Monday, September 30, 2019

Four Seasons with Susan Hill and Gladys Taber - Susan's Spring


Susan Hill's "Spring" chapter in The Magic Apple Tree may just be the best writing I've ever read about English country life. It was so beautiful that I almost couldn't believe she was talking about a real place. It sounded like a fictional Eden. But this was her real life in the early 1980s in a town called Barley. Even that name! It sounds made up, but England is full of interesting town names.

I know that she is living somewhere else now, but I would so love to read her reflections about that town now. I'd love to know about any changes she sees in weather or birds or outdoor work or the people living there.

As Giles Wood wrote recently in The Oldie magazine,
Weather has certainly become less enjoyable to discuss. 
And that's really the truth. Weather is now political, like most everything else it seems. I love hearing about weather in the past. I like to see how much it was like now, or was different. Giles again, quoting an 1878 nature diary by Richard Jeffries,
Summer cold in June. Shivering in the parlour with lilac and flowers in the grate and apple blossoms in the garden. Yet cold, and all the green things dripping.
I recently read an entry in my mother's diary from the early 1970s, I think, where she was lamenting that it was 80 degrees in the morning!

Memory is just not reliable. Tom keeps a weather diary, and it is a good thing for us all to do. "It hasn't rained this much in July ever" someone might say, but unless we look at the facts we don't know if that is really true. And now when we hear someone talk about the weather we either think it is an example of global warming (which Mr Wood says scientists are now calling global heating, "as warming sounds too agreeable"), or the listener is reminded of a period of time just like that years ago. It's a funny old world just now.

All this is a long-winded preface to talking about Susan Hill's words from nearly 40 years ago. I liked reading them without any political connotation. The weather just is.
The weather is grey, it is cold still. The blossom looks like snow against the sky. And then, one morning, there is snow, snow at the very end of April, five or six inches of it, after a terrible stormy night. ... And another day, just before the blossom withers and shrinks back into the fast opening leaves, there is the softest of spring mornings, at last it is touched by the early sun, and the apple tree looks as it should look, if the world went aright, in springtime.
Does anyone use that wonderful word "aright" anymore?
May, which can be the most perfect of all months, has crept in miserably, while we still light fires and draw the curtains early, still wear winter woolens and despair of early seedlings coming through the cold stone ground. People talk of how summers used to be, in their childhood, long and hot and golden. But I notice that it is the springs that are no longer what they were.
On an early morning bicycle ride about town, she ponders,
But the same pair of swallows come back five thousand miles, year after year ... Migration, and this sort of regular return across so many thousands of miles of sea, is the sort of common, mind-boggling fact of nature which seems more incredible the more we find out about exactly what happens, but I often wonder what the country people of hundreds of years ago thought; not too many of them can have had any idea about what happened to all those birds that appeared in their villages in March or April, and were gone again at the end of every summer. Did they speculate, or guess accurately, or have folk-tales to account for it?
She writes of the swifts,
Around and above the church tower are the swifts, soaring high and circling and diving, screaming all the time. When we lived in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the arrival of the swifts, which come in huge numbers into the town, and their departure during the first week of August, put inverted commas around the summer.
And decades later she laments the loss of the swifts and other small birds in
Jacob's Room is Full of Books.

A wonder of this book is that Barley is only five miles from Oxford. Amazing that such a bucolic life was being lived in such proximity to this city. Again, I wonder about now. I've read about the rural English properties which are being bought up by the very rich, which is what Chris Wood is singing about in The Cottager's Reply, here.

Susan goes out for a morning bicycle ride, and sees birds and flowers and farmyards. And then she writes
I stop and get off, climb on a gate and look over it, and away down acres of sheep field that slope steeply towards the last, flat acres of meadow before the main road, a mile away. Here it is quite quiet, the sun is getting up a little, warming my back, there are dewdrops trembling on the spider-webs that are draped over the wooden gate, and a thistle is glinting with moisture. Here, there is no sound, no sign of human life at all. Down there, beyond the sheep and their lambs, what gleams silver is metal, the roofs and mirrors of cars and lorries, silent because what breeze there is is blowing in the other direction, taking the rumble of engines away from me. But, when the wind blows uphill, and especially if the trees are bare between, you know, just here, that you are on the very edge of the city, and all the pastoral remoteness is an illusion.
And there, five miles off and beautiful against the sky, are the dreaming spires, ethereal, glittering, insubstantial in the pearly, misty air of this early spring morning...
Our Windy Poplars Farm is three miles exactly to our little town. I can't imagine what it might be like - two miles further to be in Oxford!!

I don't think there is anything more quintessentially English to the Anglophiles amongst us than a "bluebell wood." Maybe there are bluebells in this country, but I've not seen them. A few here and there, but not a "wood" of them. Maybe they grow in warmer climates than here?
By the gate to the bluebell copse, I stopped, just as Stanley stops the car at the end of every day when he reaches this point, and gets out to look and to smell, while the ground is a sea of that magical blue, and the scent is so fresh, under the encircling trees. ... I have memories of bluebells, perhaps everyone who has lived in the country has them; mine are of walking through Raincliffe Woods near Scarborough with bluebells all around me and stretching away, like another ocean, of bluebells up to my middle, of lying down in them and of pulling them up by their sappy stems until my fingers were wet and green, unable to learn the repeated lesson that they would not last, would droop and wilt so sadly long before home. There is no sadder sight than armfuls of bluebells thrown into the ditch and left to rot because someone has felt cheated and not even bothered to get them home.
I think I have finally learned my "repeated lesson" when it comes to some flowers. Lilacs, in particular. There is nothing more fragrant and beautiful as the end-of- May lilacs. For years and years I would bring in bouquets and they just didn't last. Now I spend time at all the bushes, just taking deep breaths and enjoying the moments rather than putting them in vases.

She speaks of cowslips
this sort of old grazing land is the last haunt of those increasingly rare flowers
Gardeners' World this year had a program on bringing back meadows, and cowslips are one of the flowers being planted! I am always elated to hear such good nature news.

 And the rabbits! Do you have rabbits where you live? We don't. We'll occasionally see one, and I thrill to it as if it were the rarest animal in the world. I have such a love for them. When we brought the kids to England in 1992, we stayed in a house in Forthampton. In the evenings, we would walk out on a dirt road to the very end where there was a gate. We would stand there and watch the rabbits cavorting in the field. I so wish I had taken a photograph, though the sight is etched in my mind.
Almost every morning in March, I had looked out across this field, and the Rise that leads up from it, to see hares behaving in that legendary way, going mad, racing around in circles, the males boxing one another to impress the females.
I can only imagine such a sight in one's daily life.

Along with the lesson about picking certain flowers to bring indoors, there is another lesson which often takes a long time to learn, for many of us. And this is the lesson of planting vegetable seeds later in the season, when the ground has warmed up.
In my experience, you rarely gain anything by sowing too early, but, instead, lose rather heavily, in both seeds and labour. ... Mr Elder, a good, old-fashioned country gardener, was in hospital last spring, for almost six weeks, and when he was fit enough to be out and doing again in his garden it was May. Even I had sown most things by then and they were coming on well enough, whilst his plot still looked bare and brown. In a couple of days, in his quiet, unhurried, steady way, born of seventy-odd years' practice, he had accomplished more than takes me a couple of weeks, and by the end of June his crops were further forward than mine. My beans and peas had simply been sitting in the cold soil waiting to germinate when the sun eventually shone, his went straight into the nicely warmed-up ground and came through within days.
Susan Hill also tells a tale that is familiar to me, and maybe to you, as well. When we first garden, we grow everything. I well remember planting cabbage, for example, a vegetable I use maybe half a dozen times a year for coleslaw, period! Our gardens are also often huge - way bigger than we can take care of! These are things we learn over time until we reach that perfect garden, growing only what we love, and in a space we are able to keep looking relatively good throughout the summer. You also have to learn your weather. For example, she can't grow anything taller than three feet because of the winds. This is always a consideration here, too. Tom had to use wooden stakes to hold our tall tomato cages, even more important in the new garden which is more exposed.
Potatoes may be hard work, too, in the planting-out and earthing-up stages, but after that they are no trouble, and they don't seem to mind what sort of soil they grow in, nor how hard it rains, or blows, though they are vulnerable to late frosts.The joys of having one's own potatoes are worth any amount of sweat ...
To which I say, yes! We didn't even "earth-up" the potatoes this year, and still we got lots and lots.

Lettuce is one of my favorite foods - the big leaved, Bibb or Butterhead types. I don't care for the many "spring mixes" that are available now. And I don't use dressing. And I prefer eating it by hand all by itself, like those rabbits I love so well. However, we just can't seem to get it right when it comes to planting it and picking it. But in a gardener's mind, there is always next year, and I think I have a good idea from Susan Hill.
Lettuces I do in succession thoughout the spring and early summer, from a packet of mixed varieties, including Cos and Webbs and Butterhead kinds, and, although I try to sow them thinly, I never thin the seedlings themselves out at all until they are quite big, and as dense as parsley. Then I use half a dozen at once, when they are in young, tender leaf. Whenever I have thinned them early - a dreadful job, in any case - and let them grow to full, individual heartiness, lettuces in this garden have come on too slowly, and become tough, snail-and-greenfly-ridden, and inedible. 
So, I will try this next year. This kind of planting is very familiar to me from British gardening shows and books. In the US, most gardens, especially flower gardens, are planted with a plant, then a space which is weeded, then another plant. It all looks very neat and tidy, but it is not my way. Everything I have seen and read from England encourages planting close together, like those cottage gardens I love so much with plants intermingling, and sometimes hanging onto one another for support. I love that, and have done it for years in the flower gardens, but never thought of doing this with the lettuce. Am quite excited, to tell the truth!

In her "People" chapter, Susan has a lovely description of the old and the young, which I now, thankfully, know so well.
That close proximity, in a small village like Barley, of the very young and the very old, is a fine thing, especially for a child like ours, who does not have grandparents to hand. Small children will talk to anyone, once the guard of shyness has fallen, and they have, like the elderly, a sense of immediacy, a need to say or do something, now, now, the minute it is thought of, combined with that other sense, of the complete irrelevance of time.
I'm sorry to be writing "out of season" but it has been quite a full spring and summer, and now with Tom's mother and step-father settled into the assisted living facility, and the grandchildren all in school, pre-K for Indy, and Kindergarten for Hazel and Campbell, I have more solid time to not only read, but also to be more thoughtful about my reading.

39 comments:

  1. I read that book last winter. It reminded me so much of my daughter's life in Cornish Flat, NH. I passed the book on to her to read and savor. I should ask her what she thought of it. Has Susan Hill wrote any other books? I'll have to check the library right now while I"m thinking of it. We are almost completely packed and ready to travel to Barcelona tomorrow. Will be gone two weeks. Quite an adventure.

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  2. Do you think Susan Hill is also a mystery writer? I found a lot of mysteries by a Susan Hill. The only other memoir was "Howards End is on the Landing: A Year Reading from Home.

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    1. Have fun!! Yes she is the mystery writer, and along with HEistL, she also wrote the one I mention, Jacob's Room is Full of Books - nonfiction.

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  3. Who would have ever dreamed that "the weather" would morph into such a hot political topic, one that splits families and ends friendships? I find that really, really sad and wonder what will become of us if we don't somehow regain the ability to have an actual conversation with those with whom we disagree.

    You'v just convinced me to add a weather comment to the daily journal I've been keeping for the last few months. I wish I had done that before Houston started having all these 500-year floods because it would answer many of the questions I've been wondering about weather patterns here.

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    1. It is indeed very sad. I know people who say they could never be friends with a supporter of blankname here. It just sickens me. Life is way more than this. I have a Texas friend who talks about how the weather folks are always saying a storm is "historic" and probably 500 or 20 year anythings are the same thing. True or false? Now you will know with your weather jottings! I follow another blog whose writer is in Houston/outskirts of. https://twomenandalittlefarm.blogspot.com/
      And I have a passel of cousins in the state. Not H, though.

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    2. That Two Men and a Farm blog is interesting. It seems that they have moved from Houston in my general direction because I'm about 40 minutes northwest of their weekday residence. That means the farm is probably about half an hour from me.

      This part of Houston (we are just outside city limits where I am) has a very different political makeup from that of the residents nearer downtown. It's almost like two different worlds - and that's part of the problem.

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    3. I'm interested - which world is where? I think where I live it might be a bit different. For example, the woman who cuts my hair is completely opposite to me politically, but I told her she is the only person with whom I discuss politics. We like each other. Period. Same with our very best friends. Completely opposite in politics but where life and family are concerned we are as one. That's the way it should be, methinks. But even as a kid, my father was only friends with those who thought as he thought so this isn't a new thing- this division amongst people.

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    4. The city itself is very liberal and is as close to being a Sanctuary City without admitting it as you can possible get. The city government is pretty near 100% Democrat, including rather unfortunately all the county judges. The judge thing just happened last election, and I say unfortunately, because so man of the new newly elected judges are young and inexperienced. All of the old heads with all of the experience were very suddenly booted out - and it shows.

      My part of the county is about 60% Republican but that is rapidly changing because so many new people are moving north of the city to where I am. My breakfast group doesn't quite reflect the 60-40 ration I mentioned, though, and is more like an 80-20 split in favor of the more conservative persuasion. We are all friends and do respect each other, but then we are also all older and I find it harder to communicate with younger liberals (including members of my family) who don't seem to understand what give and take is really all about. It's a shame it has to be so hard.

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    1. Such a dear thing to say. I wish you were closer, too. If I ever get down there, I will surely visit! I have a close friend in the Myrtle Beach area, and another who lives just over the border in NC.

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  5. I wish I had more time to read Gladys Tabor, I can't remember if I bought Hill's The Magic Apple Tree but I think I would like it better than Jacob's Room is Full of Books. Sad, so many books awaiting me. I still enjoy the strange, staid seasonal travels of Edwin Way Teale and his wife. Nan, you could write a seasonal ruminations book--you kind of already do. And for the record, it's still hot in Louisiana. It's predicted to be 95 tomorrow and next day. A cold front is coming and the temperature will go down to 89 degrees on Friday.

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    1. 95, 89. I think I would die. Or melt. hahaha. I mean to get serious with reading Mr Teale.

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  6. A very lovely post, Nan. I enjoyed both the excerpts from Hill's book and your own thoughts. I have gotten much satisfaction from the gardening I have done in the very small area I have (and even some vegetables in large pots for a few years) to empathize with the joys and trials of gardening.

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    1. Thank you for such nice words. I'm a big believer in any gardening - tiny or large. It is all good for our souls.

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  7. A lovely post and good reminder that spring will come round again in about half a year! For now, though, I am enjoying autumn with all that it means here.
    I, too, add remarks about the weather to my diary, and can check back for several years to see when we've had the first snow. Often, I simply draw the symbol of a sun for a sunny day, or a tiny rain cloud next to my diary entry for the day. The rain clouds have become a bit of a rarity, and that IS a fact, not just my impression.
    My sister-in-law lives only a mile outside the (small) city of Ripon in Yorkshire, and her village is so sleepy it does not even have its own pub, or a village shop. Sheep are all around, and pheasants come right up into her garden.

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    1. I love that you do drawings. Honestly, I am so bad at drawing that it would take me longer to make a symbol of the sun or clouds than it would to write the word! ;<))
      How long have you had a scarcity of rain - a lot of years, a few?
      I love the sound of the village outside Ripon!

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  8. I used to love watching the rabbits out playing,running, and jumping over each other, and kicking up their heels at night. I always saw them doing this when the moon was bright, and had it in my head they only played in the light of the moon, but then I realized they probably play every night and I just can't see them because it is dark.

    For many years we had many rabbits. Generations of them. I haven't seen any rabbits around here at all in at least 3 months, ever since our neighbors started leaving their two cats out all night, and a new neighbor moved in with a cat that stays out all of the time. I love cats, but I wish people could keep them in, at least at night. I believe that is when the cats hunt and kill the rabbits and raid the birds nests. I am seeing fewer birds than normal for this time of year also.

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    1. I am very opposed to cats being outside. They do a lot of damage to animals and especially birds. This isn't a popular opinion. When the vet asked how old our last cat was and we said, 18, he said he guessed she was an indoor cat because outdoor ones don't always live so long. Over the years, we lost cats to fishers and coyotes. And then decided, no more. Our cats were always perfectly happy inside.

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  9. Ho, if you had rabbits in the garden, laying waste to plants you'd nurtured, you would not love them so much! This happened to me a couple of years ago and was heart breaking. The rabbits were adorable to look at, though.

    I do love nature diaries, like Gilbert White's. Some books you might like: four antholgies of writing about the seasons, edited by Melissa Harrison. You can looke them up on my blog.

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    1. I have both White's and Harrison's books, and so look forward to them! Sorry about your plants.

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  10. The weather being 'less enjoyable to discuss' is certainly right. Every time I write in my garden journal or birding journal I write about the weather. It comes up in many conversations yet can become so controversial. We are having a heat wave. September only gave us 9/10s of an inch of rain after August was also stingy. This will be a year of many firsts and record breaking events. I think it is odd that weather now has 'events'. How did we used to describe weather? I love when you write about Mrs Tabors thoughts about most anything. I think everyone is right about you writing a book. I would buy it.

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    1. We've been very lucky to have plenty of rain - not too much, just right. Some years are dry, some are wetter.
      We used to describe weather as rainy, sunny, hot, or cold!
      You are so sweet about the book. Not me! But I do love writing here on the blog where my blogging friends offer such kind comments.!!

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  11. I think this post was lovely, Nan. Very enjoyable with the quotes and your thoughts on each. I will say that I do like a little dressing with my lettuce - just a little. Ha! And guess what? September weather was 'historic' here. Guess it actually was, but sometimes I think that every day's weather can't be. All I know is that it was very, very hot. A cool front is expected next week - as mentioned above, we might get a high in the upper 80's!

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    1. Oh, thank you, dear Kay! Upper 80s. I'm shaking my head!

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  12. My Grampa Mac kept a diary for many years--mostly notations of the weather and work about the farm. Whenever I, as a young person, complained about the current season's weather, he brought out a random pile of diaries and together we went over his weather records. Some months stood out as 'too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry' but things had a way of evening out.

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    1. I just love this. "Evening out" - that's still the way it seems in my neck of the woods.

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  13. Oh what a lovely post! The Susan Hill book is one of my favourite 'nature' books, though I suspect the life she described must also have seemed a fictional Eden to many of his here in England, bearing little resemblance to the life we led in the *80s. And you conjured up some happy childhood memories, thinking of my Mother tending her fruit and vegetable through the seasons - on Sundays she and my father would come back from the allotment laden with fresh produce. And I can't begin to describe picnics in the bluebell woods, withe colour and perfume of the flowers. Sadly, over the last few years many of our native bluebells have been ousted by an invasive Spanish variety which has no perfume. By the Way, I also have 'Through the Kitchen Window' and 'Through the Garden Gate', slender volumes rather like The Magic Apple Tree, with recipes, and reflections on flowers, food, the seasons, and lists of things she likes. Very gentle, and make you reflect on the small pleasures of life.

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    1. I found both books on amazon as used books, and bought them!! I would never have known of them, so I thank you so much!!

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  14. Oh, how I enjoyed reading all of your thoughts and the quotes you shared. Isn't it wonderful to have more time to think and write about what you've read? As far as weather, we have gone from a high of 100 degrees in San Diego (Escondido) in the first couple of weeks of September to a very chilly low of 27 in Lee Vining, California, as we travel back north in our RV. In all of the variations of temperatures, though, we have seen nothing but sunshine on this entire trip. No a drop of rain in the past 4 1/2 weeks. But, we just barely missed some snow near June Lake! I keep track of our weather in my journal and like to look back and see how much rain we get each month. Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts on your life on Windy Poplars Farm, my dear friend. xo

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    1. And I thank you for your most thoughtful words!

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  15. Those are lovely examples of "weather writing" that you share. It's true what you say, that fewer people are able to take the weather as it comes and appreciate it for what it is, or just deal with it with patience, if it can't be appreciated. And once it becomes a political issue, we have to feel guilty about the weather, too, as though we really could change it if we were only trying hard enough.

    My favorite way of eating lettuce is just as you describe :-)

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  16. One thing I have learned from the way we’ve lived since we retired is that it is possible to be friends with people whose political views are diametrically opposed. And that they can be good decent people. I think we led a rather insular life here before that, not having many friends who were that different. I think it’s been good for us. ...... there were blue wildflower fields in Texas when we were RVing there (years ago now) ...they were called “bluebonnets” ... probably not the same, but so pretty and so new to us.

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    1. I like what you said. Thank you. Bluebonnets are so beautiful!

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  17. Oh, Nan, what a perfectly lovely post! I just got through reading it through but must get up and see my husband off to work so this is a comment just to say hi and I'll be back later and read this again before a real comment because the work and talent you put into it deserves another read.

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    1. Back again and enjoyed it even more while reading it leisurely during my afternoon rest period. Weather is fascinating and I love reading about it in fiction as well as non. I haven't started reading Susan's autumn section again yet. It's been too hot here, with true fall weather seeming never to arrive as we broke record highs for weeks. But the last three days have been glorious, even the cool rainy ones, rain much appreciated. We went to the Nashville Farmer's Market on Sunday and my anniversary present was picking out a trunk load of pumpkin beauties and then coming home to scatter them around. No AC today and windows open and a wonderful 69 degrees in the house!

      How wonderful that your mother kept a diary! I wish mine had. I'm hoping that our kids will enjoy reading mine someday. And for 5 years in the 90s I kept a special weather journal with many added notes in margins about what our last two sons at home were doing, all those soccer and basketball games. My son who wanted to keep it texted me a picture the other night of it on his lap and said, Guess what I'm reading, Mom? I loved knowing that!

      We do have a rabbit family and a possum family and a lone fox and one lone skunk who comes up at night to our bird feeder that is outside my dachshunds fence with the possum and fox and eats tomato scraps we put out as well as other vegetable leavings. The skunk is so pretty and only has white on top of his/her? head. I do not let my dogs go out in their pen while the skunk is visiting. Even though there's fencing between them I don't want to risk that special perfume being let loose!

      I hope you enjoy the reading you hope to have time for--and then share it with us in your lovely way!

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    2. Such a nice thing to do - to come back and spend time reading, and then all your wonderful words. I love, love that your son was reading that. Warms my heart. I do love my mother's diary. It is like having a little bit of her here with me.

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  18. My mother loved Gladys Taber. I did not read her until this spring when I moved back to New Hampshire. My sister has all my mother's old Stillmeadow books, and I spent a cold May by the pellet stove reading about the the Taber household with its entertaining dogs.

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    1. Kind of perfect to begin reading her in New England! What a nice picture that is of you by the stove reading Gladys!

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