When life feels overwhelming, I’ve been learning to stop and remember little moments. For the past few years, I’ve been making it my practice to take time when I least feel like it to look for beauty and good things and happiness in the place that I am right then. I get distracted sometimes. Life…
Chantel
A wishful writer who only knows how to scribble, loves old books, real letters, keeping house and growing gardens and looking at pretty things. Happily married to my very best friend.
Good Eats for Summer Time
I’ve heard it said that the summer heat and humidity can be brutal here in almost-Dixie land come August. So far I’m loving most of these hot and humid days, but I know that there will come a point when the fact that I was brought up in Seward’s Ice Box will catch up with…
Five Reasons to Buy Locally Grown Food
Spring days are fast slipping into summer ones, and I’ve been hearing talk of digging up spring gardens and plans for summer crops soon to be ready for harvest. Sadly for me, it will be yet another season in which I won’t get to dig in the dirt and grow my own garden goodies.
That is one reason why I’ve been stalking our tiny local grocery store for new items in the local produce bins that they put out every year!
Well, the tornadoes and bad storms that tore through my corner of the world may have put some things on hold for a while while we pick up the pieces, and the street corner stands seemed a little slow in starting this spring, but the tiny grocery store has begun to stock greens and lettuce and fresh green onions and radishes again from the farmers in the next county over, and I am happy.
Green
I am not the deepest shade of green on the block when it comes to conservation and the “green living”….but I believe that God created this earth with all of the beauty and resources for us. It is a gift, and just as we guard our health, and because we want to guard our health, I think that each one of us would do well to take a look at what we can do in our own homes to be wise stewards, to waste less and to use wisely.
There
It was simply titled “There”, but it was one of the most powerful sermons I’d heard. The piece of paper on which I jotted the notes and main points is limp now, for each of the years that have passed since I first heard the sermon have proved to make the message it contained more…
My Ebenezer
It is a simple, hard backed journal of greens with the words “each day has a miracle inside of it” printed on the front. It is getting worn on the edges, but its pages are filled with page after page of my life. Its a record of God’s faithfulness in my life, of the way that He has led, and a map of the road I traveled from there to here. It’s my Ebenezer…
Little Things That Matter
There are a lot of big things in life: big decisions, big challenges, big changes, big hopes, big dreams, big disappointments, big opportunities. And honestly, sometimes “its hard to see the trees through the forest” when it comes down to the nitty gritty of day to day life. But just like the forests of this…
dusting bookshelves
Our little living room may not have much going for it in terms of real furniture, but it does have three matching bookshelves. The books they hold make up the lack, creating the kind of cozy decoration that, to me, helps to make a house into something more. The pretty ones are as good as any picture hanging on the wall.
The thing with books and bookshelves is that many little (and big) hands can quickly vanquish any sort of order in record time, no matter how you arrange them! It is a good thing that dusting the bookshelves and putting them back into place is a job that is more fun than work…
Charity’s Diaries
Most fiction that I’ve been exposed to has felt cheap, shallow, and unedifying. The unrealistic light in which romantic fiction often paints life and love has led many a girl to look for love in the wrong places, or be dissatisfied with life in general…
Charity’s Diaries are different. Like one of my favorite authoresses, Louisa May Alcott, Elisabeth Allen wrote Charity as a real girl who is not perfect, who faces realistic disappointments and heart struggles and fears, just like we all have had at some point in our lives. And like Gretchen, I often read the pages with tears in my eyes as time after time I recognized some of the life, I too, have lived, written into the pieces of Charity’s thoughts in her diary and daily life that are captured in these books…
The Reading Balance
Years have changed a lot of things for this bookworm. The responsibilities and demands of life have shifted my priorities: I don’t read as much as I use to read, and for a while, I read almost nothing at all. In part, many moves that kept books tucked into boxes for months or years at a time were to blame. But that wasn’t the only reason.
I doubt that over-reading in general is something that much of the population today has to worry about. But sometimes I wonder if we take time to find balance in our reading, in what we read, how we read and yes, even how much we read…
