Ladydale Diary
St. Albert Chmielowski, 2021
Today’s saint will not be known to many of my friends in the inner Sanctum. He’s a Polish saint, the founder of the Albertines, who was canonized by St. John Paul II in 1989.
This week’s diary entry is being written a day earlier than usual because tomorrow I’m flying to upstate New York to lead a Shakespeare-oriented retreat at a Dominican convent and girls’ school, near the Canadian border. More on this in next week’s Diary.
I’ve been riding the back end of the tsunami that hit last week and find myself somewhat exhausted and looking forward to the relatively calmer waters that await me next week.
This week began calmly enough, as we all enjoyed a relatively uneventful weekend with nothing on the calendar. On Saturday we went for a pleasant walk, as a family, to a local waterfall. I was especially pleased at how well Leo did, walking happily the whole time, if somewhat slower than the pace we’d have liked to have set. But then we weren’t in any hurry.
Sunday was the usual tried and tested formula. A relaxing morning in which I played ball and “Hop, Hop Hooray” with Leo, followed by noon Mass, a return home, lunch, and a gloriously welcome siesta. At some point (I can’t recall which evening), we sat down together for a family film night to watch Hitchcock’s early classic, The Lady Vanishes.
The most dramatic encounter with Mother Nature this week has been our attempts to protect a nest of Carolina wrens from the unwanted and deadly attention of two black snakes. The nest is nestled in the eaves under our deck, on the north side of the house, and Susannah was startled by the sight of the two snakes, one about five feet in length and the other about three, sidling up the brickwork to get at the nest from which the cheaping of the chicks was all too audible. Susannah called me down to help. In the past we’ve simply killed black snakes in order to protect our own chicks and eggs. These days, however, with no chicks and far fewer chickens, and therefore far fewer eggs, we’re happy to live alongside our serpentine neighbours. Since slaughter was not on the agenda, I used a stick, placed strategically under the middle of each snake’s body to catapult them away from the danger zone, after which we shepherded them from the scene, the larger of the two slithering towards the undergrowth near the duck pond, the other being ushered into the “fairy wood” to the west of the house.
In Monday’s FORMED Book Club we continued our discussion of the best of Chesterton’s essays, the reading for which set me up well for the class on Chesterton which I’m teaching on Wednesday evenings for Memoria College. This Wednesday we focused on Chesterton the Essayist so my reading for Monday was good preparation for Wednesday also. The proverbial killing of the two birds with the one stone.
I’ve given two radio interviews this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, but my customary Friday morning interview for the Son Rise Morning Show on Sacred Heart Radio will need to be cancelled because I’ll be on a plane at the appointed hour.
This week was also the second week in which I’ve been teaching the course on Catholic Literary Giants for Homeschool Connections. It’s been short but intense, involving classes on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in both weeks. Last week I taught classes on Shakespeare, Newman and Hopkins; this week, moving into the twentieth century, I’ve taught on Belloc, Chesterton and Tolkien. The final quiz is now uploaded and the course is officially complete. A deep sigh of relief is in order!
On Tuesday evening I was interviewed for a homeschooling podcast, focusing on Shakespeare.
I’ve also managed to fulfill my writing obligations for Crisis Magazine and the Imaginative Conservative, writing “The Divine Comedy in a Nutshell” for the former and an essay on gothic architecture entitled “The Church Militant on the March” for the latter. It goes without saying, however, that I’ve made no progress on the current book project. Perhaps next week….
It’s getting late and I still need to do some final preparations for this weekend’s trip. This being so, I’ll take my leave, wishing all my friends in the Inner Sanctum a blessed week.
