Working Today.

I worked all day today on the schoolroom/studio. Very pleasant work I must say. As I cleaned and scrubbed, and went through books and threw away  used workbooks and notebooks. I had kept every thing that all six of my kids did for twenty five years. Remember I started homeschooling in the dark ages when you went to jail for being a home educator. I have filled up three trash cans. Am I a pack rat? Not normally, but my thinking was if I was ever approached by the authorities along with my records I would give them work for each student. No one ever asked. :) I cleaned out drawers and drawers of crayons, pencils, colored pencils, colored markers, and dry erase markers. Lots and lots of flotsam and jetsam. The hard part was when I would run across a old photo of when they were all small.

 

I ran across my favorite kinds of children's literature. I started putting all of my Meindert DeJong books together. Books I love like Wheel on the School, or Along Came a Dog. ( which is really about a hen whose  feet freeze off.) The House of Sixty Fathers. Those are his most famous. I thought it might be nice to sit and read him this summer. I am thinking of reading all of the Melendy books by Elisabeth Enright. She is such a beautiful writer it is almost like reading prose. The quartet of Melendy books are The Saturdays, The Four Story Mistake, Then There Were Five ( My favorite) and Spiderweb for Two. She wrote Gone Away Lake and Return to Gone away Lake which I just loved.

 

 All of these books remind me of hot summer afternoons, sitting in my reading tree and watching the clouds sail by in the blue, blue sky, and listening to the sound of the wind in the trees. As the days grew hotter the leaves would start to smell of dirt and crunchy, hot, green. Sitting in a tree reading a book was one of my favorite past times as a child. Sitting and dreaming of how life would be someday.

I ran across all of the Walter Farly books that we have. How many afternoons did I spend reading those over and over and dreaming of riding a horse all summer long. I think when I finally did get a horse and lived on horse back in the summer then there would be the lovely pace of going down a dirt road and seeing where it went. I have always been sad that my children didn't have the luxury of running down a dirt road with powdery dirt squishing up between their bare toes, because who ever wore shoes in the summer?

I found all of the Albert Payson Terhune dog books today. I loved those as much. My favorite of that one being Gray Dawn. I always have been a big fan of horse books and dog books.
It is a big job going through boxes and boxes of books but it is a wonderful job too. I get to look at old friends and touch their lovely spines and know that this summer, I will make time to go inside their covers and remember all of the good things the authors wrote. I guess the reason I love books is because it is not just meeting old friends, but it is listening to really good story tellers enrich my life through their words.

 Thank you for stopping by today.
 I am so thankful for all of you who stop by to read
my blog. You enrich my life every day.

Blessings to you all,
~Kim~