making a button necklace like laura and mary

I cannot even begin to say how much I appreciate the words of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the wisdom her simple books bring to modern life. It started with the button lamp and now the necklace. I think we will go through her books and do all sorts of projects inspired by what she wrote.


I was bombarded with "Mom look at this button!" "Mom how many buttons do I have so far?" "1...2...3......Mom I have fifteen buttons." It kept K occupied for several hours.


It helps immensely that I love buttons and the vast variety of them. They are like snowflakes - small and while similar, no two are exactly the same.


"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all." Laura Ingalls Wilder






I wrote a tutorial at Suite101.

a button lamp like Laura Ingalls Wilder

We just recently finished listening to Cherry Jones narrate The Long Winter. The button lamp that Laura describes in the story has always fascinated me so I decided to make one for the girls. The girls really got into it and put on their newest LHP costumes. (Some of you will remember the first ones I made from here and here).


The girls wanted to pretend to study by the lamp like Laura and Mary.



We made sure that we had a metal button.


It is rather smoky so when we were done, I turned off the heat and opened up the house for a little while. The day we made the button lamp we woke up to ten below zero Fahrenheit, so the house got cold rather quickly when I turned off the heat and opened up the doors and windows. This inspired the girls to go down to the entry and pretended to twist straw.

Happily, I had just finished baking a Chocolate Beet Cake and so the girls could come warm up by an open oven just like Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace.

I wrote detailed instructions at Suite101.

rambling

I just finished Laura Ingalls Wilder: Farm Journalist. Some of it was fascinating and some of it was boring. It shed a lot of light on the character of the woman. These quotes are particularly insightful and very relevant today.

"Tho we do not have the advantages of travel, we stay-at-homes may acquire a culture of the heart which is almost impossible in the rush and roar of cities."(November 20, 1919)

"Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals, when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do." (January 5, 1920)

"To simplify our lives as much as possible, to overcome that feeling of haste by remembering that there are just as many hours in the day as ever, and that there is time enough for the things that matter if it is rightly used.

Then, having done the most we may here, when we reach the limit of time we will sail over the horizon rim to new beauties and greater understanding." (January 1, 1924).



Last weekend, one of Light's school friends had her birthday at Eveland Farms (the place we go for pumpkins every year). It was a pleasant day and me and the girls (siblings were welcome) had a nice time.




My apologies to my dear friends here in blogland. I am trying to focus on the essentials and as much as I love the world out here on the computer. Reality is more important.



It was very springish when we visited the farm. Everything that was male from pigs to donkeys and from horses to turkeys and even the peacock shared their glorious (or not so glorious) masculinity with the world.

Laura Ingalls Wilder quote

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee.

I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects.

I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength.

home coming

There is no simple way to write about the past three days. If one said 'I went home' and left it at that it might be simple. But it is more complicated than that. Going home can't be simple because one left for a reason and when you return, you return changed. The past and present collide. The life you live discovers that the language you speak is not born of the present but of the past. But you speak it with an accent now. You are no longer native and while you think in that language - you don't speak it the same and something as simple as a conversation changes.

Once upon a time, I grew up in a dilapidated house on a farm where there stood a barn, a garage, several chicken coops, a garden, a tin shed for the pigs, there was a light pole to show a home was there in the middle of an empty section. There were tall trees with two ropes from which hung tires. There were sheep, goats, cats, a variety of other animals and a dog named Bonnie. Four of us children lived there with our parents. We grew up and everyone left. And now everything is gone.

(where the story started)

You can stop in the past and drink the water but you cannot stay. Weeds have grown where productive life was. Life never stops in those by-ways and roadsides, it moves on along a road where we all must walk or lose sight of our hope.

(the water tanks maintained for our landlord instead of paying rent money)


I came from a land that is much wilder than I remember - there is little about it that is tame. I would guess that when settlers first homesteaded it anything they brought in soon look dried out and frayed. There is something about the land here that denies anything new but that which can be fed by rain and wind. And now the civilization in this country is passing on - the wind and rain have won and are at the business of returning the land to itself.


The schools shrink until they must consolidate and those new schools shrink and people move away. And churches can no longer sustain a pastor and so they share a man with another church. And people grow tired and pass away.



But there are those who stay - and they are beautiful. There is the temptation to romanticize their life - to suggest that they somehow have achieved a level of goodness and purity that those of us who live in the corruption of the city can't achieve. There is the desire to say - it is better.




It isn't. I wasn't the only one to leave. All of my siblings left as did my parents. And it wasn't because they had always dreamed to leave. There are ways that isolated communities are difficult in ways that aren't nice.

There is part of me that wonders, what if? For it was good to connect to the roots of my language the place that speaks deepest. The well=spring that God gave me to use in viewing this world - where my poetry, photography, words, and craft come from. Because I am sure my photography would look different if I grew up somewhere else. My metaphors would shift. My inspiration certainly would not sit in the odd places it does.

more to come...

love letters from God: brooms and dust

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” Martin Luther King, Jr.


Today I come to you to speak of brooms. For the first years of our marriage we lived in apartments with wall-to-wall carpet so I didn't use a broom. Even after we bought our first house, I didn't use one often, we weren't often home. Then we had one of those broom vacuums which for some reason I thought was wonderful.

It wasn't until I had babies that I learned to appreciate brooms. They are quiet and as I used them when the babies were sleeping, I discovered them to be soothing too because I would get caught up in the gentle rhythm of the activity of sweeping. Somehow the silences, the musical rhythm, and the pleasure of knowing I was cleaning and that it was worthwhile pleased me.

I've noticed that in the first three Little House Books (I notice it in these because we listen to them ad nauseum around here) Laura often talks of her mother sweeping the floors. In fact, it seems whenever a significant household even occurs it is punctuated my Ma sweeping the floor.

In Little House on the Prairie, the first thing Ma does when the new house is ready to be moved into is she sweeps.

“We’re moving into the house today, and all the chips must be out.”

So they ate quickly, and hurried to carry all the chips out of the house. They ran back and forth as fast as they could, gathering their skirts full of chips and dumping them in a pile near the fire. but there were still chips on the ground inside the house when Ma began to sweep it with her willow-bough broom.

Ma limped, though her sprained ankle was beginning to get well. But she soon swept the earthen floor, and then Mary and Laura began to help her carrying things into the house.

In On the Banks of Plum Creek, an ox sticks his leg through the Ingalls' roof. They thought it was okay - but the next morning the entire roof collapses.

Then they carried out the rock and the earth and the bunches of hay that had fallen. Ma swept and swept again with the willow-twig boom.

That night they slept in their house, under a starry sky. Such a thing had never happened before.

Later in the story, they move into their new house.

They hurried to do the work. And in the lean-to they found a boughten broom! There seemed no end to the wonders in this house.

This broom had a long, straight, perfectly round, smooth handle. The broom part was made of thousands of thin, stiff, greeny-yellow bristles. Ma said they were broom straws. They were cut absolutely straight across the bottom , and they curved at the top into flat, firm shoulders. Stitches of red string held them tight. This broom was nothing like the round, willow-bough brooms that Pa made. It seemed too fine to sweep with. And it glided over the smooth floor like magic.

To read more love letters check out Wendy's special blog.

Garth Williams illustration for On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Photo Hunters: wild

It is odd. My husband never reads what I write and avoids looking at photos most of them time. However, if I discuss with him a project - he has opinions and ideas. I mentioned this Photo Hunter theme and he said I should get pictures of our girls acting wild. So I looked. This is as wild as I've photographed as when they get much wilder I can't photograph them as I get too stressed. But here you go - at my husband's request. Though he will never see it.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver


I need this wild life, this freedom. Zane Grey


“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” D.H. Lawrence


wild adj: Lacking supervision or restraint; Disorderly; unruly


There is a need to find and sing our own song, to stretch our limbs and shake them in a dance so wild that nothing can roost there, that stirs the yearning for solitary voyage. Barbara Lazear Ascher


Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune. Thomas Fuller


“If you feel the urge, don't be afraid to go on a wild goose chase. What do you think wild geese are for anyway?” Will Rogers


wild noun: Occurring, growing, or living in a natural state; not domesticated, cultivated, or tamed


One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good. H. G. Wells


“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air…” Ralph Waldo Emerson


"Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?" - Miguel de Cervantes


“All good things are wild, and free.” Henry David Thoreau


wild adj: Risky; imprudent: (thank heavens for Daddy's strong arms)


Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst. George Farquhar


“To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palms of your hand and eternity in an hour.” William Blake


I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. Agatha Christie


I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” Wendell Berry


A small tribute to my tulips last spring. My 'wild' children have no respect for those things cultured. :)

'Mid the sharp, short emerald wheat, scarce risen three fingers well,
The wild tulip at the end of its tube, blows out its great red bell,
Like a thin clear bubble of blood, for the children to pick and sell.
Robert Browning, Up at a Villa--Down in the City (st. 6)