I’ve been swept into a general Heaney retrospective quite by chance. My friend Sally Thomas rediscovered his book of essays, Finder’s Keepers, on her shelf and started sharing tidbits, little nibbles of passages that caught her eye. I realized, “I...
“People of the nineteenth century showed in fact a quite extraordinary degree of incapacity when they tried to understand the men and women of the Middle Ages, even when they went about it with the best of wills. I had almost said that in this...
I seem to be on an essay kick of late. And nature writing. Someone asked me recently if I’d read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I’ve read some short fiction by Annie Dillard, but not that book, though it’s been on my radar as something...
INLAND People that build their houses inland, People that buy a plot of ground Shaped like a house, and build a house there, Far from the sea-board, far from the sound Of water sucking the hollow ledges, Tons of water striking the shore — What...
(This blog post contains major spoilers for the novel Crimson Bound. If you have not yet read the novel, consider that you have been duly warned. I discuss a major scene, a turning point in the novel, in great detail. Caveat lector.) I recently...
On Saturday the weather was lovely, sunny and warm. But we were sort of trapped in the house most of the day because the crew finally came to install our solar panels. They blocked off all the entrances with caution tape so the kids couldn’t run in...
Monday April 16 Bella: Latin, math, copywork, composition, Latin. Sophie, math, copywork, Child’s Geography, looked at pictures of the Holy Land from Cardinal Sean’s pilgrimage a few years ago. Ben: math, copywork, Bob book Anthony: math, copywork...
Monday April 9 Ben and Anthony both did some math before I was awake. But that’s all the work that got done. We spent the time after breakfast tidying up and had friends spend most of the day visiting. Bella did write a paragraph of a story...
1. What colors do you see? Do you see red? orange? yellow? green? blue? purple? black? white? brown? pink? 2. Do you see straight lines? Do you see curves? 3. What shapes do you see? Can you find any triangles? Circles? Rectangles? Squares? Ovals? 4...
The Borrowed House, Hilda van Stockum’s juvenile novel about World War II, opens with a German girl collecting eggs in a barn when the farmwife orders her to kill a chicken for dinner. Janna cannot do it. How could she kill a creature that has a...
