Back again

It's been a while since I last blogged. We took a two week trip to Dallas to get warm and succeeded too well. I caught a cold on returning and am just now recovering.

However, when I was well enough to read, I read a wonderful book that I had picked up at my Swap Shop called "Come Spring" by Ben Ames Williams. It is an 860 page history of the early settlement of a small town in Maine. Similar to "Gone With the Wind", it follows a family through several seasons of hardship and successes.

The war is not the Civil War, but Washington and England's war over possession of the land. Mixed in with the progress of the war are the trials of survival by the settlers through crop killing frosts, burned barns and all the problems that faced the determined people.

The descriptions of the virgin forests, yards of moose, streams filled with fish and skies swarming with birds are so vivid that you actually put yourself on the scene. I needed no movie to reveal to me how the fauna looked in various settings, how the bubbling waters looked and felt or what it was like to lie under a majestic tree and breathe in the sights and smells of the forest.

I had never heard of flocks of pigeons so thick the light of the sun was extinguished or moose by the hundreds, but I could see them through the words of this book.

Tom had actually seen the felling of a line of trees which was a new image to me. As I was telling him about how the settlers would line up 15 or more trees, cutting the proper angles on the trunks and watch them fall domino style, he told me about watching this done in Connecticut once.

Again the descriptions were so vivid, you could almost hear the mighty trees falling one by one.

I'm not sure I would have been strong enough to manage the daily chores the women tended for it was not an easy life.

My Swap Shop has also yielded two more treasures. I had not read Rick Warren's "A Purpose Driven Life" and I feel that you can't know about something it you don't read it. I'm going through it a chapter a day as he suggests, using it for my daily devotion. He has some excellent insight to think about.

Another good author I got at the Shop is "In the Eye of the Storm" by Max Lacado. Pastor has been using another of his books for Bible study on Wednesday nights and I have enjoyed his writings as well.

The last time I tried to add a photo, I lost my entire blog, so this one will have no photo. I'll try to send a photo of Bush's house in Dallas in a later blog that isn't so lenghtly.