The cellar hole that had once held a home had been abandoned for many years. None but a dweller of the forest could have found it, for its road was lost, its stones were overgrown with wild brier and sumac, and the old gray birches that had sprouted around it were now tall and arched by the winds into a roof. But the cellar hole could remember. There, on one side, a brick fireplace had once stood with the bean pot snugly simmering in its oven, the andirons holding four-foot logs, and a mother rocking a cradle and knitting on the wide hearth. The cellar hole remembered spinning wheels and sleigh bells, sizzling doughnuts and molasses cookies, fishing tackle, guns, singing school and Bible readings, hardships and laughter, snow drifts and white lilacs. Now it was nothing but an ancient memory-book of things past. The thicket of black alder, pine and hemlock that led to it kept its pages closed to all except those who love the country.
Outside my window… ✨sunny and cool! Gorgeous! I wish I could mow/weed-whack but already have a lot going on. It’s been raining a lot and so I’m behind on yard work.
I am thinking…✨of my tween/teen girls class I’m teaching at church tonight! Our Charlotte Mason co op beginning tomorrow! Cleaning projects! Books to be read! 😅
I am thankful for…✨my new refrigerator! Even if it cut into remodeling budget. 🙃♥️👀
From the kitchen…✨I’m making sweet 🌽 corn for lunch and need to get sloppy joes in crockpot as we have church. I attempted a cake for my hubby and I’s anniversary this week. It was WAY more difficult (and too sweet) than I anticipated and was a bit of a flop. The kids ate it all, anyway! 😂♥️👀
The Summer Book by Susan BranchEgg whites! 👀
I am creating…✨reading journal 📓 spreads and filling in September pages ~
Found alien stickers to add! 😍♥️😂Working on these prompts! Working on these, too! Back to Hogwarts!Ditto! 😅✨My favorite readathon is COMING. I’m starting now! 🍂✨Dr.Wortle’s School is my first pick with my IRL bookclub! 😍I’m never going to read those all, but fun to dream! 😂
I am going…✨ nowhere until church, working on homeschool lessons, church lessons, cooking etc.
I am wearing…✨heather gray knockoff 😅 Arirang World Tour Tshirt and green cargo pants, sandals and pearl earrings. Probably will change into something different for church!
I am reading…✨many things, but mainly excited about The Brothers Karamazov and starting Victorian things!
Here’s where I’m at in Bros K! 😎🤣👀 I’m loving it!
I am hoping…✨ to get ahead on some outside responsibilities stuff, revive my lagging health goals, and work on helping with the next step in our remodeling. 🫣😅🥵
I am hearing…✨my hubby shuffling papers in his home office. 😅
Around the house…✨messes and mayhem! 😅♥️Two children just came back from taking garbage to our dump. We have dishes etc to catch up on and the refrigerator switch out. We have more school to tackle and a little church prep, still.
One of my favorite things… ✨the golden, blues, browns, and greens of September! 🌾🍂🍃🌻
A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week…✨ Homeschool co op! A movie night with my 7 yo! “Relaxation” this weekend. 😅♥️
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he can’t distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself. The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill-he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky, p.48-49
Youch. 🥲♥️ 🙏🏻 Slowly reading a chapter or two of this amazing book after my morning prayer time! Happy Monday!
Happy September 1st! We are prayerfully and slowly getting into the groove this week with our autumn homeschooling schedule which kicks into high gear next week. I’m still holding onto late summer though. September has the potential to be a favorite month, EXCEPT if we get extremely humid weather. 🥵 Like yesterday. 😂
My last read for the Keep Me in Suspense Bingo Board. It’s actually turning out to be deeper and more introspective. The mystery is a bit slow and lackluster but the interpersonal relationship dynamics between the older father and his daughter, a 40 yo nun, is fascinating! Welcome, Early Autumn mugs! A favorite spot ☺️♥️Charlotte Mason Co-op prep! Book mail! 📬💌📦📖Very sweet new-to-me series! Husband and wife in small town! The wife is a wee-bit manipulative, but I loved the first for the most part. From Instagram! August was a great month! 🥹🥰😍♥️ I’m amyofhearthridge on there, too, if you use IG! Hubby and I went to Chicago for a quick 1 1/2 day trip! He surprised me with a ticket to see BTS. 💜
Korean pop band! It was an fantastic show!
So proud of myself for making a half eggplant and half noodle lasagna! 😅💜 Next time I need to figure out a better way to prep the eggplant. It was a bit salty.
Hope your week is starting on a high note. I’m still holding onto all the inspiration and beauty from this past weekend. I’m hoping still to make a vision/inspiration board for our new school year! ♥️
{I saw some book questions on an Instagram account called PensandPoison (I like SOME of her stuff, she’s a bit too clickbait-y for me) recently and have been having a lot of fun thinking about my answers. I think she answered them using all fiction, but I’m using everything to answer! I adapted these questions for me. It is a lot of questions and as usual, I can’t have just one answer 🤣, so I’ll be breaking this up into parts! I’d love to hear your answers and I hope you may find a new favorite if you try any of these!}
LFL finds! We actually found quite a few in this series. We like the illustrations more than the stories. 😄😉🙃
♥️book that surprised me ~ Vanity Fair really surprised me, because I’m generally a character reader and there weren’t many characters to love. The writing won me over.
♥️book that disappointed me most ~ this is a hard one, as I don’t read a lot of anticipated/new releases. I think I was surprised by how different I Cheerfully Refuse was than what I thought. Leif Enger is a bit more thoughtful and darker writer, but it was surprising how sad it was. I got to go to a book signing and loved his talk.
♥️books I recommend most often ~ possibly Wives & Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. Jane of Lantern Hill and The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery? Maybe The Hobbit?
♥️Books I wish more people knew about ~ anything by Ray Bradbury!
♥️book I wish I could read again for the first time ~ Bleak House by Charles Dickens or A City of Bells by Elizabeth Goudge.
♥️book that made me fall in love with reading ~ The Boxcar Children #1! 🥹😍
♥️book that deserves to be taught in every school ~ David Copperfield or Jane Eyre, unabridged, of course!
♥️the greatest novel ever written ~ jury is out on this for me, it’s probably a Victorian novel? or something from my favorite authors. I just don’t know if I’ve read enough to make a serious decision. Ha. 😅
♥️the most beautiful sentence ever read ~ another so difficult to answer. “Once upon a time “ 😂?!
♥️one final book recommendation that hasn’t been mentioned ~ Emily of Deep Valley by Maud Hart Lovelace is such a gentle and thoughtful deep dive into servanthood.
How about you? What’s your answers to these questions? ♥️✨
Decorating pages to write a little review on these two books for myself. A penpal sent me that lovely Regency-era printed paper! Recent letters I’ve received! Just sent out a few responses! I had a big stack to catch up on. Still more to go! ♥️Trying very hard to use a lot of the stickers and washi I have! I had those random 1920’s stickers and I thought they were perfect for Brideshead Revisited! Glass Roses featured letters and a rose garden! So I found some stickers for that, too! A reread set on an island. Random sea coast type bird stickers I had. I used up the last? I think of my Totoro cards! Need to dig deeper in my stash and see. Hopefully, soon I can get more cards. Ephemera and paper piles make me happy. 😊
I replied, “But my work seems so useless! I have spent my strength for nothing and to no purpose. Yet I leave it all in the LORD’s hand; I will trust God for my reward.”
{I saw some book questions on an Instagram account called PensandPoison (I like SOME of her stuff, she’s a bit too clickbait-y for me) recently and have been having a lot of fun thinking about my answers. I think she answered them using all fiction, but I’m using everything to answer! I adapted these questions for me. It is a lot of questions and as usual, I can’t have just one answer 🤣, so I’ll be breaking this up into parts! I’d love to hear your answers and I hope you may find a new favorite if you try any of these!}
Lovely collection of nature poems and essays by a wide range of women!
♥️favorite poem~ I have SO many favorites, but Wendell Berry’s collection ‘Peace of Wild Things’ is an absolute favorite. Robert MacFarlane’s The Lost Spells is a family favorite. Currently, Emily Dickinson’s ‘If I Could Stop One Heart’ poem is probably my favorite.
♥️favorite first chapter ~ probably The Hobbit. 🥹😍🥰♥️
♥️favorite closing chapter ~ TheBook of Revelations from The Holy Bible. Wowsers!
♥️favorite literary friendships ~ this is unbelievably hard. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib, Anne and Diana, Molly and Mr. Gibson, I could go on for an hour! 😅♥️
September/autumn buddy reads! 🥰♥️
♥️favorite literary romance ~ (spoilers 😅) Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth, Anne and Gilbert, Darcy and Elizabeth, Laura and Almanzo, Molly and Roger, I could go on and on… there are so many! These are the first that come to mind.
♥️most unforgettable scene ~ the Persuasion letter by Captain Wentworth.
♥️best narrator ~ I’m enjoying Ishmael’s POV of the whaling world in Moby Dick currently. Otherwise, I’ve loved Richard Armitage’s audiobook narration of various classics.
♥️book I wished had a sequel ~ a 5th book in The Mirror Visitor Series would be nice to tie up the ending more.
♥️book that has intimidated me the most ~ anything by George Eliot,Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy, anything Russian 😅, The Odyssey and Iliad. Lonesome Dove!
♥️hardest book I’ve ever finished ~ The Divine Comedy– woohoo! 🎉
I highly recommend this epistolary story between two cousins that has Cinderella and Beauty & the Beast vibes! Very well-written, slow paced. 🥰♥️
How about you? What are your answers to these 10 questions above? What are you currently loving reading? Any good magazines lately? I may get a subscription for Christmas and don’t know what to pick! 😅♥️🥰Happy Reading!
Outside my window…it looks sparkly and sunny after a wild, gorgeous thunderstorm later yesterday!
I am thinking… of getting some laundry going so I can hang it on the line! Also about the books I found in a Little Free Library yesterday! I need to take some back to it. Do you ‘owe’ certain LFL’s books? 😂. I do this all the time.
I am thankful for…all the beautiful stories I have access to and for my little Delft mug my daughter bought me for my birthday! She found it at a garage sale.
From the kitchen… I am hoping to throw ham, rosemary, and potato soup into crockpot as we have church tonight!
I am creating… new reading journal pages! Last month, I decided to change the way I was doing my monthly spreads. Instead of printing off every book cover, I’m just making a monthly header page, a read list/readthon/buddy reads page, and then I want to do review pages for my favorites! I’d like to decorate each favorite’s review and then write out more thoughts etc, rather than just the small, teeny area around the book covers. I get a lot of inspiration from these two amazing reading journal artists: Manda Made and Michala’s Cozy Life ~
This little space dessert postcard a penpal sent to me is perfect so I made it into a “tip-in” for Sci-Fi September’s prompts. Zoom in if you want to see the darling illustrations on it!Here’s how I set up the monthly page now. I’m trying to use all the stickers and washi I have currently before buying too much more! Going to be printing off the Back to Hogwarts Readathon Game Board and placing it here! I may print of this Autumn Bingo Board too! My reading will go significantly down as school begins.
I am going… to my in-person bookclub this week! We are finally finished with Brideshead Revisited and I think it’s my turn to pick our next read! Now to narrow it down! I might make my friends read a Victorian novel 😈 with me since we are so close Victober! Or I could be nice and choose something lighter as we are all homeschooling moms. 🤔
I am wearing… probably my black pants and a Tshirt for the morning. It all depends if I end up lawn mowing today. The grass is super wet.
I am reading… a MILLION things. 🤭🫣 I always try to read too much right before school begins! 🙃 I really am trying to finish a few mysteries that I’m reading for the Keep Me in Suspense readthon. I’m super interested in finishing Moby Dick. You can’t read it fast, but over all I am loving it. The wordsmithing is top notch. I’m SO excited to be starting TheBrothers Karamazov with my daughter. I’ve heard amazing things about it. An online friend (hi, Elizabeth! 👋) recommended A Snicker of Magic and I just started this morning after reading my Bible and ADORED the writing of the first chapter. I’m also loving my reread of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson. The little granddaughter Sophia is sorta mean to my favorite character (the grandmother) 😖🥲 and that’s bothering more this time through. It’s so, soooo beautiful though! 😌🥹🥰
I am hoping… to continue my clothing purging project! I was so proud of myself for going through my socks & underwear. Ha. Now to my two younger boys! 😬🫣 My 12 yo grew significantly this year, so I want to make a list of needs to check for at thrift stores!
I am hearing… kids getting popsicles from dad for breakfast?! 🤭🫣😂🙃
Around the house… piles, piles, piles. 😒
One of my favorite things… my deck garden, Idlewild!
A Few Plans For The Rest Of The Week… Bookclub, continuing all my class prep for various autumn teaching responsibilities. Our own homeschool, homeschool Charlotte Mason co op, local mom’s homeschool group, and church teen girl’s group! Asking the Lord for peace and wisdom for all these things.
Here is a picture thought I am sharing for you…
How’s your week going? Anything coming up for you? What are you reading or creating? Anything neat you are watching or listening to?
I didn’t realize how many series I’m in the middle of, because most of them I move through very slowly. Here’s a few of the ones I really want to prioritize and a few I want to try!
Commisario Brunetti Mystery Series by Donna Leon ~ I absolutely love the characters in this police procedural series. The Venice setting is so intriguing and I’m so happy Kate Howe (favorite Booktuber and now a friend) introduced me to this series. This series has A LOT of books. FYI – the crimes are gritty and dark and these aren’t ‘politically correct’ for today’s sensibilities.
Matthew Shardlake Series by C.J. Sansom ~ This historical mystery series set in Tudor England is so wonderfully rich in characters, language, and setting. Shardlake is a deep, interesting character who works as a solicitor turned investigator. Dark and a bit creepy.
The Huntress Series by Carrie Cotton ~ I loved this Celtic historical world and the deep, rich characters. Took a bit to get used to the dialect and the flashbacks, but I have the second on my Kindle waiting for the mood to strike.
The Hierarchy Series by James Islington ~ I really enjoyed the first two books in this Roman-inspired fantasy world. I can’t wait for the next two to be published!
The Bangalore Detective Club Mystery Series by Harini Nagendra ~ I’ve only read one of these so far, but fell in love with the newlywed couple solving a mystery in 1920’s Bangalore.
Northwoods Mystery Series by Annie McEwen ~ new-to-me cozy mystery series set in my home state of Wisconsin! A family that runs a small cozy resort with lakeside cabins. Characters are deeper and so loving! I’m reading the second right now, Dead, White, and Blue, and really enjoying it. I will pause and save the next two for winter as they move seasonally. 🥰
Green Rider Series by Kristen Britain ~ I was loving this series following messenger Karigan G’ladheon as she navigates a lurking evil, politics, and all the interpersonal relationships. This is a medieval fantasy that I want to return to when the mood strikes.
Realm of the Elderlings by Robin Hobb ~ I so want to try this multi-series interconnected world. I’m experiencing extreme FOMO as a fantasy reader. 😂 I’m newer to high/epic fantasy and have heard this is one of the best! I’m a little worried that it’s going to be VERY violent, heavy adult content, and heartbreaking.
Licanius Series James Islington ~ I’d love to read this trilogy while I wait for him to finish the Hierarchy Seties! 🤣 He also has a newer book called Scion but not sure if it is going to be a series or if it’s a standalone.
The Faithful and the Fallen Series by John Gwinne ~ I’ve heard such good things about this high/epic fantasy series from Miriam Elizabeth Reads and Paris Mae Reads, that I reallly want to try. Gwinne has more series, too, if I enjoy his stories. I anticipate these to be pretty dark and gritty, so we’ll see if this wimp can handle them. Maybe I’m coming into my epic fantasy era! 😂
What are your FAVORITE series?♥️ Or do you prefer stand-alones?
Imagine that you’ve been spending the last few minutes watching a blue jay hide a cache of seeds in a tile roof. Or imagine that yesterday, out on a walk, you passed a dog barking angrily at you. Or think about a special time when you learned to roller-skate, the first time you went to the circus, or a day when a friend moved away.
All of these events are part of life-yours and mine-and when they happen there is always something inside of me that wants to turn what I see or hear into a poem. The picture stays in my mind long after the blue jay has flown away or the dog stops barking. I begin to search for the words that will form themselves to make a picture I can share with others, the words that will re-create themselves experience for someone else.
~Myra Cohn Livingston, Poem-Making Ways to Begin Writing Poetry
I’m furiously working on our homeschool coop lessons and am LOVING this book I found for our older students. It makes me want to prioritize my poetry writing again! ♥️How’s your homeschool prep coming along? Are you all looking forward to autumn? 🍂
Annoying side character and a bit of a slow start, but I enjoyed this cozy mystery! 🔎🕵️♀️
{I saw some book questions on an Instagram account called PensandPoison (I like SOME of her stuff, she’s a bit too clickbait-y for me) recently and have been having a lot of fun thinking about my answers. I think she answered them using all fiction, but I’m using everything to answer! I adapted these questions for me. It is a lot of questions and as usual, I can’t have just one answer 🤣, so I’ll be breaking this up into parts! I’d love to hear your answers and I hope you may find a new favorite if you try any of these!}
A.M. Pine - Hearth Ridge Reflections 