Waiting For Baby Sister

So anxious to welcome our new

baby sister!

In the mean time though,

we'll just play and enjoy this magical Fall day.

Live the Width of it

Food For Thought Friday

This is an amazing critique of the state of the American academy , by a 50 year Harvard Professor, Harvey Mansfield, in this interview on the Hoover Institute's
Uncommon Knowledge

(This interview makes a great case for classical education and great books study.)


"Statistically, Harvey Mansfield should be a raging liberal. He’s been at Harvard since 1949. In 2008, 93% of Harvard faculty political contributions were to Democrats. At Yale in the same year it was 94%. While it is no secret that America’s colleges and universities are bastions of liberalism, Harvey Mansfield in our latest episode discusses how that happened and the effect that it has on our society."


"One of the first casualties of the liberal stranglehold on the academy is a healthy emphasis on Western Civilization."

One more stop

I ended my afternoon with Heidi's boys at the local farm where we love to buy produce in the summer. They helped me pick out corn and other vegies to take home.

Boys at the Park

Slightly melancholy- ( let's just look at these flowers and see the ducks across the pond.)

Animated (all the ducks are gathering around now !)

Or - not having versus - having a bag of old bread ( handed to us ) to feed those same ducks.

Now this is more like it!! A feeding Frenzy!

Blackberries

"I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry -- eating in late September." Gallway Kinnell, Blackberry Eating

Justin & Olive - Part Two

Justin & Olive

September

"Lord, it is time. The summer was very big.

Lay thy shadow on the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go loose.

Command the last fruits that they shall be full;

give them another two more southerly days, press them on to fulfillment and drive

the last sweetness into the heavenly wine."

~Rainer Maria Rilke~

"Smoke hangs like haze over harvested fields,

The gold of stubble, the brown of turned earth

And you walk under the red light of fall

The scent of fallen apples, the dust of threshed grain

The sharp, gentle chill of fall.

Here as we move into the shadows of autumn

The night that brings the morning of spring

Come to us, Lord of Harvest

Teach us to be thankful for the gifts you bring us ..."

"By all these lovely tokens

September days are here,

With summer’s best of weather

And autumn’s best of cheer."

~Helen Hunt Jackson, September, 1830-1885~