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Grace

Telling myself I need to be holding the Poppet while she sleep-feeds, rather than cleaning the house, I have been re-reading Elizabeth Goudge's Eliot's of Damerosehay trilogy.
I am presently up to the middle book, The Herb of Grace.  Goudge's novels are, for me, the height of nostalgia. They have a tartness, richness, denseness, gracefulness that seems so rare and precious today. 
They remind me of my dearly beloved Great Aunts who lived similarly disciplined, graceful, bountiful lives. I imagine Elizabeth Goudge must have been a similar sort of person, and would have found them kindred spirits. I am not so confident that she would have found me a kindred spirit, but I heartily wish that she would have.
The Herb of Grace is a luminous jewel of a book, set just after the second world war and is about a family buying a lovely old inn beside a river and restoring it - but it is also about faith, forgiveness, self-denial, the joys of family, of the world, the yearning for the hereafter and the intricacies and bonds of family. 
Goudge delights in poetry and the beauty of the natural world and her writing celebrates her joy. She loves her characters with all their many flaws and I cannot help but love them to. Whenever I read her books I always wish I was a better person, more disciplined, more self denying, more full of grace, and now I dearly wish the same beautiful burden on my little Poppet.
Asleep in my arms her face is indescribably sweet and dainty, an old fashioned girl wearing an old fashioned white dress sprigged with blue flowers. She looks as if she had stepped (crawled) out of one of Goudge's novels. 
I wish, I wish I could give her the same beautiful world. 
But already she is reaching for computers, mobiles, hearing songs on the radio that would make Goudge weep. All I can do is try to ensure my Poppet is surrounded in the best of both worlds and pray that her life is full of grace and joy.

Momentous Moments

The Sprocket and Poppet are growing so quickly it seems that I blink and they are bigger, faster and toothier. The Poppet has just reached eight months and spends each day in a delight of giggles and flirtations with random strangers who stop to admire her. She is busy exploring the world - what does it feel like? can she eat it? hmmm, over here is good stuff. To my great joy she is still calling for mama if I go out of sight and then she comes looking for me and her many sweet ways overwhelm my heart. 
The Sprocket is... very Sprocketlike. 
Today's great happening is that it is official.
The Sprocket has started reading Big Boy Books - that are not about trucks. 
When he was a baby I was all smug about his interest in the stories that I read him. And then he learnt to crawl and walk and his interest rapidly diminished. And I was all un-smug and worried and perplexed. Slowly, slowly, we started back into the books using pop-up books and touch and feel books and books that made noises and most particularly books about trucks (particularly pop-up, touchy-feely, noise making books about trucks) but now it's really happened. 
The Sprocket is bringing me books to read to him that are not (be still my beating heart!) about trucks. 
Today we read How do Dinosaurs eat their Food about oh - ten or eleven times and Walking in the Seasons in Kakadu (which to be truthful I hadn't imagined him being interested in until he at least started school, but I think he likes the snakes and crocodiles and children) another ten or so times also. 
My little toddler is beginning to grow into a big boy, to think, to imagine, to create, dream, pretend. 
O my own little one,I love seeing you grow, your mind expand, your imagination take flight, but don't grow too fast, the here and now is very sweet.

Beauty and Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley

It takes a certain chutzpah to re-tell a story and sell it to the rest of us twice over. 
However I am exceptionally grateful that Robin Mckinley decided to do just that. 
 Beauty was Robin Mckinley's first re-telling of the lovely fairy story Beauty and the Beast, and is the more straight forward and traditional re-telling, although none the less enchanting for that. It is an exceptionally satisfying and comforting read and just what a fairy story aught to be (in yours truly's humble opinion!) The writing in Beauty is lush and beautiful, the characters are agreeable and the ending is deliciously happy. 
Twenty odd years later McKinley returned to the scene of the crime and wrote Rose Daughter which is a darker, more intricate and complex re-telling of the same story. 
While possibly not as satisfying (it diverges a little too much from the fairy story as I know and love it and there are a few too many loose ends) it is still exceptionally interesting, has some wonderful details and descriptions and is still an enchanting read in its own right. If it were not that I had read Beauty first, and found it perfect, my praise might be stronger yet. 
While each book on it's own is lively and vivid and Mckinley's strong and distinctive voice is always a joy, reading the two together makes for an even richer experience and I find it interesting to compare the two and see the result of twenty extra years. 
It is particularly lovely to see the blooming of Mckinley's love of roses in Rose Daughter. In an afterward McKinley explained that she wrote Rose Daughter after moving to England and acquiring a Rose Garden (also a husband, in one of my favourite romantic stories... sigh) 
I read Rose Daughter again recently as a.) I have been un-packing my books into our new house - happy sighs - and it was at hand and b.) we have been taming our own roses in our somewhat overgrown garden (this is a massive understatement) and I now more fully appreciate and understand Mckinley's loving pages of description of pruning and compost and the deep scratches a true rose afficiando wears with pride.  
My beloved and I spent an entire afternoon recently demolishing the vast tower of a dead and dying rose, discovering only at the end of our labour that the beast had actually swallowed and half-digested a poor plum tree. 
I now understand the satisfaction of Beauty in Rose Daughter as she tends to first her own cottage rose garden and later the Beast's green house full of neglected and dying roses. As I busily prune and plant, being scratched and torn in the process and discovering it to be somewhat addictive, the two stories keep me company - and such pleasant company!

Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son is a memoir by the American author Michael Chabon told in a series of essays.  

My mum loved Chabon's novel for young people, Summerland, my dad loved Chabon's 'what if' detective novel 'The Yiddish Policeman's Club' (fascinating premise, well written, depressing as all get out) and I loved his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - Chabon is a brilliant and versatile writer. 
Getting the opportunity to delve into Chabon's mind and background, to see where the books came from was voyueristically thrilling (hey, I'm a stay at home mum, I live through other people) 
And... he didn't disappoint. His take on fatherhood, marriage, family was always considered, reflective, grabbing and beautifully written.
This is the kind of book that you can re-read and re-read and different things will strike and resonate with you at different times. At present I'm reflecting on his essay 'The Splendors of Crap' which is his ruminations on whether the junk tv of today allows enough scope for children's imagination and whether it leaves enough room for them to operate their own imaginative worlds. 
I'm feeling hopeful about 'The Amateur Family' in which Chabon writes with satisfaction that he has produced his own geek tribe to keep him company in his geekdom (being married to a geek and having my own geek tendencies I look forward to having my own geek tribe one day). 
I'm giggling over 'I feel Good about My Murse'. 
I'm having a 'he gets it, hey he really gets it' moment about his essay 'William and I' which is a piece about motherhood - in which he reflects that even though he's been a stay at home dad, he knows that if he drops the slack, his wife will be there to pick it up. At the last call the responsibility stays hers.
Hmm... can I resist.. no I can't... here's the last paragraph of that essay.


'The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself.   There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.' (Chabon, 2009, pp18-19)

His lucky children. 
Chabon's thought into their being, into their growing, into the expansion of their minds, which is deliberated upon in many essays, is considered and beautiful.
And I've just realised why I like this memoir so much. 
I think this is the first memoir I've read that's written by a guy, which focuses on the stuff I want to read about.  
I read a biography of David Suzuki recently and felt all kinds of guilty as he was all about saving the world and I was all about 'that's all your going to say about meeting your second wife?' and 'Hello - your children here, give me the details. This is the interesting bit.' 
And (the shame) I started skimming all the stuff about saving the Amazon. 
This is a memoir as (in my admittedly very biased and probably hormonally and lactationaly influenced opinion) it should be written, with the concentration on the important bits - the family.