We are trying to read a variety of things around our house. I tend to read "educational self help" while my husband reads science and history. I know we need to read more fiction. So, I do it with my kids - aloud. Today I stumbled upon The Snow-Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was totally taken by this description of the mother.
The mother's character, on the other hand, had a strain of poetry in it, a trait of unworldly beauty - a delicate and dewy flower, as it were, that had survived out of her imaginative youth, and still kept itself alive amid the dusty realities of matrimony and motherhood.
That's what I want to find, nurture and develop that "strain of poetry" that makes everything a bit more wonder- ful and magical. I have no real idea how to do this. I am much more like the father who is described as "an excellent but exceedingly matter-of-fact sort of man".
I also liked this thought:
And, to say the truth, if miracles are ever to be wrought, it will be by putting our hands to the work in precisely such a simple and undoubting frame of mind as that in which Violet and Peony now undertook to perform one, without so much as knowing that it was a miracle.
We only read half of the short tale because the 3 yo was screaming but the story is enchanting so far. Hawthorne wrote far more than The Scarlet Letter so I encourage you to check out some of his other writing.
See what others are reading in this New Year over at ladydusk.
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