Five Things That Made Me Smile Over the Weekend

1. Engineer Husband, Brown Bear Daughter, and I went to a library book sale on Saturday, and I found several treasures, including:
Prince of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger. A favorite historical fiction novel of mine.
In the Company of Others by Jan Karon. This novel is the only one Jan Karon’s Father Tim novels that I didn’t own and haven’t read. I was just thinking about how I need to purchase a copy, and there it was at the book sale.
One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson. I read and reviewed this book in December, 2014, and now I own a copy to refer to anytime I want.
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Just on the right day, Dickens’ birthday, a very nice, hardback, slipcovered volume with illustrations by Barnett Freedman, a British illustrator and book jacket designer who also worked during World War II as a full-time salaried war artist, recording the adventures of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1940 and then again on D-day in 1944.
A beautiful hardcover edition of Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux and several paperback children’s classics (20-30) in very good condition.
All for $25.00.

2. A pulled pork barbecue sandwich for lunch on Saturday, split pea soup for supper, and chicken tetrazzini for Sunday lunch—none of which I cooked. I have a very kind and gifted husband.

3. Making valentines with my daughters.

4. My pastor’s use of Dory in his sermon as an example of how we tend to “forget” to obey the simple commands we read and hear from Scripture. The text was James 1:22: “Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.” ~The Message

5. Remembering lines of poetry that I thought I had forgotten.

As I Walked Out One Evening
by W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

Things sort of go downhill for Auden after that, until “the crack in the tea-cup opens/ A lane to the land of the dead.” Read the rest of the poem at Poets.org.

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