Robert Frost and Rusty Things

 

I should have taken a picture of the maple scones my daughter baked for our poetry tea time, but, though they were Instagram worthy, they disappeared too quickly. It was just one of those mornings. When the treats were gone, the children mostly slumped in their seats while I read them Robert Frost’s poems: “The Road Not Taken,” “Mending Wall,” “The Cow in Apple Time.” No special snack could sway the children from resting their foreheads on the table, showing only a glimmer of interest as we moved on to our read-aloud, and found the Boxcar Children digging for treasures in an old dump.

                Then suddenly, my oldest daughter raised her head from the table and declared, “We should hike to the dump!” It seems that every old New England acreage has, somewhere on it, an old dump. Ours is in a gully in the woods and made up of aged rusty hulls of ringer washers and riding toys. There are lots of glass jars, car parts, and a single lace-up leather boot. The kids are normally forbidden from playing down there what with the risk of tetanus and all, but today a hike to the dump seemed necessary and could loosely be called educational, though it wasn’t in the lesson plans.

                Spirits began to lift as soon as we were bug-sprayed and gloved. Soon they were full of conjectures and questions about what era the Boxcar Children lived in and what Benny would do with the wheels they had found in today’s chapter. Wheels! We found all matter of wheels at the dump: the front wheel of a tricycle (pedal still attached), a four-wheeled push toy (a play lawn mower or baby buggy?), and the curved rusted wheel wells of a long-ago vehicle. We figured that if you put all the parts together, you could build a 1930s era truck.

After surveying the dump, and successfully avoiding injury, we decided to hike further into the woods, through the ferns and mossy rocks in the dry creek bed.

                The bored, sleepy children were suddenly full of questions: “Wasn’t it cool that Robert Frost homeschooled his kids? Wasn’t that poem he wrote about the cow in the orchard funny? It reminded us of our pigs eating apples. What kind of rocks are these? Is this granite? What age do you think Henry, Jessie, and Violet were? When you are writing a story what are the best ages for kids to be? Look how the roots of that tree have pulled up stones. Look at how the drought has dried up the creek.

                We returned home just in time for lunch with plenty of energy for the rest of our schoolwork, and all because we took a hike to the dump.

                So instead of a picture of homemade maple scones and stacks of illustrated poetry books, I took a picture of this rusty thing in the woods.

Yet, somehow, I think Robert Frost would approve…

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

Happy Hobbit Day! A Tribute to Mabel Tolkien (J.R.R.'s mother)

 

    A few years ago, I discovered the beautiful picture book biography John Ronald’s Dragons by Caroline McAlister with illustrations by Eliza Wheeler. When I became a mother, I developed this habit of suddenly noticing characters I had never noticed before, mainly the overlooked mothers in the story, and I am so grateful to McAlister for introducing me to Tolkien’s mother, Mabel. In John Ronald’s Dragons, we meet Mabel as she is reading fairy tales to her sons.

 

John Ronald didn’t care for Treasure Island, but the old fairy tales from Andrew Lang’s Red Fairy Book captivated him, especially the story of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir.

“I desired dragons with a profound desire,’ he said long afterwards in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world, in which it was, for instance, possible to read stories in peace of mind, free from fear. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”

After reading this, I pulled our own copy of The Red Fairy Book off the shelf and found “The Story of Sigurd.”  Though the fairy tale was strange, familiar faces appeared: a fearsome dragon wallowing on hoarded gold, a dwarf, and a ring that brings everyone bad luck. It was not the story of The Hobbit, but the seeds were there, buried in the rich soil his mother had prepared for him. 

Widowed at a young age with two young sons, Mabel Tolkien found a cottage for her family to live in in the English countryside in Sarehole, a place that delighted John Ronald’s imagination and was very much The Shire we imagine in his books. (Ironically, he would spend the rest of his life living in plain suburban houses where he would have to convert the garage of his house into a library, and visit The Shire in his imagination.)

Once settled, Mabel began her sons’ education at home. She took all that she knew: languages, painting, drawing, and playing the piano and offered it to her children. John Ronald didn’t take to the piano, but he loved the musicality of words and languages, and his mother encouraged his interest by teaching him Latin, French, and German. He soon started inventing his own languages and would continue to do so his entire life, even in the trenches of World War I. Tolkien would grow up to be a philologist, a scholar of Middle English, a speaker of many languages, who could read myths in Icelandic and invent the elvish languages in his books. Mabel even passed along her own singular style of handwriting that Tolkien would use as a guide for Aragorn’s penmanship.

Another gift Mabel gave her boys was her faith. After converting to Catholicism, many in her family turned against her and withdrew their financial support. Despite this, she brought her boys to church and gave John Ronald a rich experience with God that stayed with him his entire life. Later, it was a discussion of his own love of myth and God that convinced his friend C.S. Lewis to convert to Christianity.

In Mabel Tolkien’s life, we see someone who gave to her sons everything that she had: her knowledge, her passions, her faith, even her elvish handwriting. She saw in her sons the seeds of interests and passions and tried to plant them in rich soil where they would bloom and grow. And they did, even after she passed away from diabetes when the boys were just teens.

Many years later, J.R.R. Tolkien was asked how he came up with the ideas for his stories. He answered,

“One writes such a story not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind; out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” 

Before he started writing, Tolkien already had all of the rich depth of imagination and memory and myth that he needed to author The Lord of the Rings because much of it had been planted there in his childhood by his mother, Mabel.

The work of motherhood is humbling, unseen, sometimes painful, often overlooked. I, personally never knew how much it would feel like what Jesus called “dying to self” until I was buried at home with four little children under the age of six, and didn’t really sleep for a decade. Yet Jesus promised that from this soil of motherhood, new life would come.

“Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.” John 12:24 MSG

Mothers are mulchmakers, turning soil in the dark of the night when the dragons rear their heads, and planting seeds of courage and of hope. All the stories, the songs, the sharing of our passions as well as all of the sorrows, screw-ups, and pleas for forgiveness are all being worked into the leaf-mould of our children’s minds. Mabel Tolkien didn’t get to live to see the fruit of her small loving actions, but we, readers of Tolkien, can thank her for preparing the rich soil of J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination. From a boy who loved dragons, to a man who faced them in war, to the generations who through his stories will find courage to face their own dragons. Thank you, Mabel.

We Are All Going To Be A Little Weirder

 In the first few months of the lockdown, Ella came to me and said, “Mom, I’m thinking of doing an experiment where we lock everyone in their houses with only novels and knitted animals.” She paused for a moment.  “Mom, we’re all going to be a little weirder after this.”

Thus, the prophetic words of a 13-year-old were spoken.

The other night Trixie became overcome with a strong desire to rush to Hobby Lobby and buy a plastic long-horned cow toy. She could not totally explain the compulsion, but the next day while watching online church, she designed and crocheted the bull a canary yellow cowl-neck sweater.

We are all going to be a little weirder, my friends. 

 

 

One of the first things Beatrix knit was this abominable snowman named Bumble. Now Bumble is also wearing a striped dress and a backpack which contains a crocheted corn ear that Bumble must carry with her, and whom she calls Dolly.

At Easter, we had to order an emergency supply of yarn, which took weeks to slowly make its way across the country from Oklahoma. But it served us well. Trixie has crocheted an entire fruit basket with apples, oranges, bananas, lemons, blueberries, strawberries, even a whole pineapple. Mabel has been knitting one tiny sweater ornament every night. She recently finished her 100th sweater.

At one point, Mabel also knit two brightly colored meerkats. She then decided to make a felted baby Meerkat, so the whole family had to throw a Meerkat wedding first. There was music. There was a ceremony. There were abominable snowwoman bridesmaids.

So, I know a lot of you are homeschooling or at least schooling at home for the first time. So, I just wanted to warn you about the effects of being at home with a lot of really imaginative kids. Beyond the copious amounts of crocheted and knitted animals that will appear in your house, it is not uncommon for your children to pick up interests and obsessions. Yes, there are the usual things like sloths, pandas, and every episode of every show ever made about Star Wars. But then there are the unexpected obsessions like turnips, Dolly Parton, and polka music.

These obsessions might lead you to do strange things like plant a hibiscus bush (hibiscus is sloth chocolate), know all the words to "Coat of Many Colors" with the right Dolly intonations or listen to a local polka show on the way to church every Sunday. Or it might even lead you to buy two pigs as pets. 

Mabel’s obsession with pigs began when she was around three years old and first heard the story of the three little pigs. We soon owned every book about pigs, every pig toy, and would find her poring over a book of pig breeds for the one that would be the best pet for children.  By the age of four, she had decided on the perfect breed: the kunekune, a New Zealand grazing pig that had been raised by the Maoris to live with the tribe, making them docile and friendly. She somehow convinced us that if we moved to the country, our first purchase should be a kunekune piglet that she would name Arnold and walk on a leash. So just a few weeks after we moved to the country, Brent and Mabel traveled down to Connecticut to pick up Arnold from a kunekune breeder. Thus, we became not only those weird homeschoolers, but those weird homeschoolers with pigs for pets.

Gilead’s obsession with turnips is easy to trace to his favorite book A Birthday for Cow by Jan Thomas, which he received for his birthday when he was a toddler. But his turnip obsession has held on so long that every time there is a mention of a turnip in a book the whole family has to yell out “Turnip!” He even convinced me to try and plant turnips one year. I watered and watered this luscious large plant in the garden that I truly believed was a turnip. Various members of the family would walk by and say, “That’s not a turnip. That’s a weed.” But I persisted, until I finally dug up the roots and discovered that it was, in fact, a weed. Gilead patted me on the shoulder consolingly and said, “Well, Mom, that was the most well cared for weed ever. It was watered so much. I bet it felt loved.”

 

Not to leave Ella out, whose gift comes in the way of interior design. Last year, after disappearing for a few hours down in our basement, we found that she had rearranged all of the lawn furniture and various items bound for the goodwill to make a Hobbit-esque pub, which she calls The Prancing Pony.

So buckle up kids, this strange time when we are all stuck at home with kids can only lead to one thing. Ella is right.

“We are all going to be a little weirder after this.”