Lorehouse

We're Going on a Side Quest

2026-05-16

Hello Goodmoles and goodmice and dibbuns and elders and Guosim and anyone else who may arrive on this page. I have been distracted by a sidequest inspired by my son's 12th birthday. For his birthday at the beginning of April, I got him the complete Redwall novels (all 22). He has been tearing through them and sharing his favorite moments and characters with me. It has been an amazing and nostalgic experience seeing him enjoy these books the way I did at his age (and still do).

One of the things that has strongly struck him as it struck me is the fabulous descriptions of food and feasts. Bluesky has the wonderful Redwall Feasts Bot if you want to be suddenly hungry every time you log in to Bluesky. And I frequently get handed a page to read that he found particularly spectacular... only to find myself reading a long list of amazing food.

I love feeding people. And I love reading about food. And why don't we have feasts like Redwall does? I mean yeah, we don't live in a communal society where everybody works hard to make these feasts happen, but fasting and feasting are important cycles of life, and I think we should embrace them more. The thought had infected me and I found myself thinking I should host monthly feasts for people that are Redwall-inspired. Rich, seasonal vegetable and fruits, old-world style dishes, too much variety to be remotely reasonable... sounds great. And I built a little webpage to help me plan it. And then made it pretty so other people would enjoy looking at it too. You can see it on the right-hand sidebar of my website here, the link titled "Redwall Feasts". Or you can click right here: Redwall Feasts.

You might also see my box to input your email address and get blog posts here in your inbox, if you so desire. And you do so desire, right?

Poem (Untitled)

2026-04-06

I climbed a tree too high for me,
Ascending to the skies,
My Babel tower, great, lofty,
to love and idolize.

Its branches green with early leaves
And all with flowers crowned,
I, wand'ring in its blooming eaves,
Did not attend the ground.

Lost in the bold and sweet bird-song
And heedless of the risk,
I drove upward, and branches strong
I grasped within my fist.

The way was easy, and the day,
with blossom-draughts perfumed,
Poured golden sun upon my way
The path that I had doomed.

At last I grasped the highest twig
that could my weight withstand,
topped with a lacy flower sprig
I plucked with fearless hand.

Alas for me, my single-mind
That danger did deny,
For far away on my ascent
The storm-clouds did arise.

And as I held that final bough,
The wind began to grow,
And sun, which during my ascent
Cast shadows down below,

Was hidden in an instant when
The clouds consumed its light.
The altitude that grand had been,
was now a source of fright.

The rushing tempest shook the tree
As I tightened my hold,
But those strong branches proved flimsy,
For I had been too bold.

Thus snapped the limb beneath my feet,
And though my hands clung fast,
They clung to naught but blossoms sweet
Whose blooming time was past.

I fell! Oh God, how then I prayed,
As branches snagged my skin.
And halfway down, my arms all splayed,
I seized a passing limb.

Now the rain began to fall,
Not slow, but all at once.
I grappled with this tree so tall
As one an ent confronts.

The ground was still so far below;
My blood dripped in my face.
I had fetched a mighty blow,
My joy now my disgrace.

Anyone who has climbed a tree
Most certainly does know:
However free ascent may be,
Descent is fraught and slow.

The branches that present themselves
Along the upward climb
Seem very small and far away
Seen below and behind.

And so it was, and doubly so,
when in the raging gale
I clung to slick and shaking boughs,
My heart and strength would fail.

Did I bring this upon myself?
I did not call this storm.
And yet, clinging to my tree shelf,
my skin and clothing torn,

My aching head and swimming eyes
Struggling to think and see,
I know I climbed beyond my strength
And to warning paid no heed.

No thought for clouds so far away,
No care for their foreboding.
I longed to touch the sky of day
And stand high as a queen.

I reached for what I wanted now,
The future all be damned.
Lulled by the easy sunlit boughs,
I left the solid land.

But now the tree has proven weak,
The storm has opened strong.
The journey up was proud and free,
The journey down is long.

I lack the strength to best the wind,
The lightning and the rain.
I climbed the tree with no recourse
To get back down again.

Parenting (as) a sinner

2026-04-06

Sometimes I feel like I'm a little kid who found a knife (as my two-year old mysteriously did a couple days ago), and I knew as soon as I found it with its wooden handle and shiny blade that I was not supposed to have this knife. But it was pretty, and I was sure I was old enough to manage it just fine on my own. So I started cutting at a stick with it and watching the bark shave away in satisfying, if clumsy, manner. Until the knife slips (it's not that sharp), and I cut myself.

So I run to my Father, bleeding and crying, and my Father gently reminds me that I knew better than to play with a sharp knife, but He also bandages up my wound and hugs me. He takes away the knife that I should never have had, and I am upset by this because I am very small and foolish, but I also know I did this to myself. And even though I am sorry for what I did and say I won't play with knives in future, I still have this cut that aches and hurts.

It keeps me up at night stinging and there's nothing that can be done about it, it just has to heal. If I mess with it and poke it, it hurts; if I mess with the bandage too much, it might get infected and need antibiotics. If I let an infection get out of hand, it could result in an amputation or even gangrene and death, so the bandage is important. I also won't be able to do things for a while. Maybe I won't be able to hold a pen right, or play piano well. It will hurt when I use it. These are the natural consequences of my choices. My Father loves me and has forgiven my folly and poor choices, but the consequences are part of the choice.

The worse situation is that perhaps, instead of cutting myself, you came and sat beside me. Maybe you knew I shouldn't have the knife, or maybe you assumed I was old enough and knew what I was doing. Maybe you jerked my arm or maybe you were just watching. And maybe my hand slipped and instead of cutting myself, I cut you.

Now you are the one in tears, who is restricted in your activites, who can't write or play piano. Maybe you need stitches, and maybe you're not very good at leaving the wound alone. In this way, somebody else suffers from my poor choices. This is how I feel when my bad decisions, my sin, hurts my children.

My Father probably gives me consequences. Almost certainly I lose your trust in me, a more precious thing than I can possibly know. But the pain is not mine to bear, and if I don't value the things I ought, I may not be sorry for what I've done. I may go on to hurt other people.

This is mostly me coping with the fact that the God I turn to when I sin and when I don't is a good and loving Father, and the struggles I have are the results of sin. Sometimes (usually) mine, sometimes others', and sometimes just the sinful state of the world. When my sin wounds my children, that's the worst of all. I'd rather go through years of pain than see my children suffer from my negligence, selfishness, anger, unkindness.

There's no moral here. No pat wrap-up for it all to end on a high note. This is where my head is right now and I am grateful for a Father who lets me cry in His lap and Who bandages my wounds, and Who loves me no matter the state of my heart.

Thinking about repentance and forgiveness

2026-03-12

March has been a very strange month. If I'm honest, February was no less strange, but it was more actively strange and March is a suspension between action and forward movement. It is a month of waiting. What I am waiting for, I'm not ready to say publicly, but either way, waiting is an uncomfortable place to be. Facing down a monumental life change (to me, doubtless it would not be to many other people), caught between how things have been and how things will be, I find my past catching up with me and asking for resolutions before I move forward into something new.

During the last four weeks, I have been mainlining the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, as well as the writings of the Church Fathers. On the one hand, this kind of mass consumption of literature makes it difficult to stop and digest the small things. This is not close-reading. This is wholesale brain-reshaping. It is intentional and determined.

The last four and a half years have been years of parenting very small kids while going through grad school, and it definitely shaped my brain and my heart and my perspectives. Most of these have been positive things, but some have not. Some things have made my heart hard to things I should have avoided, and opened me up to situations and choices that might have been obvious had I not been so distracted by the voices and hopes and desires that surrounded me.

This is not a confessional where I'm going to lay out all the sins of my heart from the last 4+ years. Definitely not. It is a place where I'm going to work through my thoughts on what it is to live in repentance. A really strong influence on me through grad school and currently is a friend I made there, an Antiochian Orthodox priest who speaks about life as a constant chance for repentance.

We live surrounded by people (I'm going to refer to "men" a lot because it so often is very powerful men, but let's be clear, women are included in this) who commit horrible sins, crimes, atrocities, and when it becomes obvious they are going to face consequences like ostracization or loss of power, they "repent". They issue apologies. They have loud, vociferous "come to Jesus" moments that they have publicly, and then "the church" – here referring to the Evangelical political machine that is unrelated to The Church – welcomes them back with open arms, citing desire for reconciliation.

That is not how this works. It is certainly not how God works. Repentance, turning from your past actions and reorienting your entire life to repair the harm you have done, is not a mediocre apology and a return to glory. Repentance is when you acknowledge the wrong you have done at the very core of your being and accept the consequences. It is not saying, "I'm really really sorry I killed that guy in anger, so I shouldn't have a prison sentence", or "I'm super sorry I sexually abused women over whom I had power, so I shouldn't lose any of my power." Actual repentance involves knowing that you should never have any of that power again, that you deserve the social stigma and ostracization of having done real harm in the world, and then spending years, probably the rest of your life, working to atone for it.

When Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) repents in the Bible, he says, "Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount." We assume he makes good on this promise, but it is only after this repentance that acknowledges the harm, attempts to rectify it over and beyond the initial crime, and a total change of trajectory (giving half your stuff to the poor? What would that do to your lifestyle?) that Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house."

The easy part has been done. I have looked at this as it applied to the really nasty men who have done unbelievable amounts of harm and faked repentance to get out of justice. I can sit comfortably in my home and judge Kanye West and Mark Driscoll and scores of others for failing to repent and judge "the church" for failing to hold anybody accountable.

Unfortunately, this is where the mass intake of Church Fathers and the Pentateuch as well as the wise advice of my friend come into things. I cannot apply these words to other people and be satisfied with myself. The call, over and over again, is to apply them to my own way of living. Every moment is an opportunity for me to repent. For the last few months, I have been in a process of identifying and repenting of sins with the goal of escaping the pain and consequences of my actions. I go to the Lord and confess and hope that gets me out of the bad part of repentance.

When we talk about consequences, I don't mean punishment. God is not looking to smite me or anybody else. He has laid enough natural consequences out before us. When I look at how I've prioritized things incorrectly in my life, the natural consequences are things like, my kids having a mom who wasn't patient or present when she needed to be. My husband getting frustrated and lonely because I wasn't making time for him and that frustration spilling over into the household. A chaos in my life that comes from my own lack of self-discipline (we aren't talking about a messy house, we are talking about certain areas of selfishness that lead to imbalance in the household). The hardest is seeing my kids suffer from my own actions.

In this last month particularly, I've been learning to embrace the consequences not as fun or something to get out of, but as a natural part of the repentance process. I am already forgiven and in communion with God. When the pain or grief of my sin overwhelm me, I know He is there to help me get through it. He is letting me go through it because it is how I grow stronger and because it is what is best for me, but He is with me through it.

A final note, for many years now I have used the Jesus Prayer, sometimes called the Prayer of a Single Thought (derived and reminiscent of the prayer of the tax collector in Luke 18:10-14) to center myself. The full version is, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." When my heart is overwhelmed, as has often been the case especially with the state of the nation and the world this last year, it is simply, "Lord, have mercy." Any time my thoughts stray even vaguely into dangerous territory, I recite it over and over, focusing on what it means for the Lord to have mercy on me, and how much He always has.

I pray now and always, "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner." And He does.

An Old English Herbal

2026-01-22

I am here with an update on my manuscript transcription. I first and last discussed this in the enthusiastically-titled post, New Project! back in mid October. Life has been quite busy since then but I have not abandoned my quest. In fact, I printed out the first page on three separate, dramatically zoomed in on three of the four quadrants. The first page looks like this:

These came on some travels with me and I made about a page and a half, or about line 26 in the transcription below. I then got distracted by the whole November and December whirlwind and made very little progress. When I came back to it seriously, I found myself second-guessing everything I'd done and ended up going back to the one existing transcription I could find, Thomas Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. As you may or may not recall from my earlier post, I had given up on trying to OCR the hopeless jumble of alphabets contained in this book and was working straight from the manuscript, a wonderful decision when a manuscript is so stunningly beautiful. His own transcription is quite dated and I found myself making more modern choices, though not with perfect consistency. After transcribing, there will be the task of normalizing and translating that will be a significant amount of work.

I do this for fun.

That said, here is the first page transcribed line by line starting with that beautiful capital eth. Delightfully (this is sarcasm), the page cuts off mid-word and I am going to have to go straight on to 20v of the manuscript. I have also to added a quick and dirty translation below the transcription for the satisfaction of those who are interested but don't want/have the ability to read the OE text. For those in the know, I have saved the þ and ð and æ characters as well as the Tironian et (this thingy: ⁊) but have opted to replace the wynn with a regular "w".

Ðeoswyrt
þeman betonican nemneð
heo biþ cenneð on mædum ⁊ clæ-
num dunlandum ⁊ onġefriþerdum
stowum seo ðeah ġehwæþer ġeþæs
mannes sawle ġehir lic-homan hio
hyne scyldeþ wið unhirlic nihtgen-
gum ⁊ wið egeslicum gesihðum ⁊ swef-
num. ⁊ seo wyrt byþ swyþe haliga ⁊ þur
þu hi scealt niman on agustes
monðe butan iserne on þonne þu hi
genumene hæbbe ahnyse þa mol-
ðan of þæt hyre nanwiht onneclyfie
⁊ þonne ðrig hi onsceaðe swyþe þearle
⁊ mid wyrt truman mid ealle ge-
wyrc to duste bruc hyre þonne ⁊ hyre
byrig þonne ðu beþurfe.
Lif mannes heafoð tobrocen sy
genim þa ylcan wyrte betonican
scearfa hy þonne ⁊ genid swyþe smale
to dufte genim þonne twega trymes-
sa wæge þige hit þonne on hatum beore
þonne halað þæt heafod swyðe hraðe
æfter þam drince.
Wið eagena sar genim þáre ylcan wyrte
wyrt truman reoð onwætere to
þriddan dæle ⁊ ofþæm wætere beþa þa
eag. ⁊ genim þæræ sylfan wyrte
leaf ⁊ bryt hy ⁊ lege ofen þa eagan
on þone and-wlatan.
Wið earena sar genim þære ylcan
wyrte leaf þonne heo grenost beo
wyl on wætere on wring þæt wos ⁊ siþþan
hyt gestanden beo do hit eft wearm
⁊ þurh wulle drype on þæt eare.
Wiþ egena dymnessa genim þære
ylcan wyrte betonican anre
tremesse wæge ⁊ wyl on wætere
⁊ fyle druncan fæstendum þonne ge-
wanað hit þone dæl þæs blodes
ðe seo dymnys of cymð.
Wiþ tyrende eagen genim þa ylcan
wyrte betonican ⁊ syle þigccean
heo ġegodað ⁊ onliht þæra eagena
scearpnysse.
Wiþ swyþlycne blodryme of nosum
genim þa ylcan wyrta betonican
⁊ cnucn hy ⁊ gemeng þærto su- (here the page cuts off)

Translation:
1. This plant
2. that is called betony
3. it is found in meadows and
4. clean downlands and shaded
5. places. It is good whether for
6. man's soul or for his body (this word is literally lich-home), she
7. him shields against monstrous night-
8. walkers and against horrible visions and
9. dreams. And this herb is very wholesome and thus
10. you shall gather in August
11. month but with no iron; and when you it
12. have gathered, shake the mold
13. off that to it no whit shall cleave
14. and then dry it in the shade exceedingly and completely
15. and with the plant root all together
16. work it to dust, take of it and
17. taste when you need.
18. If a man's head be broken,
19. take that same herb betony,
20. scrape it and knead it very small
21. into dust. Take from it two drams
22. weight, and consume it in hot beer,
23. then that head will heal very quickly
24. after the drink.
25. For sore eyes, take the same herb's
26. plant-root and boil in water to the
27. third part (reduce to a third) and of that water bathe the
28. eye. And take that same herb
29. leaf and break (bruise) it and lay it over the eye
30. on the face.
31. For sore ear, take this same
32. herb leaf when it is greenest,
33. boil in water and wring the juice and when
34. it be stood (cooled, I think?), make it again warm
35. and through wool, drip it in the ear.
36. For dimness of eye take there
37. this same herb, betony, one
38. dram weight and boil in water
39. and give to drink while fasting, then
40. it wanes from him the blood
41. from which the dimness comes.
42. For teary eyes, take the same
43. herb betony and give to drink,
44. it will do good and light the eyes
45. sharpness.
46. For sever bloodflow from the nose,
47. take the same herb betony
48. and knock it and mix thereto (here my word is interrupted, but I looked ahead)
49. some deal of salt... (TO BE CONTINUED)

This is on pages 71 and 72 of Leechdoms, wortcunning, and starcraft of early England, which correspond to pages 193 and 194 of the Internet Archive PDF. The manuscript itself can be found through the British Library in their online archive, here: Cotton MS Vitellius C III, starting on 20r.

New Year, Old Me

2026-01-04

I'm getting overly ambitious at this new year, and trying out something I have seen Emily Liu and Cory Zue do, though doubtless others have done it as well. If you comment on the Bluesky post that announces this blog post, it will show up here as a comment! I'm not sure/not thrilled with some of the other ways to handle comments on a statically generated site, so this is what I'm going with for now. It may not be a permanent solution but it's a fun way to spend an evening for me today!

The main reason I'm doing this is that I want my posts to be more conversations than just me blabbing at the world (though I'll do lots of that too).

In the New Year's Resolutions category, that's not something I've ever done much of. But I do have some goals this year. Last year I set a goal of reading 52 books, and read 55! That was a big deal because for the last few years almost all of my reading has been for grad school classes. If I read 5 books for fun in a year, it was a win. This year I'd like to just set the same goal. 52 books is a book a week, and with four kids, two of whom I homeschool and one of whom is just... two, that's plenty ambitious.

So far I have finished one: Arise, O God, by Father Andrew Stephen Damick. Father Andrew is a fantastic writer and podcaster whom I have the honor of calling a colleague (we were grad school buddies and translated Beowulf in class one particularly strenuous semester) and friend. He hosts numerous podcasts and has written a few books, but this one is a small, approachable, and yet beautiful explanation of the Evangelion, the good news. Because he writes from an Orthodox Christian perspective but comes from an Evangelical background, he first strips away the sales-pitch gospel that is usually presented in American Christianity before contextualizing the terms and the facts of the Good News in their first-century Greek usage. This change in perspective also is a change in position (that's how perspective works; to see things from a new angle, you have to move to that new angle). No longer is every person on the receiving end of a sales pitch they can accept or reject, now they are on the streets of a battle in which they must choose a side because it is a war that consumes everything. Honestly, I'd recommend this book to anyone as an easy read that can give you a really interesting and reorienting look on Christianity, whether you are a Christian or not.

I also have the short-term goal of doing my PT faithfully every single day... sigh. It's not hard. It's just inconvenient. There is NO way I don't ave 10 minutes twice a day to do the exercises that will help me move past this chronic and miserable back pain. I don't even have back pain while I do them! But over the Christmas holiday, it was easy to just pack up the yoga mat and not get it out again.

Now if you've read this, I'd love to hear some of your goals for this year. If you came from Bluesky, comment and let me know! It would be very helpful to test if the comments really do show up here!

Care and care

2025-12-16

The last month of my life has been marked by constant, often severe lower back pain. I have had back pain off and on since I reached adulthood, both the achey kind that lasts a few days and the horrible twang that flattens you and leaves you crawling agonizingly to a chair you then can't even get yourself into, followed by a day of barely being able to walk, muscle relaxers and rest, and a few days later everything is okay again. This is the first time it has gone on and on. Muscle relaxers have had little effect, and I am hosting Christmas this year so I'm mildly stressed about cleaning and preparing for company.

None of this is meant to be a complaint, however; it has been a fascinating chance to look into the options available to somebody in consistent pain of some level and learn some interesting things about the medical community. It doesn't take a lot of digging into the dry reading of basic medical texts to learn that exercise is the best treatment for back pain. After a couple visits with my primary care doctor, who is a clever and wonderful woman, I was referred to physical therapy. At the same time, some of my loudest friends proclaimed their adoration of the local chiropractor, a woman who goes to my church and seems like a lovely person. Hoping to gain some more functionality, I decided to try both.

Chiropractors are, it turns out, eager to get you in. I think they'd have scheduled me for that very day if I'd been available, but as I called on a Friday, they got me in on Monday. PT couldn't even see me till that Wednesday. If you want to see many specialists you can wait weeks or months, so you'd better not have an urgent issue or anything important going on. The following week I went to my first chiropractic appointment and my first physical therapy appointment, and it spurred this recognition (not new or original to me) of two kinds of care for problems, which I will now refer to as "Medical Care" and "Therapeutic Care".

Medical Care encompasses care that seeks to treat and cure a problem in a clinical environment, by licensed medical professionals. It tends to be aggressive (in a good way) and make use of prescription medications as it deems necessary. It involves some sort of medical doctor and the vast array of staff that make a medical facility function. Because its focus is on a problem and a solution, the person being cured is largely immaterial. What matters is fixing the issue.

Therapeutic care is a little fuzzier. It can involve medical professionals, or professionals in medicine-adjacent fields. This would encompass actual mental health therapy or cognitive behaviour therapy, or perhaps it would also encompass things like massage, acupuncture, or other alternative therapies. The thing that makes it therapeutic is its focus on the person and their individual needs. While individual needs do matter in the medical care environment, they only matter as far as ones reaction to treatment goes. Whether the patient has kids at home or a job that requires heavy lifting or a history of some seemingly-unrelated issue is not important in a medical care situation. In a therapeutic care situation, those things are the point. The actual problem that the individual came in to address are seen as symptoms interrupting the life of the whole person.

Here is the contrast for you:
When I see my personal care doctor, I am shown in by a nurse who takes my weight and blood pressure, asks me why I'm there, writes it all down, and then leaves me in a small, clean room with the paper-covered medical bed. It crinkles when I sit on it. The lights are aggressively bright and there is an advertisement for some sort of new birth control or menopause treatment on the counter. Eventually there is a knock at the door and my doctor enters. She is petite and professional and asks if I want the lights dimmed because I have a history of headaches and she had dimmers put into her rooms specifically for this reason. I love this about her. She has maybe 10 minutes for me and makes me feel seen and heard. I have not always felt this with doctors. I have had an array of OBs parade in and out during my 6 pregnancies and some of them barely seemed to notice there was a person there. They measured my belly, asked if I had any questions, and walked out in less than 2 minutes. Truly a magical experience. After the appointment I just... leave. There are people in the hallways, typing on little computers or carrying clipboards and walking very quickly. They ignore me. As I leave, the valet parking attendant at the desk always smiles and says something along the lines of "Have a nice day."

The very first time I walked into the chiropractor, the lady at the desk greeted me with, "Hello, Sarah! It's good to see you!" I have never seen this woman before in my life but I'm the new patient and so she knows my name. She offers me water and there are comfy chairs and carpets, some books to read on the table, and little signs with encouraging mantras on them. Two separate essential oil diffusers are glowing and filling the room. They have different oils in them and the competing scents are, to me, extremely unpleasant, but I think most people would find them cozy. The chiropractor greets me by name as well, and asks me all about my life. She wants to know what I do, how many kids I have, what my goals are both for the next few months with pain relief and in life generally. These things are important to planning treatment. The receptionist brings me a cup of hot cocoa, warning me that it is too hot to consume yet. I can smell the peppermint candy cane she has dropped into it as well. The first visit lasts nearly an hour as she and her assistant get to know me and my needs. Later appointments will be shorter, but will always involve tea or water, questions and specific actions based on my responses. She remembers my kids' names and asks about them. I am not just a walking problem to solve, I am a person she can help.

I have always been a sceptic about chiropractic. The claims made by the industry feel nonsensical to me and the evidence of efficiacy is not very strong. I also hate essential oils. The whole issue is compounded by the fact that chiropractic is something that is done to you and I have always lived in a world where health was about things you did to take care of yourself. Not that medication and other interventions aren't necessary, just that they are not enough by themselves. But the chiropractor just does things and sends me away. I am a few weeks in now and still decidedly unconvinced, or rather I am even more certain than before that it is mostly nonsense. The magic of being made to feel like a human, however, is incredibly potent. I see now why people rave about their chiropractor and are devoted to their monthly or weekly adjustments. For a brief moment in time they are told that their problems are real (they are), they matter as a person (they do), and that the chiropractor wants to help (they do!). The person is no longer alone, in pain, and feeling like a walking problem to be fixed or shrugged at and told "Well that's the way it goes." There is immense power in simply being seen.

Making Excuses

2025-12-05

It seems like some sort of update is in order, so this is a very quick one to explain where I've been, how I've "fallen off the rails" and where I'm going from here. My great intentions for November fell apart when around November 14th, I started experiencing severe back pain. Lower back pain is an incredibly common thing, and I have experienced it on and off since my very early 20s. Sometimes it's a creeping thing that leaves me slightly disabled all day, and sometimes it's a severe problem that happens suddenly and incapacitates me entirely for a day or two. This was, somehow, a combination of the two. It came on fairly slowly and some days the pain has been almost immobilizing, whereas others are merely twingey and sore.

This has made everything in my life much harder. Sewing, whether sitting at the machine or bending over the cutting table for hours, is unpleasant. Crouching or sitting on the floor at the library to help sort books is out of the question. I can barely change my two-year-old's diapers most days, as a matter of fact. Medication has been largely unhelpful, the doctor has given this a simple, "sometimes it do be like that" and referred me to PT, and as we near the end of 3 sold weeks in this, it starts to feel like this might be a more constant part of my life.

By the end of the month, we were able to donate mittens and gloves to a coat drive, serve meals to homeless people, contact two people in local politics to encourage better decisions that support people in my area, and $120 saved in grocery money to donate to the food shelter. It wasn't the whirlwind of generosity I'd planned, but writing it out like this helps me see that it wasn't a wash either.

Going into Advent (today is day 5), I am rethinking my perspective. Instead of reaching out, of seeking people, of creating opportunities, I am taking this month and possibly a longer period of time to be receptive to opportunities that are brought to me. The last few years have been years of pursuit. Pursuit of knowledge, of connections, of friends, of opportunities, of academia, etc. I have reached out to people constantly to form friendships and to be useful or helpful and to learn new things. It has been exciting and exhausting, and often very frustrating as well. There is no shortage of people who want my time an attention (though the four people who most want my time and attention are very short). Rather than seeking relationships and opportunities, I'm going to cultivate what I have and let things come to me for a little while. It means that instead of reaching up to people who are greater and wiser and cleverer than me, I will be spending more time with people who are needier and poorer and more helpless than me, and perhaps that will help me with my own perspective.

This update was supposed to be very short, but alas, I am wordy. Book review of Hank Green's first novel will be coming soon.

The Advent-ure

2025-11-20

Since Christmas is always here too quickly, I'm deep into Advent planning. Because I am homeschooling my oldest two, it feels possible to truly embrace and dwell in the Advent season. We are setting aside our Old Testament study just for the Advent season to do an Advent study, though I will be doing it when my daughter is out of school as well because this is important for the whole family.

I'm also adding to the saints we celebrate in the Advent and Christmas season. We've always been St. Nicholas (December 6th) fans, and he has become particularly special to us because of my German upbringing and my parents' time in Turkey. The kids mostly care about the boots with candy. We are also very fond of St. Martin (November 11th) and St. Michael the Archangel (September 29th). Because these feast days remind us of the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us and inspire us in our own walk with God, it matters to me that we include their memory in our lives. This year I hope to add St. Catherine (November 15th), St. Lucia (December 13th), St. Basil (January 1st). St. Lucia and St. Herman share a day but St. Lucia has both lots of really neat traditions associated with her day, and a strong history in Sweden, where my husband's family is from, so I'm afraid she is getting precedence in our household.

My prayer in all this is that through the lives of these saints, my children and I see the way their lives point toward Christ, whose birth we will celebrate on Christmas. In addition to doing an Advent study with them, I am setting aside my own Bible reading plan to do a focused Advent study myself. While educating my children is my job as a mother, it is also my duty to myself, and the time spent on their spiritual develompent doesn't actually count as time spent on mine.

It reminds me of talking with a friend who works with Biblical Greek and does a lot of work with the digital side of things both for fun and professionally--find his blog here. While he might spend hours deep in the text of the Bible on any given day, doing academic or professional work on the text is not the same as engaging with it on a spiritual, personal level. That's like making food for a bunch of people and hoping that the snacking you did on the way counted as a nourishing meal for you.

The first Sunday of Advent is the 30th of November this year. I hope your season is wonderful, and blessed, and full of light in the darkness.

The Ides of November

2025-11-16

It has been more than a week since the last update. Last Saturday (the 8th) my kids and I went to a friend's house to pack meals for the homeless. There is a wonderful organization in Des Moines that delivers hot meals all over the city to homeless encampments and people on Sundays. Numerous families all over the city take a weekend and make 40 meals (there are maybe 5 families per weekend). The rest of the week, the soup kitchen is open, but on Sundays the meals come to the people. We used to help my sister-in-law every month with this, even after we moved away from Des Moines, but once she got married, and I had a fourth kid, we stopped doing it so often. It was a special feeling to be back and working again.

We have donated $80 to the food bank so far in our own small town. The month is not over yet. During the shutdown, it seems like local organizations have seriously stepped up. One of the grocery stores in town is doing nightly hot meals for $3/adult and free for children. The other is doing dollar matching on all donations to the food bank, as well as donating tons of food. It has been encouraging to see the community step up as need presents itself, and I wish we could be this way all the time.

We also have a selection of winter coats and boots to donate to the winter clothing drive. The homeless men have left and I haven't seen them since the very beginning of the month, but I have to ask around and see if anyone knows where they are now and if they need anything.

I have hosted people at my house for meals 3 times so far this month and met one friend for coffee. I meet another on Tuesday. Making the effort to reach out and then schedule times with friends has been challenging, but the actual time spent with them is good for my soul. I highly recommend it if you have the spoons.

Making friends as an adult is really difficult, and reaching out to strangers is difficult. One of the things I discussed with some ex-Navy friends and later my mom was how the constant uprooting and resettling of the military life created an environment where friendships were easy to build and isolation was almost impossible. You lived in a restless world, surrounded by people arriving, people leaving, roles that suddenly needed filling, and roles that would need filling in a year or two. The constant turnover meant there was always space for you, and if you stepped in to fill a need you didn't exactly love fulfilling, that was okay because it was only for a year or two at most.

In the more settled world of civilian life, these things are so different as to be almost unnavigable. People complain of struggling to make frineds, everything shouts about the loneliness epidemic among adults, and the solution is so difficult and so easy. It's dangerous to volunteer for a position you're not crazy about in civilian life because that might be your new identity. You arrive in a new church, a new school, a new community, and there's no room for you. The roles are filled, or everyone has given up on that because nobody wants "nursery worker" to be their identity for the rest of their existence, or "bake sale manager" or any other exhausting job that is difficult to fill.

Faced with this weird challenge that has bothered me since leaving college, I've done "military kid" things that I only just realized are from my life as a military kid. I text people I've met once and ask them to dinner. I have, twice in my life, asked specific women I barely knew if they would mentor me, because I was at sea and they were older and wiser. And these things have yet to steer me wrong, though they have been met with some surprise. (Also I'm still hesitant to take on roles that don't suit me because I'm terrified of being stuck in it.)

Sometimes making these advances is uncomfortable. A die-hard introvert, I love to be at home and left alone, but it's not a very fulfilling existence. The best thing about this system is that I'm frequently the host which means I still get to stay home (though I have to panic clean my house), but I also get to build relationships. The friendships I've been building aren't glamorous; we don't have girls nights hardly ever, there's no bar crawls or escape rooms or whatever the activity du jour is. Mostly there's lots of tea and coffee and pastries and dinners and bonfires and sometimes board games, but mostly just coversation and that feeling that we aren't alone after all and the world is actually an okay place.

One Week Update

2025-11-05

Tintin comic incoming:

I have promised to update throughout the month about my goals. There have been some wins and some losses.

Starting with the losses, I didn't have the courage to talk to the homeless men at the park, and I haven't seen them since. Talking to strangers is really hard at any time, but I'm praying the words and actions that make them feel seen and respected and heard come to me soon.

I also have completely failed to call the retirement center back. I sent them an email and was hoping that emails would be the main form of communication, but alas, they want to talk on the phone. Millenial that I am, this sounds like one of the deeper circles of hell to me, but that's why this was an out-of-my-comfort-zone goal.

Progress items include having found my fabric stash and a pattern that I can make mittens out of. Also I had coffee with a friend this morning whom I've been meaning to reach out to forever and finally did. I also invited her and her family over for dinner next week.

We saved $50 (!!!) off our grocery bill last week by not needed many pantry staples and by me choosing to make a lot more things at home (bread, snacks, crackers, etc). I was able to give that money to the food bank today. It is very encouraging to see that while the need is probably greater than we can sustainably meet, for the moment people are really stepping up and there are a lot of opportunities and a lot of people providing food and money to those in need.

There is a couple in my community that seems to do everything for the community. Everybody knows these two and they run lots of programs and events. They are huge servants of the community and I admire them immensely. This week I was able to step in and sub for one of her music classes while she was out of town on a much-deserved vacation, and that was a win for both of us. My rusty conducting skills got exercise and she got a real break (we told her she was not allowed to take her computer).

So there it is, the first(ish) week of no-chill November. In other news, I've been working on a musical setting of Cædmon's Hymn that I am really enjoying, and I'm still working away on that transcription but very, very slowly. And that's the news!x

No-Chill November

2025-10-28

November gets a lot of weight put on it besides the impending Thanksgiving feast and Black Friday consume-a-thon. There's the recently-defunct NaNoWriMo, where people were challenged to write 50,000 words in a single month (something I'd often hoped to do but never really had time for). Then there's the weird "No-{blank} November", in which the blank could be filled with many other things like shaving. My former church used No-Shave November to raise money for adoption funds, for instance. So with this theme in mind, I was feeling severely unchill about the state of the world at the beginning of October and picked "No-Chill November" for my personal theme.

When I say No Chill, I mean I'm not going to be chill about things that negatively affect my community. I'm not going to shrug my shoulders and say, "at least I'm doing okay" while I move on with my life. I'm going to do something. But rather than the opposite of "chill" being anxious, uptight, or irritable, I'm going to choose warmth.

The main goals of this are to do things that are financially challenging (not endangering my family but giving up money I could spend on books or clothes for myself), emotionally challenging, and physically challenging. The timeline is to do one big thing a week, one small thing every day, and one lifestyle change that only has to last the month. Tied to this but not specifically service-based, is my goal to invite one family/couple/acquaintance/group-of-randos a week over for dinner that I'd like to get to know better, especially people from different areas of my life like church, theater, the coffee shop, or our service group.

Finding specific, practical things to do in a small town, it turns out, is not easy. We know the need exists, but the various services that help you find and assist people with needs don't exist here. The Food Bank of Iowa stocks a pantry in this town, but the actual service location for donations and such is in Des Moines, the big city. I don't object to helping in Des Moines, but my goal is to focus on this little town adn the surrounding countryside.

Today, with a few ideas but no good leads on local needs, I recalled an acquaintance I'd met a year ago (we were both judging the county fair talent show) who specializes in rural poverty alleviation, so I sent her an email. Her response was rapid and longer than I'd expected. She had good suggestions for things I could do personally, but her knowledge of the larger needs of the community are something I really want to chew on with my service group (we call ourselves the Serve Mercs, informally, and I'll explain about them sometime).

While a description of the larger needs of our town will have to wait for a different blog post, I have been able to choose things I'm going to do this month for service projects.

Financial Goals - things that cost money: We have a grocery budget of $150/week for our family of 6 and it is enough. We don't eat steak but we have plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables and meat at every dinner. In November, I want to feed the family on $120-$130/week and set aside the extra money to donate to the local Food Pantry. Additionally I want to buy a few high-needs products like baby formula and feminine hygiene products for them. My friend recommended I call and ask what their greatest needs are and that's what I'm going to do.
Emotional Goals - things that take me out of my comfort zone:
a. Two homeless men have taken up residence in the park by the library. My friend's husband is the head librarian and they have both spoken to the men to see what their needs are. I want to bring them a treat every week like hot coffee or pastries from the café, and talk to them to find out more about their needs and goals, especially as the weather is getting colder and our winters here are bitterly cold.
b. I am going to reach out to the local elderly care center to see what their residents' needs are. There is one woman in particular who used to live near me that I'd like to check on. A stretch goal with this is to set up music recitals there, coordinating between the home and the local music teacher studio, but also other local musicians.
Physical Goals - things that probably aren't that difficult but I have to do them: Writing to my state congresspeople to support ongoing care for the homeless, the food-insecure, mental health needs, and healthcare reform. I might even make... phone calls. Spooky. Additionally I want to look into sewing mittens and hats for a local organization that provides these things. I have lots of extra fleece that I've been storing for years and years after making a bunch of sleep sacks for my own babies when they were little. This could easily be turned into things that other people could use, though I'll need to double it up to make it really warm.

Finally, the reason I'm sharing all of this publically, which I usually don't do when I help others, is for accountability and encouragement. By putting it here, hopefully it will make it easier to follow through. I'll update this blog with what I do, how much money I save and am therefore able to donate, how the guys in the park are doing, how the sewing is going, etc. In turn, I hope you will help me stay on task, and feel encouraged to do something small yourself. We can be drops in the bucket of need together, and two drops is 100% more than one drop!

New Project!

2025-10-15

I had intended to start a new project in my Old English work. After making some progress toward it that I could show off in style, I'd then tell everyone about it. When my thesis theatre was new and fresh, I had told people I'd do something in the "poetry everybody knows and loves for the extremely specific value of everyone that includes Old English poetry enthusiasts" genre. Maybe "The Seafarer" or "The Wanderer" or "The Ruin". They're loved for a reason. Of course this also means they're pretty thoroughly researched and widely available, but I'm not trying to break fabulous new ground here, I'm trying to make things accessible in an enjoyable way.

If you are an academic or really a nerd of any sort, what comes next won't surprise you. None of the proposed things has happened. Not that I didn't start them, just that I got bored and left (which reminds me of what my husband says every time he picks up lumber for a woodworking job). I read some articles, bits of books I own, some blogs by other weirdos like me, and got sidetracked onto the topic of herbals. Many people who follow me (if you follow me, I mean on bluesky, which is where I'm busily posting away) are probably familiar with the concept of a "Bestiary". Pardon me while I retrace the tracks of how I got to where I am, but this tangent really got going when I received my new copy of Hana Videen's The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary (currently on an incredible sale here apparently).

I started roaming through texts and found a book on Old English medicine called Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. This proved to be a dense and unenjoyable collection of un-OCR-able Greek, modern English, Latin, and Old English, with the Reverend Oswald Cockayne's own prose taking up most of the book and boring me immensely. I want Old English, not Old Professors.

As you may be starting to suspect, I have no stylish things to show you, just more meanderings. My next step was to see if I could locate the actual texts whence Reverend Cockayne had extracted his Leechdoms and his Wortcunning, and maybe even some Starcraft. Down the next rabbit hole, this one labeled "herbals", I found a new and exciting world of Old English "herbals", or books of plants. There are no bestiaries in Old English (there are Bestiary manuscripts from medieval England but they are in Latin). Digging through the British Library scans of various manuscripts, I discovered that Latin (which I don't read) and Old English (which I do) were so mixed up together, and often on such shabby or faint manuscripts as to be nearly indistinguishable, that I about gave up.

It was at this point I went metaphorically crying to a friend about my shortcomings as a scholar. Everything is so hard to locate. I am entirely on my own with no institutional support. My computer is small. The manuscripts are old. I am beginning to doubt my ability to read Old English at all. I can't possibly be a scholar. He pointed out to me that I sound exactly like a scholar. For some reason, this was exactly the thing I needed to hear. Maybe other scholars have it better than me. Maybe they aren't homeschooling and raising 4 children while being a stay at home mom, freelance editor, and piano teacher and have more than 2 hours total a week to do this sort of thing. But maybe they do have all these sorts of other things. Maybe it's this hard for all of them. And maybe it doesn't matter if it's super hard as long as I keep doing it.

When I am hunting through manuscript scans, I am happy. I mean I'm frustrated, aggravated, cranky, etc. But these are the happy form of those. And with enough time, they lead me to things like this:

Now this is something I want to know more about. What is it? What does the page tell me about it? When I started digitizing Old English texts, I said I wasn't going to work with manuscripts, I was going to work with facsimile editions and create diplomatic versions and translations in alignment for viewing. But gosh darn. I want to work with this manuscript. It's page after page of plants. It will probably take me ages to figure out even a single page. And it's going to be wonderful.

Just Like Everyone Else

2025-10-07

I don't remember how old I was when I realized I was just like everyone else, but it must have been very young. I was a bookish child, and A Little Princess was my favorite book for a long time, but really I'd read anything easier than Jane Austen (I tried, I really did) until I was probably 11. Then I discovered audiobooks and it broke the wall between my brain and harder books (...like Jane Austen).

One of the consistent tropes in children's books, classic or otherwise, is the child who is a "little different". As tropes go, it's a good one. Everybody probably feels a little different at some point in their life, and bookish kids more so than others. Authors with any sort of self-awareness have to acknoweldge that they are oddballs, and it's only natural for them to populate their books with these characters. The problem is pretty consistently how these characters are portrayed as different. Sometimes it's because they are a loner, exploring the woods and being by themselves, sometimes because they read constantly, sometimes (I'm looking at you, "wholesome" literature for girls) it's because they're completely selfless/pious/would-never-gossip/don't-care-about-boys.

For a good chunk of my childhood I lived in the knowledge that I wasn't special. I wasn't heroine material. Sure, I liked being alone in the woods, but the civilized woods obviously. The German woods, the woods behind my house in Rheinland-Pfalz. I loved books, but I'd never read any Ovid or Shakespeare. No Milton references flowed from my lips, nor did I cite Boethius in conversation as the bookish heros of novels did. And I liked boys. Some of them were cute. I figured I'd even get married one day. The list goes on, really. If something was an iconic symbol of being "a little different", I was normal. I wanted to be pretty and wear makeup and talk about boys and what so-and-so said at the party last week.

Actually, I hadn't planned to go this route when I started writing, but the answer came to me as soon as I wrote her name. "Her" being Jane Austen, of course. Because a major milestone for me came when I met Elizabeth Bennett. Lizzie Bennett is almost certainly Austen's most ordinary heroine. She doesn't have Jane's goodness, Fanny's humility, Emma's wit, Anne's tragic backstory, or even Catherine Moreland's invigorating youth. She's a little old but not very, she's pretty but not extraordinary and, critically to my developing mind, is "not a great reader and [takes] pleasure in many things." In many ways, Elizabeth Bennett was the first literary character I saw myself in as I actually am. Sara Crewe, of A Little Princess, was an aspirational heroine, but Elizabeth was me as I am, with pride and follies but a strong desire to do right. Without hoping to catch a man with £10,000 a year, I could at least be the heroine of my own little life.

Beyond that, the thing about being ordinary, while a little disappointing for a seven-year-old with illusions of grandeur, is that you can then just be yourself. I mean, I guess one could attempt to lie to oneself (I rather suspect many of us do) and pretened that, oh no, I don't like gossip or cute boys or girls, or looking pretty or whatever trait of ours we've decided is a vice. Someday I'll write about that concept of vice because it's worth noting that gossip is a vice but the desire to know things and talk about people and events is not in itself vicious. But it's easier and more liberating to say, "This is who I am and I might as well be the best Me that I can be, because I can't be anybody else."

This all makes it sound very easy, but there is grief at letting go of one's heroic ideal of self, as well as a sense of failure. This is where a Lizzie Bennett is very helpful. In letting go of an idealized self, we don't choose complacency. We don't allow our definition of "ordinary" to then define us and restrain us from ever being better. A Lizzie of one's own to demonstrate the growth and change one can achieve is incredibly encouraging. You're not giving up on being better than you currently are, you're giving up on being some other person entirely.

Grief on little padded feet

2025-09-26

Grief is a strange acquaintance, like a ne'er-do-well cousin who turns up unexpectedly or a stray cat that wanders in and out at will. There seems no rhyme or reason to when Grief pays a visit, and you can never know how long it will stay.

Sometimes you wake in the middle of the night to find it sitting on your chest, throttling your breathing and gazing down at you with unblinking golden eyes. Sometimes it's a smell that reminds you of someone and you turn to see the old troublemaker watching you, tail twitching. Twitching with what? Satisfaction? Anticipation? Simple nervous energy? Sometimes it stays away so long you think maybe it has forgotten you, moved on to bother somebody else. Then a flurry of autumn leaves scatter across the road and as they blow away, you see that familiar form again and your heart sinks.

Grief isn't what you expect either. There's an unspoken list of "acceptable" griefs: the loss of a loved one or a home or a special item. Death, illness, destruction. Then there are the other griefs, the ones you're supposed to stomp on and get over. The longed-for child that never came, the life that never materialized, the friend who drifted away and never came back. The idea of who you thought you were that seems to be lost —or perhaps never existed at all?

As soon as you see those yellow eyes, the shape of Grief padding back into your heart on silent feet, you wonder. "Will you just sit a while? Will I wake up to your silhouette in the window for a few mornings before you slip away again? Or will there be a loud crash from the study and I'll rush in to find you've knocked over a bookcase, scattering volumes and shattering vases? Will you simply make your presence known for a few minutes or will you stay for days and leave new and irreparable destruction behind?"

You can't know.

On transitions

2025-09-22

Today is the autumn equinox, which Old English speakers called emniht. Emniht is itself a shortening of the longer form, efennihte, though I am only aware of one instance of the longer form (in an Anglo-Saxon abridgement of De Natura Rerum by the venerable Bede). This is the official shift from the long days and short nights of summer to the approach of winter. From there will be more dark than light, and more night that day, until the solstice, or sunn-stede.

The seasons change slowly, gradually, almost creeping upon us without our notice. But a few weeks ago my children remarked that it was now dark when they went to bed, and dark when they got up to catch the bus. The change is now marked enough for them to notice. It's a time of transitions. The weather gets cooler (please, please let it get cooler), the days get shorter, the children return to school. Or at least start doing school work.

See there's one transition that went very poorly for us this year. I homeschooled my oldest till the middle of his 3rd grade year. It was very difficult and while I loved the planning and the research, I struggled to keep us on schedule and get through each day with everything accomplished. In retrospect this likely had something to do with the two toddlers I also had to manage who demanded a lot of my time (I was also in grad school but that doesn't count, does it?). But at some point in the middle of his third grade year, I realized he was kind of a twerp. He was smart, funny, talkative, and his world revolved around him. It seemed like maybe he needed some peers to show him he was really just another kid in the world. It wouldn't break him, but it might reorient his perspective on things. My husband confirmed my suspicions the same week it occured to me when he suggested Edmond be in school for a bit.

So I sent him to school. Then I sent his younger brother to kindergarten and first grade. Then I sent his little sister to preschool. And this spring I started to wonder if maybe the school had acheived what we needed from it. My kids had recognized their place in the pecking order of life, and now I missed them. I missed reading books and curricula, planning activities, and knowing what they were learning. In fact I found it very difficult to discover from them or their teachers what exactly they were learning at all, after first grade. In first grade their math and reading come along so dramatically that it's obvious what they're learning, but after that it is all a mystery. In 6th grade, my oldest boy's year, I couldn't even get a response from the teacher asking a question about a school supply he needed, and didn't expect any extra communication from her. Lord knows teachers are busy enough without the parents quizzing them endlessly.

In the end, I know that the teacher are doing their absolute best, and that the school system continues to turn out competent humans (albeit ones that use words like "skibbidy" and "rizzler"). I am grateful that the schools are there for the vast majority of people who need them. It is a tremendous gift and privilege to be able to keep my children at home and teach them myself. I love being with my kids (they're fun people!) and I love learning with them. After putting my kids in school with some reluctance this year, the first two weeks were awful. In addition to the dark mornings waiting for the bus, which comes much earlier than before due to the ongoing driver shortages, the kids were coming home cranky, tired, and rebellious. I felt like I had to undo whatever school (not the school itself but the process of going to school all day) had done to them. Even the hours I had with them were spoilt by this, and I was resentful of them instead of enjoying them.

So I took the two oldest out. My two-year-old is home with me all day anyways, and he immediately changed once his big brothers were home. Instead of following me and clinging to me every moment they were at school, he plays independently, almost as if their presence gives him the security to play without worrying where Mom is all the time. My oldest has been so fun to read and discuss work with. He's doing pre-Algebra, which led to my favorte math as a kid, and I am really enjoying reviewing basic concepts with him. He also goes to the school every day for band and choir. My seven-year-old is thriving on challenges that suit his mathematical and systematic brain and there are some challenges with reading and writing that we can work through together.

My daughter continues to go to school. I take her now, and while I hate wasting the gas while the bus still runs by every morning, the extra 30 minutes of sleep are life-changing for her. She thrives on praise from not-Mom people, and her artistic soul needs the crafts and activities I don't even know how to provide. Kindergarten is the best and she's living her best life with all her little friends at school. Maybe next year I'll homeschool her too. Maybe not. Each year, each child, I make a decision that is best for them that year.

So we are transitioning. We are transitioning into fall, into school, into being a homeschool family and a public school family, into everyone being an age they've never been before and into a life we've never lived before. Every day we wake up and get to choose again who we are and what we do and what we believe and where we're going.

Writing in the Car

2025-09-20

Two days before the turning of the seasons from summer to autumn, I am building this blog.

It is an inevitability that we must snatch the moments for personal projects wherever we can, when our lives are filled with children, work, chores, responsibilities. Add on to that a rapid decline and death of a loved family member, a quick turn-around to a funeral, and a friend from overseas whose visit, originally intended to see the deceased, is a week too late, and those moments are very few and precious. So I am in the car, writing by streetlight and screen glow, at its lowest level. Four children sleep in the back, propped up by various fixtures of carseats, shoulder belts, or cupholders. A podcast about the rediscovery of the sunken Endurance, doomed ship of Ernest Shackleton, keeps my husband awake while he drives.

There is nothing to say, in particular, nothing of value or importance to communicate. There is no content here. Only the semi-exhausted thoughts and impressions late on a Saturday night. People are worth the work. Children are more delight than effort. Teaching is learning. Learning is what keeps me human and alive. History is complicated but the complications are worth sifting through, even if we can never hope to fully comprehend it.

Welcome to the Lorehouse. I hope we learn a lot together.