FROM OTHER PLACES

Photo by Janie at Photography with a Southern Accent---her pictures are just breathtaking.

This year's first little jottings from my journal; when words strike me, I write them down to savor and to remember:


I’d rather have thirty minutes of Wonderful than a lifetime of Nothin’ Special.
Shelby Eatenton Latcherie Steel Magnolias


"I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall use my time." ~Jack London

And, even in the rock-and-sing cadence of this old poem, the one we learned by heart in our first Literature classes, the one in which we were learning da-da-DA, da da da DA da on our way to all the enrichment of rhyme and meter, beginning with this ancient saw---I wonder what Longfellow would have thought of a whole mixed class of Mississippi third-graders, reciting and rocking in time like a shul of kippahed boys:

Lives of GREAT men all re-MIND us,
Let us MAKE our lives subLIME;
And dePARTing, leave be HIND us,
Foot prints ON the sands of TIME.

And it concludes, with a hum and a haw and a homily, one that will out itself at the strangest times and places---over the dishpan or trying on shoes:


Let us THEN be up and DOing,
With a HEART for any FATE;
Still aCHIE-ving, still purSUing,
Learn to LAbor and to WAIT.



Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo

On singers who sing themselves, not the song:

As for Christina, what a disgrace. Our anthem is beautiful as it is... it doesn't need to be dragged around by its hair! A Comment on Tom and Lorenzo








The meaning of life is to find your gift, the purpose of life is to give it away - Joy J. Golliver


"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us." E.M. Forster

The cake has a wonderful rainy afternoon quality; the crumb of a great pound cake but multiple times more moist. Smitten Kitchen.

Sweetpea's first marmalade pound cake.

On returning from a trip:
. . .home with new memories, carefully folded and put away in the drawers of sweet yesterdays. KELLE HAMPTON of Enjoying the Small Things

Kelle's blog is a wonderful mix of the extraordinary and the everyday---thoroughly lived, thoroughly enjoyed, thoroughly enchanting. Once you go there, you'll keep going back.

It feels like Spring here. like Warm and Cool have exchanged vows in a beautiful blue-skied ceremony and have brought forth a love child who dwells right here, right now. She is splendid, this love child, and she brings with her breezes that send our curtains fluttering and call the babies outside. KELLE HAMPTON

I live my life in exclamation points. Connie @ Living Beautifully

Exclamation points it is---as much as Spring, I think we all NEED some Exclamation. Let's go have some!!