Spring According to Gladys Taber

"April in New England is like first love." Gladys Taber 

(Yes, Yes, I know, it's June... but when I wrote this it was late April and I just never hit publish) 

I am rereading Stillmeadow Sampler by Gladys Taber, 1959. She lived in a 1600 farm house in Southbury, Connecticut and writes about country life. I love how this book is written in seasons (although she actually has a book called "Seasons" I will read someday) 

I love to read the season I am in to just enjoy it that much more. Her writing is like poetry and I find I can read just a paragraph at night before I go to sleep and mull it around in my mind all day. Her writing reminds me greatly of my hero, Laura Ingalls Wilder who also writes about the joys of living in the country and everyday pleasures of life. 

A few of my favorite quotes from her spring writing:

(oh and our tulips were glorious this year) 

"A countryman's life always moves steadily, with a pattern fitting the changing seasons." 

"Days on the calendar come and go, but God is timeless. Love and faith and hope know no season, they are themselves, I think, eternity."

"Time was, then, the next twenty-four hours and what I would get done in it. But now I feel my own small portion of time links me with those who walked in the garden yesterday and those who will walk there after I am gone." 

"As I went back to the house, the sound of the lawn mower drowned out the rap-rap of the flickers. Somehow the first mowings are especially lovely, for the grass smells better than any perfume and the clippings fall green and think behind the blades." 

 

"The best way to keep a house spotless, of course would be not to inhabit it at all, but just come in twice a week and clan and then shut it up. I have seen houses that look like that, so guests hardly dare sit son for fear they'll unfluff the sofa pillows. To me, a lived-in house is better. But it is all in what you consider important." 

"Even in May, the evening chill comes down. There is nothing urgent to do in the garden, for the seeds, we hope, are about their own business. We may have just soupbowls of fresh asparagus for supper, dressed with top milk and sweet butter. Then after the dishes are washed, we go out and putter around." 

"We all, I suppose, desire at one time or another to escape. We not only wish to escape the drudgery and routine of our lives but the frustrations and worries. We yearn, in short, to be free. Just to pack up and go. To get away from it all, as the saying goes. But there is no place so far away that one can escape one's own self. The country of the heart is always the same." 

"I try to understand the newest music, the most modern art, but I think there is a place in life for simple, old-fashioned things."