Category Archives: Wendy Welch

The Monday Book: AN ALTAR IN THE WORLD: A GEOGRAPHY OF FAITH by Barbara Brown Taylor

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This week’s Monday book comes courtesy of Janelle Bailey, literacy educator and retired shopsitter from The Little Bookstore. Thanks Janelle!

I picked up this book for a book study at church, and I thoroughly enjoyed both reading this book–and its becoming of a devotional study for me–and the virtual book study with some great people from Peace whom I haven’t seen in person for more than a year but definitely enjoyed seeing this way and sharing our thoughts about this book.
Taylor does a wonderful job writing in such a manner to prompt individual and personal reflection on the part of the reader, demanding that I annotate (she didn’t direct that, but my thoughts about her written words demanded that interaction of me!) the book fully. I so enjoyed all of the places she took me during this reading, literal places of my faith but also “places” in my own personal history, to retrieve connections to ideas she developed.
Reading the book was wholly satisfying and solidifying in my own sabbath celebration and prayerful practices…and also inspired me to initiate some new ones. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to get in touch with their own faith. And I’d love to get a cup of tea together and talk about this book with any of you, too!

Upstairs, Downstairs – – –

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Jack makes on time again – – –

I hate any kind of changes in routine and particularly moving house, which Wendy and I have done five times now. But almost as bad is moving rooms – I mean changing the use of rooms with the attendant moving of furniture.

In all the houses we’ve lived in it’s usually taken until we were almost ready to move again before we finally had things set up as we liked.

So to last weekend –

For a variety of reasons, we decided to make the ‘ceilidh’ room our bedroom and that meant moving our big old and bulky bed down our narrow staircase. Luckily two good (and young and fit) friends were staying over the weekend. So following a musical evening in the ceilidh room on Saturday, Sunday was spent maneuvering everything down. Although we were able to get the mattress bent enough to push and pull it down the stair, the headboard and footboard had to go out to a small upstairs landing and be lowered down over the rail. Something we could never have done on our own.

Getting the mattress down involved Wendy and the other Wendy losing themselves inside it while Doug shouted “push, push!” as if the stair was the birth canal!

After everything was down and assembled we were astonished how great the room looked. This shouldn’t have surprised us as it’s been the continuing story of the last 25 years!

Of course there are knock-on effects to what was our bedroom and is now Wendy’s work space and our movie theater, and what was our sitting room and now doubles as the music room.

Onwards to installing our woodstove – – –