to-do list

Now Playing: "Diagnoses Murder", a mystery TV show with Dick VanDyke. Happens to be one of Emmaline's favorite shows....

For the two weeks' break, we had quite a list of things to do, including

Visiting Downhill Castle, which we did last week. An 1800s mansion, ruins positioned strikingly on top of cliffs looking north over the sea. It's in a sheep field now, open to the wind and rain.

Singing Handel's "Messiah" with a motley choir of two hundred fifty people drawn from across Northern Ireland. We only had two rehearsals, one Saturday morning and one Saturday afternoon, with the performance Saturday evening. Still, the choruses sounded absolutely gorgeous, reverberating in the big church where we were performing.

Hiking the Glens of Antrim, specifically Glenariff Forest Park. Two awesome waterfalls, swollen with rain, thundering down over black rocks. Also, Glenarm Castle, which has a falconry, though it was closed because of the winter. The drive to the glens was starkly beautiful, along steep cliffs, through small villages where steep-keeled sailboats were dry-docked in little harbors.

Touring Tyrone Crystal factory, where we saw glasses being hand-blown. The master blowers took the bead of glass out of the furnace, twisting and blowing into the blow-hole until a bubble formed, then twisting continually as the glass was lowered into an applewood mould in a wooden bucket full of water. Still twisting, the blower let the glass fit the shape of the mould, and as he did so, a moyle, a mushroom-shaped formation, congealed on top. This had to be sawed off, and the edges of the glass smoothed, before the glass was marked and cut in the frost-elaborate patterns famous of crystal.

Exploring Ulster American Folk Park, a living history museum telling the story of immigration from Northern Ireland (ports such as Londonderry) to America. This and the above two were done with Catherine and Emmaline and involved a lot of driving over the past few days, bumping and tripping over narrow country roads with all their odd jogs and hummocks.

Watching movies, such as The Parent Trap (and lots of others: Spider-man 1, Fantastic Four 1 and 2, etc.).

About half of which we haven't done: me teaching Emmaline how to play Milles Bornes, which she has because it's a French game but doesn't know how to play; putting together T-shirts for the girls in the group who went to Paris; painting big strips of wallpaper on the blank side to hang as posters in our room; planning games for Glenmanus RPC's annual congregational meeting in a couple of weeks (their meeting consists of a fellowship meal, then the meeting, then games and a talent show--!).

But there have been plenty of new things along the way that I wasn't expecting:

Milking, as mentioned in the last post.

Rice pudding at lunch today. Hadn't had it before--a fluffy, milky concoction, sweet and bland, tastier when mixed with raspberry jam.

That lovely walk down to the beach last week. Went down to the beach again this past Sabbath with Emmaline, Erin, and Alistair. This time, the East Strand, on the other side of the broad curve of the bay where Portstewart Strand is. We scrambled up a big sand dune--or rather, Alistair and Erin did; Emmaline and I pulled each other up, and then dragged each other down again, laughing and getting completely filthy with sand.

Right now Emmaline is working on one of the things on our list, the games. We'd thought of playing a game in which you took pictures of familiar people and cut out a nose or an ear and tried to get everyone to guess to whom it belonged. So she's scanning old congregational pictures into her computer, showing me some of them along the way. Always amusing to see how friends have changed.

All-in-all, a good two weeks. After this: School, anyone?

Yesterday the three of us decided that two of us (Emmaline and I) are quite happy just to be hanging out around here, enjoying the release from the pressures of school and city life, whereas Catherine desperately misses Renwick and is eager to fix supper for all the girls and play pranks on all the guys (!).

Anyway, ready or not, classes start on Monday.

moo

(1/21/08)

This afternoon Mr. M needed Emmaline to help with the milking, so I tagged along. Before we went out to the milking parlor, we had to suit up--Reuben's plastic leggings and boots and an enormous jacket for me, and a dark blue boiler suit and Nathanael's boots for Emmaline. The afternoon was grey, and the day's heavy rain lay in mucky pools on the concrete. Emmaline stepped into the dairy to turn on the milking machines, and then she and I went next door into the parlor.

Mr. M has a Lithuanian boy working for him, a ruddy blond young guy who barely understands English. The first group of cows came in, and we set to work. Before the milking machines go on, all the cows' teats have to be dipped in disinfectant, then wiped. So I set to work on that while the others came along behind, putting on the milking machines. It wasn't exactly the cleanest job in the world. One has to yank on the cows' mucky tails with one hand in order to get them to stand still while one's other hand is busy.

While the parlor was full, Mr. M and his helper went out to feed the calves while Emmaline and I stood waiting for the cows to be done milking. The pipes and tubes churned and swished overhead and on either side. The mucky black-and-white rumps stood lined up at shoulder-height on either side while we stood down on the walkway running between the milking machines. In the holding pen behind us, at the other end of the walkway, other cows stood waiting, their huge inquisitive heads peering down into the walkway, steam blowing from their nostrils as though they had been a crowd of benign dragons. When one group of cows was done, they had to be cleaned again, then chased out. Shouting usually did the job, reaching up through the bars and contraptions to slap their filthy gritty legs and rumps. Then the gates had to be shut and another lot shouted in, and the same thing done again. The floor was slippery with spilled milk and water, and the cows' hooves clopped and slopped on the mucky floor.

After a couple of rounds, Mr. M sent Emmaline and me out to feed one of the calves with a big bottle of milk. We went out of the parlor and round into the barn behind. There were three pens of cows here--a pen of young frisky heifers, a pen with a couple of calving cows, and a pen with some old cows, their hides greyed with years. Emmaline and I climbed into the pen with the two calving cows and attempted to feed the newly-born calf. Its hide was still wet, its fur feathery, red afterbirth still clinging to its legs. It tried to get up, but unsuccessfully. While Emmaline tried to feed it, I climbed up a ladder onto the hayloft and started to throw straw down into the pens. Great prickly handfuls, sweet memory of summer, cascading down onto the black-and-white backs below. The heifers kicked up their legs and galloped round their pen, churning up the fresh straw. Emmaline, giving the calf a rest, took the big handfuls I threw down and scattered them around the pen, a shining golden whirlwind around her black head. Between the three pens we used up the better part of a bale, covering the old muck with a deep layer of fresh straw. Then we tried to feed the calf again, but it was too silly and young to know what it was doing, so we let it go.

Back into the parlor we went to help with the last couple rounds of cows. I climbed the steps into the holding pen with a piece of PVC piping and used it to shoo the next batch of cows into the parlor. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" "Up, up, up, up! C'mon, girls!" Mr. M shouted, calling the finished group back out into the barns while I jostled and whacked the next group into the parlor. While the last group finished milking, Emmaline and I hung up the milking machines, like so many four-legged spiders, neatly on the little shelves in the parlor. When the last group had been shouted into the barns again, Emmaline turned on a power hose and gave me the job of washing down the parlor, spraying the muck and spilled milk into one of the drains.

At last Mr. M told us we were free to go. Stepping outside, I took a deep breath. The very last of the sunset was reddening on the western horizon, beyond the house. Overhead the stars were very crisp and clear in a deep blue sky, and the full moon shone down through clouds turned bright pink by the very last of the far sunset. To the east, the lights of Coleraine shone very gold in the black folds of the land.

Emmaline and I went inside and washed up, scrubbing the muck off our hands and faces. My hands still smell like cows--a sneezy smell, not exactly unpleasant. We stripped off our suits and went into the house for supper.

sea and sun

Now Playing: The Postal Service, "Such Great Heights". (Courtesy Philip. Seems appropriate, somehow. Whenever I listen to this song, and to Nick Drake's "River Man", I listen to them over and over again....)

First things first: another poem up on Through A Glass Darkly, at last. Keep in mind, when reading it, the transience of human life.

This morning I woke up in the McCollums' house to the sounds of Erin, Eleanor, Nathanael, and Reuben getting ready to go to school. Familiar household sounds--pots and pans clattering, doors banging, feet hurrying up and down the stairs, voices shouting and replying. Emmaline's alarm went off beside me, and she turned it off but stayed half-asleep until I elbowed her (as requested the night before), and she woke up with a chuckle. While she took a shower, I dressed, then went downstairs. Mrs. M was just going out to drop the girls off at school. I had a bowl of cereal, sitting alone in the empty kitchen. Outside the day was still dark and cloudy, as though morning had forgotten to come, or was running late as well. I meandered around the house, standing by windows in hallways, watching dawn come slowly in the east beyond the sycamore trees. Steel grey-blue clouds moving away southeastward, leaving behind a periwinkle sky.

I loitered in the kitchen while Emmaline grabbed her breakfast and discussed plans with Mr. M, who was eating his breakfast after the morning milking. Emmaline left at nine-thirty or so, to spend the day with Alistair: he was given a flight lesson for his birthday, so he'd invited her to come along for the half-hour flight, and then to spend the day. After she left, I chatted with Mr. and Mrs. M some, then moseyed upstairs to sit on Emmaline's bed and study Philippians 2. Philippians is proving to be a difficult book to profit from, more so than Ephesians, which had immediate relevance when I first began to study it. I know that I need the messages of Philippians about Christ's love on my behalf and how I ought to reflect Him in my treatment of others; also, the messages about peace in Christ concerning prayer and contentment, which I desperately need during this season of life as I move constantly from place to place. Nonetheless, I find this epistle more disconnected than Ephesians, which in some ways makes it harder to "get into". (Nickel Creek, "Nickel Creek", Track 1, "Ode to a Butterfly" now--perfectly blissful music.)

Anyhow, at about ten-thirty, I pulled on my sturdy trainers, my pashmina and gloves, and coat, and set off alone to walk down to Portsteward Strand, as the main beach nearby is called. A good three-mile walk, at least. The house was quiet and empty as I left it, sitting behind me in the sunshine. The sun was thinly veiled by clouds, and the morning still had a wintry chill to it, though the cold was more bracing than unbearable. I walked down Islandtasserty Road, over the bridge where the road leaps above the railroad line that runs between Londonderry and Belfast. I crossed the Coleraine Road, and went up the Agherton Road. A couple of houses at the start of the road, where big dogs barked irritably at me, but after that, the familiar network of small fields, punctuated only here and there by houses. British robins twittered at me from hawthorn hedgerows; crows pecked at the rich brown furrows of a ploughed field; a tortoiseshell cat eyed me yellowly from under a fence. The grass at the edge of the road was wet, and the black road gleamed blue, slick with water.

I went up the Agherton Road as far as I could, to the roundabout by the graveyards, where a new cemetery lies on the right and an old cemetery with the ruins of a chapel in it on the left, and continued on, up toward Portstewart. Houses now, on either side. New developments--tall white houses, reminding me of the ones in Boulder, Colorado. Behind me on the road I heard the clop of horses' hooves and , glancing over my shoulder, saw a pair of riders coming up behind me. The road fell by degrees toward the town, in two long slopes. More and more houses, smaller semi-detached houses, older ones, closer to the town. Another roundabout, and then down into Portstewart itself, along the Promenade. Past The Anchor pub, and turning off finally by the Catholic priory, where St. Mary's Star of the Sea church faces out over Portstewart harbor, and the priory itself sits on the cliff above, like a white battlemented ship.

I took the cliff walk, running along the cliffs under the priory, and at last to the Strand. Emmaline, Erin, and I had walked along here the last Sabbath I visited them, in the afternoon. That day it was cloudy and the waves were enormous, crashing against the shore with plumes of spume. Today it was sunny, the sun coming out by degrees until the air was quite mild, and the waves were blue-and-white. The path snaked along the cliff, sometimes going up and down slick uneven flights of steps. Grass grew in mats on the cliffs. Below, the waves broke on black outcrops of rock where seagulls and other small seabirds stood on the lees of the rocks.

At one point, I scrambled off the path onto one of the little shelf beaches that come cupped in the cliffs as they fall lower to the sea, toward the Strand. The tide was running high, so I had to dodge the waves that came slithering in as I walked along the little beach. Delight settled on me as I sifted through the beds of shells washed up among the rocks. Great heaps of shells, piled and stirred together, many of them no more than tiny broken fragments, making a sort of dark coarse sand. Here the shells are conical, like barnacle shells, and striped--orange, grey, black, white, and grey-blue. Sometimes there are the twisted snail shells, but most of the shells are these zebra ones. Among them I found pieces of sea glass, green and pale blue and white, scooped and scoured by the waves. Soon I had a handful, and had to climb back onto the path with a pocket that clinked slightly as I walked.

I climbed down to the beach on the flight of stairs, and walked along the beach a little way. Erin and I had walked almost all the way down the beach that Sabbath afternoon, so I didn't feel the need, with the hour-and-a-half walk back to the farm lying before me, to go very far. The firm brown sand shimmered where the waves had made it wet. The waves surging, cresting, and falling, stroke after stroke, the endless sound. The sun shone down on the water and turned it a vivid, living teal, and glanced on the white walls and dark roofs of the Portstewart Promenade, crusting the eastern arm of the bay. To the west, the strand curved away up to the point where Mussendun Temple stands. Beyond that, flecked gold and green in the sunshine, was another headland, and beyond that, more cliffs--Donegall, western Ireland.

Walking back along the cliff walk, I stopped on a bench in the sunshine to rest before marching back to the farm, my back to the warm stone wall, holding back the cliff on which the priory stands. Moving on, somewhat restored, I climbed up through the town again. Voices of people around me: a mother coaxing her toddler up the street; two women greeting each other at the door of a drug store. Not many people out. At the roundabout where the old graveyard is, I took a short detour, scrambled up some grassy steps, and went into the old graveyard. I walked around the ruins of the chapel a bit--not much to see, just wet grassy mounds, thin stone slabs aslant, an old yew tree, a lanky rosebush with one pale waxy bud coming into bloom in the shelter of the stone walls.

It was good to be back on the Agherton Road, out in the country again. Alone under the blue sky. Silence--no wind, and hardly a whisper from the busy Coleraine Road.

The farmyard was as quiet as I'd left it. Young heifers eyed me out the "window" of their winter barn, white eyes rolling in black faces. I went into the house. Mr. and Mrs. M were just sitting down to lunch and welcomed me cordially. We had a thick soup with carrots, barley, lentils, tomatoes, and celery. Mr. and Mrs. M told me a funny story about how Mr. M had gotten lost on a walk in County Armagh while he was attending synod there. After lunch, we sat around the kitchen table, drinking tea out of thick white mugs. Mrs. M was in the midst of trying to put together the church's financial reports for the congregational meeting in a couple of weeks, and detritus of papers, slips, and charts layered the table. Mr. M read classified ads out of an American dairy farming magazine, asking me jokingly if I would like to manage a cheese farm in California for him.

Mrs. M needed some desserts baked for her WMA meeting tonight, so I offered to do it. She got me started in the kitchen. At first I worked on making coffee walnut chocolate cookies (!), but once I'd gotten all the mix into the bowl, the blender refused to do the job--and I remembered that I'd promised to talk with my mother on Skype at three o'clock. Mrs. M took over for me, and I, very apologetic, disappeared upstairs to sit on Emmaline's bed with my laptop. Outside, clouds were coming over again, from the east this time. I heard doors slam downstairs--the others were back from school. I said good-bye to my mother at four o'clock or so, and went downstairs to see what I could do.

Mrs. M had baked scones in the hour since I'd been in the kitchen, and they were still warm. She, Eleanor, and I sat around the kitchen table, eating the warm scones with hazelnut honey Emmaline had bought at the Christmas market in Paris. Eleanor hung around while I made the malteser bars (the cookies were in the oven). She helped mostly by licking the spoon.

When the bars were made, the cookies were ready to come out of the oven, so Mrs. M and I pulled them out and slid them onto cooling racks, where they were sprinkled with powdered sugar. The counter was positively snowy by the time Eleanor and I were done with it. I washed up the dishes I'd used, and crept away to fetch my laptop. Eleanor and Nathanael settled down at the kitchen table to do homework while watching the new Yours, Mine, Ours on the computer in the kitchen. I curled up in the little sitting room by the fire. I'm on one of the leather sofas; Reuben is on the other, playing his PSP, a handheld gaming device. I can hear the clashing and clicking of the "Star Wars" game he's playing, but I've got my Skype headset in so that I can listen to "Nickel Creek", too. The fire crackles and clinks on the hearth--almost the same sound as the sea makes, tumbling shells in the backwash of its waves.

moodiness

Now Playing: Loreena McKennitt, "The Book of Secrets". Track 1, "Prologue".

January 10, 2008.

I let myself stay in bed until nine o’clock this morning, though I woke up when Emmaline did, at eight. In some ways it felt good just to lie still and breathe, but the heater at the head of my bed was on, and as a result my head was hot, and my feet were cold, so with some amusement I eventually bounced out of bed, dressed, and did my devotions. Emmaline and I ate breakfast together at about nine-thirty and spent the morning studying. I sat at the foot of my bed with my laptop and wrote endless e-mails and Facebook posts, while she sat on her bed in a nest of papers and studied. When I finished my correspondence, I sat on the cushions in the window and worked on finishing God’s Ultimate Purpose by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Emmaline played Disney favorites and snips of musicals on her laptop.

At one o’clock, Catherine came tripping (in the graceful, not the noisy, sense of the word) downstairs so that the three of us could go out to lunch together. She confessed to me that she'd slept in until half-twelve, about which she was humorously embarrassed. The three of us walked up Elmwood Avenue and then up the Lisburn Road, past Tesco, to Doorsteps, the sandwich shop where Rachel and I had gone for lunch on the Monday after term ended. It's a fair walk, at least fifteen or twenty minutes. Because of all the rain, the uneven sidewalk was full of puddles. Catherine bounced over them, squealing every time she did, until Emmaline started to make fun of her, which only made Catherine laugh. On our way, we passed Steven, who works at a photography place up the Lisburn Road. He looked at Emmaline with an expression which Emmaline described as, "What is my cousin up to now?" Catherine and Emmaline discussed people, especially Catherine herself and Renwick people, subjects on which Catherine never tires.

We finally reached the sandwich shop, which was as crowded as it had been the day when Rachel and I visited it. Emmaline, Catherine, and I squeezed in the door and stood at the end of a line curving along the counter. The menu was chalked on a blackboard on the wall behind the counter: over fifty kinds of sandwiches, a pretty awesome selection. The four or five workers were busy behind the counter, scooping and dabbing and daubing and slicing, taking ingredients out of an array of containers under the glass countertop. Emmaline, Catherine, and I needed the full wait to decide what kind of sandwich we'd get. I ordered a chicken salsa sandwich; Catherine ordered a club sandwich, and Emmaline ordered a duck sandwich. Catherine's took longer to make since it was hot, so the three of us pushed through the small, crowded restaurant to find a place to sit. We cleared a place for ourselves at a little round table, where everyone had to push past us, but there wasn't much help for that. The deep leather sofas along the wall were occupied by rather large businessmen; the tables by the window had been descended upon by highschool-aged school girls, resembling starlings both in their dark jackets and in their incessant twittering. When Catherine's sandwich arrived, it turned out to be a massive two-tier with a piece of potato bread separating the chicken on bottom and the bacon on top, and mounds of lettuce. Catherine's face was a study, and Emmaline and I both burst out laughing. Emmaline gave thanks, and we ate, Catherine pulling off little bits at a time with her knife and fork. My sandwich was delicious, the spice of the (authentic) salsa balanced by the smooth creaminess of guacamole. Emmaline didn't much like her sandiwch: "I don't like cold meat, but I always forget until after I've ordered it," she sighed. We sat and munched away. The restaurant cleared out pretty quickly, actually, at one-thirty, and we were left at the little table on the edge of a pool of latte-colored sunshine streaming in through the low windows over the dark floor.

When we'd finished eating, we walked back to Renwick, stopping on the way at the Starbucks at the corner of Elmwood Avenue and the Lisburn Road to buy dessert and hot drinks. I just had a cookie--one of the small reminders of life in the States, a real soft chocolate chip cookie. None of this biscuit business for me. :o) Back in Renwick, Emmaline and Catherine stood around in the kitchen while I made tea. Andy M. was eating his lunch and was surprisingly talkative. Catherine started to complain about going upstairs. "You know it's dangerous to go upstairs after lunch," Andy told her. "Really?" she asked, her eyes widening. "Yes. Your body's circadian rhythms slow down for about ten minutes every day. So you're more likely to trip and fall if you go upstairs now." That made Emmaline laugh.

When it was safe (!), we went upstairs. I settled down in the window again with my cookie and cup of tea. Half of the cookie managed to see me through the rest of God's Ultimate Purpose, while Emmaline sat at her desk, drinking coffee and eating a banana muffin, and studying French. At about three-thirty, I changed clothes and walked to the gym to go running. In the gym, I ran into Andy L., who is part of a program similar to ROTC, and goes to the gym to work out (as Emmaline said, he's about the last person you'd want to run into in the gym). I listened to one of Pastor Parnell's sermons, on irresistable grace, while I ran, and went on the stationary bike. By the time I left the gym, it was nearly dark, and the gates to the Gardens were closed. I had to walk around through the Holylands, which are the neighborhoods behind the Gardens. The afternoon exams had just let out, and I had to struggle through crowds of talking students. The Holylands can be fairly dangerous at night, but it wasn't late enough, and there were enough other students around to make it safe.

Back at Renwick, I showered. Emmaline was still studying.... I sat on my bed and wrote notes about the things I'd read, both for my Old English exam and in Lloyd-Jones. Emmaline and I chatted some. She sat on her bed, working on math, and singing along with "The Best of Broadway", while I chuckled at her. We talked silliness sometimes, and sat quietly sometimes. She drew spirals on her papers and signed one of the "pieces of artwork" for me. At about seven o'clock, Emmaline ran upstairs to see if Catherine wanted any tea (that's supper to you on the other side of the ocean). I kept writing away quietly--until I heard them come thundering down the stairs again, Catherine chasing Emmaline, and both of them screaming and laughing at the tops of their lungs. It turned out, once the racket died down, that Catherine didn't want any tea after all, so Emmaline and I went down to the kitchen and fixed ourselves pizza. The Dumwoody boys came in with Chinese take-out, and we joked around with them.

After we'd washed our dishes, I made myself a cup of Mrs. West's mandarin orange green tea, and took it upstairs. I sat down with my computer to get on the internet and see if anyone had replied to my e-mails; Emmaline sat down at her desk to work on French studying. I started to fiddle around with my blog (in case some of you couldn't tell), trying to find something new, and trying to get the picture to stretch all the way across the top (despite an evening's worth of searching through the html code, I couldn't find the code for the picture size). I found an e-mail from Mrs. Knorr with an update on Amy (you can read these updates yourself here or by going to the RUF Tulsa link in the sidebar) , and all my frustration, worry, concern seemed to come crashing down around my ears. I sat in a very miserable huddle on my bed, trying to make a card for Amy, though of course it probably won't reach the hospital in time.

This was my state of mind when Claire suddenly came into the room. She'd apparently been working in the common room since five o'clock on an online application, but since I hadn't gone into the common room, I had had no idea she'd been in the house. Emmaline and I were both happy to see her. She flopped down on the cushions in the window and talked lazily with Emmaline about exams. I tried to pay attention but was too frazzled to do more than sit dully, watching them. After Claire left, I finished the card for Amy. My concentration could only last so long: Trying to hold myself together, I was finally on the edge of tears. Emmaline and I prayed together and spent about an hour talking about Christ and the church, which helped both of us, I think, in the midst of our stresses. We were in bed by midnight, though as soon as the lights were out, Emmaline got hyper. I was too drained to do much more than giggle in reply as she talked away on the other side of the room, and eventually we both went to sleep.

prayer requests

1. Please pray for Amy S., a friend of mine from RUF in Tulsa. She had a bad snowboarding accident a couple of days ago and, last I heard, is in a coma in critical condition. The doctors are "cautiously optimistic", but please pray for God to work in her and heal her quickly. Please pray for her family and friends, who are all in need of comfort right now.

2. Please pray for those here who have exams right now, especially for Emmaline and Catherine. I finished my last exam yesterday, but Emmaline has three more, all of them pretty difficult, and Catherine has one more. Pray for diligence, skill, and peace.

snapshot

Picture this: Emmaline and I sitting on either side of our room in Renwick, studying for exams. Emmaline brought up a tray with hot chocolate and pecan pie earlier in the evening. After awhile, she comes over, sits down on my bed beside my desk, and slices another piece of pie.

"If I go back to the other side of the room, I'll have to do work. If I sit here long enough, maybe it will go away," she whispers.

"Well, let's keep whispering, and maybe it won't hear us, and will think we've gone to sleep, and will tiptoe away," I suggest.

"Yeah."

We sit for a minute while she munches her pecan pie meditatively--and then she flops over with a sigh, and I start to laugh.

procrastination

Been studying all afternoon.

Amazing, the ways one's mind finds to occupy itself when there's perfectly good work to be done. Don't worry; I've learned the passages that will be on the exam and read over my notes from the past semester at least three or four times now.

Anyone have any tips about knitting? Mrs. Rees gave me some yarn as a Christmas present while I was visiting them. One of the yarns is a beautiful long eyelash yarn, green, red, and brown--ruddy colors. She started me knitting a wrap with it, a light scarf, but this evening, to my dismay, I discovered a couple of rather serious mistakes in it, and since I couldn't figure out how to make them up, I ended up unraveling the whole thing. Emmaline assures me that Catherine and Amy both knit and that I can ask them for help, but there's something frustrating in not being able to cast on my own row of stitches.

Erin and Eleanor both came bouncing in this afternoon while Emmaline and I were studying and started to watch YouTube videos and play songs on their laptops. Erin is back now, quietly reading a book, sitting wrapped up in a blanket beside me on Emmaline's bed.

Helping Emmaline out with her French essay is another way to do procrastinate, in a sort of negative way, since my procrastinating (theoretically) keeps her from doing the same. She's supposedly writing an essay on the French play Waiting for Godot, but not getting very far with it.

The Dream of the Rood is on my mind right now. The sort of poem that you could sit and ponder forever, just about. When you actually sit down and learn the language itself, all sorts of strange parallels and paradoxes start to appear, the poet exploiting his form as much as possible to display the mysteries of the incarnation and redemption. The poem itself is something of an anomaly, combining dream vision, riddle, elegy, and epic, not to mention Christianity and pagan Anglo-Saxon heroism. My question is how to make all those rich layers of metaphor and language available to normal people without boring them out of their minds with the technicalities of grammar and poetics.

When I look at a word, I hear all sorts of meanings and connotations, playing off each other like the echoes from a peal of bells. An instrument, for example, could be anything from a tool used for creating music to a "blunt object" used in a murder to someone who's being exploited or domineered over. It gets even more complicated when you sit down with a heap of Old English words and try to sort out their relationships to each other and the range of possible meanings in modern English. How then do you select just one meaning to be put down in a translation? And is it possible to map all these words, each one with its township of connotations, so that anyone could navigate through them, without overwhelming or seeming ridiculously postmodern?

I have a feeling that this is the sort of thing I want to study after I graduate: To find a common ground between the postmodern poetry that I learned in Dr. G's class last year and this Anglo-Saxon poetry because in some sense the many-faceted flexibility of the postmoderns might help to make the dazzling richness of Old English more accessible.

It's not just for the language itself, either. Perhaps a better understanding of the power of words might make us as Christians more aware of what we say to each other, the range of different possible meanings people might put on our words, and how careful we need to be to make ourselves clear when presenting the Gospel. In one sense there's already a common ground with Old English poetry since much of this poetry is concerned with the Gospel and Biblical themes.

And again, I think that this poetry can speak to us here and now. These people dealt with transience, facing at once the beauty of the world and its grim fragility. Sifting through the quickness of life, maybe we face the same thing.

This whole post is at risk of turning into a lecture fit for a graduation or some other such stuffy occasion. Dull.

Yuck.

So anyway....

I do realize that all these grandiose schemes can't come to anything unless I actually make sure I'll do well on these papers and this exam.

Reuben made an angel food cake, with Mrs. McCollum's help, and ate at least three pieces of it himself--! It was pretty good, but not that good. Mr. and Mrs. M went out to a friend's house tonight, leaving Emmaline and me in charge of the bunch here. We had Chinese take-out for supper and ate it in the little sitting room, with the fire burning on the hearth. The boys were watching a "Scooby Doo" movie on TV, which I'd never seen before. Emmaline had to jab me and tell me to "Enjoy it for what it is!" when she saw me rolling my eyes.

She's trying to get the boys to go to bed now. They're both being unmitigated sillies.

Well, back to trying to memorize the preterite tenses of Old English vocalic verbs. Oh, joy....

"oh the rain, it rains all day long...."

It snowed in Northern Ireland yesterday, a grand total of four inches. That may not sound so exciting to you all in Oklahoma, but it caused major hoopla here. I, unfortunately, was stuck on the other side of the Irish Sea, and so spent yesterday morning frantically looking at airplane and train timetables to make sure that everything was running as normal. I did manage to get back safely to Belfast, with only an hour's delay at the East Midlands airport, and from Belfast to Coleraine without incident. Woke up this morning to a wind howling around the house and dashing rain against the windows.

Emmaline has gone upstairs to "study". We'll see if that actually happens.... Both of us start exams on Monday.

Happy New Year's

No point in saying 'White Rabbit' since my dear aunt (*grin*) so thoughtfully white-rabbited me already.

2008 began for me last night, or early this morning, as I lay in Oliver Rees' little room in the bed underneath the window. His walls are painted in black-and-white vertical stripes since he supports the Newcastle United soccer team. Through the window, ten minutes before twelve o'clock, I heard bells begin to ring--a peal of bells, chasing the changes, like at the end of The Nine Tailors. Then, as the bells tolled the twelve strokes of midnight, I could hear a crowd cheering and fireworks going off.

I went to sleep as soon as the racket was over....

I'm staying with the Rees family this week. Alistair is 15 and Oliver is 11, I believe, and they live in the little village of Rothley near Loughborough and Birmingham. Their family has been very pleasant and welcoming to me. I went on a walk with them and their church today, just out into the fields and woods beyond the town. A cloudy, damp day, the fields very muddy, but pleasant to be outside. This afternoon I studied for my Discovering Old English exam, which is in a week.

I'm sitting at their computer in a little cubbyhole in the living room. The boys are playing games on an XBox, and Mr. and Mrs. Rees are washing the supper dishes in the kitchen. I've offered to help, but they always seem to have it covered.... After supper, we sang a few Psalms. They have their Psalters, rather unused, but Alistair and Mr. and Mrs. Rees remembered some of the tunes, so it was good to sing them again--107D, 22I, 150B, 100A, and 136A.

So that's all for now. 

Paris, day 4

December 21, 2007. Our last day in Paris. We got off to a slow start this morning. Emmaline and I were both a bit impatient with everyone: we’d planned to be out of the hostel by nine-thirty, but we were only sitting down to breakfast at nine o’clock. The eating area was so crowded that we had to split up between tables and share seats. There was a great scramble after breakfast to get all the luggage packed, the rooms cleared out, and everything taken down to the luggage holding area, which turned out to be a dank, clammy, catacomb-like basement under the hostel. An arched ceiling barely high enough to stand up under, and pipes gurgling against the stone walls. We left our luggage there, though, and set out for our last day’s worth of adventures.

While we waited on the first platform for our train, we stood in a circle and held our prayer time. This morning we went to the Eiffel Tower first. The line for the lift wasn’t too long—it didn’t have any curves in it when we arrived. The tower reared over us, sturdy on its four low arches, the sun glancing through the metal network of its body. Pigeons stalked around our feet, clattering their wings, their feathers iridescent in the sunshine. Emmaline ran up and down the queue impatiently (I joked to Charlotte that Emmaline is only our leader because she can’t stand to be still for too long). We finally decided to get out of the queue for the lift and take the stairs up as far as we could. So we bought tickets at the other pier and set out up the stairs. It was a stiffer climb than any of us expected, I think. Heather, Michaela, and Catherine struggled particularly. The metal stairs clanked under our feet. Up and up, flight after flight, the ground gradually dropping away below us. On the first platform, we found surprisingly that the viewing walkway around the edge of the platform was covered in snow—why, I don’t know, though Emmaline surmised it was to keep the walkway from being slippery (if so, it defeated its own purpose!). We climbed on up to the second platform by the stairs, and from the second platform had to take the lift to the very top. The view from the top of the tower was quite impressive. As we stepped out of the little room onto the viewing walkway, a gust of wind whipped into our hair. Walking around the platform, we could see down onto the great city, Paris, lying rosy like a living being below us. A brown rime of smog hung between the pink haze of the city and the blue sky. Looking down we could see all the places we’d visited: the Musee d’Orsay, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine laced with bridges. It was wonderful to be able to spot these famous places and recognize them among the crust of other buildings—the clutter of apartments, flats, restaurants, businesses, shops, veined through with streets like hieroglyphs on a tablet. We found someone to take a group picture and then went down to the second platform.

We ate our lunch on the first platform at a little round table, sharing out the remains of our food: bits of baguette, a lump of rubbery cheese, big soft grapes, Cadbury bars, etc. The familiar taste of bread and cheese, eaten shivering in the cold…. When we’d finished eating, it was back down the flights and flights of stairs again, onto solid ground. I was thankful to be on solid ground. The line for the tower stretched away in a snakey curve. We wandered past the line, across the street, down to the Seine, where we found, tucked away behind the walled bank of the river, a little Christmas market. Bright red carpet spread on the ground between the little wooden shacks, the sellers just opening their shutters to display their wares. We stopped at a stall where a man was selling scarves, and several of the girls bought some. Light clouds over the sky today; the cold was not as harsh. After awhile, we wandered up to street level again, where there was a carousel and a crepe stand. Sarah, Michaela, Charlotte, Emmaline, Heather, and Catherine all rode the carousel, but I stood and watched and took pictures—they pulled faces at me as their colorful plastic horses flashed past.

We wandered on then—over the bridge of the Seine, and up the Seine, towards the Louvre, to visit a café that Catherine Donnelly had recommended. It was good to walk outside in the open air for awhile, to stretch one’s legs. We walked past endless monuments, the Eiffel Tower looming behind us to the right across the river, and war memorials, museums, statues, etc. sprinkled to our left along the street. We walked on the sidewalk under the trees that skirt the Seine. We walked past houseboats moored at the bank, bobbing up and down, their decks covered with potted plants and lawn furniture. Finally we arrived back at the far end of the Champs Elysees. We crossed the square where the ferris wheel is, and ended up in a fancy shmancy shopping district. Five-star hotels, first-class restaurants, high-end namebrands. Sarah and Charlotte and Michaela walked at the back, oohing and aahing over the famous designer clothing shops. Emmaline and I walked in the front, shaking our heads and laughing at them. The streets were crowded with businessmen and Christmas shoppers. Many of the shops were decorated with lights and evergreen. Finally we found the café, Angelina’s, facing the main street running parallel to the Seine, the Rue de Rivoli. Immediately all of us felt very out-of-place. Like the other shops along the street, Angelina’s had its name and insignia in mosaic on the sidewalk, and on a plaque by the door. Inside, we were surrounded by gilded archways, chandeliers, plush carpets, mirrors. A waiter took us upstairs to a corner table, where we sat a bit stiffly, both from weariness and a feeling of unbelonging. Catherine wasn’t feeling well due to a sore tooth. A kind waitress bustled up to us, laughed at our awkwardness at the language, and took our order. She soon returned with it, in white pitchers: famous Angelina’s black hot chocolate for all of us, except Catherine, who’d ordered white, and Sarah, who’d ordered ice cream instead. We sipped the hot chocolate slowly out of white cups. It was as thick as chocolate sauce, and as rich—bitter, unless swirled with cream, and incredibly strong. I could only drink a few sips at a time. It would’ve been more pleasant savored over an hour’s quite conversation, perhaps, but it was still richly delicious. We sat around talking and resting, looking at the splendor around us—the sunbursts and paintings on the walls; the chandeliers; the gilt frames of the mirrors.

Finally we paid and walked to the nearest subway station, through all the fanciness. We took the metro to the Opera Garnier. The Opera Garnier was just as spectacular as we’d expected, though sadly the main part of the Opera was closed off due to renovations. It was this opera house on which The Phantom of the Opera was based, and looking at it, I was swept up for a little while. The façade was gilt, of course, with the figures of Choreography and Lyric seated on either side, resplendent. Inside, along the first entry area, were lifelike statues of famous composers—Handel, Rameau, etc. Standing at the arches of the first entry area, we could look at the famous staircase—sparkling with light, gilding, and statues. Bronze women posed at either side of the head of the stair, balancing chandeliers on their heads and arms, which fountained over them with beads of crystal. Faces stared and swirled from every inch of balustrade. Over our heads, stone masks glared down at the first entry area, their eye sockets eerily black as the light shone starkly up at them.

As we left the Opera Garnier, it was beginning to get dark. Emmaline navigated us through the metro to San Sulfice, where we found, at last, a proper Christmas market, nestled under the shoulder of a church. The trees of the market sparkled with little lights. There were rows and rows of stalls, with carpet running between. We split up to look around. A much more relaxed atmosphere than in Belfast. The sellers would actually talk to you, being friendly. There weren’t many other people around, and Christmas music was playing from one of the stalls, drifting on the night air. Heather, Catherine, and I looked at jewelry and candies. We looked at stalls of French confectionery, polished stone jewelry, pashminas, Asian flower art, Canadian beers, all sorts of odd little random things. When we met up again, Charlotte requested that we go to the train station with the bookstore so that she could buy some French comic books for her brother. So we went back to Gare Montparnesse. While Charlotte and Emmaline looked in the bookstore, the rest of us browsed in the small Christmas market behind the train station—much more grubby than San Sulfice, and not nearly as pleasant—more like a cheap wholesale tourist stop than a Christmas market. Heather found ice skaters performing, though, and that kept her happy until the rest of us were ready to go.

Then came the final piece of excitement of our trip: the race to the airport. Sarah and Emmaline wanted to go to the grocery store to buy French foods, so while they did that, the rest of us went to the hostel and took out our luggage. We managed to haul all our luggage, plus Sarah’s and Emmaline’s, to the train stop, but Sarah and Emmaline were late. Michaela and I, both on edge, started to carry things down past the ticket barriers (our tickets always malfunctioned; mine was the last to do so, but thankfully Michaela knew enough French to get it fixed before Emmaline showed up). When Emmaline and Sarah came, we raced to the train, and from that train to the next, to the next…. Tense, Charlotte panicked, Emmaline and I trying to reassure everyone, though, as I watched the hands on my watch slide past, I felt my heart sinking. At last, sweating and breathless, we caught the final train to the airport. Charlotte was dizzy, nearly fainting from hunger, so Emmaline pulled out the bread, cheese, and fruit she’d providentially bought at the grocery store, and we made a small meal, sitting on the train—the familiar taste of bread and that soft spreading cheese for the last time. Sitting there watching the city slide by, from the fancy buildings of inner Paris to the office buildings to the grimy slums and convenience stores on the outskirts, I shook my head at Emmaline.

When the train let us off at the airport, we ran from the train station to the terminal, and arrived with just seven minutes to spare at the checkout. But after we checked in, we found, to our complete dismay, that we had a twenty-minute wait to get through border security! We all managed to get through, though, and ran up to the clerk at the gate—only to be told coldly, in broken English, “You wait!” Our plane was half-an-hour late. So we sat in the airport, recovering our breath, laughing shakily in relief, and resting, until finally it was our turn to hand in our boarding passes and take the bus out onto the tarmac. We climbed the stairs onto the plane, and were again surrounded by the familiar sound of Northern Irish voices as the stewardesses gave us our safety instructions. And then the plane lifted off…

I spent the flight with my head in my arms, reliving the past four days, and dozing. When we touched down in Belfast again, I was struck with a sudden and very bad case of motion sickness. The airport seemed oddly familiar, memories of it from that dazed September day. I went through the non-EU customs alone, and met the other girls on the other side. We collected our bags, then went out to meet parents. One by one we said our good-byes. Mr. Wilson, Sarah’s father, was there to pick Emmaline, Sarah, Catherine, and me up from the airport. All of us dozed on the hour-long drive back to Coleraine. He dropped Catherine off at her house, then Emmaline and me off at the dark farm. Stepping into the kitchen, I found myself suddenly surrounded by more familiarity, by warmth—a big Christmas tree in the corner by the bay windows; cards hanging on the cabinets; lights strung in the windows; little decorations sprinkled on the shelves. Emmaline and I went up to her room and went to bed, but of course neither one of us could fall asleep immediately. We lay away for at least half-an-hour talking, reliving the trip, all its silliness and unpleasantness and strangeness. We laughed about bread and cheese, about the cold, about all the stairs we’d climbed, about the metro, about difficulties speaking French. At last we dropped off to sleep. I could still hear, in my mind, the noises of the city—the emergency sirens, the noise of cars, the patter of French.

pictures from Paris--at last!

Paris Dec. 17-21 2007

Paris, day 3

December 20, 2007 (partial journal entry--Chartres cathedral) Emmaline, Catherine, and I took the train to Chartres today, while the other three went to Disneyland. It was relaxing to be on our own, just the four of us, and to get out of Paris and see some of the countryside: open countryside, low rolling hills, big unfenced fields, very different from the cramped pastures and hedges of Northern Ireland. Chartres cathedral was beautiful, basking in the winter sunshine. We spent an hour or so wandering around inside it, admiring especially the intricate honeycombed sculptures around the choir stalls, with scenes from Christ's life. We looked into a couple of little bookstores near the cathedral, then walked around outside the cathedral. On the south portal, I found the four statues familiar to me from Gothic history books, particularly the two of the knight and the monk, some of my favorites for their personal detail and simple serenity. I stopped and took pictures, delighted to have found 'my' statues.

We walked on around the cathedral after awhile. At the back we found a garden with a parapet, and then a steep fall, and beyond that a beautiful view of the city of Chartres itself: a fairly large town, it seemed, with some tall buildings and big cranes, a tangle of houses rosy in the slanting afternoon light. We walked around under a series of stone arches, over to the north doorway, where we goofed around, taking pictures of each other. Some workmen were unloading supplies at the side door. One of them came up to us and started to talk to Emmaline. He asked her (apparently) where we were from in America (!), and she said, 'Oklahoma,' the first thing that came to her head, so he started to sing a song about Oklahoma in French, grinning and looking at the four of us, while we smiled and laughed a bit awkwardly. The statues on the cathedral looked down stilly. There were two women at this doorway, statues, veiled, turned as though speaking to one another. Somehow the statues on this building seem almost alive, but withdrawn.... We walked on back to the train station. The light fell between the narrow buildings, casting blue shadows.

We stopped at a tourist shop where a coat of armor stood outside the door, and I took silly pictures of the girls with it. Then we got bWe were happy, relaxed, laughing and joking as we swung along together. The serene silence of tack on the train to Paris. The other girls dozed. Back in Paris, we still had plenty of time before we were supposed to meet the others at eight o'clock. Emmaline wanted to find Montmartre and Sacre Coeur, so we set out into the subways to see what we could see. We eventually came up at a stop near Sacre Coeur. Emmaline was busy looking at her map, but Heather and I, glancing around us, were a bit taken aback by what we saw--down the street were signs for bars, dance halls, and other unsavory places, the blare of the 'red light district'. Thankfully, our route lay in roughly the opposite direction. We started up narrow side streets, up a steep hill. On the way we found an odd little Christmas market with a carousel, and a 'headless' accordion player.

At last Emmaline found the steps of Sacre Coeur, and we staggered up them, Heather and Catherine puffing along behind. Flight after flight, straight up, the ornate black iron lampstands marching like grim sentries beside us. At the top we found the basilica of Sacre Coeur: white stone tinted mauve with sunset, its domed towers flashing. From that hill we had a gorgeous view of the city below. Emmaline wanted to go inside since we were there, so we did. No photography allowed inside. We cycled silently around the edge of the building on a carpet laid down to muffle visitors' footsteps. On the great dome above the altar was a gilt mosaic of Christ; on the four pillars around the main dome were sculpted stone angels, beautiful and terrible, with wings outspread. Compared to them, the Byzantine glamor of the rest of the church seemed strangely out-of-place, a forced ostentatious piety. Candles winked on the images and icons. I was glad to get outside again.

We explored around to the side of the basilica, and ducked down a little lane lined with tourist shops, including an Irish pub. (!) We stepped into a couple of the shops, which were well-lit, and crammed with cheap goods--mugs, T-shirts, scarves, hats, posters, flags, statuettes, etc. I did buy a pashmina at one of them, and Catherine and Heather both bought scarves, while Emmaline looked around rather restlessly. By now it was almost dark. Going outside, I discovered that the sky had become a vivid almost Carribean blue, with the moon like a gilt rosette hanging above the glowing towers of Sacre Coeur. Christmas lights flashed and blinked between the buildings. Wandering on, we found ourselves suddenly in a square, the most stereotypical Parisian place we'd seen yet: surrounded by creperies and cafe bars, the square was full of artists and people sitting for portraits and caricatures. We were accosted by several of the artists asking to do our portraits, but it was cold, so we turned them down. I was beginning to be uneasy. Always wary of thieves, and remembering those glaring lights further down the hill, I was eager to be out of this area.

We finally managed to find our way down the hill, but didn't know where the nearest metro stop was. Emmaline stopped at a corner creperie to ask directions, and the man was quite kind, so we all bought crepes. I had a crepe with sugar and lemon juice--hot, oozing, and delicious, the soft pastry all wavy like the edge of a shell. We found our way down into the metro finally and decided to go in search of Christmas markets. On the airplane over, Emmaline had seen Trocadero listed as an area with markets in one of the airline magazines. So we went to Trocadero. We found ourselves in another stylish area (there seems to be no part of Paris in the centre that is not stylish in some way!) and stopped in a bookstore to ask directions. The shop owner didn't know of any Christmas markets, but we lingered in the bookstore for awhile, fascinated by the picture books and the books in French. Emmaline found a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in French, and we split the cost--I paid for half as her birthday present. It was fun to take a brief break in a safe place and browse over the glossy pages. But then we went back out again.

We made our way to the Champs Elysees via the metro, and stopped in a Quick Burger restaurant for dinner. We were all cold, and Heather doesn't like to eat meat, but we settled for it anyway. Catherine and I both had hot chicken sandwiches, which were good. Then we trailed back out into the cold to meet the girls. We'd settled on meeting them in the long entrance hall to a cinema. Emmaline read the summaries of the movies in French while we waited. Crowds circled past, so many people, so many faces. Lights, cars, signs, shop windows, Christmas lights, voices.... When the other girls arrived, they were eager to shop along the Champs Elysees. So we elected to meet together again at the first Brioche restaurant at nine o'clock. Emmaline, Heather, Catherine, and I wandered for awhile--in and out of galleries and malls, peering into shop windows, glancing at tourist stores, trying to stay warm.

We caught up with Sarah, Charlotte, and Michaela in Naf Naf, an upper-end clothing store. Emmaline and I poked fun of the expensive clothes, but she decided to stay with the other girls. Heather and Catherine wanted to shop at Zara, so I went with them on down. They both found clothes to buy, and then we walked up to the Brioche place. We managed to order food, and sat at a table in a corner, getting warm. We split a brioche pastry man between us, the warm sweet pastry melting in our mouths. Emmaline came and found us. The other girls had gone to buy crepes. We made our way back to the hostel. Emmaline, Michaela, Sarah, and Charlotte sat on the floor, laughing and talking among themselves. Heather and I sat quietly together and chatted--we talked about trees and birds, which Heather also likes, and looked at pictures with Catherine. Then we had our Bible study on Esther and made plans for tomorrow.

Paris, day 2

December 19, 2007. Another slow start today, if possible even worse than the day before. 'Not morning!' Emmaline groaned as I tried to rouse her from her mattress in the corner. Outside, though, the day was just a little bit milder. Today was our day to visit the Louvre. We set out again into the metro, Emmaline with her trusty map, which she kept perusing even while we were on the train. Always the scurry and rush to get onto the train before it pulled out, shoving in among the crowded people. Thankfully there were trains every five minutes or so, so if one train was full sometimes we waited for the next. One day when we were on the metro, a man came on with a saxophone and CD player on his back, and sang Christmas carols in French; Emmaline and some of the other girls gave him money. We went through the subway and came up at last in another maze of big halls and tunnels. All of Paris must stand on very shaky ground, for underneath it is a whole other city--restaurants, shops, metro stations, small museums, newsstands, etc.

We bought ticketes for the Louvre in a little tourist shop, and then found our way to the museum itself, through the huge dark chilly halls. Past the foundations of the original museum, into a large complex like a mall with big sparkling shops, through security, and then into the central area under the biggest glass pyramid of the Louvre. From this area led the four halls: one back the way we had come; the other three to the three 'pavilions', the wings of the Louvre, Richelieu, Sully, and Denon. The rotunda under the pyramid was at least three stories tall, with a big spiral staircase from inside the pyramid winding down like the chamber of a nautilus in the white light on the white walls. So many people.... Swarming everywhere, crawling, pushing, hurrying, drifting, wandering. We tried to settle on a time and place to meet, and went in through security.

At first we stuck together. We went straight into a gallery of medieval sculptures. Silent stone-struck faces staring placidly above our heads, eyeless gazes meditating on distances we could not see. Pieces broken from cathedrals and churches, virtues, saints, knights, patrons. Through the windows we could look out onto a courtyard where green bronze statues of boars and hounds stood, the hair on their hides green as icicles in the cold day outside, poised snarling at each other. We spent awhile with the medieval statuary, then went up a flight of stairs and found ourselves in a huge long arched gallery, like the underside of a barge, with Classical sculptures running down either side. Michelangelo's prisoners, some of them, struggling bound in stone. Muscular idealized bodies trapped in position, every sinew bulging, lunging, thrusting, leaping, or sitting tense and still. At the far end was the famous Victory, poised as though about to take flight, her wings sweeping above her headless neck. Everyone seemed to have congregated here, mostly Asians, busy snapping pictures, and it was in this huge hall that we got separated. Heather, Catherine, and I managed to stay together.

We wandered into an ornate room (stark contrast to the sterile severity of the Victory's hall) full of mirrors with a painted ceiling, and out again, and down a hall with windows looking onto a hall far below, lit from skylights above, where people were busy examining statues at desks while other statues and stone plaques stood swathed in plastic, jumbled about. We found ourselves finally in the Italian art: Donatello and his peers, silent peaceful madonnas and saints with everlasting halos. And from there into another great hall, long, white walls hung with the most famous of paintings: huge canvases hung above and below each other. Da Vinci's 'Virgin of the Rocks', Caravaggio's 'Fortune-Teller', etc. I stood in front of the 'Fortune-Teller' for a long time, lovingly watching the light falling on the faces, the careful craftsmanship of the brushstrokes.

Interspersed throughout the crowd were artists with easels, copying the paintings. The crowds swirled to and fro, circulating up and down the hall. In a packed side gallery we found the 'Mona Lisa', a small hazy canvas hanging behind a glass casing, smiling mockingly at the Asian tourists taking pictures. Not overly impressed, we wandered on. Our own reflections looked back at us from the mirrors interspersed among the paintings in the main hall; here and there were archways with busts under them. Heather and Catherine were tired, so we sat down, and lo and behold, Michaela and Sarah wandered up, and at last Emmaline and Charlotte, laughing and breathless, having been lost in the museum for the past hour or so. We came together in a knot to talk and sort ourselves out. The others hadn't yet seen the 'Mona Lisa', so I showed it to them. Then Heather, Catherine, and I went on to try to find the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art. We lost Sarah and Michaela again. We went through a couple of huge galleries with more ornate ceilings and an embossed band around the edge of the ceiling, gold gods and goddesses and cupids and florals, and paintings on the ceiling itself. In one gallery, whose walls were painted maroon, were big Neoclassical canvases by people like David, of Napoleon crowning his queen, of scenes from Roman legend. We made our way out, back past the Victory, and into the galleries we'd stepped into before. Ornate: ceilings, walls, all painted, all gilded, stylized faces staring down at us. Strange contrast with the actual content of these galleries, which held endless glass cases of Greek and Roman pottery, red and black flat figures, and Egyptian artefacts--sphinxes, falcons, coffins, tablets stamped with hieroglyphs. The exotic jumble on the ceilings was weird, even somehow inappropriate, compared to the stark simplicity of the ancient pieces, which were strangely sinister in their out-of-placeness. These galleries were hardly crowded. The sun slanted through the windows, glancing off the ruddy figures on the vases. Still figures, silence.

At last we made our way out. Catherine and Heather were already tired and dazed, so they elected to find a bench and sit for awhile. I went back into the museum to see if I could find the others. Charlotte and Emmaline were sitting placidly waiting for me by the Victory; Michaela and Sarah, as it turned out, had gone to join the other two. Emmaline decided to have a look round on her own, while Charlotte and I, still eager to see more paintings, set off to look for some Vermeers that I'd heard about. On our way in the Richelieu wing, we came upon a huge glass-roofed atrium housing more statues. There was something calming about this place. Hardly any crowds here, and the blue light quietly filling the great hall, the statues standing scattered about. We paused and rested for awhile, looking at it, refreshing our eyes on the distances. Then we went on. I glimpsed a gallery with Sumerian art in it, so I stopped to take a picture briefly of a sitting statue, and then we went on. We rode escalators up to the top floor, where we successfully found Vermeer: a philosopher with a map and a lace-maker. We stopped to admire them for awhile, then went in search of the painting of the Magdalene with her skull and candle. But we ended up getting lost in a maze of obese Flemish art, heavy long faces, and so we rode the escalators down again.

We wandered quietly into the atriums of statues, and walked around them for awhile. I examined four statues of great horses with flying manes, and Charlotte found a series of statues portraying a girl (Diana?) growing up. Cloistered archways opened up all around, and through them I caught glimpses of other statues, mostly medieval funeral monuments. At last we met up with Emmaline and the others again, sitting on the little crowded bench outside the Sully wing. The Louvre: Like wandering through A History of Western Civilization.

We picked ourselves up, went back down through the tunnels, and came up at last in the big plaza encompassed by the wings of the Louvre. Here the pyramids and the fountains, the broad shallow aquamarine pools of the fountains encrusted with ice. Seagulls were floating, rather amusedly, on the cold water. We took pictures of each other--of Emmaline swinging on a lamppost, of all of us standing in front of the glass pyramids. The sunshine slanted goldly over the ornate facades of the buildings: perfect proportion and order covered over with statues, branching plants cut in stone, faces staring stilly down, hands braced holding the distinctive emblems--sceptres, lyres, spears, books.

We gathered ourselves together at last, laughing and happy in the sunshine, and descended into the metro again. Emmaline and her everlasting map managed to navigate us to the train to the chateau of Versailles. The train was a big double-decker train, and we found seats up on the second level. Sitting in the sunshine, we ate our lunch, pulled bit by bit out of Emmaline's Spiderman backpack: sweet soft baguettes, triangles of velveeta-like white cheese, Gala apples, etc. No one had quite enough to eat, but it was enough to keep going at least. And it was simple, eaten sitting in the sunshine with my friends around me. Catherine fell asleep. I watched the city slide by.

We reached Versailles in about half-an-hour and had a brief walk from the train station to the road which the chateau heads. Up the big road to the chateau itself. The chateau is undergoing renovation work, so we had to pick our way over the broken pavement. Emmaline took a picture of us under the ornate ironwork gateway. The mid-afternoon sunshine slanted over the buildings. The light in France is different: In Paris, it's very light, so intensely light, the lightest light; here, now, less white, more gold, as though the facades of the buildings were all gilded and glowing back to the sun. We bought tickets in one wing, where the rooms were plain, simple white and blue walls, fireplaces, mirrors; then proceeded toward the main core of the building, but just as we were getting ready to go through security, Heather discovered that she'd lost her ticket. Emmaline groaned. Charlotte laughed under her breath, 'Emmaline is being the big scary mother!', and Emmaline took Heather back to buy another ticket.

The rest of us went on in. We went up a grand staircase and looked into the royal chapel, so incredibly ornate that it would be difficult to worship there, even the silver organ pipes decorated. From there into a special exhibition of silver. Dim room after dim room, lit by faux candles, which seemed to flicker in the gloom. The walls were brocaded and velveted and hung with tapestries; the floors were tesselated; and the furniture...! Silver, silver, silver, silver tables, silver chairs, beds with hangings woven with silver thread and crowned with tufts of ostrich feathers, silver cupids, silver fire guards cast in the shapes of lions, silver candlesticks, mirrors framed with silver.... The ornateness was overwhelming and unnecessary. We came out finally into the famed Hall of Mirrors: the huge panes of mirrors down the left, and the floor-to-ceiling windows down the right. Between each window and each wall of mirror were bronze statues, women in flowing garments balancing candlesticks, and overhead sparkled crystal chandeliers tiered with hundreds of drops. At the far end of the room were rather realistic printed cardboard copies of the thrones and candles where the Louises would've sat. We were reunited with Emmaline and Heather here, and went on into the next wing of the building. More ornate rooms. Marie Antoinette's bedroom suite; the big painting of Napoleon crowning his queen, etc.

At last we were out, out again into the straight pure cold of the afternoon. Good to be out of the close baroque rooms at last, out of the dense cloying sensuality. We walked down toward the gardens behind Versailles. Dusk was falling. The sun set quickly over a distant hill, leaving the gardens lying in a powder-blue twilight. Emmaline, Charlotte, and I walked together. Behind us, the great chateau sat still glowing silently in the pale blue dusk, as though the sandstone was still giving back the day's warmth. We strolled down the gravel walks. Past a round pool, down to the long flat shining lake. The statues and fountains along this main walkway were swathed in heavy green canvas, bundled up against the cold. The hedges and young trees were bare, their branches stiff against the sky. In the distance tall sycamores stood straight against the chill blue sky, black slender lines veining the sky. In the lake was a statue of Poseidon rising out of the water, his horses' manes foaming chilly. Somehow seeing the naked torsos of the statues made me feel colder.... Poseidon and his chariot were coming up out of the black ice of the flat lake, protruding from the ice.

The other girls gradually caught up with us, Sarah and Michaela wandering up behind. We strung out along the graveled pathways. We walked past great arcades of sycamore trees, planted in stark straight rows, their branches arching interlaced overhead. Silence....--grey, aqua, silver-blue, mauve. Frost furring the dark black-green grass. A few white swans grazing beside the lake. The chateau standing glowing in the distance. Emmaline, Charlotte, Sarah, and Michaela played with the ice, kicking it over the lake. Sarah, Charlotte, and I were cold, so we turned around and started to walk back up to the chateau. The stillness of the gardens arched over us. Sterile lanes stretching away on either side. Strange to me: That the same people who made the overwhelming tangle of chambers and gilding could lay out this garden in its mathematic simplicity. Dusk had lingered but dark was coming quickly. The lights came on suddenly on the chateau. Charlotte, Michaela, Catherine, Heather, and I stood looking around for Sarah and Emmaline, who suddenly jumped out at us, screaming--we all laughed, our voices echoing on the frosty air, our breath pealing away. We walked out of the chateau grounds, back onto the train. We stopped briefly to look at the Versailles municipal building, lit up and crusted with statuary like a wedding cake.

Then back on the train. We went to Paris again and got off at Notre Dame, which also was lit up for the night. Michaela knew a good restaurant in this area, and as it turned out it was right near the metro. Two cafes, side-by-side, their awnings poking out like low fluttering wings from the tall buildings. Waiters standing at the doors called to us in French, inviting us in--we deliberated for a moment, then went inside the second one. Inside, we found warmth. It was uncrowded, and the waiters were patient and friendly with us as we tried to decide what to eat and how to navigate the language. It was an Italian restaurant. I had spaghetti; the others had pizza; Emmaline had a 'French burger'. We sat eating and chatting. A jazz band, saxophone and bass, struck up in the glassed-in porch under the awning.

At last we got back to the hostel. Emmaline and co. went grocery shopping. Then we had a long Bible study, discussing Esther, and God's providence throughout the book.

Paris, day 1

December 18, 2007. Today was our first full day in Paris. Some sort of irony: We were in one of the greatest cities in the world, and all too tired to appreciate it! We stayed in a youth hostel, the Hotel Auberge, just off the Ledru Rollin metro stop, down a little side street. We had three rooms: 313, a four-person room, 407, a very warm two-person room (nicknamed "the sauna"), and 405, a cool two-person room. Catherine, Heather, Charlotte, and Sarah slept in 313, and Emmaline, Michaela, and I slept in 405--every night we moved a mattress from 407 and put it on the floor for Emmaline; all our luggage and things we kept in 407.

This morning became the pattern for most of our mornings. Charlotte came upstairs and banged on our door to wake us at about seven-thirty or so. We got dressed in stages, in various places--some of us in the showers down the hall, some of us in the rooms. Charlotte, Sarah, and Michaela all had to blow-dry and straighten their hair, and used 405 and 407 for that purpose, while Catherine and Heather got ready downstairs. We always had to rush to get away, and we were always ready long after the time we'd planned the night before. At about eight o'clock we went downstairs for breakfast. The hostel served breakfast, but it turned out to consist of one baguette per person, a hot drink, and strawberry jam or butter to go on the baguette. We would find a table and sit, shivering a little in the chilly downstairs rooms, sipping our hot drinks. Various internationals would come in and out. During our stay in Paris, there always seemed to be large groups of Asian tourists about, chattering away busily and moving in flocks, like starlings.

After breakfast, we went upstairs for a brief quiet time of prayer before beginning the day. We're doing a Bible study on Esther, so this morning we read the first in the series of studies, basically just a summary of Esther. When we had spent awhile praying, we set out on our day's activities. Before we'd gone to Paris, we'd prepared a whole itinerary for each day. The morning outside the hostel was a spectacular December morning: cold, dry, crystal clear, with a high pale blue sky, and and intensely clear sunshine, streaming down over the tall buildings. It must've been at least twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Here all the buildings seemed cleaner, grander, bigger. We descended into the metro. Every time we tried to get in, it seemed, someone's metro pass would malfunction. Emmaline finally got into the habit of going last so that she could get help in French from someone when one of our tickets didn't work. We would all manage to get through somehow or other, and go from Ledru Rollin to Bastille, where the walls were all decorated with scenes from the Revolution. The tunnels in the metro were always plastered with posters, for perfume, movies, art exhibitions, etc. Often, especially in Bastille, there were performers in the tunnels, sometimes only one, playing the accordion, other times bands, playing Christmas carols. Each stop had a slightly different character to it. One had historical displays about famous Parisian performers; another had historical notices about the building of the metro; others specialized in certain art.

From Bastille we went to to Notre Dame, our first sight of the trip--coming up out of the heavy, stale-smelling tunnels into the morning, with the cathedral before us and the Seine alongside. The water was translucent jade green, flowing in its canal. Seagulls wheeled and turned above the river. We crossed the street to the cathedral. The plaza in front of it was crowded, but we made our way across, under the corroding statue of Charlemagne, past the big Christmas tree, to the doors. Inside at last, under the figured portal, the serene saints on the doorjambs eyeing us. The cathedral was crowded but hushed inside. As we walked up the right side of the nave, along the chapels, it was hard to gauge the size of the place. Chapel after chapel, patterned windows with delicate interlaced colors, geometric and floral patterns. The chapel of Jean d'Arc, her statue gazing upward, hands clasped over her spear, the light slanting over her armor. Around the transept, the chapels with their ceilings painted with golden stars on blue backgrounds, past a nativity scene, past an old chandelier, past a delicate model of the cathedral, down the other aisle--and here, a sense of the hugeness.

We went out after awhile, back out into the morning chill. We walked down over a bridge and down to the walkway along the Seine. Gargoyles sprung out of the high pillars of the church; bronze figures of saints stood poised on the high steeple; the sun slanted over the windows as though their stone paning was frozen rippled water. We walked along in the sunshine for awhile, laughing, trying to keep warm. Finally we bought tickets for a Batobus, one of the hop-on-hop-off riverboats, and set off on a tour down the Seine. The boat had a glass arched ceiling and walls, and was comparatively warm inside--thankfully, for all of us. We chugged down along the Seine. We went past houseboats and under bridges. Some of the big boats were fitted out as restaurants and bars, and as the day got later, we could see people dancing and eating inside them. We got off at Champs Elysees, just in front of the big black bridge, with the faces of river-gods gilt along its sides and the great statues on their pedestals, one at each corner of the bridge--horses with flying manes and women beside, their arms and bodies flashing in the sunshine. We walked around toward the Champs Elysees. It was so cold that none of us could properly enjoy any of it. We walked between two enormous buildings that both seemed to be on the grandest scale possible, decorated with Classic statues--Apollo and his horses and other great statues, such a profusion of faces and drapery standing on corners and cornices that it seemed as though a strong wind was constantly blowing over them. Grandiose, ornate, exotic, completely sensual.

At last we reached the Champs Elysees. A big boulevard, cars whizzing up and down. A double row of trees ran down either side, bare in the winter sunshine that sparkled on the lights strung through their branches. At one end was a ferris wheel; at the far end was the Arc de Triomphe. We crossed the street and wandered and wandered, going up and down through the narrow streets leading off the Champs Elysees. Emmaline would dash off to see if she could find a place for us to sit and eat, while the rest of us wandered aimlessly. Heather was feeling ill with a cold, and Charlotte was feeling faint (Charlotte was almost always hungry). At last Emmaline found a cafe on a small side street. It was a little cafe, with two floors, the walls painted cool blue and white. The man and woman running the cafe were very kind to us. The cafe was crowded and there was nowhere for us to sit, so we stood crowded and rather scared in a corner and waited until the crowd had gone. Emmaline disappeared, and I was nervous, not knowing any French whatsoever; the other girls all dazed with cold. But Emmaline came back just in time, and we ordered our food. The man who served us was very kind, and we all ended up sitting at a small round table on the second floor, crowded together with our food. I had pasta with broccoli and ham and olive oil--delicious and hot. It was pleasant to eat the simple food and sit together quietly, piecing ourselves together after the cold. When we finished eating, we went back outside. We walked over the bridge leading to the Champs Elysees with the gilt statues on it, and then got back on the boat. We road the boat around to the Eiffel Tower, which seemed much stockier than I'd imagined it would be, looming against the pale sky.

We got off at the Musee d'Orsay. As I found out later from Mrs. McCollum, the Musee d'Orsay is actually an old train station, converted into an art museum. It reminded me in some ways of The Phantom of the Opera, big rounded buttresses, masks, faces, names of French cities, gilded clocks. We walked along under the enormous thick walls, under the huge statues. In front of the museum were statues of animals, captured lifelike, the sun glancing off their bronze hides. We had to go through security to get in and then pay for tickets. The woman at the counter looked at me as though I were an idiot when I didn't understand her and she had to speak in English. Inside through the gift shop ('Librarie') at the front, and then into the great central hall: a huge arched glass ceiling running the length of the building, resting on curved metal pieces gilded and carved. Down the length of this great hall were placed statues, and galleries led off on either side.

Everyone was thankful to be in the warmth for a change, and Emmaline was thankful not to be in charge. :o) So I took the map and led us through the museum, to the galleries I thought were best. Early Impressionists first: Millet, 'The Gleaners', and a beautiful painting of a shepherdess; Corot; early Monet, still, serene rural paintings. From there through other galleries--more early Monet, the famous paintings of garden parties and the woman in the white spotted dress with the veil. Back into the hall now, at the far end, where is the statue from the Opera Garnier of the god of music with his tambourine and the laughing muses around him. Charlotte and Emmaline found a model of the opera house. From there up to the third floor, and here we found the classic Impressionists: Monet, Manet, Degas, Van Gogh. Degas's models of dancers and the 'Little Dancer'; his paintings of studios and dancers. Monet's paintings of the woman standing on the hill with the umbrella, of haystacks and cathedrals, and, of course, the waterliles. It was amazing to me to see these paintings at last, to stand in front of them and look at the thick brushstrokes, the colors congealing into patterns of light and shadow. I found a statue the twin of the washerwoman statue in the little art museum in San Antonio. We were all strung out through this gallery, Heather, Catherine, and I going ahead; Emmaline and Charlotte (Charlotte trying to educate Emmaline; Charlotte and I were the two main art lovers in our little group) bringing up the rear. Heather and I found a room toward the end of the gallery where the Degas pastels were housed: lovely fair, intimate scenes of dancers with the light slanting over their faces, caught suspended in fleeting movements. Restful to wander between the paintings, watching the way the light changed in each one--as when my eyes are tired and focus fuzzily on the world. Drifting from scene to scene.

And also out the windows glimpses of the city, the endless crust of buildings rising up and up, blue and mauve and salmon as the sun set, and far away, on a distant curve of hill, the round minaret-like towers of Sacre Coeur, crowning the city. On this level, between the windows, were great statues of men and women, seated in their robes, staring with blind eyes from their shadowed pedestals at the city as it lay basking in the evening. At last we managed to gather together in the room with the Van Gogh paintings. We had to hurry out of the museum in order to catch the last boat. Michaela and Sarah trailed along behind us, and as we were waiting for them, we stepped briefly into a room we glimpsed off to one side--an incredibly Baroque room, all mirrors and gilt and curves and florals, chandeliers hanging from golden floral loops. We caught the boat in time and spent an hour just sitting and riding it back around to the Champs Elysees. I sat with Catherine and Heather, who were both exhausted, while Charlotte, Michaela, Sarah, and Emmaline goofed around, sucking jolly ranchers. Heather was feeling very sick with a cold and sat with her head on her knees, while Catherine and I talked quietly.

Dusk fell around us and lights began to come on in the buildings and the streets. On the back deck of the boat a couple was standing locked in each other's arms, watching the scenery go by. Emmaline and Sarah went out onto the deck to take pictures. We chugged under bridge after bridge, each one different from the last. One bridge had fierce eagles standing with spread wings; others had rows of faces, with curled beards and flowing hair, grimacing down on the river; others were carved with letters, or were simple springing arches from one pillar to another. The buildings loomed over us on either side. We could see into the lighted windows--the insides of fancy apartments and offices, mirrors and curtains. Catherine and I sat quietly and watched the canals slide by, the small bare trees, and the half-moon shining stilly out of the blank blue sky. Staring at the light rippling on the water, I slipped into a sort of daze. Like staring at a Monet painting, each blue wave catching a curve of orange light. It seemed as though we were sailing from one picture postcard to another, sitting there quietly.

At last the boat stopped at the Champs Elysees, the same quay where we'd got off earlier in the day for lunch. As we got off the boat, the steward, who'd seen us several times today, laughed and called after us, 'Vive Irelond! My favorite beer is Kilkenny's!' The girls laughed as we walked away, though someone muttered, 'Why does no one understand the difference between Ireland and Northern Ireland?' We walked back to the Champs Elysees. By now it was quite dark, and the trees were all lit: the first row, right by the road, was hung with lights that blazed like falling stars so that the trees seemed to be dripping great globules of white light; the second row was hung with little pale blue twinkle lights. Headlights blazed on the road, and at the far ends, the ferris wheel and the Arc de Triomphe glowed at each other, the Arc lit orange and massive at the high end of the road, with the shops in between. We walked up the Champs Elysees toward the Arc de Triomphe. The broad sidewalks were crowded. On either side were big stores, restaurants, and cinemas, blazing with light. The moon above seemed unreal, staring down with its white eye out of a starless sky at this man-made galaxy. Streetlights, store windows, Christmas lights, the Arc, all glowing white and blue and orange. Fancy clothing stores, Mercedes Benz auto dealers, galleries and malls, McDonald's, Quick Burgers, coffeehouses, etc. We ducked into a pharmacy (of which there seem to be quite a lot--Emmaline always stopped to ask directions in pharmacies because they were most obvious, marked by flashing green crosses mounted above the door) so that Heather could buy tissue for her streaming nose. Back out on the main boulevard, we continued up toward the Arc. People constantly bustled and swirled around us. Crowds of Asian tourists, Parisians in high boots, strange men and women wearing fluorescent wigs, dressed in skanky pub clothes and looking at once very disdainful and very miserable.

We wandered around at the top of the boulevarde trying to find a way to get to the Arc, and at last we ducked down into a metro tunnel, which took us underneath the perilous roundabout that runs around the Arc. We came out in cold tunnels, and from cold tunnels to the area under the Arc itself. Some sort of military ceremony was going on, soldiers in uniforms with gold braid playing bagpipes and laying wreaths at the flame burning under the arc. The arc was covered on all four corners with huge statues commemorating military victories, frozen Nikes with flying banners and streaming hair, shouting silently and sweeping great muscled arms upward. All day the cold had pursued us, and it was no different here. Some of the girls, Charlotte in particular, were almost senseless with the cold. Emmaline, Heather, Catherine, and I decided to climb to the top of the Arc. We bought tickets and set off on the endless spiral staircase: flight after flight, a continuous twisting circle, taking us up and up. Heather and Catherine staggered along behind. The narrow shaft echoed with our footsteps. We went through one low long cold hall at the top, then through another hall, with a small museum inside, and then at last out onto the top of the Arc itself. Paris spread below us, sprawling as far as the eye could see on all sides: an infinite map of lights, gridded with streets spread like rays with the Arc at their centre. We could see the ferris wheel, the Eiffel Tower (which started to sparkle with white lights on the hour, and which swept the city with a spotlight), the cluster of skyscrapers away beyond the Arc, like broken lit columns of a ruined city. Directly below us was the roundabout. Emmaline and Catherine took pictures of the tangled traffic below, cars crushed together like beetles swarming on a tree trunk. Lights and lights and lights, the rushing veins of streets, the sparkling freckles of windows and doors, the orange glow from streetlights, the white glare highlighting the Champs Elysees and the Eiffel Tower, and the moon staring down on it all. We took pictures of each other, and then descended the spiral staircase. At the bottom, we wandered around under the Arc for awhile, then went to find Charlotte, Sarah, and Michaela, who had taken shelter, shivering, in the tunnels under the Arc.

At last we went to find some supper. We came back out into the freezing cold of the Champs Elysees and walked to a Brioche Doree bakery, standing huddled together in line. Emmaline had to order food for Heather, Catherine, and me--neither Heather nor Catherine were confident enough with their French, and I of course was completely clueless. We went upstairs to the second floor of the bakery and found a round table, where we sat and rested and ate. I had salmon quiche (weird) and hot chocolate, and a galette with caramel and apple inside. Light food, not very satisfying, but much better than nothing, and nice in its own fancy, flaky way. We sat with long, exhausted silences, stunned from the cold, though as we warmed up, we laughed and talked more--joking about hypothermia, etc.

At last we pulled ourselves together and, after brief debate (we'd been planning to go up the Eiffel Tower), we went back to the hostel. I was dumb with discomfort, my legs cold, my shoulders and neck sore. We took the way back to our hostel, by now becoming familiar, the sour-smelling tunnels branching away on either side, the colorful advertisements, the stairs and stairs and stairs: Bastille, the never-ending flight of stairs on the Creteil line, to Ledru Rollin. Back at the hostel, we dumped our things. Then Emmaline, Michaela, Charlotte, and I went to a nearby grocery store, Monoprix (rather like M&S--!), to buy food for the next day.

Back at the hostel, I took a shower (313 had its own shower; the other rooms had showers down the hall, so 313, being the biggest and handiest, became our meeting area). The girls sat around, laughing and talking. Heather collapsed on her bunk, and Catherine sat busily texting Daphne. We had a brief Bible study, and then I went directly to bed.

stop and think

Now Playing: Tchaikovsky, Pathetique Symphony, first movement, Adagio-Allegro Non Troppo.

It seems like a long time since I've updated on here, but from reading other people's blogs, there have been far more interesting and important posts to read about, so you all haven't been suffering.

I feel as though my mind has been left behind somewhere. Maybe I set it down on the counter in the post office this morning before I went running and forgot to pick it up. It cost me exactly five pounds twenty-eight pence to post all those letters and cards, but well worth it, hopefully. Now I just wish someone would mail me my mind back again, and then I'd be in better shape.

This morning I walked out with Emmaline to her ten o'clock class. We usually meet Charlotte and Sarah W. on the sidewalk outside Renwick, and they walk with Emmaline over to Queen's, while I split off to go running. It was cold this morning, our breath hanging on the air, Charlotte's fingers numb even in their fuzzy gloves, she said.

The gardens have been laid away for winter now. A sort of stillness and hush over them. The rose beds pruned back, their flowers picked or pulled away by frost. The oaks and chestnuts bare, their few lingering leaves lying on the green lawn. Winter comes like the lifting of a mask, as though the fiesta face of summer were slowly peeled back to reveal this sombre barrenness. The sun is always at a slant, and seagulls veer on the chilly wind against the variable sky. Rain comes down over Cave Hill and then blows away again, leaving the light still lingering--morning is laced with shadows like afternoon, and afternoon is as blue-grey as dusk.

I went running and then came back to Renwick for lunch. No bread, so I had to walk down to the Centra to buy some. A soft white loaf, half-baked, and carried back to Renwick through a sudden cold downpour, the uneven sidewalks slick underfoot. The trek rewarded with a rather soggy peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. The afternoon whiled away with a paper, a paper that proceeded by fits and starts, with many interruptions, nosing at the argument and then scurrying away again, never quite taking the bait. I shall have to tease it some more this evening and see if I can coax the rough draft into something logical.

Catherine came in at one point to ellicit advice about going to the library. I drew her a map. Emmaline came in at two-thirty and sagged down on my bed, watching me with her big blue-green eyes. So dull all day that I couldn't stop smiling like a fool when I saw her come in, and could sit and laugh at her lazy complaining about lunch and groaning about how untidy her half of the room is. She knows I'm laughing at her, and laughs at herself.

When I had finished the paper, at about four o'clock, I finished and wrapped up the box that I'm sending back to the States. It seems pitifully small. How can one pack up deep gratitude to one's parents and concerned love for one's friends into a twelve-by-fourteen-by-four cardboard box, patched together many times with brown tape?

Listening to Tchaikovsky now makes me remember Tulsa and going to the Signature Symphony concerts, as it always does. Memories are such odd things. Once when I took out my new ESV Bible, I had such a vivid flashback to Summer Conference that I could taste and smell and hear it all again, right down to the clatter of ladles in the cafeteria and the face of the mandolinist in the worship band and the feel of scorching white sand underfoot. And last night when I talked to Syneva, I could almost smell again the warm air in her car, seeing out the windows the autumn neighborhoods around Woodward Park.

Linsey just came in to ask for blue-tack. The walls around my desk are jammed with pictures, letters, and cards. Flat Matildas, photographs on the bulletin board, Psalm 91 in Jenny S.'s scrawly handwriting, bits of verses in colored pen that I've done myself, a verse from Catherine, a finger painting from Mary, colorful birthday cards, Kathryn's wooden cross, the funny little colored cards that Syneva tucked in among the bags of tea she sent me when I first got here.

Such is life. Looking at the little clock on my computer wondering when supper is, agonizing helplessly as to why all the rough drafts I've written so far have been so difficult and whether these imposing professors will be merciful when they grade them, wishing I weren't so tired. It's my goal tonight to go to bed by eleven-thirty. Renwick Bible study usually lasts until eleven o'clock. I'd forgotten how addictive socializing with people is--I enjoy just sitting in a room of people, listening, and it's hard to get up and be disciplined and go to bed, when you know that they're all still sitting down there, and can hear the voices coming up through the floor, and can wonder how many more times like this you'll have before you'll have to leave.

Friends keep getting left behind like that mind of mine, little constellations of them sprinkled over the face of the earth. I need to keep looking forward to Heaven, but right now everything seems far too large. Being twenty-one sounds so grown-up. Did someone forget to debrief me about being an adult? These papers are all too big; the time goes by too quickly; I can't make friends the way I want to because I don't have the energy or courage to love enough; I am confused about decisions and afraid to commit to anything.

Don't get me wrong; it's not that I'm miserable here. In fact over the past month or so I've started to settle in much more and focus on life here instead of being quite so homesick. I'm thankful now that I chose to do a full year instead of just a semester; otherwise, I would just have been getting adjusted to life in another country before I had to leave again. The work I do is enjoyable. I've loved being able to study the heroic themes and poetry of Anglo-Saxon literature this semester, and reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight over the past couple of weeks was a joy. The language is so rich, each word with connotations and shades of meaning that echo across the years. I wish I could bring those down and give them to each of you, make you understand what a wealth we have, a language of interconnected thoughts, where one word reflects off of and onto another, as disorienting as a house of mirrors and as dazzlingly wonderful as a French chandelier.

So now the symphony is almost over. Suitably dark. And this entry should be over as well.

Remember Zephaniah 3:17. All this has a purpose. It is not "vanity of vanities". It is a privelege and a joy, one more soul on the way to giving Christ pleasure and glory.

Oh, my! It's snowing...

... WHITE RABBITS!