House Art Journal

  A student of mine gifted our family this hand-carved statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and it is a joy to display it throughout the month of June, with flowers from my garden. Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us and on our country.

My daughter is now married. Like my own marriage and childbirth, my main emotional reaction to this event was, "How am I supposed to feel?" There was joy and pleasure but also simple shock at the momentousness of the moment, so unnerving as to be unreal. These are the sort of pivots in the stream of life which you have to keep holding up in front of you and wondering over.  I remember my own wedding bouquet, made by a florist, so huge I termed it a "bush" and ripped it down to half its size. We forgot about it at the reception. On my honeymoon, I threw it into Lake Michigan and watched the pink petal roses and white freesia float off dreamily in the vast silver and blue and gray magnificence of the Lake. My own daughter wanted a bouquet from my flower garden instead of the florist, and decreed that I only was entrusted to make it. Her groom's mother had bought her lilies, since my daughter loves them and there were none in my garden, but I paired these with whit

This post was supposed to have been published years ago, but I never got around to putting it together. For the sake of my sister, I'm doing it now. It's fall, and fall is the perfect time for a cloak. Unlike cardigans which are more of a spring thing, cloaks seem particularly fitting to fall, mainly because, unlike cardigans, cloaks communicate mystery. And mystery is precisely the sort of ambience you want for Halloween! These directions are for a sort of cloak poncho, the simplest kind to make and wonderful for children. The first step is to buy the right amount of fleece in the color you want. Our family uses either gray or red, for obvious literary reasons. Take the child you'll be making the cloak for and (you can do this in the store) measure the amount of fabric you'll need to buy to cover them from the part of the legs where you want the bottom of the cloak to fall (knees, calves, etc.) up to their shoulders, and double it. If you want the cloak floor length, m

To subscribe to  The Culture Recovery Journals on Substack, click here! For the past year, as part of my morning ritual, I've been handwriting my thoughts on recovering culture in our rapidly culture-less society in some little journals, about fifteen minutes a day. This past fall I was delighted to see the first article to come out of it published in Soul Gardening Journal . Entitled, "A Theology of Locality," it discusses how important proximity is to our souls. Catholic spirituality underlines this: the sacraments cannot be received by avatar: you need to be physically present in order to receive Christ in the Eucharist, to receive His mercy in confession, or even to attend Mass. In our Technopoly, such proximity is more important than ever. I'm not going to post the article here, because Soul Gardening desperately needs subscriptions, and I want to encourage you all to subscribe, or even just donate. I'm sure you can get a copy of the journal it's in

Today my youngest was delighting in her baby sneakers so I snapped a picture of her enjoying her feet: we received the shoes used, and, as the picture shows, they are even more well-loved now. They are certainly adorable, nearly as adorable as she is. I love the combination of the worn cotton canvas and the worn-down-to-the-plastic beads still winking in the sunlight.

Working on my new novel series from 4 am to 6 am at this desk has been a blessing this past summer. I write at a salvaged desk that just fits between our two bookshelves in our parlor ("away room") surrounded by some of our best-loved books (including the History of Middle Earth, gifted to us by a great friend). Someone noted this desk is very neat. That's because the only thing I do here is write my novel.  This is my "regular" desk where everything else in my life gets done or gets lost. I am grateful for both desks.  And there you have the two halves of my life these days.