I just saw an email in my inbox titled "A Note from the Real Hanna" and I was all, OH MY GOODNESS! The real Hanna Andersson must have come across my post about my Hanna book, and now she wants to be best friends and also send my children free clothes for the rest of their lives!
I’m right there with you. I thought that it was because I’m such a fabulous customer that she must want to send me a personal greeting. HA! Just can’t resist those Hanna’s!
“Exploration,” says John Stilgoe, author of Outside Lies Magic, “is a liberal art, because it is an art that liberates, that frees, that opens away from narrowness. And it is fun.”
Yes: it is so, so much fun, and that is why I write these posts all chattery with excitement over this or that connection the kids made today. (Or that I made myself!) I know I get carried away, but that’s the point, isn’t it, that way leading on to way has carried me away?
And yet—and yet—I think we are at once ‘carried away’ and made more fully present in the now, more rooted, by these relationships between ideas about things past and future. The joy of connection makes me want to celebrate this moment, this brief encounter with wild-haired child and broad-trunked tree, bus going by, sign on church wall, Scottish warlord creeping over the tower wall and startling the English soldier’s wife who has just put her babe in arms to sleep by crooning that the Black Douglas won’t get him. Child, laughing, shouting “Dinna ye be sae sure aboot that!” across the courtyard outside the library. How can I not celebrate this freedom?
Every day is complicated, messy, and full of friction. And every day has glorious or cozy moments worth celebrating. I seldom bother to chronicle the friction and the mess because writing time is fleeting and precious—and childhood even more so. I’d rather capture the small joys that I might forget—or take for granted—if I don’t take time to set them down in words.
(Excerpt from this post about Real Life, quoted here because I don't want anyone to be under the impression that things are always perfect around here! Heaven knows we are anything but. Perfect, frictionless, orderly? Nope. Happy? Most of the time!)
Be like the bird
Who, pausing in flight
On limb too slight,
Feels it give way beneath her,
Yet sings,
Knowing she has wings.
~h
I’m right there with you. I thought that it was because I’m such a fabulous customer that she must want to send me a personal greeting. HA! Just can’t resist those Hanna’s!
Posted on December 20th, 2006 at 1:21 pmOh, shoot. And I was ready to ride the wave of knowing you …. Sigh.
Posted on December 20th, 2006 at 5:33 pmWas it Seneca that said that man is defined by his dorky moments?
Or was it Napoleon Dynamite?
I do agree that a lifetime supply of free Hannas would be very, very cool (in a warm & fleecy kind of way).
Posted on December 20th, 2006 at 5:35 pmHi Lissa — here’s a Christmas card for you! Sorry I don’t know how to add the link so you can just click
Sherry
http://host-d.oddcast.com/php/start_replyCard/door=167&cl=61&AID=0?id=17638194
Posted on December 24th, 2006 at 10:50 amLH says:
Oh I thought *I* was the one getting a personal email from Hanna — it was my first email I clicked open that day – cute tale!
Posted on December 27th, 2006 at 10:56 am