Cottage Blessings

Tonight’s dinner

If you happen to be reading this blog, here is a little gift for you—a recipe by Pam Anderson that is delicious, insanely easy, and fool proof. My nineteen-year-old son called this his “favorite meal of the pandemic.” High praise! Serve with bread and a salad.

Cassoulet-style Italian sausages and white beans

 

Thanksgiving after Mass

My son was MC for this crew. It never gets old. 

Seventeen

That’s her on the couch a few months before I started this blog.

And here she is now. Happy Seventeenth Birthday!

 

Requiem for the Croppies

Agnes gave me “Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems” for Christmas. True to my usual time frame of life, I am just sitting down to read it now on this first day of March. Here is a poem I discovered today and love:

Requiem for the Croppies

by Seamus Heaney

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley —

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp —

We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

A people, hardly marching — on the hike —

We found new tactics happening each day:

We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

And stampede cattle into infantry,

Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

March 1, Signs of Spring

What the Scrabble Board sees

(Photo and caption credit, Marie.)

House Tours

Every January, I begin the year in a frenzy of decluttering. In the past week or so alone, I have already torn apart the mudroom and pantry and several closets and have my eye on the basement and garage. The way our house usually goes is that the main floor looks pretty good, but the basement and some individual bedrooms leave much to be desired. Anytime someone compliments my house, I always laugh and say, “Thanks, but don’t look up or down.”

Seventeen years ago, when we were selling our first house, a starter colonial with a fireplace, a glass porch, and a dining room papered in blue lilacs, I managed to get every inch of it looking good. This was no small feat with five very young children, but we were having an open house, and the public needed to see perfection. After cleaning and purging and cleaning some more, I remember looking around at my beautiful, clean house and wondering, “Why are we selling this place? I love it!”

It turns out that our family had not really outgrown the house, but our possessions and junk definitely had. With a little paring down inspired by those impending house tours, it suddenly seemed perfect for us again.

Which brings me to an idea, an idea that has been met with several responses from my teens, none of them good: “You’re not serious, right?”; “Wait, please tell me you would never really do that.”; “That sounds really embarrassing.”

My idea is to set a date, maybe two or three months down the road, and host a “House Tour Party.” We could invite a couple of friends for coffee and cake and then give the kind of tour you would usually only give if you were selling the house. I’m contemplating a full no-holds-barred tour that includes closets, the basement, the boiler room, and the attic with nothing off limits and no stone unturned. Who knows, we might even start a trend and a string of house tour parties will follow. They will be all the rage!

At the moment, this is in the back of my mind in the swirl of ideas that resides there, but I am thinking about clean closets and neatly-made beds and toys laid out in labeled bins and smiling the smile that means, “Mom is not kidding.”

As a new semester starts

“There is no pleasure in life like the joy of achievement.” —LM Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill

Backyard rink season opens!

The beginning and the beginning

Every year for the past five years or so, we have spent New Year's Eve at my home parish in Queens, New York. It is the only place I know of that has Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction at midnight to close the old year and ring in the new. Every year, at the stroke of midnight, the pastor (an excellent, hardworking priest who really got us through the pandemic) blesses the people with the monstrance containing the body of Our Lord.

Here we are on New Year's Eve 2019 into 2020:

Here we are on New Year's Eve 2020 into 2021. Same bell tower (different vantage point), same coat (on me), same boots (on me), but there is something wonderfully different. Seven of our nine children are with us instead of only three. The one good thing about 2020 was unexpected family togetherness. With so many of their usual New Year's plans canceled, we had a lot more of our children available to begin the year the best way possible--in church on our knees before our Blessed Lord.

2021 is going to be a great year for the Gunthers!