I’m back, in part, more deliberately than slowly, evaluating activities before I resume them. I told a friend that it’s as if I missed two seasons, summer in a slow decline, autumn in recovery. Or recuperation. Or, putting it another way, I blinked and moved from grilling to stews. After a good start at the beginning of the gardening year, way back in February and March, soggy weather stopped things in the squelch. Now, thorns do in fact infest the ground, is Watts’ phrase that we’ll soon enough be singing. I said to her that “beating back the thorns and weeds” was a good enough description of the Christian secular life.
I’m reading an early and possibly obscure Michael Innes mystery, so early that Sir John isn’t Sir, yet, nor even a highly ranked policeman. He has a sister, whom I do not recall from other Appleby yarns. The atmosphere of the book is a little musty, a little dusty. I’m reading it while wrapped in wool and a snug comforter on the cold nights we’re having now, and the book somehow reminds me of my grandmother’s house. The book preserves, I suppose, the late 1930s atmosphere that somehow curled around her house, the hint that prosperity might be coming again, laced with the fear of war that hovered, unacknowledged by chokingly present. Vanished worlds, both.
Speaking of grandmothers, didn’t any of these men who have gotten into such trouble for being boors have any? Grandmothers were the instructors and enforcers of good manners. “Keep your eyes and hands to yourself!” “Stand up when a woman enters the room!” And so on. All washed away in the spring tides of early feminism, leaving young men confused and sometimes concussed “Do I hold the door for her or not?” All those dull old-fashioned, courtly, chivalrous manners were ways of moderating and confining the bumptiousness of male interest. All gone.
Well, having destroyed that moderating influence and replaced it with nothing, now everyone is agape at the result. Can’t imagine why.