryland in February. Last time I was there I took a river cruise and saw alligators and had lunch at a strange, picturesque restaurant covered---if memory serves---with white iron scrollwork. This time I go to see my Auntie, and to pick up a gift that renders me speechless with pleasure: five boxes of brand new Easton Press books. "What is Easton Press?" you ask...

The picture doesn't do it justice, but basically Easton Press are the most beautifully bound books in the world. I say this largely without hyperbole. They are leatherbound, hardback, 14 carat gold edged, moire-lined, satin-ribboned books. They are the kind of book, simply, that you would never buy for yourself. At least, not unless you could find one on ebay. But if someone gives one to you... never mind gives you five boxes... well... you're treading on air. Just watch out for the illustrations---some of them are modern art or that awful blocky smudgy stuff, which has no business being set up beside beautiful words.

These books have been a longer wait than the bookshelves. I've been waiting for them, I think, for about five years. And I'm now in my fourth week of waiting for my amaryllis bulb to bloom. Brittainia gave it to me for my birthday, and it's going to be a scarlet beauty among all the brown leather and wood of my study. Someday, when I finally get the floor redone and no longer live with the horror of pink carpet, I will take pictures of my study. So far it has been two years a-making. We'll see how long it is before the room is finished.

Meanwhile, I am plotting to take a trip to Chincoteague this spring, for a little time with my dear love, the Atlantic. I will take my sisters and a few close friends with me, if possible. We might let the boys come too, but only if they get their own house. Chincoteague is the dullest place you can imagine as a tourist spot, especially in March or April. But if you bring your books and writing, your friends and food and movies and music, it becomes an enchanted (and inexpensive!) sea-side escape. I'm going to see if I can talk the girls into renting this place for a week:

Meanwhile, Charity and Marjorie and I are teasing each other about our round-the-world cruise (102 days on the Princess Lines cruise ship) that we plan to take... sometime. Meanwhile, Sarah Camille and I are more assiduously planning a four-month tour of Europe for 2010. The girls "intend" to join us for our month in England. :-) Maybe we'll stay here...

All of which is to say, gentle reader, that I don't want you to get the wrong impression about my life. It's not drudgery, drudgery, drudgery, world without end amen. Even if I had no books or vacations to look forward to, it wouldn't be that, because my job involves beautiful language, stories, poems, and plays. I mean to say, come on! What's not gorgeous about that? It's only when that is compressed into too little time with too little sleep and R&R that a problem arises. And that is when you begin to plan your trip around the world.

But it all requires waiting, my dear, and faithful, quiet, patient, hard-working waiting at that. Changes come, pleasant or terrible as God wills. All that I have or have to look forward to might be swept away in any instant. Yet I fear nothing, because one change and one thing that I am waiting for are inevitable---the change into a glorified body, and the expectation of Heaven.

What have we not been given?

I Know, I Know...

I always post quotes when I'm too busy to write something. True. But the quotes are so funny that I don't really feel obligated to apologize. :-) This is an especially fine set. Enjoy! (Oh, and meet Lauren. She's joined the team as Mom and I's joint personal assistant. She's cute, funny, and still technically a newlywed.)

“I really want Bubblicious gum. Since we’re all expressing our desires, I mean.” – Lauren

“We should have a 'phrase of the week'” – Lauren
“It would change too often. As in, every few hours” – Christy
“Well, we could develop self-control…” – Lauren
“Um, but our office sanity depends on not having self-control about things like that....” – Christy

“….Okay, the extreme eyeliner would be a problem” – Juli, on Egyptian pharaohs and whether or not she wants to marry one

“Go see the nice Brittainy.” – David
“She is nice. She’s nicer than you are.” – Mom
“She is that.” – David
“But you are more kissable” – Mom
“Yes. So you see it’s like a well-designed video game. We each have our strengths and weaknesses.” – David

“You shave your forelock like a little Egyptian child. I have questions about this.” – David to Christy

“….so you can keep your snide comments to yourself.” – Christy
“Oh, but I prefer to share my snide comments.” – David

“You act like it's our job to help people teach their kids or something” – David
“We are. It’s like an addiction. Every time I try to quit, somebody gets me started again.” – Mom

“I said sum esse fui futurus to that. And Mom was on my side.” - David

Moon-Night

Juli was having a party. There were 30 people in the house and I needed to go to bed early for the next day's work. The right word really is need; this has been a season of such exertion that it seems to me no amount of rest will ever be enough. I was just preparing to leave the happy throng and go upstairs when...

"Hey, we're going for a walk!" It was Jack who told me. I didn't think; I didn't reason; I didn't even pause to consider. My whole heart leaped up into my throat and I cried "Oh, me too!" A moment before I had been unspeakably weary and dulled; now I flushed excited and breathless. I felt that if I did not get outside into the clean knife-sharp wind and blessedly cold air, I would die. I, who depend so much on the outdoors for sanity, had been penned up in buildings, typing away at keyboards, for nearly two months. I had not been on a walk in weeks, nor on a night walk in six or eight months.

"Come on, then!" said Jack. I tore upstairs and found my warmest cloak and scarf---I think my fingers were trembling while I put them on. Then out, oh!---out! The wind tore and howled, and I saw the moon, and I knew it would be a wild night, and that I was in a wild mood, and there was no help for it, and I was glad. I wanted to be wild; I felt I could not be quiet and patient and pensive for another second. If I have my caged-hawk moods (and I do), then this was the release that I sought. For one beautiful moment there was no cage. And for the first time in so many months, I had both spirit and recklessness enough to try my wings.

I ran and ran. I forgot that there were other people on the walk. I forgot that there are other people in the world. I wanted only to run until my body merged with the wind and the moon and the night in general. I felt that I could and must attain this. It was a brief freedom, but it was freedom. Then the demands of humanity broke in...

"Christy, where are you going?"
"Christy, come back! Don't run ahead!"
"What's wrong with her?"
"Stay with the group!"

Oh, it hurt, it was agony to turn back. I knew I must not be so reckless, that I must behave myself, think of others, and be patient. I tried. I would run ahead a little, then circle restlessly back. I picked out the trail for some of the others, helped them avoid puddles or fell into the puddles with them in our collective clumsiness. I threw sticks out of the way and stared at the moon. All the time I wanted only to be alone with the night. Let me go, let me run, let me---Then someone started in on my cloak...

"You look like an elf! You're like Legolas."
"Which Legolas?" I asked, tightly.
"Legolas in the movies."

The inevitable Lord of the Rings jokes. I hated my cloak for making me prey to them, though it was the warmest and best I had for night walking. Legolas! Not Legolas as he was in the books---that I might have appreciated---but as they made him in the movies! Oh, how I wished the movies had never been made! I wanted no part of Hollywood that night, nothing of the "glamour" of black cloaks and sweeping camera angles. I wanted only my good wool cloak warm and rough around me, and to be allowed to run in the moonlight without any references made to how "cool it looked."

I turned off into a path I knew, lost the main group, and ran in the dark silence for several minutes. But of course I could not remain alone. Suppose the others worried about me, or got lost themselves? I caught up with them. Then it grew easier, as I tamed myself and rebuked my selfishness. How thoughtless, how quick to take offense, and how unloving I had been! I fell into step and conversation, found someone who would talk only of the woods themselves, and of the fairies. Ah, I wished the fairies would speak to me that night. But they of my home woods are silent; they are still angry with me for having gone away so long.

It was all dim and piercingly cold betimes. The silver lay on everything, and when the moon escaped her bank of clouds she was astonishingly bright. At length we all stood on the highest hill and let the wind carve us. I felt scrubbed, empty, clean. And so cold. I thought of going to the Oakenhall nearby, but my gentler spirits and growing tiredness prevailed. I had been running too much for my already weak condition to bear easily, and it was too cold.

I listened to the others. They talked of this and that, of who is in and who is out, who writes well and who doesn't, whether romance is a fitting subject for literature. I smiled, but would not speak much. I wanted to be free of my life as a literary person for that magic night hour, and silence was my freedom. Marjorie and Tarrah circled the hilltop arm in arm. Marjorie was telling Tarrah the story of the Bible. The wind was very strong up there. Everybody grew colder every minute. Some of us lay on the ground to look at the stars. I stood; my eyes are so bad now that the stars are only gleams to me.

At length we returned. Again I fell into talk, pleasant talk about things that matter, nothing frivolous or unsuited to the pure deep quality of the night, nothing that insulted the midnight blue of the sky. At home I lay shivering under blankets for half an hour, unable to sleep, raw of throat and lung, cold-skinned and absolutely glorying in it. It was life and radiance to me to be so cold and clear-headed and empty.

I woke sore, but still clear. I lived in the good of that walk all the next day, and all today. I bless God over and over for this gift: the agony and the ecstacy of a frozen moonstruck night.

The Office -- Season 5 --- "Lapbooks Among Us"

“David, did you get the link?” – Christy
“Yes, but we’ve been having a nervous breakdown over here.” – David, speaking for himself and Juli

The Fun We Have With Lapbooks:

“That means that we can leave medieval China square, and we can make a hexagon for medieval Japan, which would make me happy!” – Juli

“I think the Crusades need to be square, and smaller… or maybe like an accordion…” – Juli

“Right; let’s separate those puppies!” – Juli on items in the new lapbook
“’Separate those puppies’—it sounds like the beginning of a tragic but wonderful Disney classic” – David

“I think we need the Xanadu pavilion…” – Christy, getting involved in the lapbook debates
“We could use the igloo for that. ‘A stately pleasure dome decreed’” – David

“…and so I got home at one in the morning with three engine parts, one of which I named Stanley. I haven’t decided on names for the other two.” – Juli

“He burned me a tutu.” – Juli

“Just stun the pants off of me!” – Juli

“Oh, the chariot dude. Yeah, give me the chariot dude.” – Juli

“How wide was Esther?” – Juli

“Everything is toast. Everything. Deal with it. It’s biblical.” – David
“They had toast?” – Mom, referring to biblical times
“They had toast.” – David
“They didn’t have toasters…” – Mom