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At "The Violent Study Club," one of Betsy's planned poetry readings on a snowy night was James Russell Lowell's The First Snowfall (Betsy refers to it by it's first line in Betsy's Wedding).  It's a lovely, touching poem, and we include the first four stanzas here not only in salute to Betsy and Lowell, but to the first major snowfall of the season that's been "heaping field and highway" since about noon today.  (It arrived a little early for the gloaming part, however.)
Also now part of our frost-chilled, late-autumn mornings is nice, warming cereal for breakfast, from which any leftovers are always welcome as enrichments for dark, rich wholegrain breads and comforting cakes... Read more »

As our Betsy's Wedding issue shipped October 16th, we thought our readers would enjoy this real-life Edwardian wedding of Dan and his beautiful bride, Nettie, with her Tacy-like coronet braids (coincidentally their surname, like Tacy's, was Kelly); a wedding which took place just four years before Betsy and Joe tied the knot.  Excerpts from Nettie's wedding book are shared here by her granddaughter, Toni Langlais.  We met Toni, twelve years ago, just as our maiden issue of The Storybook Home Journal was coming out, and her correspondence has delighted us ever since... Read more »

 By Elspeth Young

Betsy-Tacy (and Tib).  And since it’s always in that order, Tib seems to be a parenthetical.  Even though the chocolate-colored house joined the Hill Street duo early on, it always stands a little aloof: it's on a different street; its stateliness almost makes it unapproachable; and its child occupant—little bewitching beauty, Tib Mueller—seems to suffer from a bit of the same problem.  Tib is not Betsy’s first confidant; not the secondo in the Cat duet; not the first companion of choice... Read more »

Kate Douglas Wiggin and her sister, Nora Archibald Smith, have been our companions all summer long.  While reading Kate’s autobiography, My Garden of Memory and Nora’s biography Kate Douglas Wiggin As Her Sister Knew Her, our home has been filled with dinner-table stories of Kate’s early sallies into the Kindergarten movement, community theater at Quillcote’s Barn, or her chance meeting with Charles Dickens on a New England train.  We’ve quoted their quips and read long sections aloud to any passerby—quite as besotted with Kate and Nora as they were with Dickens... Read more »

 Though it's a month since the most recent issue of The Storybook Home Journal, Our Mutual Friend, wended its way through the US Posts, it's been way too long since we caught up posting sans that venerable institution, so here's what we hope will present a reasonably creditable reparation. We didn't have space to include Elspeth's water-colored label that we used in our own version of clearing Old John Harmon's mounds, so we send it in its easy-to-download form here for anyone's personal use--whether gardening is involved or not... Read more »