I, Love: "This" Persyn

Why should you learn to punctuate properly? After all, many people have made successful careers without ever learning the difference between a colon and a semicolon. Perhaps you consider punctuation to be an inconsequential bit of decoration, not worth spending your valuable time on. Or perhaps you even regard punctuation as a deeply personal matter — a mode of self-expression not unlike your taste in clothes or music.
Well, punctuation is one aspect of written English. How do you feel about other aspects of written English? Would you happily write pair when you mean pear, because you think the first is a nicer spelling? Would you, in an essay, write Einstein were a right clever lad, 'e were, just because that's the way people speak where you come from? Would you consider it acceptable to write proceed when you mean precede, or vice versa, because you've never understood the difference between them? Probably not — at least, I hope not.

. . . more . . . 

(Via Amicus. Good boys always bring grammatical articles to their mothers' attention. Now get back to sorting the compost.)

OK, really, I have never been able to get enough of the derailment of sense via punctuation errors, or of posting links to articles my children and other students should read, if they haven't already, which then saves me the untold resources of time and energy which I would expend in explaining this stuff to people who aren't really listening all that much.

Did you hear me? I said, it saves me untold resources of . . . oh, never mind. 

Anyway, where were we?  Oh, yes. What's the next best thing to attending the University of Sussex, circa 1997? Visiting the website. Alternatively, you could drop in at Abandon Hopefully, where we have tons of neat stuff just like this (and also not just like this) on the Homeschooling Hot Links page. Meanwhile, the Grade 9 booklist is more or less up, though I'm adding more web resources, writing ideas, and other goodies as I find them. My aim is to begin soon on Grade 10, though I'm awfully distracted by the opportunity the new forum provides me for talking to myself all day long.

Chick'er out. And talk to me. Please.

Finding Common Ground

From a 1996 essay by Orthodox writer Frederica Matthewes-Green:

A few years ago, quite by accident, I discovered an important piece of common ground. Something I wrote in a conservative think-tank journal was picked up and quoted widely. I had written: "There is a tremendous sadness and loneliness in the cry ‘A woman’s right to choose.’ No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg."

What surprised me was where it appeared: I started getting clips in the mail from friends, showing the quote featured in pro-choice publications. I realized I had stumbled across one of those points of agreement: We all know that no one leaves the abortion clinic skipping. This made me think that there was common ground, that instead of marching against each other, maybe we could envision a world without abortion, a world we could reach by marching together.

. . .

In the process we have contributed to what I think is a false concept—an unnatural and even bizarre concept—that women and their unborn children are mortal enemies. We have contributed to the idea that they’ve got to duke it out, it’s going to be a fight to the finish. Either the woman is going to lose control of her life, or the child is going to lose its life.

It occurred to me that there’s something wrong with this picture. When we presume this degree of conflict between women and their own children, we’re locating the conflict in the wrong place. Women and their own children are not naturally mortal enemies, and the problem is not located inside women’s bodies . . .

You'll want to read the rest.  

UPDATE:  And while you're at it, read this discussion of the central difficulty  in occupying common ground. It's a five- or six-part series, and you'll want to read them all, but the post I've linked to does a masterful job of dismantling a lot of the mythology which passes for pro-choice talking points, and of pointing out that, at the end of the day, there's a limit to what you can do in cooperation with someone who operates on a set of assumptions utterly antithetical to your own.

The Personhood Argument

Does it or doesn't it work? Is it or isn't it persuasive? Why or why not?

I found myself asking these questions -- I asked them in a very unsophisticated, non-philosophical way, mind you,  being  neither a philosopher nor a sophisticate -- as I read Joe Carter's essay, "Being a Person," up today at First Things. Here's an excerpt:

Clearly, being a member of the human race is not necessary to be considered a person. But should all human beings be considered persons? Historically, the answer has been a resounding “no.” Slaves, women, infants, Jews, and “foreigners” all share a common history of being denied legal or moral standing as persons, despite being recognized as humans. The judgment of recent generations, however, has without exception concluded that denying personhood to these members of the human family is a great moral evil. I have no doubt that future generations will judge ours just as harshly.

Yet while recognition of personhood is the foundation of certain positive rights, it should not be required for a basic negative right—the right not to be deprived of life without due process of law. In other words, people cannot claim a right to kill you simply because they will not recognize you as a person.

Joe's article is worth reading in full for the basic truth towards which it points, too often ignored in the debate over life issues:  while we may quibble over the assignment of personhood, what we cannot ignore is our moral accountability as persons ourselves.  In short, "[m]oral people do not kill innocent human beings," whether we assign full personhood to a life form with human DNA, or we separate personhood from the naked fact of being.

In other words -- though surely the idea repulses us -- we could believe a Latvian, for example, or a fuschia-spotted humanoid from another galaxy, to be not really a person in the same way that we ourselves are, but at the same time intuit that to kill such a being would be a grave wrong, as we intuit that to kill a sentient non-human creature like a whale is not quite the same thing as swatting a fly. The vast majority of white early-20th-century Southerners did not participate in lynchings for much the same reason, though enough of them had no particular quibble with the idea of racial segregation.

I don't mean to advance this as a model of human goodness;  my aim is merely to point out that it is possible to comprehend the wrongness of doing any physical harm to, let alone deliberately causing the death of, a human being whom you do not quite regard as a person like yourself. As moral imperatives go, this one is kind of baseline, on a level with having a pulse;  but if it's the best you have to work with, it will do. And maybe it's true that at the end of the day claims whose warranty is the humanity of the fetus mean less than claims whose warranty is the reminder of our own humanity:  in the mirror, we don't quite yet look like beasts who eat their young.

**
Of course, the question inevitably comes up:  What do pro-life people do, other than talk and march and pray the rosary,  to build a viable culture of life?

The answer is that pro-life people do all kinds of things, large and small, public and private, seen and unseen. Here is a very small listing of things that you could do, actively, to contribute to nurture hope for women, children, families, and the culture at large:

Contribute to, or volunteer at, a crisis pregnancy center. You can donate money or baby supplies;  you can volunteer to sort maternity and baby clothes in the clothes closet, or to be trained in a counseling role. You may simply commit to pray regularly for the needs of your local center, which -- I hope I don't actually need to point this out -- is not to do nothing;  it may well be the single most important thing you can do.

Support initiatives like Room at the Inn, which offers housing, counseling, and support -- including opportunities to pursue a college education -- for young mothers and their children, from pregnancy until the child is two.

 Support adoption ministries like CHASK, an acronym meaning "Christian Homes and Special Kids." CHASK is a private adoption network whose purpose is to facilitate adoption of children who would otherwise have been aborted due to prenatal special-needs diagnoses. They also facilitate the re-adoption of children in "disrupted" foreign adoptions and other similarly hard-to-place children. A quick tour of the website indicates that there are more waiting families than waiting children. In a perhaps-related note, I read in the last week or so a blog comment describing the difficulty of adopting a child with Down Syndrome, as a family of the commenter's acquaintance had been trying to do:  though there's been some dispute over the numbers, it would seem that the statistic of a 90% abortion rate for unborn children with Down Syndrome is about right. At any rate, the commenter's friends were finding that there were no infants fitting this description available to adopt, because they were all already dead.

Incidentally, one wants to vet any adoption program carefully before recommending, supporting, or engaging their services. Though CHASK points out that the incidence of adoption scams is pretty negligible in special-needs adoption, I did look for an outside review of their program and found one here. Also, while they specify "Christian" homes, I don't know whether they would consider a Catholic home to be a Christian one. Still, what they do is laudable and needed.

When I have time, I'll create a space in the sidebar to keep these links on the main page. And I'll add to them as I find more listings.

Bits and Pieces

Woke up to a clattery rain that might have been sleet, but wasn't quite. The dog did not want to go out in it, for which can I blame him? I didn't, either. Booted him through the door anyway, however.

We are on something of a backwards school schedule at the moment, with recess and extracurricular things like scout projects in the morning, and school after lunch. It seems to work.

Still reading Barbara Pym.

Put in an order yesterday for a mid-winter box from Dover Books:  history coloring books and sticker paper dolls and a space-exploration kit and a book of short stories about samurai. I don't buy new books hand over fist like this all the time, but about twice a year I think we need some kind of care package to get us through either the bleakness of late winter or the soul-flattening heat of midsummer, and it's about that time that a new Dover catalog arrives in the mail. For a $50 order you get free shipping, and $50 buys you a lot of Dover books, so now we have this to look forward to.

OK, people are pacing behind me, waiting to waft my computer upstairs to the fastnesses of their rooms, for algebraic purposes. And it's time for lunch and school.

Why My Children Went to Washington

The following is an excerpt from an article of mine appearing in this month's issue of Lay Witness magazine:

“Mom?” The six-year-old appeared at my elbow. His face wore a questing expression which typically preceded remarks like, How can that line I just drew on my paper contain an infinite number of points?

“Mom?” he said again. “What exactly are abortion rights?”

I stopped peanutbuttering in mid-swipe. Exactly? You want to know exactly?

Yes, he did want to know exactly. After all, this phrase recurred hourly on the radio, alongside the hurricane news, so it must mean something at least as interestingly important as phrases like Category Three.

So, figuring that an honest question deserved an honest answer, I told him. His older sister turned up while we were talking, so I told her, too. I said that abortion rights meant that in our country it is legal for a pregnant mother, who may feel frightened or unready or as though nobody will help her, to have a doctor kill her unborn baby.

 “You’re making that up,” they said.

“I wish I were,” I replied.

They were outraged. It was as if I had revealed that their father and I were planning to cook them for Christmas dinner. I could see their thoughts travel into the living room, where their toddler brother was shaking a floor lamp to pieces, then back to me, and to the baby inside me, whose movements they had been tracking as they tracked the hurricanes, as we waited for her to make landfall.

This is a true story.  In the intervening years, I have often wondered whether I did my children a favor by answering their questions straightforwardly, but at the time, cornered like that, I couldn't think what else to do. Abortion rights is part of our linguistic currency;  why shouldn't they know what that phrase means, and without the icing of euphemism?

I did not, after all, tell them anything like this. But what I did tell them -- that in America it is perfectly legal to kill an unborn child -- was, without embellishment, enough.

[T]hat if I lost my mind, as must at times have seemed an imminent and inevitable development, the baby inside me was the last person any authority would protect:  this revelation was like a gash in the underbelly of their world, a wound which dripped with unimagined poison.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that this conversation, many years ago now, changed my children's lives. It made pro-life activists of them, though that wasn't really what I'd set out to do, not being especially pro-life myself at the time. On reflection, what I'm writing right now is, as much as my children's participation in March for Life, a consequence of the same discussion. Conversation/conversion;  I don't have time at this moment to explore etymologies, but by a slip of the fingers, I might just as well have typed one for the other.

 Pro-choice had been my default setting since college. Though each successive pregnancy taught me all over again the humanity of the unseen person -- feeling somebody turn his or her head in the halo of your pelvis while you're standing in the grocery checkout line will do that --  and though I'd settled in my mind, and with sometimes-incredulous doctors, that I would not under any circumstance have an abortion myself (thus saving myself a world of hassle with the kinds of diagnostic tests designed to make you consider having one, because what the hell else do you do with information like that?), that was as far as my thinking had gone.

A friend of mine once put her own ambivalence regarding abortion this way:  "While I was pregnant, I knew that I would let nothing on this earth harm the child in my womb. But I can't tell somebody else what to do."

At the time, this sounded reasonable to me, even sensitive. Now, I think:  do other children not deserve protection? Because that is what it comes to. Each year that one of my children was born, four thousand -- on average -- died.  (I got this number wrong. The truth is that on the DAY each of my children was born, roughly four thousand other children died.)They died because their mothers were poor.  They died because their fathers or their grandparents said, "Get that taken care of;  otherwise it's your problem." They died because they had Down Syndrome, or cleft palate -- or tests indicated that they might.

Though the reasons and rationales vary, in the end, those people died, frankly, because our culture believes that death is preferable to the potential for unhappiness. At nine and six, my children could see this for the outrage that it is. This year, when my oldest child graduates from high school, four thousand other people will not graduate, because our culture believes that death is preferable to the possibility of dropping out. (Again, the true number is more like 1.37 MILLION)

My kids didn't go to March for Life to make things worse for women. Nor did they go simply because of one unbelievably gruesome story  recently come to light, however blandly the mainstream media has reported it. They went because even the cleanest, most efficient abortion clinic tells, behind its sterile facade, the same story of the throw-away-ness of human life, the story that really, children are better off dead.



More on the unbelievable story of Kermit Gosnell here. 
No more mental retardation?
Tens of thousands? Uh, count again.
How I Became Pro-Life, plus
a photo-essay from the West Coast March
Not Safe, Not Rare. Just Legal.
Eve Tushnet on Abortion as Horror Subgenre (H/T)

Habemus Dishwasher

And I'm going to bed.

Western Civilization Greatly Overemphasizes the Extrovert

. . . as opposed to the quiet, studious, contemplative dreamer . . .

I mean, I like a good Western Culture, you're forced to. But I think I may just have had my existence justified, civilizationally speaking. 

Sunday Meandering

Walked with Aelred and dog in an afternoon of pale sun which felt like early spring despite the lingering snow. Looked in the junk shop window, and the man came to the door -- not to turn away a sale. We had no money with us, but stood talking to him a long time. His business is going under;  he owns the building (beautiful stamped-tin ceilings and wood floors, was apparently always a furniture store of one kind or another) and has been approached by Bank of America, next door, to buy it. They of course would bulldoze it and expand the bank and parking lot, which would be a disaster from the picturesque standpoint, but you have to sympathize with the man. Building deteriorated when he bought it, can't afford to renovate, sitting among his dubious treasures (e.g. a 60's-vintage trophy as tall as I am, commemorating I'm not sure what, but with a lot of blank plaque-ettes around its sides) watching everything moulder. A nice man, and a far more pleasant neighbor than a bank, so it's tempting to fantasize that progress will not march on in the direction I fear it's taking. Amicus would feel the loss of the junk shop keenly.

So many empty storefronts, so many more storefronts taken up by the kind of dance studio that keeps a row of trophies (trophies again!) in the window, signifying that art is well and good, but cheerleading is better. Tried to imagine a time when the storefronts had actual stores in them, and the town bustled. Friends in a hamlet about seven miles away have decayed railroad tracks running through their woods;  in bygone days, as they say, people in that town used to ride the train to this one to do their shopping. That this town was a destination . . . We moved here because we liked the quiet, so it's interesting to contemplate other people's coming here for the action.

Buds on the forsythia, and daylight at 5:20, clear as a drink of water. Hope, despite it all.

More Curriculum-Site Updates

Over at the new Abandon Hopefully website, we're making progress on the Grade 9 course of study, whose focus is the ancient and classical world. I've just spent a chunk of time this sunny morning adding Iliad-related links to my book-and-resource list, including the must-see "Troy Story" video. Just click the "Curriculum" button on the navbar at the top of the home page, then click "Grade 9" in the lefthand sidebar, and there you are!

It's all a work-in-progress, and I'm having to gather and streamline a bunch of scattered links and other information from blog posts, which goes slowly even when I'm not busy. If you know of links and/or resources which I don't have listed, send them along and I'll add them.

Update update:  And now I've added a forum, just because I could. A guestbook, a blog, and a forum all on one site are a bit much, I know . . . we'll see which feature, if any, takes off, and axe the rest.

Seven Quick Takes: The Diaries of Barbara Pym Edition

A cabin-feverish day. Reading novel after novel, deliciously, and then A Very Private Eye, while probably neglecting children's education. Other children got snow day, so why not they? Or perhaps this is rationalizing? Eventually settled down to some copywork. H:  I do not write sentences out of my science book. 

*

Thinking of writing a novel using names from my spam filter. Today:  Barr Chong Kim Wong, Mary Jones, Mrs. Lovet Johnson, Samantha, Habiba Gammoudi. There is also my long-lost relative, Marinda Thomas, not to mention a Mr. Doug Nosworthy, who wants to ask a quick question about my business. What fun one might have with a Mr. Doug Nosworthy, business or no business.

*

Mid-century English women writers who are elderly and/or dead;  vicars, romance, and lots of tea;  or, in case you haven't heard of Barbara Pym, Kerry here saves me the trouble of explaining.



*

"Dearest," Mrs. Lovet Johnson typed, then paused.

"In Christ," she added after a moment's thought. Quickly she composed the body of her email.

I am Mrs. Lovet Johnson from Liberia   ; My Doctor told me that I would not last for the next Eight Months, due to my cancer problem. Having known of my condition (cancer of the lever and stroke).

Marinda, passing from the galley kitchen into the bathroom, stopped and read this opening over Mrs. Lovet Johnson's shoulder. She snorted derisively. "Of the lever? Cancer of stroke?"

"Shut up," said Mrs. Levet Johnson, who in real life was twenty-three, unshaven, from not Liberia but Des Moines, and named Douglas Nosworthy.

*

[Insert description of church jumble sale here.] At the last one I went to, I bought a silverplate butter dish, a stack of napkins which appear to be real linen, a drain rack for the sink (although I already had one;  I liked the color of this one, and it does look nice under the sink, where it currently resides, holding spare rolls of paper towels), three or four books, and -- here I wish I could write something really climactic, like "a mounted rhinocerous head," but after I'd bought all the rest, I think they gave me a cupcake on a napkin, and that was that.


*

Mary busied herself with the flowers, watching the new librarian -- what was his name? something multicultural? -- who loitered beside the card catalog. Do libraries of anthropological societies use card catalogs in this day and age, she wondered. And whatever happened to people with names like John? Does no one write novels about them any more?

Dr. Habiba Gammoudi also watched the new librarian from behind the monograph he had brought her, a heavy volume on the marital habits of the Xfili people. Didn't he have work to do? Was it her attention he was attempting to divert, or that of the fiftyish spinster in her crisp linen suit, rearranging three calla lilies in a glass vase? Who was she? Dr. Gammoudi had never been able to make out quite what her position at the library might be. She was simply always there, a conscientious, busy woman who looked as though she ought at all times to be handing people things.


*

Girls for a walk to town. I washed my hair. Jen v. kind to host Seven Quick Takes. The vicar, once again, did not come to tea.

Silly Me

I thought that when the customer-service people told me, a week ago today, that they were "looking for an installer" for my dishwasher, they meant that they were looking for a person who would install my dishwasher. As in, you know, "install." Where the dishwasher needed installing. In a house which, as far as I can tell, has heretofore never had a dishwasher. Which must still happen sometimes, don't you think? To people other than me?

But no. I mean, they found a man. Then, for a while, nobody could find the dishwasher. The man called me to ask whether I knew where it might be. Other than "someplace not my kitchen," I really had not the first clue. He called me again to ask whether we had a lot of snow up this way or something, because the (insert famous department-store chain here) outlet where, it had been determined, my dishwasher was in residence, "wasn't open." This was at nine-thirty this morning. And yes, we have had a lot of snow, relatively speaking, up this way or something, but if the bookstore guy who rides a forty-year-old black Schwinn to work can open up his store on time, then I have a hard time seeing how the outlet of a major department-store chain in a larger and doubtless better-plowed town than this could have been not open at that hour. Not answering the phone, maybe. But --

Well, dude made it up there, and lo and behold, they were open, who'dathunkit, and they had my dishwasher. That is, I guess it's the one I ordered. As I write this, it's still in the box on the front porch, where dude and his business partner left it after taking one look at my kitchen -- well, first they asked me if the dog was vicious, then they looked at the kitchen -- and deciding that, despite our having told them that this was going to be a pioneering kind of dishwasher, and that putting it in was going to involve saws and little connector pipes, for which we thought we were paying with the installation fee, they, uh, really hadn't, uh, expected this, and, uh, don't do this kind of thing, and, uh, now, ma'am, I can tell you're kind of disappointed --

How I feel, I said, is nothing to what my dish-washing children are going to feel tonight, after having anticipated that their period of indenture would end a week ago.

Those weren't my exact words, of course. I was a little more monosyllabic than that. And I could tell that they could tell that I was kind of disappointed, by the way they slunk out to the truck and jimmied the dishwasher out and slunk onto the front porch with it and then left without saying goodbye.

And yes, we are refining this little narrative with a view to getting some of our money back. And as soon as he has time, an electrician friend who's already rewired our house for us for what seems to us like highway robbery -- ie, we stripped and beat him and left him for dead, and now the lights work -- will come and install the dishwasher, simply because Aelred related this tale of woe after Holy Hour tonight.

This appliance had better be ready to clear the dishes off the table and make the beds, too. That's what I have to say.

Daily Stuff

Snow and a lot of sledding, interspersed with schoolwork.

Some fiction-ish writing.

More snow, more sledding, intermittent chapters of On the Banks of Plum Creek.

The Anchoress has moved.

My friend Sarah has a new poetry blog, Long Live the Weeds.

Let the dog out;  let the dog in.

Beans and ham in the crockpot.

Work on the Abandon Hopefully site:  homeschooling resource links, a blog post about the Robinson Curriculum,  and updates to the evolving Grade 9 booklist.

At the home page I've linked to a couple of new Yahoo articles on homeschooling themes. And so far, according the guest book, my husband thinks I'm swell. Which is enough, really, but if you wanted to think I'm swell, too (or not), you could always drop by and say so.

Poetry Friday

January Spring

On the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord

Through leaf-slime,

daffodils’ green teeth

bite the air.

The quince’s knuckles

swell like a row of new graves.

Clouds drop

growling into the trees.

The brick stoop shines. My daughter

waves from the door,

yellow light behind her.

This week's Poetry Friday brought to you by Irene at Live Love Explore.  Go visit the poets and dreamers there today.

Waiting for Wise Men Bearing Dishwashers, and Other Notes on the Feast of the Epiphany

I've been waiting two years, six months, five days, and approximately four hours (and counting), for a dishwasher to materialize in this house. Which is really all I want to say about that at this time.

Well, on the other hand . . .

We broke down and bought one the other day, not exactly for Epiphany's birthday, but the fact that they gave us today as a delivery/installation date did, I thought, have a certain je ne sais quoi about it. Last Christmas in her stocking she received a pair of glammy rubber housewife gloves, which she wore until they disintegrated, which they did pretty quickly, dishwater being rough stuff and all. And now, supposedly, the Wise Men are bringing her, and the rest of us, a dishwasher. Supposedly the Wise Men were going to call us between nine and ten this morning, too, which the Wise Men did not do, which worries me a little. Did they get on the wrong side of Herod after all? Or are they just lost and out of cell-phone range? Or what?

Anyway, all day yesterday she kept remarking that her fingernails are going to be gorgeous now. The machine's not even in the house -- it's out there somewhere in the wilds on the camel's back, trying to follow the star to Fiat -- and already the sloth and vanity are kicking in. Says the paragon of diligence and humility, to the mirror which is this blog. Technology:  bad for the soul, maybe, but fab for the fingernails.

So, she's seventeen today, and she's teaching my Greek class for me, because I have to sit here waiting for the Wise Men to show up with a dishwasher. She didn't want to teach my Greek class;  on the other hand, she knows at least as much Greek as I do, so why not? I gave her a crossword puzzle and a Greek-letter search and some other busy stuff for them to do, and I dropped her and the others off at the church, and I came home where, even though I had to miss Mass, it is nice and quiet, which seems redemptive in its own way. Happy E's birthday to me.

We took down the Christmas tree yesterday, which I realize is a massive no-no, since the Twelve Days weren't over, and the calendar stays gold till the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord on Sunday. So it's beginning to look a lot less like Christmas around here, even though technically it still is Christmas and really could be until Candlemas. I lose the Living-the-Liturgical-Year Award, right out of the starting gate.

Or do I? (well, yes, I do, but let's talk anyway). First of all, the tree was beginning to curl at the tips, never a sign of increasing longevity. Second of all, liturgical year or no liturgical year, there are going to be seven children in this house all weekend, and the four who live here all the time knock over enough stuff already. We're just not even going to discuss the nerf-gun ban currently in effect here, or the origins of what looks like, but is not, exactly, a bullet hole in the glass on the framed print in the upstairs hall, the one depicting a butterfly, a fish, and a hen all standing, one on top of the other, on the back of a large pink pig, and captioned, Bremer Stadtmusikanten. B-Mannschaft. Besides, the purple-red nandina sprays which looked so lovely on the mantelpiece two weeks ago were dropping leaves like crazy, which was exactly how the whole thing was starting to drive me.

So yesterday I had the children dismantle the ornaments and the lights, and I swept the greenery out to the compost pile, and Amicus pitched the tree onto the curb. And then I felt depressed. Christmas was over, and I hadn't reveled in it enough. Christmas wasn't over, but I had hurried it out the door.

I did, however, as I habitually do this time of year, keep our various small Nativity sets on display. So if you look hard, you see that Baby Jesus is still here. We haven't raked the coals over the Incarnation just yet, not all the way. The thought struck me, as I looked around at the house, which in the wake of the Christmas purge appeared bleak and denuded, that maybe my impulse hadn't been so out of touch with things after all. It looked a little like Advent again, for one thing:  quiet and waiting. And if the greenery and lights had been, metaphorically speaking, the trumpeting of angels, maybe a little bleakness was in order as part of the season, too. Maybe we needed a sense of the ordinary and everyday and mundane, which must surely have settled in once the angels had gone away into heaven and the shepherds returned to their hillsides, and while the Wise Men were still wandering around looking for the right place to deliver the dishwasher. Maybe we needed, too, at least retrospectively, the austere memory of the Holy Innocents, and the homelessness of the flight into Egypt.

The season continues, but it has many moods, and this is the one we're in right now. No light but clear daylight, and the everyday feast of getting on with things. I am thinking that this is not so bad, after all, but I'll be a lot happier when the Wise Men finally get here.

***

Meanwhile, over at the new Abandon Hopefully site, new links are up, the curriculum page is progressing, things are happening. Go visit, and be sure to sign the guestbook.

If Things Are Quiet Here This Week, It's Because I'm . . .

1. Organizing a choral workshop for the parish this weekend.
2. Shopping for Epiphany's birthday tomorrow.
3. Making the house ready for weekend guests
4. Cooking
5. Watching the Sears dude put in my new dishwasher.
6. Gearing up for our new school semester beginning next week
7. Oh, and re-inventing my old Abandon Hopefully high-school English blog as a curriculum/resource/homeschooling-help website. Some pages are up and running already, so come visit!