The Mitford Bedside Companion
Page 48
Mamie Millwright: One of the seven Millwright children. Junior Bentley: Married to Arbutus, one of the famed Flower Girls. They live in a brick house with two screened porches, across from Red Pig Barbecue.
Morris Millwright: Leanna’s husband and father of seven.
Paul Taggart: Is from Lambert; his grandparents attended Holy Trinity.
Mitford Pets
Luther: A recent mixed-breed addition to the Meadowgate pack.
Malachi: A dog of mild demeanor who belongs to the preacher at Green Valley Baptist Church.
Waste Not, Want Not:
The Father Tim Novels
As I pen this, I’m in the early chapters of Home to Holly Springs, the first of three books in my upcoming series, The Father Tim Novels.
Why continue to write about Father Tim if, indeed, we’ve left Mitford behind?
Because I like him. Because I trust him. And because he can be a dash of fun when he puts his mind to it.
Besides, if one has struck what one believes to be a good and authentic character, why waste him? Why not heed the old Yankee proverb?
There is also another consideration. This fellow’s been clinging to Mitford like moss to a log for years on end. Afraid of flying, you know. Well, who isn’t, when you get down to it? But he’s older and wiser, now, and also well-loved by his irrepressible wife. (Being well-loved is, of course, a very freeing thing.)
Long story short, I wanted to see what he’d get up to in different surroundings.
Thus, he’s returning to his Mississippi birthplace, Holly Springs, for the first time in nearly four decades. A trip that, to say the least, will be life-changing.
Then, he and Cynthia are off to Ireland to meet Father Tim’s first cousin, Walter, and his wife, Katherine, and poke around Kavanagh graveyards and explore the family castle, now in great ruin. This book will be called Party of Four.
Afterward, perhaps, I’ll send them off to England in A Family Face.
By the end of the series, I shall most likely be, as my grandmother put it, “a pile of wrinkles up in the attic.” Nonetheless, I hope to then write a book about the building of a mid-eighteenth-century house in the Virginia countryside, and the extraordinary woman who got the job done. This will take two years to research, and perhaps four years to write, and with God’s favor, should be released in 2017. (Hope you’ll stick around.)
Following that great hurrah, I’d love to have a deep draft of what Father Tim experienced in the Afterword of Light from Heaven.
Father Tim lay on his back in the far corner of the sheep paddock, looking into the shining cumulus cloud that swelled above him….
A bee thrummed in the clover; he drowsed, but did not sleep….
Since childhood, he had avoided lying in the grass, knowing only too well that spiders and beetles and worms lived there. Instead, he had discomfited himself in hardback chairs—and look what he had missed!
He closed his eyes, and laid a hand on his dog, who drowsed beside him. “Dogs are our link to paradise,” Milan Kundera had said “To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring, it was peace.”
Where doing nothing was not boring, it was peace. Yes!
I should like to plumb the depths of doing nothing, and discover its particular (and for me, elusive) mystery.
Perhaps I shall choose to do nothing in an Italian villa overlooking the sea, with a gardener busy at the lavender hedge and a cook making fresh pasta in the kitchen. My loved ones will be there, I fondly hope, and we shall eat and laugh and walk in the garden and play Scrabble and read aloud to one another—the Psalms and Wordsworth and Cowper and Herrick and the lovely George Herbert—trying not to waste a minute of the beautiful life that remains, and saying with Michelangelo who, at the age of eighty-seven, penned this:
Ancora imparo (I am still learning).
The Almost Complete, Only Somewhat Partially Abridged Scoop the Mitford Years Series and Your Author, Jan Karon
JAN KARON HAS written nine novels in the Mitford Years series, and several gift books, all published by Viking Penguin:
At Home in Mitford
A Light in the Window
These High, Green Hills
Out to Canaan
A New Song
A Common Life: The Wedding Story
In This Mountain
Shepherds Abiding
Light from Heaven
Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes
A Continual Feast: Words of Comfort and Celebration Collected by
Father Tim
The Mitford Snowmen
Esther’s Gift
Jan Karon’s Mitford Cookbook & Kitchen Reader
The first novel, At Home in Mitford, was nominated for an ABBY by the American Booksellers Association for three consecutive years. Thirty-six Logos bookstores, nationwide, gave Mitford novels their Best Fiction of the Year award for four consecutive years.
The novels consistently appear on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and other best-seller lists.
The “stocking stuffer” Christmas stories, The Mitford Snowmen and Esther’s Gift, were also New York Times best sellers.
The Mitford books have been translated into German, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, Polish, Norwegian, and numerous other languages.
Penguin Audiobooks offers all titles, abridged and unabridged, on audiocassette and CD; Jan Karon read the early novels in an abridged format. The unabridged versions are available from Penguin Audio-books and Random House, and are read by the gifted New York stage actor John McDonough.
Viking Penguin offers these free resources:
Study guides to each novel, to aid book clubs, literary leagues, and
for personal reading pleasure. These are available separately, or in the back of the trade paperback edition of At Home in Mitford and on line (see below).
A Web site for author news, book release dates, and reader interaction at www.mitfordbooks.com.
Jan Karon is also the author of a children’s picture book, Miss Fannie’s Hat, which was inspired by her grandmother. It is available in paperback from Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Group.
Her second children’s book, Jeremy: The Tale of An Honest Bunny, is published by Viking Children’s Books, and was written for her daughter, Candace Freeland.
Her illustrated book of encouragement, The Trellis and the Seed, is published in hardcover by Viking Children’s Books and was a # 1 New York Times best seller. It is recommended for all ages.
Jan’s newest children’s book, Violet Comes to Stay, will be a favorite of every Mitford fan who’s always wanted to read a book by Cynthia Coppersmith. Art is by Caldecott Medalist Emily Arnold McCully.
Jan Karon lives and writes on a farm in central Virginia.
Her favorite authors include Wordsworth, Longfellow, Jon Hassler (A Green Journey and Dear James), James Herriot, Louis L’Amour (especially the Sackett chronicles and Last of the Breed), A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Conrad Richter, Wendell Berry…
Jan likes to recommend Catherwood, a novel by North Carolinian Marly Youmans; Down the Common: A Year in the Life of a Medieval Woman, the first novel of an eightysomething English writer, Ann Baer; Jim the Boy, a novel by Tony Earley; The Long Walk, by Slavomir Rawicz, a true chronicle of survival against impossible odds; Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soul; Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner; and Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française.
Her favorite movies include Babe, Song of the South (unavailable in the U.S.; must be bootlegged from the UK), and The Straight Story. (She admits she doesn’t see many movies.)
Her favorite Christmas hymns are “In the Bleak Midwinter,” by the poet Christina Rossetti, and “Once in Royal David’s City.”
Her favorite things to do are to complete a manuscript; direct a family skit; laugh with loved ones; walk with her dog, Agatha Grace; and make her signature dinner: lamb chops (not from her own flock, she hast
ens to avow), roast potatoes, a salad with slices of fresh, sweet orange and spring scallions, followed by Ben & Jerry’s vanilla ice cream with toasted almonds and Cointreau.
Someday, she hopes to make a perfect lemon soufflé, work intricate needlepoint patterns, and dance the tango. She has given up completely on learning to fly an airplane.
She confesses she will never have “work” done (too scary), or learn to use a microwave (too tech).
Her most longed-for privilege? Time to take a deep breath and enjoy God’s boundless provisions, possibly in an Italian villa overlooking the sea or even in her own backyard.
Here’s the information from inside my book: Mary Russell Mitford, Our Village, published by Cassell and Company, Ltd., London, 1839. I don’t think it’s currently in print, but I know it’s available from used-book booksellers.