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St. Luke’s Little Summer

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We’ve finally had a little chilly weather in Arkansas, enough to make a sweater useful and to convince us that fall has arrived. Experience tells us, though, not to put the summer clothes away just yet. All my life I’ve heard “Indian summer” used for the warm days that return after the weather turns cold. Recently I came across another name for them: St. Luke’s Little Summer. It’s an old English name for a spell of mild, sunny weather around St. Luke’s feast day, October 18. It’s a brief return of warmth after the first cool days of autumn, before winter settles in. For centuries, rural Europeans marked the year by saints’ days rather than calendar dates. These seasonal encores took their names from whichever feast day they fell near. Fine weather around September 29 belonged to St. Michael. A warm spell around November 11 became St. Martin’s Summer, the best known of them all. Shakespeare used the phrase in Henry VI, Part 1: “Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days.” The French cal...
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The Constant Struggle Against Forgetting

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It started with chrysanthemums. I was looking for information about La Toussaint , All Saints’ Day in France, which is observed on November 1. French families traditionally visit cemeteries at this time, tending family graves and bringing flowers. And the flower most associated with Toussaint is the chrysanthemum. I knew chrysanthemums were everywhere in France around Toussaint , but I had not really thought about how exclusively they are associated with cemeteries and remembrance. In France, apparently, you don’t ordinarily show up at someone’s house with a lovely pot of mums as a hostess gift. Giving chrysanthemums to a living person can be quite a social faux pas. This was interesting information to acquire just after Travis had been given two beautiful pots of mums for his birthday. We also have large pots of mums outside the side entrance to the boutique. In Arkansas, of course, chrysanthemums have an entirely different job. They mean fall. They sit beside pumpkins and front...
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🌿The Joy of Not Knowing Everything (La joie de ne pas tout savoir)

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  Un café, s'il vous plaît. Some sentences I have mastered. I spent much of my life assuming that learning was supposed to lead, eventually, to knowing. Now I suspect it mostly helps me find the next thing I don't know. I spend a good deal of time trying to learn things. I have been studying French for years, and it is slightly humbling that I still can't speak as well as a three-year-old. A French toddler can ask for a biscuit without first considering the gender of the biscuit and whether the verb requires any special treatment. I would like to have that kind of confidence. There are words I recognize easily on a page that seem to vanish entirely when someone says them aloud. Then, just as I am wondering whether all this effort has accomplished anything, I understand a sentence. An actual sentence, spoken by an actual French person, at an actual French speed. That is usually enough to keep me going. Lately I have been collecting common expressions, the kind people really ...
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Sharing the Time with 84 Charing Cross Road

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🌿🌿🌿 Thoughts about watching 84 Charing Cross Road starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.... I watched 84 Charing Cross Road expecting a pleasant movie about books and letters. It was that. But somewhere around 1951, I became aware that I was there too. I was three years old, living a very different life from Helene Hanff in New York or Frank Doel in London. I have no memory of their streets or their bookshop. Still, while Helene was writing letters across the ocean and Frank was hunting down books for her, I was somewhere in Louisiana and Arkansas, busy being three. We were sharing the same time. The film makes space for the ordinary things. Helene wants a particular book. Frank finds it, or can’t find it, and writes back. Helene sends parcels of food to the Marks & Co booksellers in London, where meat is still rationed years after the war. Someone passes along a bit of news. People go home to their families. Years go by, and another letter turns up. Nothing happens quickly...
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