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The online Gentlewood Cottage, anyway.
I will no longer be posting here on WordPress. Instead – please come visit Gentlewood Cottage at my NEW location!
All the archives and links and all that fun stuff will be there, as well as a few new additions – and I’ll be working feverishly to polish up a few other new things, as well.
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Photo by – BrittneyBush
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.” C.S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces
This is the view I grew up with. Minus Dan, of course. This is the valley that my parents bought when I was fifteen. All eighty-two acres are just as lovely.
When we moved there, the valley was filled with scrubby trees. We cleaned it out, dug a whole out of the hill, and put in our house. For the better part of a year, we lived in the shell of that house while we continued to work on it. We didn’t have running water or electricity at first.
We read books aloud to each other by lamplight in the winter evenings. We watched the fireflies as they filled the valley in the summer nights.
We hauled water up from a spring on the property and heated it on a wood burning stove. Dishes were washed by candelight. Showers were taken outside in a little solar heated shower, often at night, for privacy – not from neighbors because there aren’t any.
For a while, there were no windows on the main part of the house, but my siblings and I insisted on sleeping out there anyway. In the winter we heated stones on the wood stove, wrapped them in towels, and put them at the bottoms of our beds to keep our toes warm. In the summer, bats often joined us in our “bedroom” at night. We drifted off to sleep watching the fireflies glowing softly below us.
We loved ever minute of it! It was my parent’s dream come true… a piece of land, and a fairly self-sufficient home. We poured our sweat and blood into that land, and we love it. Those of us kids who have left home, look back on it with a fondness that we may never feel for any other piece of property. The siblings still at home may not feel that attachment, but that’s because they were still essentially babies while we were taming that bit of land.
Mom used every bit of daylight to plant her cottage garden in the front of the house, and for years she has nursed it along, and now it rivals many botanical gardens in it’s variety and beauty.
Dan and I sat on that very bench in my mom’s garden, under neath the fragrant blossoms of the crabapple tree and the sparkling canopy of stars, nearly every evening during the spring of our courtship. We watched the otherworldly dances of the fireflies that filled the valley below us. Many times since, we’ve commented that that valley must have the most amazing firefly display in the world. It’s incredible.
With the death of Lyle we would like to think that Kinsley learned that her parents do know what they’re talking about, and that we do tell her not to do things for her own good, since Dan had told her not to touch the fish less than an hour before the accident. We are afraid that lesson may not yet be learned, but we have hope that there were several other important lessons learned.
Lyle’s death showed Kinsley for the first time the permanence of death, and the loss that is felt even from the death of a lowly fish. It’s a loss that transcends the mere physical, even when it’s a pet. Experiencing that death showed the value of life. Seeing the value of life, makes us see that it is infinite, and should be eternal. Kinsley believes us without skepticism when we tell her that people can live again, in a better state, and that it is possible that even their pets will live again with them. We had talked about Heaven with her, and she did not understand why the fish could not come back to life. Now, she knows there is a waiting time, in this life, for all things to be made perfect, and meantime, that these losses cause pain.
We wish the loss of her fish could be her only loss in life, but there are sure to be more and deeper losses for her, as part of being alive in this difficult world, and because of that we shed tears of our own with her as she was weeping in mourning for her beloved fish.
Though Lyle was smaller than other fish which Kinsley has enthusiastically participated in catching, cleaning, and cooking, Kinsley has learned that sometimes it falls to us to protect innocent creatures in our lives.
Life is strange and often painful, but good because it is leading ever onward to perfect, eternal Life, of which we see glimpses now.
Today was a very sad day at Gentlewood Cottage. Through an unfortunate accident, Lyle met his maker today. If fish meet their maker.
The accident involved Kinsley removing Lyle from his comfortable home to examine him – unbeknownst to us. By the time Aunt Paula happened upon the scene, it was too late for Lyle.
It was pretty traumatic once Kinsley had comprehended that Lyle was dead. She wasn’t able to grasp what had happened, until I told her that Lyle had depended on us to feed him everyday, and watch him swimming in his nice bowl. Then she went into the living room and looked into the fishbowl – then began to cry.
She wailed for a long while for him, wishing that she could feed him again, and not wanting to bury him – but after a while, she gave in and led the funeral procession, with Lyle in his tiny casket in her hand.
She chose a spot under the clothesline, and after Glen dug the grave, Papa said a few words about Lyle’s life, and she carefully placed the Altoid casket into the hole.
Then she cried some more.
Then Marme and Grandma both called with their condolences.
As we were headed into the house, she asked Dan if he could read the book Lorenzo the Fish “in honor of Lyle”. Those were her words, by the way.
And so they did. She asked if Lyle had brothers and sisters and a mom and dad. Dan told her that Lyle had been pretty much alone in the world, and she wanted to know if it was because he was a little baby…
Goodbye Lyle. Thanks for being a good fish.
While I search through, sort out, and attempt to organize in my mind all of the multitudinous pictures, videos, and other things that I want to post here, I will leave you with a photo of this very tantalizing little boy.
I love him.
Things around here have been phenomenally crazy for the last few weeks. I can’t believe that it’s been nearly two whole weeks since I last posted.
We have so far:
Visited with my brother (Caleb) and his girlfriend, Alison who came home for a week.
Visited with my brother (Jared) who came home from college two times during the last couple of weeks.
Visited with my sister (Anna) and her family, who came home to participate in all the visiting (see above) and celebrate our mom’s and Bessie’s (my niece, Anna’s daughter) birthdays – (see below).
Started raising cockatiels with my brother (Zion).
Met my uncle from Chicago at a local(ish) campground.
Camped.
Hiked.
Fished. (Okay, only a little, but as my uncle says… “Fishing requires patience, but fishing with children requires the patience of an angel).
Uploaded and edited roughly 1400 photographs.
Celebrated my mom’s 49th birthday.
Celebrated my sister-in-law’s 46th birthday.
Celebrated my niece’s 3rd birthday.
Celebrated Easter Sunday.
Changed 224 diapers.
Had/have a bad cold and a case of hives (mine!).
Attended a play.
Prepared roughly 42 meals.
Washed around 746 loads of laundry.
Washed 300 loads of dishes in the dishwasher.
Had a picnic.
Did major grocery shopping twice.
Took a mass family picture involving 20 individual and wiggly people.
Played at the park.
Juggled three fussy babies.
Figured taxes. Repeatedly.
Bought two cars.
Cleaned up approximately 29 spills.
Visited the Science Center.
Put out four oven fires.
Had two tires repaired.
Potty trained a two year old.
Mopped the floor. Once.
Learned of two separate and potentially serious car accidents involving my parents and my brother.
Photographed most of the above.
The exert below was taken from Elizabeth Elliot’s book Keep A Quiet Heart
When we were growing up our parents taught us, by both word and example, to pay attention to little things. If you do a thing at all, do it thoroughly: make the sheets really smooth on the bed, sweep all the corners and move all the chairs when you sweep the kitchen, roll the toothpaste tube neatly and put the cap back on, clean the hair out of the brush each time you use it, hang your towel straight on the rod, fold your napkin and put it in the silver ring right before you leave the table, never wet your finger when you turn pages. They kept promises made to us as faithfully as they kept those made to adults. They taught us to do the same. You didn’t accept an invitation to a party and then not turn up, or agree to help with Vacation Bible School and back out because a more interesting activity presented itself. The only financial debt my parents ever incurred was a mortgage on a house, which my father explained was in a special class because it was real estate which would always have value.
When I went to boarding school the same principles I had been taught at home were emphasized. There was a hallway with small oriental rugs which we called “Character Hall” because the headmistress, Mrs. DuBose, could look down that hall from the armchair where she sat in the lobby and spot any student who kicked up a corner of a rug and did not replace it. She would call out to correct him “It’s those tiny things in your life which will crack you even when you get out of this school!” In the little things our character was revealed. Our response would make or break us. “Don’t go around with a Bible under your arm if you didn’t sweep under the bed,” she said, for she would have no pious talk coming out of a messy room.
“Great thoughts go best with common duties. Whatever therefore may be your office regard it as a fragment in an immeasurable ministry of love” [Bishop Brooke Foss Wescott, b. 1825].
It is not easy to find children or adults who are dependable, careful, thorough, and faithful. So many lives seem honeycombed with small failures, neglectful of the little things that make the difference between order and chaos. Perhaps it is because they are so seldom taught that visible things are signs of invisible reality; that common duties may be “an immeasurable ministry of love.” The spiritual training of souls must be inseparable from practical disciplines, as Jesus so plainly taught; “The man who can be trusted in little things can be trusted in great; the man who is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in great. If then you cannot be trusted with money, that tainted thing, who will trust you with genuine riches! And if you cannot be trusted with what is not yours, who will give you what is your very own?” (Luke 16:10-12). (The footnote to “your very own” says, “Jesus is speaking of most intimate possessions a man can have; those that are spiritual.”)
Remember Cinder? She was a chimpanzee that we saw during our visit to the Saint Louis Zoo. For some reason, she really peaked our interest, and we came home and did quite a bit of reading about her and the autoimmune disorder which caused her to continually loose her hair.
She died suddenly, last Sunday, of apparently mysterious causes. Seeing the Chimpanzees interacting with each other and reading the accounts of how they reacted to Cinder’s death is pretty sad.
Here’s a video of the news clip regarding Cinder’s death.
In other chimpanzee news (how strange is it for two news stories about two different chimps to hit the national news in the same week?), Travis the chimp, of Connecticut, had a very bad week as well. He went on a spree of apparently random violence which baffled his owner, his victim, and many animal experts. Lymes disease? A reaction to drugs (legal, I hope)? Mid-life crisis? A case of animal instincts? Strange.
Looking at the muscles on Cinder does sort of tend to make me think I wouldn’t keep a chimpanzee as a pet, though.
One of the simplest meals we’ve had recently, and so satisfying on these cold winter evenings…
We had some leftover roast beef. And leftover green beans with plenty of flavorful juices. And about a half a can of leftover beef broth.
And carrots and celery, which are always threatening to up and rot, in my crisper drawer. In fact, Dan calls my crisper drawer “the rotter”. We also have a cabinet which he calls “the staler” but that’s beside the point.
We added some potatoes, which were beginning to grow lots of eyes, and needed to be used. Some crushed garlic, some pepper rub for steaks, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce, and a smidge of truffle salt.
The girls helped make the stew. They’ve become very useful lately, just ask them.
Then, I took some of my wonderful Artisan bread dough, which is often in the fridge, and make parker house style rolls, which tasted sourdough-ish and were very wonderful.
So perfect for dinner on a one degree night. The whole satisfying dinner required about 20 minutes in the kitchen, and then made the house smell wonderful for the rest of the afternoon!
