I heard a Viet Nam soldier interviewed this morning. His family has never heard him speak of his days in that ghastly battle zone, though he has several medals marking his service there. In a choked voice, he described the nightmare that has been with him ever since: The surprised, point-blank shooting of an enemy,…
Remember Mary Poppins’ sage advice? “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” and King Solomon’s wisdom: “A merry heart does good like medicine,” not to mention, “There is a time to laugh?” Are you, like me, often so consumed with the execution of daily duties, you forget that life should have a bit…
My 30-year-old son found out yesterday he probably has cancer, had surgery this morning, and while I was talking with him in the recovery room, he mentioned staying up very late the night before. He wasn’t worrying, he was writing. It seems he once read a book where a dying father with many young children…
I know I joke that if food fails in my house, my kids can just eat the books, but there is a sense in which I am dead serious. Books are nutrition for the soul. There is a hunger as critical to life as the physical need for food. The Bible says, “As a man…
The craziest things can happen when you have an undying affection for books. But, let me back up. I’m sure that affection grew from the stories poured into my ears as a little one, and definitely was given full “scope for the imagination” (as Anne Shirley of Green Gables would say) by my visits to…
“Oh, I love that series,” exclaims my 17-year-old son, when I mention my writing about it. “I could read those books over and over and over again.” If you knew his struggles with reading, this spontaneous endorsement would carry even more weight. Full of danger, risky flights and bloody battles, Rosemary Sutcliff’s trilogy captured his…
It’s a good thing there are children in our lives—not just to round out our families or the human race either. It’s a good thing because, without children, adults would not voluntarily pick up a picture book for reading pleasure. But, thanks to reading to children, the essential and beautiful things of life come into…
As I write, the temperatures in Virginia rival the bitter winters of the far north. My children and I just finished reading a book about a hero of those brutal, wintry regions. Canada values the feat of courage and fortitude displayed by one of her pioneers so much that a statue stands on the bank…
The opening line of the classic, Little Women, is famous: “’Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,’ grumbled Jo.” But, of course, Mother did not let them down and presents were given–copies of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Each of the March girls go on with their own pilgrimage to adulthood throughout the rest of that novel…
Growing up in a family of girls, the ways of boys were always a bit of a mystery for me. Since raising three of my own, I understand them more, but this is also in part thanks to Ralph Moody. Otherwise known as “Little Britches,” Ralph enlightened me considerably about a boy’s thirst for danger,…
Undeniably, some people live extraordinarily eventful lives, but for most of us, life rolls along in a blur of sameness, the usual round of tasks, most days fairly like the one the week before. When intermittent crises or trials intrude, however, we perversely yearn for that sameness to return. Sometimes time drags, usually it speeds…
[Image by Brook Burling.] My boys and I are spending a year with Emily Dickinson. We read poetry every day together, and she stashed away enough in her boxes under her bed to give us plenty to discover during the coming year. Nothing gets you acquainted with a poet like reading their verses for months…
