Goldilocks and Jim

Goldilocks is the nickname I am giving to the little girl who had her first sewing lesson from me yesterday. I was very nervous leading up to the appointed time. She's only six years old, for one thing, but she's been using a needle and thread (and even Scotch tape) to construct clothes for her stuffed gorilla toy and a naked doll she inherited. I hadn't had a look at her stitches until our first class, by which time I had come up with a few ideas we might pursue. It seemed wise to have a few projects in case her attention span was as short as I imagined from what I know of her from church.

I picked Goldilocks up at school and brought her here, so we needed to have a snack before beginning our work. Offering a child cake and milk sounds like something a woman in a storybook would do, so I felt very romantic about it, and I didn't mind changing the liquid offer to hot cocoa, it being a rainy day and all. This yummy marzipan cake came in a heavy foil wrapper all the way from Germany so that our Czech friend Jerry could give it to us for Christmas. I had stowed it in the freezer for such a time as this.

As it turned out, my student didn't yet begin any of the projects I had in mind, which included a 9-patch potholder, a hat for her, a blanket for her gorilla, and embroidering a dish towel. She seemed to want to get some clothes on that doll (poor doll doesn't even have a name), so we started on a skirt. I showed her how to plan for the right amount of fabric based on measuring the doll, and she took home a rectangle of flowered cloth which she had started basting along one edge. I will show her how to pull up the gathers and sew it to a waistband.

Earlier in the day it was raining when I first came downstairs and found "my" feral cat Jim sitting outside the sliding door with his fur getting sprinkled as he waited for me to feed him. I thought perhaps he would be willing to stick his head in out of the wet this time, so I set the bowl just inside the door, and went away a space. After some deliberation he did partly enter the house, so I took his picture.

I hadn't put quite the usual amount in the bowl, though, so he waited outside again after finishing it.  I added more food and set the bowl even farther into the kitchen. The temperatures have been higher lately and I hadn't turned on the heat yet, so I didn't mind leaving the door open for Jim for a little while. He came in again, and I busied myself building a fire on the other side of the room.

When I turned back around, he was sitting all the way inside on the rug, while he ate. But when he saw that I saw, he was greatly embarrassed, grabbed one more bite of food and ran out the door with it.

The sun is shining today, but again, the air wasn't too cold, so I put the bowl inside, and once again he came part way in and ate it. When he had finished and was walking around the corner through the gate, I looked out the door, he looked back at me, and I told him to have a good day. He switched his tail. So we have leaped a great hurdle, Jim and I.

This morning I've been researching flights to take me across the continent in about two months to visit Pearl and family. It seems that the two airports I want to use have almost no direct flights connecting them. I had thought that if I paid enough money or reward miles I could make the trip less exhausting. Now I find out that not much can be done to make traveling easier, and I'm suffering a temporary setback in my excitement. I will have to focus on taking healthy snacks, and on the wonderful reading I can do. But for now I'll just be glad I don't have to go anywhere today.

Days Empty and Full

Me in a past epoch

It's the season for extolling the benefits of homeschooling. January in this Northern Hemisphere brings cold gales and pouring rain, and who wants to go out? Who wouldn't want to build a wood fire, curl up with a book and some kiddos on your lap, and glory in having a cozy nest?

Children need time and space and quiet, people say, so that they can concentrate, and not be constantly interrupted to run errands or take part in some group activity out of the home. I agree heartily. I'm not going to post links to these blogs because there are too many good ones. You've probably read or written one yourself.

And I realized, as I was pondering the excellent explanations, that I am one of those children still. I had the kind of upbringing that some people might look at and say, "How boring!" But I never felt that. I thrived in the timelessness of those long country days with not much to do. There was always a book or magazine to read, or a letter to write to Grandma, or a new pattern to try sewing. This poem that Marigold posted hints at the blessedness:
 

Days

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

- Philip Larkin

For over 30 years I had my own children filling my days--at first, it was easy to stay home a lot, and everyone could pay attention to whatever it was they were focused on. As the children got older we were running around more.

Now, I don't often get a whole day to be home. Going out in the morning, to the gym or shopping, makes it a challenge to gather my wits when I get back home. It seems that I am scattered for hours. I am particularly aware and thankful when I get one of those homey days that I took for granted back then, and this poem that Maria passed on tells how I feel.

PRICELESS GIFTS

An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.

I heard
in my heartbeat
the birth of time
and each instant of life
one after the other
came rushing in
like priceless gifts.

~ Anna Swir (1909-1984), Polish poet

One wants a shawl

Something I'd like to do in 2011 is read more poetry than I did last year. I'm printing out quite a few I like and hope to spend time with, and will keep my new friends in a notebook handy. I have an old three-ring binder that can't hold another sheet, and I'll like to get re-acquainted with some of those verses, too. As I was browsing my computer collection I ran across one that I'd like to have written myself this morning.

Today's a nipping day, a biting day;

In which one wants a shawl,

A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:

I cannot ope to everyone who taps,

And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;

Come bounding and surrounding me,

Come buffeting, astounding me,

Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.

From ‘Winter: My Secret’, Christina Rossetti.

 

Old Year Resolve

My new year resolve is phantom; perhaps it will become more real in the coming weeks. But looking for it engendered some substantial end-of-year resolve to get a few loose ends tucked in so that the to-do list for 2011 could be a smidgen shorter.

The two ingredients for this rice-bag project had been purchased months ago, and I put them together before New Year's Day. We warm them in the microwave at night and hide them near our feet under the bedclothes, where they have been a great coziness, providing extra heat for many hours. For days fog has been hanging over us like a cold uncomforter -- is this not the worst combination of weather elements? -- requiring extra weapons in the war against shivering and sadness. Pippin taught us this technique that she learned in those northern reaches where one can't go to bed without a rice bag. Ours are red because they were the cheapest tube socks I could find at the time.

A couple of other major accomplishments last week were a thorough cleaning of my expansive bedroom and cheerful progress in getting pictures back on the walls. Our bedroom had become the overflow space twice in the last nine months, and took a full five hours to get spiffed up. Moving boxes of this and that, and stacks of books, bedding, and folded laundry from one room to another is the kind of highly-skilled labor I'm getting really good at.

The walls required a lot of thought, but once I ordered the new picture on which everything seemed to hinge, I was able to figure out where all the old ones could fit in. When the new art arrives and I can take pictures, I'll write about my other pivotal piece of woodsy decor that I started crafting last spring. On New Year's Day B. and I ordered one picture and hung four. It's beginning to feel homey around here again.

These snowdrops also were news back in December. And now I think I've finished with that year, which was Very Good, thanks be to God.

Blessing the Waters

from Google images

Church fathers tell us that the love of God warms the soul. Hell and sin are cold. So this photo, so striking in its whiteness and cultural drama, also is highly symbolic of Christ's incarnation and salvation of the world.

I begin to grasp what Fr. Stephen writes, (link from yesterday) how the tradition of the Church "sees the Baptism of Christ in the context of Pascha (Easter) as it sees everything in the context of Christ’s Pascha. Christ’s Baptism is a foreshadowing (and on more than a literary level) of His crucifixion and descent into Hades, just as our own Baptism is seen by St. Paul as a Baptism into Christ’s 'death and resurrection.' ”

These Christians are blessing the waters on Theophany as Christ blessed and baptized a cold and needy Creation when He went down into the Jordan.

Theophany

It's the Feast of Theophany. Special services for the commemoration of the Baptism of Christ began yesterday and culminate tomorrow. I was so happy to be able to have a fairly contemplative day, morning and evening.

In the middle of the day we celebrated at church with a Vesperal Liturgy, after which nuns from a nearby monastery (a different monastery from the one where I got the big squash) brought food for us who had been fasting: warming vegetable soup, salad with lots of trimmings, bread and spreads, and even halvah for dessert.

Last year I wrote a bit more about Theophany. This year I don't have anything new to say about the feast; I am trying to just soak it up and be changed by it, though I feel too dull to follow Father Stephen very far on the topic. I do want to share an icon I found on http://www.icon-art.info where I spent a while browsing. This mosaic is from 11th-century Greece.

Here's a teaser clip from Fr. Stephen's post that I linked to above:

     The world and all that is in it is given to us as icon – not because it has no value in itself – but because the value it has in itself is the gift of God – and this is seen in its iconicity.
     At Theophany, the waters of the world are revealed to be both Hades and the gate of Paradise.... Love alone reveals things for what they are, and transforms them into what they were always intended to be. It is the gift of God.

Substantive 11th Day

I don't think I ever knew what a substantive was before today, which is surprising, as tuned in to grammar as I try to be. (Don't laugh, all you truly educated people.) I was looking up a word in my French dictionary, the original one I bought as a freshman in high school for my original French class. Just the kind of thing one might do during Christmas -- it is still only the 11th day of Christmas! -- and I wanted to know if this particular word is feminine or masculine. However, the first abbreviation after the entry was neither f. nor m. but s. ... S? The list of abbreviations in the front of the book said that  s. stands for "substantive."

I had to look it up on dictionary.com. I wonder if any of my many language teachers ever told me that it means noun? Or, why did that word never enter my radar all these years, and demand an explanation, hanging around as it was right there in my tattered dictionary?

Not a half hour passed before I was reading an editorial on a news site, in which the word substantive jumped out at me, in that case being used as a synonym for "substantial" and having nothing to do with grammar.

It's a very small thing to write about, especially during this week of the year when everyone is exhorting or inspiring or discouraging me with talk of goals and change and revolutions -- oops, I mean resolutions. But it's the most substantive thing I could come up with today.