More From My Bookshelf: Reveries at Stillmeadow

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

"Perhaps, after all, our best thoughts

come when we are alone." 

GLADYS BAGG TABER

Many good folks are creating a more focused and deliberate online presence and community during this world-wide season of isolation. They offer their unique version of pleasant and interesting material to help people feel supported and connected.

For the time being, it is my intention to join in this endeavour and post more regularly. I shall share excerpts from the many books on my shelves: to open them either randomly and select a few lines from any page, or to follow page numbers with calendar dates. I might comment on the chosen portion or just leave the author say it. You will find the button under the header to access the whole series. Tags: Creating Community In Isolation; Pressing My Books Into Service

I first heard about author Gladys Taber and her lovely writings through Susan Branch, who happens to be a big fan of hers. Today's selection of 'Pressing My Books into Service' comes from page 22 of a tiny treasure I found at our library sale last year. If you want to know more about Gladys, click HERE. Please read on...

March 22nd

Reveries at Stillmeadow, A Woman's Precious Moments

by Gladys Taber, pg 22

"The heart has its own time. How incredibly fleet are the happy hours, and how leaden-slow the sad ones. The clock cannot hurry the sorrowful minutes a jot, nor clip the wings of the joyous ones!

Sometimes, I think we rush so, and we finish a schedule only to make a newer and busier one. We do not, ever, live deliberately and fully, for we haven't time. I know few people who go outdoors now and sit quietly for a couple of hours just looking at the miracle of spring. Sometimes, as we drive along the country roads, I see occasional figures stretched out in lawn chairs. But they aren't observing May, they are reading the newspaper or a magazine. They are like the people I have seen on the great beach at Nauset on Cape Cod who never hear the music of the tide because they have portable radios playing hot music."

I want to add something that I think goes along with Gladys's thoughts. I read a post last week circulating on Facebook from a woman named Rebecca living in Wuhan, China, during this horrid time they've been in lock-down isolation. She spoke of how she and her family were coping and surviving and, yes, even a bit of thriving in the midst of it all. The thing I especially loved learning was how she could hear the birds outside her window on the 25th floor. She said, 'I used to think there weren't birds in Wuhan because you rarely saw them and never heard them. I now know they are just muted and crowded out by the traffic and people. All day long now I hear birds singing. It stops me in my tracks to hear the sound of their wings'.

Talk about catching glimpses of heaven in unexpected places. It made my heart sing, and I kinda think Gladys would have been pleased to hear such a thing, don't you?

Till tomorrow then for more from my bookshelf.

💙

With love and heart hugs,

Brenda

xox

Pressing My Books Into Service: Post 1

Gift From The Sea (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

"When we give cheerfully and accept

gratefully, everyone is blessed."

MAYA ANGELOU

Many good folks are creating a more active online presence and community during this world-wide season of isolation. They offer their unique version of pleasant distractions: interesting facts, sublime photos, pet poses, comforting scenes of home life, helpful facts and hints, encouragement, poetry readings, music and art lessons, funny videos and stories, you name it. In regular life, people were already doing a lot of that, but it's become more focused and more deliberate to help people feel supported and connected.

Musing about what I could offer, I look at my shelves of books lined up—they seem eager to be pressed into service. So for the time being, each morning I will take a book from my shelf, randomly open it, and offer a few lines from it. Or, sometimes I might follow page numbers with the dates on the calendar, so today being March 21, I would share a few lines from page 21. And, I might comment on the chosen portion or just leave the author say it.

Anyways, we'll see how it goes. Let us begin...

March 21st
Gift from the Sea

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, pg 21

"The shell in my hand is deserted. It once housed a whelk, a snail-like creature, and then temporarily, after the death of the first occupant, a little hermit crab, who has run away, leaving his tracks behind him like a delicate vine on the sand. He ran away, and left me his shell. It was once a protection for him. I turn the shell in my hand, gazing into the wide open door from which he made his exit. Had it become an encumbrance? Why did he run away? Did he hope to find a better home, a better mode of living? I too have run away, I realize, I have shed the shell of my life, for these few weeks of vacation."

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For me, that last line seems appropriate for this season, for we too have shed the shells of our regular lives for these few weeks of vacation isolation. Makes me wonder how we'll all emerge on the other side of this. Let's hope we come through stronger and more courageous and kinder. Grace and mercy for us all! 💙

Wishing you a beautiful day.

Hugs,

Brenda

xox

In Isolation With A Box Of Old Scrapbooks

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

"When (people) try to throw something away,
they feel like they are losing... personal history,
losing a bit of themselves, losing a little of their identity"

RANDY FROST

Co-author of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

In these quiet days when many of us are isolating, I have taken up a project to deal with old scrapbooks. It's partly about spring cleaning and decluttering; it's partly about dealing with old stories that still want to be told.

About three years ago, I brought the scrapbooks into the light of day hoping to deal with them. Although I had a lot of fun chortling my way through the pages, in the end I wasn't ready to discard much of anything. This past week I got a strong urge to try again. As I gazed at the pile of squashed mementos from college days in the late 1970s -- crammed class schedules, letters from home, samples of notes passed in class, crumbling corsage petals, a candle from my 20th birthday cake, quotes and magazine pics that hung on my bulletin board -- it dawned on me why I was having trouble letting this stuff go. An historian at heart, I kept these mementos to remind me of the stories that went with them. And, until I finally do my job as a writer and get them written down, my old scrapbooks with their long 'apron' strings will not release me.

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

A very 1970s sample of what was tucked in my college scrapbook

Not so long ago, I found myself captivated by the sub-title used on Dame Helen Mirren's lovely memoir In the Frame: My Life in Words and Pictures. As a child, I loved illustrated storybooks, and those words 'my life in words and pictures' reminded me that I also love biographies and memoirs when they are offered with photos. E.g., if you're writing about your experience being a wedding cake designer, I'll want to see a photo of the wedding cake you describe so amusingly as your worst disaster. It turns out I like writing stories with pictures to illustrate. Which means, I might finally know what to do with some of those old mementos I've been caretaking all these years.  

“I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences
that preoccupied me as a girl, that stay with me and appear
and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work.
Without telling everything that happened,
they document all that remains most vivid.”

BELL HOOKS, American Author

Looking at this pile of mementos, I start to see that in order to know which ones to keep and which ones can at last be discarded without regret depends upon which memories still matter, which still 'shimmer' with life at this stage. According to my former memoir instructor, Lisa Dale Norton, these are the stories to write down. Which means these are the mementos to keep (and/or take photos of). Once that is done, the scrapbooks finally can be decommissioned and discarded, their service complete.

Now, whether I write the stories just for myself or for you here on my blog, or for a future book down the road doesn't really matter at this stage. It's about being true to my inner lifelong need to record the stories and to finally use those mementos for something besides taking up space in a box on a shelf.

That, my beautiful friends, is what I've been up to the last few days.  I have been feverishly opening new files, writing down the stories, and snapping pics of the pertinent mementos. I'm excited to finally have an idea on how to move forward on this business.

 * * *

While I'm working away at that, I've also been keeping abreast of what our local Chief Medical Officer and government leaders are advising citizens in this unsettling time. I'm also whispering prayers for folks trying to find their way through this distressing, troubling season of corona virus disease 2019, abbreviated COVID-19. Hubby and I are staying close to home, staying in touch with family near and far, doing what we can to be part of 'flattening the curve'. And, one of these fine days, I know that I'll find a few rolls of TP to replenish the dwindling stock in my cupboard.

* * *

Wishing you a beautiful weekend.
Stay well. Stay safe. Stay calm.

🙚💙🙘

With love and arms-length but heartfelt hugs,

Brenda

xox

A Window On Wednesday: Tulips

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life
Double Early 'Secret Perfume'

ONE

"The spring is coming by a many signs..."
JOHN CLARE

We're glad for smattering signs of Spring around here -- warmer temperatures, longer daylight hours, chickadee songs changing, a few Canada geese flying overhead, and the welcome traces of brown lawns edging out from melting snow mounds. No signs of life as yet in our garden. So we take sweet pleasure in the pots of yellow tulips sitting in the front window and the colourful posies a dear friend brought to me from the Farmers' Market. 

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

TWO

"No winter lasts forever. No spring skips its turn."
UNKNOWN

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

THREE

"No gardener would be a
gardener if he did not live in hope."
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

FOUR

"Spring comes:
the flowers learn their colored shapes."
MARIA KONOPNICKA

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

FIVE

"I love tulips better than any other spring flower;
they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace."
ELIZABETH VON ARNIM, Elizabeth and Her German Garden

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

SIX

"Every spring is the only spring -- a perpetual astonishment."
ELLIS PETERS

* * *

Wishing you a beautiful day.

Hugs,
Brenda
xox

The Simple Woman's Daybook: March Awakenings

Image from Pixabay

"Gazing on beautiful things acts on

my soul, which thirsts for heavenly light."

MICHELANGELO

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Today I'm offering the March Edition of The Simple Woman's Daybook. I'll be glad of your company as I chat about what's occupying my thoughts these days.

Being in a semi-retired mode (that is to say, I am no longer employed in the work force), I have the luxury of following nature's ebb and flow in its seasons. So, in Winter I have the freedom to hibernate and be quiet, but now, with Spring approaching, I join with the rest of nature, newly energized and ready to push out tiny green sprouts in anticipation of the season's wild flurry of activity.

FOR TODAY

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Outside my window...

First, there are blue skies and sunshine, then it turns grey and overcast, oh look, now the sun is shining again. There is a decided bite in the air as the wind blows, and snow showers are forecast, making it a little more Lion than Lamb-like today. Well, at least for the moment.

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I am thinking...

About how refreshing the word 'refreshment' is. I just have to say the word 'refreshment' and I feel brighter and more invigorated. I don't know about you, but when I have to attend a function, say a meeting or event, there's a tiny part of me that always hopes there will be refreshments at the end. If I see a notice, I look for the bottom line "Refreshments served." Oh, goodie! Even the promise of a simple beverage, hot or cold, at the end creates a warmth of anticipation.

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I am thankful...

That I can sit at my desk most days and work away on various writing and photos projects, including this one of dreaming up new things to share with you here on It's A Beautiful Life.

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One of my favourite things...

At this time of year is watching the days grow lighter. It's dark, it's dark, it's dark, and then one evening you notice as you're eating dinner that it's no longer pitch black outside. I don't know why it always comes as a surprise  but it does, every year. It's a real boon for us northerners.

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I am wearing...

Black trousers, black muted floral tee-shirt, silver bracelets, and a dab of pink lipstick. I like how the colour from the lipstick suddenly makes the pink in the floral pattern stand out.

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I've been watching...

"The eye seeks refreshment in painting."

GEORGE LESLIE HUNTER, Scottish Colourist, 1877-1931

Art documentaries on YouTube lately, usually in the afternoons when hubby and I sit down for a tea break. A time of refreshment for both body and soul. So very cultured, don't you think (wink)? I share the links for two of my favourites:

Michael Palin on the Colourists. Michael explores the lives and paintings of a group of four Scottish artists known as the post-Impressionist Colourists: Francis Cadell, Samuel Peploe, John Duncan Fergusson, and Leslie Hunter. They each have lovely work, some gorgeous still life paintings and landscapes with bold, bright colours. YouTube breaks this into four 15-minute segments.

Michael Palin on Scottish artist Anne Redpath. I like Michael Palin as a presenter. Never boring, he is articulate, thoughtful, with a lovely sense of humor. From watching his program, I've come to really appreciate and admire this new-to-me artist, Anne Redpath. I especially connected with her interview comment (around 1:30 on the video) about her magpie tendencies -- haha, I recognize that tendency, as I'm very much 'magpie' myself. She loved to collect items that reminded her of certain events or places and eventually used them in her paintings.

I wish I could show you pictures -- don't want to infringe on copyrights -- but any Google search will bring up lovely pieces from any of these artists for you to see.

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

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I am enjoying...

The March/April issue of Victoria magazine. Bought a copy to browse while sitting at the hair salon.

Reeve Lindbergh, daughter of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is this year's Writer-in-Residence. Reeve and her husband are farmers in Vermont, and she tells the sweet tale of how one spring during lambing season, a couple of 'orphan' lambs were brought into the house to keep warm and bottle fed. Their yellow Lab retriever kept a watchful eye over them. The lambs seemed to like his company and started following him around, as if he were their mother. They were eventually old enough to move to the barn with the other lambs; Reeve would still go out to feed them three times a day and the dog would come along. She says, 'Sometimes he would go and visit the lambs without me, often trying to bring them back to the kitchen. ... I would find the trio waiting for me by the back door.'  Awww, I just giggled when I read that!

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For World Book Day yesterday...

I finished reading Louise Penny's Inspector Gamache novel A Better Man. Now I'm about to delve into an old favourite, a book I haven't read in years: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. And, today I'm waiting for the delivery of my early birthday present, Victoria Magazine's new publication Our Hearts Are in England. Not sure if hubby will let me get a peek into it when it arrives or if he'll whisk it away until my actual B-day next month. We may have to arm wrestle.

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I am listening to...

Respighi's sprightly Ancient Airs and Dances. There are many pieces of music that I love, and this is one of them. This music, with its flutes, oboes, harp, and strings, makes me think of a warming Spring day, I always want to hum and tap my toes in time with the playful tunes. Not the original composer, Respighi the Italian violinist and composer, arranged this 'very old music in the modern clothes of the early 20th century'.

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I am hoping...

For an ice cream cone. Soon. Outside on a warmish day. Dairy Queen. Chocolate dipped in a plain cone. Wanna meet me there?

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I am learning...

Something new every day. Today's learning moment hasn't shown up yet, but I'll be sure to let you know when it does.

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In the kitchen...

There's nothing more comforting than the aroma of something baking in oven. New York chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli says it best, 'Winter blues are cured every time with a potato gratin paired with a roast chicken.' Batches of both blueberry and banana-nut muffins have starred in our kitchen this week.

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Around the house...

Dust bunnies have been hopping up everywhere: on window ledges and bookshelves, tops of pictures, around baseboards, behind the couch, along the piano. Obviously, it's been longer than I first thought since my last thorough dusting out. I am reassured however by the, ahem, wise words from American interior decorator Mario Buatta that 'dust is a protective coating for fine furniture'.

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

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A moment from my day...

The pots of tulips we planted in the fall have been hastening to open. We put them in the garage with the idea of hauling them into the garden in late March/early April. However, at the beginning of February they started sprouting, pushing up green shoots while it was still frigid outside.

They are ready for Spring even when, as you can see from the photos, Mother Nature is not. Several pots now sit in the front window to catch the light of day. We are not sorry for their too-early start.

Image by Brenda @ It's A Beautiful Life

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Thanks so much for stopping by. Sure hope you found something worth your visit. Please know that your comments mean a great deal to me -- they are a windfall of delight and cheer -- and I'm always glad when you have time to share a note.

Here's wishing you a beautiful day.

Hugs,

Brenda

xox

Linking today with Peggy @ The Simple Woman's Daybook