It is a pleasant summer evening, and I lean over the rail on the deck, looking out at the backyard. The air is full of the buzz of crickets and cicadas, and a thin frosting of pink clouds covers the sky. Fireflies rise over the grass. The high branches of the maples and pines stir…
My son has been reading voraciously for the past couple of years. Somewhere between seven and eight, when we moved into a house where he had his own room, his own nightstand, and his own reading lamp, everything clicked. He went from reading Bob books under duress to devouring Mr. Popper’s Penguins, the whole Narnia…
Let’s play a game, shall we? I promise to keep it short and simple. I’ll say a word, and you tell me everything that comes to mind. Ready? “Princess.” I’ll give you a minute… Now, if the words that spring to mind are “crown,” “castle,” “ball,” and “prince,” I think it’s fair to assume that…
We’re spoiled around here. Though I’m sure there’s no shortage of used book stores in your town, in Tennessee we have the King of Used Book Stores, the Grand Pooh-bah of the Printed Word. We have McKay’s. This is the place that has allowed me to build a library for my children, that has occupied…
Over the past months, I’ve found myself gravitating towards a simpler life. I say this as a homeschool mom in a one-income household. My husband works from home, too, so we spend a fair number of our days in pajamas. Also, I’m not a hoarder. Few things give me more pleasure than a thorough purge….
My father once told me that life was a repeating cycle of wait… wait…… wait………. wait………….. HURRY! Last year we moved. It was a frantic, sweating hurry of a year. Now we’ve settled into a season when nothing much is going on. Friends ask me about what’s happening in my life, and I scramble for…
“In the days when farmers worked with ox and sled and cut the dark with lantern light, there lived a boy who loved snow more than anything else in the world.” If you haven’t bought a copy of Doug McKelvey and Jamin Still’s “Stories We Shared,” I highly recommend that you do. This book journal,…
There are languages in the world in which the word for “hello” most closely translates as “I see you.” The ancient Hebrews in particular were a people who could not embrace anything so abstract as “Hi.” For them, a promise wasn’t something that existed only as sound waves, spoken and heard by two people. The…
The year was 2007, and Jon and I were living in a miniscule house in Valrico, Florida. We had no children, and we both worked, and there wasn’t much else going on in our lives. Then, out of nowhere, something lit up our Sunday evenings. In those days, we attended church on Sunday mornings, ate…
“And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” –Luke 2:52 I remember the first time I really heard that verse, the first time the word “increased” leaped off the page and slapped me in the face. At that time I believe I pictured Jesus as something more than…
I read about Kobi Yamada and Mae Besom’s What Do You Do With An Idea? on one of those lists that all of us parents bump into somewhere or other on the internet. I checked it out from the library while we were on vacation and read it to the kids. They were delighted with…
Jim LaMarche loves light. When bands of slanting afternoon light spill into the kitchen or early morning light causes a blush to fall over a meadow, Mr. LaMarche catches the light and every subtle shade it awakens. He sees the world in quiet tableaus of light and color. A young boy holds his silver spoon…
