“Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest’s pleasure, that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one’s life that can never be forgotten.”
-Sarah Orne Jewett, from The Country of the Pointed Firs
It’s been an exciting week. I have to share the most wonderful happening first, which is that my grandson Pat’s wife just gave birth to their first baby. Glory to God! This is my fourth great-grandchild. So far among the Greats there are three boys and one girl. I’ll share a photo as soon as I get a suitable one. Welcome, Little Boy!
(In the meantime, here’s Pat at left, long before he was considering marriage and children.)
“The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope.
“I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.”
– G.K. Chesterton
In the last year I’ve planted three different types/colors of Japanese anemones, and the second of these new groups, the pale pink, opened its first flower yesterday. My old white ones have been blooming for a few weeks, and the new dark pink flowers with a wonky petal pattern also. The dark pink ones are the most enthusiastic, thriving on the amount of sun and water they get; I’m hoping the mildew they have suffered is just from unusual weather this year, and won’t always happen.
Recently my daughter Pearl and I were talking about Elizabeth von Arnim’s books, as we often do, and she suggested I might like The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen. I got it right away and have been reading it on Kindle — many of von Arnim’s books are out of print — to great enjoyment. In her telling of her travels around the German island and among other tourists, Elizabeth often uses words such as happy, blessed, joy, light and radiance to convey how she feels when out of doors, particularly when the sun is shining. She is my kindred spirit for sure. Here is one excerpt that reminded me of my own joy this very week:
“
Oh blessed state, when mere quiet weather, trees and grass, sea and clouds, can make you forget that life has anything in it but rapture, can make you drink in heaven with every breath! How long will it last, this joy of living, this splendid ecstasy of the soul? I am more afraid of losing this, of losing even a little of this, of having so much as the edge of its radiance dimmed, than of parting with any other earthly possession.”
In other places her descriptions of the people she meets and the conversations among them are, as is usual with her, both insightful and very funny!
This little purple pot above was given to me by my granddaughter Ivy. It was the first thing she ever made of clay, and it has a convenient hole in the bottom so it can serve as a planter pot. It’s small, and just the right size and color to set off the beauty of a little chick type of succulent. When it becomes a hen I may have to substitute another chick in its place.
I had another super exciting day when the Monarch chrysalis we’ve been watching matured and the butterfly emerged. The pupa stage lasted about three weeks, which is on the long side, and I wondered if possibly the insect had died. But the delay was likely just due to the week of cool and drizzly weather we had recently; the case darkened, and I began to see the Monarch colors inside.
Early in the morning I went out to look, and it was a chrysalis. An hour later, still in my nightgown, I checked again, and the butterfly had broken out. (This makes a total of four Monarchs I have monitored closely, yet missed their big event.) He was clinging to the mostly-bare milkweed stem, his wings hanging behind, heavy and damp.
All along I’d been worried that there was not enough food on those plants to grow a caterpillar to sufficient size, especially since the aphids were devouring the leaves at a fast rate. Then when the caterpillar entered the pupa stage, I thought, “Isn’t that chrysalis kind of small? Maybe it’s undernourished….” Now I stared and stared some more, amazed at how such a creature could have been so tightly packed into the thin case. A full-sized Monarch!
The sunlight was weak, so we waited, Mr. Monarch and I, for his wings to dry; intermittently and gently he opened and closed them. Drops of meconium (I looked it up) fell from his body several times. After a couple of hours he began to flap them a lot and flew/fell into the twiggy penstemon patch.
Down there I feared he’d dropped into a spider’s web, so as he struggled to walk out through the tangle, I put my finger near his head so he could climb onto it. Then I carried him, walking up my sleeve, to the zinnias in the planter box, where he was glad to attach himself to a stem.
I sat for a while in this chair nearby, where the buzzing of the bees in the salvia made garden music for me. Skippers were all over the zinnias, too, but they are hard to catch at their business, they are so quick to take a drink on the fly.
The glorious Monarch stayed another full hour on his zinnia stem before he flew up and away, eventually to a perch high up in 
the neighbor’s redwood tree. There’s no flower nectar to drink there, so I imagine he came down soon, but by then I was very late in Getting On With My Day, and had to go in.
The Anise Swallowtail caterpillars Bea and I had seen a couple of weeks ago disappeared; I hope they are hidden away in their next stage of development somewhere. But two more of these gorgeous creatures can be seen feasting on the parsley now (at right).
And there is another Monarch caterpillar not fourteen inches from where the one just emerged. It seems that there is indeed enough of the narrow milkweed leaves to support not only a large aphid population but at least one butterfly.
As you can see, the week was rich and full beyond the baby and the butterfly. But let me mention two more things that amazed me this week: Sweet peas blooming in September! Not many, but enough for a tiny bouquet. And the music of the piano.
I try not to talk overmuch here about my new housemate, so I will only say that a certain person has been playing my piano more than it’s been played in a very long time. Sometimes she plays morning and evening, and once I woke to the comforting sounds, and once it was as a lullaby when I went to sleep. This is a gift I never thought to ask for, but my Father thought to give it to me.
Do you suppose next week will be calmer?
“The world, knowing how all our real investments are beyond the grave, might expect us to be less concerned than other people who go in for what is called Higher Thought and tell us that ‘death doesn’t matter’; but we ‘are not high-minded’, and we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus—not, surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in His eyes than in ours.
“The nature which He had created as God, the nature which He had assumed as Man, lay there before Him in its ignominy; a foul smell, food for worms. Though He was to revive it a moment later, He wept at the shame…. Of all men, we hope most of death; yet nothing will reconcile us to—well, its unnaturalness. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it.
“Because Our Lord is risen we know that on one level it is an enemy already disarmed; but because we know that the natural level also is God’s creation we cannot cease to fight against the death which mars it, as against all other blemishes upon it, against pain and poverty, barbarism and ignorance. Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.”
— C.S. Lewis, “Some Thoughts”
I was excited to walk to the library this morning. Only that one errand needed doing, so it wasn’t necessary to drive from place to place. I love staying home, but I also like taking walks. It’s having to get in the car and into traffic that is a bother.
So off I went, wearing my newish pack that one of my grandsons gave me last Christmas, with his wishes for fun adventures wearing it. It was just the right size for my wallet and the three books I was returning, all related to the Iliad. I’m still reading that classic, but I was done with those commentaries.
I had barely got around the corner when I ran into the first roses on my way. I was surprised — I must have been driving past them several times a week recently, but clearly with my mind elsewhere. As I was within a few inches, and not rolling past in a car, it was easy to stop and look into their faces. I sniffed all the colors along the fence, and they were delicious. These below were my favorites, because of their romantic nature:
I thought of what Elizabeth von Arnim said about this experience:
“[Walking] is the perfect way of moving if you want to see into the life of things. It is the one way of freedom. If you go to a place on anything but your own feet you are taken there too fast, and miss a thousand delicate joys that were waiting for you by the wayside.”
Fifty steps further on, I caught a whiff of something sweet, and looked up to see that it was the oleander bush that towered above me. I don’t know if I’ve ever noticed the scent of oleanders — but how could that be? I have known them my whole life, and was pleased to encounter so many in Greece last year.
A few more steps, and I came upon a riot of blooming rosebushes at a busy intersection. This path was truly a highly decorated and aromatic one.
And then onward under the canopy of tall redwood trees, in the sunshiny and mildly warm air, and my heart was light. I soon reached the library — only to find it closed. A tall fence closed off the entrance, and a sign told about renovation, and that it would open again in the spring. In the meantime, we could use a temporary facility a few blocks farther away. What to do? Would my feet complain if I added this extra distance to their task? I decided that I didn’t want to extend my walk further, and turned back toward home, a little disappointed. I would have to drive to return my books after all. But worse things could happen.
Walking home the other direction I noticed different sights, as I looked down into the creek that is full of willows, waving in the breeze and showing their silvery undersides. I took the little shortcut along the creek, passing by this spot where the sunlight is often filtering through the trees in such a way that it makes me want to stop and sit a while, on the nice bench that has been installed there. But the bench faces into a big tree trunk, and doesn’t have a great view. So I never do.
This fennel plant was in bloom and smelling like licorice candy.
Next time I think I’ll plan to walk all the way to the temporary library. It’s likely that by then the roses will be gone, but I’m sure there will be some other good things on my path. And I won’t be going too fast to see them.
