Robin Hardy's Abbey Lands
Random Mutterings
Family Shenanigans
Feb. 26, 2025: I'm descended from an intrepid line of Scotch/English, German and Irish. The above photo is of my great-grandparents and their children at their home in Illinois. Children were highly valued at that time, and women were expected to produce a large crop. My great-grandmother rose to the challenge.
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I don't even know the names of four of my great-uncles, whom I understand to have gone off adventuring. My grandfather Robert was the only one to follow his father Armstead as a preacher. If you get the labels, you'll deduce that my father and mother were cousins. My dad wouldn't explain to me how that came about, only that he got assurances from someone that his children would not be retards. (We all turned out to be exceptionally smart and somewhat normal.) I heard whispered stories about the activities of the unknown great-uncles, but no one could tell me what happened to them. They don't look criminal, do they?
The photo below is of my mother Ruth with her aunts and grandmother, taken about 1945 (before she was married). She and Ruby were best friends all their lives. They had some adventures too, which they wouldn't tell me about, either. Ruby was married multiple times, but my mother obeyed the cultural dictates for a married woman: Divorce is unacceptable, but murder is okay. (She never made use of either option.)
Yeah, I'm kind of sentimental about my mother.
Swink Busily
Feb. 24, 2025: At one point in my life when I was particularly dry and listless, I ran across this quotation from a 14th-century divine, Walter Hilton. It shocked me to realize that I was dry and listless because I had stopped
working out my salvation with fear and trembling (which expression means "seriously" or "concertedly.") In other words, I had stopped swinking—laboring—to accomplish the one most important objective there is: to live my faith. This requires that I be patient and loving toward everyone I meet.
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Of course I don't always achieve it; it's too hard. But consistently working at it lifts me out of deadness and hypocrisy. So, yeah, I'm going to swink busily.
(I was trying to get a photo of the dragonfly over "perilous" when the sunset got in the way.)
Dog Run Dilemma
Feb. 22, 2025: What do you do with a dog run that your dogs won't run in?
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If you're me at that particular point in time, you turn it into a garden:
In the righthand foreground are daylilies; a smaller variety is across the walkway on the left. The bushes with small white flowers that extend all the way to the end are blackberry canes which sprang from one rooted cane. It took over the garden and tried to grow outside the run.
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We had such an enormous harvest of blackberries that I started making blackberry wine. It was really good!
The following year I planted sunflowers in the near end of the run. They turned out to be more than I could manage. But behind them you can see how big the blackberry canes grew that year, which meant more blackberry wine.
The Disinformation Trap
Feb. 16, 2025: So, I've been getting emails from iTunes Connect about my need to comply with the Digital Services Act if Apple is going to continue to sell my books in the European Union. Specifically, I need to provide a lot of personal information to the EU.
The reason for this, as the letter explains, is to ensure that I am in compliance with the Digital Services Act, the main goal of which "is to prevent illegal and harmful activities online and the spread of disinformation."
Remember how managing misinformation worked out for Facebook?—
"'Meta has a terrible history of censorship in the Biden era. They took direction from the government to censor COVID-19 content; they shut down the sharing of the New York Post Hunter Biden story; they used fact-checkers who accepted the word of the administration as fact and not opinion,' New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz told Fox News Digital." (I had firsthand experience with this, as my previous post describes.)
Because I'm ignoring this demand, Apple will no longer be able to sell my books anywhere in the EU. But that doesn't bother me much. The books I care most about are not sold at all, but free to download. In fact, I'm seeing downloads in China and Russia—two markets that I've never been able to penetrate before.
Coincidentally, Vice President JD Vance commented on this censorship trend in a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference:
"'To many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like 'misinformation' and ‘disinformation,’ who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.'" . . .
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"'Unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the Cold War's winners. I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be "hateful content" or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of "combating misogyny on the internet."’"​ . . .
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"'The backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular, in the crosshairs.'"
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"Vance recounted Adam Smith Connor, who was found guilty in October of breaching the local government's Public Spaces Protection Order, after he stood outside an abortion facility nearly two years ago with his head bowed in silent prayer." . . .
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"'What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? And I believe deeply that there is no security If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.'"
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The punchline here for me is, should I submit to all the DSA's requirements, my explicitly Christian books would be found offensive and ruled ineligible anyway. ​
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UPDATE: Adam Smith-Connor reacts to VP Vance's mention.
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FURTHER UPDATE Feb. 20, 2025: So, I've been defenestrated. But you'll note their offer of reinstatement if I just do what they say. To which I reply, No, thank you.
Raising Swallowtails
Feb. 14, 2025: At the house where I did most of my landscaping, one of the plants I grew was fennel. And I was surprised by the number of black swallowtails that were drawn to it. I was happy to see them, but unfortunately, so were the birds. So I started raising swallowtails just to give them a fighting chance to survive.
While the caterpillars were feeding on the fennel, I cut the sprigs and put them in open-topped jars on the patio. When the caterpillars had gotten big enough, they formed their chrysalises right on the sprig, if it was the right size. Then I watched for the butterflies to emerge.
One day I was lucky enough to catch one at the beginning of its emergence:
There are 2 pupae in this jar. You can tell the one in the upper right is about to emerge because of the black showing through.
Here you see the new butterfly breaking through the top.
Pushing out farther. . . .
When they can get their legs out, they start pulling themselves up on the stick. At this point, I discovered that they couldn't get a grip on the scotch tape, so I changed how I secured the sticks in the jars.
Made it out of the chrysalis to get a grip on the stick above the scotch tape.
Hanging on the stick to fill the wings by pumping fluid into the veins.
Working on it. Wings are getting heavy, so the butterfly needs a more stable place to wait.
There just happens to be a Christmas cactus right next to the jar.
In a little over an hour, here we are. This is a female.
She came over to finish resting on my knee for a minute, then went about her business.
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So much fun to watch. :D
Command These Passions
Feb. 9, 2025: "We are in the world like men playing at tables; the chance is not in our power, but to play it is; and when it is fallen we must manage it as we can; and let nothing trouble us but when we do a base action, or speak like a fool, or think wickedly: these things God hath put into our powers; but concerning those things which are wholly in the choice of another, they cannot fall under our deliberation, and therefore neither are they fit for our passions.
"My fear may make me miserable, but it cannot prevent what another hath in his power and purpose: and prosperities can only be enjoyed by them who fear not at all to lose them; since the amazement and passion concerning the future takes off all the pleasure of the present possession.
"Therefore if thou hast lost thy land, do not also lose thy constancy; and if thou must die a little sooner, yet do not die impatiently. For no chance is evil to him that is content, and to a man nothing is miserable, unless it be unreasonable. No man can make another man to be his slave unless he hath first enslaved himself to life and death, to pleasure or pain, to hope or fear: command these passions, and you are freer than the Parthian kings."
Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living
Corgis Like the Water
Feb. 7, 2025: Here's another throwback, this time to when we had a house with a pool. We also had two dogs, one a Corgi named Frodo. And guess what? Frodo LOVED the pool, especially when he had teenagers to play with.
What's this? Somebody lounging in the water? (Note the feet.) Frodo to the rescue!
The victim tries to hide, but Frodo is not fooled.
Frodo gets his man!
The victim escapes, but Frodo's after him!
Finally, the victim allows himself to be rescued.
Then Frodo has to help Ginger out after she was thrown into the pool.
A Corgi's work is never done.
BONUS: Ginger as she normally appears.
The Author's Apology
Feb. 6, 2025: We authors are a thin-skinned lot. But honestly, in the United States, in the 21st century, we have a great deal more freedom of expression than our predecessors in earlier times.
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For instance, consider John Bunyan. He spent over 12 years in prison for the crime of preaching the Bible. While there, he wrote The Pilgrim's Progress, and had it published in two parts when he was sprung (1678 and 1684). He was severely criticized for using (1) fiction (2) dialogue (3) fantasy and (4) allegory to explore the Christian life in this unprecedented work. He replied to these objections in "The Author's Apology for His Book" (a theme which every writer is familiar with). Here are just a few excerpts:
I knew not what; nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I;
I did it mine own self to gratify….
Well, when I had thus put my ends together,
I show'd them others, that I might see whether
They would condemn them, or them justify;
And some said, Let them live; some, Let them die;
Some said, John print it; others said, Not so:
Some said, it might do good; others said, No.
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Now was I in a strait, and did not see
Which was the best thing to be done by me:
At last I thought, Since you are thus divided,
I print it will, and so the case decided….
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I further thought, if now I did deny
Those that would have it thus to gratify,
I did not know but hinder them I might
Of that which would to them be great delight;
For those which were not for its coming forth,
I said to them, Offend you I am loath;
Yet since your brethren pleased with it be,
Forbear to judge till you do further see.
If that thou wilt not read, let it alone;
Some love the meat, some love to pick the bone….
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May I not write in such a style as this?
In such a method too and yet not miss
My end—thy good? ….
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"Well, yet I am not fully satisfy'd
That this your book will stand when soundly tried."
Why, what's the matter? "It is dark!" What though?
"But it is feigned." What of that? I trow
Some men by feigned words, as dark as mine,
Make truth to spangle, and its rays to shine!
"But they want solidness." Speak, man, thy mind!
"They drown the weak; metaphors make us blind."
My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold
The truth, as cabinets enclose the go
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Thank you, John, for pleading my case better than I could.
One Thing I Regret
Feb. 5, 2025: —about moving to an apartment is that I can't dig in the dirt.​ At a previous house I had ample opportunity to dig in the dirt:
The first thing I did was fill in the front beds which bordered a long front porch. So I could sit on the porch and read, hidden from street view by the plants. That was nice.
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Then I went on to the side beds:
—where I put in hyacinth bean, acidanthera, and lilies. I had my share of failures, though. On the left below is a gerbera daisy in a pot. Potted plants always die on me. And it took me all summer to figure out that you can't let okra get as big as it wants to.
Inedible Edible
We only stayed a few years in that house. But at least I got my signature portrait there.
Your Life Is a Story
Feb. 1 2025: In Book 20, Lord Efran and De’Ath, Efran has an epiphany:
On the trek up the switchback, they heard Cudmore, on courtyard gate duty, whistling “Whoopsie Daisy”—a song that only old-timers from Westford would know. Hearing it for the first time in years, Efran was both comforted and saddened, for it called to mind men who had been friends and tutors to him, now long gone. They played such a large part in shaping me, he mused. And Therese whispered, In Your book were written the days that were formed for me, every one of them, when as yet there was none of them. [Ps. 139:16]
Raising his face to the white fortress above, he realized, I am a character in a story. How good a character I am depends on my faithfulness to the rôle the Author wrote for me.
​In the family room of my childhood home, one whole wall was lined with books, the lower shelves being dedicated to children’s books. So I’d fry a bologna sandwich, take it to the family room, and sit on the floor next to the shelves to pull out one of the books of children’s classics.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, eating my sandwich, I got acquainted with poetry and prose. Without knowing it, I absorbed rhyme and rhythm, sound effects, and significant details. I became attached to characters solely to find out what happened to them. Again without realizing it, I learned that story is everything.
That is, the power of a story is in the plot, in what happens. The most wonderful story ever is the Biblical story, that of God’s dealings with people. How they respond to Him determines what happens in their own story.
Free will is the greatest gift imaginable. I often tell aspiring writers that, to be believable, their characters must be free to defy the author. If the characters are not free to do what they want, they’re only cardboard cutouts, making the plot a sham and the story worthless. So the great Author gives His characters the freedom to do what they will with the gifts He gives them. And many, many stories come to life.
As a young adult with children of my own, I rediscovered the importance of story. Bible stories were my lifeline during that time. When I understood the meaning of “Obedience is better than sacrifice,” I saw how a character can cooperate with the Author to live a story of purpose and power.
The creator of The Hardy Boys books, Franklin W. Dixon, gave this advice on making a good story: “Get your hero in a pit and throw rocks at him.” Conflict is essential to story in that it lays open the characters for inspection: what are they made of? What is in their hearts? This exploratory surgery is painful to the characters, of course, especially the ones who choose to look at the results. But these results are what shows the characters how to survive in a story that includes powerful antagonists.
The Author Himself will not make characters do what He wants, but His gift of freedom enables some characters to bend others to their will. These tyrants usually find their stories going quite well... until the last chapter. In the middle of Chapter 10, the protagonist cannot know what will have happened by Chapter 23; he only knows what clues he has picked up from the Author in the preceding nine chapters.
So when the Author points out the path of perseverance, self-denial, and respect for truth as the way of escape, and the protagonist chooses that difficult road, he eventually emerges into an ending previously unimagined in its satisfaction. The Author has been able to create that ending only because the protagonist allowed it.
I Once Had a Cockatiel
Jan. 30, 2025: His name was Elvis, because he wanted a lot of attention and he liked to sing. He had a nice big cage, but he didn’t like it much; only used it for sleeping. Mostly, he liked to sit on his feed dish on my desk while I was working.
So he flew around the room to land on whatever wall art he liked, then checked to see if I noticed.
He got bored with that, though, because he was a pretty harsh critic and I seldom made the changes he suggested.
He was a great cuddle-muffin, though, which is how he talked me into taking him outside to enjoy the sunshine. The minute I took my hand off him, he flew away. I never saw him again, and never loved another bird.
Until we got the chickens.
The End
Corpse in the Basement
Jan. 28, 2025: Visualize this: you have a dead body in the basement. Yeah, it’s been there for quite a while, so it’s rotting and maggot-filled, only, it won’t stay dead. It keeps trying to come up the stairs into the rest of the house. But since it’s in advanced decomposition, only a foot or an arm, or sometimes the head, will make it up the stairs. They slither through all the rooms, leaving a slime trail of putrescine and bits of tissue on the floor and furniture. Cleaning up after them is a nightmare: even after scrubbing with bleach, the odor lingers for days.
You keep corralling the pieces and throwing them back down into the basement. You’ve tried everything to keep them down there—burying them; locking the basement door; nailing it shut and stuffing rags in the cracks, but time and again you turn around, and there’s a lower leg with foot partially attached dragging itself across your kitchen to the refrigerator. This corpse is making your house pretty uncomfortable. And it won't leave.
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While you ponder what to do with that, you hear about a billionaire philanthropist who’s underwriting house renovation projects. After talking to people who have seen some success contracting with him, you invite him to your house.
The day he comes, you’re pretty nervous, because he wants to walk through the whole house. You go with him down into the basement, where he sees the liquefying corpse. But you are encouraged to see it lying there dead as dead can be. It doesn’t even twitch.
So the billionaire finishes his walk-through and leaves, promising to come back the next day. The moment he’s out the door, all heck breaks loose. Six or seven body parts come rampaging up the stairs, and it takes you most of the night to get them back down in the basement and get the house cleaned up. You are now a nervous wreck.
In the morning the doorbell rings, and the billionaire is on your front porch with his suitcase. He tells you, “The only way to get this job done is for me to move in. And it’s going to take a lot of work on your part. Are you good with that?” What do you tell him?
All of the above is my paraphrase of Samuel Rutherford’s letter to James Lindsay of Sept. 7, 1637, part of which is below:
4. It is mercy's wonder, and grace's wonder, that Christ will lend a piece of the lodging, and a back-chamber beside Himself, to our lusts; and that He and such swine should keep house together in our soul. For, suppose they couch and contract themselves into little room when Christ cometh in, and seem to lie as dead under His feet, yet they often break out again; and a foot of the Old Man, or a leg or arm nailed to Christ's cross, looseth the nail, or breaketh out again! And yet Christ, beside this unruly and misnurtured neighbour, can still be making heaven in the saints, one way or other. May I not say, "Lord Jesus, what doest Thou here?" Yet here He must be. But I will not lose my feet to go on into this depth and wonder; for free mercy and infinite merits took a lodging to Christ and us beside such a loathsome guest as sin.
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5. Sanctification and mortification of our lusts are the hardest part of Christianity. It is in a manner, as natural to us to leap when we see the New Jerusalem, as to laugh when we are tickled: joy is not under command, or at our nod, when Christ kisseth. But oh, how many of us would have Christ divided into two halves, that we might take the half of Him only! We take His office, Jesus, and Salvation: but "Lord" is a cumbersome word, and to obey and work out our own salvation, and to perfect holiness, is the cumbersome and stormy north-side of Christ, and that which we eschew and shift.
Which is not really fair, because it's not a bad cover; it just needs a little something extra to indicate that there is actually a party going on. So I improved it:
Now THIS is a party. You're welcome!
Confessions of a Facebook Fact-Checker
Jan. 16, 2025: About seven years ago, I began freelancing for a large international corporation as a fact-checker for Facebook. The name of our division was Uolo. There were hundreds, if not thousands of us working in the United States market alone. This is how we did our job:
We were given lists of flagged Facebook posts to evaluate. The standards we were required to use were a select number of newspapers or journals: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The Week, AP, Reuters, The Atlantic, and a few more I can’t remember. These were the only allowable sources to determine if content was valid or not.
I quickly discovered that these sources tended to congregate around a single position on any issue—that is, there were no divergent viewpoints. Worse, in a few instances, the only approved source I could find that spoke on a particular issue was the one I was evaluating. We were permitted to use a source to fact-check itself.
By selectively interpreting quotations, I was able to allow a number of questionable posts to stand without getting in trouble—until COVID hit in 2019. Then I watched in disbelief as a number of eminent scientists and researchers who questioned the prevailing wisdom about vaccines, social distancing, masking, and closing schools and businesses got deplatformed. The more of their posts I read, the more I realized they had valid points. But I was only a cog in the fact-checking machine.
By 2021, I’d had enough of this, and dropped the work. By this time, I had become engrossed in a new story about a Westfordian soldier who had fallen ill with the fever, and crawled out the infirmary window to find shelter from the rain in a henhouse, then was found by a young girl who came out to feed her chickens the following morning….
Fun With Ditches
Jan. 14, 2025: About 12 years ago, I lived in a new development in a rural area. The lots were large, a quarter acre, most of that in the back yards. And every back lot on our street was transected by a drainage ditch. This was necessary because the land sloped slightly across all the lots, and any rainfall required a conduit to run through the land without flooding the properties.
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Mowing the ditch was difficult, especially as water tended to pool at the bottom. So I decided to exploit that feature and landscape the ditch. Here's how that turned out:
grapevines growing
on trellises
willow tree
canna lilies
mint
aquarium grasses
What was most fun was watching the new residents take up lodging in the ditch: the crayfish and the frogs, in particular.
Here is the ditch in the winter, looking in the opposite direction.
It was a lot of work, but I miss that place.
The Problem with P.D. James
Jan. 13, 2025: When a reader asked about my favorite books, I'm afraid I gave her more than she bargained for. It's apparent that I like mysteries, but I left one prominent mystery writer off that list: P. D. James.
Her intelligent writing, deft characterizations, and meticulous plots had me carrying her books—Cover Her Face, Death of an Expert Witness, The Black Tower, Unnatural Causes—out to the chicken coop to read. But I began to weary of her aggressive atheism, which seemed to grow more pronounced in the later books (i.e., Devices and Desires.)
Now, I don’t require my mystery authors to be Christian; I don’t even require that they acknowledge God. But if they’re going to assert that all religious faith is illusory and all Christians are dupes, they have to find examples honestly. Misquoting Scripture is cheating.
In James’ A Taste for Death, the cowardly, ineffective priest who has found two men murdered in his church sits contemplating how he will contend with the aftermath of the tragedy, especially the publicity. He decides he must be proactive, visiting the prominent victim’s family: “Now that he knew what had to be done, it was remarkable how different he felt. A biblical phrase dropped into his mind, ‘Doing evil that good may come.’ But he quickly put it away from him. It was too close to blasphemy to be comfortable.” (That’s on p. 95 of the Warner Books paperback.)
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The implication for someone who doesn’t know Scripture is that “doing evil that good may come” is something that God approves of, or does Himself. In certain circumstances it’s okay. That the priest vaguely feels it’s blasphemous only means he’s too timid to do what God’s Holy Book says or that what it says is really kind of evil.
Well, there really is such a verse, Romans 3:8. But what the Apostle Paul actually says is, “And why not do evil that good may come?—as some people slanderously charge us with saying. Their condemnation is just.”
See Romans 3:1-12 for some context, though it's not Paul’s complete argument. Most of the rest of that chapter is his forcefully explaining why God is righteous and therefore His people must be righteous. But how many of James’ readers are going to look that up?
After two thousand years, Christians are still being slandered with the same old lies.