Salute to Adventurers

And happy birthday to one in particular

Feb. 21st, 2020— Today was Annie’s 27th birthday. We went to Star Fort Creek, walked 5.3 miles and stopped for hot tea and cookies. They are beautiful, pure, innocent, but not ignorant women and they are so good for me. Looking back, I can see how I have been made like them.

My twenties were rocky years, but in them I enjoyed the sweetest friendship with two sisters. We shared our lives, but mostly we helped each other climb up on a higher plane: we went adventuring, we read old books, sang old songs, and laughed every chance we could. There is something to be said for the modern ideal of friendship, of someone who will listen to you endlessly and say all the sweet comforting things. But I can tell you, there is a type of friendship that is worth even more. We all of us had plenty to complain and commiserate about in those days. Heartbreaking stuff. But the thing is, this was obvious and evident. In times like this, what you need most is a friend from Faerie. Someone with one foot in another world…

“I took a walk through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Believe it or not, there amid the trenches and bomb craters and in the raw, cold weather was a whole garden of red and yellow roses in bloom.” - Ernie Pyle, in England

With Annie and Laura as my brothers-in-arms, we went looking for joy and found it there for the taking, in old home-sites covered over in garlic and daffodils, in cedar-lined dirt roads, in water from wells and springs and creeks all over South Carolina, in the stories of John Buchan and P.G. Wodehouse and Ernie Pyle and Elizabeth Goudge, in mystery-thrillers and seed catalogs. We were rear-ended on an island, almost eaten by a dog on our antiquated bikes, soaked under roaring waterfalls, and swung high over roof-tops on mountain-sides. The journey was the goal, not the destination, and so we made a pact to pause whenever anyone had a mind to, to turn around for the local dairy, or stop to pick beautiful weeds on the road-side. Through suffering, together, we maintained a high regard for human happiness.

There is a great good in bearing sorrow patiently. I don’t know that there is any virtue in sorrow just as such. It is a Christian duty, as you know, for everyone to be as happy as he can.

-C.S. Lewis, in a letter in Sheldon Vanauken

I love being a homemaker and a mother to three small children. And it is also true that sometimes I feel like I’m going to go insane. There is the 10-minute rule, which helps, and there are the Rescue Remedy drops (which I think is just alcohol) and they help too, but mostly what helps me is that foundation of joy laid in my twenties, by the help of my friends. It’s not just any kind of joy. It’s a brave joy, a toughness, a resilience. I don’t look to instagram moms for encouragement, I, with a baby in my arms, take a walk over my bookshelves. I let my eyes run over the titles and I remember when I first read about Mrs. Montague in The Dean’s Watch, (“Could mere loving be a life’s work? Could it be an adventure?”) and first met Peter Wimsey in Murder Must Advertise, and as all the delightful phraseology of Wodehouse descends upon me again I turn to my messy house and loud, destructive children, let out a mirthless laugh, resolve to let my manner be calm and dignified, like that of a red Indian at the stake or else just curl up like a burnt feather, I ask my infant which shall it be, but there is no answering spark of intelligence in his eye, and as you know, we Woosters do not force our conversation on the unwilling so I sink into a c and pass an agitated h over the b…. The point is, I can smile and buck-up now. My friends taught me this coping technique, but it’s a right, good, old way, and I plan to keep in it.

How to best prepare for motherhood, or the raging drama of life, in general? Read the good old books, find brave friends, walk so many miles in the woods that when you are bed-bound you can close your eyes and see it— the moss-covered ground, the white-oaks beside the rushing creek— and hold onto the memories: of your faithful friend pouring out the strong black-tea, and her voice, reading from the commonplace book in her lap, “It consoles the philosopher in this hard world to reflect that, even if man is born to sorrow as the sparks fly upward, it is still possible for small things to make him happy.”

(from Jill the Reckless, by Wodehouse)

To the beaniest of old beans, wherever you are galavanting and bringing cheer (downing all the red-meat and wine, no doubt!), Annie, old stick, happy birthday!