dual personalities

I’m heading up to the prairie today with daughter #1 and Mr. Smith to see the prairie fam–so much more fun than imaginary talking on the phone!

Enjoy your long weekend and let’s all toast the hardworking American men and women out there! And a special call out to those men who do the important jobs women don’t want to do: who pick up your trash, and fix the roads, who are plumbers and electricians, who mine the coal and fix our cars and fight the wars and protect the streets. The ones who stop on the highway and pull people out of burning cars. I salute you and I thank you.

Work and love, using each in its broadest sense – work, the quality which makes a man ashamed not to be able to pull his own weight, not to do for himself as well as for others without being beholden to anyone for what he is doing; work, no man is happy if he does not work.

–Theodore Roosevelt speaking to the railroad branch of the YMCA in Topeka, Kansas, on “decent living and high ideals”, 1903

This little picture essay offers one of the best reminders of the wonders all around us, even in a simple small apartment. We are blessed beyond measure.

And this is a really good article about Wendell Berry. “Berry’s poetic imagination shapes us to love the limits and simplicity of the real life we have, even if it’s not the perfect life.’

I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man. (Ecclesiastes 3:12-13)

P.S. Prayers for travel mercies are much appreciated!

*Theodore Roosevelt