Family Bike Rides

 Last night we went on a family bike ride.  

As we gathered cameras and helmets and K.J. pumped air into sagging tires I had a flashback to when I was a teenager and our family opted to do a self-guided river-rafting adventure down the Nantahala River.  At least, I'm pretty sure that was this trip, and we were on the Nantahala?  Maybe I'm wrong.  But I'm definitely right about it being the self-guided option, and without the official instructor giving instructions, I remember those first moments on the river.  

None of us were really working together, we were frustrated, but then finally, somehow, we got into a groove and figured out what we were doing and had a really good time.

Last night we all had various problems starting out:  the wrong shoes, unfamiliar bike gears, bikes that were uncomfortable sizes, someone (maybe me) who went on a 5-mile ride with her husband the night before already had a sore rear end and groaned when she sat back down on that seat.  K.J. said, "This might be a really short ride."  Who could blame him for thinking so?

But somehow, we found our groove.

And that's just the way it is with family endeavors or maybe with any other kind of group.  The less-than-stellar start won't define the whole journey.  The grumpy attitudes will get worked out, and the best part of the memory will be like mine rafting down the Nantahala with my family:  the taste of the cold, sweet water splashing in my mouth and the thrill of the ride.

Five Quotes, vol. xix

book box spotted in Amboise, France

It's been a whirlwind of a week for our household beginning with a full day Sunday and then leaving Monday morning for K.J. to begin his cycling challenge of 400 km in 4 days. 

I read an article a few months ago about why time during the lock-down for COVID-19 seemed to pass so quickly for so many.  It explained how when we have the same experiences each day, the days run together because our brains aren't processing any new information, but when we have new experiences time seems to stretch out.  I have definitely experienced that sense of time stretching out this week as we slept in a new place every night and I drove unfamiliar roads and navigated new cities each day.  Last Friday feels like a year ago.

There hasn't been loads of time for reading this week, but there have been a few minutes each morning with a novel and a few chapters of the thoughtful companionship of The Next Right Thing book.  

"I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief."

- from The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry

"That's an appropriate way to handle yourself in a storm:  take cover and wait for it to pass over.  But it's possible to live with the dread of a storm even when the sky is clear without a threat of rain.  It's possible to take cover even when there's nothing to take cover from, except for a heavy idea or a recurring thought in the night."

- The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman

"The disciples traveling with Jesus most likely thought the goal that day was to get from one place to another.  In that moment, in the way God always does, he made the side of the road center stage.  He took what they thought was a footnote and made it a headline, a side-of-the-road detour in the upside-down kingdom of God."

- The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman

"Bartimaeus didn't say, 'I have to regain my sight or else.'  He simply said that was what he wanted, and he left the next step to Jesus.  Desire is only toxic when we demand our desires be satisfied on our terms and in our timing.  Knowing what we want and getting what we want are not necessarily the same thing."

- The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman

"Every yes you say affects every person who lives in your house.  Knowing what you want is an automatic filter to help you say yes to the things you've already predecided matter, and to let the rest fall gently away."

- The Next Right Thing, Emily P. Freeman

Five Quotes, vol.xviii

                    

inside The Chaucer Bookshop, Canterbury, England

I've been choosing a theme for my reading each month this year, and this month I decided to focus on reading Noreen's books.  I've listened to her tell so many stories that even events that happen in her fiction sound familiar to me because in every story there are bits of herself and her own varied life experiences.  I found some humor in reading a romance novel written by my 94-year-old friend this week, but I was most moved by reading Noreen's memoir of how she came to have faith in Jesus as a busy, married mother of five in the early 1970s.  I love reading people's stories, and I included a small excerpt of her describing the garden because the garden she looked out on after a significant learning experience in her life, is the same garden I look out on as I ponder all God is teaching me in this season.  My children are now the ones playing beneath the willow and the cherry tree.  I'm now the one learning to rest in the God who knows my limitations as I look out at the gray stone walls.

"Few could admit to being the victim of a fatal, historical error, she told herself proudly.  Few people lived, as she did, with the constant feeling of having been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.  And fewer still realized, as she did, that all that was worth admiring, all that was beautiful and sublime, seemed to be vanishing with hardly a trace.  The world, lamented Prudencia Prim, had lost its taste for beauty, harmony, and balance.  And few could see this truth; just as few could feel within themselves the resolve to make a stand."

- The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalia Sanmartin Fenollara

"...she was a mistress of the art of delicacy.  Miss Prim firmly believed that delicacy was the force that drove the universe.  Where it was lacking, she knew, the world became gloomy and dark."

- The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalia Sanmartin Fenollara

"And it was as if a voice said: 'I know your limitations.  I don't expect you to do something you cannot do.  I only ask you to come to me and take me as your Saviour, then I can carry your burden and use you for the work I've planned for you to do.  The work that only you can do for me.'"

- Eye of the Storm, Noreen Riols

"I put down the receiver and looked through the window at the children playing in the garden below.  The sky was the colour of a tea rose and the pink and white blossom sprayed upon the cherry tree was stretching up to meet it; and I saw the beauty of the old gray stone walls encircling my home, the graceful sweep of the weeping willow whose leaves were dusting the lawn."

- Eye of the Storm, Noreen Riols

"Bookish people, I'm sorry to say, have an unfortunate tendency toward elitism.  I know this because I am a bookish person, and also because I hang out with other bookish sorts...We want to cultivate good taste in literature, yes, but there is a marked difference between good taste and elitism."

- The Read-Aloud Family, Sarah Mackenzie

August 2020

August can be such a transitional month here.  It began with a week-long heatwave, temperatures hovering around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and is ending with a cool front, highs in the 60s, and outside my window tinges of red are beginning to show around the edges of the leaves.  

So August brought summer fun AND the return of school.  It brought an unexpected quick trip to England and rising COVID-19 numbers.  It brought the reminder that comes every August that teaching the kids is a full-time job for me, even though they can do a lot on their own.  It's brought the reminder that investing in learning with my kids is good and fruitful work, and I love it.  And so here we are entering the last quarter of 2020.  K.J. shared this with me last week, and it made me laugh:

May we all learn good lessons and not act like spoiled children. 😀

August 2 - Summer BBQ with Friends

August 3 - Church in the Park, Amazing Grace to the Ukulele 

August 4 - Last Bike Ride of Summer Vacation

August 5 - Sunny, Summer Day

August 6 - Homemade Dipped Fudge-cicle

August 7 - Falling Leaves Drying Out in the Heat

August 8 - Ripening Pears

August 9 - Hottest Church in the Park

August 10 - The Dawn of the First Day of School

August 11 - Science Experiment

August 12 - Mid-August Outside our Window

August 13 - Spontaneous Trip Across the Channel

August 14 - A Nation of Pun-makers

This deserves one more picture.

August 15 - The Old Bank Bookshop

August 16 - I can't even with those trees.

August 17 - An Atmospheric Spot to Take Shelter from the Rain

August 18 - Farewell, little island.

August 19 - Unpacking

August 20 - The garden is still lovely.

August 21 - Beautiful Start to Dinner

August 22 - Saturday LEGO-Building

August 23 - "When pressed, I say she is elegant."

August 24 - A Good C.S. Lewis Quote from Jonathan Rogers' Newsletter

August 25 - Moved J's Desk Downstairs

August 26 - Evening Sky

August 27 - Morning Sky

August 28 - Workout

August 29 - A Favorite Street in Our Town

August 30 - Church on Zoom 

August 31 - First of E's Literature Course Books

Five Quotes, vol. xvii

 

Mural in Oxfam, Deal, England

I have been fully immersed in managing school this week, and my reading life reflects that.  Some of my quotes come from the kids' reading for school with Wodehouse for a little levity and a rather long passage from Dickens that felt very prescient to the way so many people--with varied and opposing opinions--feel pressured to do good these days.  Even when human nature is bad, I am oddly comforted in its sameness through the centuries.  We are capable of great good and great evil, and it has always been thus.  And thus I'll end with some Thomas Aquinas I read alongside E this week that struck me as the most challenging belief for people through the ages, yet if we believe that God planned for the murder of His own son to pay for all our badness, then we know this must be true.

"Captain Kelly pulled a chair back and lowered himself into it with a tight-trousered man's slow caution."

- Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse

"God is constantly changing the Earth He made.  He carves rocky precipices with wind, pounds beaches with ocean waves, and softens soil with showers."

- Creation to Cathedrals, Ray and Charlene Notgrass

"...his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.  You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offense, and shoot them.  You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye.  You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion.  You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn't, or conscientiously couldn't, be concordant.  You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names.  Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account.  You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist.  Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said...in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts."

- The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens

"...there must exist something the existence of which is necessary."

- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

"This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good."

- Thomas Aquinas

Feed the Birds

The first morning we wake up in England is at the tail-end of the recent heatwave on this side of the Atlantic, and it feels stuffy inside.  J and I go out to eat breakfast on a bench overlooking the harbor.  It's cool and overcast now, and it's such a relief after the constant sweating of the past week.  The sound of squawking seagulls interrupts the morning peace.  I look just to my left and point out to J that the seagulls must be hoping for a few droppings as the bins are emptied.

This man's partner walks toward us to empty another bin and stops to shoot the breeze.

"We feed the baby seagulls every morning."

So they're not just hoping for accidental droppings; they're flying in for a breakfast buffet they know to expect.

"Seagulls are smarter than you think.  Sometimes people put bags on the top of the bins to keep them from getting in, and we've seen them go flying straight into them to knock them off the top."

"Sometimes we have to break up fights between the seagulls and the crows."

My mind conjures up a picture of rival gangs in West Side Story, and I'm reminded that every life and every job has something interesting to lighten the load.  It makes me happy that these men spend their mornings feeding the birds while they keep the harbor clean.

Five Quotes vol. xvi

Baggins Book Bazaar in Rochester, England

I spent several days this past week doing one of my favorite things:  adding to my book collection by visiting second-hand bookshops like the one pictured above.  K.J. booked our typical off-season September trip to England back in July, but as the UK began adding various European countries back to a list of places requiring a two-week quarantine we began to feel the September trip might not happen.  We decided very spur-of-the-moment to just go for a shorter, unplanned trip, feeling that would be better than no trip at all.  

We felt pretty safe doing it as we take the ferry and can stay in the open air whilst traveling, and we knew we could enjoy a lot in a socially-distanced way.  All the other elements that needed to line up worked, so we did it, and we're glad we did.  And now I have a huge new stack of books to form my TBR for the rest of 2020.

"Sidney hated the phrase 'with respect.'  It always meant the opposite.

- Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death, James Runcie

"Undergraduates, especially those in their first year, are not, of course, quite sane or quite adult.  It is sometimes considered that they are not quite human."

- Death on the Cherwell, Mavis Doriel Hay

"In a world so full of beautiful things, it seems a pity that one has got to talk about Mr. Frisby's gastric juices, but it is the duty of the historian to see life steadily and see it whole."

- Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse

"It was, he perceived, a day for joy and adventure and romance."

- Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse

"Really, Paterson, I am at my wit's end about Anne."

Mr. Frisby grunted again, this time to indicate the opinion that she had not had to travel far."

- Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse