All the Missing Pieces

If you are a parent or teacher or camp counselor, you know the forms I’m talking about.

One for each child. Name, birthdate, address. Mother’s cellphone and father’s cellphone. Mother’s email and father’s email.

It’s the final question that gives me trouble: EMERGENCY CONTACT PERSON. If the parents cannot be reached, who should we call? 

For more than three years, I have left that line blank. On school forms and dance studio forms. On swim team forms and class field trip forms.

Empty. Blank. Missing.

There is no one to call.

and life wins

We’ve never lived near family. Grandparents are once-or-twice-a-year treats. My children trade Christmas gifts with cousins they have yet to meet.

When we left Chicago, we said goodbye to more than our third-floor-lake-views-if-you-squint apartment. We said goodbye to neighbors who would knock on our door if our two-year-old escaped during the party and wandered down the stairs toward the front door and the busy street just beyond it. We said goodbye to the family in the basement apartment who could always take in our kids if an emergency came up. We said goodbye to all the friends on the blocks around us – friends whose children we had sheltered while their mothers and fathers welcomed new siblings at the downtown hospital, or, more terribly, said hospital goodbyes to siblings they would never bring home.

We left behind every one of our Emergency Contacts. Since then, I’ve learned you do not easily or quickly replace such things.

When our fourth baby arrived two weeks before grandma’s scheduled visit, we called our realtor. She was the only one who’d met our children or seen the inside of our home.

Yesterday, I filled out four more forms. The final blank lines felt a little blanker, a little emptier. They asked, not for an emergency contact, but for sponsors. These were baptismal forms. Later this summer, we’ll turn our church into a mini waterpark when we baptize four children all at once.

Even if I keep expectations low (this is a sponsor, after all, not necessarily a godparent or guardian), I wish someone could be there. A witness to our lives. Someone to stand in the crack. Someone who will always be there to remember with the firstborn. To tell the story to the fourth. Someone to make us all feel like nothing is missing.

Except, something is always missing. Something is always cracked and broken.

For a long time, I convinced myself that the most broken things and places were out there. Poverty and gun violence. Orphan crises and war. And, for the most part, this is true. There is a terrible darkness in this world, but it doesn’t live in my house. And if I have one goal in life, it’s to make sure that my home is a shelter for anyone looking for relief from the world’s dark places. We all need a place to rest before we head back out again, lights in hand.

However, I’m discovering that aloneness and disconnection are cracks that run just about everywhere. Through every heart. Every relationship. Every home and neighborhood and community. Even my own.

In our house, two sons share a room. With the volume turned low, it is storybook perfect. In real life, it is loud and late and lego-filled. But as much as I sometimes dream of sticking them in separate rooms so I can get a little peace and quiet at the end of the day, God-help-me, this sharing is a good thing. It is a good thing because they are never really alone.

And yet.

The older brother will fall asleep. Then, the little brother lies there, still awake, and it doesn’t matter that his brother’s head is two feet from his own. It doesn’t matter that his parents are right downstairs.

He feels alone, abandoned by a brother who would choose sleep over one more lego creation, and he weeps.

He cries himself to sleep.

The truth is we can be alone in a crowd. We can be alone even when our brother is within reach of our tiny four-year-old arm.

Some people might tell you it’s God or Jesus who fills in those cracks. They might say we’re chasing the wrong things when we look to fill our empty places, our blank lines with other people.

But I think they may be wrong.

The story of Adam and Eve and Eden might not tell us much about the science behind the world’s creation. I do think it tells us everything about these cracks and missing pieces. It tells me that in the beginning of our story we lost something precious. We lost the closeness (so close you might call it oneness) we once enjoyed with other people. We lost the closeness we once had with our Maker.

This story we’re living is all about recovering that precious thing.

I don’t know how to make the blanks and cracks and disconnections disappear. I do know that if we lean in to them – really pay attention to them – we might glimpse the end of our story. The beautiful end. Which will be, of course, a new beginning.

 

“With all wisdom and understanding, God made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment – to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.”

(Ephesians 1:8-10)

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

 

weathered

 

 

 

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These Farmhouse Bookshelves

Here is one last peak at my bookshelves before summer.

I think one of these might be just the thing for that afternoon in the hammock, the long car trip, those sweaty hours between events at the swim meet.

I plan to read as much as possible these next few months. I’m imagining quiet afternoons with a sleeping baby and three kids with noses-in-books, but the reality is more likely to be me on my green sofa, one eye on the so-close-to-crawling baby and one on my book, while I try desperately to tune out the shrieks of three children running circles around the room. Yes, I’m trying to be realistic.

Either way, my plan is to bring These Farmhouse Bookshelves back in September with fresh recommendations.

 

children's books

 

One of my favorite writers (she is a master of the revelatory interior monologue) has a new book. Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: A Novel is the best thing I’ve read in a long time.

I was skeptical at first. Perhaps you remember my distaste for literary gimmicks? Atkinson’s latest is structured around a stunning gimmick, but this excellent novel doesn’t deserve that pejorative term.

The book’s heroine is Ursula Todd, an Englishwoman who lives (and dies) through the Great War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, World War II and the London Blitz, and all of the upheaval of early twentieth-century European history. She lives, and she dies, and then she is born again, always and, it seems, forever on the same snowy night in 1910.

That is the novel’s literary device, and though it seems to break so many rules (most importantly, the reader’s assumption that the very worst thing cannot befall a novel’s primary character), Atkinson uses it to brilliant effect.

Ursula’s many lives and deaths, and the fascinating ways in which her story changes or does not, add up to a compulsively readable novel (after moving slowly through the first third, I couldn’t put it down) and one that gives us so much to think about: from questions of history and personal fate to the God-like role of novelists themselves.

Life After Life is the coming-of-age novel writ large. Ursula is given chance after chance to live well. We are given only one. We can learn a great deal from a character who knows the depths of the adage that “practice makes perfect.” The important question is, in that tumultuous time and now, what constitutes a well-lived life? What does “perfect” really look like?

Sylvie’s knowledge … was random yet far-ranging, ‘The sign that one has acquired one’s learning from reading novels rather than an education …’

A Time to Keep: The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays may be the best children’s book I never read as a child. I love it so much, I feel as if I have lived in its pages the way only a young child can.

Featuring Tudor’s beloved illustrations, this picture book shows us twelve months of celebration in a rural, New England family about a hundred years ago. Based on Tudor’s childhood memories, we have beautiful pictures and brief descriptions of a bonfire on New Year’s Eve, a syrup-making party in March, a dance around the Maypole, and a very special August birthday, to name just a few.

This is a book about the special rhythms of the seasons and of family life. It is sweetly nostalgic and inspiring. Enthralled by the book’s August birthday party, my daughter and I have decided that someday, somehow, we will float a candlelit birthday cake down a stream at twilight.

August brought your mother’s birthday which we celebrated at night by the river. The table was set with birch bark plates and gourd drinking cups.

I pulled this last book off my shelf last night and promised myself I’d reread it over the summer. Even the summer months deserve something of high literary value, but I find that short stories are easier to squeeze in between visits to the pool, park, and farmer’s market.

The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin is a collection of realist short stories by one of The New Yorker’s most gifted writers, Maeve Brennan. Out of print for decades, these stories were republished four years after Brennan’s death in 1993.

Born in Ireland, Brennan lived in New York from the age of 17, but the stories are each set in Dublin. These are stories about family and affection as well as the uglier emotions which can mar those relationships: emotions like grief, envy and even hatred.

These are stories in which each detail of a character’s dress and environment matters. They suggest that a writer’s primary task is observation. Writers, especially, appreciate Brennan’s work, but I think she has something to teach all of us. Whether we write or not, our lives are enriched when we pay close attention. To the arrangement of dishes on our kitchen shelf. To the face of a friend or child.

… you would think, looking at such an arrangement, that the boxes contained something of interest or of value. And what did they contain? Old bills marked paid thirty years before. Recipes for dinner she had never cooked, dinners so elaborate that she must have been dreaming of a vist from the king and queen of England when she cut the menus out of the magazines in which she had found them.

What do you plan to read this summer?

 

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Acquainted With Grief

We wake again to the most terrible news.

Like many of you, I turn the radio off when my children stumble, sleepy-eyed, into the kitchen. In an hour, they will sit in their own elementary school classrooms, and I don’t have answers for the questions they will ask.

I pack lunches, and my own head pounds with questions. Old, old questions.

Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?

We are not the first to ask these questions, but they have grown more insistent over the years, not less. At one time, God walked among us. But we have seen so much trouble since those days. We have cried rivers of tears.

I sometimes think I have the answers. When Jesus, speaking of resurrection, says, “Do you believe?” I say, yes. I believe.

But belief is not the same thing as answers. Not, really. Belief cannot silence questions like Why and Where were you?

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

Because I believe, I reach too quickly for answers. Because I write stories, I move too soon to imagine happy endings.

In other words, I do not follow the example of the One I profess to follow. It seems too hard to do what he did: to let myself be moved. To let myself be troubled.

To let the tears fall.

When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied.

Jesus wept.

I don’t have answers for a day like this. How does anyone keep going after a two-mile-wide nightmare overtakes them?

I don’t know.

I hope – I can only hope – that when the time comes to stand up again and move, I will be there, cross in hand, following.

Following the suffering King.

The man of sorrows.

The one who stays and weeps and is moved by our questions.

Why? Why? Where were you?

 

 

 

 

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Lives of Sun and Shadow

Spring.

One name for so many seasons: magnolia season, daffodil season, tulip season, and, now, dogwood season.

Each day, something is lost and some new beauty is born.

 

pink dogwood2

 

I could never pick a favorite spring season (and I haven’t even mentioned the lilacs), but I do know what it is I love about the dogwoods: they light up the shadows.

Here, from where I sit at my desk, I can see a thick, dark line of trees along the fence. It might look foreboding except that there is a lacy pink-and-white dogwood dancing on the edge of the darkness.

It is so pretty I have wasted more than a bit of my writing time googling hammock.

 

pink dogwood1

 

On Mother’s Day, I went for a drive. Alone. Because the irony of Mother’s Day is that I lose all patience for even the usual tasks of motherhood. Like wrangling four kids into carseats and listening to them bicker.

Just down the street from our house is a church like something from a child’s picture book. It is almost perfectly square and has a tall white steeple.

Of course, the child’s picture book never shows the tacky roadside notice board. This one said: We know life is hard. You are not alone.

I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated anything spelled out on one of those yellow plastic signs. Even the sentiments with which I agree bother me with their cheesy puns or too-cute rhymes.

But this one … Well, honesty is eloquent. Love sings.

I have nothing against John 3:16, but these may be the very best words for a churchyard sign.

I’m tempted to write them on my hand. Life is hard, but I am not alone. I think these words, and remembering that they apply to me and to everyone I meet, might help me respond to life with more gentleness. More compassion.

 

flowers in my lap

 

Life can be hard. It can be hard even on the good days, the days we feel at home, the days in which thank you, thank you tumbles easily from our lips.

Our lives are edged with shadow.

I write my own thank yous out in this space. Thank you for my family. Thank you for my home. Thank you for bringing me out of the wilderness and into this good, green land.

But we all live with shadows, whether we are walking through a wilderness or not.

Here is where you might expect me to point to those dogwoods and say something about silver linings or unexpected blessings.

I refuse to do that.

I think we sometimes act as if truth isn’t worthwhile unless it can be summed up in one sentence or organized into five lessons or bound up with bullet points.

I am a writer, I love words, but I know that words – more often than not – fail us.

Sometimes the only true thing is to say as little as possible. Perhaps, to say only this:

“Look! Do you see? A dogwood tree like pale pink lace dancing at the edge of darkness.”

 

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These Farmhouse Bookshelves

The very best writers are also readers.

No wonder there are so many good books about books (and bookstores and libraries). Here are three: a novel for grownups, a picture book for the littles, and a read-aloud for both.

 

tales of

 

I finished the new novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: A Novel by Robin Sloan just last week, and I could hardly wait to tell you about it.

In some ways this pick is an obvious one for me: a cozy, creepy bookstore and a bookish mystery wrapped up in a sweet story of friendship and community.

In other ways, my appreciation for this book doesn’t make much sense at all: a fanatical Google employee, geeky computer-talk, and characters who are adorably cartoonish rather than fully human.

But I loved it. This is why: optimism and joy.

This is a novel to make us love the old ways and the new (dusty books and the latest e-readers). This is a story to fill us with admiration for quirky, independent bookstores and the corporate giants who rule the internet.

Sloan reminds us that printed books  were once the very latest in technological innovation. Remembering that helps me to feel so much more at ease in a world that often seems to be leaving books behind.

… this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.

This next pick is the kind of old-fashioned picture book I love. Library Lion by Michelle Knudsen and Kevin Hawkes is lovely to see and lovely to hear. This is one you won’t mind reading again and again (which is really the only kind of picture book worth having at all). It makes me long for the familiar shelves of my own childhood library.

I’m afraid that in our zeal to see our children develop into readers we move them too quickly from picture books to easy chapter books. The very best picture books are works of art. They are as important for adults and older children as they are for the preschool set.

Not only that, but the ideas and the language of most picture books (remember those “soporific” lettuces in the Beatrix Potter tale?) are far more challenging than anything you’ll find in a beginning reader.

Spend a few dollars and support a great artist. Buy a picture book.

One day, a lion came to the library.

I’m sure you’ve all read this last title. Matilda by Roald Dahl is a classic. I wasn’t going to mention it at all, but this hardcover edition is so pretty, and … well … what if some of you haven’t read it?? I can’t be held responsible for that, now can I?

Matilda just might be my favorite little reader. Her parents are horrible, her home life is tragically comedic, but Matilda finds the strength and love she requires in books. Good books turn Matilda into a heroine, and the book which bears her name is very, very good.

‘I’m wondering what to read next.’ Matilda said. ‘I’ve finished all the children’s books.’

 

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The Surprise of Coming Home

I recently discovered that my house is surrounded by azaleas.

I came to this brilliant conclusion because spring arrived (our first in this new home), and the bushes I’d never really noticed turned brilliant pink and flowery almost overnight.

 

dandelion_blue sky

Next to the extravagance of these azaleas the flower beds in the front of our house suddenly looked sparse. There were big empty spots, and I worried about finding time to purchase and plant perennials. My days are overfull as it is just making snacks for children. In the small spaces of time when I am not making snacks, I am trying to get the new vegetable garden planted.

That’s when I noticed the fiddlehead ferns. Well, not the ferns, just the fiddleheads, really. It looked as if bright green violins had begun sprouting all around the azaleas.

I vaguely remembered seeing ferns when we moved in late last summer. I realized I could probably hold off on planting. I could wait and be surprised. Who knew what else might emerge.

blueberry blossoms!

Like the dogwood tree. Also, a second dogwood tree. Apparently, I can’t identify most trees unless it’s spring and they are flowering. There’s also a crabapple in the corner I’d never noticed. And roses. So many roses are tucked along the fence line, but I had no idea how many there were until I went around inspecting every square inch for poison ivy.

For me, this first spring is all about surprise. My eyes are wide-open, and I have begun expecting hidden wonders to reveal themselves at every turn.

It has reminded me of the birth of my fourth baby, Elsa Spring. When I first looked at her she felt both familiar and utterly surprising. I loved her, she belonged to me, but I did not know her. She would reveal herself to me only in time. Anticipating that slow revelation carried me through so many heavy, hard newborn days.

I hardly know this place, but it is home. We are planting trees and putting down roots (quite literally), and the horizon of our dreams is farther out than we have ever seen it.

When I imagine teenagers, they are slipping through these bedroom windows to sun themselves on the roof of the porch. When I imagine weddings, I picture them here beneath the avenue of maple trees. When I consider grandchildren, I see them playing beneath the apple trees that are, today, more like apple sticks.

Until this spring, home meant familiar and comfortable. The place you know so well you no longer see it.

I’m discovering that home might be familiar and surprising. Our true home is not the place we no longer see, but the place (or state of mind?) that keeps us wide awake with wonder.

Home is where we expect good things. Home is where we say, with shining eyes and hope in our hearts, What next? What next? Is there more?

And there is always more.

 

“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now … Come further up, come further in!”

- C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

bridal wreath spirea

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These Farmhouse Bookshelves

Another Saturday, another peak at my bookshelves. This one is for the mothers.

I know what you’re thinking. Who has time for reading once they have children? Admittedly, this is how I feel about exercise, but I do know a few moms who make the time. Me, I make time for reading. Every Single Day.

The secret? Lower Your Standards.

It is not possible to keep a pristine kitchen floor and read a novel a week. Priorities, people. It’s about priorities.

With that in mind, here are a few books for Mom.

picture book

 

I gave this one to my own mother a few years ago: Apples for Jam: A Colorful Cookbook (No) by Tessa Kiros.

This is a cookbook by a mom for moms (or anyone who cooks for a family). It doesn’t try to tempt children with smiley faces on pancakes. It doesn’t try to trick children by sneaking spinach purees into the brownies. This is a simple but beautiful book full of comforting, delicious, family-friendly food with a European flare.

This cookbook is all about memories. Creating them. Cherishing them. This is a cookbook that knows family happens around the table.

Apples for Jam is a satisfyingly hefty hardcover book full of beautiful photographs and the author’s own family memories.

Something else: the recipes in this cookbook are organized by color. Pink. Brown. White. And so on. It is wildly impractical and utterly enchanting. Kiros understands that many of us go looking for a recipe, not because we need an “entree” or an “appetizer,” but because we want to feed someone. We want to take care of ourselves and others. Maybe that requires an entree. But maybe that requires something white and beautiful. Or something rich and brown.

My Greek friends remember coming home from school to a piece of white bread, lightly broiled and splashed with olive oil, then sprinkled with some beautiful oregano, crushed between their mamma’s fingers.

This year I sent my mother-in-law Everything That Makes You Mom: A Bouquet of Memories by Laura Lynn Brown. Laura is a friend, but I’ve been excited about her book ever since she shared the concept with me.

This is a gift book, but I hesitate to call it that. Aren’t most “gift books” horrible? Do they ever get pulled from their place on the bookshelf? I’m willing to bet not often.

Everything That Makes You Mom is different. Full of great (read: not sentimental) quotations about motherhood and structured around the author’s own memories of her mother, this beautiful little book asks questions and offers prompts to help us record the big and little things we remember about our Moms.

Complete with your written memories, this would make a great gift for your mother. If your mother is no longer living, this book would make a wonderful keepsake for the next generation.

Mom bought a gravy whisk that we saw in a specialty kitchen store not so much because she needed a gravy whisk, but because its packaging claimed, ‘It scoffs at lumps.’ She gave it a new name: lump scoffer. When she made gravy, she whisked with glee, scoffing at those lumps herself with a single ‘Ha!’

Finally, here is the only parenting book I ever recommend: Parenting Is Your Highest Calling: And Eight Other Myths That Trap Us in Worry and Guilt by Leslie Leyland Fields.

I could tell you all about this one, but, really, isn’t the title enough? This book will set you free: free to live, to love, to be a whole person as well as a Mom or Dad.

If you or someone you know is feeling overwhelmed by parenthood itself or overwhelmed by all of the guilt-inducing advice send them this book. Trust me. When I first read this book I whispered thank you, thank you, thank you with every page I turned.

We want so badly to get it all right – our marriages, our parenting, our family dynamics. We want to meet all the requirements of a good Christian family. But God takes every hour of our home life, as well as every hour outside of it, and he uses the mistakes, the flaws, the pain as much, if not more, than he uses the good.

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These Farmhouse Bookshelves (Birthday Boy Edition)

Today, he turns four. My beautiful boy.

These are the books we read together. These are the books that will one day bring me to tears when I pack them up in boxes.

This Saturday’s book recommendations are all Beau-approved. And he is one discerning little guy.

a new walker

I can no longer remember if I bought this book with Beau in mind. I think I did. All children love balloons, but Beau’s adoration is of long standing and un-paralleled intensity. Emily’s Balloon by Komako Sakai is beautiful. A book for little people and their grownups.

The story is simple but profound. The illustrations will melt your heart.

Best of all, this sweet little story of a girl and her balloon was one of the few books Beau was willing to sit through at age two that he still enjoys today.

This one’s a keeper.

Christie & Beau

Helen Oxenbury is one of my favorite children’s book illustrators. King Jack and the Dragon by Peter Bently, and illustrated by Oxenbury, was definitely purchased with Beau in mind.

Here is another one for littles and their parents. We appreciate the story of a child’s imaginative play (complete with giants who turn out to be mom and dad coming to bring Jack in for bed), and they get inspired to build their own backyard, dragon-proof, tent fortresses.

This is an old-fashioned book that doesn’t feel even the slightest bit old.

smiley beau

Alphabet books are funny things. They tend to feel baby-ish, and we often acquire them when our children are too little for alphabet lessons. The inscription in my copy of Gyo Fujikawa’s A to Z Picture Book reminds me that I bought this one for Beau’s first Christmas (he was eight months old).

Most books purchased too early begin to fade into the wallpaper of our lives. Understandably, we forget to pull them out when they might be age-appropriate. Thankfully, I remembered this one in time.

Beau (unlike his older brother at this age) has a strong fascination with the alphabet. I’m not sure if it’s an interest unique to him or if he’s been inspired by his two older book-reading siblings, but this book is exactly what he needs right now. It’s the kind of book he can actually “read,” and that means a great deal to this always-trailing-two-steps-behind third born boy.

Alphabet books are a dime a dozen, aren’t they? This one, however, is a work of art. Fujikawa’s illustrations are equal parts adorable and intricate. There is a gorgeous mix of black-and-white ink drawings and softer pastel full-color spreads.

This is a book to linger over, searching each drawing, slowly turning pages.

This is a book for sharing, side-by-side, underneath a quilt on a rainy day.

And only the best books are snuggling books.

a genuine Beau smile

 

Happy birthday, Beau. I love you.

Mama.

 

p.s. I know you better than I did last year. You are one year closer to the Beau I glimpsed in that river of prayer.

 

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Joy Does Come in the Morning

Here is one thing I know: the world will keep on falling apart.

Sometimes it’s terrible, and you think you can’t go on. Bombs explode and guns are aimed at children, and the unimagined thing becomes our new reality.

Sometimes it’s a pebble in your shoe, a child apparently born without an indoor voice, and the discovery that you can, in fact, ruin brown rice even when you make it with an automatic rice cooker.

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Sometimes it’s a Friday night thunderstorm that sounds terrible but lasts only fifteen minutes. You wake the next morning to blue skies and sunshine and the sight of a once-beautiful and massive maple tree lying stricken across your lawn.

The gloomy face of your chain-saw wielding husband annoys you. The tears of your firstborn both sadden and exasperate.

You move swiftly to combat both gloom and grief.

The tree was already at the end of its life! It was only a matter of time! It’s the circle of life! Nothing to cry about!

But you are wrong.

It is worth the gloom. It is even worth the grief.

The young girl is right, and you consider that even flowers were not created to fade. Life was never intended for death.

If we numb ourselves to the loss of one great tree, do we lose our capacity to grieve the harsher pain? The less explainable calamities?

Can our optimism become a kind of blindness? A refusal to see and acknowledge that all is not as it should be?

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You are grateful your Saturday story does not end here. You consider that pain rarely seems to signal The End. In your (admittedly) limited experience, there is always something more.

Joy does come in the morning.

On this morning it appears in the form of a half-dozen teenagers. Needing to earn money for summer camp, you had agreed weeks ago (and quickly second-guessed your agreement) to give them odd jobs. You’d spent too much of the previous week worrying about the tall ladders involved in window washing and the poison ivy involved in brush clearing.

But here they are, and there, you have only just discovered, is the tree, and for that entire Saturday morning and the next Sunday afternoon, they will haul and carry and load. They will be your very own, unasked-for, tree-clearing work team, and your children will only occasionally slow their progress by treating the log pile like a jungle gym.

The tree is lost, and that is a terrible thing.

But it is not the only thing.

 

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These Farmhouse Bookshelves

This is a gardener’s favorite time of year. All is new green growth and hopeful expectation. Weeds, bugs, and wilting heat are yet to come. Snow and freezing temperatures seem more and more remote.

It is my favorite time of year.

Whether you are an armchair gardener or a gardener with dirt under your nails (I’m a little bit of both), here are three books for the season.

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Wild violets in the yard here at Maplehurst.
(all the photos in this post taken by yours truly)

Gardening books are some of the favorites on my shelves. In the age of google you’d imagine the internet would be a gardener’s best resource. In my opinion, the internet is almost too helpful. It can be difficult to sort the good advice from the bad, and I rarely google a gardening question without ending up overwhelmed. A well-edited, common-sense garden reference book is so much better.

My copy of The Garden Primer: Second Edition by Barbara Damrosch is creased and dirty. Like a good cookbook, this is a sign of its worth. When we planted apple trees, this book showed us how. When choosing blueberry varieties, I consulted this book. From roses to vegetables, from seed starting to planting bulbs, this book has just enough (and never too much) to say about almost everything that grows.

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I need to learn the name of these white-flowering shrubs. They are stunning.

I bought The Tree Book for Kids and Their Grown Ups by Gina Ingoglia for my children. They’ve enjoyed it, but I know I’ve opened it up more than they have.

The watercolor illustrations are beautiful and informative. Yes, we could always turn to google images, but it is so much more satisfying to take this book along for a walk, identifying leaves and bark and fruit along the way.

It’s one of my goals to know the names of all the trees growing here at Maplehurst. This book is a very nice way to start.

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Lawns without weeds or dandelions make me nervous. Our own lawn supports a healthy ecosystem of weeds.

The title of Ruth Stout’s Gardening Without Work: For the Aging, the Busy & the Indolent pretty much speaks for itself. Originally published in 1961, this book by the folksy grand dame of American home gardening is funny, entertaining, and, occasionally, quite helpful.

Stout’s advice can pretty much be summed up in one word: mulch. But, it’s a very good word. Ask me in a few years if mulching has really made vegetable gardening easier, however my broccoli seedlings do look very cozy in their mulched bed.

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The magnolia blossoms are almost as beautiful after they’ve fallen.

Do you garden?

 

 

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