I personally liked the peppermint bark, but not as much as plain peppermint.
The last couple of days we have been celebrating Little Miss as she turned 11 on Thursday. We didn’t mean to celebrate her for four days but that’s how it worked out because activities we wanted to do with her were spread out a bit.
On Thursday she wanted to have pancakes at a diner downtown so her brother and I took her down. She had chocolate chip pancakes and a fresh fruit cup. The owner sang happy birthday to her.
The diner was decorated very nicely for fall. This diner always does a very nice job at decorating, from what I understand, but I have only visited there twice. My dad and son have visited there more.
After breakfast, we hung out at home for a bit and then Little Miss and I headed to my parents’ for some pizza and to celebrate her birthday with them.
We played a board game called Aggravation and Little Miss won (with a little help from Grandma and me this time, but usually she wins outright on her own). What was funny was my dad was going to play but sat down in his room for a few minutes and drifted off to sleep. I decided I would play for him and for myself until he woke up, but in the end, he didn’t wake up until the game was almost over.
Dad usually wins at this game, and he almost won this time, even though he was asleep. He was three spots from winning when my mom sent him home again because she didn’t have any other moves she could make.
After we played board games, Little Miss had an animal club meeting on Zoom and then she went home and rode bikes with her brother and then …. Yes, there is more… they watched two Disney movies. She really wrung every last minute out of her birthday and crashed pretty hard that night.
The Husband had to work on her birthday but yesterday he took the day off and we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant and then they all went in Walmart to pick out a new dog bed and a gifts for the dog because that is what Little Miss wanted to do for her birthday. She also picked out a gift for her friend who is coming for a sleepover today because that little girl’s birthday was this past Monday.
I stayed in the car due to a sore leg and read my book. It was very cozy.
Tomorrow we are headed to a reptile zoo called Reptileland because Little Miss loves reptiles.
We are already fairly tired from celebrating already. By tomorrow night The Husband and I will be virtually comatose. We will be this way because we are, as Little Miss has reminded us a few times this week — old.
She’s been watching YouTube Shorts making fun of life in the 1990s and early 2000s and asking us if that is what it was really like “back then.”
It is hard to accept those years are so long ago, so I just pretend they aren’t and ignore her. Ha!
To show how old I am and how I have failed at educating my children about the 1990s — I learned yesterday that neither of them knew who Whitney Houston was. They sort of rolled their eyes when I mentioned her. There was some meme that mentioned her and my almost 19-year-old son said, “I don’t even know who that is.”
I was horrified and pulled up YouTube to educate them. They did recognize “I Want to Dance With Somebody” and “I Will Always Love You,” but I also made them watch her doing the Star Spangled Banner and The Boy was blown away.
“Okay, yeah, she was amazing,” he told me.
I went to tell him how she threw her life away and it was so heartbreaking to me and started to cry. She shouldn’t have died so young. No matter her talent and her beauty, she never seemed to feel worthy enough to enjoy her life of happiness and health and that always broke my heart. Now all we have left of her is her music and memories and we should have had her for so much longer.
Thank God we still have her friend and my favorite female singer CeCe Winans.
I am going to have to show them videos of CeCe this week too.
Earlier in the week I saw a beautiful sunset and even though I’m having an issue with my sciatica and leg, I made it outside to take a photo. While I was there, two guys (probably about my age) riding bikes came by our house. We do have some bike or foot traffic on our street but it is a back street so we don’t as often as some streets.
I was startled a little by them but had to laugh when the one guy looked at the sunset, pumped his fist and yelled out “’Merica!”
The other guy, with a shirt or something wrapped around the top of his head, looked up at me smiling and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
I said it was, and they kept going while smiling and left me smiling.
Later, Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) told me she thought it was cool that we’d had that shared moment together. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and her comment made me think.
After weeks of anger, hatred, and just all out sadness in the world, it was nice to have that shared moment of joy while admiring a gorgeous sunset.
The photos do not do it justice.
How about you?
How was your week last week? Anything exciting coming up for this week?
Glad you stopped by for a chat and thanks to my sister-in-law’s gift of some new teas, I can offer you some different varieties.
She even brought them in a very cute little basket that Little Miss had fun rearranging yesterday. She plopped my jar of honey right in the middle of the teas.
I have never tried the cold tea brews before so I am excited to do that later this week.
The Boy has already tried the pumpkin spice one and has loved it.
Yesterday was my birthday and The Husband took me to a very fancy restaurant in our area that he’s been saying he wanted to take me to for a long time.
Every time we would drive by it on our way to cities southeast of us, he would say, “I’m going to take you there for our anniversary one day.”
Well, he didn’t for our anniversary, which was totally fine with me, but he did for my birthday, and it absolutely lived up to the hype.
We sat out on the patio overlooking a creek and a tiki torch, as well as the walking trails. The weather was absolutely perfect, even if the trees had not changed as fast as the ones near us are changing.
The food was much fancier than what we would normally eat and absolutely incredible. I’ve never tasted steak like that. It was like butter in my mouth it was so tender. I mean, it tasted like steak not butter, but I think you get what I mean.
I gave my daughter a sample when I got home and she said she had no idea what I meant by the butter comment and sort of looked annoyed at me, but for me it was amazing.
The Husband had chicken marsala.
We both had potatoes with a fancy name, which the waitress explained was simply mashed red potatoes with the skin on. Ha! Fancy name or not, the potatoes were insanely good.
It was very relaxing to sit there and look out over the small creek that runs on the property. They have a botanical garden somewhere but we didn’t find it. They also have a garden on the property where they grow food for the restaurant. So, it is essentially farm to table.
The restaurant is also an inn and it’s a gem in the middle of nowhere really. It’s not in a bigger city near us — it’s a little bit away from a small “city” near us but there really isn’t anything else around it. I will say I felt a little out of place there, since I would say most of the clientele is in a different financial bracket than my me and my husband. I ignored those feelings, though, and made up stories in my head about the people around us as I waited for our food.
I decided the man sitting behind my husband, who did look a bit tired and unshaven, though well dressed, was a businessman who hadn’t yet told his wife that things were falling apart. He was also a closet gambler and alcoholic.
The young waiter who looked about 16 but was probably older, was a rich kid made to work there after his family kicked him out because he was an entitled brat who felt he didn’t have to do anything to contribute to his family, alone society. (Of course I didn’t really think this about the kid, despite the weird side eye he gave me on the way by — these are just stories I made up!)
Then there was the group of friends all in their 50s or 60s who were sitting in chairs along the creek, sipping their various alcoholic drinks.
I definitely knew they could be the basis of a murder mystery and tried to choose which one might get knocked off first. I chose the one man in white shorts and blue polo holding his cocktail, looking annoyed as everyone else pulled chairs up to sit next to him. I also imagined he used the word “insufferable” a lot in every day conversation, especially when referring to some of the women around him.
Most of the men and women in the group were wearing blue tops and white pants. I don’t know if that is a rich person thing or just a style choice. Either way, they all looked lovely and like they were having a good, yet slightly annoying time. By “slightly annoying” I mean none of them were really smiling much. They seemed somewhat annoyed at each other. Gosh, looking back, maybe they had come from a funeral or something. Like the funeral of their murdered friend….
Okay, yes, I need to stop reading and watching so many murder mysteries.
The man behind us was in the middle of an interview for a job at State Farm with a guy who made a lot of dad jokes, so I don’t think he needed a made up story. He just needed an escape. I didn’t hear the first comment, but I did hear when the older man said, “Because we’re always there. Get it? Like State Farm is there…”
There was some nervous laughter that trickled around the table and then the sales pitch to join the team started after that.
After dinner, we headed to where all birthday girls around here go — Walmart. Ha! Actually, The Husband ran in to grab some bottled water my parents. We made a quick stop after that and picked up a treat for the kids.
At home I watched a couple episodes of Supernatural with The Boy, but don’t know if I will do that again. I enjoyed them to a point, but they were also quite disturbing in parts.
It was hard to see Jared Padalecki as anyone but Dean on Gilmore Girls and it was confusing that his name was Sam in this show, but his brother was Dean. I kept getting confused.
Speaking of The Boy — he got his driver’s permit yesterday and we were so happy for him. He was a little nervous about the test but it turned out to be much easier than he thought. Though he has waited a bit to get his permit, he has been driving grandpa’s tractors and truck around his property for a couple of years now, so he knows what he is doing.
Right after he passed the test my dad actually took him driving around some backroads for a couple of hours.
We are definitely having fall weather and fall vibes in our neck of the woods right now. The trees are changing fast and falling down on the ground. It seems like we got our color much quicker than I thought we would and I am trying to enjoy it as much as I can before our trees are bare.
When even more of the trees have changed we plan to go leaf peeping and admire the views.
I hope to post some photos for all of you of the leaves on here but I am having an issue with WordPress,, who says my storage is almost full and they want me to pay even more than what I do so I can add more storage.
I’m rejected the idea of paying more by backing up some old posts, deleting them from this blog, and moving them to a backup blog. These are posts from seven or eight years ago, not recent ones.
I’ve also been combining photos on collages I’ve made in Canva to help cut down on how much storage space I am using.
Another blogger friend of mine, Mama’s Empty Nest, has been struggling with this for months now. She’s also been struggling with a lot more as her husband had to undergo an emergency surgery and her daughter was admitted to the hospital after going into labor way too early. I don’t know if she has mentioned this on her blog yet, but the baby did not make it and I just ask that you pray for that family right now. This would have been her daughter’s second child, as she has an older daughter. The little girl is around the same age as Little Miss and was really looking forward to a sibling. Just please pray for their healing and comfort at this time.
Luckily, Mr. Empty Nest is doing fairly well after his surgery, but I just can’t imagine how hard it was for him and his wife with him recovering and their daughter suffering as she lost her little one in the hospital.
I would say that I am ending my post with some sadness, but there is also joy in the story. This little one has gone back to Jesus where her family will meet her again one day and her grandpa is getting healthier by the day and will be able to spend more time with her older sister. There is some joy in the midst of heartache, thankfully.
This upcoming week isn’t yet a busy one for us, but we will see how that goes.
Do you have anything interesting planned for next week?
I’m the type of person who has never liked summer unless I can spend most of it in a pool. This year, though, we don’t have the pool we had before at my parents. Maintaining it has become too much for my dad with all his mounting health issues and it’s hard for us to maintain it the way he would like.
The decision to take it down was made a couple of weeks ago and it’s been very sad to walk out back and not see it. This past week my dad and son put up a small pool that our neighbors gave us a couple of years ago but it is a ton smaller than the last one.
It will at least be something that we can sit in, almost like a hot tub, when it is super hot out at least. Of course, I have to get myself in the pool without injuring myself. I am short and round so climbing in and out of a pool without a ladder, even when it is a shorter pool, can be a challenge. I did manage to get in the pool while it was filling on Thursday. It was nice to sit in it and watch Little Miss play and splash around. It was less fun trying to get back out again, especially since I needed to use the little girl’s room.
It was only comical after the fact, of course.
We are looking for a small ladder or step stool that will make getting in and out easier for all of us.
Last week was very busy for us, compared to our usual schedule in the summer.
Little Miss and I went to a library event and her 4-H Wildlife Club on Monday. On Tuesday we went to VBS but had a not-so-great experience there so on Wednesday we went to my parents to help clean. We went back on Thursday.
Yesterday and today, we stayed home and watched movies and TV, read books, ate watermelon, cooked dinner, bathed the dog, and tried our best to just relax.
Tomorrow The Husband and I are celebrating 23 years of marriage, so we are going out to dinner and to a used bookstore. Yes, we are that exciting. We both love books, though, and the little village where the bookstore is located is very picturesque so it should be a nice day.
Next week The Husband is on vacation and we have a few day trips planned but nothing very exciting. He and the kids are most excited about seeing the new Superman movie, but I’m really not that excited so I might sit this one out.
While typing this blog post up, Microsoft’s One Drive suggested I look at some photos from this same date five years ago.
Here are those photos:
These are from a trip we took a friend’s farm for me to take some photos for them and to sell for stock photography. I don’t know why but my dad took me out with the kids and on the way home he took the long way back and we ended up with a flat tire. Luckily, he knows how to change tires, but we had to wait a bit while he did that. While we waited there was a wonderful sunset for us to watch.
It was fun to visit the friend and see all her cows and the creamery she had opened. Sadly, life circumstances led to the creamery being closed and the cows being moved but her sons are still involved in farming and in showing cows for 4H.
In closing, I’ll leave us all with a quick reminder of how we need some breaks from all the hard stuff in the news. I read a couple of reminders this week that we as humans are not meant to consume all this information about the tragedies in the world all at once. Our minds are not infinite enough to handle all the grief, all the horror, all the fear on our own.
My advice to myself and to you is to take breaks from it all.
Don’t take it all in at once.
Just because we can know everything that is going on these days, doesn’t mean we need to.
Read a book. Watch a nice movie. Take a walk outside. Play with your kids and grandkids. Pet your dog and/or cat.
Sing some hymns.
We can’t ignore all the bad news, of course, but in the end we have to leave it in the hands of the only one who can carry it all.
How was your week last week? I hope it went well and I hope you have a good week this week.
Hello! Good Saturday evening. This was supposed to go up this afternoon, but life got busy so it got delayed.
Sit down and have some tea and a snack with me. My sister-in-law sent a whole bunch of tea with my brother when he visited last week so I have a variety for you to choose from. A honey ginger tea, green tea with lemon, Earl Gray, one for relaxation (I may ten cups of that tonight!), and a couple of others. And, of course, I have my go-to, plain peppermint.
First, a bit of housekeeping:
This post will no longer be a link party. Why? Because there are so many link parties out there already that I am a part of or participate in and they are great. And because I like my Saturday posts just to be a chat post with my blog followers.
If you are looking for a link party to participate in, I co-host one with three lovely blogger ladies that goes live on Thursday nights. The Weekend Traffic Jam Reboot goes live about 9:30 p.m. each Thursday (unless I’m late like this week. Whoops!) and if you scroll on my right-hand sidebar you should find the link to the latest one.
I also have added a link to parties I participate in at the top of my page.
I am going to leave up my monthly link-up for all things book-related. You can find a link to the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea link party at the top of my page.
With all of that out of the way, on to today’s post which will be about pretty much nothing. Ha!
No, it will be about something. I did actually do a few things this past week.
One very exciting something I did this past week was meet the blogger at Mama’s Empty Nest this past week. I don’t know if she shares her first name on her blog or not, since I’ve never seen her do it, so I won’t share it here. I’ll just call her C.
Over the years, I have loved reading C’s stories about her various trips across our country or into Canada. I have also been blessed and encouraged by the posts she shares about her faith. She’s hit a bit of a snag with her blog lately because WordPress says she is almost out of storage space and is trying to force her to upgrade. She likes to share photos from her various travels, so this has created quite the conundrum for her. and I am about in the same boat. The snag has led to her taking a bit of a break from her blog while she tries to reduce what’s in her storage. It’s also led to her and I both feeling like Wordress stinks a bit as a blog host.
C and her husband are trying to travel to each county in the state of Pennsylvania in the next few years. They are from the western part of Pennsylvania and I am in the East so they were able to mark a few more counties off their list this week, including mine.
C was also able to mark off seeing yet another covered bridge, which is another goal of hers. We have a beautiful covered bridge about 20 minutes from us that is located next to one of our favorite restaurants, so I suggested that as our meeting place. It let C check off two of her goals in a row — visiting another county and seeing a covered bridge.
Of course, they actually did see our county on their way through to visit Williamsport in Lycoming County. They were even able to see our county’s one stoplight in the middle of the town I live in. How terribly exciting for them. Ha!
The Husband had a later-than-planned day of work that day and The Boy wasn’t feeling well, so in the end it was just Little Miss and I who met with them. We were excited to introduce them to our local Philadelphia cheesesteak place. The restaurant is owned by someone who is originally from south Philadelphia. There are a variety of different ways to make a cheesesteak in Philadelphia and Big Mike (the restaurant owners) offers it a few different ways. C and her husband had never tried a cheesesteak with cheese whiz so they were excited to try one.
We had a nice dinner of cheesesteaks and chicken salads, sweet potato fries, and fried pickle chips, sitting on the picnic tables by the restaurant, overlooking the Loyalsock Creek and the Forksville Covered Bridge.
Little Miss is very shy around her peers and tends to open up more to adults at times. She usually opens up more when she gets to know a person, but for some reaso,n she connected immediately with C and her lovely husband.
C said later, maybe it is because they gave off “cool grandparent vibes” and Little Miss had to agree.
C and her husband have four grandchildren, one of them Little Miss’s age, and from what I have read on her blog, they really are the cool grandparents.
Little Miss loved sharing all kinds of stories with them and showing them photos of a range of pets and people from her life. She also enjoyed feeding the birds and a chipmunk hopping around the outside tables.
After filling our bellies and chatting, C and her lovely husband were back on the road again, with plans to leave the next day for home. Before leaving C gifted me with a box of Amish Inn Mysteries books after she read on my blog that I have been reading them. I’d take a photo of them to post here but they are in the back of my car, which isn’t here at the moment since my husband is using it to pick up a friend of Little Miss’s for a playdate.
I am not including photos of myself here, even though we took a photo together, because I don’t enjoy photos of myself, but here is a lovely photo of the covered bridge.
C and I met on Wednesday. On Thursday I went to my parents to help clean and ended up chatting the afternoon away with the wife of a man who came to purchase some old collector bottles from my dad.
My grandmother collected bottles for years and also won awards for her collection. Those bottles are still at my parents but with them getting older and me not having room for the collection my dad is beginning to sell them off.
It will be hard to let them go but there simply isn’t any way to keep everything.
On Friday, the kids and I had to stop at two government offices for various reasons and pick up groceries. It was a frustrating day in many ways and that really isn’t a surprise since the previous sentence included the words, “government offices.”
I believe frustration is the main feeling you end up with after dealing with government offices. That and anger. Sometimes even rage — especially when those offices have new rules every time you walk in the door.
One week they allowed us to use certain documentation to obtain a replacement social security card for our son and two weeks later they denied us the ability to do the same for our daughter. I truly feel that government employees either don’t actually know the rules, don’t care about the rules, or change the rules every time a new person comes in just to make their own, mundane life more exciting.
We did come home with what The Boy needed from his government office visit, but not what Little Miss needed.
After we came home, I tripped over a shovel in our garage and fell hard on my hands and needs on the concrete floor. I landed on both knees but more so the knee which had only just healed up from a fall on our sidewalk last summer.
There are many reasons I hate summer, and I can add falling on my face at least once during the season to that list now, apparently.
I actually didn’t fall right on my face, but close to it.
I bent my glasses, possibly cracked my phone (I found that crack later in the evening), and was left with a very bruised knee. Despite all that, I feel very lucky. Usually, a fall like that leaves me very, very sore the next day and could have left me with a broken bone, but I’m doing fairly well today. The knee isn’t feeling too great, but it isn’t as painful as it was last year when I twisted it.
While I was sitting and trying to recover from my fall, my mom called and said my dad was having chest pains that were radiating to his back so The Husband ran out the door and drove him to the ER. Dad refused an ambulance.
Because my mom has been having falls lately (luckily ones that have just left her on her bottom and not seriously injured), I headed over to stay with her, limping into the house. I left there at midnight after Dad had a clean-bill of health from the ER. They determined he had gas and a severe muscle pull.
This afternoon I had a Crafternoon with Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and others. I am also not leaving my house for the next several days for my mental and physical health.
We are scheduled to have dangerous heat for the next four or five days and my nerves are a bit shot from yesterday. We already have a heat advisory in place. Humidity is supposed to be very high on top of temperatures in the low to mid-90s.
Heat and I don’t mix well together. It bothers my asthma and other issues.
The roses outside my house bloomed in full force this week but are quickly falling off and will be gone by the end of the week most likely. I will miss them as they seem to be one of the few highlights for me in summer.
The rest of summer is a muggy, hot, yucky mess that leaves me not feeling good. This year we won’t have a pool at my parents because it has become too much for my dad and us to maintain. This is disheartening to both me and Little Miss because we enjoyed it so much.
So there has been a mix of sadness and happiness going on in my neck of the woods lately.
How about you? How was your week last week?
I’d love to hear about it in the comments, or you can leave me a link if you have a weekly round up post of some kind.
Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.
You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.
Is it just me or is it sort of weird and a bit sad that most of the classic romance authors of the 18th century never actually married?
Jane Austen?
Never married.
Emily and Anne Bronte?
Nope.
In fact, they died so young they never even had a chance to really have much of a life or enjoy their success in writing.
Yet all three women wrote about romance as if they knew all about it. I’m sure there are other classic romance authors who never married or had deep relationships either.
Of course, all three women may have known about romance and love even though they didn’t marry so it’s not like I believe you have to be married to fully understand love.
Also, before I get too into the topic of this post, let me explain a few things about my relationship with romances.
I’ve never been one to exclusively read or watch romances. I like romances but they aren’t my go-to genre.
I am a fan of romantic themes in a movie but strict romances often seem formulaic to me and I quickly lose interest – especially when it comes to books. This doesn’t mean I never watch or read romances. I certainly do. I get as giddy as the next girl when a couple finally professes their love to each other after pages and pages or two hours of dancing around their feelings.
At the same time, all the back and forth looks and touches and misunderstandings, etc. just get old to me at times, if not written or produced well. Listen, I’ve written four romances so I am in no way knocking romance stories, books, or movies.
My romances, however, have storylines in addition to the romance and I like books and movies that are similar. If I’m going to be honest, the idea of “keeping within the writing rules for a romance” became too much for me by book four and I decided I needed to write in a different genre – one that I read more of – cozy mysteries or mysteries in general. I will, however, be writing a book five of that series because I need to wrap up one character’s story. (Hello, Alex Stone, you’re getting your own book.)
One reason I don’t like reading a lot of romance is that I feel – and please read those words I feel again so you remember that this is an opinion — that they can create unrealistic expectations of love and romance for women and men, whether they want to admit it or not.
Some readers of romance books will say they don’t really believe that real-life love has to be the way it is written in the books but I feel that the idea of what romance should be is being subconsciously ingrained into their mind and many times they may judge their own lives on those books.
Thoughts like, “I know those books aren’t real life but if only my husband thought to bring me flowers like Patrick did in …” could creep in without them (us) even realizing it. Yes, even I have fallen prey to this way of thinking at times.
Now, even with all that being said, I don’t think all romance readers are this way. Sometimes they simply want a happy escape from life. They know the books aren’t realistic, but they are an idea of how life could be for them or others.
I also feel odd reading books that don’t have any romance at all in them. I like when a book has a romantic aspect to it – like a mystery with an underlying love story, so I am not, in any way, bashing romance itself or even strict romance books. There are some really good ones out there. I don’t endorse romance books with “smut” in them, of course, because that’s where the real unrealistic expectations of love lives set in.
One thing I’ve been noticing lately, though, is how at least three of the authors we consider the “founders” of romance books never married.
Does this make them frauds? No, I don’t think so.
Does it make them less reliable sources for the idea of romance? I don’t think so either.
I often wonder how hard it was for these women not to marry and have children, dreams they seem to have had and wrote about in their books. Though maybe it was just their characters that had these dreams of romance and marriage.
An amateur sketch of Jane by Cassandra Austen, Jane’s sister.
Jane Austen wrote about romance and how to find romance in books such as Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, but she herself never married. There are different theories as to why and one of those theories is that she knew how to write about broken hearts because she absolutely had one.
Historians know from letters that Jane was proposed to once and she accepted it but then withdrew that acceptance a day later.
I wrote a bit about Jane’s love life in January when I wrote a review of the movie Miss Austen Regrets, which is very loosely based on letters between Jane and her sister Cassandra and her niece Fanny.
In that blog post, I mentioned that we don’t know a lot about Jane’s personal life because her sister burned tons of letters Jane sent to her. Some historians believe Jane wrote thousands of letters to her sister Cassandra over the years, but in the end, only about 150 survived and many of those were redacted or cut apart to keep certain information out of the public eye.
Some historians also surmise that Cassandra wanted to protect the privacy of her sister. Jane was known to be very blunt and straightforward in her commentary and it is possible she was a bit opinionated about some in the family or others the family knew. Cassandra didn’t want people to see those comments. Or she might have wanted to protect Jane’s love life from a curious family and public.
Either way, some vital information that would have shed even more light on who Jane was in her personal life is no longer available.
Some of those bits of information would have been about her love life – like if she really was going to marry Rev. Brooks Edward Bridges, who is mentioned in Miss Austen Regrets, or Tom LeFroy who is mentioned in her letters (and other movies).
According to an article on the Jane Austen Society website, in 1805 during a visit to Godmersham, Edward Austen’s estate in Kent, Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra: “[W]e could not begin dinner till six. We were agreeably surprised by Edward Bridges’s company to it. . . . It is impossible to do justice to the hospitality of his attentions towards me; he made a point of ordering toasted cheese for supper entirely on my account.”
While there are some who believe Bridges did propose to Jane and she may have turned him down, there is no evidence of this happening, mainly because of the above mentioned burning of the letters. Jane did, however, turn down an offer of marriage from the rich brother of a friend in 1802. She accepted, then rejected in one days time.
Someone else historians would like to know more about is Tom LeFroy who Jane was said to have flirted with quite often in her 20s. While some say Tom may have broken her heart at one point, some historians say they don’t believe so based on the lighthearted tones of letters she wrote to Cassandra that mentioned Tom.
Jane met Tom, an Irishman, in 1795 when he was studying law in London. They attended several balls and dances together but then he went back to law school and she went back to writing.
“We don’t even know if Jane wanted to marry, which would almost certainly have meant giving up any chance to be a writer,” reads an article on Jane Austen’s House. “She certainly didn’t pursue marriage at all costs, as some of her female characters do. . . Her great love was her writing. Her books were her children – she famously referred to Pride and Prejudice as her ‘darling child’.”
The Bronte sisters also didn’t marry, except Charlotte.
Left: Branwell Bronte’s ‘Pillar’ portrait of the Bronte sisters. It was hidden away and not seen by the public until 1914. Right: The collodion photo which dates from the 1850s. If these are the Bronte sisters then the photo is a copy of an 1840s daguerreotype. (credit: https://brontesisters.co.uk/)
The Bronte sisters are famous for the books: Jane Eyre, Villette, and The Professor by Charlotte, Wuthering Heights by Emily, and Agnes Gray by Anne.
Though she married, Charlotte died without ever having a child leaving no Bronte heir, though there were many who believed she was pregnant at the time of her death. Some historians now believe she died of hyperemesis gravidarum, which causes pregnant women to become very sick and constantly throw up, leading to dehydration and death if not treated.
There are rumors that Charolette’s younger sister Anne was in love with a local curate and he may have felt the same about her, but Emily was never linked to anyone romantically, despite the passion of one of the Bronte sister’s most popular books, Wuthering Heights.
While some base their assumptions that Emily had a romance with someone named William Weighton from a movie loosely based on Emily’s life (it isn’t easy to make a movie about her life that isn’t conjecture since she was a recluse who died at the age of 30), an article on the Digital Spy says that there is more evidence that William and Anne were actually the ones in love with each other.
“William Weightman was a real person, and he really was Patrick Brontë’s curate in the Haworth parish from 1839 until his death from cholera in 1842,” the article states. “He became good friends with all the Brontë siblings, and, in his eulogy, Patrick said he was like a son.”
In a letter to a friend, Charlotte Bronte wrote, “He sits opposite Anne at church sighing softly and looking out of the corners of his eyes to win her affection – and Anne is so quiet, her looks so downcast – they are a picture.”
Some believe that Anne’s best-known novel, Agnes Gray, was written about her feelings for William. She also wrote some very heartbroken poems after his untimely death.
While most reports say the deaths of Emily and Anne and their brother were caused by tuberculosis, some information suggests their deaths were both from the effects of tuberculosis (which claimed two other sisters years before) and a weakened immune system caused by their drinking water being tainted by decomposing bodies from the town cemetery. (Read more about that here and here.)
A drawing of Charlotte said not to do her justice.
Another one of Patrick Bronte’s curates fell for Charlotte Bronte and was married to her for the last nine months of her life, which I find so heartbreaking. Charlotte was 38 when she passed away. Her husband, Arthur Bell Nicholls lived until he was 87 years old. He cared for Patrick Bronte after Charlotte died because she was the last of Patrick’s children. Arthur eventually moved back to Ireland, left the ministry and remarried. There is a lot of debate over whether his marriage to Charlotte was really for love as well as how he handled her estate, including her manuscripts, after her death.
The love affair between him and Charlotte does seem legit, though, from what I’ve read. It almost didn’t happen because Patrick didn’t think a poor Irish curate should be asking his famous author daughter for her hand in marriage. Arthur apparently left the parish at one point because he could not marry Charlotte but continued to meet her in secret. He had originally asked Patrick for Charlotte’s hand in marriage in 1852 but it took Patrick until 1854 to allow them to marry.
Poor Charlotte was dead a year later.
Arthur ended up spending much of his life after her death defending her reputation and dealing with the fallout of it being announced that she was the real author of Jane Eyre. After Patrick died, he took the manuscripts and other personal items of the family and moved back to Ireland.
There is heartache in the stories of many people from the past but for some reason, I always seem to find the heartache of those who wrote about love — and either didn’t find it or found it for only a short amount of time — the saddest stories of all.
Maybe that’s just because as much as I don’t like reading strict romances, I am really a romantic at heart.
No, romantic love is not all that life is about.
There is family and friendship love, experiences like traveling and just having joy with those close to us, and a relationship with nature, wildlife, God, and the overall beauty of the earth.
But when a person writes about love as if they want to experience it or experienced it and lost it — that makes me sad. I hate to think about them missing out on what they wanted so much.
Today I am taking part in the 10 on 10 with Marsha In the Middle as host.
Here are the questions we are supposed to answer and the answers are below the graphic:
I looked at this one for a bit and was grossed out with both ideas but then decided that I’d rather have the potato chips dipped in chocolate because, well, it’s chocolate. I could eat almost anything dipped in chocolate except crickets and, well, other gross things one shouldn’t eat, but you get my drift. (Looks like Gertrude Hawk actually makes this product!)
2, I would definitely prefer to recite an original poem to my husband than sing anywhere, let alone in front of a bunch of people. I don’t write poetry but I come from a family of poets so I think I could pull that off. I could not pull of singing or singing in front of a bunch of people. I’d probably giggle while reciting the poem and my husband would probably make funny faces to make me laugh, but it would be a lot better than doing anything in front of a bunch of people.
3. Oh gosh – this one was a little hard. I think both of these singers would be interesting to have dinner with but I guess I would choose Dolly because I want to see how old she really looks close up. I mean, the woman is 78 but has so much makeup and plastic surgery done, she’s got to really look old close up right? I just can’t imagine a human’s skin can stretch that much through plastic surgery and not rip somewhere. I’ve got to see for myself how wrinkled she really is. Plus I think she’s hilarious and I’d crack up at her jokes while she’d probably crack up if I told her I want to see how old she looks close up.
4. This one was easy – I would love to have only one red rose. I love red roses the most and I’m also not a huge flower person. I like them but I can take them or leave them. If my husband came home with one rose and said “We’re going to sit tonight and watch a mystery together tonight” that would be a better gift than a dozen roses and chocolate. I kid you not. I’m very, simple like that. If he threw a book I wanted in the midst of all that I’d be even more over the moon. Not that I’m hinting because he does a fine job with gifts for birthdays, holidays, and Valentine’s Day, etc.
5. I’m going to pick the pink with purple hearts because those are my favorite colors. As long as the hearts aren’t too big and I don’t look like a clown. Hopefully, it can be a comfy cotton dress that I can just lounge around the house in. *wink*
6. Uh, can I have both? I mean, both sound cool. This is “would you rather” though so I will go with the carriage ride in the Scottish Highlands because my ancestors are from Scotland and I absolutely want to visit there one day. On the list is Grant Castle because my family members were Grants (hello…why do you think the main character in my book series is Gladwynn Grant. One, it was my grandmother’s name, but two, to keep the Grant name alive in my family.).
7. This one was easy. The Rock, but not for the reason you think. I don’t agree with him politically and I want to give him a piece of my mind. Ha! That and I think we probably agree on more things than I think and I’d like to ask him some questions about WWE and if he thinks Vince McMahon did all those things he is being accused of.
8. I think Satin sheets are pretty slippery so I’d go with the flannel sheets with Teddy bears on them. This question doesn’t tell us what season we would have these sheets in, but I think even in the summer I’d rather have the flannel sheets. I’d simply not have a top blanket and put the fan on me so I wouldn’t get too hot. Yes, I thought of this way too long. I may have issues.
9. I will go with the box of chocolates with my least favorite fillings. I have dealt with some pretty bad allergies before and they affected my breathing so I’d rather not like chocolates than not be able to breathe!
10. Oh dear, my husband might read this and I don’t want to offend him but he likes surprise dates and I don’t. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed the surprise places he’s taken me but I like knowing where I’m going and what we’re going to be doing. I have anxiety and if I can plan for contingencies like how I’m going to be able to escape if I feel anxious or if I’m going to get carsick or not because it is a long drive, then I prefer to know ahead of time. If I planned the date then I’d know everything that was going to happen and that would help my control freak tendencies and my highly-prone-to-anxiety brain.
I’m so glad I was able to remember to do the 10 on 10 this month. I usually forget about it until I see Marsha post about it but this time, I remembered the day before. I simply didn’t write about it until after I saw Marsha post about it. *snort*
